More School Talk, A Work Schedule without Childcare, and Our 3rd Anniversary!

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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 Hart Hunger. 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 one hundred and sixty one, which is airing right at the beginning of September. We know a number of people have started up with school in various forms, whether virtual or in person. My kids have not yet started up for what will be virtual for at least the first month, but have high hopes we will transition to in person soon for most of the kids. Sarah, you have talked in the past about how you have two of your kids doing in person private school and one in the virtual public school option. But there's all sorts of different modes out there in different solutions that I know a lot of our listeners are adopting in order to do their jobs while managing school that in many cases looks different than it has in the past. What are some of the things you're hearing from your colleagues and others who are doing right now. Well, I just got an interesting email yesterday that I immediately forwarded to a couple of my residents who have kids, because I think I had mentioned either on the pod or my blog. I don't remember that our JCC was doing like a kind of like a camp for virtual school type of thing where they were going to have the kids kind of in pods with supervision and doing the public school curriculum supervised with tutors. Basically, the YMCA has now opened up a similar thing. And actually, my healthcare system is a big healthcare system in the area, and they're subsidizing this, so it's actually really really affordable for residents and nurses or whoever. I think it's like one hundred dollars a week or something. Eight to six care. Yeah, you can't get that. So that was really really cool option. And I could see how, you know, as long as they keep their rooms separate, that could be as safe as it can get for some people, So that's helpful so that people who are essential providers, because a lot of the people using that would be like nurses and doctors, can get to work and do their jobs. So that's awesome. There's the pod and there have been so many articles that you know, by the time this errs, I'm sure you've all read about the pros and cons of pods, but that does seem like it is very popular. And I think one interesting thing is the shifted schedule. So our school district is having a two pm to eight pm option, and I think their reasons for that are twofold. Number one, there are some teachers that have kids, and if the teachers need to supervise their own kids, then they kind of need to be doing their teaching work at a different time. So this was one way, like if a teacher wanted to do that, then they could supervise their kids in the morning and then do their actual teaching in the evening. And then also for parents that you wanted to get their work in in the morning or had to get their work in the morning, that they would be able to supervise their kids better in the afternoon. I mean, that makes for quite a long day, but you could technically, I mean, if you started at six am, you could work eight hours before your kid even started their school day, supervise that whole thing, and then get up the next day to start it again. Sounds super fun, but no, if you had a partner. If you had a partner, I could imagine that being more palatable. Maybe you could split up the kids part or kind of alternate on which day. And you had a very interesting blog post recently. I thought that detailed a way that a two person couple could alternate things like in a very structured way. You want to go into that. So I got an interesting amount of feedback from this, Not so much in comments on the blog, but I heard from people who wanted to share it with other audiences because I guess it just hadn't been spelled out exactly how a split scale jewel with two working parents, you know, splitting at fifty to fifty could infect work and could give both parties approximately thirty hours a week of focused work time, mostly during the work day. So none of these like you know, get up at four am and work till eight am type things, which if you have to do, you have to do, but you also wouldn't have to in this setup. So the idea is that you have two different shifts during the work day. One is eight to three and one is one to six, and that is predicated on the idea that any young children who are home are napping from one to three. That's a rough nap window. We are recording this at two thirty right, and Genevieve is napping since Sarah does not have childcare today, and you know, older children could use that time for independent work or for screen time or whatever you wanted to do. The idea is that that is could that could be double in terms of the parents. One parent is on for it during distrection, so some of their hours are not pure hours, but mostly two of them will be able to work anyway. So one party takes eight to three Monday and Wednesday and one to six on Tuesday and Thursday. The other party takes one to six on Monday and Wednesday and eight to three on Tuesday and Thursday, and then they alternate on Friday who gets eight to three and who gets one to six. So each week it splits off there and what it works out to is then twenty nine hours during the weeks when you have the three one to six shifts, and it works out to thirty one hours on the weeks where you have the three eight to three shifts. And the key thing for this to work is that when you are on, your job is not just to keep the children safe like being adult present in the house, you are also committing to keeping the children out of your partner's office right so that they can be guaranteed that those hours being at eight to one or one of the six or whatever are focused right, like absolutely focused. They are not on, they are not dealing with anything. And if you do this, then each of you can in fact get the twenty five pure focused hours and then between four to six hours each week of most likely but could be interrupted