Academics, Independence, and Adoption - Interview with Myleen Leary.

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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 episode one oh nine, which is first airing in early September of twenty nineteen. Today we're going to be interviewing Maileene Larry, who is a professor and is also the adaptive mom of two girls. And she's going to share her story of how she decided to go that route, the process of international adoption as a single parent, and all the assumptions she has been challenging in her life raising two girls on her own. Are very excited to talk to her in a little bit. One of the things she talks about, actually is the independence that comes when you are raising kids on your own. Some of these things you have to rely on your children to do and to cultivate in them. And so we wanted to talk a little bit about the idea of independence in general. I mean, Sarah, what book did you just read about this? Well as an advanced copy, so I'm not sure I'm at liberty to share the specific details. I can certainly speak about it a later episode, but it was it did talk about. It was centered around getting mothers out of sort of a management role, and one of the big takeaways of how to do that was to make your make sure your children are doing the things that they're capable of doing. And I thought the book did a very nice job of laying out practically what that looked like. And then I started to try it, and man, I've got some kids who may not naturally want to be that independent. The resistance kicked up us. I mean, you know, we've talked about on the podcast before that my children really prefer me to stay in their rooms as they're falling asleep and things like that, and to some extent, I like that they still need me. I mean, I do have full time childcare. So the fact that they feel very close with me and want that is a beautiful thing. But then at the other end of the spectrum, sometimes I do kind of need them to be doing things for themselves, And particularly when I have to focus on Genevieve if she's in her fussiest last kind of half hour of the day and I need to get her to bed, I feel like I should be able to have the big kids do certain things for themselves. And I don't want to throw my poor big children under the bus because they're going to listen to this and god knows, maybe a year, I don't know and say, mom, but it's just not that easy. I don't know. How do you teach your kids to be independent? Yeah, I mean it's something I definitely value in children. And I think some are, as you said, naturally more independent than others. I think growing up I was quite in I was always looking for things I could do on my own, and you know, I went away to school early and hence the self employment for two decades. Like, I don't like being under anyone's thumb for anything. Uh So, So there's some personality aspects to this. Some of my children may be a little bit more like me than others. And it's interesting because the ones that aren't as much are you know, often very sweet and nice and you know, so it's it's a trade off, right, Like there's you know that they want to be with you and they want to you know, have you around, and they want to have that that close interaction, which is wonderful and I know I will miss that if if they don't have that. So you know, these are these things are are a balance that you can be slightly more of a people person in some ways and and that's a good thing. But that said, I mean, yes, at some point you need to take a shower on your own, Like forget the cereal and milk out if that's what you want, Marella and melgat if you want that for breakfast, you are fully capable of doing it. And you know, we're certainly working on them doing more things for themselves and packing camp lunches. Normally the kids buy lunch during the school year, but packing camp lunches, for instance, being responsible for remembering their own things, you know that need to go to camp with them. And one of the reasons, you know, Jasper when this airs, he will be back for a while. But when we're when we're recording, he's actually at Sleepway Camp this week, and that has been a kind of cool experience for all of us just to see, because in it the nature of being away from your parents for a week is that you have to be in dependema. You have to figure all this stuff out. I'm not there. I can't help you with it. And I think he must be because his rate of texting me has declined precipitously as the week went on. You know, yesterday I got one text about how his shoes got soaked in the rain, and I reminded him that he has a second pair just for this exact reason, and he's just sent me a response text of th X. Wow you're getting THHX. I'm getting THHX. And that was it. I have not gotten anything else for more than twenty four hours now. So I'm like, well, you know, a little shocking, but awesome in a way. I'm like, the camp would call me if there was a problem, right, So I was like, I'm not worried about it all. I think it's because he's so into his friends and having a good time and figuring things out for himself and so highly recommend camp as a way to do that. You know, our guests would have said, Audrey Monk, Yes, Audrey Munk, she hears it. But you know it's it's I try to get in the habit of saying things like when somebody's complaining to me about something's like, oh, that sounds like a tough issue. What are you going to do about it? I love that. Well, yesterday I said, you guys know, it's not my job to entertain you, and they're like, it is, mom, whoa, we got to get back to our job description. Then I went into detail about how actually it was not, and I think they sort of heard it. So I'm going to continue to