Snapshots of Life Right Now

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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 ninety five. We'll be talking about life right now, a snapshot in time which you'll just talk about how life is going on. You know, if you like to listen to me and Sarah chat, we can share all about life right now. The funny thing is that we enjoy listening to these episodes. Of all the other podcasts we listen to, We're like, oh, I really want to hear about their life right now. So if you don't, I'm sorry, just turn this off right now. Sarah, how's life going for you right now? It's good? Yeah. I think this episode is inspired by like the mom hour. They do a lot of like this is what we're doing right now, or like let's share a week of dinners, and I always think those are really fun, and we actually don't do them all that often, although sometimes random stuff does come up when we're talking about Q and A or other little topical things. But we thought, you know, our kids are at kind of interesting ages. I think Laura's got like the span of teenhood to baby, and I have like moved on to like the preschooler slash elementary, the what some people call the sweet spot of parenting. So we just thought it would be fun to talk about how life is. And of course there is like a pandemic y aspect to that, because we are now more than a year into the start of COVID nineteen and we live in different places, and I have found out there's this incredibly regional component to what your pandemic experience has been like. But we just thought we would share kind of where we are. We are hoping not to get you know, a lot of judgment if your experience is very different. That's, of course, you know, that's what you're experiencing, and there's nothing wrong with that. But this is kind of our lives right now as they have been unfolding exactly. Well, let's start with our morning routine. So, Sarah, we all know that you have a elaborate and impressive morning routine. How are your weekday mornings looking right now? So I've discussed my routine, and I'm not going to do a super long but deep dive. But most weekdays, I still get up around five, and I try to fit in some planning time and some meditation time, and often write my blog posts, and I try to be working out by six so that I can be helping with the kids by around six fifty or so. It kind of like depends on whether I actually have to get dressed that day or not. Like today, as we are recording this and I am working from home, I am have not been able to fit getting dressed or it was a choice. I did not choose to fit getting dressed or taking a shower into set activities. But hey, I had a work meeting and I am recording a podcast, so choices. Anyway, Sorry that was a digression, but still getting up early, still doing a lot, working out most days, doing a mix of running and strength training and josh Ar Nanny and I alternate kind of who's dropping off. I tend to make a whole plan for the week and I have to write it on the whiteboard. Is a little bit complicated. We have two drop offs, sometimes one person will take all three. I can't really do that on clinic days, so sometimes on clinic days I just take Annabelle and then Josh almost always does all the drop offs on Thursday, which is nice because it's a day I just don't have to think about. Nice. And you're currently working from home? How often? Yeah? So I work from home basically three days a week and I am in the clinic two days a week. How do you feel about that? Is that good? I love it. It is a great I can imagine. Actually, I will say once so, our institution is still very very strict about not really allowing face to fee meetings. Once those restrictions have lessened and they feel it's safe for us to do more bigger group meetings, then I probably am going to do another day or half day where I would physically because I would like when we do our resident didactics. Right now, they're all virtual, they have to be, but I would so love to actually be able to see them, so I think in the future at some point it may become clinical clinical GM in person or maybe alternating different weeks, I don't know, and then the other two days working from home. So my morning routine is a bit all over the map in the sense that it can start at any given point when Henry wakes up. This is just the reality of tiny children who wake and want to nurse. When they do wake, I mean, it could be five thirty. It often is five thirty to six somewhere in there, but some days it could be later, could be six thirty, could be seven. I mean, so you know, I sat an alarm so that if for some crazy reason it was like he was still sleeping at seven, we get up to start getting the other kids moving. But generally I'm up with him, nurse him in bed, make coffee, play with him, or hang out with him or whatever. At seven o'clock, often Alex gets up. He has been told to stay in his room until seven. He sometimes observes that and sometimes does not. He's been very good lately about getting himself ready, and then he can just be on the computer for the rest of the morning and till it's like time to go to school, so he has some incentive there. The big kids, I try to shower before the school runs start. That doesn't always happen, but when it does the day, it's more likely that it will happen in the course of the day. If it doesn't happen before then, it probably won't. Somebody takes Jasper to school at seven forty five. The bus for him was going to come ridiculously early, Like we live eight minutes from the school, and the bus was going to come fifty minutes before the start of school. So it's just like the whole morning would have had to shift so much earlier. So it's we wake him up later than the