I’ve been logging my time for 9+ years now, always on spreadsheets that break the 168-hour week into 336 30-minute blocks (you can download various versions here). I often have my laptop with me, so it’s easy enough to write what I’ve been doing a few times per day.

However, I do not always have my laptop with me. For instance, this weekend we went to visit family in Cape Cod. I didn’t want to bother with the computer. However, given that I always have my phone with me, it was easy enough to email myself a written description of how I spent my time every 12 hours or so. I then put this into the spreadsheet on my laptop this morning (and yes, I know I could have worked things out to input directly on the spreadsheet from my phone but this way works too…). I got a record of how I spent my time and I wasn’t tied to my computer. If I’d been off my phone all weekend I could have written down notes on a sheet of paper and that would have worked too. But I tend not to be off my phone for days at a time!

Anyway, my time log from this past weekend showed a lot of time in the car. On Friday I was driving all over the place to kid events. A great many weeklong day camps have some sort of showcase on Friday. The 14-year-old also needed to go work on his projects for a technology competition he’s going to this week. The 9-year-old had an appointment. Then in the evening, my husband, the 14-year-old and I went downtown for a Phillies game! This was on my summer fun list — and while it was still fairly hot at 7 p.m., and the Phillies lost, the game was indeed fun. We sat on the third base line just a few rows back and enjoyed our hot dogs and left by the 8th inning in order to beat the traffic…because we had to be up early to be back in the car!

My husband’s brother’s family has kids fairly close in age to my older four. In particular, the 12-year-old is very close with her cousin of matching age. The family offered to host her for a week at their beach house in Massachusetts, so we all drove up to visit and drop her off.

It was a lot of driving for a short trip. We left at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday and arrived at about 2:30 p.m. — and that was with fairly minimal traffic. We left at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday and didn’t get home until 9:30 p.m. (That was with more traffic!) But the ocean was beautiful and it was fun to visit, with the upside that Cape Cod was about 75 degrees while everywhere else on the east coast was 95 degrees. We went in the well-heated pool + hot tub on Saturday and everyone else went on a boat on Sunday morning that had a capacity of 12 — meaning one person had to be left behind. I sacrificed myself (trying not to appear too eager as I did so) and hung out for a lovely 2 hours by myself, looking out at the waves and thinking semi-deep thoughts. Then I met up with everyone else for bowling and lunch before getting back in the van to drive home.

This week promises to be reasonably chill — and next weekend won’t involve as much driving. My husband will be meeting them in NYC to retrieve our daughter so that is much closer!

Cousins Maine Lobster. My 12-year-old and I have been stalking the Cousins Maine Lobster truck that comes to a mall parking lot 20 minutes from us every few weeks. So imagine how thrilled we were to find an outpost — an actual restaurant, which couldn’t disappear! — in Asbury Park. We wound up eating lobster rolls three times. I also developed a taste for their Maine Root blueberry soda. A lovely thing to sip while walking down the boardwalk.

Days Ice Cream. A family tradition now. Someone from our crew went every single night. They had a reasonable number of dairy free ice creams, and they weren’t bad. I almost forgot I was eating ice cream made out of oats…

The Silverball Arcade. There were red flags on the water for two days. We did go in up to our knees on those days but the morning it was also chilly we decided to skip the beach to head to this pinball arcade on the Asbury Park boardwalk. The 12-year-old set a new “Under 13” record twice on one machine. He set the record and then beat it himself. (He was offended when I mused that perhaps this was an underplayed machine…)

Having four sea-worthy children. The 7-year-old has really stepped up his swimming game and was able to keep his own in the waves. So I was able to mostly focus my attention on the 2-year-old, who is much less of a daredevil. This made beach trips marginally more relaxing. With five kids I will take what I can get!

Boardwalk runs. My husband and I are training for a half-marathon in September, so we both needed to get some long runs in. I ran three times in the morning. Twice I did 60 minute runs, and then on Friday morning I ran 9.7 miles. I guess I should have gone the full 10 but that’s when I looped back to the house and it was getting hot and I felt done. Running 9.7 miles isn’t bad, though, right? It was beautiful to see the sand and the water and do a little people watching.

