We are now close to 4 years into this “every other weekend” situation. And while parts of it have become exponentially better (I no longer wonder what to do with myself on long kidless days), there is a very real impact of only having access to my children for half of their “free” days.

There are 52 weekends in a year, but we are down to 26 right out of the gate. That’s an average of just slightly more than 2 per month. Ugh.

All summer we had open invitations to swim at friends’ homes, to attend picnics and BBQs.  We had big plans to set up our water slide and invite people over. And out of the entire summer, there were two weekends where my kids and I were home and available to play. Two.

Here we are in October, the weather is cooling off, the leaves are changing.  There are pumpkins to be carved and costumes to be secured and apples to be picked.  And again, two weekends to make all of that happen.

Soon Thanksgiving will come and our holiday activities will begin in earnest. We have to make gingerbread houses, put up the tree, decorate the house, hang the lights, bake cookies, put up my parent’s tree, and watch all of the various claymation specials on DVD.  We also want to go to the Christmas Village and Hershey Park’s Christmas Candylane and Sweet Lights. We’d like to throw a party.

Guess how many weekends we have to make all of that joyousness happen? One and a half.

I’m no math whiz – but that is LESS THAN TWO.

All of that fun isn’t so fun when you have to do 37 events in one day to pack it all in.

Too much fun = not even the tiniest bit fun.

Multi-tasking joy = not so joyful.

And yes, there are some days off from school and we can (will have to) do stuff on evenings after school. But those leisurely weekends leading up to big events are ancient history around here.

I don’t want to keep the kids from spending time with their Dad.  I really don’t.

But I don’t want that time to come out of MY time.

This would obviously require some sort of metaphysical time-space manipulation to pull off.  But if there was some way to jam like, 5 more weekends in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I would gladly work with Stephen Hawking (who’s currently busy worrying about the end of the world and might be down with expanding time) or Carl Sagan (who I believe is actually dead…so maybe not) or Sheldon Cooper (who is fictional and therefore probably has limited time-creating skills) to make it happen.

Of course any incremental time gains would be mine all mine with no sharing at all. I would be very greedy with the results of my theoretical time-expanding handiwork.

I would name my newly created month “Momtober” and shove it in between November and December.

Who’s with me? Party at my house on the first weekend of Momtober. I’ll make cookies.