COVID19 Life Updates Bonus Episode

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. 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 a special bonus episode, so we don't have a number for it. But Sarah and I usually record our podcasts ahead of time because as two working parents, we know that stuff goes wrong and working ahead is the way that you make sure that you don't miss deadlines. And because of that, we've managed to publish every Tuesday for two and a half years now, even as both of our families have grown, as we've gone through trips, various family things happening, It's come out every Tuesday because we work ahead. But of course the downside of that is sometimes news changes fast, and so we're going to continue to release the regular episodes on Tuesday, but we thought we'd do a few short episodes talking about life in these sort of more challenging times as everything is in flux. So both Sarah and I are working from home right now, I mean I always do, But Sarah, tell us a little bit about your situation and how this has changed with the coronavirus epidemic going on. Yeah, there's just I mean, I'm a hospital worker and part of my job is clinical, and part of it is more of a leadership role with our residents, and everything is really up in the air right now. I'm currently working from home because I have a very mild cough, and just in an abundance of caution, our healthcare system has basically required anybody with any kind of symptom that could be anything to just stay on out of there, which is fart is very smart to protect our patients and to protect other caregivers, because you know, if we interact with our colleagues and then spread something around, then that could be very bad. And there's just so much uncertainty with this. We don't know, you know, exactly how long most people are contagious for, Like, we don't know you know the the rate of asymptomatic shedding that happens. We don't even know how good kids are as vectors. So there's there's just all these question marks and politics aside. I think we're all in the same boat right now, as many of you guys are all working parents, and we all have our kids at home, which many of you, a few of you, not many of you, a few of whom might be homeschoolers, so that's normal, but most of you probably aren't. Yeah, exactly. No. It's funny because I've written a couple of articles over the years about people who work and also homeschool, and it's more possible in these days than it would have been, like you know, in the past that just would have been like what on earth, like that those two things don't go together. But there are so many ways of working. Work does not need to be done at a particular time and place necessarily for some people, and school actually doesn't have to be done at a particular time and place in many cases. With the rise of remote learning options, certainly children who are slightly older are able to be quite self directed in terms of their learning. And there's actually a number of like online charter schools for instance. And I think you mentioned like Florida has a virtual school right for housebound children. They do, like I've had patients that use it. They haven't like deployed it to any of the current students yet, but I know that platform does exist because I've had some medically complex patients, like patients going through chemo or who otherwise just aren't safe to be in the regular school system have done school from home and it's considered actually separate from the homeschool. It's considered an actual public school called Florida Virtual School. So, I mean, I don't know will happen. I do think everyone needs to breathe for a minute, because it's been like five seconds and then there's been like ninety five elaborate schedules and maybe I'm guilty. I mean I made one of the Mine is like super non elaborate, so it involved a lot of screen time. So but uh, like I'm not super worried about my kids like losing a ton of ground. Maybe it's because my kids are pretty young. Yeah, I feel like if we do a couple hours of stuff each day and that can include just reading, will probably be okay. Yeah, Well, that's the cool thing. I mean from having studied a lot of homeschoolers schedules and fun fun fact here my senior thesis that Princeton was actually on homeschooling. That's how long ago I was interested in this topic, but it was it was less common then. And but the people who do this it doesn't take six and a half hours a day or whatever your state mandated instructional time is for your for your schools. You can a lot of that time at school is transitions. It's things that your kids might be doing anyway, like recess or eating lunch. It's things that you might not even consider to be part of school. I mean, well there are, but you know you might do them on your own two like instrument practice for instance, or reading right like, I mean, that's part of it too, Like any you know elementary school teacher is going to have their kids read do silent reading for a while, and so that's part of it as well. So the actual instructional part can be relatively limited and still be moving forward. My kids, depending on age, have have somewhere between two hours and fifteen minutes and three hours of stuff that I have assigned per day and an hour of that is independent reading. So you know, we're it's it's not like eight hours a day by any means, but it's actually been kind of fun to try on dates. Well day well, day