Get Cozy & Enjoy Your Fall

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, a 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 two hundred and nineteen. We'll be talking about all things fall, how to get cozy and enjoy this season. So I know we have had the pumpkin spice talk before, Sarah, but for our listeners who might have missed that, are you into pumpkin spice? Are you suggesting that there are listeners that do not closely listen to every other everything. I would say, well, it's it's just possible. I'm throwing that out there that maybe maybe somebody is just coming to this podcast for the first time and hence missed our previous pumpkin spice latte discussion. Well, it's so welcome. I hate to dismay you, but neither of us seem to be pumpkin spice fans. We're sorry, yes, but you were like other things pumpkin. Yes, so I am not anti pumpkin by any means, and I still would like to try the pumpkin cold brew or pumpkin cream cold Lauras shaking her head. I had heard, I'd heard through the grapevine that if you weren't a huge pumpkin spice latte fan, then that would be a good alternative. So I got to try it at least once. My sister actually says she will get the pumpkin spice latte, but with just one pump instead of I think the usual three, and she says that actually makes it good, more subtle pumpkin flavor. Okay, that's probably a good idea, so maybe I'll try that. But we actually, I think this is the second year in the row we did this. We went to Trader Joe's and just like made it an activity to buy everything pumpkin that we saw. Basically, we attempted to do this in late September or like mid September, and it was too early, like there were only a couple of things. We went back again right before. I think it was like a very end of September, and it was like pumpkin extravaganza everywhere, so many options. We came home with pumpkin soamosas and pumpkin like sauce for pasta, and pumpkin salsa and pumpkin ice cream, and of course some pumpkin cookies. And the kids even liked the pumpkin spice hummus. But I thought that was like crossing the line. Yeah, and that other major thing of fall, how about boots? How do you feel about boots? Boots are not a fall item around here. They are a winter item, and even then it's questionable. I really enjoy boots, especially like the short ankle ones. And the thing is, since our boot wearing season is so short here, our boots don't get a lot of so I don't have a reason to replace them very often, so I'm often finding myself wearing like five year old boots that are look fairly new. So I hope I can still get away with wearing the ankle ones because I think they're really cute, and I have two comfortable pairs that I like that's cool. Yeah, so up north, the I mean the season for wearing nice boots, because you wouldn't want to wear nice boots out in the snow, right like. So there's there's the distinguishing different categories of boots. So there's the cute like leather or suede boots, and those are definitely a fall thing because in January, when there's ice and snow, that would just ruin your boots. So then you have to wear boot boots as in like snow boots if you wish to wear boots, and that's a different matter entirely. I do own the big snow boots, but they're not particularly cute, so I don't know. I never wind up really wearing my boits. I own a few pairs of boots, but it always seems like more trouble than it's worth because if it is fall like, you tend to sort of wear just the slip ons or something that are right by the door. Still, that's what I do. I guess there will be a point where it is too cold to wear those because you know, I'll want socks, but it will be not snowing yet. So I guess at some point in November, the Boots may make their appearance. We'll see. We'll keep you all posted on the Boots season and when it is. But yet, this episode is going to just be a discussion of all things fall. We'll talk about some of our fall fun activities, about our favorite ways to get cozy for the season, and then we will pivot into a way to sort of use Q four to set yourself up, that's quarter four, to set yourself up for a great next year, to sort of really bring it home at work, particularly for those people who are facing down end of your performance reviews and that sort of thing. So that will be our discussion today. So, Sarah, I mean fall is not really fall though in Florida, is it? It is not, But I feel like I've actually successfully worked on a reframe. I used to get really mad in the fall because everyone was showing like crisp mornings and leaves and I'm like, we don't have many of that. This isn't fair. But okay, this is like my eighth fall here, So I'm like, you know, settling in kind of feeling a little more like a Floridian and instead of fall being crisp and involving leaves, it's more like it's not disgusting out like, which is actually a celebration in its own break. Yes, even if it's kind of more the temperatures that you might think of as summer up north, the humidity is definitely a little bit less, and it is more pleasant to spend extended amounts of time outside now than it was even a month ago. And I feel like that is worth celebrating. And I just kind of know that it's like that trade off, right, Like we have a very lovely December and January in which we can just wear boots ornamentally and don't need to walk through ice and snow, and so you know, the trade off for that is that our fall is not