The 2nd shift: evenings with your kids

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of two and soon to be three, and a practicing position. 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 episode two, The second Shift. Surviving and maybe even enjoying evenings with little kids. Both Sarah and I have spent many evenings with our kids, and certainly this is time as a working parent that you can have with your young ones. On the other hand, everyone's tired, so we got to make sure how to make the most of it. Of Course, you know, evenings with the little kids aren't the only thing we do in our evenings. We were talking earlier about our date nights. Sarah's had some fun ones on weekends recently. Although you were car shopping for a date night, Yeah, tell me about that. Totally a date night. So since we are adding to our family, we need a bigger car, and I decided that it would be a great use of time together to spend one of our date nights this month going out to a cheap and easy dinner and then driving some cars, because you know, we'll still get to talk and hang out, and I don't really know when else we're going to get that nice uninterrupted time to figure out what the best car is for us, So I'm actually pretty excited for that one. I got to say, like, maybe you need the kids in the car so that you know exactly how it will be dealt with in the course of we We took the plunge and got the mini van for kid number four, and I think basically the kids just trash the car. That's that's all I can say about that. That part doesn't bother me. Yeah, get an expensive car. I think that this is not going to be a glamorous if you guys are on glamorous like Miami Beach, right, don't you? Do you guys ever like go clubbing or anything like that, have your goal parties on the sand or something like. No, I'm sure there are people that do. I have seen friends post Instagram photos literally out at clubs, but I've found that I like my date night's best when they end at like nine or ten pm. Then I can get a lot of sleep and not feel like horrible the next morning, because in reality, six forty five am is gonna come the next day, whether or not we were out late or not. So that's true my dates. Pretty much. Kids do not care if you are up late. In fact, if you are out late, sometimes they want to get up early because they really want to see you. I know, it's like a terrible paradox. What about you guys, What do you guys usually do for date nights? So we now have regular babysitting on Friday nights, which is great because sometimes we can go do a casual Friday night dinner. I'll if my husband's working downtown we're in the Philadelphia area, I can sometimes go downtown and meet him there. Sarah and I had dinner at this place called Tallulas a couple of weeks ago, and we went back there. My good went there and had dinner, so that was a fun date night. We have started sometimes bringing our big kids, so it's not a date night, but dinner out with people who aren't going to be throwing food on the floor on some of those Friday nights too, So I'd say we probably alternate it in terms of having a kid focused Friday or a couple focused Friday. But I'm really excited. We're going to do a couple overnight in Cape may Oh. I love those we've done. We usually do a one to two of those every year, and it's amazing how just one or two nights away can feel so good. We did in Austin, Texas one once, and then there have been conferences I've tagged along with my husband too, and I love it. I think it's a great You know, the kids are going to miss you too much in two days, but it means so much for your relationship, it really does it. The conference one is good. I mean, you have to deal with the fact that you're around his work colleagues then so if that's going to like detract from your happiness, so you got to know that about yourself. If you like them, it can be fun as long as you get some couple time too. I don't know, are you the planner of the date nights in your family? Are you? Oh? My god, I'm totally the planner. So we don't have we don't have regular babysitting. Instead, I just sort of plan ahead for a month or two in advance. Friday nights actually don't work for us ever, because to be honest, he's rarely home at a reasonable hour on Friday, so that would fail. But Saturdays are our typical date night. We don't go out every night, but usually at least two weekends a month, so usually about two months in advance, I'll text our regular date night babysitter and say, hey, September third and seventeenth work for you in October, you know X, Y or Z, so I'll have it all committed. And then I do do most of the planning, and I will admit that I enjoy it. And my husband doesn't usually put in much of a fight, so that works for us. No, I love it that you've got these books like two months in advance. Anyone listening to this has probably gathered a few things about Sarah and my personalities here that we are we are. We are the planning sorts. Like the idea of planning a date night two months in advance seems cool to us, Like we're like yeah, because you get you get the anticipation of looking forward. To that night, and you're actually really more likely to be able to do cool things, like if there was a concert you want to go to, you're going to get the tickets. I already know we're seeing Arcade Fire next month, which has been on my bucket list forever, and Lady Gaga November. But if I hadn't like planned it, then it would be a lot more difficult or a lot of places that you want to get reservations if it's really yes, sehn, it's hard to get a reservation last minute. And so yeah, I love Sarah and dipity sometimes too. I mean it's kind of fun to