From zero to 4 kids in under a year: an adoptive journey with clinical pharmacist Andrea Walter.

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred. Today we'll be talking with Andrea Walter, who is an adoptive mom and a clinical pharmacist, and she's got an amazing story of how her family came to be, so we're really looking forward to that. But to start this off, this is the one hundredth episode, or if it doesn't air as our hundredth episode because we've had something fall through, it's at least going to be close to the one hundredth episode, so we can, you know, still celebrate it as if it was. We'll do an official to year anniversary episode in August looking at our best ones of the year, but yay, one hundred episodes. One hundred episodes. Yeah, I think we also owe our listeners kind of a meta episode on how we do this and how it's evolved. And that's why Laura said, you know, we think this is our hundred episode, but we do work fairly far in advance when we can, so you know, there is room for things to get moved around, which is actually a good thing. We never want you to have to suffer through a Tuesday morning commute without best of both worlds if we can help it. So that's why we're not able to be one hundred percent exact. But I will say most likely are most of the time, our plans do seem to come to fruition, so it probably will be on target. Yeah. Do you listen to our episodes after they air? I would say I actually listen to almost all of them, and you know, partly just to see how we come across and see what things we could do better. I wish I could say I listened to all of well, I don't know. I listened to probably fifty percent of them. I think that's about target. I would like to listen to all of them, but I also like to listen to other things, so you know, every yes is a no, So I choose to do it about half the time. I will admit that when I do listen, I do find a lot of constructive feedback for myself, often the way I use my voice, or the way we answer questions, or maybe you know, we figured out that it helped to go video, for example, because it was easier to engage with our intervieweys if we could all see each other and kind of know who was going to talk first. I'd love to say, Oh, I've listened to enough that I've gotten to a place where I love exactly how I sound every time. I don't think I'm quite there yet, but I do think we've improved a lot. Oh, I definitely think we have. And yeah, the video component helps just that we can see each other and have a better conversation, even though we're not capturing the video for sharing anywhere. You know, Yeah, I listened to my verbal tics that you know so and the yeah, like we all have those things and that's somewhat the nature of the conversation, but hopefully improve a little bit on that front. Yeah, it's amazing to think that it's been one hundred episodes. That's too fast. I you went pretty fast, and we were saying, so much has changed since then. Genevieve was not born yet when we first began. In fact, Laura was the one with a toddler and my kids were, you know, three and a half and five and a half. I guess when we started. And now I've got a toddler five and seven and she has way bigger kids. Yeah. Now well now they're eleven. Well there'll be twelve, nine, seven and four when this airs. So that's yeah, getting into the big kid world and it's a brave new place. But yeah, one hundred episodes. We hope you will continue to listen, and it's very exciting for us because we get to bring you great stories like Andrea's, which we are about to hear. Well, Sarah and I are thrilled to welcome Andrea Walter to the program today. Andrea is a clinical pharmacist for the VA, also an adoptive mom. We're very excited to hear her story. So, Andrew, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners. Yeah, So I'm Andrea Walter. I have been married to my husband, Adam for almost fifteen years. About a couple of years into our marriage, we decided we were ready to start a family. It didn't really happen for us the way a lot of people do it, and so ultimately we ended up becoming licensed foster parents and adopting. So this all happened about seven years ago. We went from zero to four kids in about five months, which is an impressive change. Our story is a little crazy, kind of funny. And then this also happened during I graduated from pharmacy school and did a pharmacy residency, so it kind of all happened right at the same time. And so, like you said, now I'm a clinical pharmacist for the Department of Veterans Affairs. I work in the mental health clinic. Yeah, and so life is life is crazy but pretty good. That's where exactly were you in your training when the kids arrived? Were you still doing the residency or were you had you just started your new job. Oh wow, so a resident who went from zero to forge Yeah, what we were thinking, Well, you have these awesome kids available to you, as what you were thinking, right right? Yeah, So yeah, I went to pharmacy school and it was actually early on in pharmacy school that we were kind of planning our family, and I thought, well, you know, we'll just kind of figure it out as we go along, and you know, at one point we went to a fertility specialist and decided that wasn't really for us. And then early on in pharmacy school, we had looked at adoption and then we kind of backed out because I realized school was a little bit harder than I thought it was going to be. You know, I didn't start pharmacy school until a little bit later. This is a second career for me, and so I thought, oh, you know, I'll be good, but pharmacy school was a little bit harder. So it