three, we're day three here. Oh right, you're a little bit. You guys were one of the first school this way were we were one other church school districts to close, so we knew what was coming and we have gotten into it now. But yeah, no, each we have a checklist each day which the kids have one hour of reading. They have thirty minutes of math practice, which we have been doing con Academy and dream Box. Ruth was creating her own worksheets for a while but then she thought better of that. Then we have a thirty minute research project which each day we have a different subject. So we first did science, then we did history. Today was health related, so everyone researched a different epidemic and then they need to write me up a short report on it based on link sort of based on kid age, but so they can get writing practice in how is how is Alex's report? Yeah, he doesn't have to do this. His stuff. He gets stories, right, we're reading stories. Then he does ten minutes of writing practice just to sort of keep working on the hand coordination. And then we've actually been working with him through the Bedtime Math books, which I can highly recommend. They are by Laura Overdek who did a couple of these. There's several of these books, but it's the idea is it's set up like a bedtime story. So you read a short paragraph that sets up a topic, and then they have four different levels of math problems associated with their story problems, and so you read it to the kids and they figure it out. And so we've been doing that with Alex for math. Cool. Yeah, we have like our kids homework. They use a program called I Ready for both reading and math. I think it's a Florida statewide thing. So we've just continued their normal cycle of that, and we use Reflex Math for math, which is more just it's not really like they have I Ready Math for more concept type stuff and Reflex is just like NML's memorizing timestables and Cameron's try to learn like four plus three. So yeah, we they do that and then I have them write a story either like a journal entry of like what's going on? Although I think those are going to get a little repetitive, but we'll see. And for Cameron, it's more like, try to write once, try to write and a picture and then I as them to read either two chapters of a chapter book, either anibook can read it to Cameron, or he can read his own two picture books, or she can read like whatever they want, but like two books or chapters. Yeah, so it sounds good animal what you do. She's like, I read Genevieve, green eggs and ham. That is perfectly good. I mean, there's so many things you learned by doing that, right, I mean, in addition to the reading practice obviously, but reading out loud is itself a skill that I would say many adults don't do very well. That's true. That's true. You know, presenting words to other people is not automatic, and so you're absolutely right. It's good that she's working on that. No, we're actually so the first official virtual instructional Day starts tomorrow. We're recording this on a Tuesday, so the Wednesday, our teachers are starting to send assignments, so we will incorporate that into the schedule. It's mostly Jasper who's going to have the more formal remote instruction, like his different teachers are posting assignments, so he's going to start mostly doing that. The other kids, I think it'll be more just reinforced, like math practice and things like that, so you know, they'll still need a few additional things to keep them busy. And we are still having our nanny come because currently I still have a lot of work responsibilities. I've had like seven thirty am conference calls every day, and then I have to disseminate that information to the residents, and I'm trying to redesign a lot of their education to figure out how to do it remotely, which is not that easy apparently. So yeah, I feel like I know this is a dilemma for a lot of people. But our nanny herself has sort of agreed to isolate. Incidentally, she has like the same coffie I have, so I'm not worried about transmitting or getting or giving that to her because that already happened before all of this. But yeah, I know this is sort of a dilemma for some people, like whether or not it's even okay to do that. There are a lot of of college students that currently have a lot of free time that might even you know, I was thinking about it, might even be willing to live in if you have the space to keep them, so they could become like a de facto additional family member if you really need some somebody, you know, you can pay them, they can earn extra money, and you could get your remote work done without you know, worrying about an infection risk, especially if they're willing to stay with you. Yeah. No, that's definitely true because a lot of these college students are in a rough place here. I mean, if you think about it, you know, the people who's there's just this assumption that people have somewhere to go, which may not be true for everyone, right, Like, you know, not all college students are you know, have mom and dad home with the picket fence that you can just immediately move back in with. And then the people who are in say apartments near campus, there's the question, well, did you have a job on campus, for instance, and that was what was paying your rent? So you do then, I mean, there's just all kinds of bad situations here, and hopefully some of these colleges with multi billion dollar endowments are thinking that through. Yeah