Q&A Mailbag Episode!

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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 Unger. 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 eighty one, which will be a listener mailbag episode all listener questions, many of which came in over Instagram. If you are not already following us, please do Best of Both Worlds podcast over there. We post about every episode and occasionally send out the call for anything you might want to ask us, sort of ask us anything, although we may not answer everything, but you can ask. So Sarah is. We were happy she is able to record today. There was a bit of a concern that childcare situation was not but your kids still aren't back at school, but in person doing virtual But it was unclear whether your nanny would be able to be there or not too, but you made it through right. Oh my god. I had a full on spiral though. I just wanted to acknowledge those out there, especially in dual career situations with multiple young kids, that when you lose your reliable childcare, even very temporarily or even if there's just some uncertainty about it, I almost can't think of much more stressful than that, especially when you know there's work that is piled up that you need to do but you like literally can't make a significant dent in it because you just can't. So, yeah, it was a rough day, and so if that ever happens to you know that it's okay to freak out because it's one of the hardest things we have to deal with. But you the thing that did help me was continuing to keep repeating to myself, like, you know what, what's the worst thing that could happen right here? I could lose my job, And then multiple people are like, you probably won't even if you had to be out for a week or two, like because you didn't have childcare, Like that, doesn't you know you have enough career capital at this point that that's not super likely, and there are usually some weird alternatives you can come up with, like there's not Usually the answer is not usually zero options. There's almost always something if you throw enough resources and creativity and maybe money at a problem. And then finally, if you are in that kind of a predicament, it's okay to just completely do only essential things for a few days. I had to just go into my clinical inbox, sign out on prescriptions, answer urgent stuff. I canceled all the sort of non urgent appointments and things and basically took PTO. But you know, I knew I could spend twenty minutes completely putting out fires and that was better than nothing, even if that was just kind of cobbled together during episodes of Pink Delicious. So yes, working during Pink Delicious or Thomas the train is a time honored tradition for people dealing with, for instance, child sick days or caregiver sick days and such. You know, you make it work one way or the other early morning, night after the kids go to bed, nap time, when you trade off with your partner, all that sort of thing. So we've got a lot of questions to get through. We see if we can get through all of them. But go ahead and dive right in, Sarah or both of us. I guess, did you offer do you offer your nanny's a raise when a second kid came into the picture? Yes and no. I say yes because, at least, especially back then, when you know, our second kid came into the picture fairly soon after her nanny had started with us. I was pregnant with him when she came, so she kind of knew she was signing up for two kids. We did yearly raises in those days, and I say did them because at some point we had kind of a little bit of a ceiling where then we just started adding other things like increased bonuses and increased vacation time, et cetera. I wouldn't say we added specifically because of the second kid, but we did increase compensation anyway. And I will say that, you know, just like for a parent, sometimes it's helpful for a caregiver to have the toddler out of the house for part of it so they can focus on the other kid, especially if they're going to be doing some housework duties as well. So back then, you know, when Annabell was three and Cameron was one. That was probably you know, one of the hardest parts of her job. I'd say harder than it is now, especially because for the most part all three go to school for a significant portion of the day. But I had Annabelle in preschool at age three, even if it was just for four or five hours, that really broke up the day. Gave her a time that she would just have with a newborn, time in part when that newborn or one year old even would be napping. So just took the load off a little bit. So sometimes it doesn't, you know, it's not an either or plus, particularly in non COVID times. You know, preschools have benefits too, you know, something to consider that might make things easier for your caregiver if you're adding more than one kid. Yeah, I mean, I would say, like in general, with any I mean you employee and your work worker at home as well. I mean, anytime someone's job responsibilities increase substantially than a raise would probably be appropriate. In our case, we had always wound up in a cycle where we were hiring new people, like as I was pregnant with the next baby, so it was like, yeah, I like you. They were signing on and negotiating with that in mind and