Do You Still Need Childcare? Evolving Household Support as Kids Grow EP 294

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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 ninety four, airing in sort of mid late March of twenty eight, twenty three. We are going to be talking about childcare and home support, needs, wants, kids get older, and the truth is, in many families, once kids start school, the first thought is like, oh, few, now we can spend less on childcare. And in many families there is a very good reason to figure out that, because you know, money is tight and not having to make those payments is a real blessing in terms of having a little bit more wiggle room and you know, to start pursuing other priorities. However, we know that many of our listeners have some pretty serious professional ambitions and may also be in homes where things are not so tight that there are a few more resources, a few more choices. And if you are in that situation of a two income household with two partners having two big jobs, and your kids are starting school, there might be a different question you can ask, which is not so much how can I spend less on childcare, but the question of what would make you feel like you can fully concentrate at work and enjoy your time time at home. So that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode, and we thought of a little historical you know, thinking back to prior generations. This was probably something that men in certain cultures of previous generations got to take for granted that they got to go to work, probably not worrying about getting anybody to school. They'd be at work all day and they would come home and then you get like a martini handed to you, and the kids are all like fresh from the bath, and there's a nice meal on the table, and they're really not worrying about much else other than their dog. Now, I am not suggesting that this is the ideal or even something I would want in my life. You don't want the martini. I don't want the martini. Although the bath part, the bath part, haven't that be done? But it's you know, it's kind of interesting to think about, like there's a whole generation of serious workers who felt like this was their right. And now that we've moved into more modern times and many many more to income households and women doing all sorts of exciting things from a professional standpoint, people are not counting on that lifestyle well. And it's interesting because I think when women are aiming for that right that they could fully concentrate at work and enjoy their time at home. And if they don't have partners who are taking on all that responsibility, then people throw around, you know, all the discussions of privilege and stuff like that, you know, to have something that men took for granted, that was done because their wives were doing it. And so you know the question is, how could people have the sort of home support that made those men able to advance in their careers and concentrate and enjoy their home life. How can you have that as well even as you age out of the daycare or full time nanny years, you know, which we'll talk about for sure. And the thing is, this is, as we've talked about careers with our various life listeners and people over the years, we've seen that this is actually a real stumbling block, and it's an unknown one. People don't talk about it or necessarily plan with it. But you know, when your kids have been up to about age five or so, before they start kindergarten or first grade, whatever it is in your district, you've had to have something. Clearly, if you have two parents with full time jobs, you need some childcare arrangement, and for many people, daycare, even though it has various trade offs, the hours reflect full time work. Right the center is open from eight to six, so that you can work from you know, eight thirty to five thirty or nine to five or whatever it is and pick up your kids, and so the hours correspond with that, and they are open over the summer, for instance, since presumably you're still working over the summer, or perhaps you have employed a full time nanny whose hours also would match something that was like your work schedule. But then once the kids transition into school, people are like, oh, well, yeah, the kids are out of the house from you know, eight thirty to four thirty every day or something. You know, we'll make get work, but it does not always work because you're counting down to not having to pay for daycare. But school is generally one hundred and eighty days a year. Your work year is probably closer to two hundred and forty days, right, So that right there is a lot of time you have to plan for. You know, in our area, elementary school is approximately six and a half hours per day, which even if you you know, have them on the bus at some point before that, we're talking seven hours of coverage that does not correspond with a full work day. So then you're either figuring out, you know, how to get the extra hours or something. If kids have activities at school, that's great, but they might not if they want to do things that are away, maybe somebody needs to drive them. In addition to being supervising from kids get sick. We're definitely dealing with a rough winter that we're just coming out of. With this as people's immune systems are responding to whatever has been going around, so you need to have coverage for that as well. And you know, in many cases if people have had say a full time lanny during the little kid years, that person might have been helping with some household chores like being there when the groceries are delivered, or maybe running a load of laundry, And if that is not there, you are, you know, going to have to start adding in those things as you are also feeling like you have less time at work. If you're trying to match your work hours to your kids' school hours, it is a stumbling block