End-of-Summer Notes & Reflections

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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 sixty five, which is airing at the very end of August twenty twenty two. This is going to be our summer recap episode where we look back at all the things that happened this summer, did not happen this summer, what worked, what didn't work, just to think about how we plan to do our summers in the future. So, Sarah, you had a pretty full summer. Lots of PTO was taken, correct, PTO was taken Hopefully I have some left, so we knew it was a lot, but obviously the last couple of years it wasn't as much, and so I'll list what we did. Although I follow a blogger who put me to shame. I mean, it's all relative. So for us, a lot was my college reunion in Williamstown, sleep away camp for the first time for both big kids, which was not a trip I took other than visiting day, but it was just a lot of newness, a trip with Genevieve to see my parents which was super cute, a trip to see the big kids at camp that was supposed to be linked to a couple's trip to Ithaca that got covided, and then finally a trip to Universal Studios combined with Amelia Island with Kennedy Space Center thrown in there for good measure, which we just got back from a few days ago. And it looked like a lot on paper. Like It's true, every couple weeks we were like leaving again, but it also didn't feel like too much, Like it was fun. I never got tired of going on any of these trips. I was always ready to go again. I would say, like the biggest downside for me was that work wise, I just always felt like I was preparing to leave or coming back to piles of it, like from a patient standpoint, from a residency standpoint, even from a podcast standpoint, like, you know, we had to batch and like when you go away that much, there's gonna be like ripples and like when you can get things done. And I recognize I don't think it was my most productive season. But then at the same time, certain things slow down anyway, and so maybe it just is what it is. Yeah, you know a lot of people aren't that productive in summer. I'm sure you still got a lot done. It's all good. Yeah, it was a full summer here too. Still going. As we've noted in our back to School spectacular last week. My kids don't go back to school until after Labor Days, so we are still going strong. And the summer moments at them here. But we had a couple trips. For instance, went to the Virgin Islands in June, which was fun. Did a lot of snorkeling and boating and beach stuff and you know, seeing some really awesome places there. We went to visit some cousins in Boston, you know. We spent a week in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, on the Jersey Shore, which is just a place with a lot of memories for us at this point and love going back there as every year and do similar things and enjoy seeing how the kids have grown. Did a lot of camps, a lot of day camps. My oldest son went to Brown University's pre college program for a month, which was pretty exciting for him as well, to be on his own for four weeks. That was something he had not done before, and I think he really enjoyed it and gained a lot of independence from it. Another kid went to boy Scout camp for a week, also also cool. But you know, we survived. You know, I did a lot of professional stuff, couple speeches, let's see, Well, going to Las Vegas. That was kind of fun for a speech. I'm a big fan of Las Vegas as a conference destination. Now. I really enjoyed that. But you know, it was little things too, like taking some kids to being recording the audiobook, recording videos for Tranquility by Tuesday, going to a farmer's market. We didn't really do that much. Finally doing all my mommy days. I took Jasper to New York that would see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. That was something. But yeah, there's also an element of surviving people who've been following my blog. No, we were you know, nobody's fault here, but we were down a driver for the summer, and so there was a lot of kids shuttling that sort of chops up the days in ways that hadn't really anticipated on. But you know, made it through here. We are still going strong. I feel like that is a lot. And I'm super impressed at your mommy days because I don't remember when I last did them. I love doing them. But with all that stuff, I just ran out of days. So well, we ran in. I pointed it out by the way they noticed. I was thinking I was going to run out of days. But then they were sort of like, at least well Sam and Ruth had mentioned things that were relatively short, I guess, and so I realized I could do you know a little bit and it would be okay. And then, you know, Jaspers, we just had to fit in and made it work. It had been a you know, tough week, but we made it work. And yeah, that was a week where I recorded my audio book on Monday and Tuesday. I was attempting to get to Tampa, you know, on Wednesday, but my flight was canceled, so I wound up going first thing Thursday morning and coming back on Thursday after giving a speech, and then Friday midday drive into New York to go see Harry Potter and the Curse of Child. So it was quite the week. But you know, I just the kids wanted to do it, and it wasn't that I couldn't do it. It was just gonna be hard. So you know, I'm still as we're recording this, on the hook for a Chuck E Cheese visit that has not happened yet, but that seems like it should be relatively easy. Yes, you can squeeze that in. You know, just a few hours probably is enough. I was hoping for like one hour chuck it. Maybe we'll go to some like, you know, ice cream or something afterwards to make it work. Yeah. Yeah, So what any lessons learned or anything like that. Yeah, I mean I