so cool and Chris, but I think I've come to a yeah, to a more positive place with my acceptance of our type of fall that we have. Yes, exactly, even if it doesn't involve the sweaters and pumpkin spice latte and boots, and you can still do lots of fall themed things as we're going to talk about. You know, you don't need to have the cris weather and the leaves. Of course, that's a bonus. And I do hope that we weren't able to get it together this year with the uncertainty of COVID and stuff. We'll talk later. We are going to do some family travel later. But I do have a dream of doing a specific leaf trip, like just you know, four days, like in the Berkshires or something where we just fly maybe to Albany or something and just ogle the leaves and walk on some trails and enjoy that traditional fall drink some cider, and fly home. So that will happen. That is a dream of mine. Not this year, but eventually eventually. Well that's cool. So I make a Fall fun list every year I post on my blog for people who read Laura vandercam dot com. I posted that a couple weeks ago, because the truth is, it can be very easy to blow through the peak weekends of fall. It's really only about three weekends where the leaves are at their peak before they pretty much fall off, and then you're just into winter for the rest of that several month experience. So if you want to enjoy the fall activities during peak fall time to kind of have to plan ahead. And that's especially true since fall is also peak kids sports season, and so we wind up with a lot of these days, these weekend days where there's like a soccer game at two and so it like cuts up the day. So you can't necessarily go for a long triple, at least not with everyone. You'd have to split the family what you can do. But if you want to say, go for a hike somewhere, you kind of have to look ahead and say like, oh, well, here's the one weekend where baseball and soccer happened to both be on Saturday, so we should take Sunday and go do a family trip or something like that, or you know, this is the soccer game is at four o'clock, and so in fact, you wouldn't have to be thinking about it till three thirty. And so if you got up on time, you could go do something, you know that involved driving an hour to go hike in the leaves. We live about ninety minutes from the Pocono's, which is not huge mountain range, but enough to have the sort of fall mountain color sort of thing. So you know, it's it's uh, it's all good. We've got our plans, we're actually going up to well we can we can talk about our fall travel in a second, but that we'll be definitely going to see some leaves. It's just even getting out in nature as a Sarah was saying, like just having some more outside time during this mild weather. I took three of my kids for a short hike on a nearby trail on Saturday morning, and it was just cool to see the slightly changing colors and the feel of that crisp air. So what's on your fall fun list? Sarah? Yeah, our fall fun list? Well, okay, I'm trying to figure out which part of this paper is on. Okay, it's right here. So the first one is that we are definitely going to do a little play date at a nearby quote unquote pumpkin patch. I'm sure they don't grow the pumpkins. Maybe they bring them in. It's actually a strawberry farm in South Miami, and it's it's great. They have like a whole like food area and normally you can pick strawberries, but they basically turn it into like a fall festival. So, like you, I have to look ahead on the calendar. For us, it's less most of our sports are actually fairly early, so we haven't gotten into the afternoon games, cutting up the entire day yet, but for us, it's our call schedule, so there's like limited weekends where we could actually do something all together, and so we already figured out the day we're going to go to. That one thing we love to do that's really simple is that Genevieve especially enjoys looking at everybody's Halloween decorations. So again, since the weather is less disgusting, taking a walk around to you know, rate everybody's different. Our neighborhood gets really into it, so look at it. But he's decor Obviously, the process of getting costumes and all the Halloween stuff can be spread out or not, depending on your style. It's never been my favorite holiday, but I've gotten more into it as the kids, i think, have gotten older and it allows for a little bit more socializing. Last year we did Halloween with my daughter's best friend and their mom and that was great. And then I guess on our list included is fall travel, so you know, Thanksgiving is fall, and Thanksgiving is actually not that far away if you really look at the calendar and think about it. So we have this will be our first family plane trip since the pandemic, but we're all going to North Carolina to hang out with my family, and then we're actually flying back in time for Thanksgiving because my husband's working, So we're gonna have like a two family Thanksgiving this year, and I'm very excited about it. I'm hoping the kids will be vaxed by the time we get on the plane, but if not, we are still going and they'll just mask up and we'll be Maybe we have some natural immunity too, right, So Familia, hope those annibodies are antibodies are going you're strong. Yeah, we're going to When this airs, we will have been. But we are going to my brother's wedding in upstate, New York, which is going to be peak fall weekend. You know. We