because of nap time woes or whatever, and both of you would have both some afternoon and some morning hours. And so I know that that's an issue that some people would be like, well, we just split it that she takes the mornings and then I take the afternoons. But then what if you know there are some teams that always want to meet in the morning because some other person has a different shift of their schedule, And so this allows you to occasionally have morning meetings or occasionally have afternoon meetings as the case may be. Again, you know this has to be pretty much you are committing to this. You're committing to keeping the kids out of your partner's office. You can obviously arrange for a subcredit on a day if there is something like you have to pitch a new client a huge project, and the only time they can meet is Tuesday at ten am, and technically Tuesday is the day that you work one to six. Like, probably you could arrange with your spouse to get a sub credit that you would make it up for that person at another point, but you know you want to have that be relatively infrequently. But you know, working twenty nine or thirty one hours a week with no paid childcare is pretty good. If that's a situation that a couple might find themselves in, and if they need more hours, you can extend this swap idea two different times. I mean, maybe each of you works from six to ten pm one night a week and that gets you up to thirty four hours a week, or you do six to ten am on a weekend or something. You each get one weekend morning and you know, whatever it is, but that is basically full ten hours and if they are planned well, you will be okay. So something to consider. I mean, obviously, people putting it out on my blog that not everyone is in a two income couple totally understood. Not everyone is in a two person situation again, totally understood. Not everybody is working from home. There are people who have to be in the office and then their partner has a different setup. I think Sarah and I have both definitely advocated, you know, for hiring childcare if you're in a situation where this is the case, but if that is not going to be happening, this is one way that both parties can get an equitable split and a reasonable amount of time. I've learned that those critiques are called caveat critiques critics. I learned that from cal Newport, who mentions that sometimes if you give advice and Laurie, you just spend a lot of advice for a living, and I guess we do that on this podcast as well. A lot of people will come up with what but in this situation it doesn't work? And his take on that, which I thought was interesting, is that, well, the reason you don't give all the scenarios is because there's infinite scenarios and then it would be a very bad book or podcast or whatever if you spent that time listing. Well, if so, anyway, that's a caveat critic. I agree, I can't come up with everything. You know, we write advice that might be helpful to some people, and like it is not helpful to you filter, you glean what is helpful and what is not. Which, Yeah, I had somebody write me recently that even though her situation was slightly different than ours, she enjoys the podcast a lot and she filters it appropriately, and I appreciated that. You know, I love your schedule because well, I like the rigidity of it, Like if I was going to do this, which we can't, but if I was, then I think, I think it gets really difficult when it's nebulous, when you're like, oh, you know, we'll just cover for each other, because then things could get very lopsided very quickly. And I think if you really take the time with your partner to be like these are my hours, these are your hours, Like I could imagine that if my husband and I did have the kind of jobs that were amenable to this, there would have to be some kind of whiteboard, like I would need to see this in black and white, like and this is my time and this is not my time, and this is my time I have to be on for the kids, so I can't schedule something. But then once you did that, you could kind of have freedom within that structure to get a lot done. And I will mention that, you know, I think an argument caveat argument. I don't know that people might make as well thirty hours. I work ninety hours. I mean number one. Laura has done some interesting work demonstrating that most people who say they work seventy hours or whatever, many of them don't. Yes, some residents do, and you know, other various exceptions, I'm sure, but most people don't. And the schedule that you pose is actually very friendly, Like it starts at eight, right, I mean, it ends it nobody's getting up at five, And you know you could certainly if you needed to get to that forty forty five hour as she mentioned at on somebody, Yeah you do like seven to three and one to seven, right, Like that would work just as well. You know. I was just more saying that most people probably who are in corporate type team jobs like do need to mostly put their work during the work day. I mean, there's some things that they can do outside of it, but presumably most of your colleagues are not available at seven am or seven pm, So I mean that's if you are going to include those hours, it's going to have to be for your individual deliverables, and so, you know whatever. If you want to extend the window, you can, of course, but if you want to have it sort of a more normal family life, I mean, either mom or dad being gone from eight to six is really not that crazy a schedule. So yeah, no, I thought it was reasonable. That's why I posted it. But you know, we'll hear from anyone if they adopt something like that. Yes, in fact, that would be a really fun episode to have in the future. We did have one o Susanna Quincy did something like this with her partner. But maybe another example in the future of someone kind of making it work without childcare by really coordinating with a partner. Well, I think we should take a short break and then we're going to come back and hear about how Sarah's day of seeing patients from telemedicine when there was a childcare