have down below like what worked and what didn't. But I will say so we've been going to the same destination a few years in a row now, I guess. We went to Amelia Island in like twenty nineteen, twenty twenty one, and twenty twenty two, and so it's an interesting way to gauge like to compare your experience with different age kids obviously the same kids, but you know, when we went there in twenty nineteen, that was like the infamous trip which Genevieve cried all night at a fancy hotel and it was like basically a trip of torture. And I have to say it's gotten more enjoyable for me anyway every time. This time, Josh and I were both able to go running. A lot of days, we like took the kids to restaurants. Sometimes we had a couple of kids that were not the best behaved at restaurants, but we actually actively worked on it because we were like, okay, guys, we have to fix this because no one's having any fun. And by the end of the trip, I have to say it was better than the beginning of the trip. And my kids are also old enough to really especially if given access to screens like not bother me for a few hours on a languide summer afternoon while I can read or rest or you know, watch TV and not bother Josh either. So I gotta say, like this was probably my most fun version of this trip of the three, and I anticipate like this is why I'm excited. Like some family travel just gets more are fun in my biased opinion, as your kids get older, So I'm looking forward for what's to come as well. Yeah, now I think about that because we're you know, about two years behind you right on this, but that you well and ahead of me. But but you know, until I have you know, we still have to watch Henry all the time, and he, you know, his schedule kind of dictates the amount of vacation downtime that occurs, and so there's probably less than anyone wants. But you know, we're getting there. We will get there eventually, and of course then we start sending kids off into the world, so who knows. But yeah, no, that's things work, things, don't you know. It's it is kind of interesting to see how our lives change year by year as we do the same things. You know, traveling obviously to the Virgin Islands was a new thing, but coming back to the Jersey Shore do similar things every year and seeing how the kids have changed and grown up. It is pretty cool. There's something great about just going to the same place year after year and having traditions there. And I guess that's why some people choose to buy houses so they can be anchored to a specific place. We will never do that, but we can still do rentals that are close by and enjoy a similar trip each here. Yeah, I think we talk about that sometimes. I mean, right the way it's been now, I mean we read to place in Ocean Grove and I feel like a week is good. I could probably go a little bit longer. Some of my kids might get bored at the beach, and I don't see us being the kind of people who go all summer, which is what I think you need to be in order to make it worthwhile to have the vacation house, unless you're planning on renting it out as a business, which is its own separate thing entirely, because we do like to try different places, and so I'm already thinking about, well, like next summer, you know, in addition to the beach, where else would we like to go? And you know, so you know, do like to switch it up some. There's a couple of things we haven't done this summer that are sort of tradition. I almost always wind up at Hershey Park, and like last summer I wound up at Hershey Park three times because three children requested it as their Mommy Day, but not this time. I mean, nobody has requested it. Jasper and Sam went with the church youth group in June, so that's been done. They got it, did that, but nobody else's request. I guess I will not wind up at Hershey this year. I might wind up taking Henry to sesame place. We shall see. I think he's the perfect age for it. But oh, I've one more quick summer victory. Henry is almost completely potty trained two and a half. Right, he's two and a half. That is congratulations because I certainly never managed at any kid at that age. It's been relatively I may knock on wood, been pretty easy, and especially this week when we're with him all the time, it's been easier still to just sort of constantly reinforce it, and so you know, we take him, take him to the bathroom a lot. But he's got it. Which I had been so worried about starting priests school, because he's going to a school where this is required, and we still need to get him to the point where he can go independently, I think. But I'm not worried about him having frequent accidents or anything. You know, he seems to get it, and I think that the peer pressure of everyone else trying the bathroom when necessary will We'll help with that. So Yo, I was very worried about it, but I, you know, it seems to be going great. So I'm very excited about this new milestone that we're coming up on here. That is very very exciting. All right, well, let's take a quick break and then talk about screens. All right, Well we are back with our summer recap. What worked? What didn't? Sarah? What you teased up screens before the commercial break? What when I with screens in your summer? I don't know. And this isn't about some morality at all. I've kind of over that, honestly. It's about like, and did it get to the point where my kids kind of forgot how to do anything else and probably made them more annoying children overall because there was too much screen time maybe. I mean, Annabel and Cameron had no screens for four weeks, which is amazing for an eight and ten year old. And to me, one of the reasons I hope they want to go to camp for a long long time because I just think that, like, what a gift and