Family dinners on the porch. The house we rent has a huge front porch with a giant table. So we ate dinner there every night, enjoying the view of the water.

One on one walks with the kids. The beach and the town and the boardwalk present lots of walking opportunities. I particularly enjoyed chatting with the 15-year-old on the pier at night.

Sleeping with the windows open. The house has air conditioning, but we were able to sleep most nights with the windows open. Feeling the ocean breeze and occasionally waking up to see the sunrise over the ocean was such a treat, as was going back to sleep after 6 a.m.! The toddler mostly cooperated on the sleep front, including taking naps. He was in his own room this year and we all slept better.

Potty training. Speaking of the toddler…I packed a lot of wipes and then only needed to use them once. He is really figuring it out!

Buying a copy of the NY Times with my column in it. I wrote about working on vacation. And yep, did some work on vacation. Probably about an hour a day. I feel less like I’m coming back to a mess.

The kids getting to play card games…without me having to play them. My mother-in-law came with us and she is such a trooper — playing Hearts or Five Crowns with the big kids every night after I put the toddler to sleep. I used the time to read and relax.

Now I’m looking forward to hopefully going back next year! We like to travel lots of different places but it is fun to come back to the same one again and again too.

I was booked to give a speech in Tampa at 8:50 a.m. on Thursday. I planned to fly from PHL to Tampa on the last direct flight on Wednesday (4:15 p.m.). The plane boarded on time, but then there was some issue with an armrest that had to be repaired. Then maintenance took a little longer and we were slightly delayed. Then we needed to be rerouted around storms that had moved in (possibly during our delay? It was unclear.). The route that air traffic control gave us required more fuel than we had. The pilots and air traffic control went back and forth on this several times. No route was agreed upon, so after almost two hours on the tarmac, we went back to the gate to get more fuel. Alas, at that point, one of our pilots timed out. We all had to deplane as theoretically the airline was finding a reserve, but that did not happen. About 30 minutes later they canceled the flight.

So, what to do? I wound up rebooking on the 7 a.m. flight that got in to Tampa at 9:30. This was, of course, after the original speech was to start, but the hosts agreed to move things around. My speech would now start at 10:15. Fortunately, the venue was only a short distance from the Tampa airport. I’d talk, get back in the car, and with any luck make my original flight home (12:05 p.m.!)

It did seem like much could go wrong in this scenario, what with being on the ground in Tampa for only 2.5 hours, but after the Wednesday disaster, Thursday was fairly charmed. I left my house in Pennsylvania at 5:30 a.m., and was back home in my house by 4 p.m. In between, I went all the way to Florida and back! And gave a speech. We finished at 11:05 a.m., I got in the car and made my flight with plenty of time to spare. Hurrah.

I’m doing Mommy Day #3 this weekend, which will be a bit more elaborate, so more to come on that…

My Medium column this week looked at How to Stop Wishing Time Away.

The Before Breakfast podcast covered several topics, including “Don’t be minute wise and hour foolish,” that “Your friends are my friends,” and why you should “Track time while off the clock.”

Photo: I have no actual photos of Tampa, so this early morning picture of the parking lot at PHL will have to do. I always snap a photo of my car’s location and what deck of the parking garage I’m on. I think I’ll remember but…I don’t. 

I love being in my own space. I sleep best in my own bed! But traveling is definitely still a priority for me. That’s true even though traveling with kids, particularly little ones, is not easy. Years ago, when I had three kids ages 4 and under, I told myself it was OK if I wasn’t traveling all that much because they would all be out of the house by the time I was 50. I could spend my 50s traveling like a young person, only I wouldn’t have to stay in hostels!

