Date Night Updates, Atlas of Obscure Facts, and More EP 459

00:00:09
Speaker 1: Hi.

00:00:09
Speaker 2: I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:15
Speaker 3: And I'm Sarah Hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: 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.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: Term career goals.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: We want you to get the most out of life.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: Welcome the best of both worlds. This is Laura.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: This episode is airing in mid May of twenty twenty six. Going to be a bit of a Hodgepodge episode. We're going to be talking date nights, an atlas of obscure facts, some of our favorite random facts. So if nothing else today, you will have something to mention in the.

00:01:01
Speaker 1: Break room at work. Did you know?

00:01:04
Speaker 2: And we will also be addressing a listener question about taking a career pause.

00:01:09
Speaker 3: But first we have some very I don't know, exciting updates because Laura's book is out in the world a couple weeks as of this airing, but it's hard for me to ask Laura how it's going because to be completely honest. We're recording this just after launch. But Laura, how do you feel about launch?

00:01:26
Speaker 2: Well, it's been fun to see people get their copies, take pictures of it, starting to get some reactions in which is great. I think my favorite quote was from somebody on social media that said, if Laura ever starts an official cult, I will be the first one to join. So I was like, well, I'll take it.

00:01:47
Speaker 1: I like it. I like it.

00:01:49
Speaker 3: That is a very interesting perspective, but I do like it. It shows total dedication and the other like humorous reviews or anything that you've seen so far, or is a little bit too early for that.

00:01:58
Speaker 2: Well, my favorite little thing that happened with launch day, my friend Joy gave me this little tiny copy of Big Time. So a lot of listeners know I collect miniatures. I'm somewhat obsessed with miniatures, which Joy knows, and she had looked at the library scene on my shelf and had said mentioned something like, oh, hey, give me a shelf and I'm like sure, whatever, and then she came through with this copy of Big Time that is about an inch tall.

00:02:27
Speaker 1: So I love it. It's in my miniature scenes. Now.

00:02:31
Speaker 3: Well, I feel like for your birthday or Christmas, You're gonna have to watch out because you might get a whole stack of your tiny books.

00:02:36
Speaker 1: Whole Vanderkamp stack. That's true. That's true.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: Else, somebody once gave me chocolates that had my book covers on them.

00:02:43
Speaker 1: That was a wonderful gift as well.

00:02:45
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's always fun for an author to see your book art somewhere unexpected.

00:02:52
Speaker 1: So a miniature book, a chocolate, it's all good.

00:02:56
Speaker 3: Well are you looking forward to more reviews coming out?

00:03:00
Speaker 1: I hope.

00:03:00
Speaker 2: So. I've got a lot of media and things planned over the next few weeks. I mean, what was your experience with this? Were you reading reviews at all?

00:03:09
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:03:10
Speaker 3: I couldn't really help myself. I knew it might not be my favorite activity, but I don't have that many opportunities to have put my work into the public to see. And as much as I kind of dreaded the feedback, I thought it might be valuable at the same time. So I did look at reviews and at first, honestly, it was a little bit hard, but over time I kind of realized, you know what, most of these are positive, which is amazing, and I kind of had to get around the fact that not every single book is for everyone. One thing that helped me, and I don't know if you've done this is like you look up a book that you just think is flawless and amazing, and then you see that book even has negative reviews and you go, oh, okay, well, if the equivalent of war and Peace can get panned by someone, then probably Best Laid Plans isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea as well.

00:03:53
Speaker 1: So Tolstoy needed a better editor. This book is too long.

00:03:58
Speaker 2: Exactly, Yeah, yeah, I mean, well it's sort of funny because I mean, some critical reviews are thoughtful and that's great. I think some are also just like offended that the book was not for them. Personally, I was like, well, every book isn't for everyone, and we can't accommodate the entire world with every single book.

00:04:16
Speaker 1: And I don't know.

00:04:17
Speaker 2: There's a phenomenon of that online that people say, well, why didn't you write about X?

00:04:21
Speaker 1: When you write about why it's like, but I guess I wasn't.

