Today’s episode of the Best of Both Worlds podcast is about celebrating and preserving the moments that make up our lives. We talk about 5-year journals and photo books, time logs, regular journals, and other ways of keeping memories. We also talk about turning events into traditions to make memories stronger in the future.

In the Q&A we discuss how to make date nights more memorable as a listener asks for fresh ideas.

Please give the episode a listen! We welcome ratings and reviews — they really do help convince new listeners to give us a chance (and convince potential guests that we are worth the time). If you’d like to discuss these issues more in depth, please consider joining our Best of Both Worlds Patreon community. Listeners get access to monthly online meet-ups, plus a very active discussion forum. Lately we’ve been discussing going to concerts as a family, work + life integration vs. separation, and more. Membership is $9/month.

Best of Both Worlds is now a member of the iHeartMedia community, and you can listen to the podcast through that channel too.

However, beautiful as everything will be, there are still ways to make more memories from this fleeting season.

A few weeks ago, there was a question in the comments of how my family finds local events and activities to do. Some of this is just a function of living in a place for a long time. People tell you about places. You read about them. A kid goes to a birthday party somewhere. If you find two new activities you like each year, after ten years, this is 20 things — quite a lot to choose from!

So for instance in 2021 I learned about the downtown ice skating rink, Hawk Mountain (with its River of Rocks hike), and I learned about Holland Ridge Farms. All of those are now in the rotation. In 2020, I learned about the Philadelphia Auto Show (going just a few weeks before the world shut down…) and about Weaver’s Orchard. Certainly pick-your-own farms have been on my radar for a while, but we’ve explored a number and I tend to like the Weaver’s vibe.

We are or have been members at a lot of local institutions/museums, and as a result we’re on a lot of mailing lists. So when a place has an event or festival coming up, we hear about it. If it sounds good, my inclination is to try it. Some things are better than others (see the animatronic dinosaurs…probably not my favorite, though it was fine for 20 minutes). But you get out of the house in any case, and if it’s great it can go on the long-term list. This inclination to try stuff is nudged along by my “One big adventure, one little adventure” rule. It doesn’t happen every week, but the goal is more weeks than not!

With that in mind, here are this year’s Spring Fun List ideas:

See the cherry blossoms. The intention is going to Washington DC, which we did in 2019 and really enjoyed. If that doesn’t work (tricky timing with weekends and weather and such) there is a row of cherry trees in my new yard! They bloom later in the spring (closer to May) but are going to make me feel like I’m living in a wedding magazine photo spread for a few days.

See the tulips at Holland Ridge Farms. I bought the “anytime” tickets for the family so we can choose our day for nice weather and peak blooms. This year they apparently expanded their fields and their parking, so if we aren’t going to the Netherlands (truly lovely, by the way), this might be the next best thing.

Take an adventurous spring break trip. For superstitious reasons, I tend not to talk about my travel until it’s over, so this list entry is a bit vague. But fingers crossed this trip is going to happen.

Visit NYC. I have an overnight trip planned in late April, which should be during peak blooms. I’m looking forward to doing some walking around.

Listen to spring music. I really enjoyed doing this last year, listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and so forth. This will upgrade my in-the-car music experience.

Go on a family bike ride.

Take photos of flowers and print some up. I really like botanical art in general, so this is a nudge to create some myself.

Read a spring-themed book. I welcome suggestions. Could be non-fiction or fiction, as long as it’s not depressing or intense fiction (I just…can’t right now).

Go outside after dinner. Since none of my children sleep anyway, we may as well go ride bikes and pogo sticks and dig in the dirt. There may be a new swing set coming too…

Turn my Instagram feed into a flower show. I had a lot of fun last night following copious flower farm accounts. If I’m going to scroll mindlessly, may as well make it a lovely experience!

What’s on your spring fun list?

Photo: I no longer live at the house with this magnolia tree, though I might drive by to pay it a visit. I’m hoping to find a new favorite tree in the new yard this spring. 

I had a thought today that, thanks to my time-tracking, I have a record of how I have spent all 17,400-odd hours of his life. Of course, I don’t know how *he* has spent all the hours of his life, but we have spent a reasonable number of those together. It has been a strange two years in many ways, though there have been nice aspects (like having Daddy around for a lot more of those hours than with the older children).

Speaking of the older children…I also had a realization today that when kid #2 turned two I was welcoming another baby. I cannot even fathom that right now. I guess we do crazy things when we’re young.

In any case, it is so fun to watch him figure out language, and how the world works. He was excited to point out an “oc-po-pus” in a book tonight, and he said his own name pointing at himself for one of the first times recently (normally it’s “me” as in “Me did it!”) I can’t wait to see all the fun things he will learn over the next year!