time that the bus would come. So you know, it's just family efficiency here. Somebody takes him at seven forty five, drops him off, comes home. If it's not me, then I'm helping with the other kids. If it is me, then Michael's with the other kids. Our nanny starts at eight. In the future, we might have a childcare start time more like seven forty five, given that we have to leave at seven forty five when we get back to traveling. But right now, most of us we're all here, so the elementary kids get on the bus at eight thirty three. We used to be driving them, but we've we're now back fully in full day of school and everything, and so we've decided it's fine. It just takes a lot of time to drop them off. And again we're only four minutes from the school, but you sit in the car line for fifteen minutes so they can take the bus. Then after our nanny takes Alex to school and they often go off to do stuff the baby. Then I get started, usually on my rituals as I call them. I read a chapter in Warren Peace, I write a little bit in my free writing file, which is just morning pages if people want to think of it that way, from Julia Cameron's book, and then do a little bit of strength work, and ideally start then my work day with whatever big project I am working on for the day, writing episodes of Before Breakfast, working on Tranquility by Tuesday, book, recording podcasts for instance, as we're doing now, But try to tackle whatever my big priority is for the day in the morning so that I can do more calls and stuff like that in the afternoon. I will say that a big difference between my life now and like a couple of years ago, is that we usually have to wake the kids up. It used to be the other way around, where like they could interrupt us at any moment. But I guess if this gives anybody hope, and now that's become its own headache, Like I feel like I have to like send a brass band in the room yet everybody out of their show, so that they may not want to wake up anymore. At some point, I guess we'll, you know, we'll get there. But I mean, my older children could sleep forever and on weekends will if I'm you know, we don't get them up for stuff. But then you know, now I have a toddler and a teenager, so I kind of get squeezed on both ends of it. Yeah you do, Oh my goodness. Well, maybe the teenager will stay up so late that they'll be up for when the time gets up. Yeah, exactly, could happen? Could happen? How are you handling lunches? Yes? Right now? My kids are in two different schools, and Annabelle's school does provide, like it's a public school, they have lunch, but she has no interest in what they have. And I've seen it, so I I mean, hey, some people are into it, but she's a little picky. And she's actually not that picky if you ask Laura, but she's picky when it comes to the school lunch. So we pack her lunch and we have to pack the other two anyway, so might as well just do three. Our nanny does up for me or us from Tuesday through Friday. But I do have to pack Monday's lunch on Sunday and I hate it. And if Annebae will pack her own, then that takes that one off of my plate. So if you pack your kids lunches every single day, and I'm sure many people do, and they're like, oh my god, how can you complain about one lunch? Yeah, you're awesome, But we have them buy the three big kids all all buy lunch. And there's this post pandemic thing. It's now different, like you have to pre order them and then they have like they grab and go, like you grab it and then go to your spot, so they don't have people standing in like the lunch lines right that, you know, you pile up as her on the salad bar. You know what a buffet is like? Like all these buffets are no longer operating either, so they're not going to operate as a buffet in the lunch line at the cafeteria, So you have to pre order the lunch. And this was kicking my butt to remember it, to like remember to pre order the lunch. Originally it was just Jasper because he had two full days when we had the Ybred schedule, so we'd have to remember, like Sunday night to order him for Monday and Wednesday. Now I have the three big kids that I've I'm on the ordering for all of them. But because it's three of them, Ruth remembers, So, Mommy, have you ordered the lunch yet? And so that's good. I have an accessory brain now, which is amazing. And I mean, also, they wouldn't start like we just do it in one fell swoop. You can order up to five days in advance, and I want to do it on Sunday so I can get the whole week. But if I didn't do it Sunday, they would tell me, like on Monday, we didn't do the lunch, and I'd order it for the rest of the week. And they wouldn't let them starve either, if like they got to school and hadn't ordered it, So there's there are ways to avoid the failure aspects on this. But Michael and I eat lunch at home when we are both working here, and we often eat lunch together. So that's, you know, a little pandemic upside to enjoy a now that the kids are off and out lunch together. That is so cute. That is really really cute. You know, something I have learned about myself is that unless I'm in some specific social setting, I take like four minutes to eat any meal, and lunch is no exception for me. But if if Josh were home, I think I would be more civilized about it. That sounds well, we're not always I mean, we don't necessarily plan our days around it. So it's you know, either of us could wind up with a twelve o'clock commitment or a twelve thirty commitment, so you know, we'll text each other like, oh, I'm going to eat around noon or you know, so if you see you have a call at twelve and be like, hey, are you free at twelve thirty or something like that, but you know, try to it's nice when it happens. I tend to eat leftovers. He