In the morning I wound up doing Mommy Day #5. Every summer I do one-on-one days with my older kids. The youngest (whoever that happens to be) tends to get a fair amount of attention just by virtue of being little and needing a lot of care. So I don’t necessarily start doing official Mommy Days until age 4 or so. But I do remember in the summer of 2017 taking my then-2-year-old to the Shedd Aquarium solo, and him enjoying it. And sure enough, I did a Mommy Day of sorts with my current 2-year-old too.

We went to Sesame Place, which is only about 45 minutes from my house. We went on various rides — he wanted to try the roller coaster, but you had to be 3 years old or 44 inches! He did like the swings and the teacups (ugh). I think eventually he found it all overwhelming and hot, but he was revived by an Elmo cupcake and an Abby bubble-maker. We left around 1 p.m. and he slept in the car.

I did a little bit of work before leaving at 5 p.m. with my husband and older two boys for Longwood Gardens to see the Mary Chapin Carpenter concert there. I’d gotten tickets for this back in March, and so it had been an obvious entry for my Summer Fun List.

I was slightly concerned it wouldn’t happen. We’ve had two weeks of basically no rain, and then it started storming right around 6:30 p.m. for a 7 p.m. outdoor concert. They delayed it for an hour — during which we got dinner, and walked around the lovely conservatory seeing orchids and such — but then the weather completely cleared up and the night was absolutely perfect.

Carpenter put on a wonderful show. I appreciated that she mostly played her greatest hits. I get that as an artist doing shows every night you might want to play new stuff, or your favorite pieces that you feel didn’t get enough attention…but your fans aren’t there every night and they want to hear their favorites. So that is what she gave us. Her one perhaps-not-as-well-known piece she played was the exact one I wanted her to play! She wrote “Halley Came to Jackson” about a scene from Eudora Welty’s childhood, when her father held her up to the window to see Halley’s comet in 1910, with a supposed wish that she might see it again. And in 1986, from that same front porch, she did. This song gets me every time, the scene of a parent wishing a long and full life for a child, and that blessing coming true.

I also really appreciated her band’s abilities. The piano player was just having the time of his life on the piano solo during “I Feel Lucky” (which isn’t my favorite song, but the piano interlude does sell it for me). And the fiddler on Halley Came to Jackson! Very evocative of a southern summer porch.

Anyway, quite the day. I am rounding toward the end of my Summer Fun List so I’ll post an update on that soon! In the meantime, happy end of August. On Friday the morning low will be in the 50s. The weather is changing. It was good to be outside listening to music, trying to hold onto the present even while watching summer fade into fall.

Photo: From the Longwood conservatory. Kind of fitting for the feeling of seasons blending into each other…

On Friday, he and I drove into NYC. Despite living in NYC for 9 years, I basically never drove there. I didn’t own a car and when we rented one for weekend excursions, my husband would drive. But, having driven in NYC a few weeks ago for my TBT In Real Life filming, I decided it wasn’t that bad. And thus I drove through the Lincoln tunnel, and parked in a garage near our mid-town hotel.

We walked around Times Square, got Starbucks (of course!), and ate at a burger place. Then I got myself mentally ready for 3.5 hours of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

For anyone familiar with this play, apparently it originally ran something like 6 hours over two nights. To make this more doable in an American theater context, it was shortened to 3.5 hours and one night. A few parts still dragged a bit, but I appreciated that whenever something was getting too sappy or dramatic, they’d throw a funny line in there. That made the length less noticeable. And the special effects were pretty good! Not to spoil anything, but my son really enjoyed the Dementors.

In the morning, we walked to Central Park (after getting Starbucks again!). We circled the pond, taking in the sights. Then we checked out of the hotel, stored our luggage, and headed (via cab) downtown to the World Trade Center.

When my son and I visited NYC a few years ago together we had gone to the top of the Empire State Building. So this time, it was to the top of One World Trade Center. After paying our respects at the footprints of the old towers, we got in the elevator and rode (fast!) up to the top. The observatory was lovely on a clear day, and we could see the building where we lived until 2011. We had lunch in the cafe, then headed back uptown to collect our luggage, and our car, and I drove back out the Lincoln Tunnel without incident.

