It is 76 miles each way from my house to theirs, which is why I stay over for 2 or 3 nights a week. I fetch them from school twice a week and take care of them until my daughter gets home between 7 & 8 and son in law sometime after 9pm. All day during the summers when they aren't at summer camp. Thankfully, the bulk of the trip is open highway.

My other daughter is in Portland ME, 2 1/2 hours each way from my house, but she's just an hour from her big sis so we all meet there all the time.

We are looking for a place much closer so I can take care of them still but not HAVE to stay over if I choose to go home after their parents get home.

There's a crazy patchwork schedule to the madness. My SiL has Mondays off. Younger daughter takes Tuesdays off from surgeries to watch them. Their Mom has Wednesdays off. I arrive either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday mornings and stay through Saturday. It's easier than it was because now both Evelyn and Alana are in the same elementary school K through 5, within 10 minutes of home instead of Evs there and 'lana 15 miles away at a UNH specialty preschool.

Anyway, we are working on it.

Where we currently live, there is a sheep & goat farm next door on one side (which is like a mile away) and on the other side is a duck farm that also raises vegetables next door, plus a fancy horse farm and a cool bison farm down the street from us about 3/4 of a mile. Directly across the street, which is a half mile considering our long driveways, is a dog kennel where they house and raise a variety of hunting and companion dogs.

You'd think that it might be loud or smelly around here but the extra large properties make for good distances separated by heavy trees that muffles the sounds and smells.

If I didn't want to ever see other people, I could easily accomplish that by staying on our own property.

The only sounds that really echo here are the coyotes that roam the woods and extensive waterways that surround every property. Multiple wide/deep brooks divide some areas of woods so echoes are quite prominent. Their nightly howling of coyote packs drown out the wicked, but pleasant racket that the crickets, peepers, and tree frogs in our pond and outside the doors create.

I'm not fond of that howling because it is usually followed by painful screams of unfortunate critters, usually deer, being eaten alive by the coyote packs. Then the intense, giddy yapping after the kill begins. I hate that sound because even if I didn't hear the screams of their meal being killed and eaten alive, the giddy yapping wakes me up if it's in the swampy area of the brooks surrounding us.

One of the most disconcerting sounds I've heard here over the years is a fox calling out. It sounds like a baby screaming and crying for help. Until we learned what it actually was, we used to freak out and have to go outside in the darkbto find what we feared was a terror-filled human child. If the darkness in a then unfamiliar surroundings wasn't scary enough, knowing what lives in our woods sure was! But who wouldn't try to save a child or critter screaming in terror?

Live and learn! Even growing up in rural MA didn't prepare me for how wild this area actually is, especially at night!