2018 in review!

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode seventy three. This is first airing on Christmas Day twenty eighteen, so we are anticipating that we may not have as many people listening to this episode has been other episodes, because you're all, you know, doing other stuff on this day, even people not celebrating Christmas generally do another stuff. But in case you happen to find this episode, at some point, we thought we'd do our twenty eighteen year in review, and in fact we are this time. This isn't we're recording this ahead of time, so we're not together on this, but we will be together on Christmas, right, Sarah yeah, so excited for some cozy family fun in Pennsylvania and our first live recordings. Yeah, we're not going to record on Christmas, record the day after, but we'll have like in person in person, yeah, like the the you know, we'll we'll sort that out. It's gonna be exciting. I haven't seen Sarah in a year and a half, so oh be good, Genevieve. Yes, and you're hoping for snow, right, I am hoping for snow. How much actually for snow? But okay, sure, I think we may actually go skiing one day, so that way we will be guaranteed to see some manufactured or not. Yes, that's true. Well the I mean the ski resort. I think you were going to. I uh, we were up there hiking a few weeks ago and they had snow there then. Yes, but it may have melted by now, but we'll see. It's already been a brutal winder and probably will continue being. So it's a good thing you guys got the codes for Hanka. Yes, So yeah, we're going to talk about twenty eighteen or highlights, you know, professional personal. It's been a pretty good year. I mean, I mean, you guys had a baby. Well, you had the baby at the end of twenty seventeen. Yeah, but I mean the baby year twenty eighteen was like a baby year, you know, he only really dominated by a lot of baby stuff. So I mean, I'll do my professional first, because it's not that exciting and was as much it was exciting, I would say it was a baby year. I didn't get I wrote, I didn't get fired. Despite pumping for nearly twelve months. We did successfully recruit and start our first class of residents, so that was actually really exciting and has become one of my most favorite parts of my job. We started up our multi disciplinary gender clinic in December, and on the semi professional front, my blog maker should be complete by then, although I need to email my person. And this podcast we did more than fifty episodes. I think that's pretty oft probably exactly fifty two. If I had to guess, depending on how far a head you were, or depending on whether the Tuesday falls on what day of the week, you know, it's either fifty two or fifty three, depending on how you account. As I learned, there's like fifty two point twenty nine weeks in a year or something like that. Anyway. Yeah, No, this podcast has been an awesome thing for this year. It's been growing, which is good. You had some other big professional highlights, I guess, so yeah, I know. I Off the Clock came out in May. That was my first book launch in three years. I actually had quite a bit of time between my previous book was I Know How She Does It? Then there's three years between that and Off the Clock. Not intentionally, I guess I just didn't have anything to write about in it. But I was very happy with the response. I'm always happy to sell more books if somebody wants to go buy one, but it meant a lot to me that a number of people who have read all my books were positive about this one, and so that is better to be moving that direction where people think you're still bringing something new and interesting to the table, as opposed to be like, why on earth are you continuing to beat a dead horse here? Early twenty eighteen, I got a contract for Juliette School of Possibilities, which is the fable that will be out March twelfth, twenty nineteen. So that was kind of cool, you know, I'm basically it's it's a novel that is coming out from a business publisher, so you can wrap your head around that one. And it's totally novel like. It is fun. So Sarah has read it now. It took four pump sessions, so it's a quick quick read. Oh, I mean, I guess depending on how long you're pumping. But no, and it made those pump sessions fly by. So yes, very novelistic, which I liked, well good but yet with a time management message, so hoping to hit all aspects there. You know, it was a good year financially. I mean, the economy is going like you know, been going great in twenty eighteen. But I think what also happened is that I did that Ted talk at the end of tw sixteen and it sort of took twenty seventeen for it to like get into kind of people's I don't know the right people's people to get it and then to reach out to me. And so that twenty eighteen was actually my highest earning year ever. So that was that was excitingesome. Yeah, which you know, people are like, well, an if you have a normal job, I guess that might make some sense. If you stay in the job, you keep earning more. But as a self employed person, it doesn't work that way at all. It can go up and down quite a bit, you know, over the time. Obviously hope that the angle is up the trajectory, but you can certainly go up and down a lot depending on various factors. So that was good. I had a really fun time doing a couple of like big conference keynotes. I did three conferences. It's called the Art of Leadership for Women that was in Canada. I