knowing the number of children that would be involved in the job. And then currently we actually our nanny wanted to trim her hours a little bit over the past year, and that's that's been fine because Michael and I are both working at home right now and not traveling anywhere and so and we'll see how that all pans out when the pandemic is over and people travel again, but for now it's been okay. Next question, how do you relax? I like this quad. Sometimes it's just fun to think about how one might relax. I would say my main mode of relaxing is reading. It is what I gravitate towards. Like if I'm free in the afternoons and all the kids are on screens, I will go on the couch with a book. It's great. I also relax by playing with my various planner stuff. It's just fun and relaxing for me. I'll play with like a hand littering pen or something. Texting friends of course, you know FaceTime. I'll often do that, like well, cooking dinner, but it's pretty relaxing. TV. I like TV, you know, thoughtfully thoughtful TV, not like accidental TV. My husband and I are currently watching The Flight Attendant. I don't know if it's relaxing because it's a little bit gory and harrowing, but I don't know. Overall, the experience is relaxing, and then my like escapism relax is to So you know how, I have two Instagrams. I have the Underscore shoe Box, I have Shoebox Underscore Plans, Shoebox Underscore Plans. All the things I follow are all Planner accounts, like that's it, nobody else. So when I scroll that feed, it's just planner page, planner page, planet page, planner video, and I find that very relaxing. My other feed and I basically nor yeah exactly. I've been slowly changing my Instagram feed to be like all renovated kitchens. I mean, they're very pretty. I like to look at them, so that's a way to relax. I actually will put in a good word here for puzzles. Doing jigsaw puzzles is something that takes very little well, I mean reading. I mean I feel like I'm dealing with words a lot during the day, so something about puzzles is very different part of the brain, and yet it's also relaxing. It's something I can do at night. Well, you know, I'm waiting for Henry to stop screaming, for instance. That's you know, as he's trying to go to sleep. That's something I can do. Although I'm doing a puzzle right now that I feel was either thoughtlessly designed or like designed by sadists, I can't decide which one it is. So I've about one hundred and fifty pieces left to go in this thousand piece puzzle. Are all night Sky? What is it? It's just starting, Okay. I I have a child who suggested we do this puzzle together, and then said child disappeared, like stop doing it. So I've now been doing it on my own, and I've got one hundred and fifty pieces of black Sky to get through. Do you listen to podcasts or do something else while you puzzle or do you just puzzle it? Well, I will have like a craft beer while I'm doing it. I have listened to podcasts. I listened to I Think You on the Mom Hour the other day while I was doing my puzzle. That was a nice way to sort of relax in the evening. But yeah, you know, and puzzles you can come into it and come out like you know, this would even more so than like TV, because your TV you're not gonna watch like eight minutes or seventeen minutes. You're committed to either like the twenty two minutes or forty eight minutes of the show, whereas a puzzle is variable of how much time you can put into it. So it's got that going forward as well. That does sound relaxing, although yeah, I'm not very good at puzzles I think might stress me out, but sounds relaxing for you. I love that, Yes, exactly all right, as you might imagine knits for relaxation, and I'm like, I'm sort of jealous of that. But then same thing, I know that if I did it like it would not be relaxed. Sure, you know, defeat the entire point, Like you should definitely not choose something to relax that somebody else finds relaxing, Like you know, this is this is all you? Right? Oh are you postpartum style? We have a question about postpartum style. What are minimal hairstyles and face makeup? How not to look frumpy? I'd say this is I texted Sarah before our recording session that I have wet hair and no makeup and so she should not be scared. I'm not scared. It's not that scary. It's a little scary. I feel like I'm usually the one with wet hair and no makeup or at least yeah, yeah, I like in my workout clothes. But you know, I'm glad it's not me for once. It's good postpartum style. I will say, I don't know the secret to like not looking frumpy, but I do feel like this is one time in your life you get permission to like buy some stuff for yourself, even if you know you're not gonna be in that size for that long. Buy some new makeup, like whatever makes you feel better on re entry. You know, we had Laurence Smith Birdie on our podcast way back in the day. I think she wrote the Fifth Trimester, and she has like a whole chapter on this, so she knows a lot more than we do, especially because she like worked for Vogue. But I just I'm giving you permission to like invest, splurge a little. This is the time. It doesn't have to be on like forever clothing, because again, things are going to fluctuate. But I was gonna say, like go to a lovely makeup store and go to a makeup counter, but