Interview with Hannah Olsen. Ep 32

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, 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 thirty two. We're going to be interviewing a librarian today, learning about how she blends work in life and all that's going on in her life. But first we wanted to talk about a topic I had posted about on my blog and we'd heard about from a number of listeners and blog readers, which is that, as anyone listening to this podcast, as Sarah and I are both the planners and our family, and most of the time that's good. But sometimes planners can have a bit of planning fatigue, like we get tired of planning all the time, and especially if it feels like other people in the family aren't necessarily appreciating it or else you plan, and then people feel like they can comment about it or argue about it even though they did not do the work of planning, which is just not cool. And we got quite a bit of response to that. A lot of people chinme on saying, yes, this is totally a thing. I have planner fatigue. I get tired. This is how I rebel when this happens, Like I refuse to do X, Y and Z. So yeah, it's a thing, Hi, Sarah, do you ever get planner fatigue? I don't really get planner fatigue, but I do. I do. I do appreciate that it can be an issue. I happen to just really really like sometimes I get planner over let's put it that way, where life has gotten chaotic to a point where I haven't been able to sit down and do my normal planning rituals, which I think really do help me. And then it's sort of like the days are ticking down and I need to do it, and I need to do it. That's a little bit different. I do feel really bad for the couples where it's all in one person, but then the other person resists the plan and actually that may be a Q and a FOR in a later episode specifically. But I don't have a lot of planner fatigue, but you do, right. I think I just felt overwhelmed with decisions. And partly it's that I'm adding this like home remodeling project on top of it. So in addition to like sorting out you know how we're going to get one kid to gymnastics and another to swim and another to wrestling, and you know all that, I'm also looking at backsplashes. And I mean, some people get really excited about backsplashes, and I don't get really excited about Oh I so don't. And that's I'm going to I want you to keep going. But I'm going to say, I think maybe why I don't get planning fatigue is because if there's something I don't want to plan, I just say no. Like that would be something where if my husband's like we should remodel, I'm like, okay, well, if you care, then that's your problem, like I and he would listen and say yep. Like there are things that I enjoy working on, and they're like kids planning stuff, activities, birthday parties, things related to my work. And then if it's something that I feel like is not like absolutely necessary, that doesn't sound like it would be enjoyable for me to plan or worth it for me to plan. I see, you know a lot. So maybe that's why I don't get it. You know, well, I mean I'm not like, it's not like he's telling me I have to remodel the kitchen, but I think it needs to get done. And our master bathroom also had this huge leak, so we have to rip it up anyway, so we may as well make it look like it was built in twenty eighteen as opposed to nineteen ninety eight, which is what it looks like, you know, nineteen ninety eight by people with very specific tastes which are not ours. Episode. I mean, there were like little birdy door polls on the Yeah, it's a long story, but anyway way it should posture not that we're planning on move, but if we do ever plan on selling this house, this is work that needs to get done right, Like it's just the reality and our living room the kids have torn apart the furniture it needs it looks like, you know, we have issues, Like I don't know, we don't have functional furniture, so stuff needs to get done. I'm making all these decisions, but I feel like, you know, I only have so much decision making ability, and so I'm making decisions on backsplashes and like showing up in a granite yard, Like who even knew that was a thing. Like I took geology in college, and now I'm like actually looking at granite that has to come from the quarry or something like. Oh, anyway, So I'm doing this and then I'm like getting notes done. I'm doing a website redesigned too, and I have to like review the pages to say, well, is this the order that I want am in. I'm like, I'm not putting effort into that because I'm choosing the stupid backsplashes, and it's like, this is not what I should be doing, Like the website is more important for you know, my priorities in the backsplash, and yet it's hard to do. So I was taking too many decisions and I when all of a sudden, we have all these like trips that potentially could come up. I just said, I can't plan spring break. Like we know we want to do something, we keep going back and forth on what it is I cannot sit here and make all the decisions about spring break. So my my husband is planning spring break. He's sending me various things, you know, just