had to book our airbnb far ahead of time. We're staying this old farmhouse and going to their outdoor wedding and so hopefully the weather will be good and the leaves should be changing and it'll be very nice. We're also going to do some apple cider events and apple picking while we're there, even though apples are more of an early fall fruit, as we find out every year. This year, I got my honeycrisps on the right time. It was an August picking fruit not an October picking fruit, but whatever apples are associated with falls, so they still have some going. It's just not the ones that I like to eat. But anyway, we'll do apple picking in upstate New York, so that should be really beautiful. I'm excited about that. I always like the leafing trips and definitely want to do more of those in the future as well as you do and go to the Berkshire's or Vermont. Very early and my husband and my knowing each other, we went on a long weekend trip to Vermont in October and it went camping. It was kind of fun to see all the leaves and white farmhouses, very picturesque, so that was good. Yeah, we're doing some bo at the zoo type things, you know. I have to figure out where we're going to go hike. We go to this place called Hawk Mountain often that's about an hour and twenty minutes from here, that has some great trails. The Apple Aachian Trail actually goes right past it, but they also have some really kid friendly trails, like this River of Rocks where you walk down a hill for about fifteen twenty minutes and then you get these rock fields. It's just like a river that turned into boulders. I don't know if boulders came down at some point in the ice age, but it's just a sea of rocks, and of course the kids look to climb all over the rocks, and it's kind of a fun thing for them to do, so we might wind up there. I have aspirations to take a coastal fall trip on my own, probably because I'll have to do it on a weekday. I think to drive down maybe to Cape May and see the changing leaves along the way, and then the coastal fall landscape, maybe some birds, although again the bird migration is earlier, so these things don't line up quite as you wish. But you know that should be fun too, so I'm looking forward to that. And then there's the idea of, well, let's take our ad break real quick and we'll be right back. We're back, But I have a question about your coastal trip. Is this I know you were talking about doing like a writing retreat. Would this be the writing retreat or would this be just for fun? Oh? Now that is an interesting idea. I would have to get myself to gather to make that happen. But that could actually be really cool. Maybe I will float that idea. I had thought I might do it in early November, but if I get myself going on book revisions, I can probably be done by late October. I'm trying to sort of time the early November can still work. The first weekend of November does still have good leaves, and that's when our family photos are being taken. So yeah, that coulpacity work, I have to you know, that's a good question. I will write that down. Good idea. Maybe I could combine it well, I don't want to short change the fund. No, No, it's good, No, But I mean it'd be great to sort of see it and then have a place to go to and then work for two days uninterrupted on editing this manuscript, which is what I really need to do around this point. So we're talking about all things fall and of course there's the Fall Fund stuff. There's also just like little things you can do to embrace the cozy, whether it is cozy, whether or not. Do you guys have a fireplace? Is that even a thing we did in Miami Beach, which is crazy And I don't know if it's like a climate change thing like did that that house was built in nineteen thirty four. Was it significantly cooler, I'm not sure? Or was it just like all these Northerners moved from north and couldn't imagine life without a fireplace, And then we had like a little gas thing in there. I think we lit it like once, Yeah, maybe maybe never. I don't know, especially I have one that doesn't really like do heat right, it's just like electric. You see, you see flame looking things if you have your you know, cozy feeling. I love fireplaces, except you know, it's got a lot of trouble to start an actual fire. We are converting to gas fireplaces in our new home, although then we had to do ventless in some of them because the chimneys are old enough that bringing them up to code to do the vented normal gas fireplace was just going to be ridiculous. Like there were we had multiple companies come in and some claim they couldn't even do it. So you may ponder that if you are ever seeing people have gas fireplaces in nineteen hundreds houses, you might ask, what if they're ventless. If they're ventless, they just ignored the code, where does it go? Like? Where did well? I just I don't know, but it doesn't have to have the same They're smaller flames, I mean, among other things. So it's it's not quite the quite the same experience, although you can make it look slightly more real through the way the logs are designed. Anyway, that's that's what we have for that. So it'll be nice and cozy, we you know, it's I have my sweaters just because it's cold, my scarves. I like wearing my scarves. I like to go to cute little coffee places in fall. That's always a good, sort of foolish kind of thing. I'm looking forward to meeting somebody for coffee at a cafe that's a really cute