Finding Joy in the Ordinary with Ingrid Fetell Lee

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and twenty five, which is airing in late November of twenty twenty one. I'm going to be interviewing Ingrid federal Lee, who is the author of the book Joyful, The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to create Extraordinary Happiness. She also owns the business called The Esthetics of Joy and has a really popular TED talk on how certain things make us happy, be and joyful when we see them, certain physical objects in the world, and how our surroundings can really influence our mood and how we function, and whether we are nice to each other or whether we are crabby to each other just fascinating stuff. It turns out that if you're in a drab office, you are probably not going to be functioning as your best self. So you watched her ted talk, right, Sarah. Yeah, I loved it. I found it very interesting. I've discussed how I don't put a lot of thought into my physical surroundings, but this did give me pause. Perhaps there are ways of adding pops of joy without overall spending a lot of time on that since I don't enjoy the process necessarily, So that is something I will keep in mind. I also thought about my workplace, which the children's hospital part of it where I happen to work. They done an amazing job, like a lot of the examples she showed of joyful looking environments, I'm like, yeah, they must have looked at things like that where when they were building our hospital, the outpatient part where I work. Maybe not as maybe not as joy invoking, but I do think we've found ways of putting up. We tend to decorate for holidays. That's definitely kind of a joy inducing thing. We've added color and stuff where we can. My office, actually, somebody gave me some wooden custom letters that are like rainbow color. That are my initials, and I put them up on the wall and I was thinking about it, and I'm like, you know, that's that's definitely what if anything is like a focal point in my office, adding a little bit of joy, it's that so yeah, really thought provoking talk. I'm so excited to hear this interview. Yeah. Now she has a lot of interesting things to say about color and shape and abundance. Those are all things that can induce joy. I've been thinking of that that too as I've been decorating my new house. I mean, you know, I'm always going to be something of a muted, neutral kind of person. You know, I'm fine with little pops of color. I'm not going to put huge, bright colors all over any sort of wall. But many of our bedrooms are this shade. I think it's Iceberg blue Benjamin Moore, and it's this really beautiful light blue. And I think that that's going to be a definite joy inducing color as I look at it, because it's just it's calm, but it's not like white. There's something to it that brings in a bit of joy. And this is airing inn late November. We're recording it in early November, which is when the leaves are still at their peak color here in Pennsylvania, and so I'm experiencing all sorts of joy looking at the bright yellow oaks and the red maples. This is certainly an occasional pop of color in the landscape like that can really just make you smile. You know, it's hard to be in a bad mood when you're looking at this brilliantly blazing red and yellow landscape. So even as it's getting colder, we still get a few weeks where it's like, oh, yeah, I'm still going to smile about this. I still remember a walk I took with the kids, like a few months ago, when we went outside specifically because there was like a giant, vivid rainbow. I'm like, we have to go out and like experience this and like see it. And it was just so like there's just something so human about that, and so like there must be some evolutionary pressure that makes us and that's part of her work, and I think that's so fascinating, And I'm jealous of your leaves. Why we all love rainbows together that she uses that as an example as well, Well, let's go ahead and hear from Ingrid about what she has to say. Well, Sarah and I are so excited to welcome Ingrid to the program. Ingrid, could you introduce yourself? Sure, my name is Ingrid Fatelliti, and I am a designer by background who studies joy and in particular the way that our surroundings and the physical objects around us influence our emotions and our well being. That is such an awesome topic. And can you tell us a little bit about your career, like how what evolves as an expert in the aesthetics of joy. Yeah, it's a funny question because if my like eight year old self knew that I was going to grow up and study joy for a living, she'd be like, Nah, that's that doesn't exist, that's not real. I was an English creative writing major. I went and spent some time in the world of market research and branding, so I spent a lot of time studying human behavior, and then I decided to go back to school for industrial design. And so it was while I was getting my master's in industrial design that a professor made this offhand comment. But of course often it's those offhand comments that end up being really important and he said, your work gives me a feeling of joy. And it was particularly funny because at the time I was really trying to study eco friendly design, sustainable design. I wanted everything to be really ergonomic. I kind of didn't really care what it looked like. I just wanted to make stuff that was going to be good for the planet and really usable. And so this was strange to me that my work had given him this feeling of joy. But also, you know, we think of joy as this ephemeral, this intangible, fleeting feeling, not something that comes from stuff, material things, Right, So I asked, how do things create joy? And