Planning Good Weekends. Ep 6

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of two and soon to be three and a practicing physician. 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 episode six, where we're going to be talking about one of Sarah and my favorite topics, which is planning good weekends. We love our weekends. We want to create weekends that feel good, just the right balance between stuff and open time, and weekends that make you say, I'm hitting Monday ready to go. Those are the best weekends we have. But one thing we've been thinking about recently is also professionally oriented. Sarah just had a major accomplishment that she got to put on her CV is that she gave what's called grand rounds. What is that? For those of us who are not in the medical world, can you tell us about that? Yeah, isn't that such a fancy It sounds like a very old school term, as many medical realm words are. We like our EP and MS and our our lingo. Anyway, grand rounds are basically just like either a hospital wide or a division wide presentation that you're giving for a group of doctors and nurses and other professionals. Sometimes it's all doctors, sometimes it's mixed. Ours happens to be a mix. So I got to speak to everybody about one of our brand new programs and it went really really well. It was last week, and I had kind of had it on my calendar for a long time, trying not to ruminate about it, and I really did kind of follow my own advice where I kind of just didn't really worry about it until the month or so before. But there was a bit of a ramp up. It turned out to go really well, and I've gotten multiple people come up to me and ask about, like, you know, sending patients to this clinic and asking questions, So I think it was a success. And how long was the presentation that you needed to give? It was an hour? It was an hour? And how did you feel during it? Like were you nervous? I was nervous as I was setting up, and I mean, you know, it's not as high stakes as say a TED talk, which some of us here have given, so you know, I'm sure that was like incredibly nerve wracking. The part that I loved about doing it is that I was talking about something that I was the expert on, and as long as I kind of kept that at the forefront of my mind, like none of these people are gonna question me on my particular field and the research that I've done, then it's sort of like, well, I have the upper hand and I get to kind of go through all this information and enjoy it. And you know, once if as long as I focused on that fact and not the fact that you know, there are people more senior than me at the presentation, or people who might be judging me in some way but like they don't know about what the topic that I'm speaking about, it was great. So no, I wasn't terribly nervous. And I also want to say, like that's been something that's come with time, because I do think people think, oh, you know, I just am not the speaking type or like I couldn't do that. But I think the more you just do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it. Almost anybody can become effective. And part of that is having confidence in yourself just from having done it exactly, and you practiced beforehand too, write It's not like you got up on stage and be like, I'm going to talk for an hour. I mean you knew what you were going to say, absolutely. I mean, once I crafted my slides, I gave it to my car, I gave it to the wall I've given in this case, I didn't. But I've definitely given presentations to my husband just sort of hear what he has to say, and to have like a little bit of an audience before my real audience. So that is absolutely key. Didn't you do your Ted talk like twenty or thirty times to yourself before you went on stage? So what I often do is I go up to my bedroom. I actually sometimes even go into the bathroom and shut the door. There's mirrors in the bathrooms. That's why I'm in there, right, so that I can see myself talking. So sometimes I'll even put on what I'm planning to wear for my talks, and I will practice. And I said the Ted Talk, I probably practice. Yeah, twenty thirty times before I got up to give it. And that's a short one that was about twelve minutes long. So that wasn't hard to keep practicing because it's only a twelve minute time each time I'm doing it. But I wanted to make sure I knew it in and out. I knew exactly what time I would be at at different segments in it, so I wouldn't be thinking, oh, am I running behind? Am I ahead of time? I know I was right on the money with it, and you know, just even figuring out what people are probably going to react to and building in a little bit of space for that. But I cannot stress enough, like practicing with public speaking. I think a lot of people who think public speaking is hard or not something they can do, it's because they're not practiced enough, and not just even practicing for yourself in front of a mirror or a friend or family member. But the more even like small groups you can give speeches to, the more comfortable you are getting up in front of people, that's it's just comes with time. Yeah, the different audience thing helps so much. And if you're in medicine or you know, another in a science field or something, and there are learners that you can give your talk to. That is like the best form of practice because you get to kind of go through the whole thing, you see how they react to it, and then they get kind of a bonus teaching session. So yeah, now I know that I've even I've given sort of my stump time management talk, which is about a fifty minute talk. I don't know hundreds of times now, but I still practice. If I haven't given it in the last week or so before I'm going to another engagement, I will definitely still practice it because yeah, because