How to Leave Home for a Month
For one, get the (free!) USPS service that sends a daily email with your scanned snail mail
Happy Wednesday! Last week, I got to join Fox 29 Philadelphia to share some spring break road trip destinations: Cooperstown, New York for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Washington, D.C. for cherry blossom peak(-ish) bloom, Richmond, Virginia for the art museum and one great ice cream cone, and Newport, Rhode Island for Gilded-Age mansion tours and a New Haven pizza pit-stop. The segment isn’t online yet, and I pray it never will be.
I’m told (by people who love me) that it was coherent, but transparently, I’ve never been, how do you say, a natural on camera. And I will never not pull a facial muscle cringing when I think about the time I referred to a sundae as a “majestic churro creation” on another local news segment about Philly’s best ice cream. Eric made a gif. Anyway, I’m thinking we might visit D.C. for spring break now that I’ve gotten all hype about the blossoms, and on to this week’s actual topic: How to leave home for a month.
In the summer of 2022, we embarked on our inaugural August Summer Camp — the month we spent in Rome in lieu of sending three girls to actual, expensive-as-hell summer camp. (If you’re new here, you can read a little more about that in this post!)
As wildly grateful as I felt about being able to do it (saving $7,500 on childcare centering around macaroni crafts helped make it easier), I also felt a little anxiety over how to prepare to leave home for such a long stretch. A few things we did made it easier, and I’m sharing them below. If you have any magic tricks to make it less stressful to leave home before vacation, comment or send me an email or DM, I’d love to hear (and share!)
Ask a trusted friend or neighbor to check in on your place
This is the obvious one, but it’s good to have someone eyeball your place while you’re gone. Our neighbor offered to do it, so we shared the virtual key and he stopped in about once a week to water plants and do a quick walk-through. (Side note: I know it’s controversial, but we love the virtual key — it makes it much easier to share, and much less awkward to take it back. Read on for why that second part is crucial here.) He once messaged to report that we had a minor drain fly situation (a slightly gross thing that can happen if you don’t use your sinks) and then he kindly ran the water for us. As a thank you, we brought him and his wife a basket of treats from Drogheria Innocenzi and Santa Maria Novella pharmacy
One caveat I’ll mention: Upon our return, I did find half-empty bottles of Smirnoff Ice in our fridge. And about a week later, my oldest daughter happened to look at a framed black and white photo of the New York City skyline that’s been sitting on a table in our living room for years, and ask why Greg and Elizabeth were photoshopped into it. Total scoundrels.
Stop grocery shopping
A few weeks before we left, I stopped buying groceries. I wanted to leave our fridge as empty as possible, so I pulled together meals from whatever was in our pantry and freezer. My kids complained about eating nonstop dried pasta and frozen mystery fish, but we left a clean fridge. And as a bonus, we saved money on groceries and were all extremely ready to eat food that wasn’t dried pasta and frozen mystery fish.
Sign up to have your mail paused — and scanned
Did you know that not only can you pause your mail for up to 30 days, but that the USPS will scan your mail every day and email you a “Daily Digest”? It’s called Informed Delivery, and it’s! free!
Sign up here, and each morning you’ll get an email with a black-and-white scan of the address side of each piece of mail coming to you that day, as well as a list of any packages arriving to your house, with a clickable tracking number. It was comforting, not only to know that our mail wasn’t piling up while we were gone, but to know what kind of mail we were getting all month long. While the mail hold is temporary, the Informed Delivery is forever. (And did I mention free?)