While it can be easy to feel gloomy in winter, especially post-holidays, this isn’t inevitable. In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah and I talk about winter fun lists, and different activities that can make it enjoyable. Maybe some day I’ll go on a sleigh ride!

Then we pivot to discussing my annual time tracking challenges. Next week (Jan 13-20) a great many of us will be tracking our time together. I’ll post my logs here, and if you’d like to get daily motivational emails from me, you can sign up here. You can download one of my time tracking spreadsheets here (though as you can see, you could easily make your own!)

In the Q&A we tackle a question that’s definitely on my mind: Do I really need to be figuring out summer camp now? Seriously? In January? Didn’t I just make it through the holiday gauntlet???

Please give the episode a listen! As always, we welcome ratings and reviews. And please consider joining our Patreon community. This week we’re discussing snow day kid coverage and work triaging, among other things. Our next virtual meet-up, on January 15th, will cover travel. Membership is $9/month.

I ran the Frostbite 5-miler, and while my time was not spectacular (10:57 min/miles) it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was in the middle. I also went (by myself!) to a chamber orchestra concert in downtown Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon. Some other combinations of people went to a movie on Friday night. We had some friends over at one point, there was night skiing, the 14-year-old got to meet up with friends at the mall AND he cashed in his Christmas present to go see Wicked in NYC. He and I got tickets, and then my husband and two other older children came in to go see the American Museum of Natural History. We ate lunch at the Carnegie Diner and did a lot of reminiscing as we walked through Central Park. Wicked was pretty fun — a good Broadway musical to bring kids to. I forget how close the city is (1 hour and 50 minutes with no traffic, which there really wasn’t on the way there). Now that some of the kids are older we should probably go in more often.

But perhaps not with the toddler. My most vivid memory of the weekend may be taking my 2-year-old to the grocery store on Saturday. I have five kids, so I’ve had a reasonable number of grocery-store-with-toddler experiences, but this one was one for the books. I’m talking throwing bottles of mustard off the shelves, lying down in the middle of the aisle and screaming. Wow! I just had to laugh because it was so ridiculous.

Photo: From lunch at the Carnegie Diner & Cafe