In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah interviews Nancy Reddy, author of the new book The Good Mother Myth. They talk through many of these myths — those that apply to the early years and the later parenting years too — with a nod to where they came from and where we might go next.

In the Q&A we tackle a question on how to find babysitters. Please give the episode a listen! And please consider joining our Best of Both Worlds Patreon community. This week we’ll be gathering by Zoom on Wednesday at 2 p.m. eastern to discuss “The Adventure Project” — little ways to keep life more interesting.

The past few days I’ve been listening to several piano sonatas. It turns out that Beethoven wasn’t really writing these for him (or even other artists) to play in public concerts. Instead, his business model was that he was making money by selling the sheet music for these pieces. People would buy the sheet music to learn the pieces and play them for their family and friends in their own homes.

I found this fascinating because of course then the limiting factor is that the pieces would need to be accessible to amateur musicians. While this is kind of a cool constraint (can you write something groundbreaking that is also going to sell to the regular public and that someone who’d studied piano for just a few years could play?) later in his life Beethoven decided to dispense with that. I guess he was well known enough that he wrote more of what he wanted, and the later piano pieces are more for professional musician/concert hall situations.

In general, I find it intriguing how working artists balance the need to support themselves financially with creating things that they find interesting. Through history, even artists who have been independently wealthy, or had very open-minded patrons, were often still interested in having an audience. So you can’t go completely off the deep end. Or at least not for everything. And people have to be capable of performing what you produce.

I was thinking of this over the weekend when my church choir premiered the last of seven works we commissioned from Kim André Arnesen. While we are a fairly decent church choir, it is still a constraint to write something that a church choir can sing. These pieces have also been performed, as it were, for people who are just there for Sunday services, not people who’ve bought tickets to an avant-garde performance and were prepared for whatever they were getting in to. But within those constraints he did some interesting things with melodies and particularly the chosen lyrics (he worked closely with someone who helped reinterpret familiar stories in modern poetic language). It’s been a fascinating experience.

Anyway, speaking of accessible music, on Friday night a few of us went to Disney on Ice. This particular show was all Frozen and Encanto music. The 5-year-old was slightly disappointed that there was no Moana, but it was still fun! (I like trying to match up some Lin-Manuel Miranda musical moments from Encanto and Hamilton…). Yesterday a few of us also went out to run around in the very gusty wind. For a while the forecast was calling for a huge snowstorm on Thursday but that seems to have disappeared. It will be cold this week and then maybe that will be about the end of winter. We can hope…

Photo: Olaf snow cone, in portrait mode

We celebrated Valentine’s Day as a family on Wednesday since that’s when everyone was around for family dinner. The three younger kids got Squishmallows and a little toy (lip gloss for the 13-year-old) and the bigger boys got candy and (for the 15-year-old) a cherry blossom Lego set. We’re hoping to get to Japan during cherry blossom season one of these years…

The kids are off Friday and Monday for President’s Day. There will be a Disney on Ice trip this weekend and my husband and I will go out for dinner one night. My husband will also be taking the 17-year-old to go visit a few colleges. The kids have various things including a sleepover and a lifesaving class. My choir is doing a world premiere of a Kim André Arnesen piece. I’m gearing myself up to start doing edits on the manuscript of Big Time (my next book). I pasted all the individual chapters into one document so now I am staring that down. It’s a little daunting. But it will eventually be done and out in the world, as I was reminded yesterday when I was in the Penn bookstore waiting for my 17-year-old (who was at an activity). There were two previous books of mine on the shelf. I’ve done this before. I will do it again!

In the meantime, some shorter content. Over at Vanderhacks I’m celebrating Valentine’s Day with a post on “How to make anyone more lovable.” I suggested people “Plan for work overflow.” If you know when you’ll log some extra hours when necessary, a busy season can feel less overwhelming.

Before Breakfast covered the topic of why we should “Memorize important information.” It’s probably good to know at least a few people’s phone numbers by heart! For the Wednesday (longer) episode, I interviewed the wonderful Dana K. White about organization for the rest of us. Please check that out.