was during my last year of pharmacy school we do clinicals, which is a little bit less stressful than a lot of the coursework, and so we became licensed foster parents at that time. So it was in January of twenty eleven that we became licensed, and we were originally going to be licensed for two kids because we thought, well, you know, a lot of our friends have toddler preschool aged children, so our goal was to you know, maybe take in one or two kids about that age because we didn't feel like we needed a newborn baby, and so when they were completing our licensure, they said, well, you know, you have enough room for four kids. Do you mind if we just make your license for four kids? And you know, I didn't even ask my husband. I said sure, you know, that's fine, and then didn't feel like an obligation. It just felt like, okay, yeah, that makes sense, easier going back to get the paperwork done if for some reason, yeah right, yeah, they said, oh, the paperwork is easier. And then in March of that year, so this again is my last year of pharmacy. Schoo, I'm finishing up. I went to a continuing education for foster care and I met a woman and I told her we were interested in adopting, and she said, oh, I have these three kids that they're just like the best kids I've ever had, you know, And she is about the age of my parents, so you know, she I think would have kept them, but you know, to see a younger family, you know, wanting to have kids, it just seemed like the perfect situation. And so so I thought, yeah, you know, I would love to meet them. But on the way home that night, I thought, wow, three kids. That's that's a lot. And at the time they were five four and three years of my goodness, and so we did meet them a couple months later, and we just had this connection with them, and I really hoped that we would be able to adopt them at some point because it was just kind of like we met them, we got this feeling and then but we still didn't really know what was happening so with their birth mom. At the time, their birth mom was still kind of trying to get her life together, and so we didn't know, you know, they make back with her. And so I started residency in July and that's kind of when we met them for the first time. And then in August we got a call saying, we have a newborn baby that looks like he'll be free for adoption. Do you want do you want this newborn baby? You have until five pm today to decide. And so I at first I thought, no, I mean, this is crazy. I just started my residency program. But my husband said, you know, just talk to your residency director, just kind of see if it's even a possibility. And so I met with her and she said, you know, we can work this out. You know if this is something that you want to do for your family, go ahead, and so we you know, prayed about it, we you know, had lunch together, talked about it, and decided to go ahead and do it. And so then he was delivered to our house the next day, so we didn't really have a lot of prep time. So a lot of good friends of ours came together kind of helped just get get what we needed. I'm very curious. Sorry, this is a great story. I don't mean to interrupt here, but the conversation at that lunch, can you maybe are we going to be parents tomorrow? Yeah? I know it was crazy. Are we really ready for this? Yeah? I don't know. It just it's kind of surreal thinking about it now. But it's something that we definitely had wanted, and it wasn't the way we thought it was going to happen, because again, we've kind of been planning on toddler preschool age kids, but you know, we didn't know if we were going to get the chance to have a newborn baby again. And in foster care, it's pretty rare to get a newborn baby that looks like they're likely going to be up, you know, available for adoption. Which is what we really wanted, and especially so last minute like that. Like, I guess I've heard of some people who have adopted newborns, but it seems like it was arranged months prior. Yeah, but in your case, it was kind of like surprise. Yeah yeah again yeah, I mean, through foster care system, it's a little bit different than an arranged adoption ahead of time, which is also you know, a beautiful thing too. So I think that we just kind of decided to go for it, thinking, you know, we might not get this opportunity again, and you know, we really did want to have, you know, kids, and this just seemed like the way to start our family. So everything in one night we did. We went to Target that night. A good friend of ours had a car seat that they no longer needed. We got the car seat. We went to Target. We bought a couple outfits, you know, some diapers, yeah, for I think we got some formula, I don't remember. It was just kind of some really basic stuff and then we just basically kind of figured it out as we went along. I mean, we started with a pack and play, and you know, kind of a lot of that other stuff came came later and It was kind of funny because one of my coworkers, when she was pregnant, was kind of agonizing over, oh, what kind of baby monitor should we get. I was like, oh, I didn't even have time to think about getting off the band aid. Yeah, exactly. So so then you're adjusting to this, and were you both able to take some leave then through through your program, because that, of course was the complication, right, Like you're in the middle of this program, you have to ask for right. So I was able to take FMLA time, and I didn't. I didn't max it out because I didn't know what I would need later, like if you know, if he got sick or anything like that. But I took about eight weeks and for listeners got tack