this professor and his cohorts couldn't answer the question. And so that was what really started me on this quest. And in the meantime, I was working at a company called Ideo, a design consultancy, and so I was learning a lot about, you know, putting design into practice by day and then by night and on the weekends, I was writing this blog, the Aesthetics of Joy, and I've been doing that. I've been writing that blog for now thirteen years, and about five years ago I decided to turn that all that research into a book. I'd been you know, reading books and neuroscience papers on the subway, taking notes on index cards on my commute, and I decided to turn that into a book. And I've been doing this work full time ever since. Wonderful and speaking of things that bring us joy? You are also a fairly new mom, right, So, yeah, I'm a new mom. I have a pandemic baby. I had my first child's last June. So I have a sixteen month old named Graham. Wonderful, wonderful, And so, you know, as you had been, you know, realizing that these objects were bringing someone joy and trying to figure out what is this thing of joy? You say in your very widely viewed Ted talk on this topic that you became the Nancy Drew of joy. Right, you were a detective studying the commonalities of all these things when joy appeared. So what are the various things you came up with? Like, what are the characteristics of things that bring us joy? So I started asking people doing exactly that, asking people about the things and places that brought them joy. And I noticed that there were certain things that came up again and again and again, and there were certain visual or sensorial patterns to those things. So round shapes is one of them. Pops of bright color, a sense of a abundance and multiplicity, things that have a sense of lightness or elevation, things that float and fly like hot air balloons and clouds and rainbows up in the sky. So there are all these sort of patterns that bring joy the world over, and we don't notice them most of the time, but they actually have a sort of universal connection to this feeling of joy. Yeah, so you've created all sorts of like galleries of various things that you know, colorful buildings in cities, or pieces of confetti on the ceiling right that you just now that you view them, you see like, oh, yeah, everyone reacts well to that. But you had to come up with this sort of system of thinking about it. It's really intuitive when you actually hear it and you think, oh, of course, confetti and sprinkles and rainbows all kind of tap into the same principles. And polka dots and stripes, those are all manifestations of abundance. This idea that we're drawn to things that feel like they've gotten multiplicity or variety to them. That's something that we see in festivals the world over. So you know, we see these things in our environment, and we don't think much of them. But when we actually focus on them, we can see that there are predictable patterns and we can start to harness those patterns and use them in our homes, in our lives to physically surround ourselves with more joy. And why should we do that? Because, I mean, another very memorable moment of your TED talks you talk about all these wonderful, colorful, you know, wonderful things, and then you flash a picture of the world's like dravist cubicle farm, just you know, what many people work in. And so I mean, why should we be thinking about rainbows and sprinkles like you know, when we're we're like, how would that change anything about our lives if we start thinking more about rainbows and sprinkles in our physical spaces. Well, the way that I us to answer this was that I would point to all of the things that joy enhances in our lives. So joy has been shown to increase or enhance productivity. We're actually up to twelve percent more productive in some studies when we are in a joyful state of mind. Doctors come to a correct diagnosis more quickly in a state of joy more more resilient emotionally and even physically. So joy helps to reset our body's cardiovascular responses to stress, so we're less stressed out or more resilient. Joy enhances connections between people, so it improves our relationships. So there are all sorts of reasons why having more joy in our lives is beneficial, whether that's our work lives, our personal lives, or anything in between. But I think that to some extent, trying to justify it that way misses the point a little bit, because I think a lot of us are trained to see joy as this extra in life. It's the thing that we do when we get to the weekend, we get through our work. We have to be productive enough so that we can get to the joy. And that is really a frame of mind that limits our joy. It limits our sort of defines joy as this thing in the margins, and I think, you know, as I've come to see it, we've been inculcated with that view. But joy is actually the thing that makes our lives worth living. And I think as we see people right now in the wake of the pandemic, starting to make all sorts of shifts around their work and saying, you know what, maybe I don't want to work in an office sixty hours a week. Maybe I don't want to base my whole life around work. Maybe I want to change how I work so that it brings me more joy. I think we're starting to see people become more aware of that fact, or start to question whether joy actually belongs on the margins or whether we shouldn't bring it back toward the center of our lives. A good point. All right, well, we're going to take a quick ad break and we'll be right back with Ingrid. I'm here with Ingrid fatel Lee, who is the author of the book Joyful, The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to create Extraordinary