So it was up and at it, but the slower start was nice. I went for a walk in the snowy woods, and then the 5-year-old and I made a snowman in order to make use of the snowman kit he got for his birthday. It will all be in a puddle later but it was a tiny little adventure, squeezed in around shoveling and getting people out the door.

I have been pondering weekly rhythms lately. No week is ever quite the same around here. There are a lot of moving parts, so I find it helps to have some things be the same week to week. For instance, on Mondays I do a virtual session with my trainer at 12:30, so I don’t have to think about scheduling exercise that day. Monday dinner is always pasta night. This is especially helpful now that I’m usually headed downtown for a rehearsal on Monday nights. It’s quick, and I don’t have to think about it.

Tuesday tends to be a run-on-the-treadmill + resistance training day. Tuesday’s dinner has lately been some iteration of chicken and rice. This week it was with a jar of curry sauce. (People ate in shifts last night with activities.) Tuesday is always Best of Both Worlds podcast release day — I tend to listen to the week’s episode at some point on this day, often on the treadmill (yes, even though I recorded it…I like to listen to it as other people do).

Wednesdays I drive the little boys to school in the mornings. It’s our lighter activity day (no one has anything after 6:30 p.m.) so we aim to do a sit-down-together family dinner. That’s also trash night so everything goes out to the curb. This has become bath night for the little guys too (they do bathe at other points, but I for sure do it this night). We pick up whatever part of the house the cleaning service is doing the next morning. I now think of Wednesdays as Before Breakfast interview days — this is the day those longer episodes come out.

I tend to do my planning on Thursday mornings these days. I know I’ve touted “Plan on Fridays” as a rule…and this is Friday planning, just moved a day up so I can do the upcoming weekend’s plan at the same time. I send around a schedule for the weekend, and I plan what I have coming up the next week professionally and personally (I tend not to send the next week’s family activity schedule until Sunday because changes keep coming in). We generally do breakfast for dinner. Thursday is another choir night for me, this time with my 17-year-old. At some point during the day I practice my music for that.

Friday is another day I take the little boys to school. If we’re home Friday night it’s make-your-own-pizza night, which is generally a hit around here. Well, for most people. Two kids strongly prefer a frozen pizza, so sometimes I throw one of those in the oven too.

There’s a weekly rhythm of activities too…ninja warrior class Mondays, parkour Tuesdays, after school yoga (!) for the 5-year-old on Wednesdays…Anyway, I’m sure all of this will change soon enough, but 6 months into the school year it’s finally starting to feel fairly routine. There are always some changes (see: 2-hour delay) but when the scaffolding is in place I worry slightly less about forgetting things.

Listeners share (anonymous!) tips on how they make time in their lives for romance and intimacy. Since Sarah and I are not anonymous we don’t get too personal here, but we do talk about whether we actually celebrate Valentine’s Day or not (this year I decided to purchase fun gifts for my kids…I mean hey — we all need a little midwinter levity).

In the Q&A we address a listener question: Is there a male equivalent of BOBW? We’d love suggestions of podcasts with a similar vibe!

Please give the episode a listen. As always we welcome ratings and reviews, and please consider joining us in our Patreon community. Our monthly meet-up will be next week, where we discuss our “Adventure Project.”

Anyway, a few weekend highlights:

Going out with the big boys for dinner Friday night. The younger three children were all occupied with other things, so my husband and I took the older two boys out to our favorite Mexican place. Eating out with big kids is generally pleasant! And no one needed to be distracted with an iPad! Plus the guacamole was good.

The 10-year-old finished the pool part for his scuba license. He finished the online classroom part a few weeks ago, and spent the weekend doing the pool dives. This was pretty intense (Friday night, Saturday day, Sunday day) but he did a great job. He’ll do his check-out dives on a trip we have coming up, and then he’ll have his license.

We played outside in the ice. There had been some predictions that it might snow overnight Saturday to Sunday, but we woke to no snow but a lot of ice. In the afternoon, I took the little boys outside to go pull icicles off the leaves. We were competing to see if we could pull whole leaf-shaped icicles off without breaking them. It was not quite the same as building snowmen or sledding but it was winter outdoor entertainment nonetheless.

