This morning, our kids left on a trip to Michigan with my folks. They’ll be there for about a week before we head out there ourselves. This marks the longest they’ve spent without us. I spent a lot of time leading up to this week wondering how they would do with that. She’s 7 and he’s 4, so they’re still pretty young and I’m just not sure how they’ll do flying solo with my parents, but they were mostly excited as they left around 7:00 AM!

The funny thing, though, is that I didn’t even think about the flip side of this experience: we’ll be in the house for a week without the kids! This didn’t even come into my mind until my mom mentioned it later last week. Oh the possibilities! The first thing that popped into my wife’s mind as well as mine, though, was the sweet, sweet sleep we’ll get. As of now, Lucy sleeps through the night with no problems, but Jack still gets up any number of times per night.

Another interesting aspect of the week that we’ll enjoy is the fact that neither of us have to worry about the kids’ various likes and dislikes when it comes to food! I usually keep it simple, especially in the summer, but there are certain ingredients that the children just don’t like. I’m not the type to push that too hard, so I usually just avoid them, but that means this week we’ll be able to eat foot with corn and beans in it! It’s almost sad how excited I am about that.

What’s worse, though, is the following thought that ran through my head yesterday: I want to clean the house and enjoy it that way for a week. Last week Lu was going to coding camp, so I got both kids out of the house pretty early in the morning which meant that, after cleaning the downstairs living room, it actually stayed that way for a while. That is until yesterday when we spent all day down there and they made a mess. Every time I clean the upstairs, it lasts that way for as long as it take the kids to get home and then gets relatively trashed which makes me feel like Sisyphus in a big, bad way. What would it be like to have a clean house for a full week? We’ve never actually experienced that, so it might be nice…if I feel like cleaning, which is a big if.

At the end of the day, yes I’m looking forward to eating whatever I want, casually drinking my morning coffee on the back patio (as seen above) and sleeping to my heart’s content, but I sure am going to miss those kiddos. Sure the fighting and constant food requests can be maddening, but that’s all the normal stuff that comes with this whole parenting thing. They say that being a dad or mom is like having a piece of your heart living out there in the world. I’m in full agreement with that, so here’s hoping we do alright with two big chunks of our hearts hanging out 10 hours away and vice versa.