Impulse shopping has never been easier, and in the empty nest it can sneak up on you fast. In this true confessions episode, Clancy asks: am I addicted to shopping, or is it just a phase? A new season, a closet she's rebuilding from scratch, a TikTok feed full of cute finds, and one-tap Apple Pay all lined up to fill our porch with boxes. Nothing on its own was expensive. Together, it was a lot. Rick owns his part too. As the one who handles our finances, he saw the spike and went with pas...

Acts of kindness are the small, observant choices that take about 30 seconds and can turn someone's day around. So why do they feel so rare right now? On Clancy's morning walks, only about 60 percent of people wave or say hello back. Commutes turn into races, a friendly note on a windshield feels like a scam, and the algorithm keeps feeding us the worst of each other. If you've been wondering where all the kindness went, especially in this empty nest season, you're not imagining it. We're ...

Mid-semester is when a lot of families start asking these questions. What can a parent do after three weeks of silence? Why do so many students start struggling right around week six? And how do you support your student without stepping back into the driver’s seat? Annamarie Tellez is the director for parent and family programs at the University of Arizona, where our daughter is a senior. Annamarie is also the parent of three Wildcats. Her office is where families go when they don’t ...

We just got back from Arizona. Another parents' weekend, another hike into the Grand Canyon. That trip sent us straight back to Episode 9, so we're bringing it back as a Greatest Hits episode. We recorded it in our first few months as empty nesters, a mile and a half down the trail, not even sure the mics were on. If you can, turn on the video. It was Tanner's last parents' weekend at ASU, and we said yes to everything he wanted to do. Then on to Tucson and Teagan, six weeks into college. ...

Rick gave Clancy a trip to Los Angeles for Christmas, and we finally took it in September. This is our first trip as just the two of us since Mexico last year. The whole thing was built around one concert. The biggest highlight came from a tour Clancy found the Tuesday before we left, after our original plan fell through. That tour got us into hidden places on the Sunset Strip and the stories behind them, the kind you'd walk right past on your own. We also get into where we stayed, where w...

John Infortunio writes about his father's Alzheimer's, and he chose fiction over memoir to do it. On this episode, he tells us why a character can hold what a memoir can't. John is a lifelong educator, a native Brooklynite, and the author of two novels drawn from his own life. We get into how he balances that authenticity with fiction, what actually happens in his editing process, and how growing up in a tight-knit Brooklyn neighborhood shaped the way he writes. He also talks about caretak...

This is the second half of their relationship check in, questions Rick and Clancy come back to when it's been too long since the last one. They continue with the 5 love languages conversation, their lowest-ranked ones this time, and move into bigger questions about what the next five to ten years look like. It's easy to assume things are fine because nothing's actively wrong. A check-in surfaces what's actually going on underneath that, the parts that don't come up on their own until someone ...

What does a relationship check-in look like in the empty nest? This episode, Rick and Clancy go through their actual check-in questions. Unrehearsed. Real reactions. They cover togetherness versus independence, what's working day to day and what they'd change, and whether they still talk about anything besides logistics and the kids. Then they get into the five love languages, comparing results and where they overlap and where they don't. Part two picks up with their lowest-ranked love lan...

Your student isn't the only one at college who has someone in their corner, you might too, if you know who to call. Heather Deere spends her days on the other end of the phone calls families make when they can't tell if their student is really doing okay three states away. She's the Director of Family Engagement & Student Affairs Communications at William & Mary. In this episode, she walks Rick and Clancy through her coaching model, the shift from directing a student to consulting with one...

A solo move-in for Teagan and a podcasting conference happened back to back this month, and together they got Rick and Clancy thinking bigger than they have in a while.The move-in was their tenth, routine on paper, but still came with new lessons. The conference is where the muse appeared.Conversations with fellow attendees, several of them empty nesters themselves, left Rick and Clancy with a clearer sense of how much appetite there is for real connection.That's what sparked the idea to take th...

Rick and Clancy started rewriting their wills this year, and that's what led them to Jill McClennen, a death doula, who says you don't have to be dying to use one. "It's also that with a death doula, you don't actually have to be dying to use a death doula. We really actually are probably more effective if we would work with people earlier on." - Jill In this episode: -Why death doulas are non-medical and work alongside hospice, not in place of it -How to know when it's actuall...