that might not be there might be I bet, I bet, I haven't googled this, but I bet there's online consultants that would be like thrilled to work with you over zoom to do product recommendations, do tutorials. Not to mention the fact all online. Not to mention the fact that, like Instagram has approximately one billion makeup tutorials out there. So this is the time you're allowed, you know, put that's the four order together, go for it. Yah, that's my feeling now. And sometimes it's nice to just be like, okay, I do get to take a shower, Like even if I'm not going anywhere, it's okay to like dry my hair and put on makeup if it would make you feel better. And then getting clothes that do make you feel good right now, Like just ignore the part of your closet that doesn't work right now. If you're a different size, it's fine, like probably you'll be there at some point, but right now, just get some clothes that work for you right now, Like choose your your power color. I remember that Lani Inlander told us, whatever your your power color that looks really good on you, like, get some shirts in that color, roomy shirts, and then you know, just just just rock that and you can you can donate it once you're you know, back to your normal size, but you can wear but fits you now feel feel good about it. Yep, don't torture yourself. Torture yourself. Not worth it at all, all right. Best travel tips with kids want to travel resumes. I always I go back to this when we had our our guests. This is we can all do our We've been at just so long that we have a guest for every single one of these questions. So Henley Vazquez was one of our early guests back in I think early twenty eighteen talking about travel with kids, and of course we're like, what is the best way to travel with toddlers? She's like, I wish there was an answer to that, and it was just like, yes, it sucks. It just does. Like there's nothing you can do to make it not suck. But that doesn't mean you have to stay home. Like you can just travel knowing that parts of it are going to be terrible, because you still want to go see whatever that thing is, and you don't want to wait till all your children are over five years old, in which case great, Like take the days as it come. There will be some parts that are awesome and there are some parts that are going to be terrible. And I think I think that's probably a very wise mindset. Go in knowing that your experiencing self may not be happy. Well, no, you're having one hundred percent of the time right like it's You're gonna have some good moments. You will also have some bad moments. But the bad moments do not need to define the entire trip, right Like, we're in charge of the stories we tell ourselves about it. So you know, manap take the trip when you're allowed to, like not right now. Yeah, And I will say plug for not for going. You know, get a place with a kitchen, like an Airbnb is probably better than a hotel if you have a young kid. I've made that mistake enough times. I'm not going to make it again. And keep your plans pretty minimal. I think we took a couple of trips where we'd like stack three things in a day with a toddler, like that is not going to work. Unless one of those three things is a nap and the other one is like eat breakfast in your room, because you're just the energy is you're going to be expending so much energy just like trying to like keep the peace and keep the needs met and keep utter disasters from occurring, that you're not gonna have lifted in tons of stuff. Although I will say again the remembering self, some of our families best and most favorite stories involve toddlers melting down in various way, shapes and forms on different trips we've taken. So it might be worth it for the memory the memories alone, No, and they do grow up and then they become good travel companions, Like I've actually enjoyed traveling with my big kids, like they're fun and so you know, then you've got a travel companion who, like you're still in charge, like this is the fun. Like they're fun to travel with in the sense that you can talk to them, you can do fun experiences to gather but you are in charge in a way that you wouldn't be if you're traveling with another adult. So if that's something that appeals to you, like you get to make all the decisions, you know, There's there's something to be said for for that now, So I'll throw that out there. Remember was like, I have my first kid trip. I traveled with just Anneville and it was amazing and I can't wait to do it again someday. Yeah, exactly, exactly, And I also, like Sarah had a suggestion here. She included, but you know, you might want to build in some parent relaxation time, maybe after the trip. So, for instance, you are taking six children into Disney World, you should understand that probably grown up fun is not really going to happen in the course of this experience. But maybe, like you book a date night for the two of you a day after you return, and you can you know, look at your pictures and talk about your memories and that will actually be fun. Whereas you know, waiting in line for Space Mountain with six children is not fun. So you know, but the kids are going to want to go on Space Mountain. So there we go. Tips for finding connections somewhere new when you move mid