00:04:24
Speaker 3: Writing about X. You're like, but there might be some great books about X, so feel free to feel.

00:04:29
Speaker 2: Free go check them out. Yes, exactly, Well, this is life in the public eye. You cannot please everyone, nor should you try, because it would make life very uninteresting to attempt to do so, and also futile. So the first topic we are talking about today is date nights. This was actually going to be in an earlier episode and we ran out of time. Sarah, what are your date nights looking like these days?

00:04:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, to remind listeners, I did set that as one of my goals for the year, to try to aim for two date nights per month, because I had realized that this had fallen by the wayside a little bit once I didn't have to schedule a babysitter, which is the opposite of what one might think. However, it does kind of make sense because that babysitter was forced planning, right. So I have started to at the beginning of every month, as I do my planning, try to identify at least two slots for date nights. As I've talked about, we kind of differ on what we count as a date. Josh does not count social events as a date. I kind of think they do count. But regardless of the definition, we've been much better about it this year, and I do feel like it's been good for our relationship. Sometimes we do what we've planned. I would say like eighty to ninety percent of the time our plans come to fruition. But I've also kind of embraced looking for serendipitous occasions to have a date. I think especially like if a date does fall through, I'm like, Okay, well, I'm determined if the conditions are right, let's see if we can just make it a last minute thing. And we were able to do that on one recent occasion that was just like so delightful. Annabel didn't go to Acro because she had a meat coming up, so I realized that Friday night, no one was really going out, my husband was done with work, and I was like, let's go, and we did.

00:06:03
Speaker 1: It was great.

00:06:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fun. And you do you have like a place around you that you go frequently?

00:06:07
Speaker 3: Is?

00:06:07
Speaker 1: Are you like a regular somewhere?

00:06:08
Speaker 3: Now? We're trying, I say, Josh leans towards doing different things almost every time, but he does see the value in like becoming a known person, and I love repetition in my life and in this sort of thing. So we have kind of come to a compromise where I feel like at least one date is going to be something different. But the other one, we have this really cute local pizza place. Actually you've had their pizza Laura in takeout form, but they have a really nice bar and a really sweet server that we've had at least twice. So I feel like we're on our way.

00:06:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you get the same waiter, it's like you know you're becoming a regular somewhere. Maybe even have your table at your certain time.

00:06:45
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:06:45
Speaker 2: Now we haven't really done the regular thing so much. We have been trying to do something like a little bit different and bigger, maybe like once a month, and that's actually happened in the first four months of the year so far. So in January we went to see a Sixers game together. I'm a big fan of live sports events as a date night, it's a little bit different and exciting. February we did go out to dinner, but it was at Longwood Gardens for their Valentine's Day dinner, so there was a greenhouse tour along with our dinner, so it was a little bit different than the usual restaurant kind of thing. In March, we went to Chicago together to go to a friend's birthday party. And while they are we went to the Art Institute of Chicago and that was really cool to tour the museum.

00:07:38
Speaker 1: We like art museums.

00:07:38
Speaker 2: It is the kind of thing that our children do not like, so it's good to do as an adults only experience.

00:07:43
Speaker 1: And then in April we went to go see.

00:07:45
Speaker 2: Jerry Seinfeld and he came to Reading, Pennsylvania, which I just love. I mean, Jerry Seinfeld has absolutely no reason to be out doing two shows on a Friday night in Reading, Pennsylvania, but he's in.

00:07:59
Speaker 1: It for the love of the game, which is awesome.

00:08:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is something really gratifying about that. As you said that, I'm like, yeah, Taylor Swift probably didn't have to do that second part of her tour, but like, it's lovely to see someone just so in love with their craft killing it out there. Yeah.

00:08:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, like, let me do three nights in Philly. Not too, I'm gonna do three nights in Philly. Yeah, I know, if they love their craft and are still at it and really enjoying it, which I know he was. He was really this is what he loves to do, so it's good to see it as a show. I don't exactly know what May is going to be. We haven't really planned anything, but we are going to my twenty fifth reunion, I guess for one night. So if Josh doesn't count social events, maybe that doesn't count as a date. But we will be there at least one night without kids, So maybe.