Fortunately he did go down at 7:30 p.m. last night (if he was up again at 11 p.m….) which was good because I needed to record a ton of Before Breakfast episodes. I haven’t been able to do this during the day because my neighbors are putting on a new roof and hence the workers bang and run machinery intermittently from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily.

Did I mention that I am recovering from a cold? Not Covid, but not fun either.

The high schooler was supposed to take the bus this week (since I was on solo duty in the early mornings) but something went wrong two days in a row and I needed to load the three youngest kids into the van (waking two of them) to drive him to school.

I have also spent 1-2 hours on house stuff daily — including such fun activities as re-selecting carpets after realizing my first choices were not good.

So, even though it might seem a bit premature, I have been making Christmas plans. I put together my annual holiday fun list. I have been buying tickets and making reservations. For me, at least, knowing I have fun stuff coming up makes a not-so-great week feel better. I have something to look forward to! Here’s what I plan to do this year to celebrate the season:

Get matching family pajamas. They are ordered! We will open them on Christmas Eve (or the day before) I imagine, and take our family picture. I know that the 12-year-old in particular will wear them once for the picture solely as a favor to me and then never wear them again, but oh well.

See LumiNature at the zoo. I wound up purchasing tickets in advance for a lot of holiday light shows in November. I figure that the weather might be slightly warmer than in December and November weekends tend to be less busy than December ones. Plus, it stretches out the holiday fun! So we’re going to the zoo display soon. We will also go see Longwood Christmas and the holiday railway at Morris Arboretum over Thanksgiving weekend. (I may wind up getting a ticket to see Longwood solo too, as I did last year — it’s a nice family activity but sometimes the kids don’t want to linger in the same way I do…)

Take the boys to the Nutcracker. The performance is back on this year! Seeing this ballet is one of the annual events that really makes Christmas feel like Christmas to me. My two eldest children, interestingly, were the ones who raised their hands to go. We’ve got tickets (and our vaccine cards for the theater).

Go to a handful of in-person holiday parties. My husband has two festive work-related events we will be attending. Alas, between the fifth baby and the pandemic I’m not sure my festive dresses (dating back to 2018 at this point) fit me, so I will add dress shopping to the holiday fun list.

Go out for dinner for my birthday. My parents are coming to celebrate during the day (ok, the day before — my “birthday eve?”) and then stay with the kids while my husband and I go out.

Play Christmas carols on the piano. I’ll need to use the upright piano at the current house as the workmen are still pounding away over at the new one. (Much banging…I suppose my neighbors’ roof is payback for what we’ve put our neighbors at the new place through…).

Make the Lego Christmas set with whichever children wish to participate. I’m debating when to start this one as I don’t want to have small pieces and an in-progress project out while we’re showing the house. But maybe soon.

Buy holiday flowers for the house. We will need to put the poinsettias up high so babies and dogs don’t get into them. My daughter asked that I put “decorate for Christmas” generally on this list. We’ll get a tree of course, and put a wreath on the door. She wants to wrap her bedroom door in wrapping paper. This reminds me that I need to go to Costco to supplement the wrapping paper supply.

Read Christmas stories with the kids. Five kids and fourteen years in, we have a fine collection of Christmas stories. I just bought Mr. Willoughby’s Christmas Tree and the Fletcher Christmas book so we’ll add those to the list.

Visit the live nativity at church. Kind of like going to the zoo and church at the same time, I guess? There’s no Christmas pageant this year, so this will be our main Christmas service for the kids. I may sing in the Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols. They’re still limiting how many people can be in the choir loft so we will see if I make the cut…

What’s on your holiday fun list?

Getting my crew to behave and smile is never easy. This year we’ll be throwing a dog into the mix, in addition to the mobile toddler and occasionally surly older children. One of the photo proofs that came home from the school yearbook photo session is just laughable for its “really, you expect me to do this?” vibe.

Our long-time photographer is truly excellent and she will get great shots of all of us looking at the camera with something close to happiness. Or not looking at the camera when it is artistically appropriate! Nonetheless, getting everyone to wear their nice outfits and cooperate is going to be stressful. And there will be other stresses. We’re doing the shoot at the new house since there is a good chance there will be an open house going on at our current house at the same time. Preparations for that will overlap with preparations for the photos. Plus, my husband will be bringing one child back from an overnight camping trip. Theoretically there should be plenty of time but…he might come back covered in mud. And with the open house going on, there won’t be a chance to shower him. Can you see I’ve been pondering this?