pandemic, like is there an answer to that? We need to take a break. We'll think about that. We'll come back after our break, all right, So the question was can you make connections with new friends when you move in the middle of the pandemic. Uh, you know, I feel like this is a time that you might it might be like you don't have to worry about it right now, because I gotta say, like that took the it took the fire out from under me about doing that. Personally, I don't feel like I've really built up a dribe around here. You know, we didn't move that far. So I'm still in touch with some of like my key really just one but whatever one counts old friends from Miami Beach, and then there's like work friends. But then there's this whole like online and zoom World, which is obviously playing a lot greater role in all of our friend interactions now, at least for me, and those people don't need to be nearby. So I just kind of tabled it, just tabled it because really I don't think zoom is great for making new friends. I think zoom is really really fun if you know people really well, Like as I mentioned, I do this. You know, every other week, my college friends get together and like all six of us usually zoom at like five o'clock on Sundays, and it's lovely and we weren't doing that pre pandemic, so that like fulfills that kind of a need. I have to go to work sometimes so I will see people there and that is an opportunity for socializing. And I do feel like the online group chats that I am in, and there's like a couple of them, mostly with people I kind of know either from various online things. They've been much more active this past year, So it's cool. Your friends don't have to be your neighbors in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. And maybe when we come out of this, I think everyone's going to be so excited to do things in person, and probably like it'll be even more normal to walk up to the playground and be like, hey, where your kids go to school? What do you up to? Because people are gonna be so thirsty for that, so I'll just give yourself a pass. Yeah, no, that's probably a good idea. And I refer you also to our episode with Shasta Nelson. She was a guest to this fall, and she's got a couple of great books, some once called a Friend Timacy and another called Friendships Don't Just Happen, So you can kind of get what her drift is here, but just that any friendship is based on consistency of seeing each other and positivity in your interactions, and that's very hard to engineer right now. I mean, not the positivity, and you can be a positive all you want, but seeing people consistently is the hard part. But once we are seeing people in person more, some of this just naturally develops. When you see the same parents that drop off every morning, or you know you're all at the same kid plays to gather, or you see each other at the playground, or your work colleagues that you see each other every day, people you might see at the gym because you take the same class, or if you go to worship services the families you see there every week, just you know, see who you feel good about talking to when you start seeing them consistently, and then over time those can kind of be moved up the friendship ladder to become more people who can be your your real confidence. We missed a question, Laura. I don't know if you missed it on purpose. Dinner table conversation ideas for five year olds sort of a funny question like eat your peas, Like I'm sorry, do you have a deeper conversation than that, do you. I think if it was one of our guests or some other podcasts that I listened to, but somebody mentioned asking like what's the best thing that happened today? And what's the worst thing that happened today? And I do sometimes throw that one out there, And actually I will say that, you know, when you have kids my kids age, and you have like a very verbal toddler, it can be really really funny to hear what that two or three year old comes up with. So it's usually entertaining to ask almost anything around the table because when it gets to Genevieve, it's going to be funny no matter what the topic is. But those are my two go tos because I feel like they're not too prying. They kind of like give them some to think about, you know, the worst thing. They don't always have to tell me like truly the worst thing, but like I'll get kind of like you know, the gossip that way some kids said something bad and the chat or something, and the chat in particular, now kids are in online school, you can ask about like, hey, anything happened in the online chat and usually you'll you'll get details. Oh I hadn't thought to ask that. Maybe I should. That's a we we have a lot of people around the dinner table every night. I really am never able to successfully steer the conversation one way or another because everyone's like talking at the same time. Genevieve goes, you're erupting me. I was talking. Be quiet, Why are you talking? Yes, this is it's just a lot of people. I mean, you've had a dinner party with this many people would be a lot of people. So yeah, I mean it's even though we're having the same dinner party night after night, it's a lot of conversation. So I don't really successfully ever introduce topics. Maybe that's why I skip that question. And you're