Happiness. She also owns the business The Aesthetics of Joy has a very widely viewed ted talk on finding joy in everyday things. So definitely recommend that our listeners go check that out. So, Ingrid, we want to you know, dial down into some specific spaces, you know, because we've got our listeners. Our busy women, you know, building careers, raising families, would love to have more joy in their lives. But everything is you know, going on your working mom as well. So let's talk about how we can bring some joy to the various spaces where we spend a lot of our time. I would like to start with the house, and let's start with one of the places where we spend maybe a lot of time, the kitchen. What can we do in our kitchens to up the joy effect there? Well. I think the kitchen naturally is a place of both gathering and also sort of sensorial experience. So I think finding ways to make that more prominent or more central, since having a sense of sensorial abundance is really connected to that abundance esthetic, that sense of variety and multiplicity. But it doesn't just have to be visual abundance, So it doesn't just have to be stripes or polka dots. It can have to do with the joy of the actual experience of cooking. So, you know, a way of bringing your ingredients out into the open so that you are you know, your pantry is organized in a way that it feels joyful to you when you open it because you see the abundance of all those ingredients in a way that is uncluttered, but you still get the excitement of seeing all of that potential. I think another thing is really just to make your kitchen a place where it is easy to gather, and I think one thing that really contributes to that is lighting. So we don't often think about the way that light influences whether people want to be in a space or not, but generally, having warm light that's sort of focused on an area will help draw people in. So if you look around your house, you'll probably find that there are certain spots where people gather if you notice what the lighting is like. It's often because there's a nice contrast between light and shadow where people want to gather. And so having a pendant light over your kitchen table, for example, that draws people together, or having the same thing over your islands so that that is sort of lit up and becomes like a beacon, can be a way to add joy in those spaces. Yeah, no, that sounds great. I was even just thinking, as you know, thinking through your categories of things that bring joy, and something like a bowl of oranges, it's like the sphere and the bright color. You throw in some lemons in there too, or something that would It's so simple, it's so simple. But yeah, that's I think that's a lovely way to to do it. That's a wonderful way to add abundance to a kitchen space. Another thing that you can do as you prep is a lot of people make a meson place and a mezon plas is a form of sort of spatially organizing your ingredients. You can see everything, and that can be a really joyful exercise of laying things out and having all of your prep neatly laid out. That that taps into the harmony aesthetic, which has to do with symmetry and balance and a sense of rhythm and repetition. So the way that you organize your food when you're cooking can also be something that brings joy. Yeah, and you mentioned the part about the pantry, you know, seeing things displayed. I suspect that's why people love to click on those photos on Instagram from the home edit people. Right, you know that they're the canisters of fruit loops, and that you know it has the symmetry, but then the bright color within it, right, is that what we're reacting to? One hundred percent? And I think what you mentioned there is actually this kind of combination between aesthetics. So harmony and abundance work really well together, because if you have pure abundance, sometimes that can feel overwhelming. But if you have harmony imposed on abundance, then you have all of the joy of this sense of variety, but you have it contained within this very clear structure, and that tension is really joyful to us. Excellent. All right, let's move to the home office. So many of us have been working at home for twenty months or so now, often in repurposed corners of cluttered guest bedrooms and such. So what can we do to make our home offices feel more joyful? I think the number one thing here is to add something green. Have a plant or some element of greenery in your space. It can even be artificial. It doesn't necessarily have to be a living plant. If you don't have a green thumb and you're worried about keeping a plant alive, even an artificial plant will help. But research shows that having something green in your workspace can help reset and restore your attention, help with concentration, in addition to giving you this feeling of sort of freedom and joy of having the outsides brought into your workspace. Wonderful. All right, put the plant there, maybe an artificial one. If you're worried that a dead plant will bring you zero joy whatsoever as you look at it. And a lot of our listeners are actually listening to this in their cars, and it occurs to me that, you know, even your car space probably has some way you could make it more joyful, and particularly if you're spending a lot of time there. What should we be thinking about in terms of our cars. I haven't thought about this one as much, but as you mentioned it, what comes to mind for me is having something silly in the car or having something surprising in the car. I think there are opportunities. There are all sorts of little compartments in your car that you know close up, and that creates a really great potential for surprise in the house. You