Over the weekend I did cross a major parenting milestone. The 2-year-old can now reliably sit and watch a video like Peppa Pig or the wide variety of YouTube offerings (“Hazel’s Mom” is a particular favorite). So when my husband took the 10-year-old and 7-year-old out for the afternoon, I left the little guy in the care of the two older boys while I went for a run in the neighborhood. He sat at the computer with the video on, and I had the 12-year-old sit in the same room with him (watching his phone), and basically neither moved for the 30 minutes I was gone. Success!

Speaking of the 2-year-old, he has been on a strike against napping in the crib. So over the weekend, I gave in and let him nap in my lap both days. In related news, my screen time totals on my iPhone are quite high…

I’ve been showering at night because it makes getting ready in the AM much faster. Unfortunately, I’m sometimes cold at night (though we’ve now set the bathroom heat to come on around my shower time). So I’ve come up with the strategy of hanging two towels over the shower door. When I turn the water off, I immediately wrap one around me. Then I can use the other for my hair without getting too shivery.

I also found my real towels this weekend, so I’m no longer using beach towels, though I did like that they were very large.

The 7-year-old recently celebrated a birthday. Since writing is a source of real tension, we had him record video thank yous to the people who gave him gifts. This inspired far less resistance.

We now have our “real” fridge and freezer, which is great, because we have more capacity. One current helpful life strategy is having set meals for certain nights. Wednesday, for instance, is always breakfast-for-dinner day. This tends to be pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and fruit. Easy, and everyone eats it. Friday is pizza night. This will be make-your-own-pizza night again once we get our oven but for now I’m ordering in. We do Sunbasket kits on Monday and Tuesday (usually) as a way to have some variety. We often have steak one night over the weekend, which only leaves two days to sort out. In the morning, I almost always give kids toaster waffles plus fruit. (Some people add milk, or yogurt, and the occasional handful of chocolate chips). Most people have one toaster waffle, though my daughter has two. If you do the math this means we go through a normal box of toaster waffles in two days. This explains the appeal of Costco!

Photo: Ice on a trail from one of my weekend runs.

As befits middle age, it has been a year of coping with various maladies. Back pain from carrying a toddler around mostly on one hip! Last year at this time I was just figuring out that I was going to need to eat (and drink) differently to deal with my chronic congestion and sore throat. I have not enjoyed this change at all, but I am making my peace with it. My husband and I went to a retirement party for one of his colleagues last night. I did not touch the cheese or wine, which felt very responsible of me.

I am trying to keep a sense of humor about the fact that I am coping with middle-aged maladies while still breastfeeding a baby.

I am hoping, by the time I turn 44, to learn how to buy and apply make-up. This is a topic of approximately zero interest to me, but eventually it becomes clear that it would be better to wear make-up than not wear it (hello toddler sleep woes…). I just watched a YouTube video of an attractive young lady applying a color corrector under her eyes. Who knew?

I’m sure it will be another year with the usual things: writing, speaking, podcasting, running, singing. I’m glad I’ve made space for these things in my life.

My birthday plans include going out to dinner with my husband, taking the family to the Brandywine museum for the holiday trains, going ice skating, and getting a massage early next week. If the weather cooperates, there may be a long run too. And probably lots of decluttering/moving stuff to the garage at the new house to get ready for our move in a month or so… I should be celebrating my next birthday in new surroundings. After this project that started around my last birthday, it is about time!

Photo: From the family photo shoot with Yana Shellman

On the plus side, we got our family photos back from Yana and they turned out well! I’m posting some over on Instagram (@lvanderkam). As predicted, wrangling the children was stressful but also as predicted, I’m really happy to have the pictures. Now we need to make the Christmas card!

I started holiday shopping in earnest this week. Some children are easier to shop for than others. I am really struggling with what to get the 12-year-old. He has promised to think about it and help me out. I should note that he has about $60 in birthday gift card money that he has yet to spend. Contentment is good but this does make gift giving challenging! I welcome ideas on what anyone buys pre-teen boys.

