Sarah and I discuss our reading habits, and then Sarah interviews Traci Thomas of The Stacks podcast. They discuss all things books, from reading habits during busy seasons (Traci has twins!), curating your reading lists, getting out of ruts, tracking reading, and much more.

In the Q&A a listener asks about the logistics of having overnight care for a couples getaway.

Please give the episode a listen! Sarah and I are also looking forward to our Patreon virtual meet-up tomorrow, at noon eastern, when we’ll be discussing travel goals and hacks. Membership in the BOBW Patreon community, which has a thriving forum (70+ comments on a thread of our top book picks of 2024!) in addition to monthly meet-ups, is $9/month. Please consider joining here. Thanks!

I did not mean to take two weeks off from the blog, but life happens. At the beginning of this stretch, the preschooler got a nasty stomach bug, so I was up much of the night with him. Then our nanny got it, so we were sans childcare. Not my most productive week!

And then of course it was Christmas. We hosted my extended family for a party a few days before. On another day, all 7 of us went into NYC to see the Rockettes and go out to dinner. Activities like this remind me that my family is…bigger than average. When we parked the minivan at the garage we’d booked and all climbed out, it had a real clown car feel. It was a fun trip, but it was also 17 degrees that day, and so every time we were outside someone got massively unhappy.

We did the Christmas pageant (this year we had a reader and a sheep) and the service of lessons and carols on Christmas Eve. Christmas itself was low key in the morning but then the afternoon was a flurry of packing because at 5:45 a.m. on December 26th we drove to Newark Airport to fly to Barbados! International travel is another thing that is challenging with 7 people. But we made it. We spent time in the pool, on the beach, with my husband’s brother’s family (they went to the same resort) and just generally relaxing. Also, we celebrated someone’s 5th birthday! Yes, the little guy turned 5. For the first time since 2007, I do not have a child under the age of 5. Crazy.

I will give a shout out to my husband here, because I arranged to fly home from Barbados on 12/29, leaving him to travel solo with five kids the next day. Why? Because I had a dress rehearsal in Philly on 12/30 for a performance of the Bach B-Minor Mass!

Yep, this item has been on my List of 100 Dreams for ages. If you read 168 Hours, it’s in there. In college, I learned the mass, but then I was going abroad to study in Australia, and so I missed the concert. I figured I’d have another chance. Then 25 years passed. I started to realize that a bucket list item like this was going to be challenging because while you can buy a plane ticket somewhere exotic if you wish to go, it is a lot harder to arrange for an orchestra, a chorus, a director, a performance venue, etc. My back pocket idea was to audition for a choir an hour north of here that performs the mass every spring.

But I got a hot tip that Choral Arts Philadelphia would be performing the B-Minor mass on New Year’s Eve, and the director was kind enough to let me join them. I started going to rehearsals on Monday nights downtown, and re-learning the music. Yesterday, I sang in the performance and finally crossed this off my list. It was really cool. The singing sounded amazing and I was just trying to be as present as possible to appreciate it all. I hope it won’t be another 25 years (any other Philly area choirs doing this work, let me know!) but I know now to appreciate the opportunity.

(Also cool: a member of the orchestra introduced herself to me before the concert and said she had read my books! How fun is that?)

Then I drove up to my neighborhood to meet my younger two kids at a New Year’s Eve party (our nanny worked during the day and took them to the start of it). We did a New Year’s countdown at 7:30 p.m. The kids danced and waved glow sticks. Just perfect. Then my husband and I came home to supervise a houseful of teenagers, because some of the older kids decided to have sleepovers. There are 5 extra young people in my house right now but everyone is still asleep and they have all been very good.

So that was how I rang in the new year. This hasn’t been the easiest year, but I love the way it ended — with music, family and friends. Here’s to a great 2025!

Yesterday I wrote about how our mornings were shifting. Today, it’s on to the other side of the day.

