So it was up and at it, but the slower start was nice. I went for a walk in the snowy woods, and then the 5-year-old and I made a snowman in order to make use of the snowman kit he got for his birthday. It will all be in a puddle later but it was a tiny little adventure, squeezed in around shoveling and getting people out the door.

I have been pondering weekly rhythms lately. No week is ever quite the same around here. There are a lot of moving parts, so I find it helps to have some things be the same week to week. For instance, on Mondays I do a virtual session with my trainer at 12:30, so I don’t have to think about scheduling exercise that day. Monday dinner is always pasta night. This is especially helpful now that I’m usually headed downtown for a rehearsal on Monday nights. It’s quick, and I don’t have to think about it.

Tuesday tends to be a run-on-the-treadmill + resistance training day. Tuesday’s dinner has lately been some iteration of chicken and rice. This week it was with a jar of curry sauce. (People ate in shifts last night with activities.) Tuesday is always Best of Both Worlds podcast release day — I tend to listen to the week’s episode at some point on this day, often on the treadmill (yes, even though I recorded it…I like to listen to it as other people do).

Wednesdays I drive the little boys to school in the mornings. It’s our lighter activity day (no one has anything after 6:30 p.m.) so we aim to do a sit-down-together family dinner. That’s also trash night so everything goes out to the curb. This has become bath night for the little guys too (they do bathe at other points, but I for sure do it this night). We pick up whatever part of the house the cleaning service is doing the next morning. I now think of Wednesdays as Before Breakfast interview days — this is the day those longer episodes come out.

I tend to do my planning on Thursday mornings these days. I know I’ve touted “Plan on Fridays” as a rule…and this is Friday planning, just moved a day up so I can do the upcoming weekend’s plan at the same time. I send around a schedule for the weekend, and I plan what I have coming up the next week professionally and personally (I tend not to send the next week’s family activity schedule until Sunday because changes keep coming in). We generally do breakfast for dinner. Thursday is another choir night for me, this time with my 17-year-old. At some point during the day I practice my music for that.

Friday is another day I take the little boys to school. If we’re home Friday night it’s make-your-own-pizza night, which is generally a hit around here. Well, for most people. Two kids strongly prefer a frozen pizza, so sometimes I throw one of those in the oven too.

There’s a weekly rhythm of activities too…ninja warrior class Mondays, parkour Tuesdays, after school yoga (!) for the 5-year-old on Wednesdays…Anyway, I’m sure all of this will change soon enough, but 6 months into the school year it’s finally starting to feel fairly routine. There are always some changes (see: 2-hour delay) but when the scaffolding is in place I worry slightly less about forgetting things.

So, theoretically we could have gone somewhere though I often find it hard to plan for this one. It’s only a few weeks after Christmas. I often have been planning spring break and putting together the summer spreadsheet and I am just…planned out.

We’ll wind up doing something — we always do — but as I’ve been thinking through options, I’ve been pondering what makes a weekend feel “good.” A key part of it, I think, is that everyone in the household has something they are looking forward to.

I, personally, have some things I am looking forward to, but I want to make sure the others do too. Here things get complicated. My 14-year-old has tickets to a show, so he’s good. The 2-year-old is going to a birthday party (his first!). My husband is usually happy if he can go to the gym a few times, though he does like to ski too. My daughter said she wanted to go to a restaurant (we went to Moshulu for brunch a few weeks ago and she was really taken with the idea of going out for brunch…). Unclear on the 12-year-old and the 7-year-old. I’m sure both would like to have lots of video game time, which they will get, but the 7-year-old in particular is having his screen time limited currently (honestly the 12-year-old should have it more limited) so we’ll need to go a little deeper on their requests. Or I guess I can feel that as long as they are getting some video game time they’ll have something to look forward to!

Anyway, it doesn’t always happen, but it’s something to aim toward. That means adults too! Of course, a key part of having something to “look forward to” is that it is planned in advance. That means thinking through the weekend a few days ahead of time. In the past I’ve suggested carving out a time on Wednesday to think through the weekend, which can work, though with a 4.5 day weekend earlier is probably better. Maybe next year we’ll plan a trip somewhere warm…

(Though it is actually supposed to hit 60 degrees on Friday! Spring may get here yet!)

Would you agree with this “everyone has something to look forward to” idea as a weekend principle?

I will preface this by saying that I really enjoyed the tubing itself. Flying down the mountain was just exhilarating, and since I’d been watching the Winter Olympics luge/bobsled/skeleton events, I was making a point of tucking in my feet and pushing off with multiple short strokes, and so whatever kid I was doubling with and I just flew. The weather was beautiful — a light snowfall in the morning making the mountains glisten like they were frosted, with the temperature hovering right at 32 degrees.

However…we only wound up tubing down the mountain three times. And the transaction costs to make that happen were substantial. I am not talking money (though there was that) — the energy itself was immense.

For starters, it turns out you need to be 36 inches to go tubing, and the little guy is 34 inches. So we chose a day when we could get a babysitter for him.

Theoretically all our ski/snow stuff should be in certain places but it was…not. Plus when the kids go skiing, they have ski boots, but we needed real boots for this adventure. Finding them in the right sizes for everyone required hunting through stuff that had not been unpacked yet.

We drove the hour and 15 minutes north to the ski place, and had a bit of a snafu on whether 6 waivers were signed. Fortunately, this got solved fairly quickly. But nothing else was quick. We were not the only people at the mountain. A nice snow-covered 32 degree weekend day brings crowds. So every time we got to the top it was a 20-25 minute wait to go down. After three times the kids had basically had it.

If you figure each of the runs was about a minute (maybe) then that was 5.5 hours of total time for 3 minutes of tubing for each of us. Plus the getting ready craziness. (There was a WaWa stop afterwards, so maybe we subtract that from the 5.5 hours).

So are these adventures worth it? A complex question. It would have been an easier day if we’d stayed home, especially if we were going to get care for the 2-year-old. On the other hand, time was going to pass one way or the other, and the feeling of those swift flights down the mountain with the powdered sugar snow on all the nearby evergreens is probably going to be one of my memories of this winter.

I don’t know if it’s clear in the balance what is worth it, but that is why I have the rule to have “one big adventure, and one little adventure” each week. It is easier not to do things, but doing things tends to create the memories that define time. This weekend has still featured a lot of down time and screen time. So probably best to do something else, and the rule nudges that impulse along.

Did you have any adventures this weekend?

In other news: “One big adventure, one little adventure” is Tranquility by Tuesday Rule #6. In case anyone wants to mark their calendars, the book will be out on October 11.