one. What else, Yeah, like there's some restaurants that sort of have fireplaces and you know, sort of darker decor. It's kind of fun to seek those out as well. Yeah, steakhouse is definitely like much more of a fall winter vibe and less of a summer I totally agree. There's definitely a whole look right, like the plaid and even just getting out your blankets even if you don't really need them, having some candles around. I'm totally gonna get some candles for this season, just to have something hopefully like a little spicy smell going on or something. We made a list of Halloween movies and we like taped them to the bottom of the TV with some washy tape. They were having fun like checking them off and at least, you know, looking for stuff to watch. If anybody there's a repository of them on one of my blog posts, oh nice, I find it. Yeah. I've been doing Fall themed puzzles, doing one that unfortunately I'm now like in the stage where there's one hundred pieces of blue sky and I am just not feeling it at the moment. So we will see if I actually finished that one, or might use the excuse that we're getting our real estate photos taken soon. It would just like clear it off the table and I couldn't finish. Oh well, didn't feel like doing the one hundred pieces of blue sky. And an idea for a story that would be about a character who did the blue sky parts of puzzles first and what that would say about you if you were the sort of person who didn't leave it toward the end. But you'll see, and I may I may attempt Nao Ramo National novel Writing with We'll see again if I finish the book that I'm actually contracted to right now. If I knit, this would be a wonderful time. And by the way, this is a verbal hello to whoever the listener was that said hi to my sister the other day. Sarah's sister owns Warm and Fuzzy Yarn and Carrie, North Carolina, which you should all go visit if you are in a yarn needing mood and happen to be in Carrie, North Carolina. You can also order online, right, so you have to also tell her how you found her. Yes, it's fun. So, yeah, we just embraced all things fall and the Q four. I mean, Sarah does Q four Q five because she knows Quinn tiles. But it's just such a festive time of year because you start around here, especially with the fall color, and then come into the holiday season, and so I know every part of the year has its own special aspects to it, but I really like this quarter because of that. And so pivoting from talking about fall per se, we're you know when you think about it as Q four. Many people have sort of business associations or goal setting for their upcoming year associations with Q four, and this can be a great time to think about that we will do. Don't worry a whole goals episode we always do as a nod to our lovely expert on planning here who I don't know. We could do like ten goal episodes right for you. That would be a lot. I really enjoy our goals episodes though, and we tend to get like other people like them too, so we got to keep them going. Be a nudge for all of us to set our goals. I often do because Sarah says, we're doing our goal setting episod, so then I set my goals for the next year. It's all good, but if you are, you know, ending up the year, this could be a great time to think about how can I end the year strong right and thinking about like what sort of professional goals did I set myself for the year, and are any of those are aspects of those still obtainable now? Because for many places you know that do say annual performance reviews in late November. Curiously enough, what you do in October winds up being far more important for the review than what you did in February, even if they are of equal importance overall for your company's performance. It's just that humans have this recency bias. They're like, oh, yeah, look she remember she just did this, and so you know, it winds up mattering moral this. Sarah, you get your review in June, right, So I guess that. Yeah, so every company is probably different. We our fiscal year runs from May to April, and so all of our reviews are in June. So I guess I could say the same thing about the Spring. Got to complete out the projects. Everyone's going to remember my spring productivity. That's so that's true. That is so true. But you can use that to your advantage, which means that if you said, like, oh, well what could I do in October in early November, that would really make people say, whooh, she had a good year. I mean, maybe it's that you produce some document about you know, your you know, white paper on your particular area of expertise, and you circulated around the organization people like, oh, yeah, she's got thought leader aspects of that, or you know, you maybe it's a client you've been really sort of nurturing along and then you can really kind of push them to like now convert into something because people go, oh, yeah, she's bringing in the business, you know, all sorts of things like that. Or if you're looking to start a new lunch and learn series at your organization, or launch that mentoring program or whatever it is that you've been thinking of doing, now could be a really good time to make that happen. And often, you know, these things don't take nearly as much time as you might imagine. It's just they're often hard to make happen because they're never urgent. But if you said, Okay, I'm going to devote x hours for the next four or five weeks too, then you'd