makes a sandwich. It's good. Yeah. When I'm home, I love to eat leftovers or like eggs, like there's something some somehow like I don't know, because just because you can't make that at work, you know, so it's like ooh, I can like like my fish. I mean, because that's definitely not something you should do to your colleagues. I think I've done that. Sorry, that's I try not to eat it too hot, because yeah, I know. Yeah, And we do break room behavior. We have like a like a physician dining room that's now open again. But I usually like to walk during my lunch break because I that is like my only time to just escape. And on my clinical days it's just it's just very go go go and intense and with people that whole time. So I have now started to look to my like twelve fifteen to one pm as this little respite. So I really I try to bring food from home so I can eat it really quickly, so I can go outside and just relax for like forty five minutes, and it's really really nice. It's a good work time routine. At home, I don't do that. I take like two seconds and I don't know. I don't know what I do. It must not be very exciting. Something food gets consumed and that's how we change that sometimes, Well, how about dinners because you have slightly fancier dinners. Then yeah, so we do a week sporting? Can we do a week? Yeah? So this this may nose. We better do a week sort of dinners. Because on Sarah's request, I'm like, I wrote down what I ate for a week. I think this came from Girl next Door podcast, but they have done this, and then I think The Mom Hour did it because they did it, and I was like, it's our turn. I'm going to share a week of passing on as podcast pass it on exactly, So we did track actually what got eaten? Now on the Mom Hour they do this like deep dive. They're like, well you planned this and we ate that and this kid went there. But it's not that complicated at our house, so I don't think it'll be quite as detail. But well, why before we get to that, you guys are just going to have to wait through the commercial break in order to get our scintillating week's worth of dinners. We will be right back. Well, we are back, best in both worlds with the exciting topic of what we ate for dinner for the last week. So Sarah, let's go, let's hear what you had. So I was able to look back pretty easily because I do put in my place our meal plan for the week, so it's really easy for me to see what we ate. Now. I guess we could have deviated from it, but we typically don't. We actually usually do have whatever we planned on it. Last Tuesday we had tacos and taco salad, and on Wednesday we had the same thing. So you're gonna notice a little theme here. And by the way, when we do that, it's our nanny usually cooks for us two to three times during the week because the kids are all in school all day and she doesn't mind doing it, and so she used to actually do our grocery shopping as well, but I've started kind of doing it, and I've been doing a lot of grocery delivery, so she doesn't have to shop anymore, but she'll throw something together for dinner two to three times. So she cooked on Tuesday, and we ate this dinner on Tuesday and on Wednesday. I am very happy to do leftovers to dinner, and the kids really like it because they can make their own tacos and we can do you can do it kind of more in a salad style, et cetera. On Thursday we had it wasn't even like from a recipe. It was just like some pasta with red sauce and turkey sausage and broccoli. I think I had had something else planned and then I liked, really gotten all the ingredients, and her nanny was like, why don't I just make pasta? And I was like, that is fine, And then we ate the same thing on Friday, and then on Saturday we ordered pizza. Annabelle had her first sleepover at our house, which was really really fun. Her best friend slept over for her birthday, and we just ordered pizza and salad. And then on Sunday I cooked. I had shopped at Trader Joe's, which I don't normally do, so it was like a novelty. I actually took Annabelle and Genevieve with me while Cameron had tennis, I believe, or soccer something. I think tennis. And I got salmon and I made salmon and mushroom risotto and green beans and all three kids ate this. So yes, they're not that picky, and then on Monday we had some Trader Joe's Revoli with jarred pesto sauce plus tomatoes and broccoli, and that was it. That was a week. And I don't always eat with the I usually don't eat actually with the kids. I wish I did, but I they're usually hunger at like five or five thirty and I get home at like five forty five, so I'm just there at the tail end of their dinner. And then I'll often eat like immediately after, and then Josh comes home like an hour and a half after that. And I don't usually wait for him either, because not a bad wife. You're hungry hungry, they're hungry wife, That's what you are pretty much. And actually, in my defense, if he gets home early, he doesn't wait for me either, So there, you know, that's just not how we spend I mean, on weekends, we love to do the whole family dinner thing and we enjoy it. And we do that on Sundays and on Saturdays for takeout night actually because we don't really do date night anymore. So for better or for worse, we've just gotten into a routine. And I think that once more more comfortable taking the kids to restaurants, will do more family restaurant experiences too, so that'll be fun. Yeah, well, so I wrote this down. So this is what adults eat though, because I mean the kids. What we tend to do is the adults eat something, the kids eat a little bit of that, and some like kid food fodder that goes with it too, so like pasta or right or hot dogs or any you know, something like that that they have a little bit of