First, we cover our new school year routines. In my household things are looking a little different with new school start times, but so far I am a big fan. It’s nice not to have everyone up quite so early. Today, for instance, I was able to get up at 6:20 a.m. and get a treadmill run in before getting the first kid up at 7 a.m. We’ve also been getting everyone in their rooms earlier at night, which has some benefits too.

Then we do a deep dive on whining — both its inevitability and a few strategies for lessening the sting.

Finally, I go on a bit of a rant on preschool vs. daycare and how they’re not actually as different as people sometimes make them out to be.

Please give the episode a listen! If you’d like to join a discussion group of people who are interested in topics of work and life, please consider joining the Best of Both Worlds Patreon community. We have about 3-4 discussion threads going each week on our forum, and we meet up once a month by Zoom. In October we’ll be discussing all things meal planning (Oct 22 at noon eastern). Membership is $9/month — see the page here.

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.

So in that spirit, this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds is all about that back-to-school energy. Sarah and I discuss what will be new for our families this year (in my case, a driver with his own parking spot! And kid #5 goes to full-day school… plus all the school start times have changed).

The new school year is always a time when routines change and new logistics must be figured out. That can be stressful…but it’s also an opportunity to buy yourself some school supplies while shopping for your kids. So there’s that too.

In any case, please give the episode a listen! What’s new for your family this year?

Speaking of the new house, it is coming along. I felt happy with the floor stain color (“Golden oak”), and my selection for main staircase runner carpet. I am less thrilled about the tile I chose for the master bathroom shower, but since it’s in there now, I’m going to see if it grows on me.

I went to the elementary school’s back-to-school night this week. My 6-year-old had created a family portrait for his “All about me” page that, curiously, contained only him, my husband, me and the dog. I guess all other family members are extraneous… (Go visit me on Instagram, @lvanderkam, to see it).

My second eldest turns 12 today. I always reflect on his birth on his birthday because the whole experience was so ridiculous. We still lived in NYC. I was supposed to be induced but the hospital sent us home or back to the doctor’s office twice because it was so busy. People were in intense labor in the hallways. One might reflect that 9/24 is almost exactly nine months after Christmas, so perhaps it was always going to be a busy season. In any case, it was definitely a maybe-we-should-leave-New-York feeling, aside from the maybe-we-should-leave-New-York feeling that comes from having two small kids in an apartment.

(Though since they’re still sharing a bedroom in my suburban house…)

We’ll do a family celebration tonight, and a small friend celebration tomorrow. He has an appointment for his first vaccine dose set too.

Thanks to those who came to my virtual speech this morning for the UNC School of Medicine’s Women in Medical Sciences event. It was a great morning with a lot of good programming. If you are just coming here for the first time because you attended the event, welcome! I blog 3-4 times a week most weeks and there are a lot of time tips and such posted here from the last 13 years or so…

Lots of odds and ends this weekend as we prepare to list the current house. I’m also hoping to make progress on my current puzzle, which is White Mountain’s “Friends in Autumn” scene. A pastoral barn scene with bright red and yellow leaves. The leaves haven’t changed here yet, but I’m trying to embrace the season. I will admit, I’m even looking ahead a season. I ordered the Lego 2021 Christmas set… (but I haven’t ordered the Halloween costumes yet. Have you?)

Photo: This will eventually be my kitchen, but the cabinets aren’t built yet.