it's totally it's like a short term memory thing. It's not it's a short term memory. It doesn't so I don't want to get up in front of people be like, oh what am I going to say to you people? So it's definitely about knowing it in and out and then you know, then you're just sharing something you know, right, You're helping people like you were telling these people something new that they didn't know and so you could share it with them. Well. So I think thinking through things ahead of time is also one of our best tips for weekends. We're so planners. You can tell us by listening to this podcast, But I know we're gonna have to have someone on at some point who's like the anti plan, because I'm curious actually, like how do you how do even make it work? I don't know, I don't know how that works. I'm sure somebody does. Somebody makes it work. So if you're that person, let us know, we'd love to hear from you. But Sarah and I plan our weekends, Like, how how do you plan your weekends? What's what's kind of your weekend planning process? Yeah? So I think I start actually a little later than you. I usually start like Monday. Well okay, actually, let me take a step back. So the big pig you're planning, like specifically whether we need childcare, that is done like months in advance, and literally this morning I sat down with our nanny and with my phone so that I could text babysitters and like ramped figured out and again we're recording this late August. I figured out all the childcare for September and October, and I started on November so that I know, like, this is what we're gonna have because part of it is that we have calls, so we need to account for that. So it's work. But then part of it is just like when are we gonna want to have date nights? When are we gonna do nothing? Because honestly, like it's just number one is one of my least favorite things. You know, we're talking about undoing the mental load last time, finding babysitters or sort of getting that anchored down is not my favorite. So it's so much easier to do it in advance and have people commit. You know, also from a psychological standpoint, people are very willing to do things in the future. It's like when the November exactly exactly, so okay. So that's sort of the long range part of it. But then I don't really do specifics until usually Monday or Tuesday of that week. I'll sit there and kind of look at like, oh, do I want to call anyone up for a playdate? Do we have any birthday parties? Have I ordered the gifts? Usually I order them when I RSVP? But you know, have I gotten everything done you need to do for that? Is there any reservations, like you know, low key kind of ones that I want to make You know, again, sometimes these have already been calendared ahead of time, Like I have some friends who are also big planners, so I don't have to think of I'll say, oh, we already talked about doing something with this family on Sunday, so we're good. But I don't really put things together until like Monday or Tuesday of the week, and then on Friday, I send my husband an email that he actually will ask like if you're going to gotten it and no, but he likes, like to the point where like he'll ask, oh, did you spend the weekend plan yet, like because if it's not done, he's sort of wondering, uh, hey, what's going on? So this is a symbiotic thing. But I spend on a week in email that's like Friday night, movie night, Saturday, you know, swim class and then pool time and then lunch with these people, et cetera. So like I will really kind of map it out fairly granularly on Friday afternoons. Looks give you to that, et cetera. I actually want to hear it. So tell me about a recent weekend. Let's let's get what a racon. Yeah, okay, I'm going to skip the past weekend because someone was sick and that's something you can never plan for and I think when someone gets sick you just sort of have to declare it a wash and see how you can relax in any way, shape or form. But the weekend prior to that, my husband and I were both off and actually using my planner to like refresh my memory here because I did write it all down there. But on Friday night we just had movie night. That's our typical, low key plan. On Saturday, in the morning, my husband had some oh I know what he was doing. He was like removing the satellite dish from our thing with his uncle. But that fun times. Yeah, it came into the plan because an aunt and uncle came over and had breakfast with the kids. My breakfast together. Yeah, it was awesome. Then we had a birthday party at like a kid's play place. Then we just sort of had some downtime at home and I don't remember what we did. We might have swam, we might have just like played. Like you know, we do like to schedule some time that's just totally unscheduled. I guess there's nothing wrong with planning on scheduled time. You got to because otherwise there might be something comes up during it. I don't know, you want to. If you want to have downtime, you got to plan for that too. Yeah, And then we went out to dinner, which we had scheduled a babysitter, and we went to see Dunkirk, and we went out to a Miami restaurant for this thing called Miami Spice where you get like a discount fixed price meal as long as you go to a certain time, and they do that in August and September here because I guess those are like the opposite of peak season, so downtime. And then on Sunday, we had planned in advance. I think we both went running, first myself and then my husband in like insequentially, and then we went to the Science Museum. We had actually tried to go a couple of times and the parking garage fills up, so we knew we had to go early, so we kind of just headed there around nine thirty and we're there for most of the day. And then again had some sort of planned