what an experience in this day and age. But you know, when they got back, like that's all they did basically, and Genevieve got into a pretty hefty habit of like come home from camp and then like roll up into her iPad and then TV. And I guess, I mean some of it was laziness on my part. Some of it was just like there's not as many activities and there's not as many things to do, and it's disgusting outside. This is our winter, Like I'm not going out when it's lightning or when it's like, you know, one hundred Well it's never one hundred degrees, but it usually feels like one hundred degrees because it's ninety three with ninety eight percent humidity or whatever, and it's just like that's just going to turn my kid off of going outside because it's like literally torture. So I don't know, we just kind of like leaned into it, and I don't feel like we did it great. I think I want to play with the timing a little bit. I'm not have so many days with like no kids in camp, which my big kids come from sleep away camp and actually our big family trip the timing of that, which is already booked embarrassingly so but whatever will help with that. But I'm also thinking maybe like it would be a good time to do the trampoline slash Ninja Park membership, so that we have something that we can do when the weather is bad, that we can reliably just spend a couple of hours like being active and doing something else that's fun for the kids. Because I don't know, I just think we tilted a little. It's so funny because we were screen free in March because I was like, they need to detox, and it actually was a really good month, but it was very labor intensive, of course, and this was a complete swing in the other direction. And I guess I just I'm hoping to find a little bit of a happier medium. Yeah. I mean, I feel like when you keep the kids busy a lot of the time, there's just fewer hours than there would be. I mean, because there's stuff going on. I mean, that's one of the reasons to have lots of activities. And when they're in school, that's the various time that they may be on screens, but it's educational, and you know, I make them stop at some point in the evening too as well, So I realized I can't track it, nor do I want to put the mental energy into it. But I if I sense that people have been on way too long, I'd just go yell at them to go play outside or do something else, and then they have to go do it, and more or less, that's how we function, rather than having particular policies on it. There's been a lot of screen time, though what can I say. I don't think I'm looking for a policy. I think I'm just looking for more alternatives to crowd it out, and like maybe even like just making sure there's not two weeks of my big kids having no camp and no nothing. Yeah, no, that could be hard. I mean we had a week in between the end of camp and the beach trip in which there was nothing, but we wound it since again we were down the driver. They were in the house for chunks of it, like when I was gone and my husband was gone. But it was fine. I mean they had a list each day, like they had to read for an hour, they had to play outside for an hour, they had to practice their instruments, and then other than that whatever, I would just kind of decided it could they could watch stuff. I mean, you get bored of anything eventually, and so sometimes people would go entertain themselves. I mean we took a trip to a craft store and so then they got new craft stuff and were able to do things with that. And you know, I have certain children whould literally never get bored of certain screenectivities, or at least that havn't ever gotten them to them. Yeah. Well, and it's true it's nice to have some downtime as a parent too. I mean, I will admit that I I Hendry is not in my care. I mean, I'm definitely that is the time. I'm kind of like other kids be on screens because I don't really want to deal with it necessarily. But you know, then we try to do some stuff too, like the Mommy days, to make sure we have we have that time. Yeah, you know, like let's talk about what worked and what didn't. So what did what do you think was a real win for you guys? Okay, so in terms of what did work, I mean definitely love the vrbo I will you know, or Airbnb whichever franchise you want. But having like a home sized place, we do three bedrooms and then we put two kids in one room and one kid in the other room and the parents in the other room. And this was actually the first trip in a while we were actually able to stick to that configuration versus splitting up the parents and some god awful whatever, and it was great. I love having laundry, I love having this space, so definitely that worked. I also feel like combining the theme park element of a trip with a beach trip really suits me, rather than doing like five days of theme park madness, which I understand why people do that if they live far away and they're flying to Orlando just to go to Disney and Universal or whatever. But since that's not our scenario, we can get to you know, Orlando in three four hours. The second thing that worked for us, I would say, is that we did a combo theme park slash beach trip. And for us, this works far better than like we've done trips where you do Disney for a few days in a row, and I just find it gets so exhausting, and especially now that my kids are older, that we can last a full day at the park, Like the idea of doing three of those in a row gives me hives. And since we live fairly close. It's really great to be able to combine those trips with a more relaxed trip. So I really like that. I think that will kind of become our new tradition, either combining Amelia with Legoland, Disney or Universal, depending what we're in the mood for in a given year. And