Welcome to The Heartland Album

Our old fashioned telephone answering machine can tell us only relatively how many phone messages await us.
It gives a real loooooooong beep to say "There are about 12,548,837 calls on the tape - they're all for your offspring." Recording tapes wear out at a fierce rate. There is a solution for the situation.

We directed Offspring to draft a master list of all telephone friends. Next drawn up was a blank dally schedule. The first calls were blocked off in 15 minute increments beginning at 9 a.m. At 3 p.m. the increments narrow to 10 minute and from
5 p.m. to 9 p.m. the intervals are 5 minutes. Offspring distributes to each of Offspring’s friends a copy of a blank schedule with a suggested call time.. Each schedule has the name of the friend at the top. In our offspring's case there are,
I'd guess, 2,497 copies.

Each friend notes on the schedule the time that Friend will be calling Offspring. Friend then sends that schedule back to Offspring. Offspring compares all the schedules and adjusts call differences by five or ten minutes. Any adjustment of
more than 10 minutes must be approved by Friend. Then all of the adjusted lists are returned to all of the friends and the plan goes into effect. Each day when Friend is ready to call Offspring, Friend examines the agenda to see when the call is scheduled. Friend then places a check mark at that time.

When Offspring arrives home from football practice or the ballet lesson Offspring examines the master list to see which friends called and then checks off those calls on the master list. Then when Offspring is scheduled to return the call of,
say, Friend 217, Offspring would merely place a check mark for "Return call to...Friend 217 on the master phonelog and consider the return call made. The beauty of the system is the results when the plan goes into effect. Then any time the phone rings we would know it was for Parent.