right, a lot of times ours is dominated by I hate this dinner. She didn't need her chicken. Why do I have to eat the chicken? And cheated? She's eating the chicken, but she didn't. Yes, the great stuff that goes on here, all right, Sarah? How do you budget your personal administration times? This listener wants to do so many optional organizational things like home improvement, photo organization, But how do you select? What do you schedule it out for the year? No, not really, I might. If there's some project that's nagging me, I might put it like in a quintile goals, like, you know, instead of quarter Like, Okay, I'm going to organize a garage or donate all the clothes. You guys know, I am doing the organization the organized three sixty five one hundred day program right now. So I am trying to declutter and organize a little bit. But you know, you can only do so much. And I do a lot. I do, like a lot lot, And so one of the things I don't really do is spend almost any time thinking about my home decors, my furniture, like in depth cleaning rituals, like I just don't care. Our house looks like mixture of like Ikia warehouses, and like I don't even know. It's just it doesn't take up brain space, it doesn't cost money, and it makes me it like it like doesn't detract from my happiness not to think about those things. So I I just usually don't. I do make a photo album every year, and that's like that's enough for me for photo organization, Like that's that's all I feel like I need to do. Yeah, I think this listener may have a different impression of our lives than it's probably reality. I kept putting, you know, organized bins in mudroom on like my list for weeks and then I'm like, you know, pretty much find everything, And the occasional extra five minutes it takes to find stuff is less than it would take to organize all the stuff. So you know, no harm, no foul. I guess we'll just move, which we will. I did have to build in time for the home renovation that is actually a much more time consuming process. We are deep in the planning part of it right now. I do not recommend this at all for most people. I actually scaled back some work things knowing that that was the time that would then be devoted to this. And I'm just saying, this is one of my big priorities for the year, to get us that house renovated, to get us moved out of this house in there, get this whole house sold. You know, it's a top thing for the year, so everything else can be less. And I'm definitely not saying that anyone else should should do that, but that sort of has made me jailback. You like, have a book coming out yet, I know, but it's it's honestly, I mean, having only two podcasts Sarah has been, I feel like so on top of things, I don't know. It's it's almost scary. I'm like, what was I doing? I don't know? Anyway, So we actually got another question that for you, Laura, specifically, do you have some It was something like, you know, renovating a house is a really big project, like do you have some sort of organized organizationals like do you have a spreadsheet? Like? How are you breaking that giant project up into like manageable chunks. Well, I mean we have a lot of people working on it, so we have a general contractor, for instance, and that's his job is to organize all of this and obviously you pay for that, you know, Whereas if I was perhaps working with all the subcontractors individually, it might be cheaper. But I don't really so because then I wouldn't know what I was negotiating, like I you know, so it's I might put a big thumbs up for enlisting expert help if you have a big enough project. This way, you know, we have timelines, I have, you know, rough sense of when things are happening, you know, the week after we're recording this. I actually have like four showroom visits to get everything chosen, and they're very much like you need to choose this week if we're going to stay on the timeline. So I'm trying to get that all done. But you know, it's it's like anything else, you know, a project with lots of moving parts that you have a list, you know roughly what each thing is needs to get done at any given points, the same as writing a book, I guess is what I would say, which I also then have timelines for things and people working on it, and yeah, that's that's how I that's how I roll. Do you tend to use like a giant Excel doc or like how how do you track these times? Well, this is more we're getting into like best laid plans to territory. But I mean a calendar, you know, I put any date that I need to and I also have a sort of a general sense of when things need to happen, Like I mean I'm looking forward, like I have my weekly planning and I look forward and I say, oh, yeah, this is coming up. Let me just circle back with everyone and make sure that we're on top of things. So if you know the level of detail here that somebody from the architecture firm needs to make a presentation to the Historic Planning Commission, like the plans need to be in ten days before that so that they can review it. But again, there are other people doing this too, Like I am not the only person who's got an eye on these timelines. I'm not saying it won't be a long complicated process. It will, but yeah, get get expert help and then write down the dates and keep reviewing the dates