It was fun seeing NYC through my son’s eyes. He loved the theater district and the bustle of Times Square at night. He’s now decided he wants to do a summer program in NYC next summer. I remember going to see Phantom of the Opera when I was 18 and feeling just as enamored with the city…which is why I wound up moving there in 2002.

Now I just need to figure out one more Mommy Day for the 7-year-old. He has requested Chuck E. Cheese. Something of a different vibe! But hey, it’s about what the kid wants…

But, as someone once said, people are a good use of time. The kids have actually had more limited ambitions than the full day-at-the-amusement-park extravaganzas we’ve done in previous years. So I figured I could at least do a Mommy Few Hours.

My 12-year-old and I seized some time yesterday. I had to pick him up early at camp because of my call + virtual meeting schedule but when I finished at 3:30, he and I took off to go find the Cousins Maine Lobster truck. He got a Connecticut roll and I got a Maine roll (and a blueberry soda!). Then we went to Dave & Busters and played games. I managed to make the leaderboard on the piano keys game (several times, in fact…) and I got a 500 ticket jackpot on one of the spin-the-wheel games.

Of course, that is just about enough for a single piece of candy in the prize area, but my kids are absolutely obsessed with trading in their tickets. I gave my son my tickets and he selected a handful of treasures. All in all, he was happy with the experience.

Next, I’ll be doing a spa day (well, few hours) with the 10-year-old. Then I just have to figure out how to fit in two more requests. The 7-year-old isn’t sure what he wants to do, but I have a sneaky suspicion it might involve something similar to Dave & Busters…

The week of July 18 2016 came back to me pretty quickly as I looked at how I spent every half-hour of it. Highlights: It was the week I met and hired our previous nanny (who worked for us for 4.5 years). As she is still in our life regularly (we chatted about it this morning!), this is fun to see. I was up a *lot* with my high-energy toddler (then 18 months) who is now a high-energy and somewhat rebellious 7-year-old. During that week he decided to wake up one morning at 4:30 a.m. and not go back to sleep…this week he elected to make his stand on the hill of not bringing a white T-shirt to camp for some color war/tie dye thing they’re doing. Why????

I took him (the 18-month old who is now 7) to the Please Touch Museum for a morning, which is fascinating since I took my current 2-year-old there this past week as well. We drove to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware for an extended family week there — one of the few years we didn’t go to the Jersey shore for our summer beach trip. Apparently I went shopping on the boardwalk for an hour!

Then I went down a little mental rabbit hole…I can see my 2016 logs now from 2022. What if I could look at a week in 2022 from 2016? I guess my first big thought would have been “Who is this ‘H’ person who is everywhere on the log…?”

Anyway, I’m doing a recurring segment here called the TBT Scorecard. TBT is “Tranquility by Tuesday” — my book which will be out October 11. In the book, I share nine rules to help calm the chaos and make time for what matters. I had 150 people try them out for 9 weeks and their time satisfaction scores rose on my surveys to a high degree of statistical significance! I try to follow these rules in my own life because, hey, who couldn’t use more time satisfaction?

The week was chaotic as it often is. Childcare is still a patchwork, regular blog readers will recall the fiasco of my getting to my speech on Wednesday, and it was hot. So my planned big adventures for the weekend just sounded incredibly unpleasant. But some good stuff happened too. Here goes!

Rule #1: Give yourself a bedtime. I wasn’t asleep by 11 p.m. every night for sure. The time is definitely creeping later as I don’t have to set an alarm for 6:30 a.m. every morning (even if I am often up by then). But it was around 11:15 p.m. most nights. I’m usually at least close to my bed around 11!

Rule #2: Plan on Fridays. Yep. The upside of this is that I did a lot of preparation for this week’s video shoots (for the TBT In Real Life series). I have the logistics all ready, questions for everyone…I’m feeling slightly more confident about this week as a result, which is the point of this rule!