saying this is our rough plan, and you know, I am basically like signing off on it, I guess. But it's really nice to not be making those plans. I'm kind of, you know, enjoying stepping back a little bit on that one. I actually think it would be kind of fun someday to completely do a hands off trip where I just say, okay, Josh, like you are going to decide where we're going to go, and we're going to find out when we get there or when the kids are older. I would love it to be like a like, you know, Annabella and I plan a trip for the family that they don't know about. But then when I asked my husband of this, he was like, no, I like, that's great. I mean, yeah, I'm not that big on trip planning. It's not It's not something I really enjoy all that much. I do it. But you know, my husband and I also have somewhat different He's he understands that we're traveling with children, you need to plan more as we learned from our guest doing Henley Vasquez a few weeks ago. You have to plan more than if it's just a couple, right, if you're an adult, Like well you said you guys used to land somewhere and not heavy. Yeah. Well it was funny our honeymoon. We went to Africa, and I had planned the wedding most of it, which, as you can imagine, there was I did a lot of planning, like the service was all set out, you know, anything, And then he was planning the honeymoon and so he had like the first two nights booked in our beginning and ending flights, and we knew we were staying at a resort the last week of it, but the two weeks at the beginning, he was like, well, we'll just drive around, Like, oh, this is interesting. Like I was young, I don't know, maybe this is what people do. It's like we literally and we would just around Africa, and there are lots of places in Africa where there aren't that many hotels, and it was a little bit more nerve wracking for me that I think it was for him. But I think he's also like he's a dude, like he felt if he had to sleep in the car. He would, but I kind of felt a little bit more worried about that. So, you know, it was an introduction to our different planning styles. So I said, when we're planning, we're traveling with children, we absolutely need to know where we are sleeping every night before we start this trip. Does that sound like a good ground run? It does? It sounds like a very you know, that's not like a hard bargain that you set the bar nice and low. I can't wait to hear where you guys end up going and help go more on that later. We are very excited to welcome to the program, Hannah Olson. Hannah, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners? All right, I'm Hannah Olson. I am a public librarian, and I live in in uh Texas near Dallas. And your kids are you have a spread? Right? Yes? I have two kids. My daughter just turned seven and then I have a five month old. So there's there's definitely an age gap there. That is a serious age gap. That's even more than is that more No, that's not more than your oldest, but it's very similar to the oldest youngest. Did you think that you would plunge back in sooner than that, or that took you that long to be motivated again the ladder definitely Now, until she was five years old, we were very solidly and no, no more. That one was hard enough. We're not doing this again. Can't change my mind. We did, we did. I've I've learned never say never, because you've always ended up doing the things I said I would. Life works like that sometimes, So how has it been plunging back in? It's actually been wonder I think a lot of that, though, has to do with the fact that my baby's a unicorn baby. He sleeps, He sleeps all night, and he has since he's a few weeks old, and so it's just he's very, very chill and easygoing and not like his sister was at all. So if he'd had the second one first, you'd probably have like six right now, right maybe maybe I actually come from a very large family, and so I've seen that that side of things, and it's really how many siblings do you have? I have nine younger siblings. Wow. We weren't even going to delve into that, but I feel like we can ask you a lot of questions there too. That's very unusual and kind of cool. It is. It is. We're all about two years apart until number eight, and then there's five years between number eight and number nine and three years between number nine and number ten. And my daughter is five months older than my youngest brother, so it's different. That's fascinating. What number are you? You said you were you learn a lot about I imagine by the time you had your daughter you were pretty well practiced in all things baby related. Yeah, yeah, I was. I was pretty used to babies. I was comfortable with babies. Of course, it's very different being the mom, especially when one is breastfeeding and that sort of thing. So, so tell us about your job, because a lot of people don't really know what librarians actually do, and it's one of these people that you sort of imagine just saying shush in the library. That's and that's it. But of course the job is far different from that. So please tell us about how you wind up and what it entails doing. Okay, Well, first