Happy 2nd birthday to BOBW!

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercam. 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 oneh eight, which is airing first in late August of twenty nineteen, and this is a special episode for us because we are celebrating our second anniversary. Best of Both Worlds has now been around for two years. We celebrated our actual one hundredth episode a couple weeks ago, but it turns out that there are fifty two weeks and a year, and we did three to start off with to sort of fill the channel at the beginning. This is actually our second anniversary episode and we're about at the one million download mark, which is just incredibly exciting to have grown it so much so yeah, we're gonna make that assumption that all of a sudden our downloads aren't gonna stop. Next. We are actually recording this in early August, so we don't know for sure that we'll cross that mark, but it appears, and I hope we do, and I've been excited to see we've gotten. You know, it's been a slow but steady growth. The last few episodes have done really well. You guys still are super super into our goals and routines. If we get goals and routines, which is actually great because I love talking about goals and routines. But yeah, those do amazing, So thank you for listening to those episodes. Yeah, so we thought in this episode we'd talk a little bit about the behind the scenes, how this podcast comes to be, how we come up with ideas, how we come up with our segments and our guests and all that good stuff. But first we would wanted to revisit what happened in the summer of twenty seventeen that led best of Both Worlds to be. Yeah, so I have copied and pasted some of these auspicious words that I wrote on my blog back then. Now I think we've talked about it before, but Laura and I have read each other's blogs for quite some time. I believe I found hers after reading one hundred and sixty eight hours and then we just started commenting for each other. And then we met in person a couple times in Philadelphia and just really hit it off, and we're like, yeah, we like hanging out with each other. And I wrote a couple of posts in the summer of twenty seventeen, and to set the scene, I at the time had two children and was pregnant with the third, Genevieve was a few months away from being born, and I wrote in other news, I kind of want to start a podcast because clearly I have time for that, right ha ha ha, unless someone can recommend a great one centered on life as a working woman in the throes of parenthood with young children. Suggestions welcome, And I got a few responses to that, not a ton, But then the next day I guess I was like, still kind of excited about the idea, and I wrote, clearly, I'm not NPR over here, so it's not like I'm thinking about creating the next This American Life. But of all the podcasts I listen to, I have noticed several themes, especially in the life hack self improvement ones, and I still do enjoy that realm quite a bit. Number one, the podcasts are often created by men, and unless said host is in charge of more than fifty percent of the home management scene, I don't really enjoy hearing work life balance tips man spleened to me. And number two, I wrote, when they are done by women, the women fall into two categories, number one, stay at home moms with a side gig and number two entrepreneurial women with flexible jobs. And I felt like there was a void. I wrote, I want to hear from intelligent women who are working more typical jobs with set hours and locations with kids, and I want to hear them talk about how they are doing life. I wrote that I envision a popoury of topics, from the trivial like school supply shopping, to bigger ones like making the most of leisure time and procuring excellent childcare. Clearly there would have to be guests or a co host involved. No one wants to hear me blather on myself week after week. And that post got over fifty comments. And since I'm not like a giant blog that was a pretty nice proportion. And then Laura email me, yay. Now I was up in partly in the Poconos. I was on a bit of a writing career retreat, whereas I was finishing off the clock, and I read Sarah's blog and I was like, hey, you know, it's certainly a space I had been thinking about. I mean, clearly podcasts are growing. This is, you know, from what I'm hearing from the various busy people I'm talking to interviewing, studying people have units of time where they want to fill this time and do something interesting and productive, but they can't use their hands and they can't use their eyes, and so what do you do to fill this time? When you're driving, when you're folding laundry, when you're exercising, et cetera. And so podcasting seemed like a great option. And so I saw this that Sarah had written this, I'm like, wait, this seems like potentially a great opportunity. So I sent her an email and she was amenable to it. Was not just amnimal. I was like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be great. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. No, I seriously that email was like, I never would have thought to ask you, Laura, but when you sent it, I was like, that makes so much sense and will be such a great opportunity for both of us because you had, you know, a lot of background that I didn't have, You had connections that I didn't have, You had a different perspective, and you had the valuable perspective of you know, in my comment that I don't have time for this, like you're like, yeah, you do, and you do kind of know better. So yeah, it was a great match. I mean. And granted I did fit in that category of sort of entrepreneurial moms with flexible jobs, so we are aware of that. But we've certainly tried to bring you a lot of guests who are in more traditional jobs. Certainly many people who you know, report to an office for at least some chunk of their working hours and have some things that need to happen at certain times. We want to make sure that those voices are out there because I agree with Sarah, there's a lot of stuff that's you know, again, say at home moms or people who have you know enough to work for four hours a week. Yeah, yeah, exactly, and that's not what we're going for. We definitely wanted to be here for women who have serious and intense jobs, who are raising children at the same time, who are rocking both now of course, you know, so we had to put it together at that point. This is where my small business stuff came in handy because I had various vendors I work with over the years. You know, I'd had a graphic designer do various work for me. So this lady was able to come up with a logo for us. She came up with a couple of logos that we were then able to choose from my digital marketing person, Nancy Sheed, is connected to a lot of like women owned small businesses around the country through her network, so she was able to help us match up with a podcast production company that could then sound advice in sales, which was able to help us get on the major platforms and figure out the format and the software we needed and all those things. And I know there are people that do diy those things. But you know, with my comment about time above, I don't think either neither Laura nor I really wanted to devote that time. We wanted to devote the time to writing scripts and thinking about topics and doing our other parts of our jobs. So it was really nice to have Laura, who right off the bat was kind of like, we need a team here, even when we didn't necessarily, you know, plan on doing ads and it was more of just a fun thing. I don't think either of us wanted to be doing hours of audio editing or exact wading through that part. And the honestryt it's not that expensive. I mean, you know, as we grow, it gets slightly more expensive. I mean there's certain things with hosting where the price goes up as you get more downloads. I'm not discouraging downloads, please keep downloading, but it does raise the the rates. For instance, it raises the uh, you know, the same thing if you have a blog, if you have a lot of traffic you're you're hosting, costs go up and such. But it's not that expensive. Like you could definitely do this as a hobby. That would be comparable with a lot of other things you might do if you're taking music lessons or something like that. So we certainly want people to think that you could do this on your own, if this is something that you wanted to do, and if it's on a small scale, it is very affordable, and if it's on a larger scale, there are ways you can leverage that. So I think it can kind of naturally find its own place where it needs to be. I mean, and I would say this, you know, if I don't like this to make be a commercial for Laura's stuff. But I'm actually an investor in a small podcast company. I've been doing more investing on the side. One called messy dot fm that will help you set up a podcast immediately. It's like a you know, I would call it blogger for podcasting that you can get on it and get going within an hour. And so yeah, you could check that out help that company grow too. Yea. Our lives have evolved a bit since then, so we've covered a lot of topics. Sarah was obviously pregnant at the time that it launched, and so we went through the birth of Genevieve and the maternity league planning, planning, and then the returning to nursing. In nursing, we hit on nursing a lot. Sorry, nothing wrong with it. It was an ongoing theme. You know. My I had a two year old at the time that was still in the throes of toddler type stuff. And now my kids are definitely getting older, so we're exploring more older kid topics. Will definitely be doing that with some of our guests in, but we will try not to leave our readers behind with young children, because I feel like we still are going to have young I mean, Genevieve was just still very young, exactly. And we'll make sure that we have guests because I do feel like those are the women that have sometimes the least amount of time to do things like go on podcasts, and so they don't end up as represented in that sphere. So we're going to be very conscious of that even as our broods grow older. It was it's funny because I used to do a lot of freelance magazine writing, and I had a funny conversation with an editor at a parenting magazine once and she was just lamenting that. She's like, I really want more articles for women with newborns, and I'm like, yeah, there's a reason you're not getting pitched by women with newborns. No time to do this, but you know, so I wrote so many blog posts after I had Annabelle. It's not even funny. So