that people don't see coming. And so that's why I'm saying, maybe shift the question from how can I spend less on childcare to what support would I need to make my career work? What do I need to make my career work? And what do I want to make my home life run smoothly as well? Like you know, those are all things that will interfere with you getting your work done, like you mentioned the sick days or school days off, et cetera. And then there might also just be things you want to do, like spending more time one on one with a child, for example, like maybe after school one really needs intensive help with homework and you're able to do that. That's a whole other conversation and a whole other episode because it can be a little bit challenging at times. But let's say you need to spend that one on one time, but you have younger kids that you need help with at the same time, So that's difficult to do if you've gotten rid of all of your childcare. And then things like travel, So either if both parents are traveling for work or if you are a two parent couple that wants occasional kid free travel, then the ability to do that might depend on having somebody willing to to do that, and usually it's going to be someone that has a kind of significant relationship with your family, Like it's probably less likely that you're going to be able to find a random babysitter willing to cover a couple of overnights, because that's just a lot to take on if you don't know a family and their routines, et cetera. Yeah, you'd have to have somebody who is who is definitely they are and familiar with you and would have it. So what do you do? Well, the first thing is to say, you know, if we're not automatically trying to drastically cut costs of support, what are the options? So Sarah one that you've sort of come up with. Maybe you can talk about what you guys have. Yeah, let's take a very quick break first, and then I will go all right, we'll take the We aren't here live together. By the way, I didn't mention this for the intro of this one, but we are here in Fort Lauderdale sitting on a sofa together. So we're like, oh, yeah, at break law, Yeah we'll lose. We're just having a conversation. We're just having a conversation. But yeah, we'll be back in a few minutes. All right, we are back. And I certainly wouldn't say our solution is unique to our family. I've seen it kind of play out very similarly often where there are two working parents. And you know, interestingly, we'll get to this a little bit later, but there can be certain cultural norms in certain areas that seem very foreign in other areas. But where I am, this is not an uncommon scenario. So I would say this unfolded organically rather than some kind of grand master plan, even though you guys know I love my grandmaster plans. We hired our nanny in twenty thirteen, and Annabel was sixteen months old. At the time, Cameron was not yet born, but I knew that, you know, he was coming. And I had a job involved a significant commute at the time, and I needed someone who could get there early, be there to take Anabel to like little preschool classes, and then be there for Cameron when he was born. So we hired her nanny, and in my mind it was a childcare job like However, turns out that she is a very efficient person and was happy to kind of fill in other gaps for our family. And I get that that is not what every employee is motivated to do, but in our case that did happen. Who knows if she had a master plan of, you know, being a long term kind of employee for us, knowing that were we to were our kids to get older, as kids do, that her staying on might depend on her doing other things as well. So I have no idea if she thought through this. I actually don't think so. I think it was more just like, eh, I like to stay busy. The kids are asleep, I got the schedule down, I want to get stuff done while I'm here. So she took on some laundry stuff and some cooking stuff, and I have always been very much pro sending my little kids to school, even when we had a nanny, because I just felt like it was good for them to be around other kids, to experience like this, just the routine of school. And so that probably also opened up her schedule to be doing a little bit more than if she had been like home with two little kids all day long. So when I say school, I mean preschool, and I recognize it not school school, but we felt it was valuable. So then as the kids got older, we started to need her lesson less, Plus we moved less and less for childcare. Specifically, our move changed our routine. COVID obviously changed our routines at the time, and at this point we're actually in a place where we drive the kids. Well, I usually drive the kids to school, in part because their school is literally on the way to my office, so it does not actually add that much time. I mean probably it's an extra fifteen to twenty minutes for me each morning, but the timing works out very nicely, so you know, the drop off coincides nicely with when I have to start clinic. So I just didn't see any reason to have her show up at our house when it was easy for me to drop them off, and then Josh usually does one day because he has a clinic nearby. Anyway, so I recognize, oh wow, so now her start time is very loose, like, you know, if she doesn't need to come at seven or eight, then she might as well, you know, not come until three some days. And so we have just morphed into like a And yet I knew as a person and as an employee, she needs full time income. And I also knew that I wanted someone to a continue with the household help that we have been appreciating, and b to be there on call because kids get sick, kids forget lunches. There are a million random days off from school, My kids have activities that overlap on my clinic days or my call weeks. I'm busy and I need extra support. Like there are just like too many moving parts. My husband's job is very inflexible for the