emphasize that because I think that's if that was really news to them, and it may have been, then I got some work to do. So I'm glad I read the book. Yeah, No, that's a well, yeah, I mean I think and on some level that's also just you got to let them figure out what they want to do for themselves, and if it's going to be, you know, telling each other fart jokes for an hour to entertain themselves, then you kind of have to be okay with it, right, I'm okay with that, You're okay with that? Yeah, So go shut yourself in the room and not not deal with it too much. But yeah, raising independent kids always good. All right, Well, let's bring this over to Mylene and we're going to hear from her about her raising independent children and all the other things she's got going on. Well, Sarah and I are thrilled to welcome Myleene Leary to the program. Milene, could you introduce yourself to our listeners? Sure? I am, first of all delighted to be here, so thanks for inviting me. I am an associate professor in a college of Business in Montana. I have two adorable, completely unbiased opinion, two adorable children, a nine year old, nine and a half year old and an eleven year old daughter. And that's about it, I think. Yeah, And we wanted to bring you on because your sort of journey to becoming a family is a little different than a lot of people. So why don't you talk, Well, first talk about how you wound up in you know, teaching business, becoming a professor of management. You can talk about that, and then you can talk about your family journey. Sure, So I'm going to bring them together because they sort of happened a little bit together, and I'm going to start way back when when I was in what I affectionally referred to as my mid twenties midlife crisis. I don't know if anybody else had that, but it's those couple of years after graduating from college when all of a sudden, it's like, oh my god, what's happening. I get to make decisions about my life now. And at that point, I remember I've always wanted to have kids, and I was like, oh my god, I'm not married, and when am I going to have kids? When am I going to have you know what's going to happen? And I thankfully figured out at that point that what was important to me was not bearing a child, but raising a child, so I was able to once I decided that, I just was like, Okay, I can keep going living my life and I can move on. So adoption was always in the back of my head because I had decided, if I ever get to the point where I'm not married and I just want to have kids, I'll adopt. So from there, I when I got my master's, then when I got my PhD, I got my first academic job, and then I got my second academic job, which is the job that I have right now, and about two years into that, I started the adoption process. It was one of those like, oh, okay, I want to have kids, so let's look into this. There had been a program here that I met with somebody about. It was, you know, they brought in kids from the Philippines who needed families, and this goes to the single parenting part of it. They some of the agencies that they worked with in the Philippines weren't open to single mothers, so that became a non issuer, not an opportunity. But in talking to the social worker, she said, well, have you thought about adoption And I said, well, yes, I have. Who do I talk to and she said me, It's like great, let's have that conversation. So that's how that started. And it was again this is how it sort of goes together. I had to put together all of the documentation for adopting a child, and there's a lot. There's background checks, fingerprinting at the federal level, the local level, financial information reference checks, or people had to write references for me. I had to write essays. It was like being in school all over again. But as I'm putting all of this stuff together, I was also going up for retention, which is our third year review in academia. So, as my mother so succinctly put it, I was justifying myself personally and professionally that summer. And so I went through all that and then put it aside, and you know, kept doing my job, which was teaching, research and service and presenting and going forward, and then got the referral. That's the short person. Yeah, and and so your your daughters are from Ethiopia. How did you wind up going through that? Like? Where what was it? If you can step back a tiny bit, I'm just curious how long the process took from the moment you spoke to that social worker to the girls coming to because I've heard very interesting timelines. So yeah, yeah, for me, it was a month under two years from that first official meeting with the social worker to the girls coming home. Much longer than a nine month gestation. There was. There was more time to get used to the idea, I guess. Yeah, So how about how did Ethiopia happen? And so, as I said, originally this and I hadn't been thinking of adopting from the Philippines, but the original discussion had been this program that was affiliated with the Philippines, and so I already had an international focus. And so between the social worker and I, she talked to some of her contacts, and then I did some research and it sort of narrowed down, you know, who was open to single mothers, and it narrowed down to Ethiopia. And the thing that I learned is this was new to me. When you adopt internationally, you go through an agency, right, So I had an agency here that did the home study, and then I had an agency that was actually out of Massachusetts that did all the international component of it. They had to have the connections in Ethiopia and all that, all that paperwork and everything. But when you do when you adopt internationally, and you have to pick the country first because each