that's all there. You go. I mean, well, but you wrote the blog post, but you weren't like on the phone with six you know, I wasn't doing hardcore journalism exactly. That's the part that's harder to arrange. Like, certainly we can write about our own experiences, but doing the more intense part of the writing was what was generally not happening for people. So our process, yeah, well, we don't have a process. I do have a process, actually, I mean we don't think about it that often, but in preparing for this episode, I kind of thought, no, we definitely have a system, and we we kind of had an informal division of labor of how we do things that seems to work really well. So Number one is the brainstorming, and that often starts at the end of a recording session where Laura and I will just say, you know, we should have this guest on or someone had this good idea. I'm usually tired by that point, so we're not ready to completely hash out details because we've been talking for like three hours. So we just started kind of thinking about, like, you know, where the gaps are. Oh, we haven't talked about superficial things in a while or whatever it's planning season. You know our favorite things, and I try to keep a running list of suggested guests so that when someone posts on Instagram, hey I have a great expert for you about food prep or finance, that I don't forget about it. And so we kind of revisit that from time to time. Yeah, revisiting is I mean, at first, I think we were worried about going to the same topic multiple times. But it turns out that there are certain ish shoes that come up again and again, and you can take a slightly different perspective. You can have a guest who's got a slightly different angle, or maybe something's happened in our lives as our kids go to different stages that changes some aspect of it. So it turns out we're happy to revisit things. It turns out we'll be looking at routines and goals and organizing again and again, partly because again, you guys click on it all the time and it's fun to talk about. At least I enjoy it. So we're still continuing to be interested in great guests. So you can feel free to continue to pitch us yourselves, your friends, other experts. We continue to be very interested in you know, every woman is a real woman if they're lives, So I sort of don't like the phrase real woman. You know, a CEO is a real woman, just as the janitor is a real woman. But we're interested in women in all levels. And so if you know someone who has a good story to tell or logistics that work, you guys know that we really like people who are enjoying their lives and finding a way to see the positives. So keep those suggests. Yeah, it feel free to say just yourself too. We have had a lot of self suggested guests, which is wonderful. And sometimes when people are a little bit nervous about doing a podcast interview, will arrange for a pre conversation just so we can make sure we're all on the same page and know the story. And that can make people a little bit more comfortable because you know, obviously, people who have written books or you know, the CEO of a company or something have often been through media training and so they kind of understand what goes on with this and the people who have not done a lot of that don't necessarily and so many of us are not used to talking about our lives in story form, and that's the kind of thing that we can work with people on. So I'm personally happy to do that. So please keep nominating yourself, even if you haven't been on podcasts before, if you haven't been doing a lot of public speaking or radio or TV or anything like that, it's totally cool. And if you don't make you know, an episode soon, know that we have a big pile and we always keep going back to it. So yeah, the scheduling is yeah, which is you Actually you're like the excel keep Well there's actually does not really excel, but you're the one that usually keeps them back the list of upcoming episodes and air dates and the episode numbers and kind of keep. So you're the one who tries to keep us about a month ahead. I think I would probably cut it closer. So I'm glad that we have you running that because you were saying you have a sneaky sense. Most podcasts do not work that far. Yeah. No, we found this out as we are taking on advertisers, and some advertisers are repeat so you have the copy from a long way ahead. But then some you know, start campaigns and they start a campaign or week ahead of when the campaign starts, and you're like, oh, well, I mean, we we're fine to put it in, but we we have to. That's not usually when we're recording it, which I'm kind of like, we'll get we'll get reminders from them, oh and we're like, yeah, we recorded that three weeks ago, three weeks ago. But I mean, I'm sor used to that again with the whole like magazine world, It'd always was funny to me like there was some completely clueless more than they were inexperience in this world, and they would send you stuff for like a holiday gift guide on November twenty five, and I'm like, my dear, the December issue shipped like November first, my god, which means the stories were assigned likely September fifteen, so it's a nobody cares anymore. Yeah, you're like, we're on March, so if you wanted to be in the gift guide, September was