their food with it and people can judge if they will, but that is what works for us. So Thursday, April first, I did the week before we were recording. This was during our spring break, and Michael and I went out to a local Italian place. We've been going to places very very early when they are empty. This is a little little pandemic trick here that you know, might try eating somewhere at like five PM when there's like you and you know, the table of vaccinated old people. So that's something we've been doing. So I think the kids had pizza, probably at home, which is funny because then Friday was make your own Pizza night, which is something of a tradition we tend to do this almost every Friday night. Sometimes Michael will make the dough in the breadmaker. That's like a little special treat. Otherwise we buy pre made frozen dough at the supermarket. One workflow issue for here, which I've identified as always a problem, is that Ruth likes strawberries on her pizza. Since this is make your own pizza, you can put on it what you wish, and Ruth likes sliced strawberries, which you know, good for her, like it's a unique thing that she likes to do. But we tend the grocery shop over the weekend, which means that by Friday there are no strawberries in the house, like those have been eaten Monday Tuesday, they're gone. So somebody has to run back to the grocery store on Friday to get the strawberries, or if we think about it, Thursday, but we're usually not thinking that much. Sometimes Michael will go during her karate on Thursday, he'll go to the store and get strawberries and milk and whatever else we're out of. But a little bit of a workflow issue. We're always like, we don't have strawberries, and it's tragic anyway, We have make your own pizza on Friday, which I tend to eat mine without cheese. There you go, it's awesome. Saturday this week we had steak fruit as in, we had steak and French fries, which the kids mostly could eat steak and French fries. People may have had other things with it too, I don't know, fruit, veggies, that sort of the thing. Sunday, April fourth was Easter, so we actually had ham for lunch. That was our Easter lunch, so dinner was leftovers. I don't really like ham, so I had the leftover steak from the last night. Kids had some mac and cheese. We had deviled eggs or hard boiled eggs if you don't like deviled eggs. So that was Sunday. Monday, April fifth, we had sun Basket Kit one, so we get two sun Basket kits per week that we tend to eat on Monday and Tuesday, and currently our nanny is generally cooking those on Monday and Tuesday her longer nights. So she made the sun Basket Kit one as Michael and I were driving kids around to various activities. It was a created chicken on a salad that had some citrus and whatever that word is with J I c A m a do you know? Yeah? I think that was Ana's delicious makma. I think it tastes kind of like apples. Yeah, it was a lot like apples, but it wasn't apples, So that was very, very spicy. We happened to eat in shifts that night because no one was home at the same time. On Tuesday, April sixth, we had sun Basket Kit two, which was a tuna on top a white bean salad with olives and tomatoes. I believe the kids most likely had hot dogs on Wednesday. Sometimes I try to make it match, like if you know, we have something like if I can do a scaled down version of what we're having, you know that if we're having a chicken with sauce on rice, like they could have plain chicken and rice. But it doesn't always happen. Wednesday seventh, we have breakfast for dinner every Wednesday, and so I cooked eggs and pancakes and bacon, which we then had with fruit. We eat early because that's roots karate night, so it's just better to eat before that happens. We can sort of eat together, like around five thirty on that night. That was it. I bet your kids love that. Oh yeah, well, and it's easy. So you'll notice that the nights that we, you know, Michael and I are cooking during the week, Wednesday and Friday, are breakfast for dinner on Wednesday and make your own pizza night on Friday. It's it's just it works, you know, to know exactly what you're going to do that night and then you don't have to think about it. So I am a big fan of things like Taco Tuesday, Like if that makes your life work, there's all sorts of ways you can do variations within that. I mean, there are great different kinds of tacos. I mean they do pizza lots of different ways. Breakfast for dinner. Sometimes it's waffles, sometimes it's French toast, you do an omelet, you could do you know, craps. I don't know, there's just various things you could do, but you know, sausage instead of bacon, smoked salmon, like, there's all sorts of breakfast fare, you know, but having it for dinner is always fun. And there is something to be said for putting a meal down and knowing your kids are not going to complain about it, and I always was like, I'm never gonn a pan orn to my kid's taste. But even though I I do and I don't like, I don't go like the direct kid food route. But at the same time, when I'm going through a cookbook, there are certain things where I'm like, well, that's not going to go over well, and other things that I know will be more of a hit, and that's okay. We can find a middle ground exactly, all right. So bedtime routines, what's yours looking like these days? Yes, so it's not it's not amazing they're still all in the same room because Genevieve has FOMO and does not want to sleep in a different space. But the truth is we're dealing with some like cusp of preschooler like loss of nap sleep issues with her, where it's like if she does nap and her school does I think, now give her like a very short nap, which is helpful, But then sometimes she like won't go to sleep