see, we'll see. So yeah, How's how's remote work going. How have you adjusted to that? It's I'm still learning. I mean, we're actually in the process of setting up telemedicine. I mean, this is interesting. We were on this big conference call this morning and they're like, we have one test site set up, and I was like giggling internally because that test site is our house. Because well because actually, I mean two physicians in one one place, so they get double bang for their box since we both worked for the same health system and my husband has like a computer background and he is actually the one that sort of spearheaded it and volunteered to be to help set it up. So actually, fairly certainly, I'm fairly soon. I think I'll be able to do a lot of my clinical job from home, although I can also do telemedicine from the office if they prefer to have me go in there. At some point. They're just trying to really avoid groups of people cohorting together and our office spaces are really cramped. So in my mind, if you know, for a real infection control, if you can do the exact same thing from your desk at home, like why not? Yeah, no, that's so true. I mean, and we talk about things that are going to change coming out of this, because why on earth do we ever have people congregating in a waiting room. I mean you could. I just got an article pitch on an app that tracks doctor waiting room times, right, so that you can actually tell the patient in real time, like your waiting room will be I mean, your your exam room will be ready in forty minutes. So why don't you just stop and get a cup of coffee or like run an errand or whatever, and then knowing that that's when you can get into the exam room to be more respectful of the patient's time, and then to keep people from congregating in the waiting room because that's where you know, you spread disease. I mean, poor little Henry his two month appointment was a couple of weeks ago, and he came out of it with a cold, because you know, just passing through the doctor's office like it's just jermy children everywhere. So the problem is it doesn't work for everything, Like there are certain things you do want to do an exam for, like I have a ton of growth patients. Well I'm not going to be able to measure them when they're at home. It'll be great for like my diabetes patients because I can just kind of actually we can download their pumps or their meters, look at them and kind of make adjustments on the fly and send in prescriptions. But then other patients like yeah, especially growth in my personal like I'm not going to do puberty exams on a screen, Like, no, we're not going there. But it's true some visits. I've always thought this could be moved more to virtual for the convenience of patients. And you know, everybody does say, like the silver lining of this is like and there's not a lot of silver linings. I mean, I you know, we'll get to it. Like, but we're coming from this at such a place of privilege, and I know there are people that are struggling and they don't have childcare and their jobs are in jeopardy, and like this is just a big freaking deal for a lot of people and it sucks. Yeah, but if there's anything that will come out of it, maybe there is the transfer of innovation or figuring out if we can question the ways we do things, because sometimes we do things the way we've always done things, and it takes I guess something this big to sometimes make us question some of those things, like even little things. Yeah, well you just think about all the jobs that people insisted, oh, this couldn't be done remotely. Yet Yeah, it can be done remotely. Like all those meetings that could have been emails, Yep, turn out they could have been emails. There's just been a huge amount of wasted time that did not have to happen that way. In terms of commutes, we're and tear on the planet associated with people moving around. And that's not saying you never need to be in person, but I think the balance is much different than many people have assumed it to be. I mean, just our podcast, right, you and I have actually seen each other in person I think half a dozen times, right, But it's doesn't feel like that. But it doesn't feel like you're right right, Like I mean, we've started a an enterprise here that has managed to run itself for a couple of years, and it's it didn't need to all be in person. That it's really fun to hang out in person when we do, but that hasn't been required for it. Well, it was funny, like we had a new conference next week. There was a specialty lecture I will not reveal which specialty lest it because someone might find this podcast and they were like, no, sorry, I can't do this remote because I prepared this blah blah blah, And I'm like whatever, Like you can. You can a lecture like I will make a video screen. You'll be able to see the residence. They'll be able to virtually raise their hand. You can run them through a case like, you can have them do questions and they can answer with their phones. Like there's so many things we can do that are like that where sometimes you know, it's easy to be like or like you just said like, oh, we can't have that meeting baby, like, well try it and see try it, and I agree. I mean there's definitely been you know, I think what part of the resistance is many people have been on horrific conference calls before where it's like somebody's flushing the toilet, like somebody's dog is barking, like you can't see who's on