know. One of the things I did in my old house was paint cabana stripes on the inside of my hall closet so that every time you would open it, you would have this like bright yellow and white stripes to greet you, and you almost kind of forget about them when it's closed. So that's one of the funny things about space, like creating surprise in space, it feels like a strange thing you're going to surprise yourself, but in a spatial context. You can actually you can close doors or drawers or this is something you can do at home. You can do it in any space in your in your house, but you can also do it in the car because there are so many of those little compartments. So I would be thinking about what kinds of little things you could hide in the car that would give you joy when you are rummaging for something in the glove compartment, for example, or looking for something in that center console. Yeah, you could also do that in your home, having something in your home office, having something silly, so something like, I don't know, a little dash you know, those bobble dashboard ornaments would be an example for your car, but in your home office, having something maybe with googly eyes or something cute. Research actually shown that can also increase focus, which sounds strange. You think of those things in a car as distracting, or think of those things at your desk as a distraction from your work, but actually the research shows that that might actually help you focus more. Yeah, because it's cute to look at, and if there's something cute to look at, you're not looking at Instagram then, which is also distracting as you're going about your workday. We I thinking about sort of like communal places where people gather. I mean, so if you're advising a company, let's say that's that's building an office, and they're like, you know, we would like to make people feel joyful here. You know, we also have work to do. You know, what would you have them think about in terms of you know, what are the couple of things you would do first to make a space be more joyful for employees working there. A lot of times it has to do with the kinds of work that are going to be done in the space and thinking about the existing space and what it needs or what it lacks. So some spaces are a really severe and are very hard angled, and so in a space like that, I would be looking at how do we soften the edges, how do we add more curves to make this feel less like just a sort of severe block. If a space lacks color, that might be something I would be looking at. So I would be looking at what is what is happening in that space and what actually can we add to an existing space to make it feel more joyful as we look at the kind of work that people are doing there. For example, if people are engaged in teamwork and creativity. Then that might imply again that we would want to look at curves, which we've seen in studies can promote flexibility of thought, so have a natural playful round shapes have a natural connection to creativity, So I'd be looking at shapes like that. On the other hand, if you're doing big strategic visioning and that's you know, it's an executive floor with people who are really focused on analytical strategy, then I might be thinking more about trying to give people a zoomed out perspective because research shows that when we have aerial views, when we have a sense of being upward in space, that that can actually help us take a bigger picture view on problems. So it really depends on the kind of work that's happening there and using the aesthetics not just to create a feeling of joy, which is really important, but also to complement the kinds of things that people are doing in that space. Yeah, and I want to ask a little bit more about the whole color thing, because people hear this and be like, you know, all well and good, I'm not going to paint all my walls orange. And so for those who are not going to paint their walls orange? Does this mean just forget about the whole thing? Are there more subtle ways to incorporate color in a way that will boost mood while still recognizing that, you know, again, not everyone's going to paint their walls orange, right. I think it's easy to to misinterpret this as me saying you have to cover your office with rainbows, and it's really more about creating a sense of vibrancy, making it feel like the space is alive, that people can thrive in it. And so when you think about the spaces you feel alive in, they might be the beach, it might be being out in nature. Often there's really good natural light, sunlight, there's some sense of vibrancy, but it doesn't mean that there are neon colors everywhere. So I think it's more about creating a sense of vibrancy, and that could be about improving your lighting. It could be about adding little pops of color. It doesn't have to be a lot. It could just be about changing out, for example, your largest surfaces in your office from gray to something that maybe has a texture that includes a color in with the gray. So it's not to say that you have to do everything, you have to paint all your walls orange. But I would say to someone who is maybe worried about it or has a little bit of what I call chromophobia or color or fear of color, to start small. Might be a yellow coffee mug, and then it might be adding another lamp on your desk. But start with these little touches and see how it affects your mood, and then you can grow and build from there. Yeah, and certainly I mean adding a plant, adding flowers, for instance, That could be a very low key way to bring in more color, and then people feel like, well, I haven't committed to anything, but would still probably boost mood, right exactly. Yeah, Sop, have