the other thing that worked for me is something kind of silly and obvious, but I had a planner from Lisa Woodruff's Organized three sixty five program, which unfortunately you can't just buy that, you have to be like part of her program. But I had it, and it had this really cool page that just showed every It was a calendar, but like three months on the page going from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Maybe didn't go all the way to Labor Day, but it was like it was perfect. It had the right amount of weeks for our summer. And I made a whole like washy taped and written on version with the kids camp dates and school dates. Actually I didn't want to post it on my blog when I created it. I remember texting it to Laura and being like, look what I made. And then I just shared it a couple days ago because it's already over, so no one can stop me for this, not that anyone probably would, but it was really helpful to have that as like a roadmap sitting on the fridge that kind of a showed me where we were and like, B what was coming up and C for the kids to reference or Genevieve to be like, oh, that was our trip here, and oh this is when the big kids come home from camp. Like it just felt really centering, and I think I'll do that as a summer thing. Yeah, I mean we made it through a lot of logistics. I mean I just you know, sometimes I'm like, hey, yes, I actually do this professionally thinking about the logistics of stuff. But I mean even just like you know, coming back from Saint John at midnight and Jasper and Sam, I mean Jasper and Michael leaving the next morning for him to go to Brown right, like making that work, and then me leaving that day to go to Las Vegas. I mean just everything, Like when you have this many moving parts, it is a circus. But I think the circus is a good metaphor because circuses are incredibly well organized. I mean, people get where they're going at exactly the right time for the act to work, and so I've really been aware of that metaphor this summer or even just you know, when you think through ahead of time how things will work, it just makes them go much smoother. I was for the you know, a couple of professional things that happened. For instance, I've filmed all these videos for Tranquility by Tuesday in real life life is the name of the series, and there are time makeover videos, which is something I'd wanted to do for a while, and so I hired a production team. But of course you're trying to do it in as few of time as possible, so you only have a certain number of days with the crew. But you know, we'd mapped out like how you get to each place and what we're going to film there and then moving to the next place, and it just it worked. It was like amazing, you know, built in the right amount of time, and I was very excited about how logistics do play out in real life. It can be really good when that happens. I let's see what else was recognizing that things can be broken down into chunks as well. I mean, so for instance, I've been trying out new speech material and giving the whole speech to practice it. I don't use notes, I don't use powerpoints, so it just has to be in my head. So you have to practice a fair amount to get it to that place. And running through a whole forty forty five minute speech can take a while forty to forty five minutes, as you might imagine, but you can break it down into chunks. If there are six five to eight minute segments, then you can run through that eight minute chunk. On the way to pick up somebody at fencing, for instance, or on your way to an appointment, you can run through another chunk, and by doing that you can up the total volume of practicing. I've been doing the same thing with running. We are training. My husband and I are both training for half marathon, and obviously getting chunks for each of us to run. You know, ninety minutes to two hours on a weekend is complicated, but you can break it up if you need to. So, for instance, one Saturday morning, when I had to bring Alex to karate, leaving at eight forty, I mean I ran from seven to eight twenty five, got him out the door, and then during karate I ran another twenty five minutes and so it's like you add it up right and it gets to the right amount. So that was that was something that you know worked, you know, using care dot com, using our babysitters of the mainline Facebook page and stuff, just to find people. I had gotten a little bit lazy about having backup setters and having date night stuff and it's probably good to do it. So we actually a couple weeks ago had to sitter on both Saturday and Sunday who came at too, and it was like, great, we could do you know, some stuff individually as a couple, could go out to eat and just had that sort of sense of relaxation. That was pretty cool and I hadn't done that in a while, so enjoyed that. How do we get to see these videos, Well, they will be released around the time of the book coming out. I mean, you know, probably they'll be a pre order incentive too, so if you are pre ordering the book, you can watch the videos early. But they are still being produced as they may I may have them by the time this comes out, but yeah, it will be short videos that are time makeovers that you can watch and see the magic of the tranquility by Tuesday Rules amazing. No, I was just curious what the videos were like some sort of like you had to have the book to get the videos, but they're like for everybody to watch. Yeah, they'll be for everyone to watch, kind of trying to drum up interest in the book and me and all that sort of stuff. I love it now. The stuff that that didn't work, I don't know. I guess that's or did we already do that? I forget. We went and gutted throughout We've been coming in and out. There have been