LEAVING THE NEST

I was single until I was 21, and childless until I was 31. Then EVERYTHING changed. I no longer had just a girlfriend or a wife, I had "the mother of my children." My estate plan, our house, what car we drove, where we went on vacation all had to be modified to at least some degree because we now had car seats, play pens, 500 disposable diapers, binkys, and formula. I thought it would get better with age but the impedimentum (see previous blog) just got worse. I understand why the SUV and the MiniVan became so popular. That is not to say that I gave up all the toys or that we only went to Disney World from then on when we vacationed. Au contraire. We went all over the world with kids in tow with a little as we could get away with in strollers and the like. Car seats were simpler then. They looked like a plastic seat on a swing set and could be taken out of the car and put back in without an engineering degree.

Fast forward to grade school, high school and eventually college, 2 years apart. One went to Cambridge MA and the other to Washington DC. While most of our friends said "have a nice time at college and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" when their kids left, and finally got to convert a bedroom to a sewing center or a man cave... the Kitty and I looked at one another and said... What do they have in MA and DC that we can use as an excuse to spend lots of time there and just "happen" to visit our kids? We found plenty. It takes some sacrifice to fly or drive back and forth from FL to the north and stay in a hotel or a rental apartment, but it was worth every minute and every cent. I would not do it any other way. Our kids were very understanding.

Today I am sitting in our place in Nantucket. "Of all of the gin mills in all of the world" why are we in Nantucket? To be closer to family, and the grand kids who spend their summer here. This takes us away from our friends in Florida and my son and his wife and the Grand Dog in Miami, but we have other ways of continuing our close relationship to them. We have a condo in Coconut Grove, Miami. It exists for only one reason. So we can spend time with our son and his family. Financial sacrifice? Yes. Things we love so much more about the bumper to bumper traffic on the Palmetto Expressway in Miami as compared to bucolic Sarasota?... Not so much. Being with them...PRICELESS.

So getting back to the photo above... APRON STRINGS are not meant to be CUT, only stretched and perhaps even lengthened in that sewing room you made out of his bedroom when he went off to college. Gas up the car.