00:08:44
Speaker 3: I'll have to drive there. And that's like I don't.

00:08:46
Speaker 2: Know, because I may already be there, because I might go for three nights and then he would only come for and then we'd go back or something.

00:08:53
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:08:53
Speaker 2: We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. But it's good to like have these things, as you were saying, like planning them at ahead of time, even if you don't need this sitter as much.

00:09:03
Speaker 1: I think if it's just like I like to look forward to it.

00:09:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, just like a vacation, you get the anticipatory, you get the experiencing, and you get the remembering. And I think as a bonus, when you're doing these kind of more involved things, they're going to be like higher stakes on the discipatory and the remembering, So probably the whole date is just more meaningful. I feel like you guys have done a definitely higher concentration of those types of things together in the last few months than I remember, and I think that's probably the kids getting older and your intentionality behind it.

00:09:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and also just I mean, if we are just going to go out to eat, we often will go with the kids. Now that this has become as we had in a recent dining out episode, it's become less of a horrible thing to have children out with you at a restaurant. Not horrible, but not relaxing when you have little kids, and that is not the case anymore. So you know, we've been able to bring them with us, and especially the older kids becomes a lot of fun. So well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back with the second part of this episode are Atlas of Obscure Facts.

00:10:13
Speaker 1: Well, we are back. We have been talking date nights.

00:10:16
Speaker 2: Now we are going to go on to our favorite fun facts that if you are looking for anything to strike up a conversation.

00:10:24
Speaker 1: Today, that's your workplace. Did you know we have a few for you? Sarah? Why did she start?

00:10:30
Speaker 3: So? My first fun fact is that people are taller in the morning, and it can vary by how much, but can be up to like half an inch. So if you're trying to really gain the system and get your tallest possible height, then try to be measured when you first wake up. Now I don't know the time cadence, Like after forty five minutes, have you already lost this benefit? Because my guess is that gravity might work really quickly.

00:10:52
Speaker 1: I think gravity is a swift, unforgiving force.

00:10:55
Speaker 3: But yes, but we're definitely all taller when we first wake up. And then my unofficial fact that goes with this one is that the average man is about one and a half inches shorter measured than they see the bit are.

00:11:11
Speaker 1: And the humorous part of this Sarah is they point to their driver's license.

00:11:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're like, what my driver's license says? I'm like, yeah, usually you just tell the guy what you're heighting. Like at least the two states that I have gotten licenses in, nobody had a ruler out so yeah.

00:11:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so that is not unlike something like your birth date. You don't have to prove your height on your license. So yes, that could be a game the system if somebody needs to.

00:11:38
Speaker 1: All right, well here's my first Sarah's You're.

00:11:40
Speaker 2: Gonna be like height related and miner would be like ancient Earth or time related. So there was a period in Earth's history during the Late Triassic called the Carnian Pluvial event, when it rained for a million years. If you look up the Carnian Pluvial event on Wikipedia, it will tell you that it was characterized by intense and prolonged rainfall.

00:12:05
Speaker 1: So there you go.

00:12:07
Speaker 3: I would like to know what the land like looked like at that time, Like was it pretty much just always covered it a few feet of water? Were there totally? Like were there really high mountains and that's all that was above the I mean, we so see this was okay.

00:12:23
Speaker 2: I think this was during the Pangaea time, which if you have a giant land mass, a lot has been desert in the middle. And this was when the Earth was undergoing a shift from this arid climate to a wetter climate that then enabled like the rise of the dinosaurs. And part of the thing that every so much of life had died out in the in Permian extinction going into the Triassic, and it said had been this sort of dry, deserty, low oxygen environment. So this was the coming of the rains after a great many times I guess it lasted for a million years.

00:13:01
Speaker 3: You just never knew you were going to learn that today when you turned.

00:13:03
Speaker 2: On us both worlds, we're gonna hear about the Carnian and Pluvial event. So obscure fact number one for me.