downtime, and then I cooked dinner, and I think I'd even asked ur nanny to shop for the ingredients on Friday so that we had them. So I even planned so that I wouldn't have to like run out to the grocery store. So yeah, that was an example of one that worked pretty well and was pretty planned. It still had a good amount of unstructured I think we both worked out one or two times. The kids had the party. It was good, it was good. It wouldn't have worked if I hadn't like done the babysitter in advance. Oh no, and you wouldn't have been like, I mean, what often happens with people is they know that that you know, restaurant week or whatever it is, is coming up, and then they don't think about it ahead of time, and then a lot of places are booked up, for instance, or you couldn't get a sitter, and knowing that you needed to go to the Science Museum right away would make it a much more pleasant experience than if you're driving around hunting for parking. And you know, sometimes with little kids, it's good to just get going in the morning and that spend a lot of energy deciding what you're going to do. We learned that one hard way on two unsuccessful trips. We're like, okay, have to go, nine am, have to go. It was great, Yeah, and then you're out and you're doing your thing, and then you could come home and have your downtime and it's exactly what about you this is I like the specifics. I agree, yeh, there's a I want to know. No, the specifics are great too well, so we we we're recording this right after we got back from a week at the beach. But the weekend before we went to the beach, I knew that two of my kids had a pool party on Friday night for their karate studio was celebrating forty years of being in business. So we went to that. It wasn't great because it was actually kind of chilly. Believe it or not, it was only about seventy degrees that night, so being in the pool was not actually that fun, which who knew in mid August that would actually happen. But we had that in the morning I had of Saturday morning, I had set up with a running friend of mine. We were going to run ten miles. She's training for a half and she was viewing it more as a slow ten miles. I was possibly viewing it as a quick ten miles because my natural pace is quite a bit below hers. But it was good. We chatted, We ran our ten miles. I was home by about nine o'clock. We got some I got some downtime during the day. My husband took our two year old on an errand at one point, so I got to read during that time. That was really cool. We had some nap time that I also got to read during. I always make sure I have a book i'm working on, and so that way I can, you know, I know what I'm going to do when that downtime comes. So if my husband's all saiden, like, oh, I'm going to take the two year old with me to the dry cleaner, I'm like, ah, I know what I'm going to do. I think that helps with with weekends as well. And so I had a good book I was reading. I was reading Kristin Lavn's Daughter. This is this eleven hundred twenty four page epic. But we'll talk about that some time. But then in Saturday evening we had had to book this months ahead of time. I got tickets for my husband and I and our three big kids to go to a firework and fountain to display at Longwood Gardens, which is this botanical garden that's about fifty minutes from us. And these tickets literally sold out the first day they were on line, so I had written in my calendar months before they went on sale to buy them on that date. That date I was ready. I went on I got my tickets, and then we had these for months ahead of times. So this thing had been in the works like literally five months to go to Longwood Gardens. But it was great. Like we went. We walked around the gardens at twilight. It was a beautiful evening. I got some great photos of flowers and sort of twilight is kind of this otherworldly glow on them. I mean, it's gorgeous. And then they had a beer garden that was there, so my husband and I got beer and the kids got pretzels, and then we went and watched the fireworks and the light show on the fountain and then came home after that and it was great and so cool. Yeah, and then Sunday was pretty low key, but we were leaving for the beach in the afternoon for a week at the beach. We only live about ninety minutes from this house we were renting on the beach that week. So we had a low key day up until that point getting ready to go. But it was nice, you know, after we'd gone out late the night before. It was probably good to have not a whole lot planned on Sunday, planned lying around time, planned lying around time, although if you've got little kids, there's not a whole lot of lying around time, which is one thing I think many couples find out the hard way. Not that like toddlers are hard to deal with, which I mean you learn as a parent in general, but that you don't automatically get down time on weekends and both parties want their downtime to do their thing, but you sort of feel like, oh, well, we should be together and we should be with the kids, like if we're off doing our work during the week, and so nobody winds up planning for that or asking for that, and then you both are kind of resentful at the end of the day of like, well, who was with the toddler moore, or who took more time or whatever. Talk it through. I mean, when you're planning your weekends, say like I would really love to have two hours to read. Can you take the baby for two hours? And then I will take the baby for two hours, And so each of us gets two hours to do whatever we want, and there's not this argument about it or bad feelings or like passive aggressive sort of like oh here I am with the kid. You know, if you can avoid that marital discord by talking through it ahead of time, that's great, and you know, build