I was definitely looking to refine our household evening schedules. The older kids are not exactly looking to go to bed early. If screens are an option, it’s hard to get people to do other things (like read). Because I have older kids, my youngest child in particular had a hard time going down while everyone else was up and about the house. That meant that I felt like I had very little downtime after he went to bed (or after the others went to bed, for that matter).

Last year I had enforced an “In room with no devices time” of 9 p.m. I’d go around and turn out lights at 10 p.m….if I wasn’t still dealing with the 4-year-old, whose bedtime can be long and involved. As parents of older kids have probably experienced themselves, sometimes when I went in to turn people’s lights out, they’d decide this was the perfect time to talk to me and…

Since the high school now starts an hour later (8:30 a.m. vs. 7:30 a.m. this year) I had visions of everyone’s bedtimes drifting later and later and I was not excited about that. So I decided that the official “In room with no devices time” would move back to 8:30 p.m.

There was actually not too much resistance to this, which I am grateful for. I think it helps that the older kids can still have their (school) laptops to do homework, so they can play music and honestly could be on (limited parts of) the web if they wanted to — they just aren’t texting their friends or watching YouTube. The older boys also have a fair amount of homework (and college applications!) so if they go to bed around 10:30 p.m., the 8:30 p.m. in room time gives them a reasonable two hours for work (and shower), which they kind of need.

Because everyone is up in their rooms, I can have the 4-year-old in his room at 8:30 p.m. I know that sounds late for a little guy, but he doesn’t have to be up in the morning until 8:15 a.m. and some number of days he actually sleeps until then! We go up, sometimes take a bath, read stories, and he is usually in his bed before 9 p.m. Unfortunately, I often still have to sit in there for a while, but he is asleep somewhere between 9-9:30 p.m. (if it is taking a while he has started to allow me to leave while he plays with toys in his bed…and then I just come check that he’s fallen asleep later). As soon as he is asleep, I go around and say goodnight to the big kids, have quick chats, but I don’t turn off their lights. They can deal with that on their own. Since there are no phones/ipads/Nintendo switches they will not stay up all night.

The only one who’s had some struggles with this is the 9-year-old. He’s not been a huge fan of independent reading. He’ll do art in his room, or quietly (sort of quietly) play with toys. And my husband has been reading Harry Potter out loud to him during this window. But my husband doesn’t exactly want to read to him for 90 minutes so this is something of a work in progress. We’ve been trying all sorts of books to entice him toward independent reading. One surprise hit was an Oahu guidebook, so go figure. I’m hoping he’ll build the habit over time.

But in the meantime, I’ve been a fan of this new routine. One complication: If I am not home at 8:30…it doesn’t always happen. Yes, this is a source of frustration. But I have been working on some solutions to this — it turns out kids can be good enforcers of their siblings following the rules!

This can be frustrating…or it can be an opportunity.

We’re only a week and change into the 2024-2025 school year, so I don’t want to make sweeping statements, but so far I’m happy with our schedule changes. Today’s post talks about mornings, and then I’ll do one later this week on evenings.

The biggest change is that the high school now starts an hour later than it used to (8:30 a.m. vs. 7:30 a.m.). This move was years in the making, and is supported by a ton of research showing that adolescents are not at their best early in the morning.

The result is that my older boys don’t need to get up until 7:30 a.m. (They could probably get up a little later, but they like to get to school on the earlier side. My 17-year-old is driving, and wants to back into his parking spot so he can get out of the parking lot earlier on the other end…but since he is driving a 2011 car that does absolutely nothing to assist you on the parking front, this is hard if the neighboring spots are already taken!).

To accommodate this, the middle school start time moved earlier. This is not awesome (middle schoolers are adolescents too) but it only moved 15 minutes earlier, from 8:15 to 8:00 a.m., so not terrible. Unfortunately, the school system did not magically procure more buses, so our assigned pick up time for the middle school bus was early enough to negate all the wins of the later high school start time. SO…we decided to drive the 7th grader.