and thinking what needs to happen for this to happen, What needs to happen for this to happen. That makes sense focusing on the next step, kind of having a holistic overall picture. And I think when it comes to things like books, you can rely on your kind of intuition and experience for that part because you've done it. Although to a degree, I mean, yeah, I sort of know how the time I would go, but for tranquility, by Tuesday, I have a huge time diary study going. I have the pilot running now and then I have the real version of it running in the spring. But again I have a professional researcher who is assisting me, and so partly she is on top of that too, like she's you know, figuring out and suggesting things and like has the timeline running as well. So I am watching that too, but I'm also relying on people whose expertise is in this to keep some of the trains going on time as well. Oh, I am extra excited for this book now. Yeah, okay, question eight, which kids to Well, we did a gift episode recently, but still a right, which is the biggest bang for the buck? Right? Is that that? Yeah? So you're gonna say magnetiles again, right, You're always the can't go wrong with the magnetiles. They never get old, they get played with for many, many years if you have many, many kids. But I was going to also say the play food sets from Ikia. If you're talking bang for your buck, I think those things are like five dollars and we had to set go through all three kids. So wow. And I do like those Calico critters once again because they seem to last. They can be kind of played with a multiple levels. And again it's like a toy that I watched go through both Annabelt and Genevieve. I'm sad to say Cameron was boring the gender normative in this regard and did not express most interest in the Calico critters. But yeah, but it kind of went straight through from anabelt to Genevieve. So a lot of years of play with those little things. Yeah, I would say blocks are definitely things that can get used again. And again I think you mentioned duplos, which even bigger kids will sometimes be willing to do stuff with the duplos because you can build big towers quickly. So it's the kind of thing that can entertain you for a while and then you can roperate other things into it too, like make marble runs out of duploser with blocks, make you know, do things with matchbox cars with your blocks, big cardboard boxes. Honestly, like if you ever, you know, order an appliance or something, definitely keep that box because the kids will play with it forever. Honestly, the biggest hour bang for the buck, you know, is stuff like the Kindles, oh yeah, oh yeah, because they will play with them for hours and they're you know, not that expensive. But you know, Amazon tends to have pretty good deals on them around the holidays, and they keep getting better and better in terms of their processing capability. So I know that that's probably not the answer that the celestener was looking for. But you know, our kids all have devices, and yeah, they spend time on it, and it's a high bang for the buck in terms of hours spent on any of these devices. It's very true. I don't know if it fits on of the category of toys, but eh, close enough, all right, Sata, how do you keep your house clean well? When it is safe to do? So? We hire it out, so I don't really clean. Our nanny does help with a lot of the day to day cleaning. We I know there's like interest in like a cleaning schedule, and like I've looked at some of those because the planner in me thinks that's kind of cool. But then like if it ever came to actually like executing one, there is literally no way. Again, like this podcast wouldn't exist if I was spending time on my cleaning schedule. So are you glad this podcast? I'm probably preaching to like the wrong wire here, But anyway, someone did ask the question, So there you go. We just straighten up obviously at things as things go. Maybe Laura doesn't I'm curious about this. I mean, I've been in our house. It was very clean, but she knew I was coming, so like, I do feel like I need to pick up the toys off the floor, like before going to bed or else. I'm kind of stressed about it that. It's also because we don't have a basement. It's like not a thing here, so that's like our main room like where we eat and everything. It would just be like toys everywhere. But I don't really like clean that much. Unless something looks terrible, I either have other people clean or just let it not be that clean until it really needs it. Yeah, we have a I mean the cleaning service come every other week. Curiously, that was always deemed essential around here. I you know, we we just they come wearing masks. We all go hide in the basement while they're here, then come out. The one thing we started doing is doing like a ten or fifteen minute cleaning blitz, like you know, you have four kids, Like if they're each putting fifteen minutes into it, that's like an hour of cleaning. So you know, just saying okay, we're all doing this, like basement will be picked up in the equivalent of an hour of cleaning time if everyone puts fifteen minutes into it or you know, all go pick up your room. Only one child's room ever gets that messy. It's kind of a long story. So that's and then occasionally I'll find like some