Then, of course, I proceeded to have two more babies, pushing that everyone-out-of-the-house moment close to 60. My husband will be 70! So yes, we’re beholden to the school schedule for a while. And while we both travel for work and have traveled some together, most likely a lot of our trips will involve young people. But while travel with kids may not be easy, it’s still doable. I realized that I don’t need to wait until they’re gone, nor do I particularly want to, since my oldest kids shouldn’t miss out on experiences just because they have a baby brother. And so I’ve been devising some ambitious travel plans for the next few years. Possibly Europe, Hawaii, another national park or two…

Alas, so has everyone else in this summer of “revenge travel.” Some of the places I’m looking for 2023 travel are already starting to book up! I’m a fan of planning ahead, but I’m not sure I like that everyone else is planning ahead if they have the same travel desires as me…

Anyway, I’m reminded of a quote from the first year of Best of Both Worlds, when travel expert Henley Vazquez talked about adventurous family travel. I asked if there was a way to make traveling with toddlers more pleasant and she basically said “I wish there was!” And yet she’s traveled with kids over and over again. The point is that it is going to be rough at times but it is worth it to see the world, and have your kids see the world.

To be sure, they won’t necessarily remember the world if they’re really little, which is one reason I have traveled with just the big kids to Paris, Yellowstone in the fall (and Disney! Which is honestly best for big kids, whatever impression people might have). But as my little guy crosses three this winter he might start to remember these adventures. And given that my oldest three will indeed all be gone by the time I’m 50, we don’t actually have that much more time to enjoy adventures with them. And hey, my husband has racked up a lot of frequent flyer miles that need to get used at some point…

What’s on your family travel bucket list?

In the not-travel category: We’ve been having fun watching the fireflies in our new yard. For some reason they seem far more numerous here than in the old yard!

I finally bought a new MacBook Pro. This one I’m typing on now made it six years, which I think is reasonable for heavy daily use. I wrote several books on this laptop — Off the Clock, Juliet’s School of Possibilities, Tranquility by Tuesday. I’m curious what I’ll write on the next one! I put this off for a long time. I’m cheap and I have a strong tendency to just make do. But a few of my frequent-use programs could no longer update on my current Mac and my machine didn’t have the capacity for upgrading to the current Mac operating systems (I mean, maybe with a lot of add-on memory? But that seems really inefficient). The good news is that since I bought a new machine this time BEFORE my current one died I will be able to slowly make the transition.

I have been making progress on another Summer Fun List item: morning runs. During much of the year my during-the-week runs happen in early-to-mid afternoon. In winter it’s warmer then. I tend to need a break, and we have childcare. Morning seems cold or dark and if we have to be moving at 6:30 a.m., it’s harder to get out and do anything. But! Summer changes all that. The camp schedule doesn’t require anyone to be up until 7:45 or so, and we’re definitely up by then anyway. On the days my husband is around I can set the alarm for 6:40, run from 6:55-7:35 or so. It’s a nice way to start the day. I don’t do it every day by any means, but I have been doing two weekdays per week and I’d like to get to three. Though my eldest has decreed that when he gets home from camp he wants to start running with me three times a week and he is not going to want to do it in the morning. So maybe I will be both a morning and an evening runner. We shall see…

I have two Medium columns up since the last time I posted about them. One is “Jealous of your kids’ camps? Make your own this summer” and then yesterday I posted “The best way to kick your screen time habit.”

Friend-of-the-blog Lori Mihalich-Levin, who was a guest on Best of Both Worlds a few years ago, recently released two new guided meditations that are designed to be used while pumping: short version and long version. If that sounds like you, please check them out!

Easter weekend was pretty full — I guess a good thing since I didn’t have time to get tired! On Friday my choir performed a fascinating piece by Allan Bevan for the Good Friday service called Nou Goth Sonne Under Wode. (That links to a recording of singers at the University of North Texas performing the work.) It features orchestra and a soprano soloist and 8-part choir. It was written in 2005 or so but feels more traditional in parts. Not easy by any means but a good challenge to become familiar with this work! I have had chunks of it swimming in my head for weeks.

On Saturday our family adventure was to visit Holland Ridge Farms in New Jersey. We cut tulips and visited the Cousins Maine Lobster truck. Yum! Some members of the family went to see the new Harry Potter movie that night.

