Fitting In Adventures with Rachana Shah, Physician & Mother of 2

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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 Unger. 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. In this episode, I'm going to be interviewing doctor Rachna Shaw, who is a physician, mother of two, all around very interesting person. People who have watched My Tranquility by Tuesday in real life videos will recognize her from the video on rule number six One Big Adventure, One Little Adventure, and she and her family have done an amazing job of coming up with cool things to do between the very camping adventures, trying out different places in the city. She'll sometimes just go to a different coffee shop and get a tea in the middle of the day, I explore different parks, so very cool video. If you haven't gotten a chance to see it. I really enjoyed getting to hang out with her while we were filming it and experiencing the joy of parallel parking all over the place as we were filming it. We were filming in an urban location, which we will talk about later. But yeah, it's Sarah. Are you doing big and little adventures these days? Are you following rule number six? I'm not like tracking it to the letter, although I think it might be fun to do that. I do find myself rather intimidated by this rule. However, I do absolutely see its benefit, and I think for me it helps to keep the bar low for both of them. Like this weekend, I'm taking Annabel and Genevieve to the container store because Genevieve in particular is like dying to go to the container store, and it is across town, and it's going to be our adventure for the weekend. And a little adventure to me can be something as mundane is like going on Uber Eats and ordering lunch. It's somewhere I have not tried before, because I do find that these little things are memorable, like they make the day more interesting. There's something I probably am going to like write in my five year journal that night, so they make the day a little bit notable. And if I tell myself I have to like go camping, which I never am gonna want to do, I'm so sorry, Rachna, but just know then I won't want to do anything. So I think that I have to just meet myself where I am with the adventures and set my bar low. It's all good. Yeah, no, I mean that's the reality. We can't go, you know, sailing across the fjords like a Viking. I don't know every weekend. It's not gonna happen. And sometimes we're in periods of life where we may want bigger adventures and some periods of life where we want maybe less adventures because life is kind of complicated enough. I know I personally have somewhat been feeling that way. Obviously. I enjoyed flying to Florida a few weeks ago to see Sarah. That was a big adventure, and I like doing stuff like that. But sometimes motivating the entire family to go on a day trip on a weekend, you know, when we've got lots of kids stuff going on anyways, is a little bit less exciting, especially when we've had, you know, not awesome weather over the course of many, many months, hopefully coming out of this when this airs. But yeah, I mean just having adventures. It's about making life feel a little bit more memorable. And routines are great, Like we love routines and they make good choices automatic. But when too much same this stacks up, then you wind up not being able to remember whole periods of life because it's like nothing different happened, right, I say, the same Each day is just like every other day. So if you can answer why this day is different from all other days, or why this week is different from all other weeks as we come into not sure if passover will have happened when this airs yet or not, but that question, you know, why is tonight different from all other nights? We want to think about how we can ask that question of life in general, how time is different. So has a great example of that, but many other things that we're going to talk about in this interview, So give it a listen. Well. Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Rachna Shaw to the program. She is a friend of both of ours. We've both had the privilege of meeting her in person. So, Rachna, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your job, and your family. Yes. Hi, my name is Rochna. I am a pediatric undercrinologist, just like Sarah. I live in the Philadelphia area with my husband and two sons who are eleven and thirteen. So on a fun teen phase of our parenting. Absolutely, Yeah, it's new challenges, but you know, it's kind of fun to be out of the little kid years too. And you know Sarah's talked some about her career journey too. How did you wind up in this line of work? I always found the endocrine system really satisfying to learn about out their pathways and biomarkers. And I really have always enjoyed working with children and being able to affect health really early on in life because it seemed like, yeah, I mean, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that because you work a lot with you know, children with diabetes, but also like looking at issues of obesity more broadly. Right, Yeah, so I guess three years ago now, in twenty twenty, I took on a role as the medical director of our weight management center at a major gent's hospital, so I help our team. I helped lead the team and work on finding protocols and treatment plans and really trying to facility working with this population. Job involves a lot of administrative work, but there's also opportunities for clinical care and research. So it's kind of I feel like I get to do a little bit of everything. Because you've done a lot of research in your career as well, I mean that's been part of your career journey, doing various forms of research along the way. Yeah, So I mean I've kind of evolved. There was a time where I actually had a lab and was doing a lot of basic research translational research, and kind of grew away from that into really wanting to focus on clinical aspects. As much as I really enjoyed