probably be pretty far along by that point. Definitely, there's enough time left in the year you can get a lot done. You know, if you wait until December to look at your to reevaluate your twenty twenty one goals, it's probably too late. But now it's a great time because you can probably finish up some of that stuff that you were so excited about in the beginning of the year, or personal goals too. Right like if you were, you know, looking to run more regularly, you could actually sign up for a Thanksgiving turkey trot or one of those jingle bell five k's or something, and could in fact teach yourself to run three miles by six to eight weeks from now. I mean, that's not an undoable thing for people who are in rest shape. So yeah, I mean that would be totally doable. Or you know, there's lots of fitness challenges that are thirty days, and there's more than thirty days left in twenty twenty one, so you could definitely say you've done that by the end of the year. That's one of the reasons I like nao raimo, because I'm like, hey, I actually wrote that novel manuscript this year, which I've done a few times now. It's a rewarding thing to have ended the year strong that way. Now, something else that I think is a natural thing to think about when you are starting to plan your next year is meetings. You will notice that this is the time if you work for an organization, when all of a sudden you get a million meeting invites for the next year because whoever schedules and meetings realizes, ooh, I have to send out the outlook invice for twenty twenty two because maybe the I don't know, I don't know if it's just where we work. But I have a suspicion this is not an uncommon thing and that hopefully maybe if you hear this should prompt you to think about hmm, if you have any control of do these meetings need to be monthly? Do they need to be an hour? Do they need to include everyone on the list? Maybe, just as someone is sending that, you might want to push back if you think it's totally appropriate. Hey, these meetings are really useful to me, but I think we could complete the agenda in twenty minutes if we circulated a document prior. This would be a great time because people are probably a little bit more open to change as they feel like they're opening a new quote unquote series of these meetings, and it kind of makes sense to defensively work on your calendar before it's kind of all laid out for you, because it's a lot harder to fight back against a meeting that's next week, But when it's like March of twenty twenty two, people are probably going to be more open to thinking about that. So this would be a good time to do it. Yeah, I mean, just the whole idea of having to renew the I mean the problem with standing meetings is that they never have to earn their place on the calendar. They happen because it's Tuesday. And so if you get this wonderful opportunity to say, like, oh wait, it isn't scheduled in Tuesday for perpetuity, I've always wondered about that. I don't use electronic calendars really, so like, do you have the option to have the Tuesday meeting continue forever? You do? But and again I can only speak to like where I've been. Usually some sort of administrator, like an assistant or something will send out like a series and it will include like a year's worth, so it'll be like, you know, accept the meetings from January first to December whatever they So I think maybe that is designed to prevent like infinite meetings. I mean, it's electronics, so why not. I mean it could go through too, But where would your endpoint be? Like is there some point where the calendar stops? I mean, there wouldn't happen to me. I think the reason that they don't do them all at once is because sometimes there might be irregularities, some leaders on vacation, and they want to be able to like look ahead kind of like versus having to move something later, so they might work with the head boss and say, hey, do these twelve months work Okay, great, click, and they'll all be Tuesday, except for some months they've moved to Thursday, because whoever can be So again, I'm sure it's probably different everywhere, but I also think the practice of like block scheduling a year's worth or six months worth is probably pretty common and should be an invitation to to think about what is being because that's a lot of time and a lot of people's I'm just pondering somebody's electronic calendar having that Tuesday ten am meeting in the year three thousand. Guess what the first Tuesday of January is on the eighth. That's so sad, I know, well, and I mean because well, the thing with these recurring meetings again is like the truth is, there will come a Tuesday where this meeting will not happen, and even before that, maybe there's a Tuesday when you're not at it. So it's like all things do end, even if this meeting is scheduled in perpetuity, So we just have to decide at which point it is going to end. And maybe that is earlier. Maybe it is January of this year where you decide that we don't actually need to meet every Tuesday at ten am, So take that upon yourself to try. But one thing you do want to schedule for the upcoming year is your vacations. So Sarah, this this is you look at this right, you know, tell us percent. I love those spreads in your planner where you can, like my aeron conjurent actually goes all the way till the end of twenty twenty three, which is like glorious, Like there's like they're