the time to send the excitation around. And so I'm sort of used to that with this. And it's also that longtime listeners know that Sarah has a job schedule, she has a schedule, and she needs to see patients and she's not going to like be like, oh sorry, I can't see you now, I got to go record a podcast last minute. Yeah, I only recorded the podcast on days that I am officially off one and so that's currently about two days a month, maybe a little more, depending on if it's you know, PTO for something. But so we attempt to get the bulk of our guests on those days to do the interviews, and if it's impossible, then I can just do the interview. Sometimes we've done evening interviews if that's been necessary, if we've had to retake for some reason. So we have some flexibility in that. But generally we aim for Sarah's two days a month and then batch record on those days. So my spreadsheet helps me keep up with that that I've asked you know, three guests for you know, this array of four different dates and then work around that based on on Sarah's schedule. Well, speaking of spreadsheet, we're gonna go to an ad break now and then we'll talk about how we end up scheduling these ads and putting them in and how that works. But today we are going to talk about DoorDash. So DoorDash is the first on demand plat form to launch food delivery in all fifty states with the largest network in the US. They work with over three hundred thousand stores, which gives you a lot to choose from when you are ordering lunch at work or perhaps getting sort of easy catering for a playdate. That's my favorite time to use online ordering and delivery. I love that there are local places on the app and not just chains, although there are plenty of those to be had as well. And my method if I've got people over is all crowdsource about what's available, place the order online, and then I have a dasher come to my door and greet the kids with our meal. It can also be a super convenient option at work on those busy days when you don't have time to get out of the office but still want to treat yourself to some good food. It's very easy to set your account up with multiple addresses, so you can put both home and work on there to get a different menu of options to choose from based on your location. We think you will love trying door Dash and we are excited to share this offer code with you. You just have to enter the code best of on the app to get five dollars off your first order of fifteen dollars on more. I think you'll really enjoy trying it. Yeah, thanks for that, Sarah, And we also want our listeners to remember our excellent advertiser, m M Lafloor. Sarah and I are both big fans of m M laflor now I've been buying their clothes for several years. Sarah is a new m M laflor customer, but she's been really excited about it too, sending me photos of her in this stunning blue dress. I'm going to have you in all like blue sheath dresses from now on. Sarah's going to be the best of books. I actually do have like three blue yes, and I'm probably going to get more from M lafloor anyone's. They have lots of other things other than blue sheath dresses, so if that's not your style, you're good. They've got work pants, work skirts like excellent array of pencil skirts for instance, wonderful dressy tops, dresses, everything that the working woman needs to look awesome and pull together at work. And you know MMS laflor Is goal is to take the work out of getting dressed. They know you have better things to do than sift through garment racks at crowded departments store and so you can just go online. You can order straight from the website, or they can also send you a Bento Box, which is a selection of outfits that they think will work great for you that you can then try on at home and send back what you don't like. They make it easy to get dressed so you can focus on what's important in your career, in your life. And just a sign note, these pieces are really easy to take care of. My black pants are machine washable. I mean I want to repeat that here, machine washable. Anyone who wears a lot of black pants to the office knows how cheap that is. That you don't have to run to the dry cleaner every week, so you know, lots of details like that. They have thought through what working women need right now, New customers can enjoy twenty five dollars off their first purchase or Bento box with the code best of b E stof. Visit mmluffler dot com slash best of for more details and to redeem this gift. Awesome. Well, we'll get into how we end up scheduling our ads moment. But the next step after all the scheduling that we do is what I have now named pod prep. Pod prep sounds good. I see that on your planner sometimes when you post plan our notes. Yes, because it tends to be one of my morning activities. Somehow my brain does not want to do that at night. It wants to do it at like five am, which Laura knows because she'll get multiple scripts before six, and sometimes she even responds before saying, it's just pretty amazing. I've been having some waking up early issues, but that's a long story. So a few days before the recording date, sometimes the morning of, sometimes farther in advance, depending on how our lives are going, We send notes back and forth about the topic. We decide on our intros, We