most part, and I accept that and that's okay. That's just kind of part of the way his is structured. And so we're now at this point where we do pay full time hours, you know, a standard kind of minimum amount every single week that were we to be paying hourly, it would be a very high hourly rate with the number of hours she's often working. But again, she is on call, so if on a random Tuesday morning, Genevieve is coughing and can't go to school, she will come in and work earlier that day. And she has also continued to help us with various household tasks that she had kind of been doing already, and because she's very efficient, she doesn't necessarily need to put in tons more hours to do that, So she enjoys kind of a pretty flexible schedule at this point. And I just feel like everybody is winning. She has a job that I think she considers a good position at least the fact that she's been with us for ten years would probably speak to that. And we are getting what we need as a family in terms of the support we need, the help with household stuff, me not having distress over you know, specifically if a kid gets sick or like all those kind of like little things that otherwise would add to a lot of mental stress and clutter and I know would fall on me. And yeah, that's kind of how things have evolved with time. Now people who want specifics in terms of like, well, what are you talking about? Household support? She does laundry in our house, pretty much all of it. She does cook, do the meal planning, and I have been doing a lot of the shopping in terms of like partly because I enjoy it, But she does a lot of the cooking. I usually make the plan and then the meals are basically done when I get home, and we use a lot of practition prior podcast sponsors, so I don't even often do the planning. I just do the shopping. And then let's see what else does she do. She doesn't do heavy cleaning. She definitely does like straightening up, but we do have a separate cleaning service that helps with like cleaning bathrooms and stuff like that. So yeah, and then she does driving, lots of driving to activities as the kids have had more and more activities, often that are not at the school but in other locations, so there's just shuttling around that has to be done. And sometimes that's on a Wednesday and I'm still in clinic until five, and I won't be home until five forty ath the earliest, so I just can't do it. So for us, it works, it works for her, it works for us. Is it the least expensive way we could do life with kids? Absolutely not, But it is it one of the least stressful ways to do a lot of it? I think so. So I feel like it's a worthy use of resources. Absolutely so. We're still in the state. I mean, Henry is only in preschool for three mornings a week from nine to noon, and they have teacher and service days, they have holidays. It only runs from mid September to the end of May. So the question has been posed to me of like, well, do you need childcare now that he's in school, And I'm like, well, I cannot run my business, and what would be seven and a half hours a week, you know when by the time you do drop off and pick up. I mean, that's sort of ridiculous. It wasn't my husband who asked this, by day, but yeah, I mean so it hasn't even crossed my mind yet. And the mental load that would then wind up, probably primarily on me, to try to not have to pay anyone for those seven and a half hours is just so high that it asn't compute at all. So that's why you know, asking the questions like maybe stop trying to ask if you are in a family that is lucky enough to have two high income earning parents, you know, which is why you have these You have these big jobs that you're trying to do your best at not trying to ask that question, how can I make sure that I'm not compensating for any time whatsoever that my kid is not here? And so we use that time for you know, things like grocery shopping, laundry, various errands. I swear every week we have something that has to be picked up at targets that some could urgently needs and we somehow didn't get it ahead of time with like the two day Amazon delivery, and so there's always something that has to happen in that time. So yeah, we're still in the little kid years from that perspective. But that brings us to the question is there an end point? Because I mean, at some point one might eventually transition out of needing a full time employee. I suspect if I only had, like to say, my two oldest kids, who are fifteen and thirteen, I would probably not have a full cut time childcare, and partly because they wouldn't go for it at all, I think they would be offended by the concept, but they do need rides, right like, they still need rides places, they need to be picked up from their activities after school sometimes, although sometimes they take the activity bus, So I think we would be relying a lot more on the activity bus at that I think I might have more of a housekeeper type arrangement, somebody who's doing more of that, which that's the question of would that person, what sort of hours would that person want, And definitely having the ability of somebody who could stay overnight because you know, fifteen and thirteen year old, especially since I can't drive, could not really stay overnight by themselves, and so you'd need somebody who could do that, because that's something that does still arise in our family of you know, my husband and I bold of having the occasional work travel and it if it overlaps, it overlaps, and even if it didn't, somebody might have a plane's like canceled, and then you have to figure that out. So there's probably a point where you don't need full time. However, there may still be some level of support that you will still need. Yeah, probably depends on what your goals are in terms of whether you want to continue to outsource different types of housework depends on a lot of logistical stuff, like if your