We know many of you can relate. For 18+ years we have loved, nurtured and supported our kids to ensure their future success as grown adults. We can't even fathom they will one day leave the nest.

We look back with fond memories when our children were little. I mean, how many of us remember the “new” math (insert headbanging emoji here)? How about running your kid’s 3D printer overnight for 3 nights in a row to print a solid Leonardo da Vinci tank design for a school project (before we knew you could make them hollow)? How about spending every Father’s Day for over a decade at your son’s baseball tournaments? Or freezing your butt off at your daughter’s all-day figure skating competitions from which it would take 3 hours to defrost? Some of the time we may have even banged our heads against walls—hello, teenage years! Any of these scenarios sound remotely familiar?

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This blog is dedicated to any parent who has lived it…dare we say, survived it!

Did your child leave home for college, move away for their first big kid job, join the military, move out and get married, join the Peace Corps or move abroad? This is for you! It’s for the parent who has earned the status of “empty nester.” That’s right, we worked hard to achieve this rank.

We started our empty nester adventure just 2 years ago when our son left for his freshman year of college out of state and our daughter moved 1,300 miles away for her first big girl job right out of college…all within 3 weeks. After a 23-hour drive with a U-Haul hitched to our daughter's car, we settled her into her new Texas apartment--and flew home without our kid, her belongings or her car. We opened the front door and burst into tears. After moping around the house depressed for several days, we decided to plan a trip out of town on a long weekend so we had something to look forward to.

From there, the rest came quite naturally. We created our very first empty nester “bucket list” and starting slowly crossing things off the list. Then we started posting our adventures on social media with our very own ‘emptynestervibes’ hashtag. Our friends started commenting and reaching out about how we came up with our ideas. A dear friend told us to write a book to share our ideas with others in the same stage of life (you know who you are). So here we are…

Check out our blog to get ideas on how to make the most of your new life in the empty nest. We hope our ideas spark your own amazing #emptynestervibes!