decide on which questions we are going to use. We try to decide our love of the week, although sometimes those are more spontaneous. Laura is really the leader in choosing interview questions, and then often I'll add my own because she is the journalist among us and she does a fantastic job with that, and she's also great about always reading books of our guests. This is okay, this is one of these things of being a book author myself, and I am perfectly willing to do interviews with people who have not read my books, So I don't want to put that, you know, out there as a condition. On the other hand, you know, it's kind of nice when the person has read your book, and I know that from my own personal experience, so I never want to do that to one of our guests. So I've always read the book. That is awesome. I try to read the books. I often skim the books, or sometimes we've invited someone because I already read and loved their book, and that makes it super easy. But yes, so that's that's pod prep. And yeah, it's usually back and forth. And we actually are not very fancy with this. We just do it in Gmail and then just print it out, so no fancy shared documents. Just on an email. I use a lot of bolts and italics to make it easy to navigate through the page when we're speaking. Yeah, so I print out the schedule. You have that with me. When we're recording, we both record on our own laptops and our home office setups, whatever that may be. We try to kick as many people out of the house as possible when we're doing this. I'm actually recording in a Regis office today because we've had been work going on on the power lines in our neighborhood and our deck is getting redone, so there's hammering and such, and it's like, you know, let me just rent an office for the day, So I am not in a home office today, which is kind of exciting, but yeah, normally that's where we are attempting to make it quiet. We both have our microphones, our headphones, and then we use Squadcast, yes, which is actually our second go round on recording software. We'd previously Usezencaster, which is great sometimes and then sometimes wasn't, so we decided to switch, and we do enjoy that squad Cast has a video feature so we can see each other's faces and the faces of our guest. We sometimes forget to tell our guests that and then like, if you know, wearing like a bathrobe, and we're like, oh, sorry, I can never mind them that it's not going to be shown any you want to. If you're coming on as a guest and you want to wear a bathrob, that's actually perfectly fine because it's only for our purposes to facilitate the conversation that our audience will never see the video. We're not capturing the video in any way. I don't think squadcast is even keeping it anywhere that I've ever seen. So that's it's more it helps for having and maybe longtime listeners can tell us if they think we've gotten better in this regard. But to have a conversation where you're not stepping on the other person if they're about to say something, or you could see that they're nodding, and so you feel like you could keep going with a point if they're like no, no, no, stop, and then you can stop with that point too, or you wave your hands because we're late to add our ad segment on or because we're over time on a certain yeah exactly exactly. So yeah, so we do that in Squadcast. I kind of run that show, which is not a very hard show to run, but I've gotten used to it. And then I put an email together basically with some very brief show notes, as you know, as we do have some show notes and any notes that we need our recording people to know about, like oh, I said something ridiculous in this part and I want you to edit it out. We don't do tons of editing, so from the most part, you get what you get. But every once in a while there's a hiccup that we don't need to be publicly shared publicly sharing. Yeah. Yeah. So then we about a couple months ago, we decided to start doing ads. I mean partly I kind of already blown through that idea with starting the Before Breakfast podcast, and that's just it's part of the world. So I'm now it's part of the podcast world. We were purest in the beginning, but you know, this does take a lot of time, and it was it was sort of realizing, Wow, my time is you know, when you start doing the calculations of what my point eight ft salary is and my point nine ft salary and what the one hundred ft salary would look like, you're like, oh, I my time is definitely worth something, and I do greatly enjoy doing this podcast, but it's still time that I'm not spending at work. And so I kind of proposed to Laura, I think it might be time. What do you think? And she was amenable and we found an agency. Yeah, so we're working with Lipstick and Vinyl, which is another you know, women owned company. We are big fans of using women owned companies. So they send us perspective advertisers and we bet them and you know, we we were a little concerned about this, I think in the beginning because like, well, are we going to have to advertise things we don't like? Like how much control do you have over the process? You know, Sarah obviously can't really talk about anything that would be health oriented so much that you know, like there's a lot of supplement companies that advertise one and wet them