billed. Sorry, let me just interrupt. For listeners who you know may or may not be familiar. FMLA is unpaid leave. You can take up to twelve weeks per year. It only applies in companies that are a certain size. Obviously the VA Health System would certainly be big enough, or any large hospital system, and you can take that, yeah, throughout the year. So if you wanted to take like eight weeks and then four weeks, you're protect It doesn't give you anything paid, but it will protect you against losing your position, right yep. So I had approval to do that, and then my time that I took off was basically just tacked on to my residency program, which for pharmacy is a one year program. It seemed like it worked out pretty well. And then my husband also had adoption benefits through his company, so he also was able to take some time off. So oh, how much time did he take off? I think he took just a week off. But then later in our story about when the baby was about a month old, so this would have been in September, we found out that the other three kids that we had made this connection with were they were looking for an adoptive home for them, and so then they called us and said, are you still interested? And because we had met them and had this connection, we definitely were. And so then we started to make plans to transition them into our home from their previous foster home. And that was a bit more gradual than right, Like, they came for weekend visits and yeah, okay, yep, yep, So we did weekends and then we did you know, after or a month or two we did a full week where they came and stayed a week, and so we got to kind of test drive how is childcare drop off gonna work? How is you know, cooking dinner every night after we're gonna fit into our schedule. And then it was in January of that year that they they moved in with us, and so I didn't take any extra time off when they moved in, but my husband again used some more of that adoption leave to kind of help during that transition time. And so that was really nice to have that. Now, because they were coming from another foster family in the community, was there able to be some continuity there in terms of things like, you know, whether their activities are schooling, their childcare, all that. Yes, so their foster mom is still in our lives. She has become grandma and you know, all of our kids, even you know what was our baby who never never lived with her, she's grandma to him and she often will take him overnight and just helps us a lot. She's been a great social support for us. She's just a fantastic lady. So yeah, and was it I mean, I guess at that point you're still in the like surrealness of having become parents, you know, overnight, and then you're adding these other family and I mean, did it change the family dynamic at all? Because suddenly you've doubled the size of your family. You know, somebody asked me one time, what was the hardest part about it? And I'm not even joking. It was the laundry to go to go from you had two people, then you had three people, and then all of a sudden, you have six people and including an infant, and it was super overwhelming. And so then when we were able to adopt the kids, one of our friends as a gift, gave us a bottle of laundry detergent. Also in those younger years, bath time was also kind of deal with so many small kids because they, you know, still all needed to do at least two shifts. Yes, that's great. We will return to our interview with Andrea in a moment. We're going to take a brief break to talk about today's sponsor Circle. 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When we talked earlier, Andrea, you mentioned one of the one of the things that is interesting for you observing this is because you didn't physically give birth to these children, there were some different assumptions. There's probably still some gendered assumptions in terms of parenthood, but fewer than you might have had in a situation where you personally these four children. Yeah, I feel like we have a pretty even split between you know, kind of gender roles a little bit because you know, from the time our baby, you know, he was you know, because he was adopted. I mean, breastfeeding wasn't even an option for us. And so getting up in the middle of the night was very split evenly, and just that caregiving was was pretty even and so uh and then with the other kids, they were already past that stage. So when it came to bedtime, you know, kind of rocking them and laying by them. And you know, because we've just always had so many we've just kind of had to divide and conquer. And my husband is awesome. I mean, he does a lot of cooking and you know, so I don't know, I feel like it is pretty even. He does school pick up. Now, he has a job now that's a lot more flexible than mineus. He actually, we both had you know, full time employment through companies where the leave was very you know, kind of very strict, like, you know, I'm going to leave an hour early, so I have to take an hour of leave and that was kind of hard to balance. And so a couple of years ago he decided to leave, you know, his regular job and then start his own company. And that's been a real benefit to us because it's given us a lot more flexibility with our schedule. And you know, I'm still sensitive to the fact that you know, he can't dedicate all of his time, you know, because he you know, has to. Yes, yes, you know, we want him to be able to make money too, but it's been a lot easier to kind of restructure our daily schedule in a way that is very helpful for us. So, yeah, it does seem like a no, I was saying, because if you