tiny, like little mini boxes, but it's enough space so I can like think ahead. I mean, I don't think that far ahead, because actually I don't have a school calendar that goes that far ahead as of now. But at least I certainly already know spring break for twenty twenty two. I've already started thinking about where we want to travel in the summer of twenty twenty two. We are thinking about sleep away camp this summer, So figuring out those dates in twenty twenty two and this is the time to claim your vacation days now. It's a little trickier depending on if you have a call schedule that doesn't get to put out. So the only thing I can't do that's a little bit frustrating is like, I have a goal that and we'll get to this in a soon episode of doing like a little mini getaway with Josh every quarter or so. But those are a little harder to schedule because they kind of depend on which weekends he's working, and I don't want to necessarily block that off ahead of time because there is some flexibility, but I also find that when I don't, it does become hard. So I guess maybe the answer is just to be like, those are days you won't be on call. Period done well, I mean, you know, and especially popular dates. So presumably if you are in an organization where most of the people are local, you are not the only person who has kids in that school district. So if you are interested in traveling somewhere on the school breaks, you need to probably figure that out earlier rather than later, because there will be a high demand for those dates. And I'm not saying that you get all of them. That wouldn't really be fair to your colleagues either, But if there's one in particular that you want to aim for, you should probably go for that and get that on the calendar very soon. In Q four is a good time to make that happen. Yes, all right, should we get to our question here? I think's a cute question, so here I will read it. Sarah has her first answer for it, so she's this person writes in my oldest started kindergarten two weeks ago. So I guess this is like a fall themed question right there. Probably much of the art we're talking about is also fall themed. So anyway, she came home the first day with a coloring sheet of my first day of kindergarten. We ood and odd appropriately and put it on the fringe. Since then, she now has a folder that comes home every day with two to three worksheets and drawings and so forth. I love to have her show me what's in your folder as a way to hear about what she's learning at school, But I am already over the volume of kindergarten worksheets on our kitchen table. Of course, the idea that we might throw out what she just worked hard on all day as a non starter with the kindergartener. So what do you do with the school work? Do you keep it for a while, do you sneak it into the recycling bin at night, have the child choose something for the fridge. So, Sarah, what's the policy in your house on kid art and the sheer volume of creative work that comes home. Well, first, I have to say I love the show me what's in your folder as a way to hear about what they're learning at school. So I applaud that. I think that is wonderful. But I do not even entertain the expectation that most art is for keeping. It's about the process, and I think a kindergartener is old enough usually to understand that if we kept every single piece of artwork that every kid brought home, we would literally be waiting into a sea of crumpled paper when we walked into the house, because over time that would accumulate to an incredible extent. One way to do it might be that you take a bin. And I don't do this. I'm a lot more harsh and just my kids don't seem to be that attached to it. So unless something special personally, I just put it in the recycle bin and I really never hear a complaint. In fact, probably they don't even notice what I do keep. But if your kid is more sensitive. One thing you might do is to put it all in a bin for the month and then have a little time together at the end of the month where they pick out, like their two favorites for keeping anything that's like a runner up. Maybe you snap a picture of it with your phone and you say goodbye to the rest of it, and then you make a big deal over the stuff that you are keeping, and how, oh, how cool is it we can see your progress throughout the year. I doubt that even your kindergarteners that attached to every single worksheet that they completed, But yeah, I go. I make a distinction between art and like those little worksheets, Like I don't need every single you know, math thing with a star on it, or you know that they should that they could write the letter A. I will keep something if it's really cute or interesting, like if it's you know what, We kept one of Alex's first writing the letter A things because yeah, did then illustrate things. It was so cute, little cartoon illustrates of these, you know, it was not the way you would have thought to automatically illustrate a few things. And so I was like, oh, that's really kind of fun. So I keep stuff like that, I would, you know, I'd probably buias more toward keeping stuff just because I feel like I don't like the idea of throwing kids stuff out if they worked hard on it, Like I'd be pissed off if somebody threw out my notebooks or throughout my stuff. And so I mean you can have slight you know, some sort of organization for it, like so we have some filing cabinets in the basement, like