We celebrated the 10-year-old’s birthday with friends on Monday at Oasis, which is this indoor play place. A number of parents expressed gratitude for having somewhere to take the kids to burn off energy at the end of a long weekend. I know my son had a really good time. I think of his birthday as the end of the cycle of kid celebrations. In May, the oldest took some friends to a restaurant for tea. The 15-year-old had a group of friends over for pizza/playing ping pong and pool and running around outside in September, the 13-year-old took a group of girls out for brunch and to Build-a-Bear in October, the 5-year-old did Chuck E. Cheese, and now we had this celebration on Monday. I think everyone was pleased, and now there is at least a few months’ gap before any more celebrating.

The 10-year-old is working his way through the PADI online course so he can get his scuba diving license! This is an exciting development of being 10. He loved snorkeling and then this “snuba” diving we did a few years ago, so I’m glad he’ll get to join his dad and older brother (the 15-year-old) on these trips.

Just a little content round-up, as I probably won’t be able to post tomorrow. On Before Breakfast, the interview this week was with Gillian Goddard, a long time friend of this blog (and a repeat guest on BOBW too!).  There were short episodes on how “The devil doesn’t need another advocate” and “Don’t remember, plan.” Relying on memory tends not to work; best to give anything you want to do a time on your calendar.

At Vanderhacks, my every-weekday-morning Substack newsletter, I suggested people “Start the wait.” If you know you’re going to be waiting for someone or something to do their part, best to start the clock as soon as you can. I suggested people “Get curious when things don’t go as planned.” Maybe some smart questions can uncover a new approach. Behind the paywall, I talked about “How to make interruptions less frustrating.”

I’ve also really enjoyed hearing from people about how the Time Tracking Challenge went! I am slowly responding to all those emails — so if you reached out, know that I will get back to you within the next week!

On Friday night, we had our family party. The usual version of this is that the kid chooses what he/she wants for dinner, and we have ice cream cake after. Only 4 out of 7 people actually eat ice cream cake (the 17-year-old and I are both out on the dairy, and then the 9-year-old doesn’t eat anything) but hey. She had selected French toast as her birthday dinner, and she made the French toast. I made the eggs and bacon and we had breakfast for dinner. Then we opened presents: 2 nightgowns, several bead kits, a bedazzling kit, paint pens and canvases, and earrings. A good haul!

Then on Saturday we celebrated with friends. I took my daughter and four other girls to a local restaurant for brunch where more French toast was consumed — pumpkin cream cheese stuffed, this time. Then we went to Build-a-Bear at an area mall and they all made their various creatures. My daughter rang the bell and the whole store sang. Then we came back to the house where the kids had pizza and cupcakes and hung out into the evening.

The birthday celebrations consumed much of the weekend, but a few other things happened. I walked with a friend on Friday, ran with another friend Saturday morning, then went on a bike ride on Sunday. The 17-year-old took the SAT (he has a good score from taking it two months ago, but would like to get about 30-40 points higher). There were two swim practices, soccer, and church. My husband and I went for a walk at Chanticleer. Now I am up at 5 a.m. on Monday morning for unknown reasons. There is no space for a nap today so here’s hoping I woke up because I didn’t need more sleep…

(Side note: Not so many mom-son pairs in the audience! We joked that they really needed to re-purpose some of the men’s rooms in that football stadium for the evening!)

It was a gorgeous night (75 degrees) and a great show. It was also incredibly long — about 3.5 hours, and 44 songs. It struck me that in an era when you can get individual songs whenever you want, and watch the music videos for those songs whenever you want, one thing live entertainment can provide is to be a real experience. Requiring some serious stamina of the audience could be part of that.

To say nothing of the stamina of the performer. Whoa. She did that show three nights in a row after doing it three nights in a row the previous weekend, and so forth. I really appreciated that Swift acted happy to be there, and you didn’t get the sense that this was just another day on the job, which one could imagine happening somewhere in the middle of dozens of shows. She seemed very aware that some people had waited hours to log on to score their $99 Verified Fan tickets, and others had no doubt spent insane amounts on the secondary market. At one point she said something to the effect of “whatever effort you went through tonight to get here, please know that it is very appreciated.”

As for my effort — it wasn’t that bad on the ticket obtaining front. I bought my tickets on Stubhub six months ago and paid what I felt was a very reasonable price considering what I saw tickets going for later.