I registered the little guy for kindergarten. I put this on my weekend to-do list and then shut myself in my office early Sunday afternoon to get it done. I will do a shout out to the Apple Notes “scan document” function that makes it very easy to create PDFs of documents such as a birth certificate, our real estate tax bill, an immunization record, etc. The gathering of documents took some time, but once I logged into the system I got everything done in about 30 minutes. Nice.

Fortunately we had childcare from about 9:15, so I was able to get most of my work done. Three of the five children saw Dogman. I finished a draft of a book chapter. I did a podcast interview. I am getting close to caught up on my time tracking emails (this was a project…I’m so glad that we had 1600+ people tracking their time in January but it has taken me longer than I’d like to get back to everyone).

Some content from this week…Over at Before Breakfast, I had episodes on “The case for a winter walk” and “Carpooling isn’t just for kids.” For the longer episode I interviewed Mary Laura Philpott about “Being patient until the right idea comes.” She talks about how she’s had a gentle year creatively as she figures out her next project. She’s approaching the process with curiosity, rather than a sense of hustle. There are turtle metaphors. Please check it out!

Over at Vanderhacks, I piggybacked on Groundhog Day and the associated movie to ask “Would you live today over again?” Related: “How to enjoy 6 more weeks of winter.” I suggested people “Try a 30-minute closet triage” and “How to (finally) make progress on your personal to-do list” (those two are behind the paywall).

The Best of Both Worlds Patreon community had a fun discussion of the best jeans (I have been informed that this was an expensive thread). We also talked early money memories, and favorite TV shows. Membership is $9/month (you can join here).

Thanks for supporting my writing and podcasting! I appreciate it. In the meantime, a tongue-in-cheek sonnet about big game football…

Some sixty thousand people in the stands
All scream alike as seconds tick to none.
The lights glow green, the crowd is slapping hands
confetti flutters, people start to run,

as fireworks explode into the air.
The players rush the field, their helmets tossed.
In this cold night, the revelers will dare
to claim that all is changed from if they’d lost.

And yet, a few blocks over, someone else
sits in her condo, watching Netflix, sure,
that nothing else has happened, and she tells
her friend that it’s a boring night, and you’re

on your way over right? Oh yes, I’ll try.
I see some traffic — but I don’t know why.

Photo: A different sort of bird, through the car window. Note: no snow.

A few observations…maybe for 2025 I will do more real-time analysis so I don’t have to do it all at the end of the year. Any given week doesn’t take that much time, but doing 52 weeks (plus 2 days) takes a lot of time. Theoretically using spreadsheets means you can just sum the cells with a certain entry but…due to some choices I made early on in time tracking that are now habits this doesn’t really work. So there was a lot of manual tallying. Oh well.

I do not work that much. Well, on some days I do. On a “normal” workday I’m at my desk at 7:45 a.m. and end the work day at 5 p.m., or later, and often do 30-60 minutes at night. But for various reasons I don’t get a lot of normal workdays. On Monday this week, for instance, I stopped at 3:30 to pick up the 10-year-old and take him to the pediatrician. Then he really wanted to go to his ninja class, so I drove him out there to meet B (nanny), who was there with the 5-year-old for an earlier class. I got home at 5:30. Those would have been work hours — I had childcare — but with 5 kids there is often something. It is what it is, but I need to be careful about protecting longer stretches of deep work time when I can get it. I averaged about 32 hours/week for the year. For what it’s worth, Tuesday was my longest average workday, but I think this is skewed by Monday being more likely to be a holiday.

My sleep was absolutely consistent with what it has been for the last decade. 7.33 hours/day. Every year I’ve tracked has been 7.3-7.4. Guess this is my set point! No surprise that I slept more on weekends than weekdays, but curiously Sat and Sun were both 7.68 hours apiece. (Tuesday was my lowest — 7.08.)

Choir, as a hobby, turns out to be very seasonal. I was in choir practices, or practicing music on my own, for 31.5 hours in December, and did about 6 hours of performances that month. My total for July was 0!