issue, how that went. So we'll be back in just a minute, all right. So on Sarah's blog the other morning, we got an announcement that she had learned at two am that she was on for the day. So how did this go down? Yeah, so our poor nanny, like she had a health issue come up, not COVID, don't worry, and she's already doing much better. But it was a kind of thing where there was no way she was going to be able to come in. So I got this text at two am and I was like, oh my god, what am I going to do about it? But oh my god. So I kind of cycled through all the possibilities in my head at two am, because it's not the kind of thing you can just roll over and deal with later. And I had about thirteen telehealth visits scheduled that day, like that morning, you know, starting in about six hours. So I was like, okay, option one, Hey, Josh, what are you doing? And I think he was like downstairs when the text came in, But then he woke up too and came upstairs. Sometimes he might fall asleep on the couch downstairs, poor guy. Anyway, so he comes upstairs, I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, I have three surgeries. Crap, because you know, if he just had clinic then it would kind of be debatable, like maybe we could each do half. But since he had actual surgeries, I felt that bumping people surgeries was probably a little you know, not cool. So I figured it was then on me. So then the option too was going to be Okay, Well, I guess I will just cancel everybody and move them to like the next week when we were supposed to be off. But that sounded really unpalatable and also kind of a logistical nightmare to try to reach everybody who was going to be, you know, seen that day. I'm sure our office would have helped with it, but still that was stressing me out. Then I was like, maybe I could just see them with the kids home, and maybe Annabelle would rise the occasion as my year old babysitter, and so I was like, I'm just going to give it a try. What's the worst that could happen, like I have terrible encounters And I told them we'll have to reschedule because I have three children at home due to an emergency. When we when out of all got up, I told her that she was basically going to be in charge of the kids for the morning. And she's eight and a half by the way, she's pretty mature for her age, but obviously only hal so, you know, and I told her that, I well, I told them all that if everybody was good, then they could all choose a toy from Target online at the end of the day. So it was a nice carrot to dangle in front of them. And I also told her that she could give them unlimited screen time during the morning to help her get through it. So she kind of was really excited about it. Actually, she got all like, I don't know, she was very poised for the day, kind of like like she had aged five years instantly, and she actually did a really good job. I was able to kind of go downstairs. My office is upstairs. I would go and check on them kind of between each patient and be like, okay, everybody's still alive. She was leading art class, she was doing dress up. She got them as snack. She was like, I got Cameron a big bar and I made sure it was just the one fig bar. Well, so she did really well, and then the afternoon was fine because honestly, like my big kids usually just play Minecraft the whole time and Genevieve sleeps, and it could have gotten bad because at the very end I had like a sibling pair of schedule and then I heard Viva and I was like, oh crap, and then they ended up rescheduling. So that was that was a really good ending to the day because it could have been. It could have been rough because the thing is once I mean, unless Anibal could have gotten her bribe back with a show, which is possible, but you know when she first wakes up, if she hears it, I'm here, she's very interested. Yeah, mommy, mommy, mommy. So it ended up working out. So it was it was not fun, Like I definitely had this undercurrent of like ohto god, oh god the whole time, but then the truth is, like what's the worst that can happen, Like it's telehealth. We can always move it, although it feels catastrophic because with telehealth, like if you have one visit that goes the bad and then like then your next visit starts late and they're trying to get in, and then your next one doesn't, it kind of snowballs. So I mean I was lucky it worked out. I would do it again in a pinch, But I am not going to plan on doing that. No. No, it's the kind of thing. It's like you can do it for one day because you know that you can make it up at some other point if it's a problem, but you can't do it day after day, and that level of stress that's just hard to work with. And I think that's what's really been challenging for a lot of people, is the constant fear of interruption when they you know, don't have hands on coverage for younger children. Yes, plus it was a little I was thinking to myself like that, if I were to do that regularly, that's that's a lot on an eight year old. Yeah, traumatize like, oh my god, I was the family babysit for a year or something like. No, I think she had fun. But if it was a routine thing, yeah, not so much. Yeah, well, as you discovered. I mean, the screens really help. I mean I would talk about using screens as a babysitter, but oh my goodness, sometimes you need the screens as a babysitter, and definitely are you know, when we need it. The older kids can play Minecraft or be on their computers or whatever for a while. The one issue with Alex and why this has been sometimes problem is if he gets bored on the computer, he will then come and cause havoc like you know, and sometimes just naughtiness for attention and that that could be rough to deal with, you know. So it's not one hundred percent reliable by any means. Well, and it's also very age dependent. Like I thought to myself, I could not have done this a year ago. Maybe you would not have had it, or two years ago, like with the six month old, Like, no way I could do that. I was just on the fringes where I was able to pull it off. But well, and my older kids, I mean