00:13:09
Speaker 1: All right, Sarah, let's your pivot a lot pivotal ready, let's do it.

00:13:13
Speaker 3: Blow your mind. So my kids are into watching like the old like I don't know Aughts Nickelodeon shows, including I Carly and I was like, this is vaguely familiar. And the reason it's familiar is because the set they used on I Carly for the school is the same as Saved by the Bell.

00:13:30
Speaker 1: Ah, were they just like kept it somewhere?

00:13:33
Speaker 3: Yes, I bet they did keep it somewhere in some old studio building, dusted it off. Nickelodeon's like, we're low budget, let's just reuse this.

00:13:40
Speaker 1: It worked really, really.

00:13:41
Speaker 3: Well in the eighties and nineties when Zach Morris were in the halls. Let's just do it again.

00:13:46
Speaker 2: I can't believe they still had it. That part blows my mind. Like that, We're like, okay, I don't.

00:13:52
Speaker 3: Know how many years elapsed between the end of Saved by the Bell and the beginning of I carly, But you're right, it was like probably like more than a decade, definitely.

00:14:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:14:01
Speaker 2: Well there you go, I mean, and people say you'll never use it again, just throw it out, declutter it.

00:14:06
Speaker 1: Well there you go. Not everything all right.

00:14:11
Speaker 2: My second obscure fact, this one is Bible trivia, because my daughter just went through our church confirmation process and they all had to do a thirty day spiritual discipline project, and so she researched thirty biblical role models and she had a goal of doing at least half women, and so, as you might imagine, some of this was a bit more obscure.

00:14:34
Speaker 1: Because of that.

00:14:35
Speaker 2: But one of the people she wrote about, the name of the mother of Moses, Miriam, and Aaron is Jochibid. Now a lot of people have heard of Moses. If you have any sort of like if you ever learned like Hebrew Bible stuff, or if you have read any of the Old Testament the stories, you would know Miriam and Aaron as well.

00:14:59
Speaker 1: But most people do not. I know the name of Jochibit.

00:15:01
Speaker 2: So let's give honor to a biblical mother of three famous children in here as we are near Mother's Day.

00:15:09
Speaker 3: My confession is I've actually had patience with that name, and I just thought they like made it up.

00:15:15
Speaker 2: They did not, Sarah, But now I know, Now you know, Now you know, and now you can use this obscure fact.

00:15:20
Speaker 1: You could tell them, oh, I know where that name comes from. Awesome.

00:15:25
Speaker 3: All right, we're going back to the human body. But no, we're not going back to height. Height was a one off. We're going to left handedness. And my fact is that about ten percent of the population is left handed. That's been fairly constant over time, but it's actually more common for men to be left handed. So it's just over ten percent in men and something like eight point seven percent in women. And I'm left handed, so that just made me feel a little special. It also said that if you have two left handed parents, then the chance of having a left handed offspring is twenty five percent. But my two left handed parents had two left handed female offsprings, so I don't know. I think I have a superpower left handed gene that then did not pass on to any of my children.

00:16:03
Speaker 1: So they'reascinating.

00:16:05
Speaker 2: So one of my favorite things about the left handedness statistics, and I remember reading this years ago as an evidence of sort of the misuse of statistics is that there were lower percent of older people who were left handed. It's like, uh, oh, does something go wrong do people? Are they more likely to kill themselves accidentally in accidents if they're left handed? No? No, no, it's that they used to force children to be right handed back in the day, Like even if you were naturally dominant on the left side, they would force you to write with your right hand, and so up until a certain point. Until that changed, there weren't people saying they were left handed because they hadn't been allowed to be so.

00:16:39
Speaker 1: Different issue. Okay, all right, what is your next fact? Time related? I guess it's more of a dates related.

00:16:47
Speaker 2: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, and not just the same day of the year, like the same day as in February twelfth, eighteen o nine.

00:16:58
Speaker 1: So what about hey, Yeah, and.

00:17:00
Speaker 2: As you'll learn out this learn in a minute, this is actually the same day. There's another obscure fact coming about places having different days, so we'll get to that in a minute.