Also in financial news: We set the 10-year-old up with a bank account. Our family policy is to get the kids an account at age 10 so they can start learning about saving and investing. This has been fun to watch. The 14-year-old bought Disney stock on the dip of the pandemic when the theme parks were closed. He was bullish on them coming back and has been rewarded for that bet. I should note that in general we are index-fund-oriented investors who don’t try to time the market, but that is a lot less interesting for kids starting out.

I’ve been pondering what to choose as my 2022 year-long read. I have really enjoyed reading through War and Peace at the pace of one chapter a day during 2021. Right now I’m having to restrain myself from just finishing the darn thing (only about 150 pages to go). After some thought, I’m pretty sure that I will spend 2022 reading through all the works of Shakespeare. I found a reading plan that assigns the plays and poems and sonnets to appropriate times of the year (we start with Twelfth Night, of course, for early January!) and I have a copy of the collected works, so I think that should work well. Humorously, the front of the book notes that it was “purchased at Stratford on Avon, England,” by my husband, during the summer of 1988, back when he was bumming around Europe as a student.

And speaking of books — though not quite so classic…the Kindle version of 168 Hours is on sale for $1.99 today over at Amazon. If you haven’t read my first time management book and were thinking about doing so, today would be a good day to get a copy!

Photo: I think of this as the album cover image. There are some with our faces over on Instagram (@lvanderkam). Photo credit Yana Shellman.

So it goes. This tree’s glowing red and the magnolia in the front yard’s showy pink spring blossoms last for just a week or so each year. Whatever else is going on, I know I need to stop and notice them. Savor them for a few days in April and November. This year this savoring has had more poignancy to it as we will be living in our new house for the spring blossoms. There are going to be beautiful ones there. I walked a row of late blooming cherry trees, for instance, and once we start taking care of the place it will blossom. I know there are fiery trees there for autumn, too. But we come to know “our” trees and their rhythms and this year I am saying goodbye to these.

Anyway, it has been a long week, with much interrupted sleep. The toddler has been clingy and unhappy (the interrupted sleep isn’t good for him either, even if he’s causing the problem!). But the kids’ activities are winding down, so this weekend should, theoretically, be more relaxed. I sorted through some kid clothes and found size 12 jeans for the 12-year-old. I also found a pair of *my* jeans tucked in that same pile, which I guess had been missing for a while. Since it’s raining today, the workmen aren’t working on my neighbor’s roof, so I can get ahead on recording. I will take these little wins!

I am not a pure night owl by any means. But I’m also not naturally an early-to-bed, early-to-rise sort either. So the early wake-ups have been one of the toughest parts of baby and toddlerhood for me, especially since many of my kids haven’t been great during-the-night sleepers either.

I had been considering my bedtime to be 10:30. This allows me to read to the 6-year-old, relax a bit and make sure the big kids are going to bed, then get a little reading done. But even if I was asleep by 10:45, if I woke up at 5:45 and had any wake-ups during the night, I wasn’t clocking the 7.3-7.4 hours my time log shows my body aims for.

So this weekend, I had a revelation: I should probably aim more for 9:30. Let me state right now that I absolutely hate this. I want to stay up and do stuff. It feels like no fun whatsoever to go to bed at a grade schooler’s bedtime. But it also feels really, really good to fall asleep by 9:45, wake up at 5:45 and — even if I have been up for 30 minutes or so at some point in the night — not be exhausted.

Thus, I went to bed at this unreasonably early time on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights this weekend. On two of the nights my husband did full big kid bedtime duty. (Since the baby nurses in the morning, I am, alas, the parent he prefers at 5:45 a.m. — I generally hand him over at 7 a.m or so). Since Sunday is a school night, I made sure that my portion of the 6-year-old’s bedtime routine was done by 9 p.m. Then I had a quick chat with the big kids (and took their phones) and then got ready for bed.