the older three would be you know, fine all day basically. So if I only had them, I think this would be a very different setup than it is. But of course I have younger children as well, so it's a little bit more problematic. Yeah, we can do some stuff without childcare, can't do all that much. So the days that we don't have it, Michael and I try to come up with some way of splitting it that tends to it's basically every Friday for the most part, and so he will mostly work in the morning, and then he can tend to be able to stop work around one. I mean, because it's the summer. I mean they might have had summer Fridays and a lot of places anyway, and then I usually would work in the afternoon, and I just sort of anticipate that if I need like calls, I either put him on Friday afternoon, and if people don't want to do Friday afternoon and summer, because that's kind of nobody wants to be on the phone in Friday afternoon and summer. I just to try to make sure that happens earlier in the week since Friday morning generally isn't gonna work for me. So that's how we split it. That makes sense. Yeah, I don't think anyone wants to do anything Friday afternoon ever, really no, But there is a light at the end of the supervision tunnel that the older children can pretty much fend for themselves and get their own snacks and turn on their own screens and usually not wander in and cause trouble. Eventually, they do grow up amazing well. So we wanted to pivot here to talk about our third anniversary, so alert listeners may recall that we started in late August of twenty seventeen. We had so this is our one hundred and sixty first episode. So I guess we're a little past the three year mark and we do fifty two a year, plus we had three to start with or something. Have you gone back and listened to those early ones at all? Nope? Yeah, I was saying earlier, I don't think we want to. We have grown and evolved as podcasters in the course of Yeah, I don't. I don't enjoy listening to my own voice at baseline, So listening to my own voice when it was even less experienced than it is now would be not the most fun. But I'm sure some of them are fun. Actually actually revisit some of my favorite prior guest episodes because there are definitely some in our archives and I'm like, wow, we had that person on, So what were some of your favorite from the past year. Yeah, so in the past year I went through and kind of scrolled through, and some of my favorite guest episodes were Jennifer Petrillieri, who wrote Couples That Work. I just thought she was so eloquent unlus, I love her book. I think my husband's reading it now. Actually, so there you go. And I really liked and I think you did so having Joel and me, how do we listen to their podcast? Right, and so you feel like you know people from listening to their podcast, and then when they're on your show, it's like, hey, we know each other already, sort of sort of we don't and that's that you don't. But it was still so much so they were great. And then in terms of the ones that we did, I loved, of course the post baby update when you came back after your very very brief majornity non leave. And then I did kind of a memory. Somebody asked about this one recently about like when I talked about PMDD and stress and stuff. It was like episode one eighteen that we had a whole discussion about that. And then the milestone birthday episode after I turned forty was pretty fun and we both discussed our fun milestone birthdays. That was episode one forty six. So I think those are my favorite. Yeah, those are all good ones, yeah, Jolin, that was definitely a favorite for me. I enjoyed the one in September of twenty nineteen where I announced that Henry was on his way, just because well this was a first, you know, baby announcement on Best of both worlds. Obviously, Genevieve we announced when she was born, but people knew you were expecting her when we started the podcast. So it was fun to make a baby announcement like that and know that people would be excited and interested. Like having this podcast makes it feel more like there's a community around that's excited about these things, and so it was fun to share it and to know that I was putting that out there, and so I really enjoyed that part of that one. I wanted to pause here to note a guest from a past year that you know, we our first fall that we had Emily Garnett, who was so eloquent about her battle with breast cancer and what that was like to be a young woman facing that diagnosis, especially with a very young child at the time. And I'm tearing up here, but unfortunately we learned recently that she had passed away this spring, and so are you know, sincere condolences to her husband and her son, and you know, we were so glad that we were able to have her on the show and get to know about her and her story, So people want to go back and listen to that one. It was from right around Thanksgiving in our first year, so yeah, she was inspiring, really really a loss. Well, so we have been talking about so many topics on best of both worlds, and of course we always want more guests. We want guests of all different backgrounds and family types and different situations. You're dealing with combining work in life, different professions, different numbers and children and in different ages and all those sorts of things. People facing different challenges. So we always welcome ideas on guests. Feel free to reach out to either of us. And you know, people pitch themselves, So if you think you would make a good guest, you certainly don't have to do the you know, unassuming woman thing and nominate somebody else like if you want. If you think you would be a good guest, we would love to hear about it. So let us know why you'd be a good guest, and hopefully we can we can make that work. So our question this week comes from a listener who says, how do you find one on one time with your spouse? She says more time to talk than physical Okay, so she's not looking looking for advice on that lock the door. I find that working and a child want. I find that with working and with