off, librarians do not read all day. That is a complete myth. We do very little reading at work. What I do is I'm a technical services librarian, which basically means that I'm the one who does the cataloging, so that online catalog that people use to look up books. I maintain that our library is pretty small comparatively. It one library in our city is about thirty eight thousand people, so that hopefully gives an idea of the size for for people. How did you wind up? That's why? How did you wind up in this line of work? I actually grew up in that library. I mean, I've always I've always loved books from the time I was a kid, when I was like six, I wanted to work at the library. It's just that I ended up actually doing it. In college. I was a work study student at the library there, and then I got done and I was like, oh, I'm never gonna never gonna do this, you know, for work. I'm done. I don't want to do it anymore. But a good yea. I had always wanted to work at that particular library, and they ended up in a position open up serendipitously. I mean, this is you know, library world. So often people just you know, they're there for years and years and years and years. Apparently what happens when they're there for years and years and years is that everybody retires at the same time. So I actually started working there part time six years ago, almost exactly. It was a few days ago. And then after doing it working there for a few months, I was like, this is really fun. I would love to do this, but I want to get paid more because it was a part time job. So I decided to go to graduate school and get my MLS. And then when I was and that's Masters and Library Science. I guess sorry, yes, Masters of Library Science. And I was doing all online, which is the thing that you can do now. So that worked out very nicely as far as being a mon because I did have my daughter at that point. She was born before I got the job. And why didn't you walk us through what a day looks like for for you first? But I guess before I get to that, your your husband, What what line of work is he in? Then? He has been in the service industry for many, many years. At until a few months ago, he was either a waiter or a bartender, and he's been doing that for all of our marriage. A few months ago he actually got a full time job as a cashier in like a company cafeteria, so that is full time and has really great hours. For I was probably much better hours than the waiting bar attending, which sounds like might not have been so exciting for for Yes, I did you guys seriously have alternate hours basically for the first couple of years that your parents, we kind of did for a little bit. That did not work out well at all for our marriage. Imagine it probably it probably is logistically good in terms of childcare, but yeah, I could see how it would certainly tickets toll in a relationship. Yeah, And we're incredibly lucky in that when we moved to where I grew up, my parents still live there, and so my mom was actually is actually the one that has watched first my daughter and not my son while both of us were working, and when I was in school, she was she was doing a lot of that as well, and that's something a lot of people don't have. And how old did you say? Your youngest sibling is five months younger than my daughter, and so my daughter seven, my brother will be seven in July. So for your mom, it was just like, yeah, yeah, it's it's amazing and it's very it's very interesting feeling because I'm like, well, I'm a working mom and I do all these things. But the reason I can do that in my particular situation is because my mother has been stay at home mom, you know, since I was born. So wow, it's interesting. But yeah, why did you walk us through what a what a typical day, like a weekday looks like for you guys in your household? Sure? Well, my husband hours are crazy early. He has to be at work between five thirty and six am. Get breakfast. Wow, so you are the morning parents. I am the morning parents. Yes, So I try and get up around five point thirty to have some quiet time to myself. A lot of times I sleep in instead, but I pretty much I'm always at by six thirty. And so we have two large dogs as well as the two children. So I will let the dogs out, feed them, feed the baby. We'll get him up and feed him, get my daughter up, get her ready. And since since we've had the baby, and since I've been doing the morning by myself rather, I've actually just been driving her to school, so all of that takes out. On a good day, we get to school at seven thirty, which is the earliest they'll let you drop the kid off. On other days, it's very very close to eight which is when school starts. So I drop my daughter off and then I drive to the city where I work, So it's about I think thirty to forty minute commute during the morning, since there is the kind of the traffic and all that. I drop my son off and then I get to work between eight forty five and nine point fifteen. And you say, you drop your son off, so is he to take care close to where you work with my mom watches him? And oh, of course with your