Generally, the person driving her leaves around 7:40. If necessary, this person could leave closer to 7:30 in order to be home before the high schoolers absolutely have to leave. That means the high schoolers could stay with the little boys if need be. I try to set up household schedules so that one adult can cover if necessary!

To leave at 7:40, the seventh grader can get up around 7 a.m. or even a little later. This is a pretty major lifestyle boost that no one in the house has to get up before 7 a.m. (I am almost universally up before then, but it definitely buys some margin in the morning).

Meanwhile, the elementary school does not start until 9:10 a.m. Children cannot be dropped off until — wait for it — 8:55 a.m. Whoever is doing the little kid run generally leaves at 8:50, drops the 4th grader off between 8:55 and 9:00, then heads over to the (nearby) preschool to drop the 4-year-old off late. (We could do it in the opposite order, but the elementary school pushes back more on tardies. Also, theoretically the 4th grader could take the bus, but the stop is by a busy road so someone would need to wait for him and then drive the 4-year-old in the same direction as the elementary school, so this doesn’t really help matters.)

Another change: 3 mornings a week, our FT nanny is starting at 7:30 a.m. On these mornings, if I’m not driving the 7th grader (my husband tends to do it if he’s home), I say good morning to the big boys, talk to them for a few minutes, and then I aim to be at my desk by 7:40. Mornings are really my most productive time, and I wind up doing a lot of kid shuttling later in the day, so I like starting work earlier. Honestly, I love this. The past few early start days I’ve felt giddy realizing how much I’ve gotten done by 8:30 a.m. I have definitely gotten a ton done by 9:30 a.m., which is when I would be at my desk if we didn’t have morning childcare.

There are variations. On Wednesdays and Fridays childcare hours start later. On Wednesday I can be at my desk at 9 and Friday it will be more like 9:30 (usually; my husband will do some of these mornings too). My 17-year-old has a “free” during first period one out of every four days, so the 14-year-old takes the bus on those days and the 17-year-old goes in late. I have told them I am not keeping track of this — they can work it out. If the middle school jazz band meets before school (as it did last year) that will change everything up a few days per week.

But at the moment the schedule has some big benefits over years past, so yay. Some mornings I get up at 6:30 a.m. and run on the treadmill before the 7 a.m. kid stuff. That’s what I did this morning and I’m hoping to convince myself to do that roughly 2 mornings per week. Some mornings I drift up and just enjoy a quiet cup of coffee before 7 a.m. With the light coming through the living room window, it is…nice.

We got back from the beach Saturday afternoon. I decided to record five Before Breakfast podcast episodes that night. On Sunday I sent them in, got my various newsletters squared away, and did podcast prep for a massive recording session on Tuesday. That gave me space on Monday to work through the results from my recent Evening Hours Challenge, and to approve the various surveys that will be part of my upcoming Better Workday Challenge (a 3-week project where people test out three strategies designed to make any workweek better. You can sign up here if you’d like! The results will be used anonymously in my next book. You can still sign up if you did the Evening Hours Challenge too. As usual, my sign-ups tend to skew more female, so male readers are particularly encouraged to sign up – thank you!).

On Tuesday, Sarah and I recorded an episode of BOBW, two intro + Q&As for upcoming interview episodes, plus I interviewed Sarah for Before Breakfast. Yep, Before Breakfast will be launching a weekly longer show in mid-September — I’ll explain the reasoning in this weekend’s Week’s Worth newsletter, but suffice to say it’s a new project.

At noon we did the BOBW Patreon community’s monthly meet-up. Then I finished packing, dropped my 14-year-old off at the high school to take the bus to a cross-country meet and I drove to Newark Airport. I was flying to Austin, TX to give a speech, and American Airlines does very few flights there (they are always at bad times out of PHL, or else require a connection) so I tend to drive to Newark so I can fly direct. I practiced my speech in the car! Then I parked in the garage for Terminal C (an important point for later – the Newark flights flew out of C).