have reasonable benefits through your job at the VA, then you know that that's that works right like that? Yes, yeah it does because all of yeah, all of our health insurance and everything came from my job, and you know, just my income is is pretty good. So it really did give us the freedom to do that and kind of help him, you know, get started with you know, with his consulting business. So I was going to say that it does seem to be a theme where you can certainly have two big jobs, but two rigid jobs is a little tougher. There's definitely families that make it work. Yeah, but wow, it is nice when you can have one big and slightly flexible job and then one less, yes giving job. Sorry, go ahead, I was just gonna say, I feel like for me to have kind of more rigid is good. You know, I think that I have a tendency to kind of work and work and work and work, but it's it's good for me to have my day you know, normally start at eight a m. And ends at four thirty. And when I'm at home, I'm at home, like my work doesn't bleed over into my you know, home time with the kids. And then you know, I like knowing, like I get leave through work, but I and I use a lot of it too to go on a field trip or you know, to take a snow day with the kids if I need to, or you know, I have people to cover me if if my kids are sick, and so that's that's been really nice. I think that if I had a job that was kind of more like really flexible like his, I would probably not take as much leave as I should because I just have the tendency to work and work. Probably interesting. Yeah, well, and I mean we definitely want to hear about the a day in the life of a clinical pharmacist because I think a lot of people have no idea what that you know, what pharmacy involves other than you know, when they go fill a prescription at CBS, which is not what you do at all. But I mean, before we get to that, you know, it sounds like, you guys have an amazing situation, and but you know, we don't want to be totally Pollyanna Pollyanna about this. I mean, what are some of the challenges of adoption. I know that you guys, you know, have a few sort of mild special needs. Yes, you know, there's complications with birth families still being around, you know, positives and negatives with that. So can you talk a little bit about all that. Yeah, I think you know, on the surface, our story does seem pretty amazing. It is very amazing. It seems a little bit too easy. And at the time, you know, the baby, the newborn baby we took is seven years old now, so this all happened quite a while ago. But what we thought was going to be a relatively easy road to his adoption ended up not being so easy. His birth mom had three older kids, and her parental rights to them had been terminated, and so it looked like it was very, very unlikely that she would be given the opportunity to parent this child. But early on, when he was a newborn, they still he still had visits with her, and you know, they kind of had to give her some chances because everything with her older three children wasn't final, and that was really difficult because you know, you're kind of co parenting a little bit with a person that that's not like you. You're co parenting with a person that actually really dislikes you and what you're doing and is is not happy about the situation of course. Yeah, so so that was difficult. When Elijah was about three months old, then her you know, the court determined that she was not you know, they didn't need to give her any more services. But around that same time, his birth father was identified and really wanted to parent you know, the baby, which is understandable, and so for a year and a half, this kind of went through the foster care system where he had visits with the birth father, and so you're kind of dealing with you know, their needs and their wants, and you know, they have certain you know, just certain things like like foster parents can't decide to cut their child's hair without you know, without the authorization of the birth parent. And so you know, our our youngest kid is black, and so he had his hair just kind of like grew and grew and grew and grew and grew, and we thought, well, you know, we'd like to trim it up, but you know, we never got permission to do it. And then Elijah was about a year and a half old and he came home from a visit and all of his hair was shaved off, just super suddenly. And this is just kind of a funny thing. But they sent it back with him in a ziploc bag, which is kind of weird. They thought we would want it, but it's just things like that. You know, you're you're dealing with people that you know, grew up in a different way from you, you know, that have different values and different priorities, and then you're kind of trying to kind of coordinate, you know, taking care of care of a child in ways that you might not always agree on. And so that was kind of hard because that lasted a long time. And so our youngest, our baby, we actually weren't able to adapt him until he was three years old. So that's kind of how long we had to wait for this to work through the system. And then our older kids it was a little easier. You know, their birth mom had relinquished her or rights because she, you know, eventually agreed that you know, it would be good to put them in a home and we were open to having an open adoption with her, and so we we do see her, you know, a couple times a year, we meet up at a park and the kids see her, and that I think that's difficult for her. I mean, I think it is kind of sad for her. She she loves, she loves her kids, and you know, if she had her preference, I think that you