Then Sunday I was up early to make sure the Easter Bunny had come. This year, our first year in this house, we are creating various new traditions, and so the Easter Bunny decided to hide the eggs outside all around the new play set! Everyone was either up or rousted for a 7:50 a.m. egg hunt, because I had to leave for church at 8:15. I sang in two services, and so sang the Hallelujah Chorus twice, plus Randall Thompson’s Alleluia, and a brand new commissioned piece called Easter Hymn by David Conte. (That links to the recording of the service; the piece is at 57 minutes).

We were supposed to premiere the piece two years ago for Easter but that did not happen since church services had ceased happening a month prior. So the composer had been waiting diligently for us to perform it so it could be published and put out into the world! This was a very singable piece with four-part brass playing an old Easter hymn atop a rolling organ melody and the choir singing a poem from Christina Rossetti. Good stuff.

After that my whole extended family (well, minus one nephew) came over for Easter dinner. We had ham and deviled eggs and a bunny cake among other things. They all toured the house and the yard. And then when they left we just sort of crashed. I don’t think I ever got entirely reset to Paris time last week, but I’ve been pretty tired right around 4-5 p.m. every day.

This week has been pretty low key after all that — I should be getting first pass pages of Tranquility by Tuesday to look through, plus digging out from the vacation backlog. I went to an actual happy hour last night (a gathering of fellow alums in my area) and I think it was the first such event I have been to in a long time…

I had booked our activities through a travel agency, and so much of the trip was straightforward: a car and guide show up at the hotel and the guide shows you around whatever attraction you are visiting. But the last two days were a little more complicated.

I sometimes get anxious about logistics, and often things are easier than I think they will be. And sometimes they are harder.

On Wednesday we were going to take a bus to Disneyland Paris. (In retrospect I should have booked a van from the hotel straight to the park, but I guess everything is clear in retrospect…) We needed to check in with the tour operator at 8:40 a.m. for the 9:00 a.m. bus. We needed to get ourselves to the bus stop, which was a few miles from the hotel. An obvious idea would be a cab, so then I was thinking about where I would get a cab, but I learned that many cabs will only take 3 people. I had four total, three of whom were kids who I did not want to send in a separate vehicle from me, so I was musing wouldn’t it be great if there were an app where you could summon an appropriately sized vehicle to take you to a destination…and then I realized I had re-invented Uber.

So I was all excited that I had solved that problem, and I dutifully summoned an Uber van on that rainy Wednesday morning only to have…no takers. The app ran and ran and I was running out of time. So I canceled and called an Uber X and asked the hotel doorman to please talk with the Uber driver who did not want to take 4 people in his car. He did finally agree (pour les enfants!) and so we made it.

(My other plan had been to call a second Uber after summoning the first one but, again, I was quite wary of sending the kids without me.)

But the transportation was easier than the Covid test ordeal. I confess that I was pondering these logistics the whole time we were in Paris. I knew we needed to take an antigen test within a day of the return flight (anyone coming to the US has to do this). Theoretically it should have been easy, as almost every pharmacy in France advertises their 15-minute test results. In countries with less testing infrastructure, hotels that cater to American tourists often have a testing option there (which is what we did in Turks and Caicos last summer) but France is well-supplied. Most people would do the Covid tests the day before (Wednesday for a Thursday flight) but… this happened to be our scheduled Disneyland Paris day.

In retrospect, I wish these had been scheduled in a different order — maybe the Louvre on Wednesday, and Disney on Monday — but I didn’t think of this until the agency had booked everything. The tour agency had suggested getting a test at a pharmacy near the Disney bus stop, but the pharmacy didn’t open until 8:30 a.m., and with the bus check in at 8:40 this seemed like it might not work (and given the Uber issue it really wouldn’t have). Pharmacies tend to close at 8 p.m., and while I had hoped we would get back at 7:30 p.m. from Disney and could do it then, we made a strange detour back to the park (I think someone missed the bus? Maybe?) and then got to the bus stop at 8 p.m.

