However, I felt like my eldest’s room wasn’t necessarily living up to its potential. It has lots of light. We bought furniture for it from the previous owners, and bought an additional book case and desk, but things weren’t terribly well-organized. Or, they were, but it was hard to maintain them that way. My son is busy and he’s also grown a lot in the past few years, which means he’s grown out of a lot of clothes — sometimes clothes I swear I’d just bought a few months before. It’s hard to stay current on that, plus old school notebooks/notepaper, etc.

He’s been away for the last three weeks at camp, so with his permission, our house manager and I have been busy upgrading the space. (I don’t have permission for pictures yet — hopefully later! But this is why this isn’t a design blog haha).

First order of business: clearing out the too-small clothes. The good news is that because he is at camp, we’re pretty sure he took his favorite things with him. So a lot of the other things could be dispatched to some giant Rubbermaid-type containers, ready for the 14-year-old to “shop” if he desires. (He is also gone, so we’ll have to wait on that.) Trash was removed, books put on the shelf, etc.

We purchased a rug, so that is now grounding the space around his bed. Also on the decor front: framing posters! Several years ago, right before we moved into the house, he received a number of movie posters as a Christmas present. We were going to frame these and put them up and then just…didn’t. But that finally happened and they are being delivered today, so that is going to make the space look a lot more coherent.

We also got some new lamps, which give the bedroom a much more homey glow. Clear off some horizontal surfaces and the place looks a lot better. I’m looking forward to the big reveal when he comes home (though given that he’s getting home after midnight maybe it will be more of a wake up in the morning reveal).

Of course, I’m also realizing we should have done this a lot earlier. He’s likely going away to college in approximately 13 months. But I assume he’ll come home for vacations and long weekends so it will be good to have a more attractive space to welcome him home.

In today’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah interviews Ellen Galinsky about her new book The Breakthrough Years: A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens. What sets Galinsky apart is how positive she is about this phase of life. There are challenges for sure, but also wonderful things. People who are parenting kids of any age will enjoy hearing her thoughts!

In the Q&A, Sarah and I address a version of a question we get frequently — should I have another kid? Only in this case the listener wants to know how to decide if she should go for kid #4 (or possibly even #5 after that!). We share our thoughts on understanding whether you feel “done” or not, especially as you contemplate having a larger brood.

Please give the episode a listen! As always we welcome ratings and reviews.

He is a wonderful young man whose interests can be whimsical and deep. He has a math project going on now about the changes in box office sales data, a long-running passion. He’s also recently become interested in tree identification and asked for the Sibley Guide to Trees for his birthday. He figures in my TBT scorecard this week, as you’ll see below.

The Tranquility by Tuesday scorecard is how I rate myself on following the nine time management rules in my next book. In advance of the book’s publication on October 11, I post this scorecard on occasion, usually on Mondays looking back at the week before.

Rule #1 is to give yourself a bedtime. I was in or near my bed around 11 p.m. every night this week, according to my time log. However, we had a couple rough nights with the 2-year-old that meant I didn’t get the same amount of sleep each night. And then last night I had some ridiculous stomach issue that meant I could barely sleep. Hopefully this week will be better.

Rule #2 is to plan on Fridays. I do this every Friday, although I tend to plan the kids’ activity schedule for the week on Sunday nights. I might start moving this to Friday since I generally know most things that will be required by then.

Rule #3 is to move by 3 p.m. I walked or ran outside every day by mid-afternoon. I have not necessarily been running as much as I want (I ran three times this week — per the next rule) but I’ve realized this is partly because we have construction going on on our street which makes it hard to run or even drive past during the day. Plus once you run past the construction you’re on a busy road before getting anywhere else. I did get myself motivated to get in the car and go run elsewhere, so maybe I just need to think about doing that more. There is a parking lot 3 minutes away where I can avoid the busy streets so it wouldn’t really eat up much time.

Rule #4 is “Three times a week is a habit.” If you want something to be part of your identity, make time for it three times during the week. I had a few wins here. I ran three times (even though I’d like that to be more, three times is the minimum). I practiced the piano four times during the week. An unexpected win? My husband and I ate lunch together (with no kids around) three times this week. We haven’t done a date night in forever but if we’re both working from home, we often stop to eat together at noon. We managed to do this even with him being in Seattle part of the week.