know, she would want them with her. And so I mean that there is hard situations, you know, because you realize you have these kids because somebody else was deemed that they you know, couldn't or or shouldn't parent them, and so sometimes that can be kind of difficult. And then overall, I would say foster care, the goal really is to reunite kids with their birth families. And so I wouldn't encourage anyone to go into foster care just expecting that, you know, they're going to take this kid into their home and that kid's going to be with them forever, because it it does, you know, they can go back. And we've had some good friends that did foster care, and you know, in some ways it's kind of hard to see them go back with their birth family, but it's really good in a lot of ways too, And some friends of ours just became really good friends with the birth parents of kids that were in their home. And you know, some people just need a little help to get through a tough time. And you know that's kind of part of foster care too, yeah, which is amazing work for the people who do it. That you can be part of a family's being able to be reunited. Yeah, that's been such an important role. Well, I'd love to hear about a day in the life now, I mean, because yes, you know how it works, then what you do professionally, like during the day, and of sure obviously very complex cases that you create. Yeah, so my day normally starts around five five point fifteen in the morning. You know, I like to get up and have a little bit of Bible study, quiet meditation time while everybody else is asleep and I'm not interrupted, and then I usually do a workout in my basement, just kind of get some exercise out. I know Sarah likes beach body. I usually do each body workouts and then you know, then I kind of head up and kind of get myself some breakfast and kind of get the kids up and get them moving. My husband and I split drop off. Our girls are in middle school and so I usually drop them off at their school. And then our boys are still in elementary school, and so my husband drops them off. And so then I go to work, and my job is at the VA. I will just kind of explain a little bit about what I do. I guess my office is in the mental health clinic, and so I'm not actually in the pharmacy all that oftense. So it's kind of funny when I'm asking people I go through their medicines with them and they're like, I don't know the name. It's the blue round tablet. And I'm like, I don't actually look at the pills. All that I do always know. But what I do is I help with some monitoring for some of the mental health medications. You have to check labs, you know, evaluate for side effects. I do a lot of to baco cessation. I work with patients who want to do medications to quit smoking, you know. I talked to patients with diabetes and I help them adjust their insulin. So I have people, you know. I usually I start with a face to face visit and then I do phone follow up with them and they give me their blood sugars and I kind of tell them, okay, increase this. Are you a diabetes educator too? No, I don't think it should be one. I thought about it, but you have to like the number of hours that you need to prove that you do clinically. I just don't know if I would meet that because there's so many other things that I that I do for my job too. So yeah, that's actually what I thought I would do in pharmacy school is I was super interested in diabetes diabetes education, and it was kind of by accident that I ended up in mental health. I really wanted to stay at this VA system because we were kind of locked into living in Lincoln, and then this was a job that they opened up. It was a brand new position that I've kind of basically had to build. So so yeah, so I do you know, I have scheduled appointments with patients, and within the VIA system, pharmacists can basically act kind of like mid level providers in a way. So I would say it's kind of equivalent to like a PA or a nurse practitioner because I can order medications, I can order labs, and you know, do follow ups. So so Yeah, it's pretty cool. I work pretty closely with the psychiatrists. Sometimes when they have kind of a difficult patient with a difficult history, they'll kind of have me do a med review and make some recommendations about how to treat them. And so mental illness has really become a like a big interest of mine, just I feel like it's an underserved population and so now that I'm here in mental health, I really like it. And you know, I really like helping people learn about the benefits the risks of their medications and kind of tailoring their regimen to meet their needs. So kind I'm going to be honest, I've like always had pharmacists envy, like ever since I was in residency and we had this amazing clinical pharmacist in our nick you, and I was like, oh, I would love to be a pharmacist. Yeah, and your description is definitely continuing to propagate. Yeah, pharmacy has definitely evolved over time. You know, many many years ago, like one hundred years ago, it was an apprenticeship, and then it was like a two year technical degree, and then it was a bachelor's degree, and now it's a doctorate level program. And so really you are trained to do a lot more than what traditionally pharmacists have done. You know, I think even I think even a lot of people don't fully understand everything that goes on behind the scenes. When you fill a prescription out of pharmacy. You know, they're looking for drug interactions, they're trying to make sure your DOS is safe. You know, there's a lot of clinical work that goes on, you know, with what you see as a traditional