all sorts of the attempts to film or record anything in life in a I'm in a beach house, but yes there's people. Now there's construction next door. Again they've stopped. And then we had a child wake up from an app and yeah, just all happens. But Sarah, did you want to talk about anything else? You're like, are you gonna do it? Or are so? What Laura is getting at is that I am going to share some pretty big news. I will plan on this will be I guess where, and then I'll do a blog post like the day after or something. Anyway, maybe the same day. I am actually going to go part time at work. I am leaving my graduate medical education role and I'm going to be purely clinical at sixty percent. And there are many reasons this was my choice. It wasn't like, you know, someone I was doing a terrible job and that would be a pretty bad podcast, you know. Anyway, it was a choice I made because honestly, I want more time to do this kind of stuff. I love it, I love writing. I've been doing it for long enough and it's been, you know, building surprisingly over the years. And I also want, honestly, like a little bit more flexibility to do certain things with the kids, because I find big kids more fun than I found little kids, and so I'm more sad about missing out on certain things. And the GME role is so so important that I don't want to give it less than it deserves. And so it just came down to making this choice. And once I just thought about what my weeks could look like, it just felt pretty obvious. So I made this decision many months ago. But it is going to happen in October, and it will have been announced to everybody at work more than a week before this airs, so I feel safe sharing it here. But maybe they'll be a little bit more from me in the future in the form of best of both world related projects, best laid plans related projects, other things. And I am just super excited. I don't know how much less I'm going to be working, because I really do have fun plans for these things. I'll just be replacing one kind of work with another kind of work. But I think I'll embrace the flexibility. Like there's like certain meetings that I'm just so I'll be happy to have not not on my calendar anymore. I had a little more control over my time on the days that I'm not clinical. So yeah, and that's very exciting to have a little bit of extra serah capacity. So you know, we'll see what she puts out into the world. We're very excited to hear about that. Yeah, And you've been through a bunch of different iterations in your career of the past few years. You've you know, your clinical percentage has gone up and down, and that's that's kind of a cool thing about medicine, though I mean that I think a lot of people don't necessarily know that it has that flexibility that you can be part time in a way that may be harder to in other fields. I think it varies by specialty, how easy it is to do, and also by employer. But yeah, I am glad that this is an opportunity that's available to me. And I'm also sure it's not going to be my last iteration. I mean, that's I'm an iterator. I think I know that about myself by now. Something is not working at some point. I'm not going to, you know, just continue doing the same thing year after year. I think I'm too obsessively self reflective to let that happen. So I'm just really really excited. And I if any of you you know, want to talk about it or have similar scenarios they want to flesh out in a more private feel free to email me and I can tell you more exactly. I always like to see how people are making the different pieces of their work work together. So which brings us to our question section for this episode, So we have a listener question. She says she's a lawyer and a mother of a four year old daughter. Twenty twenty one was incredibly busy, but things have slowed down this year. She's having trouble taking advantage of less hectic time at work. She's a partner at a small firm, so she has a lot of control over her work and schedule, but can't seem to give herself permission to take time off that isn't vacation or kid appointments. She seems to let her work expand into as much time as she has. So any advice on how to take advantage of the slow times? So, Sarah, what would you say? So? The first thing is, I was wondering if she has more vacation days, because if she has a lot of them built up from those busy periods, maybe she could actually just, like if she has trouble relaxing unless she's on vacation, like take some more vacation or maybe build some vacation into the day by just a siding on a little bit of a shorter standard work day. And again, I'm assuming, based on the way she describes it, that she's allowed to do all of these things. It's just that she hasn't like let herself do them. She could also focus on learning a skill that's like tangentially related to her work but isn't directly work, Like I don't know what it would be in the legal field, but in the medical field it might be something like, oh, I want to learn more about alternative medicine, or I want to learn more about coaching, or like, you know something that you're interested in that might help you do your job even better, but isn't like exactly your job that you're interested in. I also feel like if this were me, I'd be like, oh, perfect, Now I can train for my marathon. So if there's some kind of long range physical goal that you want to do, that triathlon, that hike up Amalgain, I don't know, this might be a nice time to do that, and you'd feel like you were being productive. So since you said you would let yourself off the hook for kids appointments and vacations, maybe you would feel good dialing back to do something like that for yourself. And then my other ideas were to maybe do some more mentoring or