at all, and other times she like basically needs to go to bed at like seven fifteen or something like that. So it's like it runs the gamut what she needs and it's often not totally what the big kids need, who are more in sync. So I don't know, we don't have it figured out. But they're all in the same room. She's in her toddler bed, the others are in bunk beds, while we have a completely empty room next to it being used for literally nothing. It has like a bookshelf in it and it's yeah, and desks from when they were doing school at home, but that hasn't been for a very long time. And so we read. Oh, I heard a really interesting hack that made me think of my own hack. So I was listening to Happier and they were talking about like having the kids read with you for twenty one minute, because they were like reading twenty one minutes, which I haven't done that specifically, but it was like read with the kids for twenty one minutes and then read your own book and have the kids read. And I was like, I think I need to enact. Read Genevieve's book for twenty minutes, read Annabelle and Cameron's book for twenty minutes, and then the lights go out, and if you want to put a reading light and read your own book for twenty minutes in the room so be it, or you can go to sleep, because I feel like we're running into this issue where I want to read like more advance things with the big kids, but then Genevieve like gets bored, and like then I end up reading Francis the whole time, and the big kids are bored and like, it's just because I'm doing them all at once. Now, if Josh is home and we can separate them, which often he is, he actually I feel like he's been home more recently, which is great, then we should probably do more dividing and conquering, even if we bring Genevieve back in for the finale of going in her her finale. I love how it's I say, twenty minutes with each set of kids, that's forty minutes is a lot. That's it's a long. But I mean our kids we try to get upstairs at eight, and if they're in bed by like eight fifty or nine, it's like a good night. It's it's maybe it's bad, it's a mess. I don't know. Well, whatever we do do reading, we always read together, but it's not always functional reading because like two out of three are usually into whatever is being read and the the ones being annoying and then you collapse right afterwards. Right, the fifty gets us close to nine day, it's just time to do your skincare, which we will get to exactly, and that's not going to change. I mean, I don't think Annabel and Cameron need much. Cameron Falling needs a little more sleeper than that, but Annabel doesn't. So it's not realistic to think that she's going to like go about an eight or something. But yeah, that's just where we are. What about you guys, I'm sure it's really long and drawn out. Yeah, it's long and spread out, and I've done it, you know, basically almost every night since March of twenty twenty. But I mean, so is Michael, Like, it's just you know, we're here, and you know, it's like wow, when I was doing my time tracking publicly, where I was like, yeah, I do seven out of seven nights pretty much. But that will change, I'm sure at some point. So the baby, it's you know, sometime between like seven and seven thirty, I start it. If he's been really exhausted, he took his nap earlier, and it would be closer to seven, but if he had a later or had a second nap, then it might be closer to eight. Do some nights the bath, but you know, try to talk about the routine of like we do diaper, we do milk, we do sleep. Now I'm trying to put in diaper, book, milk, sleep as he's getting a little bit more able to focus on books and things like that. So I nurse him and then put him in the crib. He sometimes he conks out, sometimes he screams, so it goes hoping to you know, mostly he'll go down. Then after a while of screaming. Wish the screaming didn't happen, but it's just, you know, no matter how long we've been sleep training, they're still gonna scream this little kid. So anyway, he was hopefully going down. I tend to do a puzzle while he's screaming, self soothing, self soothing, self self soothing in a screaming manner, because it's hard to concentrate on anything else. So your kid is screaming. So given that I can't do anything, like I'm going to sit there and do my puzzle, or because I don't feel like cleaning the kitchen. Maybe sometimes that they see it done too, but anyway, hopefully by eight thirty, I'm starting to think about Alex going up eight thirty eight forty five. I take Alex, I do stories with him, and our routine as we read some together, not really usually twenty minutes, but he wouldn't sit through it, so I don't know. I'm sitting there waiting in the room, like scrolling on my phone while he brushes his teeth and then disappears to go potty, which sometimes is a long process. Then you know, we read for a while, and then he has his snuggle routine. He's very sweet about his snuggles, and for a while over spring break he's like, well, we have our snuggle schedule. We have to do five snuggles a day. I was like, okay, we'll do our five snuggles a day, but at night we do twelve hugs, twelve kisses, and then a bonus hug, which he says, a bonus hug is a snuggle. Okay, So we do a snuggle and then we do a bonus kiss, which is usually him like diving across the bed to give me a kiss. Then I go get Michael to come in and he like throws a ball with him or something like for a certain like I don't know, back and forth twenty five times, forty three times. I guess is what it is. There's certain number obsessions here, but often Michael is currently reading Nancy Drew with Ruth at this time, so I go interrupt their Nancy Drew reading, so you could come over, throw the ball forty