did a Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. They kind of took the show on the road and I did did all three of those and it was really fun, you know, having like thousands of peopleople in the audience and you're just up on stage. They have the big cameras on you, with the big screens and stuff. It's I never would have thought that that would be something I'd enjoy, but it turns out I really do so performing it's fun awesome. Yeah, Plus Canada's awesome. Canada is awesome. Yeah. So you you didn't get fired, which is great. So no, I think twenty nineteen is going to be awesome though, right Like I I feel like twenty eighteen I did more than I might have expected. Yes, work wise, so I'll just and I would say that Sarah, Sarah's your being like, oh I didn't get fired is like a normal person's like best year ever, So maybe and positioning herself for an awesome Yes, position is positioned well. So how about travel, We didn't do a ton, but I would say, considering the fact that it was a baby year, we did a Disney trip that was part of my husband's conce after I just talked about how horrible it was that my parents traveled to conferences with me. We totally did that. But we did go to Disney after the conference was over, so there you go. Did that in April, and then we did take our big epic Pacific Northwest trip to Whistler and Seattle and Portland and that was fantastic And I can't I at one point, I like almost didn't even want to go because I was panicking about the logistics of traveling with Gene you being only eight months old. And it was great. So, yeah, it was a highlight. Your remembering self as glad you did it right totally. Yeah, you can look back on this. Yeah, we had a bunch of good trips too. We took the big kids. We did two trips with just the big kids, which has some upsides when you have a little guy who is kind of active. Yes, I don't know how to a little break. Yeah, but then you could do stuff that you could only do with them. I mean they would have been you know. Try and think about keeping Alex from like leaping into old Faithful. I'm not sure if able to stop him from like running up to the guyser or something. Oh, he and Cameron are gonna love each other and they are totally gonna have it. I'm scared. I'm kind of scared of this too, And I don't know if you're gonna like judge my parenting choices and what toice I let him have. But anyway, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The we went to London over spring break and that was great. You know, the kids loved seeing another country, just seeing how different things were there and just driving on the left side of the road. And you know, I would say the one upside my husband travels a lot for work. But the one upside is that we have a bunch of Frequent Flyer miles and hotel points and you know hurts car rental points for whatever. So a trip like that. It's actually very inexpensive, more affordable than you think, because our hotels were all points, our flights were points are so all we were paying for is like you know, museum entries and meals. I mean, you know, it's amazing. Yeah, it was. It was great to introduce them to that, and Yellowstone was just an amazing experience. I highly recommend if people are listening to this and pondering like going to someplace in the US that it just seems almost otherworldly. Yellowstone has got everything. I mean, you know, yes, you see cool wildlife and you see pretty mountains, but you also see like the earth exploding all the time, which is I mean, geysers are something you just can't get elsewhere. I mean, we really can't because you could go to Iceland. It's like Iceland or Yellowstone is basically do you want to go to Iceland. It's a short, relatively short flight from the US, so you might put that in, but that's actually, well, this is getting way ahead of ourselves. But my college girlfriends and I have decided that that's probably going to be our fortieth year turning forty group trip. That sounds really cool. Yeah, okay, but we're not led to digress. Okay, well we are marching through our highlights with no digressions allowed. Yeah, so it was those were some really cool trips now in terms of what we've been doing in our personal lives, well, other than you're nursing a baby all year long, which yay goes there so much nursing, so much pumping, but that actually came with so much reading. So it was an unexpected perk that I used that time for something I've never like, I know a lot of people read one hundred books in a year, but I've never done anything like that. Well, probably when I was a child, reading like Pansy Drew books. I know you probably read like one hundred Babysitters Club, but its my adult life I have been I've always been a reader, but more like one or two, maybe maybe two books a month. But this year I read I think something like forty six books in the year's not even over yet, so I'm probably going to top out it close to fifty, which is great, an all time high for me. So that's that was a really fun part of side part of having a baby and nursing and pumping actually as getting time to read Yeah, Now I had some good books I read this year. It wasn't quite the same as twenty seventeen, was, I guess, more of a banner reading year for me, partly because I had actually set a goal to read a lot more and so I did. And then in twenty seventeen, I actually knocked a bunch of sort of my reading bucket list books, you know, off, I