kids are all in one school and like there's a bus like that might make things a million times easier. And if your kids have special needs that mean that one of them has to be across town and like the drop offs are going to remain complicated for years, then that might be a situation where there's no end point until the kids are quite old or even finished with school. Who knows, so so many variations, but I just I think our thesis is that for the most part, most people, if they are able to do it, might benefit from some continued support as the kids grow, at least until the point where they are definitely able to stay by themselves right and reach the point where there is some transportation that means that you don't have to end your work day way earlier, then you might choose to on every day basically more or less. So yeah, thinking about that now. Obviously, having a full time employee is not the only way that you can achieve this level of support. There are a number of families that we've talked to with in our best of both worlds community have parents and that that is a solution for families with older kids, an O pair being usually somebody from another country, generally between the ages of eighteen and twenty five. It's a particular visa that that's one of the requirements on it. I think for the most part, that they come stay for a year or two live with your family. There's a cultural component. You're supposed to be showing them around your you know, this is the United States. We have listeners fromever or but this is what the OPARE program is in the US, that you're supposed to be showing them life in the US, being part of the household. The tradeoff they get a stipend, but it's not as much as one might pay for a full time normal employee in the most part, so that can be good, and especially if it you know, the if you have tween children, for instance, who like the thought of having a cool older sibling right who's who's helping to drive them around, it doesn't feel as much like a babysitter as just you know, an older sibling who's living with you. That can be really good. And then there's the babysitter portfolio, which is something we've you know, brought up before, like if you really don't have needs that are that consistent and you're willing to manage the task of maintaining this staff, which could be a little mini job in and of itself. But this might work for you, especially if you're in an area where they're plentiful, like where maybe there's lots and lots of colleges around and you always have like a little text chain with five that know your family that you can on a moment's notice, Okay, my kid is sick and someone come, I will say. Managing these portfolios, the more you pay, the more people are gonna want to stay on this text chain. I pay my babysitters a lot because I want them to be excited to get a text for me and feel like they are winning when they come to our house. We don't get babysitters that often, so I feel like, for me, it's not that expensive, but having them at my figure tips is very helpful. So the group of babysitters might be a cost effecttion av option if you really just need a spot, like a spot fill in type of a thing, and then you know local family support. People are so lucky when they have that, and I feel like there is an interesting like cultural piece of this in which some families or in some traditions, there's like just kind of either unexpected or just a very common choice for parents to go back and live with people and how about with kids. And that's awesome if that works for your family, But obviously that is just going to your mileage, Mayberry, and we can never expect that necessarily of our elders. They might have other stuff going on. Yeah, or even you know, people might be willing to take an overnight every you know, month or two. That's something that extended family might help out with, but they don't want to be the person doing Monday and Tuesday pick up every week. That they have other things that they might wish to be doing with their time, right that they don't want to commit to something like that, which in that case it does usually need to be a paid person who's going to make that commitment to do although you know which again we want to want to point out with managing the babysitter portfolio at Sarah pays Well, which is how she gets people and who are committed and all that, but when somebody is not working for you full time, their level of commitment and reliability may just naturally be lower then it would be if it is their full time job, because they have other things that they are probably doing most of the time with their time, right if they're a full time student, or they have another full time job or whatever it is, and that's always going to be their primary priority. So you just have to keep in mind that you might be scrambling, and if the scrambling is something that is going to keep you from focusing on what you would like to be doing in terms of building your career and enjoying your home life, then it might be worth some additional resources in order to not have to do that. Yeah, And I guess the one last thing I wanted to say on this is that I I think there's such an interesting slate of feelings that come along with people thinking about having somebody work for you in your household, and in certain circles, as I mentioned, in my area, it's very very common, and in others, I feel like there is an air of looking down upon people if they choose not to stay home with their kids or choose not to do some gymnastics in order to work and care for your kids all day long. I guess I would just say, like, this is to me a morally neutral choice, Like, as long as you are a responsible employer and you treat your employees well and you pay taxes and do things what you're supposed to do, then you know you're providing somebody else with a career, and hopefully a decent one. Again, that has