three times, turn his light out, go back over to finish reading with Ruth. He probably reads for twenty minutes. He probably reads like he could read like forty five minutes. They get into it. It's really cute. Then the boys are supposed to be up in their room at nine. That doesn't always happen, but they know they're supposed to be up. Then I make it in there at some point to confiscate their phones. But often they've been reading lately and they've been into books, so I take the phone. But they have been reading during this time, that's what they're supposed to be doing. But you know, if I haven't gotten around to confiscating the phone, then I guess that's on me. I will read or do more of the puzzle if I'm into it. I am to be in bed at ten thirty, which requires you know, getting face washed, teeth brushed by like ten, ten, ten, fifteen. It doesn't always happen. I often give myself an extra fifteen minutes because I am not an early to bed, early to rise person, So I'm like, I don't. I'm not actually a let tired at ten thirty, although than I am, like, if I put my head down, I do fall asleep, but I don't want to be asleep. I want to be doing other things than sleeping till seven, but that never happens. So anyway, I have to be in bed at ten thirty to wake up at five thirty. There we go. I am cracking up at the forty three ball tosses. I had an elaborate number centered routine as a kid that like I always think back and think, like was I o CD for like a little while? But I will tell you it resolved on its own. So probably it's not that if you do like forty two, the world will end it. He's not that way about it, but it's just we you know. I actually am a fan of the twelve hugs twelve kisses because it's a number, like it doesn't go on forever. Then like, how about one more? How about one more, it's like, no, no no, we do our twelve right and and so that's then it's done. Like you know, I love hugs and kisses with my kids, but you know, you don't want to drag it out for the rest of the evening. I think at one point I did think the world would end, but I get over It's all right, that's good, that's good. So skincare, good care. By the way, I do not think the world will end if I miss a step on that. But I have become very good about my skincare and my flossing since about age thirty eight. I've been good flosser. The first thirty eight years of my life, not so much, but since then really good, and I pretty much always cleanse. I finally used up my Thrive cleanser. I'm so sad, but I'm back to one of my other favorite fund cleansers, which is by Fresh and it's like a soy face cleanser. And then I kind of alternate. Either I do my lactic acid serum, which is the Sunday Riley Good Genes, or I use their retinol oil, and then I do a moisturizer on top of that, which I have a couple of different ones that I like. So I do have a routine that I've taken many, many years to figure out, and I don't know if it has any effects other than I do find that the lactic acid in particular does the certain softness that nothing else seems to be able to replicate. So that's nice. That sounds very sophisticated. I'm sitting there. If people read my blog, I like arguing with myself at night over washing my face, even like I don't want to. So for whatever, it's like, I can brush my teeth without the inner rebel coming out, but somehow washing my face like I don't want to. I don't want to wash at any but I do it. Do you use warm water or cold water? You know? I just turn it on and no, I don't wait for it to warm because I did not like to wash my face until I figured out it has to be warm water. And I run the hot water. Hopefully no water people are gonna yell at me, but I run the hot water ourselves to judgment on all kinds of things there. I don't think it's the water that's gonna get it. I run the hot water while I've brushed my teeth and so by the time it's time to do my face routine, it's all warm. Plus if you do that, you're not gonna like waste all that like water effort and whatever and not use it. But I I used to Actually, I think there's something like terrible about putting cold water on your face that would make me not want to do it, Like it's like a you get like a vagueal response and if I yeah, so once I figure that out. And I also kind of learned a technique of really bending over it. I'm like pantomiming it, really bending over the sink, so I don't like get myself all wet. Interesting, those two things have made me much greatly enjoy my evening skincare routine more than I used to. So I just tell myself I have to do it, and it's quick, like it advanced over in thirty seconds. Right. You just put a you know, splash your face, put a little soap on, scrubby scrubby maybe a minute. I don't beg it a win at whatever, like than a towel my face off. I've been trying to moisturize. I use the oda regenerous this big girl who can use real moisturizer. That's a very good that was on the like. They mentioned that on some podcasts I listened to, and I think that particular moisturizer won some award in like a lower magazine. So yeah, but maybe it's supposed to like get rid of wrinkles. But I plan to go back and get botox one of these days, so I'm just not worrying about it too much. That will deal with my wrinkles. Then combination approach, combination approach, yes, all right, how about weekends, Sarah, what are your weekends looking like these days? Okay, so a curtain thing. And by the way, we're back into most not all activities, so again this varies based on comfort level and everything. My husband and I are vaccinated. The kids had COVID in December, so I don't know. Maybe they're in an autoimmunity or their immunity is wearing off, but I'm not as worried about them anymore, and I'm not worried