did them. So then in twenty eighteen I didn't have that built up kind of anticipation of reading some of those books. So I haven't read nearly as many books in twenty eighteen. I think I'm going to be probably somewhere between sixty and seventy. I mean, I mean it's gonna be between sixty and seventy unless I like start reading you know, twenty short books and the books the day through the day for the next next few weeks. But yeah, it's this year. I read The Memorable One's Infinite Jest, which was quite the reading experience. I mean, it's huge book, crazy book, Quite the reading experience. So if people are looking for an epic, kind of more modern but in many cases quite funny book to read, that that's one. David Foster Wallace without I read Moby Dick, though I would actually highly recommend Moby Dick. If you are able to get through like Jane Austen, if something if like Pride and Prejudice doesn't bother you for its slowness factor, then you could definitely make it through Moby Dick. And in fact, I think you'd have more fun with Moby Dick because he goes into these all kinds of sort of ridiculous like set pieces on wailing. And so if you read like Jane Austen and John McPhee, maybe it's a mash up between those two, you'd probably like Moby Dick. And then you get to say that you've read, you know, this, this classic book Middle March. I was kind of dragging myself through Middle March about fifty percent of the way through, and then I was like, hey, this is actually really awesome. So it just I partly because I don't really like Jane Austin all that much. So this isn't Janelsen, it's George Elliott. But I'm saying that that sort of style of like the slow plotting British, you know, domestic kind of novel, It's never been my thing. You know so much. But once once I got into the characters, which took me a while, but once I got into them, I was like, oh, this is really deep, and like she's she's created all kinds of situations where the stakes are, you know, beyond what you would think the stakes are, and the interlocking characters, and so I really I wound up enjoying Middle March quite a bit by the end. In nonfiction, I read North the Scott Jerk. Have you read that one? No? I have not? Okay, So it's a running book. So Scott Jurik, who is the ultrarunner, has done the fastest known time on the Appalachian Trail. And normally they go south. Normally the through hikers through runners go south just it's an easier direction. I guess that doesn't really make sense, but anyway, normally they go south, and he went north. It got the fastest known time, but like by you know, three hours, which is kind of crazy if you consider how long the trail is, which then fell very quickly too. I mean, once people are paying attention to a record like this, you know, you get more and more people trying it. But anyway, it's a fascinating book. About what the ultra running mindset. Basically, I mean he's putting himself on a death march, like as he's losing weight, sick, tired, running twenty hours a day by the end, but he makes it. You know he's going to make it because it's nonfiction. But it's still got a lot of tension with it. That sounds great, especially if you're looking to motivate to run or do something. How about your favorite dress? Well, I actually kept tracking a little list in my my mini bullet journal situation, and I pulled all the nines and tens, and I will I will say that I probably like, maybe there's I don't know if there's great. Like I'm not the kind of person who's like, oh, I'm only going to give it a nine. If it's like life changing. If I really like it, I'm giving it a nine. So I'm going to read you my list. I think you'll like it. Ready Player one by Ernest Klein, Bellcanto by Ann Patchett, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron, The Phone Sorry Only Child by Rhiannon Nevin, Off the Clock by Laura vander Kamp by its own method got a nine. I don't think anyone got a tense Fair Town by Frederick Bachman and Queen of Hearts by Kimrie Martin, The Things we Were Promised by Lucy Tan Being Mortal by a Tool Gwande, and The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah, So that those were my favorite books, certainly like the top twenty five percent of the books that I read this year, and I love them all enough to give them lease to nine. So there you go. It's a good list. There's a couple of theres that I haven't read that I've have on my list, so I'll have to get through them, but possibly not in the rest of December. Maybe they got my twenty nineteen. You saw one movie in theaters. I saw one movie. I saw Crazy Rich Asians, and I loved it. And I do think it's possible we'll be able to see A Star is Born. If it doesn't come out of theaters, if it's not already by the end of the year, maybe we'll find it in like a budget theater somewhere the second theater. Yeah, but you watch some more TV, which is also possible to do ale nursing right, Yes, well, I didn't do you know I was mostly reading, but like Josh and I have our shows that we watched, and I would say my favorite thing I watched all year was one of my loves of the week, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling Season two, also known as Glow very good show. I saw a picture for that. I'm like, oh my lord, it's best. I highly recommend. And we saw one concert Father John Misty, and that was great too. Yeah, no, that sounds that sounds really awesome. Let's see I've been what have I