spot that's just driving me crazy. So it turns out that Alex was not able to easily put his toothpaste on his toothbrush, so he came up with an ingenious solution where he'd put the toothpaste on the counter and then dip hise toothbrush in it. Resourceful, resourceful, Oh my lord. When I went in that bathroom so that you know, he and I together with our paper towels, cleaned it all up. But yes, and then did you do a little tutorial On'm like, yeah, there were just like I can help you with us until we work on our motor skills. I'm glad he was still brushing. I mean, you know, please, that's true. Give him some credit. He could have just not I probably wouldn't have noticed for a while. All right, Sarah, how do you maintain a relationship with your husband with his long and different hours. I don't know. We just fit it all in in the cracks, I guess. Yeah, there are definitely some stretches if he's worked a lot where I just feel kind of by myself. But they're not forever. You know, he gets weekends off. Every once in a while, he has some nights that aren't bad. Hey, we've got to spend all of our COVID quarantine together. So that was lovely great for our marriage. And I'm just kidding, it was fine. You know, we were not really doing date nights right now, but therefore we'll try to take advantage and all again, if all three kids are occupied with some toy or screen and we're making dinner, we'll chart, we'll try to talk to each other and just I mean, I don't feel like I have to try that hard, which is probably says something good about our marriage. Like I want to hang out with him, so I guess I feel very lucky in that way. But it works out. It works out well, and we have when we have downtime, like you know, we will watch movies and hang out and just try to stay close. And every once in a while when the stars align and get our nanny to take the kids for a night or two, then that's wonderful as well. One of our children has started to kind of rebel against this, but that child might be ready for some friend sleepovers while the other, yes, exactly, do something to make this keep going. Yeah, I don't think I really have a great answer for this, partly because I mean, we don't even get the time after kids go to bed, because some of our children definitely stay up later than me now that I'm often waking up with the baby very early. So you just, I don't know, take advantage of whatever time you have baby's napping on the weekend, try to hang out that kind of thing, and eventually they'll all be back in school and maybe he'll still be working at home. We'll see, could happen. That'd be fun, Yes, exactly, all right, do you know bonus question? Do you know your idiogram number? I do know him. I've taken a couple of quizzes. I I don't know that much about any grandmother than a couple quzzes I've took, and I always get a three, although I always almost get a one, and people often think I'm a one, but I'm like, no, I think three actually fits me. I'm more I wish I was one. Ones are kind of like nicer threes are a little it's A three. I don't even know what that. What does that mean? I think it's like achiever or again not not not an Anyagram expert, but I always felt like the ones that want to succeed at all costs or something, which I don't really feel like I want to do that. But then at the same time, I'm like, well, I do like putting a lot of things on my plate and like doing a lot of things, and I like feedback, so doesn't like it's one that likes negative feedback, Like what on earth? Like this doesn't even make sense. Well, one is perfectionist and I'm not actually a perfectionist, which is something people sometimes think that I am or something. But no, I don't know. Is there Anyagram type? Why we're good at this podcast together because we're just like, is there an Aneagram type for people who are not like into Enneagram types? I wonder if what that what that would immediately classify you as like a question equivalent of anyagram Aneagram experts? Will you help type? And what is that? You hear me half an hour every week, you could probably type me pretty quick. I'm sure if if there is a type, we'll all find out. We'll see all right. Love of the week you are on this podcast. We were we were worried you might not be. My love of the week is having our nanny and just generally childcare back and knowing that it's all good for the first time in like three weeks. So yeah, yeah, no, that's really an excellent thing to have. Now I'm trying to think, what is my oh Pendleton blankets. It's been really chilly here and we have I got one this summer. I don't know why I were doing the summer. Maybe it was on sale. And I also got Michael, you know, one that he can sort of have like in his office or whatever. It's a very cute one, but they're nice. They're they're warm, toasty, so as it's chili in Pennsylvania this time of year, it's it's always nice to have a blanket. If we ever wind up sitting out on the back porch relaxing, we can bring our black gets out there and to make the backpoort usable even in January. Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been doing the listener mail bag this week with your questions from Instagram. Be sure to follow us their best of both worlds podcasts and 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.