about them infecting us because we got fizer in December anyway. So our kids are back into tennis and in soccer and school full time. They've been in school full time most of this academic year five days a week. I'm in Florida, so that's an option in pretty much every public school here, so that's something I've been grateful for. And so on the weekends, usually Saturday is like the activity day. Right now, Cameron's doing tennis, and actually Annabelle and Genevieve are starting soccer this week, which I'm so excited. It's like Genevieve's first activity. I cannot wait to watch her kick around a soccer ball like I'm dying. So that's our activity day, and then we try to keep Sunday like no activities. And then Saturday is takeout night, and we still haven't really gotten that excited about going to restaurants, and honestly, it's just working for us, so we just do that as a family. And then on Sunday, we either like do outdoor outings. Sometimes we have some friends we meet up with parents are also vaccinated, so we feel good about that, and we I don't know, go to the zoo or like do some kind of outing. And then usually I cooked dinner on Sunday. Sometimes I go to the grocery store or get groceries delivered on Sunday, and I don't do too many chores, and I tend to sleep in more on the weekends, and then we kind of like take turns when we're working out. Now my husband is on call every third weekend, which is not a trivial amount, so those are different. But and then I'm on call like a lot more rare than that, every couple of months basically, so those weekends are different. But our general home weekends are pretty much activity Saturday, take out on Sunday night, more relaxed family time on Sunday, and kind of clean up the house a little bit within reason. So we I mean weekends and weekdays, all of our activities are basically back in you know, modified forms masked kids Well, obviously can't swim with a mask on, but you wear it when you're not in the pool. But and with four kids in stuff, it just is a lot. We pretty much have something every day of the week Saturdays. We have three kids in baseball and two in soccer, and so I've sat there with the schedule. I just try to map it out because you can deal with two events at the same time. Three is harder. And it's if one child has two things at the same time then, right, because it is entirely possible that a soccer game could happen at the same time as a baseball Now, this was not supposed to because soccer is Sunday and baseball is supposed to be Saturday. But because of the number of teams, it is not universally on Saturday for the games. So didn't quite work as nicely as I thought it would. But anyway, well, you know, it's probably not the end of the world if you have to occasionally miss one game or the other of one of your sports as a small child, I guess you know, in general, you want to be there for your team, but it is what it is. I can't make them be in two places at once, and I tried to have different days for everything. But we have some babysitting help again on Saturday, which is great. That was a nice you know, we obviously didn't have that during the pandemic, and we've sort of decided we can take that back on and it worked out with somebody that happens, so that's great. So I think by the time this airs, we should both be vaccinated too. So this is airing in May, right, Yeah, Okay, yes, yes, yeah, maybe end of April, but yes, yeah, oh yeah, that's exciting, and so yeah, they're just driving around a lot. But I view it as a season. You know, my kids were having this conversation maybe that you know, one or the other was unhappy about there being two things on one night after a full school day, which happened to work that way for a couple of weeks before something ends. And I said, well, yes, that's true, but you just went through a year of like not leaving the house, and so maybe you could have rested up during that year a lot. Leaving the house for this particular Tuesday. That's busy, but you know, whatever it's it will be busy now through May, and then summer won't be again, right Like most of this stuff doesn't happen during the summer. So it's just you take the busy seasons where they come, and then you deal with it when it's not. Oh my gosh, I just realized this episode is super long. I was gonna ask one question to you related to that, what is your policy on like quitting an activity? Well, I mean, so many of this stuff. It's a short season, right if there's only eight soccer games, I think you can soldier through and get yourself to the end of it. We had a policy with certain things that each kid did a certain number of years of swim and you know enough that you are able to swim, right, And then there was one child who quit something that we'd signed up for for a longer period of time and wanted to We basically said, you know, go for a couple more weeks and reevaluate to make sure that it wasn't a one off thing, like if you can always have a rough lesson or a rough practice or a rough game, so you make sure you're not rage quitting as they would say in the gaming world, and also say, if this was your main sport, like you need to choose something else then, right, So it's not that you were quitting to play video games. It's that you particularly don't want to do this, but here's something else you are willing to do as your physical activity. But you know, I don't have to do things forever, like if if you don't like it, I mean, it's certainly a bother to bring people places. So if the kid hates it and there's no overarching reason for it, right, like, I mean, I can see forcing children to learn to swim. I can see forcing them to do for instance, religious instruction. If that's something that's important