mom. Sorry, yeah, and she's located close to where you work. Because I was just listening to something that was talking about like the difference between dropping your kid off close to home versus close to work, and whether you have your eating time kind of to yourself or with your kid, and there was sort of debate over which is better. And I guess the truth is, in most cases there's not a choice. Way. Yeah, you know, dropping him off is all right, I mean it adds fifteen minutes basically at fifteen minutes, especially on my way back, so it takes me an hour from when I leave work to when I walk in the door. But he's little, so I can listen to my podcasts when my seven year old is in the car. I yeah, it's and she yeah, and she's wonderful, but she talks constantly, and so it's it's a very different experience with her. And I was actually just talking about that with my husband and I was like, during the summer, you're going to have to pick them up in the afternoons, please can you? Yeah? Exactly, So you get to work between eight fifteen and sorry, you get to work between eight forty five and nine to fifteen, and then what does the day look like from that point? It's a variety of different things. A lot of times in the mornings, I will try and do the cataloging, which is almost half of what I do, and that's basically handling the books, finding the records, proofing them and that sort of thing. We're a pretty small library, so I do spend a significant amount of time at the information desk answering questions, being available for reference. And then I supervise the technical services team, which is two part timers and a full timer and they do receiving, receiving processing. And then my two part timers especially have a lot of volunteers that they work with. A lot of high schools used to require volunteer hours that they might not need more, but it's usually optional or maybe like a special activity will require them. So we have a lot of teenagers who need volunteer hours. So you've got a lot of volunteers there, the teenagers. And do you do you get any breaks during the day or is it just sort of go, go go from the time you get there. Yes, we get an hour lunch. I think we're allowed to do two fifteen minute breaks, but a lot of people don't take them because we're busy. I kind of I don't take them in one block, but that just means when if there's something that comes up that takes my attention away for five minutes, I don't worry about it. I am not breastfeeding, so I don't have to worry about pumping. How did you make that How did you make that choice? Well? I had an unexpected sea section, and after the sea section, I was just physically exhausted, and and so they were you know, they do the thing where they try to get the baby to nurse. He wasn't latching on, and I was like, let's just not must not worry about it. We'll just came in a bottle. No and that is perfectly fine. You know, we've talked about this definitely before. Would you not want to judge anyone who makes one choice versus the other. So do you get to do anything sort of for you during your breaks or how does that wind up working? Yes, during lunches, I typically will either read or you know, put her around online things like that. Sometimes I'm able to go to lunch with friends, which is really nice. So usually it's it's just being reading or just something rejuvenating during the middle of the lis have to read on their breaks. You're surrounded by books, but you can't pick them up because you're too busy with everything else. And so then what time do you wind up leaving for the day? What time do you get off your shift? I will leave either at six or up five, normally at set six, and then I do have the one day, which is today, where I do work twelve to nine instead. But yeah, normally I leave at six and I pick up my kid and I get home at seven and we immediately have dinner. And so your husband is also home last, Yes, he gets off around two fifty to thirty. He gets home around three, three fifteen, three thirty and then My daughter's bus arrives at three forty five, so basically he picks her up from the bus stop and he's with her the rest of the day. She has I think gymnastics one day, and she's gonna have soccer practices, and so he'll take her to those and he's able to make dinner. So that's that's really exciting because we don't have to do aftercare for her. Oh that sounds fantastic, like a very nice Yeah, bought out division. Yeah, so you're kind of the morning parent, and then he has the afternoon with the older child who's there in your the same town as where you live. And then it makes sense for you to pick up your son because that's where yes, because he's you know, five minutes away, and so do you. I mean, now that you guys have sort of similar hours in the sense of not having the opposite hours anymore, how has that changed your marriage and how you manage things together? I mean, I think we've always been pretty equitable in a way that I don't often see among my people I went to college with, which is which is interesting because he's always done more around the house than typically people will talk