the scientific challenge of working with cell cultures and animal models, I always find it more fascinating to work directly with our patients, and so I've morphed a bit to doing more clinical related research. That's awesome. Yeah, And in terms of like what does your life wind up looking like day to day, Like on a typical work day, then what would your schedule wind up looking like? So I have like five different types of work days, I think, depending on what I'm scheduled to do that day, It's say seventy at the time, I'm seeing patients in three different locations, and so those days are basically start at eight and around five and you know, have a motion every thirty minutes or so, with not a lot of break or time for really anything else. And then you know, about thirty percent of my work days are more of the administrative research days, and those days are also extremely variable. I can be in my office or i can be at home, and I sometimes have back to back meetings all day long, meeting with all the different numbers of my team and working on new initiatives educational initiatives. But my favorite days are the ones where I have some time to actually work on some of the things that I've been talking about in these meetings and really start putting together the writing, the research applications, actually getting to focus and do deep work. Deep work is always good when it happens. Yeah, And from what I understand, you are sometimes a morning exerciser as well. Are you getting up early to do that? Some days I am. I'm not as adamant about it as their hub, but yes, I try to exercise, you know, four or five days a week, and I do find that I'm much more likely to do it if I do the first thing. I have been known to be an exercise close all day long and never get that work out in if it didn't happen before I took the kids to school. So these days I'm doing a mix short runs with the friends early in the morning, interspersed with There's a bar studio like less than a block away from my house, so I've been doing a lot of classes there as well. I really enjoy What time does that class have to be in order to make your morning work? So the bars is I can only do on my advan days because the earliest class they have is at seven fifteen, So I do seven fifteen to eight, come home, take a shower, get ready, and I'm like straight into ninety m meetings. So yeah, and then at the end of the day, like what does that look like? You know, you get done with work. You don't work that far from your house from what I understand, and come home. How does that go? Yeah? So one of the things I love is that I have a walking commute most days, so I walk home from work often listening to a podcast and I, you know, we kind of get straight into dinner. Usually my kids are in activities mostly on the weekends right now, so we don't have a lot of running around after school and work, which I appreciate, but we get started making dinner. My husband and I kind of trade off cooking. We eat, We often watch TV. To be honest, We've been trying to rally to go for a walk after work, but it doesn't always happened. It depends on the weather. And I am quite honestly, very tired in the evening. So I am around nine o'clock thinking about heading up to bed. Sounds like a good plan. All right, Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we're going to learn more about the various things that Rachna does with her families. So I am back talking with doctor Rachnashaw about her life. You guys, so you talked about the walking commute and your family has made a choice to stay urban, to really give this city lifestyle a go, I mean to the point of doubling down. You guys are doing a big home renovation project, right so maybe you can talk about that, like what you know, many people kind of flee to the suburbs once their kids are six or seven or so. Why did what led to your decision to stay. You know, it's funny because my husband and I both grew up in the South and in sprawling suburbia. We moved to Philadelphia as part of my training, and we're living in the city, and very soon after kind of settling in, we realized that we felt quite at home and felt really comfortable and energized by the urban life. I hate driving, so I really appreciate being able to work and pretty much everywhere. For ten over ten years, we didn't have a car, including when our kids were going to daycare and activities. We did everything with our double stroller and the kids on scooters and our own two feets. So we have a car now, but we use it mostly to get out of the city, trying to get our nature fixed by going on hikes and weekend camping trips. But we, you know, we really appreciate Philadelphia is very livable and walkable city. Everything is close by, so that part is great, And we have, you know, a community, we have friends. We you know, a lot of people flee to the suburbs because of fears around public schools in the city, and we actually happen to be really lucky in that we have a wonderful neighborhood school with amazing teachers and leadership that our kids have really thrived at. So we really haven't seen the need to leave our our neighborhood. And as Laura mentioned, we needed a little more room, and so we looked into houses in the neighborhood and outside, including you know, further out into the suburbs, and really weren't happy with anything found. So we kind of made the unusual decision to completely renovate our city rowhouse. We are adding a fourth floor for additional bedroom space. Since we're doing that and needing to you know, work on the foundation in the basement to support the additional floor, we had to move out and said, well, if we're moving out anyways, we might as well make some upgrades to the kitchen and our rooms and basically everything. So we have undertaken a really huge project which were coming towards the end of but we're really hoping to have speace for our family to continue to grow and be comfortable in. Yeah, so you guys have been living in a rental now for about a year. Right, that's