Rule #5 is to create a back-up slot. I leave Friday mostly open so it can absorb what it needs to. This week the afternoon was booked up but the morning stayed open and fit some spillover from earlier.

Rule #6 is “One big adventure, one little adventure.” The existence of this rule changed how I spent my time this week! I realized, as I was doing last week’s scorecard, that I had no “big adventures” planned. But I heard in choir rehearsal that there was going to be a production of La Boheme (with professional singers and a full orchestra and such) staged nearby on Tuesday night. My now 15-year-old expressed interest in going, so he and I got tickets. And just like that we became the sort of people who go to opera on a Tuesday night. We did leave a little early because it was a school night but that was a big adventure. As for little adventures, I ran on a trail I don’t often run on during the week, and on Saturday I took my oldest and the 7-year-old on a short hike. Over at Instagram you can see the reel I made of the 7-year-old crossing a creek on a log several feet up in the air.

Rule #7 is “Take one night for you.” I went to choir practice on Thursday.

Rule #8 is to “Batch the little things,” and I tackled my Friday punch list as usual, doing such things as paperwork and making appointments. Knowing I had a time specified for making those appointments made me feel less guilty about not doing it at other points.

Rule #9 is “Effortful before effortless.” This has not been so successful the last few weeks, but I did make some progress here this week. On Sunday, I had 20 minutes between when I came back from dropping one kid off and had to go pick another up. Instead of losing that time to nothing, I turned it into one of my piano practice sessions. I also read the book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs over the weekend. I know this consumed several hours, and those were hours that might have been spent on Twitter. Now I just need to come up with another book to read…

Photo: Squirrel statue guarding the trail I ran on…

I set my alarm for 6:10, intending to nudge the teenager out of bed, so he could take the bus to school. (He shares a room with his little brother, who can sleep a little longer, so we come wake him rather than have him set an alarm that is going to wake his brother too. This will not be the case in the new house thank goodness!). My husband and I had a walk-through meeting at our new house at 7 a.m. with the contractors to take stock of what needs to be fixed before we move in a few weeks from now. Our nanny agreed to come at 6:45 or so.

Well, I woke at 6:40. My alarm was ringing…but silently. I’m still not sure what I did there. My husband was up and in the shower but I guess hadn’t noticed that none of the rest of us were moving (including the teenager). I threw on some clothes, woke the kid up and drove over to the new house while my husband did the school run (since the bus was long gone by that point).

The house is coming along nicely. I trudged through with my coffee, flushing toilets to make sure they worked, turning on faucets and light switches and so forth. We may not have an oven when we move in, but we will have a stove so I guess that’s good. In any case, I was in the midst of that when I got a text from another child who asked if I had the felt and foam half-sphere he needed for an earth science project. What? He’d mentioned something on Friday, but I had not understood that this was needed by Monday morning. He thought I had ordered it or something and then when I was gone when he needed to leave there was general panic.

And so I found myself at Michael’s craft store after the construction walk-through. This was quite the place! They did indeed have foam half spheres. And full spheres. I bought a variety, plus felt for creating the various layers of the earth. And potato chips because I was hungry by this point and not inclined to make healthy breakfast choices. Is there any thing this store doesn’t have??? It’s a good thing I don’t go there often.

Anyway, I drove my bag of stuff over to the middle school and left it with the security guard who has a book shelf for just such forgotten things. Indeed, I saw that there were materials for other children in the same class sitting there.

By the time I got home it was 10:30 a.m. I attempted to get started with work, but wound up needing to deal with the forms to lock in the movers for early January. On the plus side, I learned that the Notes function on an iPhone can scan documents and turn them into PDFs. This is very useful knowledge!

Anyway, we’ll see what I get done over the next few hours before I take two of the kids to get dose #2. The people running the clinic (for 5-11 year olds) have promised a special guest at the post-shot waiting area. So…is it going to be Santa? I’m not sure it’s possible to keep kids socially distanced from Santa, and streams of children all piling on the same guy would be ironic at a Covid vaccine clinic. So maybe it won’t be Santa. One of the area sports team mascots? I’ll report back!

Photo: Colorful felt!