connecting more with others, like just longer lunches with colleagues, like enjoy some more dedicated social time, or think about whether there are other educational or networking type conferences that you might want to attend that normally during a busy season wouldn't be something that you'd be able to put in. Yeah, I think she needs a hobby. I think this is my advice I'd give over and over again, and people like this, you feel like we need to be doing something with our time, and so the work will expand to fill whatever time you give it. And so if you are desiring to spend less time on work because you don't really need to at the moment, then put something else active in there to fill it. So, as Sarah was saying, you know, if you train for the marathon, or you go on long bike rides with a friend, like if you have a you know, biking group that bikes from seven to nine in the morning, those mornings, you'll come in a little later and the workday will naturally be shorter, and there you go. Or sting at a choir, play in a string quartet or something like that, or if you want to volunteer. I mean you could say I'm committing to, you know, go work at the food bank on Thursday nights and I have to leave it five thirty because of that. And my guess is, you know, because you have that hard stop, you will make sure that work fits into that time on those days. But really you don't put some time into thinking about this, like make yourself a list of one hundred dreams, like what would you like to do with your time? Because when we're really, really busy, we don't think about what we would like to do with our time, and then when time does appear, we are not prepared to seize it. But if you have put some active thought into what you would like to do with this time, then you can start working your way down the list, and you know, putting one of these into your schedule in the course of a normal week and seeing how it goes, and just enjoying that sense that work is not the only thing going on in your life. Because yeah, I would say she probably doesn't necessarily even have vacation days. I think as she since she's a partner in her firm, she's the boss of it, right, so they don't necessarily have a certain number that they are allowed to take. It's that you need to keep your client relationships moving forward. But within that you have the freedom to take what you want as long as you are making enough money to keep the firm going. But then that makes it hard to know how much you can take because you always want to make sure that those relationships are going forward. So yeah, I mean it might experiment with a few sort of longer weekends and building more vacation into your life that way, even if it's not an official vacation time. And yeah, having a hobby that would be good as well. All right, I want to think of reading the Eve Rodsky book Find Your Unicorn Space. Maybe that will help you. I don't know figure out what that hobby might be exactly. All right, Sarah, what is your love of the week? This week? I was just enjoying perusing my family travel ideas list, which we talked about in a prior episode, and then it came up in our patreons, so people were excited about this. I had made a list a couple like in twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, with like the years, the ages of my kids, and where we might go for each trip and number one I didn't realize, but it was like fun to look back and like see if because I hadn't looked at a while and see what we did. And also just fun to like add ideas as I hear other people or read like a blogg or go somewhere fabulous. I'm like, Okay, where could this fit on my family ideas trip? Like how old, ideally would the kids be when we take this specific trip. So shout out to the Family Travel Ideas list listed by year with the ages of your kids on it, so you can tailor your trips too when you feel like they would be the most fun. Yeah. I love the idea. I'd love to book this stuff ahead of time. My husband is way less into planning and so it's a little bit like he doesn't want to commit to something. I don't know, something else. But the trips are not booked. This is just no I know, but you know, I would like to book our trips for the next year or so. We have years sword to them, and you know, but he would probably prefer not in case, I don't know, something else came up that we might want to do. So there you go. Yeah, I don't know. Let's see, what's what's my summer fun. I was gonna say, I do like making my summer fun list because it does give me a nudge to do stuff. For instance, going peach picking. We did that one morning on a weekend with a couple of kids. I took them and it was fun. I enjoyed it, and you know, it probably would not have done it if I hadn't specifically listed it on my Summer Fun list. And same with going Too Big. I took two of my kids tubing down the Delaware River, and I wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been on the list. It's something I had thought about, you know, we'd done the previous summer and I thought was reasonably enjoyable. I'm not sure if it'll make it on the next list, but I kind of enjoyed it, so, you know, it just it nudges me to do things. So I need to get going on the fall list now because there's fall things I want to do. Needs to be some apple picking and orchards and various things, but leaf peeping, but yeah, that's coming up, so that will be on the list as well. Yeah, love it lists for love of the week, lists for love of the week. So this has been best of both worlds. This has been our end of summer recap, talking about what worked, what didn't. Some update on professional news for Sarah. We will be back next week with more on making work in 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