country has different requirements. So even though my agency facilitated adoptions, if I remember correctly, it was the Philippines, Columbia, Russia, Ethiopia, maybe not the Philippines, someplace else, and they did domestic adoptions as well, but each one of those different countries had different requirements, so you had to pick one and then you went down that path. You had to commit. You had to commit, which was the first step is going to be a little open minded on this. So, yeah, did did you go to Ethiopia to get them? I did. I had to go twice. And so once I got the referral, let's see, which was in September of two thousand and eleven, and it was a year and three days after I had gotten on the wait list. So there's the time for the waiting part. There's the time putting everything together, and then there's the time being on the waitlist, and you're not on the wait list in my agency until everything was complete. And so that was the last piece of that process was the federal fingerprints. So once they got that, then so my waitless date. And then a year and three days later I got the referral. And then about six months after that there was more paperwork and then they came home. But I got the referral in September. I went in January the Ethiopia because I had to go through the court system in Ethiopia and then flew back. So I was there for a week, flew back, waited here about six weeks. Well, there was more paperwork, and then flew back to get the girls and go through the US embassy. Oh my gosh, what a process. Well, in a moment, we're going to hear about how things have gone since you've gotten the girls and all the tips and tricks you have, because I love how you kind of described it to Laura that you've figured a lot of things out and gotten rid of a lot of assumptions. But we're just going to take a quick break and we will be right back. Listeners. We know you're busy, but is there something that's interfering with your happiness or is preventing you from achieving your goals? If so, Betterhelp Online Counseling is there for you. You can connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment, which is so convenient for people who are working and raising families and still want to prioritize their mental health. You can get help on your own time and at your own pace. 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Simply fill out a questionnaire to help them assess your needs and get matched with a counselor. You'll love. That's betterhelp dot com slash best of. We also want to tell you about meal kit delivery service Hello Fresh, Hello Fresh Mix, conquering the kitchen a reality with deliciously simple recipes. HelloFresh does all the meal planning, shopping and prepping so you can focus on a healther you and a happier family. You get fresh, pre measured ingredients and easy to follow, six step pictured recipe cards delivered to your door each week in a special insulated box. We tried HelloFresh at our house. I put my kids to work chopping veggies, mixing ingredients. We made some chicken pineapple caesadias and they ate them. They were very proud of themselves for being able to follow the instructions. My eldest son, Josper, also pretty much put together the Tuscan sausage and pepper spaghetti. He liked it as well, So good stuff for kids to do too. Yeah. Yeah, And we found them really efficient. All of the meals came together in the promised thirty minutes back, sometimes even a little less, and they call for less than two pots and pans, so there's minimal cleanup. This was a big plus in our house when we made the Chipotle chicken quesadillas. Yuh. For eighty dollars off your first month of HelloFresh, go to HelloFresh dot com slash best of eighty and enter promo code best of eighty. That's b e stof eight zero. That's HelloFresh dot com slash best of eighty. Promo code best of eighty for eighty dollars off your first month of HelloFresh. Here's to making family dinners bus free. All right, So I can't wait to hear more about this adoption story. So you are getting your girls from Ethiopia, and when you adopted them, they were about you said, three and sixteen months, right, that's about how old they are. Is that pretty typical for the ages that children are adopted from. It ranges. It can be babies to teenagers. And are they are they siblings? Like? Were they adopted as a pair? You just wanted two children? Okay? Yes, and yes that worked out well. And that was another thing I had to establish that upfront. You have to establish you know that you're open to siblings and or not and that. Yeah, so here we are. We'll set the scene. You're you're single direct at the time over in Ethiopia, and she's suddenly bringing two babies, like, yes, toddlers, toddlers like from flying from Addis Aba right to like jfk JFK to Bontana, Like this sounds like quite a journey, you know about this because that's a pretty big baptism into parenthood. And did you go is by yourself? You did this journey by yourself. My mom came with me, which was great, and yeah, Addis Ababa, we went oddis to Frankfurt, which is like an overnight eight hour flight, and then there's an eight hour layover in Frankfurt, because that's what you want, and then ten hours to Denver I think it was. And then what nobody told me, and we had a two hour labor in Denver. But nobody told me, and I read like every blog I could find about this is when you go through customs and immigration, you get pulled aside into the special room. Because my girl's visa they got citizenship when they landed, so they had to go through a different process. Wow, we had a tow hour labor. We had to go through all that stuff. And so we got to our plane with fifteen minutes to spare, and I was like, we can't stay here. We have to