in health. We did want to imply that she was saying, as as a physician that some of the stuff is you know, especially especially when it isn't not even anyway that's a different story. But we we've since learned, and especially our agency is very good about this that they want us to be enthusiastic supporters. I mean you can hear we we love the stuff we're advertising. You tried it out and we have said not a plenty of things, many things that we wouldn't be excited about. So and the cool thing is that if it's something that we're not sure about, they will send us something to try so that we can find out oh yeah, this is a service or a thing that I feel comfortable recommending that I would buy on my own. I have already purchased my own Lola tampon prescription, and you guys have all heard my mm will Blur Supplies is huge already. All those are advertisers that we're very excited to have because you know, yeah, like we'd be telling our friends about them anyway. So that's been really best of both worlds. There highs and lows from the last year. Yeah, oh wait, you forgot this spreading the word part. Oh yeah, sorry. So we have an Instagram account, yes, and actually it's pretty active. It was really active when you guys didn't like an episode but are unhappy, But it's actually also really act. We get really actually like the Julie Morgenstern episode recently. Oh my gosh, you guys like it made me so happy. I felt like it was a really good episode, as I'll mention you know, and i'll mention it now. But it was awesome to hear the feedback that so many of you guys loved it too. So I love it when you express your thoughts on what we've talked about. And usually there's a photo, so it's not kind of nice to put an image to the things we're talking about. I do exploit my children with this a little bit, but they're so you's nothing embarrassing, like only cute features, and so yeah, we really have fun with the incident. And then Laura is awesome because she does a blog post every single week. Yeah, I do a blog post every week. I mean, partly because it means that that's one more idea. I don't have to come up with I blog four or five times a week. You kind of got to come up with a lot of ideas. But we'd love to grow, So please help the podcast grow. I mean, we'd love to expand our traffic and get quicker download rates. So please leave a review, recommend us to your friends. You can also recommend either of us as a guest on another podcast that you listen to that you think might have a similar, you know, or over lapping audience, because we're happy to spread the word that way. Yes, I'm gamed to be I haven't. You've done a lot of guest spots as the nature of your job, but I kind of want to try it too. It seems kind of fun, So if you think I would be an asset to some other podcasts that you enjoy, you know, don't think. Don't think someone sent Forever thirty five. I'm like, I love those ladies, but I'm pretty sure you need at least like one hundred thousand Instagram followers to even be considered. So think medium size whatever. You can go for the big ones too, It could be good. Okay, sure, maybe on highs and lows. Yeah, oh man, well let's talk about the low. When we recorded live together and then realized that we had not pressed beyond buttons. So I was in Miami because I was giving a speech, and we were all like, oh yeah, we're going to record several episodes in Sarah's office. It need just be great. And then and it was great. It was great, like we had a lot of fun. But apparently our computer was not in on the phone because we didn't actually record. I think we recorded blank tracks. The microphone was that her phone wasn't on, And normally we would have been learned to that, because the only way to hear each other when we're recording right now is for both our microphones to be on. But because we were in the same room, it was not that we had. Also, you know, sometimes it rarely happens with guests, thank goodness, because they're not in the same place as us, right, and so we can see if the track is coming through. But we had a close call where we thought a file was missing from one of our guests and we're sort of panicked about this, but she was She was really nice about it. I mean, we made a plan. The plan was that I was going to re interview her within that week. She was amenable to that, which was very nice. So nice because she could have been like, uh, no, not do that, but she's like, no, no no, I'll get back on the phone with you for twenty five minutes to talk through this stuff again. And then Sarah was meanwhile, Sarah's going through customers. Yeah, and that's actually the cool thing with squad Cast is they do have some sort of backup system and they were able to recover the files. So that was amazing. And that wasn't anything we did wrong. I think that was a glitch, but they were able to fix it. So yeah, yeah, that was that was good some highs. I mean, we've had amazing guests, Like we said, the Julie Morganstern one, Emily ost was a lot of fun. Loved Emily Tiffany Dofoos so good. I had wanted her for so long. Yeah, and having Josh josh On as our you know, lone mill guest, but you know, one who could talk about the issues of work and family that come from being married to Sarah. Yeah, that was that was a lot of fun to do. By the