the call, Like so there's somebody there you didn't even know was there. And then somebody's gone and you keep talking to them and they're they're gone, like you never knew they were there or not there, and it's horribly inefficient and it doesn't feel anything like you're in person, and I think that's probably why some people have the resistance to it. That said, that's just bad management. I mean that's which happens in person as well. You know, video conferences are so much better now than they used to be. If people have high speed internet access. There's so many programs that it feels like you're talking to the person. I mean you the human brain does not distinguish between someone you see on a video screen and someone you see in person, because why would you, like, those things are so great, Yeah, I mean there's well this is when people talk about that. You know, if you've ever talked to people who are in the television business, like they would people come and see them, like meet them on the street, like go see them shopping or in a restaurant. They talk to them as if they know them. Like it's the weird thing about it because they assume any video thing is perceived as being two way, even though that's ridiculous, Like the person on the TV screen doesn't know you, but your brain thinks that you know each other, right. Well, audio can be like that too, because I definitely have some of my own favorite podcasters, where like, if I met them, I think I would probably start talking to them like I knew them, and we're like maybe people that we've interviewed that I'm like, oh, I know you, and it's like, no, actually we don't know each other. I listened to your podcast, yes exactly. But because of that, I mean, you could definitely establish relationships, you can definitely have good conversations, you could get stuff done virtually. Yeah, so that's that's good to know, you know, And if you're stressed out, I just want to say that's okay. Yeah, I've been stressed out. I'm trying to do things to mitigate that stress. But there's just a lot of things that are very different and up in the air right now, and fellow planners may well, I'm sure everyone's struggling with that, but man, someone who had every day planned out for the next or for months might really struggle even extra because it's so funny. I was like, I've never had an experience where planning actually like backfired on me. But like all these trips that I now have to cancel, and you know, many of them, like a normal person wouldn't have ever made the arrangements in the first place, because there's you know, four months in advance or whatever, but well, things could look different well now, I mean, we don't know. But I think it's you know, it's also sometimes hard to see in the middle of a crisis that things don't last forever and things do change. And I mean I certainly remember in the days after September eleven, for instance, living in Washington, d C. The sense of just panic every time something happened right like, you know, car alarm going off or you know, quick power outage or something like what happened, you know who's done it now? And and you forget in that moment of uncertainty that life will keep going and in fact, you know, I mean obviously there's been terror attacks sense in different places, but nothing on that scale in the US. And if you'd thought about that the week after nine to eleven, you probably would have said, like, oh, there will definitely be another huge one coming right up, because that's it just resets your expectations. But then you know, things change again. It's I mean, I think that's the hard part for planners too, is to know that how we how we feel, will how it can change over time. So yeah, we're trying to keep that in mind that this sense of anxiety probably won't last forever because it rarely does. So are you doing anything positive for yourself to kind of stay sane or motivate it or so forty news to avoid news? And I would recommend that to everyone. I mean, not to the point of being ill informed. I don't think that's necessary. But you could check the news once a day at a time when you are best able to deal with it, and give yourself a certain amount of time, like I'm going to read for ten to fifteen minutes and then that's it. And if you need to take social media apps off your phone, if you need to block websites, like whatever you need to do to say, Okay, this is my time that I can learn what's going on and you know, be anxious if I need to, and see what the world looks like. But pass that beyond doing the sort of things you can do to take care of your family and to you know, keep the enterprises you're involved with moving forward, Like there's nothing you can do, Like I mean, there's very few people listening to this podcast who could say affect the course of the outbreak in some other country. I mean, you just it's it's outside your realm of control, and that's very hard. But that doesn't change whether you're checking the news for fifteen minutes a day or fifteen hours a day. So we're probably better off not doing fifteen hours. Agree? Are you putting yourself on a new diet too? Basically, yeah, I started off horrendous. I mean like refreshing CNN every hour, I mean partly is like I was like, okay, like I have to keep seeing what's happening because it's going to change, like what I'm gonna you know, should I tell the residents to go remote? And should I do this? And should I do that? Like I did feel