All this is to say it probably won’t be the most relaxing few hours of my life. But on the other hand, the kids are growing up. The photos we take for our Christmas cards capture these fleeting moments in time. I know I will be happy to have the photos, even if in the moment we will be cold, and the toddler will be running off somewhere, and the dog barking, and all the rest. Future Me will be happy to have the photos. So I can picture myself on some future day, cozy and quiet, looking at these adorable children and the bright fall leaves, and hold on to that image. And hopefully not scream too much in the meantime!

This meant I was here with the three younger kids. It was not the most relaxing weekend ever. The toddler was up before 6 a.m. both mornings, as he had been the previous two mornings during the week when my husband was traveling, and I was feeling a bit…done…on the early morning toddler entertainment front. He is enamored with the Jimmy Fallon board books (Everything is Mama and Your Baby’s First Word Will be Dada) and wants them read over and over again. I also spent a lot of my toddler-free time (when he was sleeping, or when my almost 10-year-old daughter was watching TV with him) cleaning up the house in advance of the listing photos.

However…there has been progress there. Several rooms are less than 5 minutes away from being photographable (personal stuff/functional stuff like waste baskets would just need to be pulled out). This includes the bar kitchen in the basement which has been covered for years by the remnants of those horrible little “find the dinosaur fossil” type kits where you pound at plaster and make dust.

There were also a few nice moments. I took the three kids for a short hike on Saturday morning before various sports, and it was lovely to see the early fall color. I ordered in sushi for myself Saturday night, and enjoyed that. Sunday, I had a few hours of coverage for the toddler, so I could do some birthday stuff for the soon-to-be-10-year-old (with her 6-year-old brother in tow). We ate at Olive Garden — her request — and then went to Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Since the space is contained and the kids didn’t really need me, I sat at a booth and read my daily chapter in War and Peace. It was quite the juxtaposition. Tolstoy opens many sections of the book with a discussion of how individual choice isn’t shaping history nearly to the extent that much “Great Man” theorizing claims. Perhaps. It’s curious to think what forces beyond my individual choice led me to be sitting there in the booth, with one eye on my son, who was using his unlimited play pass to hone his skill at the claw machine. By the time we left he had won 8 small bouncy balls, which I could not help but see as just more stuff to be moved. At least he was happy about it!

The big boys all came home around 6:30, at which point we had a birthday dinner, and later cake and presents. In a very on-brand moment, my daughter had let me know which kind of wrapping paper she wanted her presents wrapped in. So I obliged, and made sure to use the bows that were tonally matched. In life, I suppose it is good to ask for what you want.

Now it is nearly noon on Monday morning. I have not followed my own advice at all, and have spent the morning clearing the decks of various things instead of doing my main task for the day, which is revising chapter 3 in Tranquility by Tuesday. But! Onward. It will get done by the end of the day.

Photo: Living his best life

I have done this every day since January 1st, which was 215 days ago. I did do some push-ups yesterday. But I did not do the reading or writing.

I have spent quite a while today pondering why that was. There was no real time reason. I had time; it only takes a few minutes in any case. I was at my desk — fewer hours than on a “typical” Tuesday, but still there, with my copy of War and Peace next to me and my laptop available, and indeed, in use.

The honest truth is that I forgot. There was a brain blip of some sort, influenced by slight changes in schedule and work on other things. On weekdays, I often do my rituals in the morning as kids are getting ready for school or camp. But yesterday my husband left early for something, and I was driving a kid downtown. Our nanny gets to work at 8:00 a.m. I needed to finish getting ready, and we left at 8:20, but there was a lot of traffic and I didn’t get back to my desk until around 9:30. At that point, I decided to dive right into book writing, rather than doing my rituals. I think I figured I’d do them during a break. Then I got really into the writing, and kept at it without much of a break until I wound up with the baby for a while as other camp runs were happening. Those camp runs were delayed with other traffic, and I had to race out as soon as a kid got back to go to a planned afternoon adventure. This involved the Cousins Maine Lobster truck (see picture), which was parked at a nearby mall for the day, and then this indoor trampoline thing a handful of children had been begging to do.

This all took longer than expected (there was a wait for the trampoline) and we got home around 6:15 p.m. We ate dinner, there was a showdown over fruit eating, I put the baby to bed and then didn’t make it back into my home office until late. At that point I wasn’t even thinking about the rituals, because I have almost universally done them in the morning. I had more or less forgotten that I hadn’t done them.

Until this morning when I walked into my office, picked up War and Peace and said…wait. I didn’t read this yesterday! It’s somewhat amazing to me that I could do something for 215 days in a row and then forget, but there we go. At least it was easy enough to pick back up. I read two chapters and wrote two separate 100-word bits in the free writing file. We’ll see if I forget again before the end of the year!

• baking cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve. My husband spearheaded this one, using two sticks of “special ingredient” (butter). Yum.

• buying a Christmas tree from the local fire department. It’s quite an outing to get a Christmas tree and see fire trucks at the same time!