So we had to do the test the morning of departure, which was really not ideal. I got the kids up to make it to a pharmacy near our hotel right when it opened at 8:30. Entering all the information on French forms online four times was fun (new learning: I live in the États-Unis, which I knew, but in a drop down menu, the e with an accent often comes at the end of the alphabet, and not with the “E” section…kind of hard to find!) We got the tests done and they said I would be emailed the results in 15 minutes.

We went to breakfast, and 15 minutes came, and went, and 30 minutes, and 45 minutes…

At this point I was deep into my daily 30-minute freak out. Our plane was leaving in a few hours! I knew I had the information correct on the forms because I got an initial email that I had registered. So I left the kids in the hotel room and went back to the pharmacy to investigate. The tech who had done the tests (and who didn’t speak much English — not that she should be expected to! — but I’m just mentioning this to explain why the whole experience was more complicated) conveyed to me, through a random lady shopping in the pharmacy who agreed to help translate, that the pharmacy receptionist hadn’t come to work until 9:45, and hence the tests hadn’t been put in yet.

So much for results in 15 minutes. But her colleague had just shown up! So that was good — I did get the results within 10 minutes then. But, sadly, though I could see we were all negative in the test results section, I kept getting one of those “error” and “forbidden” codes when I clicked on the link to get the digital certificates. Trying to enter a screen shot of the results page in the VeriFly app resulted in the app not being able to read the results. I really needed a clear QR code. (I imagine I could have shown my phone to someone at the airport and checked in that way but that would have meant an entirely separate wait there, and the uncertainty of whether our results were in the right form…).

So…picture me asking s’il vous plait if the pharmacy could print my results. I don’t believe they were thrilled about this, and there was a mix-up when they re-entered the children’s birthdates meaning we needed to do some reprinting, but half an hour later, I had four printed EU digital test certificates with lovely and clear QR codes that the VeriFly app just gobbled up. I got back to the room just in time to load up the suitcases into the car for the airport.

Fun morning! Travel in the Covid era has this added uncertainty that can ratchet up the anxiety a lot. But as often happens, now that I have leapt through that particular hoop, my trip becomes rosier in retrospect. I forget that in my jet-lagged state I would be up at 2 a.m. worrying about how to make a within-1-day Covid test happen. And hey, we made it home. All good in the end.

Photo: Another picture of Versailles….

I was remembering this when contemplating a biking add-on to our Versailles excursion during last week’s Paris spring break trip. I have been to Versailles (though it has been a while) and while it is opulent, and on the list of required destinations when in Paris, I suspected the children would only have so much tolerance for rooms of old furniture. I figured biking would perk everyone up.

And it did! We got our bikes and stopped at some of the “extra” castles on the estate (The Petit Trianon, the Grand Trianon, etc.). Then we just circled the pools between Versailles and Grand Trianon — seeing far more of the grounds than we ever would on foot. The little wildflowers had exploded all over the forest carpet, and the green on the trees seemed to be rolling in thick like fog. We pedaled hard and listened to the birds and the air swooping past us and the pleasant spring air made the world feel perfect.

All was not perfect of course, but something about a good pedal on a nice day can make you feel that it might be possible. I stopped worrying about the “ordeals” of the next few days on the trip, at least for a few hours. That will be the subject of a later blog post this week!

In other news: We made it to Holland Ridge Farms over the weekend to see the tulips (thus crossing another item off my Spring Fun List). Five little sets of hands picking tulips meant we left with a lot of tulips, but hey, there could be worse souvenirs. My 12-year-old and I had gone together last year and discovered the Cousins Maine Lobster truck. So he and I were reminiscing about that a lot and how it has been quite a year since. It feels like longer than 365 days! But I guess in life that’s probably a good thing.