keep going, but we have to make this plane. I cannot not be home tonight. No, especially after the plight to Frankfurt, the eight hour labor or from hour flight to Denver. Yeah, you wanted to go home. You wanted to go home, But I remember, you know, it's sort of madness and everything is sort of a you know, a blur. But I do remember with my mom, she had a bad back, so she was in a wheelchair in the Hospit not in a hospital in the airport, just in the airport, and because it was hard to walk long distances, and so I don't even she was in the wheelchair being pushed by somebody. There was a child on her lap. I was pushing some another child in a stroller. I had a backpack. I'm pretty sure there was a wheelie suitcase. Like we looked like a circus, right, And we get to the gate with fifteen minutes to spare. We just get right onto the plane and a flight attendant shows up as we're settling ourselves in and he's like, I'm your new best friend because he's holding a cell phone and uh he says, you know, like you left this in the waiting area. And I'm about to say no, no, that's not us, and he's like, as another flight attendant says, no, no, it's not them, it's somebody else, and like, I'm sorry, that's okay. We look like the kind of people that would leave a cell phone in the waiting area, and he goes, yeah, you do. By the way, I mentioned, we've been flying for forty eight hours at this point. It was brand new to us. Toddlers. The hardest part, like, you know, we did. My little one still had was a bottle fed and I was like, I don't know when she's gonna be hungry, Like I was just constantly ready to feed her. But she was in the basinette and the vibrations of the plane she slept. Oh, that was great. And I suppose the eight hours and Frankfurt worked for us because she got to run around and then she slept again. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. We should use that as a tip sometimes, right you push ridiculousness, it might all be okay. And so you come back and now you are a single mom of two young girls and you have this big job at the university, and so what was the system you put in place, Like how did you sort out childcare and your work hours? Tell us about that part. So the interesting thing again this is, you know, one of the the unique features I think about adoption is I had to figure out the child's care before I knew who the children were. So I had to go to different places to you know, like maybe it's somebody, maybe there's an infant, so I need to go to the place that has infant daycare and maybe it's going to be like twin three year olds, so that means I have to go to the place here. So I had a few different places set up, and I knew that they were going to go into daycare, and I one of the daycares for my older daughter was on campus and you had to be three in potty training to go, so I knew that was going to be all set, so that was great. And then the other one, my younger daughter went to daycare that was for infants to three year olds, and so yeah, that was they. I was home for four months with them, but they started daycare in July, I remember correctly, because I had was going up for tenure that year, so I had to get my tenure packet ready so that we could all continue. You to eat, Yes, there is that. There was that right, so they and I think it was in June. I actually started having a friend's daughter come over for a few hours, just in the mornings, like after school got out. Our school gets out early in the month of June, so she came over for a few mornings a week so the girls could get used to having somebody else besides me take care of them. And then I could also breathe. But in the beginning, what was hard is they needed to bond with me. They needed to know I was their mother. So I had to do everything, which is hard because you want people to come in and help, but I really couldn't. You know. The kind of help that they could do is a friends, you know, set up a meal train, which was great, and you know, like I would have killed for somebody to come in and do my laundry. That I would have been fabulous because Aunt of Laundry had suddenly gone up a lot for my Lord before. Yes, and it's so little, so you can shove so much in a wash and then you're, oh, yeah, I remember that, and then yeah, So because they came home in the middle of the semester, so I had the rest of the semester off, and then I already had wasn't teaching in the summer, so it worked that way. And then as I said, I arranged for the daycare before I went back also so that when I did go back, it wasn't this transition of me going back to work at the same time as I'm getting ready, you know, to drop them off a daycare. And so they did daycare and I can't really remember if they started part time or full time in the summer, but they were full time in the fall. Yeah, but you're very I mean straightforward about it, like as you said, like you need a tenure because everyone had to eat. Like it's not like this was an optional part of this family's building process. So you know, you go through that hurdle. And one of the reasons we wanted to talk with you is, I mean, some of the emails you've sent me, I guess I could quote from them, but you know that single parents have to navigate a system in society that was historically designed with two parent families in mind. And because of this, you've had to question assumptions and successfully but some myths I mean both on the parenting side, I mean what you're capable of doing there, but also on the employment side, that the sort of accommodations that are possible that people might not imagine. You know that, oh, can you go up for tenure with two new babies, Like, well, yes you can. So it turns out you can talks about those assumptions