I spent 128.25 hours on puzzles. I worked out with my trainer 44 times. I ran 122 times. That feels a little low, but my logs reminded me that there were 7 weeks of 0s there after my back incident. I biked 9 times as an actual bike ride (there were a lot of other “bikes with kids in driveway” kind of rides). I did yoga exactly once — on the beach as part of BLP live. That may be all I do it in 2025 too. Oh well!

To that end, SHU and I produced an episode of Best of Both Worlds this week on interesting money questions. We ask each other what we’d do with a windfall (my boring answer is that changing day to day life is a really high bar! I suspect we’d be living very similar lives…while sitting on a nicer sofa). We talk about money mistakes we have made. We talk about our earliest money memories.

Please give the episode a listen and we’d love to hear your answers for any of these questions as well!

In any case…For many people, the year starts with a lot of vim and vigor and then around now reality starts to set in. Various surveys find that a lot of people have abandoned their goals and resolutions by now (if not earlier).

There are reasons for this. Sometimes goals just aren’t that appealing. Sometimes they’re vague. Sometimes they’re not compatible with life as it is. It may work to exercise for an hour a day on a normal workday when nothing goes wrong, but not on a snow day when several family members have the flu…which is just as much life as any other day (and is probably more likely to happen in January than other times).

I have learned not to set unrealistic goals like that for precisely this reason. But, with the first month of 2025 over, I can report that my (more realistic) goals seem to be going fairly well.

I have listened to the first 33 days of the Complete Beethoven calendar (with a bonus listen to his 8th and 9th symphonies in Boston). I am not sure if I set this as an “official” goal, but I’m also reading through Anna Karenina, one chapter at a time. I have read 33 chapters. I continue to write 2 lines a day in my sonnets. I wrote one called “For the birds” with a nod at the Eagles that I might share later this week.

My “healthy living” goal was to eat produce for breakfast every morning. I can report that I have done this 33 days in a row. A lot of times this has been apple slices, so I’ve needed to make sure we have apples in the house at all times. Some mornings I’ve just grabbed a few carrot sticks to munch while I’m making my eggs. At my hotel in Boston I had a lot of cantaloupe from the buffet. One morning I had avocados, and another morning I had a full mushroom omelette… but it tends to be apples.

I set a goal to go to three professional sports events: A Sixers game, an Eagles Game, and a Phillies game. I thought this would take me to fall to complete, but thanks to the Eagles’ post-season run, I have now been to three events (one Sixers, two Eagles, but not the Phillies yet of course). So this goal is mostly done and I’m sure I’ll be able to get to a baseball game this summer.

As another fun goal, I planned to buy some more dollhouse furniture for my miniature scenes in my office. I ordered some from a place in Australia before Christmas, but this has yet to arrive, so I’m fearing that may have gone missing in the vagaries of international shipping. But I got a tip about a place called Flip This Dollhouse in New Bedford, MA, so I might need to make a road trip there (and maybe tack on some Moby Dick tourism too with the area?)

On the professional front, my major goal is to finish Big Time (my next book). My deadline is April 1 and I can see the finish line. I’ve basically collected everything I need to collect for the book itself, so now it’s a matter of piecing things together. I found the fascinating tale of a Soviet scientist who tracked his time for 56 years so…that’s going to get a mention. I also added up my hours spent on various things in 2024. It was eye opening, even for me. I’ll write more on that later, but one major insight is that I don’t think I’m working enough, and I worry I’m not going to find stories like that Soviet scientist precisely because my days are fragmented but…we shall see. The good news is, unlike with my first book, I’m now regularly emailing 50,000 people and many of them have ideas, and have come across things of interest, so there is some leverage. Wish me luck on finishing…

Finally, I set a goal to do one extra strength training session each week beyond the one I do with my trainer. I’ve been doing this by combining it with my treadmill workouts (how I tend to run when there’s snow outside).

Anyway, I’m sure life will intervene in various ways, so we’ll see how this all goes. But at least the resolutions are good through January. I’m enjoying all these resolutions enough that it doesn’t feel too onerous to stick with them.

How are your resolutions, one month in?