recently moved to a new house that you're in the process of redecorating. Correct, Yeah, So first, how does what an expert on the aesthetics of joy is house hunting? Like? What does that even look like? When you walk into most houses? Like? Do you what are you thinking? As as you see most of these places, it's a pain in the butt for everyone involved. Yes, I'll be honest, I'm not the easiest house huner, but I'm pretty clear which is good. I generally can walk into a place and know very quickly whether it feels like something I could live in or not. We all have an intuition for how a space feels to us and what feels good in a space, and I think that we have lost touch with it because we are constantly being fed imagery of what a good or a perfect space is, and so we're constantly being bombarded with that imagery and it's hard to tune into what feels good. If you think back to let's say, maybe it was your grandparents' house or a house of a friend you went to as a child, there's always somewhere in your memory that you can reach back to of a home that felt good, and it probably wasn't picture perfect, it just felt good. And when you can start to look back at those homes or those places and you can say, what is it about these places that feels good to me, that is sort of the the beginning of understanding. You know whether a house is going to feel good. So for me, there are a few features that I know feel good. Light is always going to be the most important thing, because it's one thing that's really hard to change. So if you're buying a house, this is something you're going to be living with for a long time. Another thing that is really important to me is having very specific, but having a circle in the home. I actually learned about this from a designer named Gilen Vignas, and she pointed out to me that circles in a home feel really good. And what that means is that you have rooms that interconnect where you could actually walk in a circle through the home, so you could walk from the kitchen to the dining room, to the entryway and back around. Any home that has one of those circles in it feels really playful for some reason. You can if you had one of those as a kid, you could probably remember playing tag or some kind of game in a home like that. So that always is something that I look for because I think that's something that makes a home feel really good. And then as you you know, you purchase your home and you've been renovating, I can see behind you that you have half of the wall of wallpaper currently. It is very colorful wallpaper. I'd like to assure our listeners that it is a write and pattern. How have you got alund selecting? Like you what you're going to put in the walls. I mean, just very curious to hear about the design process. My co hosts Sarah and I are both moving into new homes in January, and so I just love to hear about how you've been going about doing that. Well, it's different every time. Actually, was this the third home that we've done some kind of work too, And each time the process is a little bit different. But I've learned a lot over the past few years, and in this instance, partially because of the pandemic and partially because I just kind of wanted a little bit more time. I've really been taking my time with this process and going one room at a time. I teach a course on designing a joyful home, and I feel that in the course, I teach a methodology of going room by room, and I think that going room by room is really powerful because it gives you the sense of completion of having one one space completely done before you start to do. If you do a little bit here and there, then you feel like it's never done, whereas if you go room by room and you finish one room at a time, you get the feeling of satisfaction of having your room complete. I think For me, the process always starts with looking at how I want to feel in the space. So this is my office that I'm in right now, and for me, abundance was a big part of it. So I look at the aesthetics of joy and I say, okay, well what aesthetics connect to how I want to feel in this space? And for me, abundance was a big one because it's a place of creativity, it's a place of ideas, and I know that I think best in those kinds of environments, and so wallpaper was a big part of that. Also, you know, painting my trim so that really felt like this enveloping space. And then once you have that foundation, you can start to to different colors in different spaces, but you have a fundamental set of ideas and it's all connected to how you actually want to live in that space. Excellent? Excellent? And can it be done cheaply? And are there ways that we can add joy without spending too much money? Well? I think again, a lot of us have been conditioned to feel like we need our spaces to be picture perfect, and it's just there is no perfect space. I know that Pinterest wants to make us believe that there is, but there really is no perfect space. And so when you let go of perfection and you use joy as your guidepost, it frees you up because you no longer have to make sure that. I think it can be very paralyzing if you think, oh my god, I have to get the exact right paint color for this wallpaper, and if I don't get it, then I'm going to have this really ugly. It's not going to be right because it's not going to be perfect. So you let go of that and you say, does this color bring me joy? Does this color make me feel good? It's very liberating and it frees you up to not have to fix all the problems. So one of the things that I think can really help from a cost perspective is to focus on moments that matter. So instead of thinking about everything in your home is equally important, think