about their husband's doing, for example, and then I was also working full time. I've been working full time since I got this job five years ago, and he's been part time through most of that. Do you think that division of has happened because of that? Like, do you think that the that you are the primary breadwinner sort of nudged him into doing more than he might have otherwise or do you think he was sort of more always like that. I think part of it was he was more always like that. I think part of it was I asked which great for that? So you probably form the meetings, like do you too communicate about it? Yeah? So I'm the logistically minded one, so so a lot of the logistical side of things I do do so what actually needs to get done when I'm often the one that's figuring that out, and then I'll ask him to do specific things. So of course there are exceptions to that. I would like to do it more formally, especially the weekends. I know, Sarah, you've blogged and talked on the podcast about your weekend planning and I would love to do something like that. And it only I totally get it when people find that it doesn't work because if their partner really hates it, so I you know, I don't like to be like, oh, this is the answer for everyone, but if your partner is open to it, I do think it helps, yes, yes, but yeah, so he's really always kind of been like that, and I think the biggest difference now is that we're both tired at seventh So before, you know, we of course we were both tired, but now it's like, we're both really tired. And so how do you guys manage your energy? I mean, what do you do to kind of keep yourself going knowing that you do have this long workday and then you have the little kids to deal with after. That's honestly still something that I think we're trying to figure out for me right now. Part of the things I've been trying was the getting up earlier to have kind of quiet time, and then I think also I'll be able to use my lunch period pretty intentionally to get some of that rejuvenating quiet time. And except that's something I really noticed, the absence of if I just go go go all day and don't have any sort of quiet time or reading. Reading is a big thing for for me regaining mental energy, I can imagine, so yeah, and then of course our house is just a total mess that's probably gonna happen. Does that bother you? Oh yeah, does it bother you? Or you're sort of at peace with it? It does bother me. But at the same time, there's there's a limit to our energy, and I'm realizing that most likely we will people need to find a way to outsource that or to probably just make peace with it, because there's yeah, just realistically, that's probably going to be something that's that's going to be on the back burner for a while. And that's okay. Laura's She's like, accept it. So, Hannah, I have one sort of off ball, off question. But I bet when you're working at the information desk you get a lot of crazy questions. Is that true? Sometimes some of the stranger questions you've been asked at the information desk, or maybe something obvious like like why would you ask me? Though I just heard that, Like brands get asked questions like well, there's this book I want and the cover is read. Yes, that is definitely a thing I have had people. I think it was. Yeah, there was one particular time there was a probably she was eleven or twelve, and she asked for a particular book, and she knew what it was about, and she knew like the size of the book, and you were supposed to be able to know what that book was based on that. Yes, thankfully we actually had the account history. No, it wasn't the account history. There have been a fine on the book and a gotten turned in late, so it was in her record aversa is that the book? And so we were able to figure out which book it was because yeah, we knew what she checked it out before. So I was like, oh, well we can we can look there, which has not always been the case. And of course you have the people that are kind of living in their own worlds who who ask interesting questions. But so you went back to work relatively soon after your second child was born, right, yes, I had How did you? You had a C section too, so that Yeah, I'm just very curious how that wound up working. Was that very tough to get back to work so soon after major surgery? Not too horrible, thankfully, Yeah, because I think you see, Yeah, the first I worked right up until the day before I went into labor, and then I ended up having the C section, which, as I said, was unexpected, and so I think the first two weeks I was extremely glad I didn't have to go anywhere because it was still really, you know, difficult, painful to move around. By the time I did go back to work, and I eased back into it, so I wasn't full time those first two weeks, and I wasn't doing the desk, so it was basically just I was at my desk. I wasn't walking around, you know, showing people where things were or anything, and had gone down some It was it was more like particular motions would would trigger pain or whatever whatever. And then at six weeks when I was back full time, I was I was