in time for family stuff too, but make sure you get your downtime right. I mean yeah, and I will say, you know on that note, because I said lying around and you mentioned not being able to lie around with a little one, You're very right about that. I mean, you can, but only if you've like expended all of that. You have to sort of be thoughtful about it. So either it's lying around time in the morning for an hour or two because you know they have their favorite shows to watch and you're gonna like have them watch that mood. That's gonna be their screen time so that you can lie around, or they're still napping and you're gonna use their nap or you know that they're gonna kind of play in a more relaxed way after using all of their energy like a water park that day. So there is there is something to be said for like tiring them out and getting out and doing something on purpose to kind of make that lazy time happen because it is not going to happen automatically, and it is not going to happen for the entire day. So unless you do it like a trade off, which also we do all the time. We do it to exercise, We do it because we want to work, or we do it because we want to you know, get a massage or just relaxing, then yeah, you don't get anything. Yeah, And if you have little enough kids, I mean, nap time is good. I like the idea of everyone having quiet time during nap time. If no one naps anymore, it's kind of harder to pull off, and then you've got your whole day to do stuff anyway, so you don't have to observe this. But if you have one little kid at least who naps, letting the older kids maybe have their screen time or reading time during that, and then you can take a nap, like if you are up early with the kid, or if you are tired from the week, or you can have your reading downtime that or heck, you can even have a couple time during that if that's you know, another way we can euphemistically nap during that time. On the weekends. I love it, but just that you have time for something else and make the most of that uh downtime that you do have, even with little kids, it can go a long way to making weekends feel a lot better. My heart goes out to people whose kids like won't nap, because that must be really no. I mean, like I've been lucky, like you know ours up until the age where they sort of can play, they napped. But I know that's not true for everybody. So yeah, there's lots of things those people have every right to use screen time on how you get that out there, or for baby sitting or friends and family or what exactly, like you're having a play date exactly. But now there's certainly obviously things on weekends that you may not want to do. We've been talking about planning fun stuff on the weekend, and you know, many weekends wind up being consumed with sporting activities or birthday parties or whatever else that are sort of have to do. Sometimes it's that there's a major chore that has to be taken care of, especially people who have to be in the office during the week with very little flexibility. Maybe there's things that have to happen on the weekend in terms of errands or chores or getting a plumber out if they can come on Saturday, or something like that. So do you have any good tips for dealing with those things? My mind was lost in thinking about the parents who have their kids and travel teams where they're doing the entire weekend, and how can I avoid that, and how can I talk about that without having it in that my children are related to me and so their athletic ability is limited. So I'm pretty sure there will be no travel teams in our future, which is what I was upside. I was thinking about that, which is even though like I don't I don't feel personally qualified to speak on it, but I was just thinking about how if that ever did become an issue, I would be like the carpool lady, So like, if my kid is going to travel every week, I'm going to find four other families on that team so that I'm only doing it one and of every four weeks. Because as much as I want to be supportive, I have three kids and I have myself to think about two, and I I'm not going to spend like the entire day at a soccer field or whatever whatever it maybe I think it's important. I mean, yeah, so if you have to be gone the whole weekend for that, that's one thing. But for many kids sports, it's at least relatively limited. And so even if something like a four hours of swim meet sounds really horrible, I'm long and all that, it's there's a lot of time between six pm Friday and six am Monday. So yes, that is true, sixty hours of which you are awake for you know, thirty six of them. I guess if you sleep eight hours at night, So four hours of thirty six devoted to the swim meet is not all weekend. Whereas you know, it becomes easy to be like, oh, I've spent the whole weekend at a swim meet. Well, no, it wasn't the whole weekend at the swim meet. It was four hours. And there's often stuff you could hear that narrative a lot. I hear that narrative a lot in these traveling sports teams, and I'm like, well, you've signed up for it. But then again, I don't know how I might feel if my child gets very intensely into it. But then if it's really for the child, then then that's fine, you wouldn't mind if your carpooling. I would mind if you're carpooling, And no, I got it in a lot of reading time this year at my seven year old did wrestling, and so I'd go to wrestling meets, usually on Saturday mornings, and I'd read because I didn't have the two year old with me, and so it was time I could relax other than watching him do his you know, matches. But those were only three minutes maybe three he'd do in the course of the morning, So there was a lot of downtime. And if you think about how you want to use that, you can use it really well. I mean, you