about where are the places you spend the most time. What are the things you want to have happen in a space. So, for example, in your bedroom, do you just really want a space where you can read a book and be cozy. And if that's the case, then maybe it's your corner with your reading chair, and you invest in that moment in that space and making that moment possible, and the rest of it isn't so important, and the rest of it fades into the background. So instead of thinking about it like a picture that I'm going to have to take where everything's going to have to be perfect, think about it as a moment in your life and how you want that moment to feel. And I think that really helps from a cost perspective. Very good advice. Well Ingrid. We always live in with a love of the week. This is something that we are really enjoying, so I can go first. In the introduction, Sarah and I talked about fall color and how you know, having we're recording this in early November, and where I live in Pennsylvania, the fall colors are at their peaks, and I'm just loving looking at Japanese maples, which is the most brilliant red color right now. And many times of the year you don't get those bright colors in nature. You know, there's like two weeks in April and three weeks in October in the beginning of November where you get those colors, and this is one of them, and so I'm really enjoying seeing reds that are about the color of the sweater that Ingrid is wearing. And I can see on the video. You guys can't say, but trust me, it's a beautiful, bright, brilliant red and that's all over the place right now. So that's what I'm loving this week. I love it. Mine is maybe a little bit more serious, but I have been listening to Bessel vander Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score Will I do wallpapering and painting in my office. And it's a book that I started a long time ago but I was never able to finish. And for those who are not familiar with it, it's a book about trauma and the way that all of his research on how we heal trauma and how we come back from trauma. And I have to say it's a difficult listen, but I have been loving it because it really speaks to a lot of what my work talks about on the lighter side, which is about the connection between our body and our surroundings and our mind and how those three things work as kind of a system. And he's talking about it from a place of deeper struggle and trauma, but they sort of come together for me in this really beautiful way. So that's my love of the week. I have an excellent book, so people should definitely check that out, and also check out Ingrid's book Joyful On you get this right this time? The surprising power of ordinary things to create extraordinary happiness? Did I get it right this time? That's it? That's it all right, So please go check that out. Her website. Aesthetics of joint and her Ted talk a great insight into the things that make us happy. So Ingrid, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Well that was amazing. It was so fun to listen to Ingrid talking about the aesthetics of joy. So we have a question from a listener this week who heard our episode about layering childcare, So please go check that out if anyone hasn't heard. It aired in early November about how everyone needs multiple layers of childcare, and she said that she had fact mostly used just one layer. Namely, they've had a daycare because her husband's office had an on site daycare, which is of course very convenient because it's going to be open during the hours that you are expected to be at work, right, I just that makes sense. It is you know there whenever the office is open, and so they've used it right because it was so convenient for them. However, they are thinking that possibly they may need some more layers because they've encountered the issue of, well, what happens when you know kids are sick and maybe they're not that sick, but they can't go back to daycare yet, And she says, so what kind of kids sick days? Do you have your nanny's cover? And when do you or your partners cancel work to be home, either because the kids are so sick that they need a parent because you don't want to get the giver sick, and also do you ever have nanny take a kid to a pediatrician? She says there are times when a sick kid has caused a big work disruption, and she's wondering which of those days would have been more covered in the event of having a full time caregiver versus just having this on site daycare at her husband's office. So, Sarah, what have you found in terms of, you know, the additional coverage for sick days. I feel like I need to knock on like several surfaces right now. Sound effect for the podcast This has not come up as much as like one might think. I'm not saying my kids aren't sick. They certainly get like runny noses, and in the era of COVID that has led us to keep them home. But I haven't had kids that were so sick that for a long time really where I felt uncomfortable leaving them with a caregiver. I also should knock again. I'm not going to make you guys listen to that, but like my goodness, like, we haven't had a lot of those, like family vomiting illnesses. I think that is one where I'm not sure I would subject an outsider too. Plus that's so contagious that I'm probably going to get it, and do I really want to go to work like that anyway? But for the more common, like simple respiratory illnesses, our nanny has been fine to work. Usually by the time the kid has a fever and is sick enough, they've already been exposed anyway, so it's less of a you know, oh my gosh, we have to protect this other person. I also recognize the privilege in this that my kids don't have underlying diagnoses. I