00:17:09
Speaker 1: All right, Sarah, what's yours? Yours? You actually went geological here.

00:17:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true, I did, But this is my special area of interest because it aligns with my phobia, and that is that a lightning bolt is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. I really don't like lightning. I happen to live in. Well, Florida is generally the most lightning is state, like the more highest frequency I think for square foot in the United States. But that's not true every year. And apparently in twenty twenty five, when you look at the calendar year, both Oklahoma and Texas beat my state out. But less, I get less paranoid. I started to look at fatalities, and we did win in fatalities. And when I saw the fatalities listed in twenty twenty four, like two of them were in my neighborhood, and I actually remember both of those storms. So my phobia is going to just continue.

00:17:59
Speaker 2: Yikes, all right, Well, this is why Sarah does not want to be out in any lightning storms. And I maybe contribute to your not wanting to be in large bodies of water either.

00:18:07
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know.

00:18:09
Speaker 3: Well, if the sun is out, I can't accept.

00:18:10
Speaker 2: The sun is out if there's no chance that a lightning bolt will come, except if it's a very I don't know there is a lightning bolt out of the blue. Well, no, something went terribly awry.

00:18:19
Speaker 1: Okay.

00:18:19
Speaker 2: So here is another fun date related fact. So, in September of seventeen fifty two, Britain and the United States, which was part of Britain at the time, skipped eleven days, going straight from September two to September fourteen. And the reason they did this was to align with the Gregorian calendar that was being used in most of Europe at the time. What I find funny about this, so they had used to say a year was three hundred and sixty five days. We all know now with the leap years, it's three hundred sixty five point two five roughly, And so they were falling behind basically over since the calendar had been used kind of in Roman times. They over the course of centuries and centuries, they had fallen several days behind, and it was clearly changing where the seasons were falling. So in Pope Gregory the Thirteenth in October of fifteen eighty two had ordered the various Catholic countries in Europe to move forward ten days, right, so they skipped forward actually from Thursday, October fourth, of fifteen eighty two to Friday October fifth, fifteenth. I guess that's also eleven days. I don't know anyway, they no, I may have us more. They had skipped ten days in the middle, so October fourth to October fifteenth in fifteen eighty two. Now the really crazy thing about this Europe had moved forward ten days Britain had not. Now it is absolutely possible to go from say Italy to London in seventeen forty five, right, like there was transportation between these places. People were regularly going back and forth on Europe, and yet continental Europe was about ten days ahead of written for one hundred and seventy years.

00:20:08
Speaker 3: I feel like this must make reading history and like looking at primary texts extremely confusing.

00:20:14
Speaker 1: I think it probably.

00:20:16
Speaker 3: I also made me wonder we can't be exactly point two five years, like it's it can't be exact. So are we gradually getting like slightly behind or slightly ahead and are we going to get like a bonus day?

00:20:26
Speaker 1: Well, okay, so here's the thing.

00:20:27
Speaker 2: Every hundred years you skip a leap year, only not in the year two thousand. It's something like every four Hundredever, it's I'm gonna get it wrong here, but it's every hundred years you skip it, but every like four hundred years you don't, right, so it like gets it slightly closer to it.

00:20:43
Speaker 1: It's a little bit off, but it's less off than it would be.

00:20:48
Speaker 3: That's less fun than like we get a party day like that doesn't.

00:20:51
Speaker 2: Cast every once in a while, we can all just celebrate the weirdness of the sun.

00:20:56
Speaker 1: All right, Sarah, your last one.

00:20:59
Speaker 3: Should we take a rake and leave this one as a teaser?

00:21:01
Speaker 2: Okay, one quick, it's really important, okay, and then we'll be back with our last obscure fact.

00:21:19
Speaker 3: All right, we're back with our very last obscure fact, and actually last two I one and Laura has one and mine. Very important here is that if you go to Japan, you two can purchase a square watermelon.

00:21:32
Speaker 1: But it's expensive. It's expensive, well because it's a delicacy, of course.

