Is 39 Days Too Soon To Start the Countdown?

When I graduate I will:

Take a nap with my family after church on Sunday instead of reading and writing.

Focus on developing my business plans so I can spend more time with Adaline and Jason.

Treat my mom to a massage for raising my daughter for the last 7 months.

Treat myself to a massage for finishing a master’s degree.

Write a contract to myself to never enroll in school again. Ever.

Write another contract with myself that outlines the many reasons I will never go back to school – just in case I decide to do something stupid like get a law degree or something like that.

Cook dinner every night until I run out of ideas of what to cook.

Call friends who have been severely neglected – talk until they can remember why they loved me in the first place.

Clean my house from top to bottom without the guilt of sacrificing either my daughter or my grades.

Sleep in on a Saturday.

Organize all my textbooks that I never opened but were somehow “required” for the course – and sell them for what I paid, if not more, because Heaven knows I am not going to read them.

I will buy a grocery store tabloid and devour it cover to cover and delight in the mindless education of celebrity gossip and fashion.

Be tan. Gloriously golden. Burned to a crisp. Either way, there will be no traces of a Vitamin D deficiency in my house. (Not that there is now, but you can never be too sure…)

Organize my pantry.

Write the book I have been putting off since I left Hawaii.

Run. Walk. Swim. Ride my bike. Draw. Do all the craft projects I have seen and want to do. Essentially, have hobbies again.

Throw my housewarming party – 10 months after moving in…

Put pictures in the empty frames hanging on my walls.

Sew Adaline an entire wardrobe of adorable stuff.

Did I mention clean my house?

Take my husband on a vacation – in the middle of fall – just because we can.

Meet friends for lunch or dinner or breakfast.

Make cookies for my neighbors, whom I have lived next door to for several months now and still haven’t delivered the first baked good.

Take a really, really long shower. The kind that uses all the hot water, simply because there is time for it.

Sit on my couch and watch TV for a few hours without papers and a highlighter in my lap.

Take my dog for a walk.

Trade in my phone that has been broken for over a month.

Host a Pampered Chef party.

Make Adaline’s activity chart that I have had the supplies for for longer than I care to admit.

Sit down and do the budget with Jason instead of just asking if we have money to do something.

Be alive again – knowing that I truly obtained all the education I could from school. I know there is more I will learn in this life from non-school settings, but my school setting education is D-O-N-E.

Thank you to everyone who has been supporting me and having faith in me along the way. I have 39 days left until I graduate, which means school will be done much sooner, and Public Health will have a new Master. I have 2 papers, 1 test, 1 portfolio, and 5 simple assignments left before I am done. It is happening fast because I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Stick with me for one more round of, “Did Melissa fall off the face of the planet?” and I promise you won’t regret it. Just a few more weeks.