• going to the Camden Aquarium on Christmas Eve (includes a visit to Santa)

• going to the 4:30 children’s service at church…and barely making it through to Silent Night (the last hymn)

• having pigs in the blanket for Christmas Eve dinner

• enjoying mugs of hot chocolate spiked with marshmallow vodka (yes, there is such a thing)

• leaving several of the kids’ presents for Dec 26 because we just got overwhelmed
• pulling out my keyboard and singing Christmas carols with my extended family when they visited

On the other hand, a few things didn’t work out so well. We tried to do Advent calendars, but the kids opened all the doors prematurely. They’ll probably get better at this over the years, but success on this front seems a bit in the future. What new things from this year do you think you’ll keep as holiday traditions?

flickr image courtesy of moonlightbulb

I find this question asked less often, here in my new home outside Philadelphia. Indeed, I have had the experience now of meeting parents of kids at Jasper’s preschool who actually went to the preschool themselves 30 years ago. That would be parents, plural – it’s not one outlier. It’s a somewhat regular thing.

I find this worldview fascinating, because it’s certainly different from the one my husband and I grew up with. Both of our fathers were academics, which means that, first, you go to graduate school somewhere that has a great program. This is probably not the town you grew up in. Then, coming out of grad school, you go to the best university that offers you a job, which is seldom the same place you went to school. You may stay at that job a long time, but still, your kids don’t view it as the ancestral home. None of my husband’s siblings stayed in College Station, TX, and none of mine stayed in Raleigh, NC or South Bend, IN. My husband and I both moved to New York because we thought it would be a fun place to live, and we moved to PA because my husband is currently part of the Philadelphia office of his company. But he’s been in at least three other offices during his tenure. In my world, place is a variable.

But for other people, it isn’t. When all your extended family is in one place, you may simply assume that is where it is best to live. And perhaps it is. Having a tight social network is a strong predictor of human happiness. You look for careers you can do in the place you are, rather than follow work opportunities elsewhere. This is not necessarily good or bad, it’s optimizing different things. You may give up something in salary, but if you can, say, rely on family for a chunk of your childcare, you may not need to earn as much.

It will be interesting to see which mindset my children adopt. In choosing a community in which to live, it certainly never entered my mind that this would have any bearing on which community my children ultimately choose to live in. Will they, like us, view holidays as a time for flights and long car trips, or trips down the street? Will place be a variable, or a constant? What is it for you?

On the other hand, there are some jarring moments. Every issue has a feature about doing housework more efficiently; for instance, January ‘s page 44 features instructions on how to speed-clean your fireplace in 15 minutes. Yet page 32 (thanks to Jen from Laughing at Chaos for pointing this out in a Facebook conversation) touts a $1,100 Anya Hindmarch leather satchel. Page 120 highlights a $1,240 task lamp.

Note to Real Simple readers: If you can pay four figures for purses and lamps, you can afford to pay someone else to clean your fireplace.

But anyway, I think Real Simple captures the worries of a certain demographic quite well. Which is why I enjoyed a recent online package on “15 Easy Christmas Decorations,” that you could make yourself. The modern woman is very nostalgic about Christmas crafts and the like. She also isn’t going to take all Saturday to do one. The compromise? “Crafts” that amount to putting pinecones on a table or apples in a glass bowl and calling it a day. You get the effect, without spending time in a way that takes you away from more important priorities.

There’s something to this. I was thinking that this weekend as I made Christmas cookies with my 3-year-old, Jasper. On Saturday afternoon, we found our Christmas cookie cutters and decided to go for it. I had wanted to do some baking with him this year, but baking with 3-year-olds still isn’t exactly easy. So we popped into the store across the street. As I was standing there in the aisle, I had a thought roar up from the depths of my brain that Christmas cookies are supposed to be made from scratch! Was I really about to buy cookie mix and pre-made frosting for such a hallowed event?

Yes, yes I was. A mix let us get to the fun part — cutting out shapes — quickly. Jasper paid attention and helped the whole time. The cookies tasted good. The frosting is kind of eh, but small children turn out not to care. We had so much fun that I’m pondering doing simple Christmas crafts next weekend. We already have apples and glass bowls!

In other 168 Hours news:

• I have a column in USA Today this morning called “When’s the right time for Christmas carols?” Singing Christmas carols during Advent is controversial. If you didn’t know that, read on to find out why!
• Thanks to Tim Brownson for choosing 168 Hours as one of his Ten Best Self-Development Books of 2010. We’re in good company on that list!
• Star Lee magazine reviews 168 Hours positively in the current issue. As they write, this book “caught our attention and kept it.” (This magazine is aimed at women entrepreneurs; for more about it, read here).

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