be wandering around downtown and figure out, oh, here's a cool looking place that looks hot. Everyone should we should go there? But I mean, come on, like you're paying a sitter, Like you don't want to wait for an extra hour for a table when you're paying a sitter. And yeah, I think I think both of us have sort of realized like, even if you do like the serendipity aspect, if you'll want to make life work with little kids, you're planning. You just got a plan, and you can find the serendipity in small ways, like for example, on our car shopping date, I do not yet know where we're going to go to car shopping and where we're going to find ourselves for dinner. So even though I know what we're going to do the details, that's enough of a surprise for me. That may just be my own person. I'm good with that level of spontaneity myself. You know. I feel like there's many wonderful things in the world, and some wonderful things happen to us, but others we need to make happen. And yeah, the better date nights tend to happen when we think through it ahead of time. But speaking of thinking through life ahead of time, we've also both spent a lot of time thinking through our evenings, our evenings with our little kids. And just to explain something about both of our lives, we both work, you know, long hours and such ourselves. Our husbands do as well, and for the way things go, both Sarah and I have wound up being the parent in charge on week nights more often than that. And Sarah, what's sort of the situation with you guys? I would say that while I work, I would say regular hours, I do have a commute, so I get home at around six o'clock every day, and my husband every once in a while does come home to see our kids, but it's not something that I can count on. So he'll arrive any time between seven and thirty on an early day to midnight on a bad day cause he's in surgery here. It's it's not like that, like purposely, like I don't want to go home. He's no in a surgery that's run long, and you obviously can't leave someone on the table, absolutely, and that's part of his job description, is part of the expectations, and we signed up for this, so I'm I'm actually completely fine with it, and I will throw in as an aside. He's been really he's really great about making sure that I get time in the mornings to exercise, so that that's more my time to kind of make up for the fact that evenings, like, I'm committed to being the primary caregiver for our kids, so that works pretty well for us. But it's definitely been a thought process and a lot of trial and error of figuring out how to make the evenings work when I'm by myself. So what does it look like now? Now you have the two kids who are sort of school age. What does your evening wind up looking for you? Yes, so my kids are three and a half and five, and our evenings are way easier than they were a few years ago, which definitely gives me pause to get too overconfident because of the third one I'm expecting up ahead. But I do feel like we have a pretty nice routine. So I actually do not have dinner with the kids. I know that's you know, I went through a little period feeling guilty about that. But the few times that I tried to get home and have dinner, it was kind of too late for their dinner and they were cranky or else if they had a snack, then they weren't hungry for dinner, and it just it just really didn't work. So instead I get home at six. Our nanny, you know, sometimes a few minutes before, but she usually leaves by six. They've already had their dinner with her, and they've already had a bath. We really have the next two hours to hang out together before they're both in bed. Now, since getting pregnant, I've been especially i would say angry, and it works best for me lately if I let them watch one twenty six minute TV show while I eat dinner and gather myself to kind of make the rest of the evening ahead of success. I used to just sort of try to wait, but also that didn't work for me, and I had to let go of that little guilt factor of getting home and putting them in front of a screen for twenty six minutes. But really it has worked out for all of us. So they watch a show and then when it's over, usually they've lately requested me to write them a little note during the show, so I write them a note, and then that's kind of the signal. When it's over, they come to the table and they try to read their note or I read it to them, and we all have a snack together. We spend the next thirty to forty minutes just hanging out doing something sometime that's like building with magnetiles. Sometimes it's drawing. Once in a while, will FaceTime my parents or something like that, but something kind of all together and just chill. And then by around seven seven fifteen, we go to brushing teeth and getting changed and we read books together in my son's room. He's the younger one, and my daughter listens sometimes. She's lately been kind of ignoring us and looking at her own book, which is fine because I kind of want that to be Cameron's time. And after three or so books, I've been kind of lucky and I shouldn't stay it out loud, but he goes to bed very nicely, especially since dropping his nap by seven point thirty. And then I go to my daughter's room and we read together. Well, I read to her, although she's starting to want to read these short little books, which is adorable, but really generally I read to her like more grown up books. Right now we're reading Beesus and Ramona and then yeah, yeah, it's awesome when they get old enough that you actually enjoy what you're in to them. It's so cool. And then I do like but with her, which is my sister in law's like, she's gonna be with you until you're