way, my husband said, no, I know, it's sad. In case anyone's wondering why he has Maybe in another year he'll change, Maybe he'll change his mind. We'll see. He's like he is invited, his invitations open. Like I like being anonymous, so not that anonymous. You can Google search if you want to. But no, So we have lots of great guests coming up. We're very excited about that. I don't think we're going to run out of things to talk about. No, I don't think so either. I think maybe at first we thought, but then it's true, like there's so many things that have you might have the same general topic but different angles, like back to school from a teacher's perspective, and back to school with special needs kids and back to school. You know, like there's just so many different angles. You could take a lot of these broader topics, and things are always changing. So things are changing where we keep getting new guests. We're going to possibly do some live events. We'll be done. Yeah, we have one potential live event next spring that's kind of exciting and we won't give details because you know, who knows if it will come to Fruition the way it's supposed to. But I think it'll be really fun and assuming that it does happen, we will record some live episodes while we're there, so that would be cool. We may talking about podcast conference, Laura. I've mentioned this before. We haven't made it happen, but I think maybe in twenty twenty podcast conference and our marathon in twenty twenty right that we're going to run together. Yes, I was already thinking about this and thinking maybe we should push it because it's so hot right now and there's so much lightning, as like, would Laura be okay with a December just because I do not want to train in the summer here at all, But we're thinking we'll figure out November twenty twenty would work. Yeah, our summer last until mid October. Okay, we'll see maybe maybe I'll just promise if you. I mean, there's fewer things in December, because it's true, I know, and it gets cold where you are too, So yes, exactly, all right, let's move to our Q and A, because we got to get through this before we actually have to sign on our first guests, whereas we're batard. Yeah, all right, well, then I will concisely give this one, although I will mention this person is a huge fan of Laura's work and loves secretly all the money in the world. So don't forget that Laura has a financial book out there that is still good and still out there. And this person is expecting her first child and is looking at local daycares, and she had it narrowed down to two. She writes, we're fortunate enough to be looking a year out. Yes, it's such a good best of both worlds listeners. She's been listening to us. They have their pick. They are confident that their non existent child will be in good hands of both. Like she is pregnant by they, I mean, it's a year is doing because she's she's due in like February. And then no, she sent us like a month ago and it was doing fast, so she really is planning ahead. Her husband has quite a long paternity leave actually, so they're not actually having to send the kid until about four months five months in. Yeah, but she's being very smart about this. So School number one is one mile or four minutes from the house, very easy to pick up and drop off, whether they commute or work from home, currently rare, but potentially doing some once the baby is born. The schools one hundred and fifty dollars cheaper per month, but the downside is the earliest they open is seven thirty. Her commute is thirty minutes, and while she rarely has an eight am appointment, it does happen at least twice a month. She notes, I'm sure my husband could do drop off on some of those days, but obviously that's a change in the schedule. Pickups are equal at both schools six pm, which is great. School number two is further it's two point four miles or seven minutes. Oh my gosh. Still pretty good, and it opens nice and early seven am, so drop off won't be an issue. The downsides are it's slightly out of the way for both of us to get to work. Nothing terrible, maybe five to ten extra minutes each person. But further, if we work from home, obviously one hundred and fifty dollars a month more is a downside as well, But from a curriculum standpoint, it's definitely a quote better learning experience, but school one will be more than sufficient. So it's not something I'm factoring in as much for my eight week old, but it might be when they're slightly older. The money is not a barrier, but one of the factors weighing in Which one would you choose? Which one? Yeah, I mean the good news here is that they're both awesome. I mean, you know, there's no bad choice here. And the fact that she has two awesome daycares is like way ahead of the game, you know, And so if she chose one and then they suddenly didn't have spots, it wouldn't be a problem to choose the other. She shouldn't really stress about it. I did point out that, you know, the one thing you do want to keep them in mind with daycarees who are going every single day, and it sounds like they're planning to split the day, you know, drop off and pick up, which is awesome. I think that should be the default with most families. However, if you're in a family where one parent is doing both of