a pretty well Yeah, I was. I was impressed. I was like, whoa, they're really serious about staying in the city with doing that. How has that been? Is it, you know, something of an adventure? Maybe? Yeah, we wanted to stay close enough to the kids' school, so we are about half a mile away from our actual home. Living at a rental is interesting. On the one hand, things break and we don't need to worry about paying for fixing them. On the other hand, nobody else really cares to fix them for you. So, for example, we lived without a washing machine for several months this fall until we could finally convince the owners to buy a new one. And so let's just say, I'm happy to I will be happy to be back in my own space. Yeah. Is that planned for a couple of months in the next few months or you got a timeline for it at this point? Yeah? Is six to eight weeks? Six to eight weeks. And I'm curious, are you you know, are you excited about your new kitchen? This is it wasn't your favorite thing to be picking out materials, was it? Yeah? You know, you never know how many choices there are to make until I think you went through this too, Laura, Yep. I actually enjoyed some of the kitchen stop Like I like picking out cabinets, encounters, and tile. Not so excited about like where do we put the light switches and what kind of skirting do you want on your toilets and you know, all the different hardware and minutia. Yeah, the less glamorous parts of the renovation definitely. Well, I'm sure the boys are going to be excited too, because they're going to have their own bedrooms, right, Like that's a part of it. Yeah, they shared a room in our house, so this is going to be the first time that they have their own rooms. Very exciting. You know, there are sort of the trade offs that urban living and wonderful to be able to have the city as your space, but then you don't always have as much space in your own place until you do a renovation like this. So I wonder if you talk a little bit about you know, the boys are obviously, you know, getting older, what does any sort of like childcare, after school kind of thing, Like what does it look like at this point? I mean, because you've sort of aged out of the point where they were, you know, in meeting so much of the of the care. So what does it wind up looking like for people as their kids reach kind of those middle school years. Yeah, I mean this is a tricky time actually. You know, my thirteen year old has aged out of a lot after school programs and even summer camps, a lot of the city recreational center camps, which is what we primarily used go up to age twelve, so we've had to look a bit more creatively at things for him to do during the summer. Of course, they get older, the kids also have a lot more to say about these things. Currently, we're lucky in our after school care and that my husband primarily works from home, and at the age that the kids are at, it's very doable for them to just be at home working on their homework or playing video games while he finishes up the rest of his day. We do sometimes have to struggle on the half days or days off, but again, they mostly can entertain themselves as long as there is plenty of food around. I don't want them sitting around all summer playing video games. So we have we've identified some camp options and we've got We've still had to you know, kind of print out the months and look at the weeks and when we have vacation, and so that part hasn't really gotten much easier, this more camp part, but after school care has been pretty much eliminated. I would say, yeah, yeah, no, that is tricky with that age because they can't really be by themselves all the time, and even if it is sort of you know, walkable around the area, they needed some supervision. But yeah, so that's that's fortunate that your husband's mostly working at home at this point, but you guys do not stay at home longtime listeners may recall that Rachna did the video for Tranquility by Tuesday rule number six on one Big Adventure and One Little Adventure, and you guys have been having a reasonable number of adventures. Tell us during the pandemic, I think you guys started camping, So let's talk about camping. Yeah, so, you know, it turns out camping is a great pandemic vacation in that you really don't have to interact with anybody. So we basically took off whatever weekends we could and went to local state parks and set up our tents. It is a very affordable way to travel with kids. We bring all our own food, and it leads to a lot less money being spent, but also a lot less complaining from paky kids. When we can just have hamburgers and hot dogs every night, there's really nothing for them to complain about. And it also just gave us an opportunity to get out of the city and connect in a different way. There's just kids being able to just run around, ride their bikes around by themselves, throw sticks and poke in the mud and go in the lake, and all of that just seemed to really help calm us all down after days on end of all being together and being stuck on a screen. So it was a really good kind of break during the pandemic. And we still do it less frequent now because now we're back in you know, weekend activities and other types of travel. But you know, I really appreciated that time, and you know, we do plan to continue our camping adventures. Yeah, were you kind of like a veteran camperor. Did you grow up going camping or this was totally new? Neither my husband and I grew up camping, so we kind of learned as we went. That first time pitching the tent, I was, yeah, it's still something I know we would practice in the living room. But yeah, I feel like we've wrote a lot of skills. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Our kids are learning some of these skills also good, also good. And do you have so let's see, Okay, you're your hobbies here, you're camping, you're doing the boot camp class, and you're you're running with a friend in the morning. Is there anything else you sort of do for fun in life? I love to read. I hopefully read about one hundred books a year, and my phone on my kindle up because it's just so convenient. And I think Flora has mentioned, you know, having that book there that's ready to go kind of surpasses and need to want to get on social media for me. So uh so I do a lot of reading. I am my son and I have both take piano lens. I've always wanted to do it as a kid, so it's something I picked up just over the past year and so I've been really enjoying that as well. And where do you make time for practicing then? Is that do you both have like a practicing schedule or how does that work here and there? But I'm not that good at it at remembering to practice. But yeah, sometimes on a work from home day, I can take a break and knock you out fifteen twenty minutes. So just just about as much as I can do. Yeah, and then definitely in that like after dinner or time frame. Yeah, one hundred books a year is pretty impressive. So I mean that's that's not just in those little bits of time though. While you're you know, you're like, oh, I could be on social media for ten minutes to read a book. I feel like that must be like the thing you do before bed at night too. Then right, yes, I head up to bed at nine o'clock and usually it's too spend some time with my most recent book. Yeah, I also tried to carve out some time on weekends to really just and read. Yeah, what you can do when the kids get older? Right, I feel like this is you know, recently had this experience. So we often send our three year old to a babysitter's house for a few hours now on Saturday, and it's like this experience of like, oh, this is what it's like to only have older kids, Like you couldn't yeah, sit down and read a book. You know. Something I've realized and it's I never thought this would happen, but I have to ask the kids to spend time with me. Yes, like the opposite like I could have. I mean, they're very happy to be on their devices or in their with their friends, and so it is definitely a phase where we are actually trying to get them to come to out and spend time with us or hang out with us as for cookie dinner or you know, you can just like hang around on the weekends because they have in their own worlds and doing their own thing. So it's definitely not something I anticipated when they were like hanging on my leg all day every day. Yep. Now it's weird that switch that that happens, like oh wait, oh yeah, at some point you wanted me to drop them off the block away from the school. Wow. Yeah, we had something like that the other day with my son. Well, it was more like, don't bring the rest of the kids into somewhere to pick him up and not acknowledge that he had other people but no, no, that nobody nobody else has parents either, right, Like you know, so funny. So I guess that's one of the reasons to do things like camping then, right, because it's something that forces a wee bit of family time. Yeah, I think we're realizing that, you know, we're planning in like weekend hikes and camping trips and things really for the kids to be author screens and interacting with us. And you guys had when we talked about it doing the video you were doing on occasion. I mean, I realized this doesn't happen every night or whatever, but some kind of evening adventures, like little adventures you could have with your family. And that's one of the things with Philadelphia, right, I mean, there's so much that is there. Yeah, I admit that with you know, we are much better about this in the summer months, and now that it's light out a little bit later, I think we need to start. We're going to start reinstituting just at least one night a week being not exactly the same as all the other guys. And so I know in the past we tried things like going to a rock climbing gym, going to mini golf, fulling. You know, there's lots of ice skating, roller skating, things like that. So I think I wanted to put together like a spring summer fun list with the kids adding some suggestions and then seeing how we can make those things happen. Yeah, sounds awesome. Well, we always end, as you know, with a love of the week. So you know something that's been been good for for you lately. I could go first my thing that I am enjoying right now, and this is maybe this is gonna sound terrible, cheap clothes, and I can explain that. You know, I went through a phase where I'm like, I'm gonna buy fewer things, but they're gonna be nicer. It's gonna be great. You know, I can invest in stuff and keep it forever. I wound up, you know, I spill stuff on things, I snag things. I had like moths eat a bunch of my sweaters. I was like, all right, I went onto Amazon. I bought like four T shirts for twenty dollars each. Not like if they fall apart, it doesn't matter, It's not the end of the world. So I was a I think there's definitely a place for nicer clothes, and I encourage people to think about doing that. Fewer pieces, nicer, invest in them. But some stages of life it just doesn't work. So here's here's to the twenty dollars shirt that you do not really care about. How about you, What's what are you enjoying right now? So this might sound a little odd, but I'm going to say television, oh okay, and specifically shows that we can watch together as a family. So currently we are watching ted Lasso season three and a wonderful show about the Philadelphia public school system Abbot Elementary. It's just nice to have something that comes out once a week that we look forward to that all of us actually want to watch instead of the inane like early childhood dribble that used to be played on our screens. So I'm really enjoying part of this phase with teens and tweens is finding things that they enjoy that we actually enjoy as well. So yeah, well I'm curious about, you know, being a Philadelphia public school parent, what you do think of Abbot Elementary. So I honestly think it is very accurate. I mean, obviously there's things that are exaggerated for community effect, but the way the teachers are so caring and so invested in their job and their students, like rings one hundred percent true to our experience, and so I actually love that that show is on television and showing a different side of what people usually think of as just the terrible place. Yeah, I know, you guys have been thrilled with your your school. Are they able to keep in that through to the end. I mean, you're good through high school. We're in a key through eight. So the boys are both their ring after middle school. But we are going to be in the throes of the high school application process about six months from now, so I am not sure how that's going to go. We'll see. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I'm sure there's other urban parents out there that you can learn from through the process of time, one step at a time, exactly. Well, Rochna, thank you so much for joining us, and we really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Thank you. Well, we are back. I just was interviewing doctor Rochmashaw about her work, her family, her adventures, life in general. We have a question from a listener who says, I recently moved to a new city and I'm generally introverted, but I still want local friends. So what is the best way for cultivating adult friendships? So, Sarah, you've moved in recent years, and why don't you tell us a little bit about what you did. I mean, the first thing I would say is patience, because every time I move, I think that I'm going to like instantly be able to replicate my same group of friends in like six months, and in my experience it does take years. It probably took even longer with my latest move because we moved in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one and twenty twenty we're a little tougher for making friends. People didn't want to like invest their risk in people they didn't know. I guess as much. But now it's obviously much better. So I mean, the things that have worked for me are I mean, some ons I just like try to stray. If a parent just seems interesting maybe by like I mean, this is so superficial, but like one of their clothing choices perhaps like just strikes my then I'll ask them about it and like try to strike up a conversation and maybe even try to suggest some kind of low stakes hang like, oh, do you want to take a walk during this gymnastics class because I hate just sitting here and we're not, you know, doing anything. That would be a nice low stakes way. And if the worst case scenario it's a boring conversation that at least you got some movement in. I will say running has been such a great way of making friends over the years, and I am like so happy because I haven't had running friends for a long time and now I have running friends again. And the funny thing about running friends is, at least in my experience, like when you make one, they may already have some and then all of a sudden, like you have a group and you had none before. So that's been great. I started a book club because I wanted to join a book club and there wasn't one in my neighborhood. I know that might not be every introvert's favorite thing to do, but at least you could find out if there are already groups in place, either for books or supper or whatever, because then you wouldn't even have to do much work except show up. And then, finally, I'll say, post to our Patreon, because there's been quite the social explosion happening recently, including like live meetups being born. So if nothing else fails, you should join us on Patreon and maybe you'll find someone in your city. Yeah, exactly, But online communities in general, if you have a very specialized sort of trusting online community. You might ask around and see if people are relatively local to you, and you know you already have something in common because you're part of this whatever community. It is, our Patreon community being a great one, but there are many out there, and you know, if the somebody lives thirty minutes from you, it might be worth meeting up, right, if you're trying to cultivate that relationship with somebody who you already know has a lot in common with you. But yeah, I mean I would be saying patience as well, because you don't need that many close friends. I mean, maybe some people are just total social butterflies, But it sounds like this listener really isn't you know. I don't think she's really going to want to handle more than like four or five. I think four or five would be great if she felt like she had four or five people she was relatively close to, and if you sort of give yourself a pace of making a new one who could be part of that four to five every six months, even maybe four to six months. To take that, I mean that's going to take you two years. So but if you have that as your goal, like I am going to find a new friend in the next six months. Like probably you can start with a couple people who seem, you know, relatively cool, and see if any of them there's sort of a connection, a little bit more chemistry, you want to do a little bit more with them, get together a little bit more frequently, and you know, over a couple of months that can happen. I mean, it's sort of like dating, although you didn't don't then keep adding to it, I guess, and goal with the dating kind of narrow completely down to one, not so much with friendship, but but the same mindset of trying lots of different people and seeing if there's a bit of a connection there sounds good and if all else fails, join lots of online Oh and you know what I'll say, sometimes texting is less scary, so kind of like with dating, get their digits and then like you can always send them a meme or something and test the waters, and then sometimes it's just easier to get things started off that way. Yes, exactly, all right, Well this has been best of both worlds. I was interviewing doctor Rachna Shaw about all things you know, related to being a physician, being a mother of older kids now all that she does with her families, her hobbies. We will 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. Out