ten, But it works for us now, and I figure, why I mess with it? Thirteen years old? She is not gonna want you lie, Yeah, exactly. There's gonna be an end at some point, And right now it's fine because she falls asleep within ten minutes and it's just nice. So by eight fifteen, she's asleep and I get a little slice of time for myself. So yeah, that's worked out really well. What about you guys, Well, so we've gone through many iterations of this over the years. My husband is often traveling during the week, and it won't be every night. So some nights he might be, you know, Monday night, home at like six, and then we'd have a family evening together. But then he might be gone Tuesday through Thursday or something, or maybe it's he's home Monday and Tuesday and gone Wednesday through Friday. It's varied quite a bit, and that's part of how we can't really have a routine in that sense. And this has been a source of stress over the years to imagine as the number of children has stacked up, because you know, it's also the sort of different nature of the work we do too. I mean, so Sarah sees patients and that's her work, Like she has to be focused on the patients. But when she's not with the patients, there's the paperwork. But it's it's not like, oh, she could be marketing her practice or something, whereas there's something with you know, running your own business. It's like there's different things you could be doing, and so I always have that saying like, oh, I could have been working in the evening too, and so there's a lot of stress and sort of issues with that with me and my husband, and especially as I travel too sometimes. So what we have finally done now is that we have childcare until eight o'clock and I tend to be home during that time. I'm assisting with driving the kids to activities if we have those, getting to swimming or karate or whatever, and sometimes that's fun. I can just take one kid and then I don't have to be with all four of them. I have, in fact, taken all four to karate, and I wish to never experpet that sounds unreal. It was pretty unreal, and you know, my nanny doesn't like doing it either. So usually she and I are treading off right that where we have some of the kids with each of us, So it's really more of a team approach that and if my husband's home then he can be part of it as well. The family dinner thing, if we're all home, we will eat together. Otherwise it's me and the nanny and our kids will often have dinner together. But I don't think it's like any sort of sacred thing. Honestly, I know family dinner gets this total put it up on a pedestal in you know, as we talk about family life, but as you and I have both discovered, like little kids wake up early, like evening is not the only time you have the family, breakfast is totally underrated, and we do that a lot, all four of us, and I love it. I have that time before everyone goes off to work, and probably many people are actually better behaved in the morning than they add it or not. I also bet you're probably not trying to make your kids eat broccoli for breakfast. The food they're eating is probably more kid friendly food people like yogurt or pancakes or eggs cheese. It's yes, well, I will admit that my two year old has been worn to eat cheese it's for breakfast, but that that's where everything falls apart by kid number four. So the older the older three do not do that, and they never even think that it's a possibility. So they haven't they haven't totally grasped that the rules appear to be totally different for their little brother than for the rest of them. But that's okay. Maybe they can continue in that for a while, but the evening is we have homework obviously that needs to get done. Our general rule is that homework before TV and video games, and my seven year old loves video games, so that has been a good thing for getting him to do his homework promptly. He walks right off the bus and does it just so that then he's got the rest of the evening to do what he wants to do. My issue more is have it as the kids get older, and even to some degree before, Some of my children don't need much sleep, so the evening can be pretty long when I just had one. My oldest son does not need much sleep, and it's not that I'm letting him stay up watching stuff. I mean, he'll just lie awake in bed if he's there with the light out, and I will come in an hour later, need still be awake, and at some point I feel like this is just cruel, so I will let him stay up later, and he will honestly stay up later than me. So there's not really much time that has not kid in the evening, which is that he's at least at an age where he can be pretty independent, right, I mean reading? Yeah, So he reads, he writes his little stories and stuff. And that's another reason we wound up having the childcare till ten, not till ten till eight, Sorry we don't have until ten, huh till eight? Is that I can have a little downtime for me sometimes between like seven and eight, and then if I don't get it later, I'm less upset about it. So that is another upside of that. For one thing I did want to talk about though, because I sometimes work at night, I used to do more work at night after the kids went to bed. That's become less of an option as they get older and they want to talk with you during that time. There's just not a huge slice of time anymore between when I'm trying to get the big kids in bed and when I need to be in bed. If I'm waking up with the little guy who will wake up at five point thirty in the morning, you know, to get my seven and a half hours, I have to be in bed at ten, and you know my kids don't even want to be in bed at ten. There's not as much time. But for