to your family, that's a family value, you can make them do that. Maybe if it's like language classes so they can communicate with your parents who speak a different language, or something like that, I can see. But most other things do not rise to that level of like family value. You know, it's just something fun to do on the weekends. So well, you know, in general in life, you don't have to do an activity forever. You move on to something else. All right, Well we've been talking here about our life right now, real quick, we could do our love of the week and then our Q and A right maybe sure, gosh, I don't remember, all right. My love of the week I already said themed dinner nights, knowing that Friday is pizza night and Wednesday's breakfast for dinners really life changing and wonderful, So heartily, heartily recommend. My love of the week is just that the kids get to do stuff again because it was sad when they couldn't, and it's really nice. Yeah, hopefully that can continue, hopefully, all right, So our question we had one from a listener and I think this is really going to be for Sarah here because you went through this recently. But tips on transitioning children to new schools, anything you learned the last time you did this that you're now as you ponder possibly doing it again, that you learned and you found helpful, or that other people would find helpful too. Yeah, we've actually done it a lot recently because we moved and then we switched Cameron School, and I have written about how we're switching at Avel next year too. So I guess I have learned that it's less of a big deal than it seems. Kids are resilient, they make new friends, people move anyway. The pandemic has kind of taught us that things can change in unexpected ways. And I also think the pandemic has allowed for like a layer of fluidity about how we think about our kids' schools and their learning. So I feel like there's been more shifts than ever right now. And so if your kid is going to be starting a new school next year or in the near future, they're probably not going to be alone. In the area where I live, there's also a lot of like people will switch from public to private and back again to charter, and there's there's just so many different options that the switching is natural, and in my experience thus far, it's gone well for each kid that I've seen switch, and I don't even necessarily feel like I've had to do anything specific to try to I think initially, like when Cameron was going to start at kindergarten, they had these these days where we could like take them prior to school starting and they could like see the school. And the funny thing is, like I remember missing work to go to these or like taking off work, and in retrospect, I'm like, what's that. Did he really need to like sit in a cafeteria because like other parents were there, like it wasn't really like school anyway. And I think kids, as long as it's a good environment you're putting them in, and I'm sure it is if you're contemplating a switch and thinking about things, then they're probably going to do better than you think. So I haven't found that there's like a lot that I had to do, but maybe at least while they're younger. I think the older they get, the more ingrained their social groups get. And it depends on the kind of kid you have. You may have a kid who really only has one main friend, and as long as you can keep that relationship going, they don't care. But if you have a kid with a very close social circle and you're switching, then you're going to have to figure out how they're going to be able to handle that and maybe keep some of those ties that really mattered to them. Yeah, I mean I moved when I was twelve, and in my mind is total disaster, which you know, so to put that perspective out there that you know, we moved to a different state and I went to a school that was not really that great a school, and so that can happen. There's actually some interesting research that moving children in adolescents can cause some long term issues. I don't think I have any long term issues, but just saying in general, there are increased risk factors for unhealthy behaviors when children are moved in adolescence. So that is something to think about. If you are considering that you will want to move someplace, you might aim to do that when your kids are more in the elementary school early elementary school years. You know, toddlers won't know any better. Preschoolers and early elementary probably fine, but by the time you're getting into adolescents it can be a little bit harder. So you might think about planning your own, for instance, career moves if you have that option, with that timing in mind, not saying that you can't. You know, you lose your job and need a new one, like you may have to move, like that's life, and kids will probably deal, but you know, it may not be the first choice if you have options. Oh that's so interesting. I think it happens to be where I live that people so commonly will like kind of switch different types of schools that at least at certain transition points, it's expected that you're going to end up with a bunch of different kids, like when you start high school or maybe when you start middle school. But I could see how, especially like if it's in the middle of seventh grade or something, that that could be really, really tough. Well, anyway, I'm that little bummer of an ending. We've mostly just been talking about life right now. I think we're staying here for a long time, I hope, since we're renovating a house, putting a lot of effort into that. But anyway, we'll be back next week. With more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can 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.