I miss the noise.

Don't get me wrong, I love the peace and quiet I have now, but I really miss the sound of my kids running through the house or yelling "Daaad!! the toilet is over flowing " or whatever small crisis it was that day. I miss the sound of kids playing with dogs and rattling the windows while they did it. Dogs barking, kids running....I miss that. We had dogs, ferrets, gerbils, hamsters, cats and a iguana.....all at the same time.

When I moved back home to Kentucky, my kids were grown, but I let them have the house up there to live in. Ok, not "Let them have it" I let them live in it rent free as long as they pay the bills. It's not a big house. 3 bedroom, one bath and I realize that we had some pretty hectic times. 5 people in a fairly small house, one bathroom and getting ready for school in the mornings could be a lesson in logistics some days.

I still have the door jamb we marked the kid's height on and it's one of my prized possessions.

Now ? I get up in the morning, grab coffee and decide if I wanna go fishing. I live out in the country where it's nice and quiet.
No getting kids ready for school, no feeding the various animals [ except the dogs and cats ] no crisis intervention when someone takes too long in the bathroom and I mean, it's been years since I did all that, but moving away from them and into a house that's 3 times the size [ for perspective my kitchen is 32 X 15 with 12 ft ceilings and why the hell did I move into a huge house by the way ? ] it seems weird that I have a big house and nothing to fill it.

I go out on the back porch in the mornings to watch the Sun come up, drink my coffee and all I hear is birds singing, the creek behind the house burbling, watch the deer wandering through the yard......

It's too quiet. I miss the noise.

a reply to: DAVID64

I know what you mean, when I got a divorce I missed my daughters obviously, but yea I missed the noise and the activity too. Not saying raising them was always sunshine and rainbows, but I missed a busy household. I was lucky though my next LTR, she had two daughters and we had all 4 of our kids for many weeks throughout the years yea and when my new kids went away to college I missed the hell out of them too, and still do and it's been a decade.

Pretty sure this is why even crappy parents can become much better grandparents, they figured it out.

To memories!

I still anticipate those heavy heeled footsteps stomping around the house in a mad huff... It makes me smile sometimes. Sad others.

a reply to: DAVID64

Just think about how many times you only wanted some quiet?

I think you deserve the quiet, and there is always music, it works wonders against quiet...

Play some tracks from the time with your kids and watch the magic happen...

a reply to: DAVID64

A few years ago a friend allowed myself and my girlfriend use of a holiday cottage to use as a home.
It was a cottage in a forest on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. It was six miles to the nearest anything.

When you'd stand outside you actually could not hear a thing. I mean nothing.

Too quiet for us both.
It was then that i discovered im a city boy at heart. Or at least a town, as long as theres people/noise/movement going on.

The silence was great at first, but we only lasted a short while there

a reply to: Terpene

You know one of the ways I know I was a good influence on my kids ? I listened to AC/DC, Bob Seger, Clapton and a lot of what the current generation calls "oldies" while getting them ready for school.....they still listen to it.

As my grandson said in amazement, "Wow! You went to school in the 1900s!"

Well, technically, yeah, but it was the last half anyway.

a reply to: DAVID64

I played in rock and roll bands for my entire adult life, (40-some years), and I appreciate quiet when I can get it. It's just that my neighborhood has went to the dogs and it's always noisy. You wanna trade houses? I can guarantee the noise.

a reply to: DAVID64
Aint you got any grandkids that could come for a visit? The best thing about them is they come for a couple of days then they go home.

a reply to: schuyler

That's hilarious,...
did she say it with the same casualty we used to talk about the 1800s?

Makes you feel old.

It's a poor substitute but a substitute nonetheless, like Mom said sometimes she would go down to my Dad's office at home and he would be there on his computer working while a family get-together video played on his old VHS player



I seem to remember professors Henley, Walsh, and Frey's thesis on how to not let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

a reply to: schuyler

Absolutely, this happened to me too. Some students of mine came up to me one day with something behind their backs. They tell me, “put your hands out,” while behind them a few others I can hear are saying, “he’ll KNOW he’ll KNOW!”

I feel something tremendously cumbersome and heavy plop down into my hands and I look down and identify in my hands, “what? A Walkman?”

They all burst out in laughter and then ask if I really know how to use one, qualifying the fact, “you can’t just pick a song on it, there are only like ten and you have to go back and forth through it all to find what you want to hear!”

“Yes, I know that, thank you much. You should have seen what my mother and father got me for Christmas of ‘88! A $600 CDMan which you could listen to for 40 minutes straight, if you had the money for four C batteries, and you stood absolutely, positively, perfectly still…you see, skip protection was a ‘93 addition and…..you know what, just get outta here!”

“I TOLD you he’d know, he was born in the nineteen hundreds!”

A few days later too I explained why it was that made their music suck while they think ours is “LIT!” In that if we wanted to be able to hear a song at all, the only two options were to sit at the radio the whole day hoping they would play it, or spending an entire months allowance on an album of 10-12 songs or our weekly allowance for a single. So artists, knowing we only had the money for maybe 12 albums on CD a year as kids, had to give us gold or they simply wouldn’t make it. So the popular songs and the collections we kept were collections of just the best, and maybe even obscure since we had every genre you could imagine while now, every kid without exception is into Billboard Top 40, and that’s that. Gag. Now, too, since you can like a song and play it til you’re sick of it with the click of a button in an hour, anyone that the music industry pushes can make it, just use a catchy mindless tune with rhyming lyrics or vulgarity, and also bank on quantity not quality. So what you get is all that music today from Katie Parry and Pink and crap which is actually insulting to your intelligence and you should be offended, not into it since they’re calling you mindless simpletons.

a reply to: TrulyColorBlind

I don't miss noise, I miss my people noise.

...other than that Get Off My Lawn.

a reply to: crayzeed

I have one that's 3 weeks old, but he's in Texas with my oldest Son and prying him away from the new parents would be a bit of a challenge.

a reply to: DAVID64

Im not missing the noise because its here now.... LOL!

My sons cabin got probably 15 feet of snow this year, so he came down to the valley to live with me through the winter. We are hoping the roof didnt collapse on his home up there. So anyway, his sons, my grandsons, 6 and 9 moved in with me too. So plenty of noise and laughter here everyday. They are home schooling and my son has just started back to a local college for carpentry, so I watch them during the day. They are good boys. They are out on their bikes playing with neighbor kids now. Theres a whole pack of kids in the neighborhood, all different nationalities. The kids have really enjoyed this winter and spring over here. I would like to sleep in a bit more, but I know I will be loney for them when they go. So Im enjoying every minute of it now. I love it when they tell their friends proudly" Thats my Grandpa!"

a reply to: DAVID64

Our youngest moved out a few years ago, we're still getting used to having everything to ourselves.

Funny how long it takes before you let yourself relax. For the first year I think I was just itching for the phone to ring with a problem for me to solve or a conversation that needed to be had or just to say "good job, kid". It rang, but never enough for my liking, lol.

Yep, looking forward to the grandbabies!

ETA: We have plans for my youngest son's birthday on Sunday, we're all getting together. There WILL be NOISE!!! LOL

I have a coworker who spent the first half of the school year year (her youngest is senior) worrying about becoming an empty nester. Now, here we are at the end of the year, and her youngest might go to aviation school to learn to pilot instead of college, meaning he won't move out, and her eldest couldn't handle his crap at college, so he's having to move back in.

Now she's griping about all that.

You could tape a banana skin to one of your shoes with tape so you could...slip.
a reply to: DAVID64

SPAM