could go for a walk outside the venue. I mean, if you're at some place pretty, if you're like at a college, there's often walking trails near that, or you could walk around campus, or maybe even run if you plan for that. Yeah, that's true. That could be perfect running opportunity. Actually, that makes sense. Exercising things like chores and errands, I mean, as much as possible. I always encourage people to try and compress that. I mean, a lower your standards, like just the house does not have to be spotless, but it might help to say, okay, well, if we do want to vote some weekend time to making this place look presentable, maybe we're going to give ourselves a nine minute window and we're gonna set a timer. We're all gonna do our chores during that ninety minutes, and when it's done, it's done. And if it didn't get done during that time, probably it wasn't the most important chore to have happened, And that way it's not bleeding into the entire rest of the weekend. Yeah, I'm somebody who's like I'm tempted to kind of like continually clean up the house, like if we do st We had a weekend recently when people weren't feeling well in the house, so we didn't get out as much, just not to spread our gross germs everywhere. And I like had to resist the temptation to like clean up every two hours. Number One, I don't want to teach my kids that like they have someone following around them cleaning up after them, because that's terrible. And number two, like it literally was never ending because like they were playing a new thing. I mean, so I sort of told myself, Okay, you're going to clean up at the end of the day. It's going to take thirty minutes. You can play a podcast while it happens, and you can play our podcast. Well, you can play our pack. It was totally doable, and it really didn't matter that our house looked like crazy the rest of the time because whatever they were playing and like no one was looking at it anyway. And that's the thing. I mean, if you were cleaning up every two hours, like two hours later, it was just gonna be as messy as it was before, like those magnetiles as nature of cores a vacuum, like it's gonna fill. Yeah, exactly. So just relax as much as possible. Errands as well, It might be helpful to say there's a time for errands, and we're just going to do our best not to do errands at other points. Maybe compress the chores and errands on one day so the other day is completely open from those sorts of things. Well, Sarah, I can order everything online. Order everything online. That's so much better too, Amazon Prime. That could be another love of the week. But speaking of our love of the week, I bet some of those toys that came on that weekend. What's your love of the week this week, what do you have? Yes, you love that segue. My love of the week is magnetiles. So anybody who has a child ages one through well, I can say at least one through five because I've my kids play with them all through those ages, although I don't see the obsession ending anytime soon. They're these little flat magnetized shapes that can be put together in all kinds of different configurations. You can make castles, you can make walls, you can make buildings. They stick together very easily. They last forever. So I'm actually thinking about trying to look towards eBay to expand my collection, because I'm like, these probably don't go bad, and they are fairly expensive. I am not kidding when I say that, Like I could probably like get rid of most of our other toys, and as long as we still have those, my kids would not notice. They just they are just like they that is just what they've been doing. And it's not like I can safely say it's not a phase because I have pictures of us doing this when they were like one and three. Although I will say, like the one year olds tend to be more of the knocking down than the building, but now that they're both old enough to be constructing, Like they'll just sit there for hours, and even I like playing with them, like it's sort of unmeditating, that's right, So Magnetiles's that's I check them out, check them out. I know I probably have some kids wo'd play with them. So my love of the week. We're recording this in August. They know this will be released in September, but we're still out of school here. We start after Labor Day and it's at this point of the summer that everything's kind of winding down. Sometimes there aren't even camps these last weeks because some of the districts start earlier. So a friend of ours who has two kids the same age as two of my kids, is hosting an informal camp at their house, and so she hired a couple of college students to supervise her three kids, and then a handful of their friends, and so we're all chipping in money to help defray the cost of supplies and paying these college students. But my kids love it, like this is possibly their favorite camp of the summer. They did this last year and they're doing it this year, and it's because it is so informal, like they just play in the mud with their friends for six hours. Like there's no oh, let's try to make this educational, or we have a theme this week. It's just we're playing with our friends in the backyard. We're having a great time. And there's something to be said for that. I mean, you know, we probably have a lot of structured stuff even for young kids these days, with activities and camps and you know, with school having homework at relatively young ages, and part of that's just the way the world is. But stuff like this reminds me of how much fun kids can have when they have a little bit less of that in their time. And yeah, it's still a camp, like we plan to bring them at nine and pick them up at three, but it's been a lot of fun for them, I guess. In the same vein, two of my kids decided to make this