The upside of it being an afternoon event in Austin on Wednesday is that after having a long lovely night of sleep (10:30 CT-7:30 CT) I could work in my hotel room all morning. Even if the morning did not start that early! I had avocado toast for breakfast, worked until 11:30, went to the green room, met everyone and worked there and then gave my talk to the group in early afternoon. It was an all-women (well, 90%) audience as it was a women’s conference, which is always fun. I feel like my material is useful for all people but it tends to land best with people like me, which is probably true for humanity in general.

I was back at the Austin airport that afternoon, and on a 6:26 p.m. flight back to Newark. We landed early, but unfortunately, we landed in Terminal A. I have no idea why United and Newark do this. Flights to/from various destinations alternate between terminal A and C and they are no where close together. So I had to go wait for a shuttle bus to Terminal C. Given that it was 11 p.m., there was a certain amount of gallows humor among the folks waiting for this bus, though I got to talking with one of the Newark airport employees who was herding us around and she mentioned that she never wanted to fly because people were so grumpy when she was dealing with us at the airport, which I thought was kind of sad. Anyway, I made it to my car at something like 11:20, and onto the highway around 11:30, which put me home at 12:55 a.m.

I was in bed around 1:15 a.m. but my goal of sleeping in this morning was somewhat thwarted by the sheer volume of activity around this house. I made it to about 8:15 a.m. with a lot of in and out. Oh well — there’s more running around later today but for now I’m having my coffee and getting a bit less discombobulated…

Photo: Books available for conference attendees. 

Eating out is fun with older kids and in smaller groups. Eating out with all 7 of my family members, including a 4-year-old (and a highly selective 9-year-old) is a bit less relaxing and enjoyable. So we tend to eat dinner at home most days.

I got a note recently from someone who was reading I Know How She Does It and was looking at one of my time logs. She saw that I spent 30 minutes on meal prep on a day I was cooking and she wanted to know more about this as she felt meal prep was consuming a lot of her life.

I know from getting a lot of similar notes over the years that people’s ideas of what home cooking involves is highly variable. I’m not from a culture that particularly celebrates elaborate meals (we’re also fine with leftovers) and I know that is sometimes a factor in how much time gets devoted to these things. That said, I don’t think that has to be either/or. One can make elaborate meals on weekends and holidays and maybe be a bit more practical on Tuesdays. There’s also a big space between completely made from scratch and ordering pizza every night, so those things don’t need to be either/or as well.

My family’s weekday meals generally do take 30 minutes or less. On Monday this week I made pasta (as we almost always have). The driving schedule was such that I was cooking. I started the water to boil the pasta, browned some Italian sausage, and cooked some veggies too (peppers and onions — we actually already had a bunch cut up from a previous dinner prep so I was able to just throw those in). Then I added a jar of Rao’s marinara sauce to the sausage/veggie mixture, and heated up some plain sauce for the folks who prefer that. My 14-year-old made a tomato and burrata salad. I also cut up apples for everyone. Voila — dinner.

On Tuesday I made chicken with Rogan Josh sauce — this involved boiling water for rice (I generally use the boil in a bag Jasmine rice for this — our family uses about 3 bags…) I cut up several chicken breasts and browned the chicken. Then I added a jar of Rogan Josh sauce (Patak’s brand). I sauteed some more of those previously cut up veggies. We also had some dumplings and spring rolls that were part of a meal kit sent by a potential advertiser, so I heated those up (the spring rolls went in the oven with some chicken nuggets for people who weren’t going to eat the Rogan Josh sauce). I believe I cut up fruit. This was all less than 30 minutes too.

On Wednesday I outsourced cooking but it involved that potential advertiser’s meal kit so I’m pretty sure it took 30 minutes as well, since that’s kind of their major selling point. (It was a vegan Thai curry, by the way). Kids who were not eating that (I will admit, tofu was a hard sell) had a pizza.