Rule #3: Move by 3 p.m. I ran in the morning 5 mornings this week. Tuesday morning was a regular run, and then Thursday and Friday I ran laps in the yard because I was the only adult around and felt I needed to stay close to the house (everyone was asleep). On Saturday morning I ran with my 15-year-old, who is home from camp! Here’s hoping he wants to do this more often, though the “morning” aspect may prevent it. For whatever reason, he was willing to get up at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday morning to beat the heat, and I am here for it. Sunday I did my “long” run (not that long since the heat had hit hard by 9 a.m.). On Monday I didn’t run but I walked all over the Please Touch Museum with my 2-year-old, so it’s not like I was sitting still. Wednesday featured four hours driving to and from northern New Jersey. So no walking by 3 p.m. that day. Oh well. I did walk around the neighborhood for 15 minutes at night when one of my older kids took the 2-year-old.

Rule #4: Three times a week is a habit. I have been focusing on running, piano, and family meals. I ran 5x (see above). I played the piano Monday night, Friday during the day when I had the house to myself, and for stints on Saturday and Sunday. The Sunday stint was cut short because I heard a loud snap right outside the window by the piano and noted that a giant tree branch had fallen. Luckily not toward the house! We had family dinner with the folks who were home Monday and Tuesday, and then with everyone on Saturday and Sunday (we were all home again!). I learned to use the gas grill, which turns out to be very simple, so that was exciting (we always had charcoal before, and that seemed like a lot of work). I have been trying to enforce sit-on-your-chair rules more with the dinners and I feel like there have been marginal improvements.

Rule #5: Create a back-up slot. I try to leave Fridays fairly open in general. One corollary to creating a back-up slot is creating back-up plans. I can’t say I had great back-up weekend plans but I did get my Wednesday morning crash course in thinking through my options when the original transportation to the speech didn’t work out. I wound up driving (and the talk shifting 30 minutes later) but we also talked through the possibility of doing the talk virtually.

Rule #6: One big adventure, one little adventure. I’m not sure anything rose to the level of “big adventure” but I did several littler ones. The 2-year-old and I spent the morning at the Please Touch Museum on Monday. I saw my 10-year-old perform in Seussical (her camp play). We had a sitter Friday night in the hopes of doing a date night, and then realized that we needed to pick up the 15-year-old at camp Friday night instead of Saturday morning. My husband had been in London, so he flew to Boston on Friday instead of Philly, and then he took Uber to Providence and they took the train home. Since I had the sitter, I roamed the King of Prussia mall, thinking I would get a new outfit or two for the videos this week. I completely struck out. Like, nothing looked good to me. I am suddenly old and ornery about clothes, but I hadn’t been to KOP mall to shop in ages (since pre-pandemic, maybe?) so I guess that was an adventure. I took my daughter to a farmers market on Saturday AM and we had lunch based on what I bought (bread, a tomato spread, peaches). The tomatoes in the picture are from there, though we got our first tomatoes from our garden this weekend!

Rule #7: Take one night for you. I guess the Friday night mall trip would qualify? I took myself out for dinner, though it was just a burrito at the food court. If I’d known how badly I would strike out on clothes, maybe I would have made myself a solo reservation somewhere fancy instead.

Rule #8: Batch the little things. I created my Friday punch list as usual and worked through it. Given the driving situation (I’m doing most of the camp driving) my work hours are pretty curtailed, so I’m trying to preserve the bigger blocks of time for deeper work. I can fill out forms at night if need be.

Rule #9: Effortful before effortless. A mixed bag. I spent way too much time scrolling as usual. However, I read Much Ado About Nothing in the Shakespeare project. I’ve been reading The Economist at night rather than scrolling — we have several back issues sitting around that I never got through when they came so the stack is slowly dwindling. I went and sat in the hammock a few times during nap or after toddler bedtime or when he was gone; I even intentionally set a timer to make sure I stayed out there for at least 10 minutes without looking at my phone. And a summer-specific form of effortful fun: I’ve been taking some of the kids out to go chase fireflies at night. They’re pretty magnificent in the yard at twilight, so rather than all of us on our screens, we go out and run around.