mean, my patients with like type one diabetes. If their child is sick, it's usually the parent has to stay home because it's just things can come up and the management's complicated and they're just not going to trust a caregiver to be able to handle that. So there are scenarios where this is incredibly challenging, but for us it hasn't been so bad now In terms of going to appointments. If I think this kid is sick enough to like go to a doctor because I don't know what's going on or need some help, I generally try to go. Unless I had some big, big, big work thing, I just figure stuff out and at least go to the appointment, even if I can't be with the child all day. I have, on a rare occasion, sent a kid if I'm like, okay, they're completely fine, but I know they just need a strip swab. I have sent her with our nanny, like with instructions to be like, can you just get them to do a strip swab? And then you know, we find out if they have strap and usually it's because I suspect they do and just go left proof or something like that. Yeah, And I have sent our nanny to routine like dental visits and stuff like that, and it's been fine. I'd love to be there for all of them. My husband is almost never able to help with any of them. And so with three kids, and they all have eye appointments, they all have dentis, they all have doctor like, every once in a while there's one that I just can't make. I'm flexible to a point, but like one kid had to have a cavity filled and I couldn't make it a couple weeks ago, and it was it was fine. Yeah. And I would also point out in terms of I mean, Sarah actually is a pediatrician, so she may know what the kid has, and so feels more comfortable sending somebody for a routine visit for a routine chest or whatever because she does, in fact know what they have, right, So it's just more of a confirmation with the child's actual medical team than anything else. I think that'd be harder for a lot of other people to do because they wouldn't have that same level of knowledge and certainty on the diagnosis. And so I think for many people it would have been it would be harder to get their heads around doing that because of their own lack of medical training and that so I think we only had once where like a grandma took a kid to the doctor because something came up and Michael and I were both traveling, and that's, you know, just what had to have happened that somebody had to go for something acute that had happened while we were both gone. One of us has gone to all dental or doctor visits, but again we have more flexibility of not needing to be in the office for dental vis as we tend to like schedule ours at the same time, so we're just like all there and so that's more of a thing. As for the sickness though, I got to say, we have also found that having a nanny has meant we haven't had to cover as many sick days, which we don't have as many now. But I think obviously if Henry was in a congrege care setting, he'd be getting sick all the time. It's just the nature of young children in a group setting is they're going to get sick and then and many times they're not terribly sick. It's just that if you know they have you know, diarrhea, they can't come back for twenty four hours until after it's gone, so you can wind up missing like a whole week, even though they were only really feeling crummy the first day or two. It's just took the whole week for it to work its way through their gi system. So you know, then within nanny you wouldn't have that as much because you know, presumably she would be able to handle the messy tapers. As part of the joy of this kind of work, you do it as a parent, if you're caring for kids, that's part of it. You know, we've normally what winds up happening is our caregivers will be there when the kid is getting sick. I mean, they're part of it, and then they may get it themselves too, and then they'll miss a day or two after the kid had it because they're throwing up or have a high fever or something, and that's just something you have to prepare for the possibility happening. So it's actually that you know the kid is no longer sick, it's that your caregiver is sick because your kid got them sick. So you know, it's hard to avoid that happening. And I think many people who are in the childcare business understand that children have germs that you get. But the problem is, like if they stayed home when your kid was sick, the problem is the exposure probably already happened. Right unless, like it was a Monday morning where your kid was getting sick and they hadn't seen them since Friday afternoon, maybe they would have avoided the exposure. But it's pretty hard to avoid getting a caregiver sick by preemptive having them stay home. So just to clarify the order that that winds up happening in of needing to cover a day, it tends to be after the kid is sick, rather than simultaneously while they are sick. Yes, I mean, case in point, my poor niece just had a very transmissible illness. I won't mention it specifics what it was, but even though none of the kids like went to daycare sick, the entire class got it because what happens is they've exposed each other before anyone shows any symptoms, and then, just like it would for a caregiver. So I mean, that's how illness spreads, even if we do a wonderful job of isolating and quarantining ourselves once we show symptoms, Unfortunately a lot of times the damage has already been done, and we're not just speaking about COVID, but all the other things, everything else, Yes, exactly, all right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. I've been interviewing Ingrid Fedallee about the aesthetics of joy. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.