years I would do more of that what I call the split shift. And I know a lot of professional women, this is what you do. You come home at a reasonable hour, spend the evening with your kids, do more work at night after they go to bed. And I've studied a lot of time logs over the years, and this is how this is how women work the hours they need to and yet still have family time too. And there's been a lot of articles out there saying, well, women will never work fifty hours a week because you know you'd be working till eight o'clock at night, and so you'd never see your kids since, first of all, like, well, I don't know about you. My kids wake up in the morning, so even if I didn't see them at night, I'd be seeing two hours of them in the morning. But that's not the way many professional women work. That they come home in the early evening or even late afternoon, sometimes have family time, do more work at night after the kids go to bed. Can be good, But Sarah does not do that. I was gonna say, I'm a total variation on that, but one that works for me. I read this really fascinating book about chronotypes, and I am like your classic early riser. Like for me, staying up past ten o'clock is a major challenge. But I'm really good at waking up in the wee hours, like it doesn't bother me at all. So if I have a project that I need to get done, I am pretty likely to get up at four thirty or five and spend a solid two hours working on it before the kids are awake and before the day needs to begin. And for me, that works a million times better than attempting to do it at nine o'clock at night, when I would just be like distracted and zoning out in front of my computer and very slow. So that's the alternate split shift for the early birth early birth, and you have to know yourself, So yeah, no, are you better off going to bed waking up early doing your work in the morning if you don't know when your kids will wake up, that's kind of risky proposition. If you know they'll wake up later, then that can work the nighttime many people. Even if you do have the ability to work at night, sometimes your mental energy level isn't that great, so that could be a good time for sort of those lower energy tasks, like if you need to return the emails that absolutely have to get sent, you, editing a report if it's just light editing for the next morning, or looking over notes for a meeting in the morning. That's the kind of thing that's good for that split shift. At night. You probably are not going to, I don't know, write the Great American Novel at nine thirty pm. At least I know I am not going. Some people can. Some people are naturally inclined to that. Some people are. If you are, and this is how you know you are a night out is if you are writing the Great American Novel at nine thirty pm, a lot of people, you know, will be like, oh, I'm not a morning person. It's like, well, okay, the reason you think you're not a morning person is because you're tired in the morning. But that's because you're staying up late at night. But if you look at what you're doing, you're just like on this like two hour Instagram vender, you know, looking at photos on Facebook of people you didn't like in high school anyway, So that's that's that's kind of a different matter. But you know, if you are going to do the split shift, one thing a lot of people have told me is works, is you got to bake a make a to do list for that second that split shift the you know, if you're working say eight pm to ten pm, because the temptations are so great. I mean, it's nice to have a beginning and an end. Yeah, so map it out, say, like I'm going to answer these four email I'm going to look at these notes for tomorrow morning and set this agenda for Friday's meeting. Okay, and when I'm done with that, I'm done. I Am not gonna have that temptation to do just one more thing, just one more thing, because you're probably gonna want some me time after that, you know, I really do, and I do think this is going to be more of a challenge when I'm dealing with adding pumping sessions and the baby. But I really make a point of having something for myself each night after I put the kids to bed. And it doesn't have to be big. It can be watching one thirty minute show like I'm working through the last season of the MINDI Project right now, or reading a book for forty five minutes in bed. And I'm a total nerd, but I actually often will like in the beginning of the day, when I'm sort of planning my day, I'll write out what I want to get to and somehow just again that's part of being a natural planner, having that little thing to look forward to. It really, I don't know, it makes the evening go smoothly. It just sort of ends the day on a good note. Of course, sometimes I get to actually spend some time with my husband and he gets home before I'm going to sleep, so that's always nice too, But it's not necessarily something I can count on, whereas fifteen minutes in bed with my book, Like I know I can make that happen one way or the other. Fifteen minutes is so much better than nothing. I mean, we don't have to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. But I mean there's lots of things you can do for yourself at night, Like a lot of people do have some time before they go to bed for fun stuff, and so make sure it's something you really want to do, that you're really looking forward to, reading a good book or a show you really like, or anything like our hobby. Like some people like to do crafty stuff at night. That could be a great time for it. I guess the one other thing we've found, which is kind of fine. You know, sometimes it can start to feel like the evenings with kids, it can start to feel