pretty much I was your mom taking care of your son at that point, or did was your husband able to do any time off at all? He took about a week off, but when the baby was born, he was still at just a regular restaurant as a waiter. And so there is no FMLA, there is no page yes. And he was really lucky at that job because he was experienced and they were very understanding, and so they actually had given him this regular schedule of only working during the days, which is incredibly unusual in food service. But yeah, So he just took a week off and then he was gone, and then I had different family members that came and helped me out. So and I was also lucky in that I was actually ready to go back to work at four weeks. I was ready to use my brain in that way again and be around adults. But I know a lot of people don't feel that way four weeks after a baby. And also I was not breastfeeding, which I think was a very big part of that as well, because I remember with my first one, who I breasted for two years, that there's no way I could have been going back to work at that. Well, and you had your mom too, for you know, knowing when you did go back to work, you had that child care situation in place as well. Yes, yes, that was another reason I could do that so early, because I think if we had more traditional childcare, I probably would have tried to do longer leave, though I would not have been able to get paid for it all, which was the main reason I went back as soon as I did. Sarah, do you have anything else? Well, we didn't talk too much. You talked about not planning right now to outsource your cleaning, and you know with a young baby, and I know you kind of mentioned previously when your email is not having like tons of extra financial wiggle room, But has there been anything that you found has been really like worth trading off for anything that you feel like, well, I'd rather you know, get discounted X Y Z as long as I can blank you know, is there anything that stands out for you? The first thing that springs to mind is actually that we have been using Blue Apron, which is one of those meal preparation service so cool, and you guys have been liking it. It is it's it's really good. It's pricey for us. I was just looking at our budget and it's a significant portion. I don't know if we'll be able to keep it up, but the meals are really good, and the fact that it all comes in the box and it's all there, it's all the right amounts and all you have to do is cook it like that. Our issue has been figuring out what to eat and then buying the right ingredients in the right amounts and not accidentally wasting any of it. So having the Blue Apron do that part four us has been really nice. Oh that's so funny because I feel like that those meal service gets seem like one of the most divisive issues. People are either in love or absolutely don't get it at all. So it's interesting to hear from someone who in the camp, in the blop camp. Yeah, well, let's do our love of the week. Then, Sarah, what do you have this week? Well, I thought that since we had a librarian on our show, that I would give As I've been mentioning, my maternity leave has been kind of like a reading renaissance for me. I you know, last year, I think I read twenty four books, but I have just finished my like fifteenth book and it's February twentieth for this year, so like, yeah, lots of books. And I just read the book Only Child by Rhiannon Navine and A VII N and oh, it's very heart wrenching. The subject is actually I started it right before the Parkland tragedy happened, but it is on the same topic and it's a novel and it's heart wrenching, but it was beautifully done and one of those books that you just kind of devour and makes you think. And yeah, so that's my love of the week, So mine, I'll go ahead I'll do something along those lines, although not really but also book related is I found this article on BuzzFeed, which I will, you know, not discuss how I wound up on BuzzFeed anyway. It was called forty Brilliant short Novels you can read in a day. This is great Reads under two hundred pages more or less, a compilation by Dan Dalton. He has gone through and found like a bunch of short novels and some you've heard of obviously, stuff like Animal Farm or whatever. But then others are this like offbeat stuff. I mean, I read one called Mezzanine. I just am finishing one called Speedboat. I've found this Gabrielle Garcia Marquez novel novella on it. And so they're all very short, which I kind of felt like I needed some short books after hacking my way through Moby Dick and some other kind of longer works lately, and so it's it's you feel like you're reading a real book, but they're short. And so there's like forty six on here. So I was like, on you know, my Kindle, just loading as many of them up as I could to have a few short reads. So I encourage our listeners to google that one. All right, BuzzFeed for the wind, how about you, Well, I'm going to pick. There is a magazine called Bella Grace and they actually the creators referred to it as a book azine. It's almost two hundred pages. There's no ads, and what it