Adjusting to life with half our family has been a challenge. Also going from a 50/50 split of estrogen and testosterone to 100% estrogen has been an interesting transition.

The most obvious changes are in the refrigerator. A was on a bodybuilding mission this summer, so lean protein was the cornerstone of every menu I prepared, as well as the basis for most of the snacks we had on hand.

Both boys tend to be bottomless pits, whereas E tends to focus her diet and her meals around her practice schedule and providing her body with the right fuel for her activities.

Throw in a 50-something, menopausal woman who is trying really hard to navigate an entirely new chapter of how her body reacts to food.

Ice the cake with grocery prices that are astronomical, and honestly, I’m not sure how I just survived summer meal planning. No one went hungry, though.

Now that it’s just me and E, I have a different set of challenges. She loves soup, and it’s a great way to incorporate all the vegetables she also likes to eat. But after the fourth day of eating the one pot of soup that I made for both lunch and dinner, she said we needed a different plan.

After years of doubling recipes, I now have to halve them. I guess I am using that mathematics education after all.

E has three sports on her plate right now, so I’m still pretty busy running to her matches and meets and getting her to practice. She plays tennis and runs cross country.

After three years, I still can’t make heads or tails of how to score a tennis match, and cross country meets mostly consist of dashing between a few points on the course where I can give her a quick cheer when she dashes by.

I find myself missing the boys’ soccer matches immensely. G played with a close group of friends that he’d been with since they first started playing soccer, and although some of those boys are still playing, it’s just not the same.

Both boys have been drawn to different sports in college, and while I’m happy that they are continuing to stay physically fit and that they’ve found the camaraderie of a team, I’m sad that I can’t be there to watch all of their activities.

That being said, I’ve also realized that in general, I don’t enjoy watching sports; I enjoy watching my kids play sports. I truly don’t miss having to try to finish work and make a few crockpots of food and work another shift in a concession stand, while missing one or the other’s event.

E definitely got the short shrift last year. Since it was G’s senior year, I opted to attend as many events of his as I could, promising her that I’d be at every event of hers this year. It is nice to be able to focus on her and not feel guilty about missing something else.

And, then, there is band. I’ve been a band mom for eight years now, and I wouldn’t know another way to spend my Friday nights in the fall.

Both boys had exciting band careers. A worked his way up to having a trumpet solo at several games. G was the lone baritone sax player, and as the low-brass section leader, he would charge onto the field leading the sousaphones ahead of the band.

On top of being the only bari, his lanky 6-foot 6-inch frame made it a little difficult for some of the shorter members to keep up with him, so it was mildly comedic watching him scurry about the field.

There is no bari sax player this year, so the sousaphones run solo. I thought I was the only one who missed him, but at the last game, another band parent mentioned that it just wasn’t the same without him in the lead.

The boys are missed, but E and I are making up for it by having new adventures of our own, since we don’t have to worry about anyone else’s schedule. Since she got back from France, E has been wanting to explore more museums and learn more about art, so on a quiet Sunday morning we headed down to Philly and spent a few hours walking around the Art Museum.

We also squeezed in her homecoming dress shopping adventure one evening when practice was canceled. That night, we also decided to have ice cream for dinner, which also solved the continuous leftover problem for a day.

Obviously, we’re not done changing yet. E will be moving on to her next chapter eventually, and who knows how the boys will be cycling back through, even if only part time.

What I have noticed, even when our family went from five to four, is that somehow we expand to fill the places that have been vacated, even if it’s only a temporary emptiness.

E and I seem to be just as busy, even if it is a different kind of busy. By the time we think we have it figured out, the semester break will be here and we’ll adapt all over again.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News