As for clean up, kids are all required to put their dishes in the dishwasher. I’ve been hitting up various older kids to help with other bits of clean up, but the good news is that simple meals tend not to involve too many pots and pans. For pasta there was the pot with pasta (not that messy), a colander, the pan with the sauce (a bit messier) and a pot with the plain sauce, plus two cutting boards. For the chicken Rogan Josh there was the pot for rice, the colander again, the cutting board, the pan with the chicken, the pan with the veggies and dumplings, plus the cooking sheet for the nuggets and spring rolls. We use a spray detergent so individual items can get sprayed and scrubbed down (scrub brushes go in the dishwasher at the end of the day and the dishwasher gets run overnight).

In other news: I’ll go ahead and do my content round-up for the week since I’m probably not posting tomorrow.

If you enjoyed this week’s Best of Both Worlds episode with Anna Goldfarb (I enjoyed it!) please consider joining our Patreon community. Next week we’re having a meet-up via Zoom on Tuesday at noon, eastern, to discuss our current book club pick: Tara Mohr’s Playing Big. This promises to be a great discussion.

Over at the Before Breakfast podcast I suggested that you “See what’s nearby” every time you visit somewhere new or where you don’t go often. That’s how I got to run on the beach in the beginning of May! I suggested you “Plan your travel portfolio” and that when it comes to work, “Flexibility matters more than hours.”

At Vanderhacks (my every-weekday-morning Substack newsletter) I suggested people figure out “What makes it good?” For any broad experience, like going to an amusement park, different people are going to be looking forward to different thing. It might be wise to figure out what would make the experience “good” for different people so you can optimize overall happiness. The paywalled post was about “What I’m loving now” — a few of my favorite products/clothes/things for summer. Please consider either a free or paid subscription for more daily tips.

Photo: Not the current kitchen, but the one from a few years ago…

Anyway, one I’ve been pondering lately is to let your ideas ripen.

History is full of things that are good ideas…they just aren’t usable right now. Leonardo da Vinci came up with various concepts that were “ahead of their time” — promising ideas that needed more modern refinements to be usable in their modern form. Aztec children played with toys with wheels but wheels were less useful for transport without the right kinds of animals to pull carts, so the Aztecs didn’t explore all the possibilities. It feels like the steam engine could have been invented and adopted earlier, but it wasn’t — or at least not in the form that powered the Industrial Revolution.

Productive creative types tend to work on ideas that are usable. Young notes that some even have a special sense for this (avoiding working on problems that are just going to make you bang your head against the wall)…but of course the real breakthroughs will come from being ready to combine ideas with new technologies or conditions when they happen. So it might be wise to come up with the ideas and store them somewhere so they can be used when the time is right. In other words, like a green strawberry on the vine, they just need to ripen.

It’s a fun metaphor, and I’m sure we can think of various examples. That brilliant marketing idea might not work for anything your company is currently selling, but could be perfect for a product that’s launching two years from now. You don’t know what that product is yet…but when the time is right it will be a great combination. Years ago, I wrote a National Novel Writing Month novel about some characters named Juliet, Riley, and Skip, and a school focused on the domestic arts located somewhere on the Jersey shore. The story was terrible. But I saved the manuscript and then when Portfolio asked me about potentially writing a fable, I was able to resurrect the characters and location and Juliet’s School of Possibilities was the result.

I guess the implication is to keep coming up with ideas, and put them somewhere, and review them periodically. Sometimes conditions change, or a new opportunity is presented and the idea will be ripe. Maybe not for all the ideas. But at least for some.

In other news: This week has already featured a lot of kid stuff! Yesterday was the 3rd grade wax museum. My 9-year-old was Albert Einstein, with the full on wig and everything, and he had a good quote about success involving hard work, play, and keeping your mouth shut.

Then today was the 6th grader’s “Genius Hour” expo — she put together a collection of recipes and made a cook book of them. There were two school picnics, and the 14-year-old is off on a class trip today.