to do with how you you are as an employer, and at least you know, we've talked about the literature doesn't suggest that kids tend to suffer so much when there is help of this kind. And so if you choose to be home with the kids and you enjoy that, absolutely wonderful, that's morally neutral too. But if you choose to use your resources to make things smoother and you want the extra help, then that is that is also great. Yeah, that it's you know, and it's so funny. We hear people's stories all the time at it and I've you know, from writing about time and often women's life choices all these years. I am always curious as people who write me these notes about the various gymnastics that they have undertaken to minimize their use of paid childcare. And I think many of these people are writing me these notes because they want me to congratulate them on how good they are at time management by figuring out some way that they've managed to do a forty hour job in with fifteen hours of paid childcare or something like that. And I'm I mean, you know, if it works for them, great, I mean, I'm always happy if people are happy with their lives. But I don't buy the underlying assumption, which is that the use of paid childcare is bad and a sign that you are failing as a parent, and therefore by minimizing it, you are winning as a parent. Like no, you may just be making your schedule miserable, Like if you're having to wake up at four in the morning to get you know, three hours of work done before you're dealing with your kids, and then you absolutely have to use the two hours of nap for work to get yourself to five, and then you have to you know, work all night and all weekend to get yourself up to forty Like no, that, I mean, you know, that's that's a lot of stress that maybe didn't need to be there if we questioned that assumption. So yeah, I would. Our thesis of this piece is that maybe spending less on childcare is not a good in and of itself. There may be other things that you wish to optimize for in your family, and it doesn't have to be forever, but maybe considering paying for it a year or two longer than you might have might go a long way toward helping you build your career, helping preserve family harmony, and making life feel more fun. Yes, I love it all right. Our Q and A is sort of related because it maybe think about the childcare situation and overnight travel. But our listener writes, I know you've done a travel podcast episode, but have you ever done anything on what you need to do at home to prepare for traveling by yourself and or traveling with a partner and no kids. Are there things you put into place at home on a regular basis so that you can travel? And are there tips for people who want to start doing more adults only travel? So I think one thing you need to do is make sure that your home routines can be done by one adult, so you know, maybe not putting three children in three different activities that require driving that are in three different places simultaneously. You know, some things can't be avoided, but if you can avoid that, you're probably in a better place, you know. I certainly in our family, they the activity bus, which I mentioned here and there, but our middle schools and high schools have late run buses that you leave at four thirty or five thirty approximately and come pretty much to the same place the regular bus stop is. It's more like a taxi service. You tell the driver where you need to go, and he or she drops you off there. And that is so helpful because it means you don't have to go get the kid, which means that two of them can come home simultaneously from different schools and one adult could still handle it. The morning routine is a little bit more complicated, but we do have a set system that can work if there is one adult home, and it does involve a little bit of extra driving because we have to have some of the older children stay later with the littler ones in order for another ride to be taken place, and then those people that need to be driven to school, they can't take the bus because they have to stay. But it does work. My older children are able to babysit the younger ones, and so that is a possibility. I understand that wouldn't work for many people who have younger kids at that point, but as much as possible setting up a routine so that one adult can do it, I think a big piece of this other than the logistical part, And I guess I will mention like, yeah, I've definitely thought about the benefit that ur nanny will do overnights as being a reason that I will probably you know, continue to employ her for maybe longer than I need in other aspects, because I do love being able to do travel just with my husband. So setting things up, whether it's family member, whether it's an employed person, but just like having someone who you know can handle your kids, also giving yourself the permission to doing it, and just planning it. I think sometimes we end up with the block. And I struggle with this sometimes, like I worry that it will my kids will be mad, or my husband might be mad. But then I kind of try to zoom out and think about the number of days in a year, and I wrote like, even if I traveled for twenty days, that is, you know, three hundred and forty five days out of three hundred and sixty five days, and I'm not traveling And by the way, twenty days is like an enormous overestimate of like what I typically doing these days, especially because a lot of times when I travel it's like forty eight hours. And so yeah, I think, just you know, we're giving your permission right now if this is something you want to do. It certainly has worked in our cases, and it's worked in other homes as well, and everyone will kind of get used to it. And truthfully, having one trip, even in a year that's short, to look forward to, can be more therapeutic than it sounds. Yeah, I say the adding it up how many nights it is because