00:21:37
Speaker 3: Apparently it's actually terrible to eat because the skin gets like very thick, so like there's no fruit inside. But it is a ornamental thing and it's often like or I don't know about often, but it has been given in.

00:21:47
Speaker 1: The past as a gift, so.

00:21:48
Speaker 3: They sell it at novelty stores and you can purchase one to give to a friend and then display in your home. But when I look at them, I'm like kind of schemed out by them, and apparently they're not good to eat, but they're.

00:21:58
Speaker 1: Really into their like fruit in Japan.

00:22:00
Speaker 3: Did you have there, like really cool fruit.

00:22:02
Speaker 2: Ye, well, they had like strawberries that were done up as candy. Like they had a whole story devoted to strawberry and various farm toown. It's kind of fascinating, really sounds fun. Yeah, well, that's not my obscure fact though. My obscure fact is that most of Indiana is on Eastern Time, but a handful of counties, many of them around Chicago, are in Central Time because they are economically aligned with Chicago. Also, for a while in Indiana, some counties switched with daylight saving time and some did not, so it was a bit of a patchwork in terms of what time it might be at any given point in any given geographic location in Indiana. And this was actually a plot point in the West Wing once where they missed a flight because they didn't know that one county in Indiana was in a different time than.

00:22:52
Speaker 3: Can you imagine if your kids was on a sports team and like you're traveling and then this county in that county and the practice is on this field and it's on this line, and like, did the hour sway to do?

00:23:00
Speaker 1: Like I can't. This is why most states don't do that.

00:23:05
Speaker 2: But it's true that, like it would be more annoying if you are commuting into Chicago every day from a county that is right across the border in India and you're constantly having to switch your watch. So I mean, I understand, like the economic gravitational pull to get back to our space and time things of Chicago is big around there, so that's why you would be aligned for instance.

00:23:26
Speaker 3: Well that's it for our facts. We hope you enjoyed it. We're not going to pivot to a fact podcast, but we just thought it would be fun to share some of our favorite little tidbits of life with you all today.

00:23:36
Speaker 2: Yes, all right, So today's question is was specific one from a listener, but has also come up fairly frequently from people that we've heard from over the years. And this particular person said, I am pregnant with my second child and I.

00:23:49
Speaker 1: Am really burnt out in my tech job.

00:23:52
Speaker 2: My husband just got a fairly sizable promotion, and so we have talked about my taking a short break, like perhaps two years or so from paid work. However, I'm worried that this is going to be a very formative two years in the technology industry. I am also worried about some of the ramifications of becoming a one income family, even if only for a while. What do you think, so, Sarah, what do you think?

00:24:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's right to be a little fearful of this really big change, especially at the time in your life you're making other big changes and you may not know exactly what's coming for you in terms of financial demands and what it's going to feel like, et cetera. I would definitely work on conducting some kind of detailed analysis, including long term financial projections if you can. And just will point out that there's like a narrative that if you stay home it's better for the child because they have more of you. And yet the number of opportunities that I've had to just get my credit card out for my kids at this particular juncture in life has been like a lot, and there are things that they may be really interested in doing outside of the and they're older. That cost money, and I've I've never been happier to have two incomes, I guess, I would say than at this particular juncture in life. And so sometimes it can be unclear what's going to be of benefit now versus later. And then I just think you should be careful of sort of the false dichotomy between I have to completely opt out of the workforce for a couple of years versus I need to stay in this terrible job. I mean, there are probably a rainbow of other intermediate things that might be considered that may allow you the best of both worlds.

00:25:32
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, no, I think that's great that Sarah pointed out that you may like giving up your income is not inherently a great thing for your children.

00:25:44
Speaker 1: That kids need time and money.

00:25:47
Speaker 2: If you are working for pay, you are generally providing both, and so we want to be careful about falling into this argument of this somehow being better for the kids. Would definitely think about middle of the road options too. I Mean, the most obvious thing is that you may be able to work differently at the job you are currently in. Right like, you may have become burnt out because you are an absolute A plus employee, Maybe you could try being a B minus employee for a while and see how it goes.