some bins where we do put a lot of the art. So if you're not saving the worksheets, you can in fact save a fair amount of pieces of paper and then you know, maybe eventually you'll go through it and say like, okay, this is the stuff we want to keep it not but I don't know if your kid cares about it, I think you're gonna have more problems that it's worth by, Like I'm forcing you to throw away everything but two pieces. You know, it's just gonna you're gonna have a meltdown every single month if your kid cares about it. And why is it only gonna be two pieces? Like why are you forcing instead of like four? If you really like four that month. So I would encourage people to like understand your kid. Here. If Sarah's a fine, what they're throwing out beautiful, but if your kid is not fine with it, like, don't make this an issue, like keep the extra three pieces of paper and like stop making it into a deal. Where like if your house doesn't look like a minimalist paradise, you know the Pinterest gods are going to come after you. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbucks. I just do not look like a minimalist bear. And that's so funny. No, I guess it's true. I mean, i'd be informed by if there was a kid that cared, but that's thus far mine mine don't. I'm the one who saves it from like otherwise they just kind of like leave it wherever, and then they leave it on the floor and I'll say something like do you want that? No, like okay, So then I'm the one who actually keeps like I have like boxes for each kid and folders and stuff that I do choose to rescue. So it's almost the opposite issue. So I guess maybe that's true. I don't have as much insight into a kid that feels this game. Yeah. I would also point out that this is not perpetual. Like by the time your kids are in i mean like fourth grade, almost everything they're doing is like non art. If it's art, it's going to be special. Like they've only you know, they only produced like four big projects a year, and a lot of their work is online, so it's already saved to their Google drive or something. So it's if you have two children and you're only really going to get the artwork from you know, late preschool to second third grade, maybe you just don't need to worry quite so much about like keeping it the minimalist that you would. I know we have people who disagree like crazy with this, but you know, anyway, I will. That's my piece about it, that it's a time limited phenomenon. I wonder if my kids make more art than yours, that could be. That could be we'll go through like a ream of paper like it's it's like Genevieve will like write on twenty pages one one sitting regularly. I guess that's not very echo friendly. Yeah, we haven't been doing as much art at home lately. I think it's Yeah, I mean I almost even miss that they just do other things, you know, which is fine. You read, you do sports, whatever, But yeah, I've found that it doesn't continue at the pace that it does for the first weeks of kindergarten for the rest of your life. All right, So let's go to our love of the week, Sarah, what's yours this week? Yeah? So this TV I don't know, I may have mentioned it already, but I don't care. I loved it so much. The TV series White Lotus on HBO so much fun. It was like candy. And yeah, we actually went back and started watching Enlightenment, which came out in twenty eleven and was also created by Mike White, who was a genius, and that has been fascinating in and of itself because twenty eleven was very different, and you forget it doesn't sound like that long ago, but like nobody had an iPhone and there was a singer and I was like, who is that. I was like, oh, that's for ginas Spectr. And I was like obsessed with Regina Spector in ten years ago, but I don't know she faded into the I have not thought of that name for like anyway, it was a fun little time capsule and it seemed just as fun. So there you go Enlightenment with Laura Dern and White Lotus. So, speaking of having fewer papers, one thing I've our elementary school switched to a few years ago is they used to send home a Thursday folder, a Thursday envelope, usually with your youngest child or it was the oldest child, I don't remember, but if you had multiple kids, you only got one. But it would have all the announcements from the office and from the Home and School association, and so it was new paper coming home every week. And a couple years ago they switched to doing it electronically. So if you have a flyer about something in the community, you know, you send in a PDF and they include the PDF in the Thursday folder and so you know it's you have to look at it, and I'm you know, maybe people had to get themselves in the habit of doing it, but I do, in fact look at that folder online every Thursday, just to see if there's an announcement of, say a cute pumpkin patch that we want to go visit to to bring this back to our fall theme, or if there's going to be testing on a certain day that I should know about or whatever, but it just generates a lot less paper that needs to go in the recycling bin. So hey, we're all in favor of that, so heay save those trees which are turning fancy fall colors. Now that we've been talking all things fall in this episode, how to get cozy, and then how to position ourselves in Q four for a great new Year. We will be back 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 Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.