like this just march from you know, dinner, bath, bed, Everything is the same one night after another, and sometimes it's fun just to bust up the routine a little bit. I agree, especially if it's if it really is kind of a special occasion kind of thing. What have you done? Have you done anything? Recently? We went out for ice cream with the big kids. My husband had taken two of the kids for a swim team tryout, so that went well, and so we went out for ice cream afterwards to celebrate. So that was a fun evening activity that we could do. But even it could just be like playing outside or going to a playground in the evening if it's summer, or if you're in a place where that's possible. You know, I've seen people do like a six pm movie some night, just for fun. You know, you don't want to do this every night, of course, but something that makes life a little bit more exciting and memorable can be fun for the evening, like what have you done? Well? We like the post the rare swim night so not late at night, because night swimming not quite working so well with the three year old, but especially in the days where I'm off, if I take them out at like four thirty pm, they will totally have a great time and tire themselves out by six in the pool. And that's just kind of shakes things up a little bit enough that we still can get all the bedtime stuff done, but just breaks it up. I really like it. We've done movies out or even something social on a weeknight once in a while, and again rare, not our typical because there's homework, and while there will be homework and there's lots of other stuff going on, but every once in a while having another family with the same age kids over, or even just like my friend hosted a movie night to watch The Descendants too, and we all came over on a Friday night with the kids at like five, and that way it was sort of like movie played eate dinner. It was great. So broke up the routine without being too Disruptive's that's great because you want to enjoy this time too. It's important to enjoy it. I always think life is better when it's actually fun, which brings us to our love of the Week segment. So this is the segment where we talk about something we are loving now be a strategy, a product, a service that is making our lives easier. Sarah, what do you got this week? Well, my love of the week, I'm not sure everybody's gonna think of is so fun, But my love of the week is our treadmill, and to me it is kind of fun or I guess just really really useful and really beloved because I just find being able to do workouts either at home or right outside my door is one hundred percent the way I've wanted to go since having kids. I mean, I will rarely throw in like a boutique, you know, like did some flybar workouts, but I just find it with the driving time, I just have better things to do. So I got a treadmill when our daughter was about four weeks old because I just knew that I'd want to be working out again, but didn't want to have to leave her alone or try to find a babysitter at that age. So the treadlee was the perfect solution. And it actually went dormant for a while because I did almost all of my runs outside since moving to Miami Beach. But this summer, being pregnant in the heat of the summer, I embraced it again and I'm just loving it. I'm doing three to four runs a week. I don't feel shame how incredibly slow I'm going. I take walk breaks. I mean the air conditioning. Yeah, so that is my love of the week for this week. So I think my treadmill could be my love of the week every week. But treadmills are I mean, I would much rather run outside always, but the treadmill is the alternative that makes working out possible. I would rather run outside except when it's like literally like feels like one hundred and that would be that would be one of the reasons where the treadmill is the alternative, right or exactly you know here I live in Pennsylvania. If there's ice on the roads, clearly running on those verses is somewhat of a not going to happen. But so yeah, treadmills are awesome. I'm going to have a related love of the week, which is my as you say, athleta athleta. I don't know how you say. I think I always said Aleta. But they have these running pants they called the Dobby B. Free Nickers. Again, when I say this is not sponsored at all, I'm just saying that I like these. That's why we don't know how to pronounce. We don't know how this was sponsored. They would have told me, right, So anyway, absolutely, the thing with running outside, and especially if you go for any distance kind of running, is you need pockets. And I feel like a lot of women's workout gear is all about looking cute. And the honest truth is, I don't care if I look like a pack mule when I am out on a trail or if I'm like running ten miles on the road somewhere, I don't care what I look like. I want my pockets, so I have my phone in one, I have, you know, my car keys. If I run somewhere to run, I have my driver's license, and the other if I need like choose or gels because I'm going ten miles or something, you know, I need my pockets. These are the only running pants I've found that have two huge side pockets. They have a zipper pocket in the back so you can put your key or your license in that one and it won't fall out, and it's awesome and yeah, okay, I don't look like the sleekest thing ever with a phone or like gels, on hanging out of my hips. But I know not all of us are are very excited about looking cute while working out, like some of us actually just want to get the workout in. So I appreciate these pants. Those are the Dobby B free Nickers. If anyone wants to wants to look those up, I feel like I would probably love