is is it's pretty pictures and like short pieces about living like a beautiful ordinary life, and so it's very you know, easy to read, encouraging. It reminds me kind of litter lit mags, like what we had in high school and college, except it's not so much literature. It's more like kind of short personal essays and it's just really fun to read. And I was given a subscription to it by one of my family members for Christmas, and my first issue arrived a few days ago. It's a quarterly, so it's yeah, it's a less frequent magazine, but it's so big it makes sense and so it's just it's a lot of it's a lot of fun. Can you say the title bit one more time? Bella, Greg Sar and I are both major magazine addicts, so we've all have Yeah, I just yeah, I just listened to the episode. We will have to check that one out well, Hannah, thank you so much for being on the show. We really appreciate your taking the time to do this. Thank you for having me. This listener sent us a question that we both thought was very interesting. You know, we've done some episodes looking at gender divides, and we've talked about outsourcing, and to some extent, this question to addresses both of those topics. So here it goes. I started listening to the podcast a few months ago and recently started to go back and listen to episodes I missed. I just listened to outsourcing and had a question. I've had a cleaner since my son was two and it has been a life saver. My son is now seven, and I realized he wasn't learning cleaning skills. Growing up, my family all girls plus my parents had an elaborate toward art, which included everyone. We had it mapped out every night who was responsible for cooking, sitting the table, clearing the table, washing and drying dishes, as well as weekend chores. In my late teens and twenties, I was shocked by how little the guys I dated knew about taking care of a house. My boyfriend's mom had to teach him how to do laundry when we left for college at age twenty. Side note, I think my husband had that experience as well. I did not, all right, I vowed that if I had a boy, he would help with tours and know how to clean a house and do laundry. I'm wondering if teaching your kids how to do household chores as a priority, and how you handle it without sourcing. I stopped my cleaner six months ago since this was a big concern of mine, and we now have one hour family cleaning time on the weekends. It is not perfect. The house is definitely dirtier, and some weeks I feel like I'm doing the bulk with the work. But I feel like we are teaching my son that if the three of us work together, we can get these mundane tasks which are important done and still have fun about every other month. I do contemplate calling the cleaner again, though, I'm curious how you approach this in your Famili's Yeah, I mean, I would say that this is making an issue out of something that is not really an issue. I mean, I don't know about other people's households, but I would say that even in the times when we have had you know, weekly cleaning services or something like that, there's still a lot of other work to be done too, Like that in no way takes all of it off our plates. Like, there's still plenty of other stuff to get done. And so the kids are learning about setting the table and clearing the table because I mean, a weekly housekeeper, how would they're not cleaning your table off every night after dinner, right, They're not there every day after dinner. So unless you actually have a full time housekeeper, like someone who's there for eight hours every day, you're not getting that. So you know, there's stuff like setting the table and clearing the table, doing the dishes, picking up toys, you know, putting your laundry away, and stuff like that. I mean, these are all things that you can learn even if you do have a weekly housekeeper. I think what the weekly housekeeper does is keeping the house a little bit cleaner than it would be, maybe doing some of the major stuff, which you know, maybe that's stuff that your kid needs to know how to do, but I think you can teach it pretty quickly if you know that is I've always surprised when I read like old good housekeepings from the nineteen sixties and stuff that it used to be considered like this full time job. But you look at their sort of standards for cleanliness, there's things many of us don't ever even think to do now. I mean, like you know, waxing floors on a certain regular basis and making sure you get the wax onto the polisher with a butter knife too, so you get the right technique to get the exact right, you know, level of it's turned it into a science, like whole economic science, right. But like we discovered once women devoted less time to that part because they more of them went into the workforce, that you didn't really have to do all that stuff. And so I think it's to say, I mean, there's certain tasks that are great to have done weekly and you know your house to be cleaner, but there's still a lot of other things to do too, So I would say this is really not the trade off that she is making it out to be. And if she would like to have her cleaner