pharmacist too, but you know, clinical pharmacy, especially within the VA, we say we practice at the top of our license because we really use a lot of the stuff that we learned learned in school. So and at the same time, I hope there are so some nice boundaries for you, Like there's not usually a lot of night call on those kind of no no no call. Yeah, for pharmacy, it's a pretty sweet schedule because I work eight to four thirty most days. A couple times a year I have to work till six thirty on a Wednesday and work eight to noon on a Saturday. You know, there's a bunch of us here, you know, I think I don't know exactly how many we have. There's maybe twelve other clinical pharmacists here, and so you know, if I do take a sick day, you know there's people to cover for me. And then you know, we kind of take turns doing those evening and weekend hours. And the VA is mostly open eight to four thirty because I work in an outpatient clinic, only we don't have have inpatients here, so it really is a good schedule for pharmacists. And then you're done it for thirty Then what yeah, I've done it for thirty. Yeah. Sometimes my boys go to after school care and then I pick them up, you know, kind of depending on my husband's schedule, but usually my husband picks up the kids. The girls take the bus home, and yeah, usually by the time I get home, my husband's at home, he's starting dinner, he's kind of overseeing homework, and they're kind of the kids are getting their thing done, and then we we often eat together as a family, unless there's some activity. With four kids, we haven't really gone overboard in a lot of the activities. We've kind of had to stream nine that a little bit, just because there's two of us and four them, so we have to kind of keep that a little bit simple. But sometimes we have a concert or a like a sports thing. And yeah, so then in the evening we have dinner together usually, and then we kind of have some family time. You know, we still read together as a family. I kind of read one on one with the kids. That's just been you know, of all the things about parenting that that's the time that I feel like the best mom is when I'm sitting reading with my kids and kind of teaching them to love what I love. And our kids go to bed fairly early, you know, still like between eight and nine, and so we usually take turns kind of laying bare kids at night, and that's kind of the time where we kind of have ours I guess it's one on two, one parent with two kids, but we kind of talk with them about their day, the good things and the hard things, and then put them to bed and then you know, then it's kind of our time for a little bit. And you know, I had to bed at ten o'clock so I can do it all all over them again. Sounds awesome, Sarah, Did you have any more questions? Or should we do our Love of the Week? Yeah, I think we could go into our love oft we do our Love of the Week, well, Sarah and I can go first. Although I'm looking at our notes and this is the episode we didn't write down our pre it's at the bottom end. Okay, I think you did not. I did not. Okay, Well, Sarah, what's your love of the week? So about approximately a week after this airs, we are going to be headed to Lego Land, which is my love of the week because it's like Disney Light and for little kids it's awesome. It's much less expensive, it's still really fun for the kids. And this will be our second time there. So Legal Land, Yeah, I know that's a that's a favorite of ours. Two, although I won't copy you and have that be our love of the week. Although this, you know, there's a couple of smaller places around my home in Pennsylvania we like to go to to as well, like Hershey Park, for instance, is a good one, a Dutch wonderland also pretty manageable. Sesame place gets a little crazy in the course of the summer, but some days you get it and it's good. So here's to cheers to small amusement parks. All right, Andrea, how about you? It doesn't have to be anything amusement park? Really mine? Is I love listening to you guys talk about what you read. And I actually read Crazy Rich Asians because of Sarah's recommendation. And so I guess my love of the week is I love using Audible. And then our local library also has you can do audio books because that's how I do. The majority of my reading is in the car or just on the go while I'm vacuuming or things like that. And it's just been wonderful to help me get a bunch of reading reading time in stay on top of books I want to want to read. Awesome, Awesome. I hope there's going to be a fourth Crazy Rich age in Yeah, that sounds plus. I keep seeing part of it on every time I'm on a plane, like somebody's watching it next to me, so I feel like I've seen it without listening to it. Yes, immediate watched the movie too, so exactly. All right, Well, Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. This is been awesome. Yeah, thank you this. You know, I've been listening to you guys for a long time, so this is super exciting for me. Today. Our Q and A segment came to us via email. She writes, I was wondering about your opinion on the last name debate, both with women and kids. I was with my mother and my sister brought up that she is planning to keep her last name when she gets married, and I told her I was planning to hyphenate. My mom was very surprised and said, what kind of kids did I raise? I noticed that, Sarah, you hyphenate, and I was wondering how you made that decision, and did you hyphenate your kids last name? Is there weight to this discussion or is my mom just being old fashioned? Thank you very much and I love your podcast. Oh, thank you, well, gotcha? And