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Here’s a message for you lucky people with small children at home: Enjoy it while you can. Come on, Visine-up those bloodshot eyes, shoot some caffeine into those sleep-deprived bloodstreams and try to appreciate what you’ve got, while you’ve got it.

Some day you’ll be like me. Well, hopefully not JUST like me, but in my position, which is lost for hours in memories of when my children were small, and lived here, and were tiny and needy and helpless (but less so every day). It seemed like they would never change and it would always be chaotic and smelly and WIDE AWAKE. . . . .

And how some days I’d give my right arm for some SLEEP.

Suddenly, those days are gone, and you finally have the opportunity to do all the things you couldn’t do before because of those little kids. You discover two things: 1) YeeHAW, you can do those things now, and 2) Those things aren’t such a big deal after all; you’d rather have your kids back.

Those two sensations come and go with no regularity, by the way. One second you’re in tears, sitting in your quiet house, looking at photographs of tiny children clinging to you and wishing you could turn back the clock. The next second you’re cranking up the music so your house won’t be so quiet, looking at those same photographs and thinking, “I thought those days would never end.”

You feel guilty no matter which mode you’re in.

There are always things we should have done, or shouldn’t have done, or could have done and didn’t. Regrets can blindside you if you let them. I can only advise you to cherish your children while they are still children. The day will come when they will be obnoxious teenagers and you’ll wonder what went wrong. And then the day will come when they will be lovely responsible adults and you’ll look at them with pride and wonder that anything that awesome could possibly have come from you.

People always say things like this to parents when their small children are in the middle of a particularly horrible phase, but parents seldom believe these old coots who give out all the annoying free advice.

I didn’t.

And now I know it was true …  a lot of it anyway. And speaking as an old coot, empty nester, I tell you these things: No matter how horrible the phase may be, this too shall pass. No matter how obnoxious your teenagers may be, this too shall pass. The tantrums, the mess, the neediness, the clinging. . . . all of it shall pass.

It doesn’t last very long. It’s a tiny tiny fraction of your life. If you blink, you’ll miss it. It will pass.

And when it’s passed, you will miss it more than you ever thought possible. You won’t wish it back as it really was, but you’ll romanticize it and want the good parts back. Remembering is good, but sometimes forgetting is better. Not everything, just some things. Like vomit down your back. Or diarrhea in a baby backpack. Emergency room visits. Public tantrums. Blood. Words.

Be especially careful with your words.

Cultivate your memory. Cultivate your forgetter, too.

It sure is quiet tonight.   Sometimes, I can’t stand it.

I want noise. I want childish giggles. I want horrible songs about bunnies and kitties and little ducky duddle. I want a mess that smacks of fun and playfulness. I want buttercup cookies on my little finger. I want to see that Gerber baby on my pantry shelves. I want finger plays and action rhymes.

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