that you've been challenging. Well so. And I think part of it is that just by the nature of the fact that when I'm a single mom, and two that my kids are adopted. Right, there were a non traditional family. So therefore all of the traditional approaches or thoughts or assumptions about families don't have to exist. We have already started challenging them so we can, like Father's Day, we celebrate with my dad and instead of with a father here right in work, it's very much trying to figure out the balance between being at home and being at work and saying like, no, I can't because I'm going to you know, I can't do this at this I can't go in at work at night to do an event because I'm with my kids. Right, I'm going to balance that. But it's also you know, making having discussions with people at work because the way our sick leave and our vacation leave works out, it's two separate things. And so if my kids are sick, I can take sick leave, but if they don't have school, I'm either putting them in camp or I'm using my vacation time. And I've had conversations with people to say, like, your vacation time is so you can go take a vacation, which I understand. Right, I'm going to do my job better if I go take a vacation, and at the same time, the way it's structured it makes it hard if I'm using all my vacation time because my kids are not in school, Like, can we talk about maybe using some of the sick time for that instead. Haven't gotten them to make those changes yet, but I'm trying. We are, you know, subject to state law and all of that, so there are some constraints that we have. But it is you know, just having people think about it, because there's a lot of stuff out there that I think is set up for those two parent families. Right there is this assumption that you're going to well, it's actually set up for two parent families with one working parent exactly right, And so I think just doing it. You know, in your situations you've got two parent families and two working parents, so right there, that's challenging it. In my situation, it's one working parent, and step further, it's challenging it. And it's just saying here's this, it's what happens. You know, it works, and let's if this can happen, let's think about all the other things that can happen. This is not it's not well. And I would think I would think that the dreaded mom guilt would not apply in your situation, right, Like what single mom would feel guilty about working? Like I again, you just said you wouldn't eat. It was when the girls. I remember the when where I was going back to work right after the girls came home. I had a class once a week that I had to teach at eight o'clock in the morning, and both of my girls were in daycare, and both of their daycares opened at seven thirty, and so I, yeah, unfortunately I live in a small town, so I did it like we would, you know, be waiting at one daycare for to drop off one girl before seven thirty. So we like we were there be when the door opened, like here's the child to get back in the car and go then to the next daycare. But I remember talking to somebody and explaining this, and I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. You know, these two daycares they opened at seven thirty. It's going to be interesting. And this woman that I was talking to, she's like, I know the guilt, and I was like, the logistics loving to do it. There's no guilty here. They need to go daycare, I gotta go to work, and they need to get Yes, yeah, yeah, that's problematic here. Well, you know, I'm going to take a flying leap of assumption here that maybe not all of your students were in their seats at eight am sharp. Either's no. There were a couple of times where I would I had a TA who could set things up. He couldn't teach, but he could set things up, and I'd be like, I just get the slides ready, and I'd be like, you know, taking my coat up, take my coat and put my back down and then just start teaching. And yes, still people would come in after me. Yeah exactly, exactly, Yeah, But I think it is worth You know, what it has made me think about is and it's both. You know, I'm a the parent of black children and I'm a single parent. So there are a lot of different things about our world in society that I did not know eleven years ago, right that I do now. And it makes me just question everything and question in a way of does this need to be this way? Can we make a change, can we make it better? And I really do believe that if we improve situations to adapt to non traditional families in whatever way we actually improve the situations for all families. Yeah, right, that's wonderful. And I'm curious with I mean, with your daughter's different cultural backgrounds. I mean, do you plan to have them learn about Ethiopia and travel back there and see the country and things like that. Absolutely, they talk about it. My daughter, one of my daughters, has very distinct memories about it. We have pictures from when I was there. Yes, they we definitely will go back. It is their heritage. It's who they are. And they're very proud Ethiopians and American. That's true. You going to be both. Well. We always like to ask our guests about a day in their lives. And now your daughters are older, so you know, obviously you were getting used to them when they were toddlers, but now they are big girls. So what does the day in the life of my line look like now? So the mornings are so much nicer. You're not chopping them off at seven thirty day care, Yes, not even that. Like they get up by themselves. One of them always wakes up earlier than the other. They will go downstairs, they will make breakfast, they will make their lunches, they'll empty the dishwasher. Ooh, I know, awesome. And then and I'll get up