I think especially people who have jobs that do involve travel often get really worked up about this that they're traveling all the time. But the reason it feels like it's all the time is that travel is memorable and it stands out in the mind as being bigger than it is. And sometimes, you know, if you stay in the same hotel chain, for instance, they'll tell you how many nights you stayed there in the past year, and it's often like ridiculously low, Like people who feel like they're traveling constantly will find out that they spent thirty six nights in that hotel over the court that hotel chain over the course of the year, and that's the one where they do all their all their say, and that's ten percent of the year, right like, and in their mind it was all of it, and in fact ninety percent of the time you were not there. So it's important to keep that in perspective, sort of flexible attitude about kids missing things, Like we certainly if one of us is traveling, not everything has to happen. We have ordering food or you know, somebody can miss ninja class and it's it's okay. As for you personally, like the list of it just sticks of getting adult out the door. I think the less precious you can be about the fact that you are traveling. And this may be getting into our previous episode on transitions, there are ways that it can be easier for you if you are used to it, and some of this, you know, if you wind up traveling a lot, whether for work or personal things, you're going to develop some of it. Like you know, you don't actually have to be at the airport two hours ahead of time. You know you can have a packed toiletry bag and a very sort of quick, quick and dirty how you pack kind of thing. Yeah, I mean make it easy, don't be super perfectionist, like have your rituals, and even you talked about like have your parking rituals, like know where you're going to park, or like that you always, you know, order an uber at a certain time beforehand. So like the more it becomes, I guess routine, then the more it just seems like less of a big deal. Yes, it's appropriate that we now have an airplane going outside the window here as we're having this this live recording session here in Fort Lauderdale. But someone's traveling, someone's traveling, I don't know. Yeah, I always park in a certain garage at the airport because it almost always has space. Although I also look like I've bookmarked the Philadelphia Airport parking map and it tells you what percent is full in any of the given garages, and I choose one that also has a dedicated TSA pre check lane. And so unless I am flying internationally, which is Terminal A, and if you know you're coming back international, you have to land there. That's where the International Rivals Hall is. But if I'm doing domestic travel, most of the time you land bc ORD. And so if I park in one of those you know, then you're closed. So yeah, Philadelphia Airport parking tips from us, But you could do this for any you know, whatever, your park at your airport that you fly out of. If you are doing this frequently, making sure that it is a routine for use, then you don't have to think about it, and so getting on a plane becomes not this huge thing like ooh, you know I have to think about it for days, I have to think. You know, I didn't have to think about being on the plane until Sunday night when I was flying here on Monday morning, and it was kind of a only because I looked at the time of the ticket and realized I wasn't actually gonna have any time to pack in the morning, so I was like, oh, I guess I better pack tonight. So I did. But you know, it's something that you don't have to think about much more than twenty four hours ahead of time. Awesome, all right, Well, Love of the Week. Mine is not travel related this time, and it is like so so basic. But I'm just going to tell you this story, which is that I told myself a story for many years that Trader Joe's was for specialty ingredients and not for every day shopping. And I've decided that I was wrong, and it's a wrong that cost me a lot of money because I shopped at other stores that are much less cost effective than Trader Joe's. And I've been using Trader Joe's for the last couple of weeks, and I'm like, very very impressed with what they have there because I was deluded. I think I got distracted by all these like dedes are the weird fines, but like they also have grapes and salmon and yelsk and eggs and whatever pretty and expensively too. Yeah, so maybe it And we have one near my house. Helps. Yes, I used to love the dark chocolate covered caramels, and then I realized I can't have you know them anymore. Oh well, so that will not be my love of the week. I actually we have this new funny little you know, you don't want to overbuy kitchen devices, but we got a little egg slicer, and Henry loves that thing, Oh my goodness, So we boil him eggs and peel and he put it on there. He slices up his egg and then eats his little egg slices and he's a happy, happy little camper. So that's breakfast a great Many mornings, I try to boil ahead of time, so I have lots of boiled eggs, so because if you have to do it and he has to wait for the water to boil, it's kind of a a not a great morning experience for everyone. But if they are already boiled, we're all good. I love it. Yeah, sliced eggs, sliced eggs. Well, this has been best of both worlds. And we've been talking about what support should look like when your kids are a little bit older and so you might not have automatically had full time childcare, whether that's daycare or nanny. What would still make you feel like you could advance in your career and feel adequately supported at home. We'd love to hear from people about what your setup is because I know lots of best of both worlds listeners have dealt with this question and come up with interesting solutions. So let us know and 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.