Over at Vanderhacks (my new Substack newsletter), this week we covered how you should “Create kits to stay organized,” and how you might be “30 days to finished.” The paywalled post is an analysis of one of my time logs, with a focus on evening hours.

Over at the BOBW Patreon community we’ve been discussing various myths of working parenthood (based on this week’s episode) — that thread is at almost 60 comments now!

And in my sonnet writing project…here’s a sonnet about honeysuckle and summer, called The Herald:

An amble down the path, no thought in mind
when suddenly, the honeysuckle’s scent
is there, familiar, coaxing me to find
the blossoms hidden, vines and where they went.

I breathe in deep and, laden in the sweet,
are summers past, like nectar buried deep —
the hope before oppression in the heat
a breeze, an open window where I sleep

one morning, when the dreams have vanished, gone.
In groggy hours, I’m unsure what’s real,
but all is possibility and dawn,
is waking, and the wonder that I feel

is carried, fleeting whiff upon the wind —
the hope that budding summer will not end.

Photo: Not honeysuckle, but these are blooming now!

I knew my phone had been living on borrowed time. It’s an XS, purchased (I believe) at the very end of 2018 or beginning of 2019 — making it 5.5 years old. That’s a lot in phone years! I kind of liked the idea of stretching out its useful life. I’d been able to solve some earlier annoying problems (a good cleaning helped) and the flat chargers had bought me another 5 months or so. But this seemed like a harbinger of the end. Like, the very-soon-to-come end.

So I drove over to the Apple store to purchase a new iPhone 15 Pro. Very exciting. I figured it would be relatively easy to switch over with my Apple ID. But when we went to do that, it turned out that the automatic back-ups on my phone were turned off. I don’t remember doing this but obviously I must have. Who knew when it had last been updated. We started a back-up, but the store people helpfully told me that if the battery was under 50 percent that could be problematic. (I am not entirely sure why, but that made me rue that I had been scrolling while waiting for a sales person to help me! I was just under…)

So we jerry-rigged a charging set up where if you held a plug into the port at an angle and pushed, it would charge. So I was stuck at the table holding it as I started the back-up… and then the time remaining estimate kept going up and up (I guess I have a lot of photos…). At first I thought I could finish it there, but I needed to get to preschool to pick up the 4-year-old at noon. Also, a contractor came to get in the house while I was gone (I had thought this would be a 30-minute errand, not a 90 minute one!). Sigh.

Anyway, eventually I had to leave and abandon the project. I got to the preschool a little late and fetched my son with both phones still in transition. I had a brief moment of realizing how much my phone is intertwined with my life as I was not able to do the proper preschool check-out procedure as I didn’t have the check out app working. Normally my trainer FaceTimes me at 12:30 on Mondays but none of his calls were going through either to either phone. Fortunately, my (new-ish) laptop gets the FaceTime calls too, so I used the laptop instead of my phone for my training session. And then, after that, I saw that the back-up had been continuing while I was running around, despite the battery draining. I was able to sign in to the new phone and get whatever had been backed up over to the new place.

The good news is my photos made it. My contacts did too. My apps don’t seem to have. But I guess that’s not a terrible thing. I’ve been figuring out which ones I use and have been reloading them and retrieving my passwords. My Yahoo email account was the first thing I added. Amazon made the cut quickly (I had to buy a phone case and chargers…). So did Venmo (I had to pay folks). I’ll need to do my bank’s app to deposit a check. I’m debating on the social media ones. I have a few books in my Kindle app that I haven’t read but I guess I wasn’t dying to read them as I haven’t made that happen yet.

After making do with a falling-apart phone for the last year I have to say it is quite nice to have a shiny new one! I bought a violet phone case and — even better — violet-colored chargers so now I will know if anyone has taken my chargers. (Charger theft is a pretty frequent crime in this house…)

So…should I put Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter back on my phone?