back because she feels like she is doing the bulk of it, like that's certainly a reasonable thing to do. And I also be careful if you are often doing the bulk of it. That you're still not teaching your son the right lesson. You're teaching him that the woman in his life should do the bulk of this stuff right, and that's not the Yeah. I hope that family cleaning hour includes both parents, Yes, because we've got to be careful, like you know, you can in some way ways. I feel like the choice is not that we all learn it and everyone sees that they're responsible. What it winds up being is either we outsource it or mom does it. So you're teaching a lesson either way, So just be clear which lesson you're teaching, right, Yeah, I one hundred percent agree. I mean, first of all, she references a torchart, which sounds awesome, but you could still have the exact same tortart, it just wouldn't have like toilet cleaning. And if anybody can argue that like they really needed to clean toilets in their childhood, that it made them a better person, or that they couldn't figure out how to clean toilets later when they needed to, I just am going to be skeptical. Yeah, because not rocket science like I learned it. It's pretty rocket science. And one lesson that your kids may pick up on, is, Hey, mommy and Daddy do tours themselves. Yes, sometimes, but there's some tours they might not like doing. And part of the reason they don't have to do it now is because they go to work. And we actually do make it very clear that, like, you know, the reason we have and Nannie, the reason we have help around the house is so that mommy can go to work and Daddy can go to work. So I think that's an important lesson, or maybe that the lesson that working hard will help you to not have to clean toilets someday. I mean, I don't I'm not saying that some people who are still cleaning toilets didn't work hard, but that they're because that's a very slippery slope, and I don't mean it in that kind of fashion. But in our current situation, I might feel differently if I was home all day outsourcing these things. But since I do work, I feel like there's enough justification that it does teach my kids something. Yeah, And I would also say it's not a bad thing for people to have to learn stuff when they go off on their own, partly because things stick more when you really do have to learn it right, Like I mean, I learned to do laundry when I went away to multi week camps in the summer and suddenly had to do it. And when I went to a residential school for my last two years of high school, I also had to do it, and so I learned how to do it. And I hadn't necessarily I've been doing my laundry growing up, but when I had to learn it, I learned to do it. And you know, the same thing with cooking, Like I can't say that I did a whole lot of cooking growing up either, but when I was out on my own, I had my first sort of apartment in the summer when I was nineteen and doing an internship in Washington, DC, and actually had to cook, like I taught myself. And because I had to learn, and I was fully responsible for the results, like I feel like I learned pretty quickly and I learned pretty well. And so there's a whole theory of education, not that we're going to going into it now, but that when people feel like they really need to know stuff and it benefits them, then they really learn it, which is why you know, people never pay attention to learning, like trigonometry, because I can't see any reason they'll ever need it. So I'd say it was probably this same thing with laundry. If they know that mom and dad will just do it anyway, you know, So there's something it's not a bad thing to learn when you go off to school. But you know, in general, I know, just to end this up here, we we have a lot of fraught narratives about outsourcing, and this is, you know, one of them, like what are we showing my children? What are what are we teaching the kids? But the truth is everyone outsources things. And I know we've talked about this before, but like we don't drive our letters to Wisconsin, like the post office takes them there. Like I'm not worried that my kids don't know how to churn butter, Like this is not something I get worried about, like even though that's outsourcing too, Like we don't grow our own food, and that doesn't worry me that we don't. So I think, you know, it's just about these chores that tend to be traditional women's work that people have these more fraught narratives about, And so I would I would sort of question that and push back on that that when we worry about what we're teaching our kids is often that we're still uncomfortable with the idea of mom not doing these things, and so we need to be careful about that. Al the way, I guess I do applaud the writer of this question because she did have a son only so that's true. It would be sure question like my daughter is doing it, But that's a whole different issue. Not to be going here anyway. This has been episode thirty two. Turn in next week for 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 shoe Box 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. M