done? So Yeah. Reading wasn't as great as the other. But I did keep up with my running streak, which has been fun and we know almost well in this air is probably will be at two years. That is amazing. Sang with my choir, which I quite enjoyed getting sort of back into the swing of things with singing. I enjoyed writing my a novel during National Novel Writing Month, which is November. That setup is that you write a fifty thousand word novel in the thirty days of November. The idea being that you, you know, just gow to crank it out. A lot of people say, like I have in the novel, I want to write, I want to write this novel something we'll have about this day, all right, like the choose this month. And it's so crazy to write a fifty thousand word novel in it's definitely doable, by the way, even if you have like a full time job. It's it's probably gonna take you about two extra hours a day. I totally want to do it, by the way. You should do it next year. You know, if you have a novel and you and say, well, this is I'm going to get this fifty thousand word draft on, it's probably not gonna be done at that and it's not going to be like amazing, but who cares. It'll be a it'll be a book. It'll be a very bad book, and then you go back and make it better, right, Like I mean, I'm a big believer in like righte fast, edit, s low and and so it's a good way to just get it out and do it. You know, it's like doing a whole thirty challenge, right, you could do anything for thirty days and then you're and then you're good. So I did that. Yeah, that's that's been fun. How about on the exercise front, sir, how's your how's your ear on that? I got really into beach Buddy for a while. I want to get back to it, Beau. I think it was great. I mean I'm still run here and there. I don't feel like I've had like a good It's just been really hard with the baby sleep issues, and I think I've give myself more leeway and I think it's been the right time to just be a little slack there, So I'm excited to pick it back up. Well, hey, your year for your word for the year was space, right, so the space slack can both be they give mean the same thing, So there you go. They're definitely related words. I think I wrote that I carved myself some space with a nice pick because I do feel like I managed to make that word come true. But it seems sort of silly given how much we have had going on. Yeah, but you got it done. It was a good year, right, full year, but it was a good year. It was a good year. Yeah, and your kids really grew up a lot, they did. I mean I started the year with, you know, somebody still in diapers. We had taken the side down the crib, but he was still in the crib and now he's in a big boy bed, potty trained, going to school, like I only have big kids. It's kind of crazy. It's totally true. It's a different phase of life. Although he's still been waking up at ridiculous hours. So the other day he fell out of bed at three thirty, came and got me, I'm sorry you fell about it. I guess I'll put you back in, but you know. And then another day he was like, you wanted to play the computer was two thirty in the morning. Came in. Oh, no, doubt me for that. I'm like no. And we taught him like how to read sevens at the front of the clock, but he just doesn't care. I mean, this is the rebel child. He's like, interesting that you told me to stay in my room, unil it's pay seven and I don't want to stay in my room, so I'm not going to Well. I had a trifecta of all three children waking me up for separate things last night, and Josh's Josh isn't in another country for work, so that was So maybe it's not going to be over anytime soon. I don't know, because I have kids that are older than Alex that are still fighting reasons that they need me. All right, So that was twenty eighteen. Let's let's go to our get to our Q and a day. Okay, So, question, what are strategies for pushing through entertaining young children when the activities they want to do are exhausting or boring or otherwise unpleasant for you? I just love this question because for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's like, oh, I proactively want to fix this. But number two, it's like admitting it. You know, sometimes when you're hanging out with a toddler, you may not be in the mood to hang out with a toddler, and there may not be like utter joy in the beauty of their cute, little chunky hands. Like you just might not want to be hanging out with your toddler, but they're there and you have to and we might as well make the best of it. So I'm not sure I have an answer, but I still love this question. Like I felt like companionship in this question that I love. I mean, it's like I love Genevieve so much, but then like sometimes when I'm alone with her for hours, it's like, well, it might be nice to have somebody who is able to talk to I like do something entertainingly. So my strategies have been over the years. Number one, changes of scenery. So when I'm just like ready to die, going outside helps, going to another place, meeting up with somebody else because then I can talk to somebody. That makes the time go much much much faster. Planning ahead and then making a deal to trade off time with your partner so that you know that you're gonna spend two hours, but then you're going to get the treat of like going to read for an hour after that, or going to do something else, taking all your kids if you have a brood and just going for a walk like that, you know, the power of the sun and just being outside, or the cold weather if you live somewhere cold. And then my favorite that I swear I've been doing recently and it kind of works, is to treat it as a meditation exercise, so like I'm not going to look at my phone. I'm just going to like be here. I'm going to like notice little things. And I kind of did that at the museum yesterday. I had all three kids with me, and the time actually went really fast, and I kind of enjoyed it. So sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it does, but it may be worth a shot. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean that one thing is I mean you can try to switch up the activities so they are not exhausting or boring or otherwise unpleasant for you. Like you don't actually have to do exactly what the kid wants to do. Ay in general, like, I mean, you know, they're kids, like and you're the adult, Like, you don't have to They're a two year old. They don't get to set the day of a set the day's agenda. This is not you are in charge. So like, you know, the fact that they want to do something doesn't I's so in fact, I mean you need to do it as well. You know you can also if you want to engage with their desires, you can also elect to do stuff that you could push them toward things that you more want to do, right, so that you know they want to go or not go somewhere, but like you know, maybe it's a playground, or maybe it's a zoo and you like the zoo better than the playground, We'll go to the zoo. You're the one driving, right, like, or if they want to play a board game, and you hate Candyland, Like, choose a different game that you really enjoy, and candy Land has mysteriously gotten up on the top shelf where nobody can find it or see it or remember it exists, right and so, or you know, or just do it, like oftentimes it's the whining is the worst part of it. They're asking you again and again to do something you really really don't want to do, like maybe just do it once, and like they might lose interest after you've done it once. I sort of felt that way about playing Busy Town with Alex the other day. He wanted to play which is not even as bad a board game as some other one, Like I don't really like board games at all, but this one at least is like cooperative and semi fun in some ways. And so, you know, we played it twice and then he was done with it, and you know that only took like twenty minutes, and then good, do something else, you know, get stories in the house that you like to read, you know, ste we were like, oh yeah, let's just say, hey, let's read this story together, like, not this other thing that you really find boring or exhausting or otherwise unpleasant. To use the language that they did, you know, and we I'm definitely a fan of planning ahead as well. Like like Sarah said, we we just you know, I've been thinking about the well, on Thanksgiving weekend, we'll be dealing with the kids all for holiday break here. But when we were going through the Thanksgiving week and my husband I sort of sat down ahead of time and said, Okay, what are the activities we'll do to get the kids out of the house and sort of plan our days like the morning activity and like the afternoon activity, and you know, what are the things that we'd like to do, and so we could combine them to do. You know what, we want to see this art exhibit, So we're going to go to that first. And yes, we'll only be at the exhibit for like forty five minutes grand total, if we're lucky. But then we'll go do this thing the kids want to do and we'll get them out and you know, so just combining it. If you have some of the stuff that you like, and we we've talked about this with this podcast in the past, there's some stuff you like to do, it makes it easier to get through the stuff you don't totally all right. Well, this has been a nice, short, tidy episode. We should just end with our love of the week, which mine has to do with the episode. I am just so happy. I kept that paper list of books with readings for the year, and I'm going to do that again. Yeah, that's your love of the week. I'll do the love of the week from something we did over the Thanksgiving break. We went to this. I mentioned going to that art exhibit. We saw Birth more so at the Barnes Foundations, and Birth more so is my new discovery. It's awesome, an impressionist painter who is a woman who knew you know, people will hear all the time about like you know, Monet or all the others, and not about her. I don't know what reason, because I've looked at all her art now and she's every bit as good as they are. So but fortunately a lot of her work is out there and is being exhibited, but it hasn't really been pulled together in one place so much. But there's a touring exhibit now and it has been at the Barns and we'll be there through January. Swillian saw it was great. She has amazing paintings of children, domestic scenes, you know, her husband and her daughter playing together. Those are some of my favorite that she was painting, The two of them hanging out in the park having little daddy daughter time. So gorgeous stuff. If you can see the work somewhere, please go do it. I love that all right. Well, this has been Best of Both Worlds Episode seventy three for our listeners who are celebrating Christmas. Merry Christmas to you everyone else. I hope you're having a wonderful day, and we'll 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.