in the perfect world, I'm up before them and reading or writing. Sometimes it's work writing, sometimes it's journal writing, doing yoga or mowing the lawn or you know, doing something before they get up. And then you know, check in with them, eat breakfast with them, and then they walk to school, which is delightly cool. And so they'll leave like eight fifteen ish. And then and even for camp this summer, they will the camp that they go to is down the street from my house. They will walk to camp like amazing state, how exciting that is. Yeah, and then do you just leave after you leave around the same time yep, and leave after that when they finish camp. Because all camps, this was if one thing I would change, all camps end at three thirty. Yeah. I mean. The one thing I have found is almost all of them seem to have after care until six. But maybe that's regional. I don't know. Yes, none of their camps used to have the camp that they went to last year, and for a few years before that did have some aftercare. But now that they're older, at the end of camp, they can take the bus to my office. Ooh, I know, so cool. Yeah, so they take the best of my office and then they'll hang out there for about an hour and then we'll come home. I'll make dinner, they'll unpacked, get ready, they'll read, they'll play, and then they'll read, get ready for bed, and then they're in bed. A good day, eightish on a summer day. Night, good night. Yeah. But they're pretty good discipline over here. Well, that sounds lovely, And I do wonder if the fact that you are single has actually helped them become more independent, which is a fantastic thing. And oddly enough, what we're talking about in the intro of this podcast, even though you didn't hear that part. So how cool. They're doing so much. They're together, they're going to camp, they go to you up. That's fantastic. Yeah. I do think that's one of the things that I mean, you basically sort of took the words right out of my mouth there, that I do think that as a single mom, they they are or in a family that is led by a single mother, they are more independent or they have more autonomy. I'm not sure they're not running free, right, I'm still decidedly in charge. But they will go out and they will do things like they have their chores. And I actually got the idea from one of your podcasts, I think, in a much earlier one with the chores, the year long term chores. K Oh yeah, thank yes, yes, kJ yes, I was getting your name. My girls their birthdays are about six months apart, so they'll switch on their birthday. So whoever's birthday it is, their birthday present is they get to pick first about which chores they want to do. I love that. That's so cool. And they fought over who got to clean the bathroom, which I don't. I'm just going to accept that one and let it go exactly so do not understand that one. And then but yeah, like even with you know, going back to the laundry, like when they were little, they had and they would dress a lot alike. They liked, you know, we picked stuff out and they would always pick out the same things, and their sizes were similar, and it would like my eyes would bleed trying to figure out whose was who's oh yeah, because you know it's the same thing. Finally, one day I got frustrated and I was just like, all right, this is your laundry basket, and this is your laundry basket. You put your clothes in your laundry basket, and I would just do each kid's laundry at once, fold it and then give the basket back and they would put it away. Great, even little one like three and a half four. Wow, totally cool. Well, I wouldn't blame you if that was your love of the week. But my yes, perhaps you have another one for us as well, dude, Well one of mine, and I wish this had existed, and I think it's come up before. I think wish this had existed when the girls were little. The grocery pickup, which was its spectacular, But the one I really love is the Target order online pick up and store, so that there's you know, we don't go into Target and they don't get all distracted by all the things that they can buy. It's a limited little list, unlimited selection of stuff. But I do love that. That's awesome. Good love of the week, Laura, what's your love of the week. Oh my goodness, Now I'm like stuck. Oh yeah, I have to come up with the no, no, no, We've been having good good stuff. Mine. I think this week. We're recording this In the summer, I've been doing mommy days with each of my kids, but leaving theme parks after just a few hours. That it turns out you don't have to stay all day, and if the kid is done, you can leave. And this is a wonderful thing. You don't have to bring out every single penny. And I'm usually done after a few hours too, So I am all in favor of the half day at an amusement park. That's my love of the week. My love of the week is Girls Get Ways, because I'm going on one tomorrow and I'm very excited about it. Yeah, Laura, I could have told you that we're like the laziest theme park people ever. We'd love to go to, like we must open seconds down. I had one thing, Oh yeah, sorry, It just occurred to me when you mentioned your Girl's Weekend, Sarah, that one of the things that I did when the girls were little is I went because I traveled sometimes for work, not nearly as frequently as you do, Laura, but you know, i'd have conferences and all sorts and I went on you know, workshops and things like that, but I made sure I went on a trip by myself before I went on a work trip, so that when I went away for work, I wasn't going to be having any of that mom guilt should it have existed that I was going to be away, because I had already been away and I knew I could do it, and I was like, great, I got rid of all of it on the trip for me, and then all work trips afterwards were very smart. Well, my Lene, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your story. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me all Right, we have for our Q and A today. A fairly short question that we got from Instagram says, I recognize the value of planning, but never seem to find time to do it. What are your tips for holding planning time sacred when there are lots of competing priorities? You guys know, we've answered a lot of planning queries on the show, but you know what, there are plenty more, so we'll talk about So my response was, Hey, you are halfway there in recognizing the value of planning. You mentioned competing priorities, but a lot of times thinking a few steps ahead makes those other priorities much easier to accomplish. You can get more done when you're not scrambling for childcare, when you order things ahead of time or have booked things in advance, just meaning you got to remember that, yes, you have other priorities, but in order to make things more seamless for you down the line, it's probably worth the investment of that time. I mean, I suggested making it part of this person's routine somewhere for me in the morning. Some people like to do in the evening, right after they as they're going to leave for work. Other people like right before bed. I think making it an automatic part of your day rather than something that you're trying to quote fit in is probably going to make things easier. And then I want Laura's response, And then I thought we could share a comment from another listener that kind of answers this question in a way. Yeah, I mean, I think having a regular time, as Sarah said, is key. And you know, I do the bulk of my planning sort of on a weekly basis, and I do it on Friday afternoons. You know, we've talked in the past about why that might be a good time for at least some chunk of people. You tend to be winding down the week at that point. A lot of people aren't willing to start new projects on Friday afternoons, so it's very easy to waste that time. And if you repurpose it for planning the week ahead, then you've turned what might be wasted time into some of your most productive minutes of the week. I also tend to do then a quick planning kind of at the end of the work day or before I go to bed for the next day, sort of looking through the schedule, and you know, planning any times I've assigned myself around what David Allen calls the hard landscape of the day or the hard escape, whatever phrase he uses. But you know, whatever meetings or time specific commitments you have. So if you see you have something at ten o'clock and you want to, you know, do an hour long project, you try to do that before your ten o'clock, right, and then you know, maybe I'll make these phone calls at eleven when I'm done with that meeting, and you know, you know how this works. So but by doing the bulk of the planning on Friday and then the night before for the next day, I find that it happens. And as Sarah said, I mean, yeah, we've have tons of priorities, but those priorities are not going to get easier to fit in if you don't think about your time. So planning is time passes, whether you think about how you're spending it or not. It's like you are on a canoe in a raging river, right. The only way to direct the craft is like try to get yourself over to the side for a little bits of time to say, okay, well that's where I see the rapids going, like that's why it see. You know, this is how I'm going to maneuver around it. If you don't do that, you're just going to go where the current's going to take you. I love that analogy because it's not like you have total control. Like we all know, there are things that are going to derail you. If you have a tsunami come by, you're going to flip over. But it doesn't mean you should just you know, let yourself drift in circles. Yeah, if that's how water works. Yeah, if that's how water works, well, this is not a water movement podcast, so we'll just well and I was going to add, so as we were. You know, we've talked about planning fatigue many times, and I just thought this was a cool response that one of our listeners wrote back to us. She wrote, Sarah mentioned keeping the planning process enjoyable. I'm considering ways to personalize that for me, which will likely involve coffee or chocolate. I also want to embrace the perspective that plannings is a means of feeling prepared and equipped for the days ahead. That would be the starting place for planning to feel pleasurable and proactive. Again, she says that one of Laura's comments also helped her to reframe planning. See it as a privilege in getting to experience things that I want to experience in ways that resonate best with me. Those events are tasks that take greatest signifants can bring it greater sense of enjoyment or accomplishment when I take the lead on planning. And then she mentions that she got her kids come up with their own summer fun lists and that they've set some goals about family adventures and kind of just involve the kids more in general in that and that that's been a fun aspect for her. So I don't know if this person who wrote in was speaking about plans that involve the family, but you know, maybe there is some stuff that can be done more more as a group, or to even outsource onto the kids. Going back to art independence discussion independence. So it comes back to that. That's a great answer and this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Mileen Lary about adoption and single parenting. We've also been talking about independent children and planning. We'll be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box 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.