The month kicked off with a run on the beach in Florida. I was there to give a speech (which went well! Also a solid start to the month). When I travel for work I kind of just go where I am told but I happened to look at the map and saw that my hotel was about a 10-minute walk from the beach. I also saw that my speech was not at the crack of dawn. So I packed my running gear and enjoyed an absolutely delightful early morning run along the sand, watching the waves. So a useful life hack: Search nearby.

That weekend I survived an MRI — definitely a memorable experience. There was no real clarity provided by all this. My lower back has a pronounced curve and I have some disc degeneration…but so do many people. There is nothing in particular to be done for it so I just keep figuring out how to live with it.

The good news is it doesn’t keep me from living my life — and May had a lot of other cool things. One highlight from the first weekend was hearing my middle schoolers’ jazz band perform in a competition. They were actually really good! It’s fun to hit the stage when listening to your kids’ music is truly enjoyable.

I went to a concert of Bach cantatas downtown on the 8th…and then on the 9th my daughter and I left for Paris. This was such a fun trip, with tons of crepes, walking around town, a Seine cruise, the Rodin museum and the Musee de L’Orangerie, eating on little tables outside little restaurants and, of course, Taylor Swift. However bad my back is, I managed to stand for 5 hours at that concert so go me. I enjoyed spending time with my daughter and with old friends. Paris in the springtime is just beautiful. The roses were in full bloom at the Rodin museum, for instance, and all the birds were singing as we wandered around at night. On our last evening my daughter and I just kept going outside as it was still light and we didn’t really want to leave…

A few days after coming home I went on my shopping extravaganza with Lani. I purchased a bunch of pants at Nic + Zoe and then also bought copies of several of them online afterwards, and and few shirts so my summer wardrobe has now been completely transformed. Which is a good thing. Let’s just say it was time.

That weekend (the 18th) I drove to Bethlehem to see the Bach Choir of Bethlehem perform Bach’s B-Minor Mass. This is my favorite work of music, and it was a more enjoyable experience to hear it having heard so many cantatas over the past five months as I listen to all of Bach. I could place more of it in context. Then my 17-year-old enjoyed his tea party birthday!

The next week featured the fun of my 9-year-old and 4-year-old getting to ride to school in a police car. That was memorable for sure. Then there was Memorial Day weekend with a family cookout and Princeton Reunions (and a solo bike ride!). I got to listen to the jazz band again last night during the middle school end-of-year concert. My 14-year-old hopes to continue this in high school and I hope he will. I love music and I’m happy that my older three children have all made it a big part of their lives. I have a tentative plan to teach the 9-year-old a little piano this summer. He can choose a band/orchestra instrument this fall as part of the school music program, and get lessons through school (which I will supplement with private lessons) so that will be exciting. I think it will help if he has some music reading skills ahead of time.

Anyway, lots of fun stuff. June will likewise be full. School is ending but not before there are several more recitals, an 8th grade graduation, multiple during-the-day school events and outside-the-school-day events. I have this idea that summer will be more relaxed but…maybe. In July or something. Anyway!

In other news: Vanderhacks is now 6 months old! This is my every-weekday-morning newsletter from Substack. Posts this past week included “Enjoy the 2,352 hours of summer” and “Say what you will do, not what you won’t.” The paywalled post was “3 easy ways to build a platform.” It’s been a lot of fun doing this newsletter, so if you enjoy this blog, it’s really just a bonus blog each day. Please consider subscribing! And if you’d like to support my work, a paid subscription would be great.

Have an awesome weekend!

To help with that, in this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, I talked with Bobbi Rebell, author of the book Launching Financial Grown-ups. Bobbi shares ways to help kids learn about money from an early age, and her advice on encouraging independence over time.

In the Q&A, Sarah and I address a listener question of how we keep track of our calendars without using a digital system (yes, it is possible!). Please give the episode a listen, and as always we welcome ratings and reviews.

The Best of Both Worlds Patreon community is gathering today, at noon eastern, to discuss “Career conundrums.” There’s still time to join! Membership is $9/month (the session will be recorded for people who join after). We have a lot of fun discussing issues of work and life, and know you will too!