having a child, once the child is asleep, I either want to sleep or do something personal. I used to have date night, but that's now gone, I assume for the reason it is for everyone else. There's no restaurants or bars to go out to, and your child care situation may be gone as well. So any suggestion she says for forgetting one on one time with a spouse, I love how she thought we would have advice silence silence. I'm just I mean, okay, well, first I would just say, hopefully you still feel like you can connect, because it's probably not going to look exactly how it looked before. And maybe that's okay. I do feel lucky that I don't feel like our relationship has suffered despite the fact that we do have much, much less kind of one on one time. I mean, honestly, maybe screens are just the theme of today's episode, but the only time my husband and I seem to have like an uninterrupted, non fatigued conversation of any quality is when either the three are miraculously playing like you know you kind of can't. We've noticed you can't make that happen like it just happens sometimes and it's like, oh, don't touch it, like this is amazing. They're all doing whatever, do not bother them, and then we can like have a nice conversation. Or if they're all watching some kids movie that they're engrossed in, then we can usually actually talk and like maybe drink a beer or hang out like while they're doing that. And that typically would happen like in the early evening, right after dinner, sometimes on the weekend before dinner, especially wooden takeout so I don't have to cook anything. A couple of weeks he was making some cocktails on Sunday, which is kind of festive. So yeah, but no, we don't. I mean, it's not like I don't have like an answer. Yeah, there's there's not really a great answer for this. I think the good news is it doesn't have to be a lot of time. I mean, if you could come up with, you know, twenty minutes twice a week to chat without interruption, that might feel like enough right now to keep treading water till when we get to a place where we can resume more of normal schedules and the like. We you know, sometimes we try to chat when we have Henry around, for instance, you know, he'd just be playing on the floor and the other kids are off doing something and you know, we're there with the baby. But there you go. I mean, that's as close as you get to kid free time. And sometimes you know, just sitting outside, you know, while the kids are playing, watching a movie or something, can can do that. But no, there's is not really a great option at the moment, and I think a lot of couples are struggling with this. But on the other hand, you know, you're you're in this project together right now. This is really something that is feeling like we're getting through it together. We're both trying to do the best we can with five children and you know, everyone around all the time, so you know it will be okay. Maybe there's like a wartime bonding thing going on. Yes, exactly, a wartime bonding. That's that's a good a good way to put it. But I do love that she said it was apparently they're still having physical time. She doesn't care about that part. I don't know. I don't know I care about that time. I was like, well, you know, hey, if you're still pulling that off, good for you, then you know you're you're you're good like talk for five minutes beforehand or after or something. All right, so love of the week, what do you what do you know this week? Okay? Well, I will have to admit my like basic self is playing Taylor Swift's Folklore on repeat. It's such a good album. I love it. My friends make fun of me, I don't care. It's great. And then I also can I have two loves? Yes, it's my podcast, it's our podcast. Okay. Of course, Catherine Goldstein, who was on our podcast previously and who hosts the Double Shift podcast, did a great job being a guest on Spawn, which is another parenting podcast that I enjoy, and she spoke all about how the pandemics has different impacts on the entire spectrum of working mothers. So that was a great podcast listen the other day. All right, well go check that one out. And I have to admit I have not listened to Taylor Swift's Folklore yet, but I like Taylor Swift. I don't I I don't know what's with me right now. I can't focus on anything. It's like here's an album that I would like to listen to, and yet I have not listened to it. I go figure out night Tonight, my Love of Tonight. All right, I'll do that maybe while doing My Love of the Week. So, you know, none of my children ever want to sleep ever, so they don't go to bed at normal kid times. But what I doing in the evening to sort of fill time until it might conceivably be possible to get some children down for bed. I put Henry in the stroller and I pour myself a beer and I go walk around the driveway with Henry and the stroller with my beer and just enjoy the evening. We're kind of looking at each other making faces. Sometimes I'm texting Sarah, just like, why are all my texts from Laura coming at seven forty five pm. Well, that's why, because I'm out in the driveway and there are no open container laws in your driveway. Well in my driveway. Yeah, I'm not walking down the street with my beer like I'm in my driveway. It's fine. So that's a nice way to spend the evening and to relax and to have you know, the kid, you know, he's strapped in so he's not rolling around left and right and getting into trouble, and the kids are doing whatever they're doing inside. Sometimes Michael is playing Minecraft with them or Fortnite with them, and other times he's outside and sometimes then we talk. You know, that could be a time what we chat. Like He'll be doing yard work and I'll be pushing Henry around, and yeah, that's what passes for quality time these days. But it's nice. It's a nice evening ritual. And you know, I am enjoying looking at a chubby, smiling baby. It's a different version of happy hour. I love it all right. Well, this has been Best of Both Worlds Episode one hundred and sixty one. We'll 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.