00:26:25
Speaker 1: My guess is you actually won't get fired.

00:26:28
Speaker 2: Because your B minus is probably equivalent to a lot of other people's A minus whatever. And definitely your bus is better than the new hire that they're going to have to bring in who won't be up to speed for at least six to twelve months anyway, So it is possible perhaps to coast for a while and just let it go at that.

00:26:52
Speaker 1: That would be the most simplest option.

00:26:54
Speaker 2: You could, obviously go for an official part time arrangement if your company is open to that.

00:26:59
Speaker 1: They might be.

00:27:00
Speaker 2: You can look around, has anyone else done it? You could bring it up with your manager. Try and take an extended maternity leave sometimes that's something you can do. You could try out doing that life for six seven months whatever they will let you do, especially if you add together some vacation time to that. You may decide at the end of that that you actually really do want to come back to work at least part time, because that's the other thing, like, if you're burnt out, taking care of two small children is not going to be relaxing, like that is not the relaxing thing that will allow you to rejuvenate yourself and get back to being whole again. Like, it's going to be challenging. It's going to be meaningful obviously, but it's also going to be exhausting, especially if your husband is needing to work longer in this new promotion position that you may be doing.

00:27:53
Speaker 3: And if you can afford less help, Yeah, and you cap in a situation where you like you're not or can't take a break, Yeah.

00:27:59
Speaker 2: Yep, So you might want to keep that in mind as you are going into this, if that is really the thing that's going to help you feel less burnt out, or maybe it does need to be that you look for a different job, like there are a million jobs out there in the world, especially if you have skills in the tech world that are related to all the AI stuff that's going on, maybe that would be helpful. And so yeah, I mean, obviously, if you decide, especially at the end of your maternity leave, that yes, absolutely what I want to do, and which by the way, you don't need to make that decision till the end of your maternity leave anyway. So first step is negotiate for the long leave, then decide. But at the end of your leave, if you decide, yeah, this is really what I want to do, then awesome, Like that's great to like, life is long, And if that's what you want to do, to take a couple of years out for focusing on childcare during working hours, that's great. But you want to go into it with your eyes open as opposed to not eyes open.

00:28:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't follow the narratives, follow the actual concrete like details of what it would be like for you.

00:29:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:29:02
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Well, With's just one thing that somebody had pointed out when we raised this question on our forum. If your husband has just started his new job, we don't know yet that he's going to love it, so if you do quit, he may be slightly more trapped in it, and maybe neither of you could wind.

00:29:20
Speaker 1: Up happy at the end of this.

00:29:22
Speaker 2: So we should just make sure that everyone's cool with that and he's all settled before you make a decision as well.

00:29:28
Speaker 3: All right, Sarah, your love of the week, Well, I went off of yours, but I'll share mine specifically. So I love my Mephisto sandals and I got them on sale at Norte drum about a year ago. But to me they look like elevated Birkenstocks. They're the Domenica style in particular, and I feel like they just they go. They like make a casual outfit look more polished, but then they will also look fine with address and they're incredibly comfortable. So I'm thinking about getting them in another color for this season. But they are just like my workhorse summer piece right now.

00:29:58
Speaker 1: How about you it?

00:30:00
Speaker 2: Well? I also, yes, have a summer uniform which is slightly cropped jeans. I'm wearing a pair right now flats, my Sharecks flats and a sleeveless shift type shirt. I'm not wearing that because it's still a little cool today, but once the summer comes, that's kind of what I wear on repeat, which is nice because then I don't have to think about it. I love your things in life to think about the.

00:30:20
Speaker 3: Better, comfortable, less decisions.

00:30:23
Speaker 1: Go for it, go for it.

00:30:25
Speaker 2: Well, this has been best of both worlds. Today, we've been talking date nights, how we've been handling those the past few months. We listed some of our favorite obscure facts in case you're looking for a way to strike up a conversation with somebody this morning. Did you know that people are generally taller in the morning, Well, now you do know, Thank you, Sarah. We've also been talking about taking a career pause. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:30:51
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.

00:30:58
Speaker 2: 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.