them, except that it's probably too hot to wear them here. That could totally be true. My body is such that I don't know. The loose running shorts have never quite worked for me in terms of I kind of need the compression away bit. Yeah, no, it's good stuff. Our last segment is our listener slash reader questions. We're recording these first episodes now, so we'd love to hear from people who've listened to us. If you want to reach out to us through social media or our blogs, you can email me. I'm el Vanderkamm at yahoo dot com, but send us any questions. The first questions we have, though, come from Sarah's blog The shoebox dot com with her readers have one, so we have one this week. What is it screen time? Yeah, we're gonna this could be its own episode, as were many of the questions that were sent in. They were awesome questions, very thought provoking. But we got a comment that said, I would love to hear your thoughts on screen time and smartphone usage. My baby is only ten months old, and they refer to an article that terrified them that recently came out in The Atlantic, talking all about how screen time has affected our youngest generation, leading to increased risks of mental illness, or at least that's what the association that the article was making. So I'll start because I did read the article after this reader pointed it out, and I was a little alarmed by the article as well, just because I do think that, you know, over reliance and over addiction, I guess to these devices can be very problematic in children, and I feel like I've started to see the effects and some families and kids that I see at work. But I also don't think screens are the end all, be all evil, and our personal philosophy is really just moderation. So when our kids were really little, we really didn't do too much. But I will say certainly my second one had TV at a pretty young age, just because I had the two under two, and sometimes I just needed to turn on a screen to help me with my toddler for a little bit. And I really don't think that's bad parenting or the end of the world. Again, not four hours of god knows what, but like half an hour or an hour or a movie, an age appropriate programming. I don't see anything wrong with that, and I think that can help everybody. And I will say, we're in an era where it's so much easier to get commercial streaming content, so our kids are not inundated with breakfast cereal commercials and the like if we don't want them to. Right now, my kids are obsessed with the show Wildcrats, which is a PBS show where they talk about wildlife and animals, and it really doesn't make me feel even guilty to let them watch it, so it's great. So I guess my thoughts moderation. I think in the younger ones, you do have to be a little bit careful. And I personally and my husband is with me on this, we tend to kind of avoid the devices because both of us find things like phones and iPads to be much more sort of addicting and sucking in, and our kids are little and just don't need it, so the only time they've really ever used those things, or on plane rides or very long car trips, because at that point anything goes Yeah, how about you. I'm in the moderation camp too. I feel like some of this it just goes in waves. And when you're on vacation. We're recording this during summer break, there's gonna be more screen time probably than when you're in school and you have school all day and then activities, and then by the time the kids get home and do their Hammork there early isn't even that much time for being on screens. We definitely use it with the early rising little one because it allows the adult who is with the two year old to lie down on the couch and attempt to sleep while you have a super early I have a super early two year old, and so you know, honestly, if I am up at five point thirty on the weekend, he can watch hours of cartoons for all the care. I am not going to apologize for that at all. It is what makes life kind of doable. So I feel like, you know, there's probably gonna be studies coming out on whatever. You can come up with a study on anything you want. I mean, this is the reality of research and lots of people doing stuff. As you find one sort of statistically significant outcome and then make a big headline about it, whereas there may be ten other hypotheses you were testing that didn't work out, and then you don't ever say, like nine out of the ten things I was checking didn't actually work out. That's not a headline that you ever see. And yeah, that's such an issue in science. I am general and so I know that, you know, there are studies looking at for instance, when TV was introduced through the country at sort of different points, Different areas got accessed to more television at different points. The kids who were in the areas that got TV first were not behind the others in school. They were not worse behaved. If anything. What they found is that English language learning children did better in school. That's because they were watching TV at home and so they you know, weren't getting English from their parents. But by the time they got to school, they had you know, seen American TV and so they had learned English. So I think it's all things in moderation. But screen time is not as evil as lots of parenting literature would make it out. To be. I think you're right, all right, We'll go with that. Well. Thank you for listening to this episode. We're recording a few to gather at the beginning, but we aim to be weekly by the time we're up and running with this podcast. Please feel free to send us your questions and we look forward to connecting next time. 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.