Photo: Versailles

We packed a lot in. We saw the Musee D’Orsay on the first day, though the kids were a bit over tired to appreciate the art at that point. We went to the top of the Eiffel Tower. They got crepes from a street vendor and macarons from a fancy shop. We toured the Louvre. We visited Versailles and then biked around the surrounding forest/park. We went to Disneyland Paris for a day.

It wasn’t the easiest trip. International travel rarely is. I haven’t traveled to Europe since 2018 and I am out of practice — meaning that while I remembered to pack the outlet converters I forgot to pack the melatonin and paid for it at 2 a.m. as my body refused to sleep. Four people in a hotel room is also not conducive to sleep, and the kids have a limited tolerance for culinary adventures. So we ate in cafes/bistros that had pizza and pasta every night (fortunately, many very cute places along the various boulevards have such offerings). The obtaining of a Covid test within 24 hours of departure (for the US) turned out to be far more of an ordeal than it should have been, given how every French pharmacy advertises the 15-minute turnaround of their rapid tests. Perhaps that will be its own post.

Anyway, it is always easier not to travel, especially internationally, but then I know I would miss out on some peak experiences. Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower is perhaps a travel cliche — one reason I’d never done it on my adults-only trips to Paris — but with kids it seemed like a must-do and on a clear spring day it was stunning, cliche or not. The Mona Lisa draws the crowds, but I always love looking at the handful of other Da Vinci masterpieces in the Louvre, such as the perfectly composed extended family portrait of Anne, Mary, and Jesus holding a lamb. Riding a bike through the greening woods where Louis XIV lived was sublime. The cool breeze on my face and zipping past the rippling water by the palaces will remain a favorite memory. And my kids are convinced that the Big Thunder Mountain Railway at Disneyland Paris is better than the one in Orlando (you whoosh around in the dark for quite a while!).

So, having done the trip, I am happy to have done the trip. The kids seemed to have enjoyed it too, though my eldest said it was good except for the 30 minutes every day when I would freak out (someday, if my children are herding their own children around a foreign country, perhaps they will understand…). There were moments my experiencing self was unsure. I am definitely unsure about traveling internationally with even younger kids (the older ones are 14, 12, and 10; the 7- and 2-year-old stayed home with my husband). But I was glad to be able to show my kids another part of the world. We had a lot of good conversations over those plates of pizza and pasta. I practiced a little of my French! Not too much, though, given how many people in Paris speak English. We didn’t stay in a particularly touristy part of Paris but even so, many restaurants posted French and English menus outside. At one point my daughter remarked that “We’re talking and probably no one knows what we’re saying” and I’m like…um, I’m pretty sure they know what we’re saying. Which is helpful when traveling internationally! There are definitely places that would have been harder.

Now, after a good night’s sleep in my own bad, my memories are even rosier. Isn’t that funny?

Photo: Random Paris street scene

I feel like I’m rusty…driving to the airport, going through security. At least the airlines appear to have been preserving people’s frequent flyer status from before the pandemic, so I was upgraded, which was nice. A glass of wine on a plane. And reading on a plane! With no one needing anything. I switched seats so a couple could sit together and they held hands through the whole flight. I didn’t need to sit next to anyone, so I had that flexibility.

I also did not need to tell anyone it was time to go to bed — something I have also done every night for the last 21 months. Sadly, I did not sleep as well in my hotel room as I could have. But I did wake up on my own (a few minutes before my alarm) rather than to someone calling “Mama!” I will get there eventually in my normal life too I am sure but it is also intriguingly different to start the day with a cup of coffee and a blog post rather than the school runs.

We shall see what life looks like in another year or two. I am not speaking this week (the work trip is something else) but that’s normally why I travel. I had built up my speaking business to a good place in the three years after my TED talk. I traveled to talk somewhere most weeks between March-June and Sept-October (peak conference season). Covid obviously changed that. I have been doing a lot of virtual speaking, which I like, but it’s got a different rhythm. It has been lovely not to have the same logistical pressure of figuring out overnight care and pumping and such. Pumping this morning reminded me of that! But there is something to be said for leaving normal life for a night or two occasionally. Hopefully there will be a good balance in the future…