she may not even have realized, Laura, that you have your own You know, you did not take your husband's name either, and we'll get into that in a second. But my answer is I'm not sure there's as much meaning to it as there used to be. I think there previously was a bit of a feminist bent to keeping your own name. I don't really feel like that's why I kept my name. It was more just not wanting to let go of what I felt like was a piece of me, which I guess maybe that could be interpreted as feminist but I don't know. I didn't do it to make any kind of statement. I also felt like Sarah Hunger did not flow very well. There's that little guttural stop in the middle. So I thought about that. And I certainly didn't want to just be Sarah Hart because it was a very short name that if you google it you can find like nine million different people, and I didn't like that very much. I wanted to fancy your name, so I decided to hyphenate, and I'm Sarah Hart Hunger, which a lot of people. I did the name Shoo. Actually during my fellowship, we had two fellows named Sarah, and so I was Shoe to make things less confusing, which is why my blog is anyway. So that's my initials, which I really like. And if you google Sarah Harthunger, you're only going to find me. So I really like that. I did not hyphenate my children because I mean, part of me felt like it's not a very sustainable solution because if they choose to hyphenate later on, what are they going to hyphenate like ten names? But also because yeah, I just didn't want it to be too cumbersome, but instead a tradition in my husband's family is to make the mother's last name the children's middle name. So all of my children have middle names of Heart, which actually is a very middle name sounding last name. So it works out well. Yeah, I no, that works. That works well because then they are the same last name as you. It's just they don't have a hyphen, you know, and people don't necessarily know that that's what it is. Now, that's really cool. I like the idea of giving kids both names, even if one parent's name is the middle name. I agree that it's completely a personal choice, Sarah, I'd put in the notes where there's plenty of cultures where it isn't automatic that you don't or the permutation is different of how you do it. There's the whole thing of Spanish surnames that goes entirely different in terms of how you change it. But one thing I would say, I did not change my name. So Vandercam is my maiden name, and my name now my only name, my only name. And if you have a career where name recognition is going to matter, I think there's something to be said for taking this into account. My husband's last name is more common so if you googled Laura and then his last name, there'd be other people, tons of people. It's just a very common name, whereas there is only one Laura Vandercam, So that's it was. It was sad when I was like in seventh grade and they're calling your name to assign you classes from the gym on the first day, and people would ruin it. I think the lady yelled Laura van Dorkam, which of course was the worst thing ever to shout. But now in the Google era, it is a exciting to have a name that nobody else has. Another thing, I just think about the Google era. Back in the day, it was kind of cool to have the same name as a celebrity, and now you definitely do not want the same name as a celebrity because you will never get to the top of your Google rankings if that's yeah, or you'll have to have an Instagram handle with like fifteen. Middle's not know, whatever your name is fifteen, or remember your name is two thirty five, or the name of your college or something else that you've had had to throw in there. So I would say, just do whatever feels right for you. It has nothing to do with whether you are part of the team of your family or not. I would say probably half the people in my personal life call me by my husband's last name anyway, just because it's the same name as my kids. And do you correct them or do you know? I don't correct them, although once I was paged with that last name and I didn't know it was me. I mean I was so it was one of these situations where my kid at a party, like you know, big thing whatever, had wandered up to the DJ and was trying to find me and asked the DJ to call me. And so the DJ said, well, what's your name? And and then what's your mom's name? And so did that, and they're paging this this woman, which is not the name that does all exist. Yeah, and I was like, my husband's like I think that's supposed to be you. I'm like, okay, I go. And then yeah, of course my kids just hanging out there wondering we're in this in this big room we were. But yeah, so it was funny because I you know, it said like when we were getting married, I was planning to keep my name professionally and legally, but then sort of goes socially by by his name, and people are like, oh, well, would you answer to it? And I'm like, oh, sure, I'd answered to it, but the problem and then when I was being paid with it, I didn't, not because I don't like the name or anything. It's just not really part of my identity, I guess. But now it's personal, personal choice, and it isn't nice to live in a time and era where you can choose. You don't have to do one or the other. So I think that's pretty cool. All right, Well, this has been Best of Both Worlds Episode one hundred. We've been talking with Andrea Walter about being an adoptive parent. We're also celebrating our one hundredth episode, we think so We'll be back with next week for the one hundred and first episode 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.