them, whatever additional time you have is going to be twice a day, so ten times a week. So even if it's only five minutes, that's fifty minutes out of your week. If it's ten minutes, that's one hundred minutes out of your week, it's fifteen minutes, one hundred and fifty that's two and a half hours. That starts to be you know about the amount of time you're probably like exercising during the week. It starts adding up. So you want to make sure that it's worth it and that you are factoring this into your life. That it will be very annoying on the days when it's like, you know, rainy, or you know, you're late to work or anything like that. However, in her case, they're both pretty close. I mean, I think there's not a huge difference between one mile and two point four miles, so that's not going to be a huge issue there. I did say the closer one one thing to consider is whether she could walk or run to it, because that might be something a sneaky way to get in more exercise, So you know, that might be an upside. There's also you know, I don't think the close the earlier later hours are necessarily a deal killer. I mean, certainly they could work it out. However, it is nice to have a slightly earlier start for the option in case she wanted to go into work early. Some days agree with her. The curriculum is not a huge deal, like it's you know, people get a little bit over obsessed with that. So I thought she should also look at the community surrounding both daycares, as in, like what sort of you know, how she felt about the other parents, like the vibe she was getting, Like if it was, you know, if one was drawing more from people from her neighborhood that she wanted to get to know, or if one was like more people from her work that she wanted to get to know. I mean, just because, for better or worse, these people are going to be your community for the next four or five years at least, and they're going to be the people you're seeing at birthday parties because that's who your friend's kids are going to be. So you want a group that you mesh well with. And so that's something she could look with too, and so you know, Sarah, what was your your gut instinct on this. It's funny I read this and I was like, school too, no brainer in my which is the one that's slightly far away. But it was like a little bit yes, And I would feel very differently if she said it was a ten mile drive and a twenty minute drive. Do you see what I'm saying? But to me, I'm like seven minutes, Like that's how long it takes me to get out of my complex. So if these are actually accurate times like that is still extremely close to the house. And I felt like the earlier opening time would be great because she did mention that there's these like some mornings, and I just feel like taking that conflict completely out of it so that she has the option or the husband has the option of dropping off early is just like super valuable. And then I also was thinking, yes, you're right, she could run to school number one, but she could number She might be able to run to school number two, depending I mean, it depends how long she would run. Annavel's daycare was about that far from our house when we lived in North Carolina, and I did actually sometimes run with the stroller to drop her off run home. It was like four miles total, four and a half miles. It was great. Yeah, and biking, you know, two point four miles isn't that far. So I just didn't feel like the length was far enough. And there was something in her words that made me feel like she was a little just more excited about number two. The price difference. Really, I mean that's like, you know, not a huge difference over the course of the year, especially to getting the option of like ten extra hours a month, right, which again and maybe it's my like morning productive person speaking, but like the fact that like she can get that, I mean, that's a great time to fit into work out too, So I think I think it gives her more options. Yeah, And so we responded this that, you know, on the margin, probably number two but if you know, for some reason, number two didn't have any space, like number one was not going to be a tragedy and anyway, Number one still send it off, and she wrote back that she thought about it. You want to make sure she wasn't just you know, going with number two to spend more, just to spend more or something. But she decided that she would feel worse if there weren't spots and number two versus number one, so she put her deposit down for daycare number two. So we'll hopefully that works out well for their future baby and we look forward to hearing about it. So Love of the Week, Sarah, I think that for an anniversary episode where we've been doing this this long, the only appropriate love of the week for me is you, guys. Thank you so much for listening, for downloading, for being with us, for commenting. I mean, this is just so much fun, and it's partly fun because of you. Also, thank you so much. You are the love of the week. Thank you listeners. Yet, love of the week for us and every week, but we'll particularly celebrate it this week as we are celebrating our second anniversary. Well, this has been best of both worlds. We'll tune in next week for more on making work in 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,