The logistics of getting to and from Lincoln Financial Field, on the other hand, felt more intense. We took off at about 4:40 p.m. from my house. In light traffic, you can get there in less than 30 minutes. We didn’t pull into the far parking lot until about 6:10 p.m. (to be fair, this turned out to be more Friday rush hour traffic than Taylor traffic). Then we hiked about 15 minutes to the stadium. And that was better than the departure! We stayed until the end of the concert, because, well, we wanted to hear the Midnights songs. But after arriving at our car at 11:55 p.m., I didn’t even bother starting the car until 12:55 a.m., because no one had left our parking lot in that time. I finally got onto the highway (about a mile away) around 1:15 a.m., at which point it was the 30 minutes home it should be.

So, into bed a little after 2, then up at 6:50 with the toddler, but back to bed a little after 8 and I slept until 11! And now it is a memory that I think will stick with me — more so than many Friday nights. I imagine that is so for lots of people who were in the stadium — something that live entertainment can do that you don’t necessarily get from just listening to an album.

In other news: As for a little adventure…my husband and I wanted to go to a party one of his colleagues was hosting Saturday night. We didn’t manage to get a babysitter, but then I had a realization that some of the young women posting on the babysitter list where I look are 17-year-old students at my son’s high school. (Note: when we hire sitters, they are not generally charged with supervising the older three kids, who tend to hang out in their rooms or watching movies. They are there to watch and entertain the 8- and 3-year-old.)

So I put my two older boys in charge, each splitting the time, an hour and 15 minutes apiece at what I felt was a reasonable rate. And then I left the party early (my husband stayed) to make sure all was good. And it was. When I got home, my 13-year-old was playing a game with his little brothers wherein he dressed up in the inflatable dinosaur costume and chased them and they shot at him with Nerf guns. Good times.

I will be careful not to abuse this (and I pay!) but the prospect of not having to hunt for a sitter for “peak” times when it’s hard to land one really has me giddy…

It’s a local move, and we don’t have to be out of the house immediately, so nothing is particularly high stakes. We can come back and get stuff. I’m sure we will. But still — it is a lot of moving parts.

I spent the past week feeling a lot of nostalgia as I took things down from the walls and packed up toys and plants and loose items that would be hard to move.

If the nostalgia was robust, I’m not sure the progress was. Looking back, this was probably not the most efficient process. We split up the family for the post Christmas week. My husband took the four older kids on a ski trip and I stayed home with the toddler (since I don’t really ski and he doesn’t yet — so we’d just be hanging out in a rental house rather than our own house, which has his familiar crib and toys…). I had some childcare, and I used that time to take bins of stuff over to the new house. But I am only so fast, and I am one person. Plus when I did have the toddler with me, moving stuff was painfully slow. Once the rest of the family came home, my husband and I could both load stuff in cars, and the teen/pre-teen children could carry things and unload them and I made as much progress yesterday as I did during the entire week. Moving turns out to be a team sport.

I am telling myself it will all happen eventually. I did record a few more episodes of Before Breakfast, and I did some revisions on the book. I edited emails for the time-tracking challenge that will run from January 10-16. And I spent a lot of time with the toddler. We played with his new toys, read a lot of stories and (yes) watched a lot of Blippi.

The new house wi-fi is definitely up and running so we’ll have that. We’ll see when the address change gets registered with the school district, though, so bus service is unclear. We may wind up driving for a while. The logistics are making my head spin. Well, one day at a time for the first week or two and then I’m sure we’ll get into the groove.

I did not stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. I went to bed around 11:15, but then the toddler woke up howling around 12:45, so I guess I rang it in in my own way…

(Though honestly he’s been pretty good about sleep this week — slept through the night most nights, and not too early in the mornings, and I don’t think that would have happened in a rental house, so I’m feeling good about that.)

We had a belated 2-year-old birthday celebration with the other kids last night. We even had half of an ice cream cake sitting in the freezer so we pulled that out for everyone to have a few bites. The little guy managed to blow out his candle quite well and is getting the concept of opening presents (though he had a lot of help there…all the other children seemed to want to help him!)

I have read about half-way through Twelfth Night in my Shakespeare reading project! I hope anyone who started reading War and Peace has enjoyed the first few chapters….