it. But then at a certain point, you're right, like you don't need to know every fifteen minutes, probably even every twelve hours is sufficient. I'm trying to listen to up first in the morning because I really like it's just like a nice I don't know, fifteen minutes like and that's it. And then I feel like I've I've gotten done to maybe three times a day. I'm not going to be honest, because but that's down from like way higher than that. So yeah, I would say it's an improvement. The more I get busy with other things, the better off I am. I mean to be honest, Like the worst days were there was a weekend and Josh was on call and I was home with the kids and just like spiraling because I didn't know what was happening and I was by myself and we weren't really yet on a schedule. But I also it was you know, social distancing was starting, so I couldn't take them anywhere, and it was like just sort of flailing, and I was just refreshing every two seconds because I felt like I needed to be doing something and that felt like something. But now that I've actually been back at work and you know, had to attend meetings and had to create new schedules and new you know, rules for the residents and figure out telemedicine, like, well, I haven't had time to check see in every two seconds, and actually it's felt better. Yeah, totally agree. You know, I keep running, can run in the neighborhood without an issue. So certainly people who've been going to the gym might want to look into running or walking or things like that. And there's a lot of fitness and online workout because I decided this was a great time to dive back into Beach Body with a vengeance, mostly because it was like, Oh, I like the idea that like, I don't know, like there's something specific every day and I can have control over that and feel like I'm like completing something. I mean, a running plan would have worked too, but I sort of got tired. I needed a running break, so I'm doing that again. Yeah. Well, you know, it depends what people are motivated for her, But most of the major races have been canceled for the next month or so, so if you were if you were aiming for that, then maybe that's kind of demotivational to choose something else. Michael was planning to run a half marathon in early April that has now been canceled, so that's it. I guess he still got his ten miler in last weekend. So you can always do your own own ten miler. Yeah, yeah, your own half marats a run outside, so you can just turn your watch on and make it virtual. That's true, you could do that, which, honestly, I mean, I've I got so you know, frustrated with like big crowds at races at some point that I hadn't been doing that many, but this year I signed up for a bunch. So there you go. There's the planner in May getting squashed again. We'll see. They may still happen, like the fall could be this it's turned out to be a good time that I wasn't looking for conference speaking opportunities anyway because of the newborn. I was sort of taking a maternity leave from that. But now that's going to be extended. I've started getting people who were looking for stuff in May canceling things, and to think about how good of a video chatter you are. You're a perfect webinar Speaker's true. I can pivot my about remote work, you can talk about efficient you know, working from home, all that kind of stuff. So you know, maybe you'll have just as much demand in a different, more comfortable for much more comfortable format. Oh my goodness. But yeah, no, I start building the webinar business. And then it could also be that a lot of the stuff that gets canceled will happen in the fall, in which case it'll be just a very busy fall. And that's definitely, definitely, definitely someday, someday, things will change because eventually everyone's going to be immune to this, I think. So the develop a vaccine and all that. Yes, the vaccine technology is pretty you know, there's a process. I mean, so they're working on it. I know they're going on it. They're working hard. And all the good things we're doing to isolate ourselves now will buy people time, which is what the what the point is. Uh So, so yeah, if you know, we'll we'll keep talking about this. You know, please send in your own remote work tips and strategies. Yeah, maybe that can be our topic next week. If you're people remotely, how you've done that in the past and how can do that now. We've had some guests in the past talk about how they manage remote teams. Certainly the idea of managing by task rather than time is getting new converts, which is also a silver lining and all this. But yeah, no, we just wanted to do an episode to up date people on things, to talk about this issue, to know that just because our every Tuesday episodes don't seem to acknowledge what's going on, it's not because we are sticking our heads in the sand. But we are still thinking about these issues and thinking about everyone and hoping you are all staying safe and healthy. Yes, and our hearts also go out to anyone who's really struggling from a you know, work perspective, because this has to be hard, in very in certain sectors. But hopefully your communities will you know, support you and your business will be back with a vengeance and a half when this engineer let's hope for all that all right, Well, this has been best of Both Worlds our bonus episode, and we'll be back with other bonus episodes in the near future. 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.