giant fort in the basement out of a box that we bought a sofa from Ikea, and we just never got rid of the box, so it's just been sitting in the basement for the past two months. And they took the box and they made this fort and they put two sleeping bags in it. And pillows and a flashlight and their water bottles and they have actually slept in it the past two nights in the basement. I totally did not think that would work, but it did. Like they went down at a normal bedtime and they got up at a normal wake up time and they are just happy as clam. So here's to some structured So forget bunk beds. I can just put my kids in a box. I love it. But your kids in a box on the floor and they will be so happy. That is cool. I love the camp. Yeah, so we wanted to move to our Q and A, which this week also came from a blog comment, but I want to remind you all that you can submit them either to either of our blogs or to our social media. We are always looking for good questions to discuss on this podcast. This one was what are creative ways working moms with multiple kids have to spend individual and special time with each And I wanted to direct that mostly at Laura because mine are little and there's only two of them so far, but she kind of has the whole spread and I think she has some interesting ideas about this. So yeah, So my kids are ten, seven, five and two, and the two year old takes a lot of time and attention, partly for being two, and also he's just kind of a more needy, energetic child, And so it has actually required some focused effort to make sure that I am not neglecting my older children, because when the two year old is sleeping or with somebody else, that mean my first impulse is just to kind of sit down and shut myself in a room and get away from it all because I need downtime after dealing with him. But of course I do like to spend time with my older kids, and they're getting a lot more fun at this age too, So there's a couple of things we do, both macro and more micro. The macro, which we discussed on an earlier podcast, is that I try to do mommy days, which with each of the three big kids during the summer. So I know I have a very flexible job, and I know many of our listeners have a little bit less flexibility. But what I try to have it almost everybody has paid him off. Yeah, pay time Brandy kind of company. You can plan days off, you can play. Before I went eighty percent, I could say like I'm taking a day off a month using my days. Yeah, and so I plan ahead of time for a day that a kid doesn't have camp and I can not have work on that day. I'll move stuff to other days and I will take the kids one on one somewhere they want to go. And so that's generally been an amusement park. We've gone to Hershey Park, We've gone to Dutch Wonderland. Last year, my then nine year old wanted to go to Washington, d C. To see the zoo there, so I took him down for that. We used points on Amtrak because I had all these Amtrak points, so you know, we could make it relatively affordable for the day too. But it's just so nice you get to spend one on one time with each kid. Then you don't have to have these fights at the amusement park of like, oh I want to do the arcades while this other person wants to do the kidde rides. Like you just do what that kid wants to do. And so we had a lot of great conversations. But it doesn't have to be major or things like that either. I think sort of taking opportunities to just get one kid. So, for instance, if you are going to run an errand try to bring one kid with you and then you can talk in the car. Or if you are you know, running one kid to an activity and not having others with you, if you can leave others with your partner or with a sitter, then you get that time to talk with them. I try to have a little bit of one on one time at night with the kids. So I put my five year old daughter to bed before the boys and my older boys, and so she and I have some story time and we have our ritual. I have to take the bad dreams out of her head. So I have this whole thing where I'm finding the bad dreams behind her ears and under her pillows. I'm finding the bad dreams behind her stuffed animals ears and under her stuffed animals pills. It's a little bit elaborate at this point, but whatever, it seems to work. So then we throw the bad dreams away and then kiss and say good night. So that's, you know, time that they chat. And my ten year old will come and talk to me at night, and sometimes it's a little like, oh, I want to be done, Like I want to be done with kids at nine thirty at night, and he's not done for the night yet, But I'm telling myself, you know, I bet in four years he will not want to do this, like he will not want to come talk to me about his life, and so I should just embrace it and you know, sit and have a chat and he'll tell me about his five favorite things that happened that day. He loves lists, and so just trying to seize those opportunities when they arise and say, oh, look, I have one kid in front of me right now. What would happen if I just gave this one kid my full attention and it doesn't have to be much like three minutes honestly goes a long way toward making them feel like they are truly there with you. Yeah, and you can learn a lot about what's going on with them in that time if they're in the mood to share, because if they're figured out that like either they are or they really aren't, they may not be yes exactly. All right, Well, thank you so much for listening. This has been episode six talking about what makes a good weekend. As always, we'd love to hear your tips on what you think makes a good weekend too. You can email me El Vandercam at yahoo dot com or visit us on social media. Thanks so much for listening. 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.