To not feel too sorry for myself, I’m being more pro-active about other leisure time. I’m generally reading or doing a puzzle from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. To ensure I don’t piddle this time away, I’m making sure to have a puzzle or book going, so there’s something I actively want to do (and get to do for an hour!).

This weekend, I finished the 750-piece “Brooklyn Flower Market” puzzle I’d been doing. This one was fairly easy — first of all, because it is 750 pieces (not 1000) and because the art was intricate enough that there was no question where pieces would go. I never had to resort to sorting pieces by shape (as I have had to for some other puzzles with big patches of, say, blue sky). I’m also reading a book about hummingbirds called The Glitter in the Green. Parts are a bit overwritten, but it’s also interesting, and has made me look at our hummingbird feeder, and my oldest child’s school art project replica of Frieda Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird differently.

This weekend also featured a few fun-for-me anchor events that made the 9:30 bedtime feel less tragic, too. I ran 8 miles along the Schuylkill River Trail with a friend on Saturday morning. The 11-year-old and I went to Holland Ridge Farm in New Jersey on Saturday late afternoon. He picked 20 lovely tulips, and then — the real highlight — we got lobster rolls from the Cousins Maine Lobster food truck. We are now obsessed. Apparently there is a Philly-based truck too, and it occasionally stops at a mall near our house, so that is now on the schedule. And then on Sunday morning I sang with a very small group (one on each voice part) for our church’s first live, in-the-sanctuary service in over a year. The staff singers are incredible, and so this small ensemble singing is a real treat.

The weekend had its share of frustrations — the puppy and toddler combo is definitely stressful — but looking back over it, any weekend when I run long, enjoy tulips and a lobster roll, finish a puzzle, and sing, is probably a good one.

What time are you going to bed these days? I’m reminding myself that I won’t have to go to bed at 9:30 p.m. forever. Eventually my kids won’t wake up before 6 on weekends. The older ones could probably sleep until noon if I let them!

Someone needs to watch him constantly. We’ve baby-proofed a section of the basement but someone needs to be there with him, and with four other children, the baby-proofing is hard to keep perfect (I found random pieces of paper in there yesterday that he naturally tried to eat). Constant vigilance does not make for a relaxing weekend. But five kids in, this stage is not a surprise. So we’re back to the Official Toddler Hand-off around here to ensure that both parents get their downtime.

Sunday in particular we wound up with nothing formal on the calendar. Another snowstorm dropped at least six inches during the morning and early afternoon, and so the kids’ activities were canceled. My husband and I decided to trade off every 90 minutes around nap time. Like alarms set and everything.

I can attest that 90 minutes spent watching a toddler definitely feels longer than 90 minutes not spent watching a toddler. However, 90 minutes also doesn’t feel endless like a full day stuck at home can. I got a treadmill run in, finished my 1000-piece puzzle, did Legos with the 11-year-old, took some of the big kids sledding, and, with the addition of nap time, helped the 9-year-old clean off the two craft tables in the basement to make them usable.

If it had been possible to go anywhere, then a longer window might have made more sense. One party might do the morning, one party might cover post-nap to bedtime (in a one-nap scenario, which is where we’ll be in a month or two). But for a snowy day, the official 90-minute hand-off worked pretty well. So we’ll probably be repeating it until things warm up around here.

Do you do weekend trade-offs?

In other news: This post reminds me, again, that I am in awe of single parents.

In other other news: Amazon had a one-day sale on the ebook version of 168 Hours over the weekend (I sent a blast out to my weekend newsletter list about it Saturday when it happened). It was so fun to see a book that came out eleven years ago climb up the Kindle ranks. One of my goals for the year has been to sell my “back catalog” as the publishing industry calls it. Between the Kindle sale, Drew Barrymore holding up a copy of I Know How She Does It on air, and a large virtual book club reading All the Money in the World, I’ve now seen bumps for three titles. Now I just need a celebrity to mention Juliet’s School of Possibilities or Off the Clock…

Photo: Intrigued, but unsure about the snow thing…