Aside from our snow day on Monday, this week has been mostly back to normal. The kids started their activities again. I went on a little adventure Wednesday night. I’d mentioned on the blog that last weekend no one was willing to go to Longwood Gardens with me to see the Christmas lights. So I decided to go on my own during the week. It was certainly less crowded. I left the house around 4:30 p.m. and was back before 8 p.m. I love that Longwood has kept the lights up until January 12th. It was freezing, but I bundled up, spent a lot of time in the greenhouse(s), and had my Hot Hands in my pocket. I really enjoyed myself!

Next week (Jan 13-20) I am hosting my annual Time Tracking Challenge. You can sign up to get daily motivational emails from me here. I will be posting my time logs on this blog, and we’ll have a large number of people tracking simultaneously. If you’ve ever thought it might be interesting to track your time, now is your chance!

 On the content front…This week the Before Breakfast podcast welcomed Amy Wilson to the show. She is the author of the brand new book Happy to Help, and she shared strategies for figuring out boundaries when there is too much to do.

Over at Vanderhacks (my Substack newsletter) some recent posts included “You are someone’s after” and “It’s OK to throw it away” (which is the case against guilt-based clutter). Behind the paywall, I shared “10 money challenges that have nothing to do with deprivation.” Please consider a free or paid subscription!

At the Best of Both Worlds Patreon page we are having a lively discussion of our top 3 books of 2024.

Thanks for reading and listening. I really appreciate it!

So, theoretically we could have gone somewhere though I often find it hard to plan for this one. It’s only a few weeks after Christmas. I often have been planning spring break and putting together the summer spreadsheet and I am just…planned out.

We’ll wind up doing something — we always do — but as I’ve been thinking through options, I’ve been pondering what makes a weekend feel “good.” A key part of it, I think, is that everyone in the household has something they are looking forward to.

I, personally, have some things I am looking forward to, but I want to make sure the others do too. Here things get complicated. My 14-year-old has tickets to a show, so he’s good. The 2-year-old is going to a birthday party (his first!). My husband is usually happy if he can go to the gym a few times, though he does like to ski too. My daughter said she wanted to go to a restaurant (we went to Moshulu for brunch a few weeks ago and she was really taken with the idea of going out for brunch…). Unclear on the 12-year-old and the 7-year-old. I’m sure both would like to have lots of video game time, which they will get, but the 7-year-old in particular is having his screen time limited currently (honestly the 12-year-old should have it more limited) so we’ll need to go a little deeper on their requests. Or I guess I can feel that as long as they are getting some video game time they’ll have something to look forward to!

Anyway, it doesn’t always happen, but it’s something to aim toward. That means adults too! Of course, a key part of having something to “look forward to” is that it is planned in advance. That means thinking through the weekend a few days ahead of time. In the past I’ve suggested carving out a time on Wednesday to think through the weekend, which can work, though with a 4.5 day weekend earlier is probably better. Maybe next year we’ll plan a trip somewhere warm…

(Though it is actually supposed to hit 60 degrees on Friday! Spring may get here yet!)

Would you agree with this “everyone has something to look forward to” idea as a weekend principle?

I will preface this by saying that I really enjoyed the tubing itself. Flying down the mountain was just exhilarating, and since I’d been watching the Winter Olympics luge/bobsled/skeleton events, I was making a point of tucking in my feet and pushing off with multiple short strokes, and so whatever kid I was doubling with and I just flew. The weather was beautiful — a light snowfall in the morning making the mountains glisten like they were frosted, with the temperature hovering right at 32 degrees.

However…we only wound up tubing down the mountain three times. And the transaction costs to make that happen were substantial. I am not talking money (though there was that) — the energy itself was immense.

For starters, it turns out you need to be 36 inches to go tubing, and the little guy is 34 inches. So we chose a day when we could get a babysitter for him.

Theoretically all our ski/snow stuff should be in certain places but it was…not. Plus when the kids go skiing, they have ski boots, but we needed real boots for this adventure. Finding them in the right sizes for everyone required hunting through stuff that had not been unpacked yet.

We drove the hour and 15 minutes north to the ski place, and had a bit of a snafu on whether 6 waivers were signed. Fortunately, this got solved fairly quickly. But nothing else was quick. We were not the only people at the mountain. A nice snow-covered 32 degree weekend day brings crowds. So every time we got to the top it was a 20-25 minute wait to go down. After three times the kids had basically had it.

If you figure each of the runs was about a minute (maybe) then that was 5.5 hours of total time for 3 minutes of tubing for each of us. Plus the getting ready craziness. (There was a WaWa stop afterwards, so maybe we subtract that from the 5.5 hours).

So are these adventures worth it? A complex question. It would have been an easier day if we’d stayed home, especially if we were going to get care for the 2-year-old. On the other hand, time was going to pass one way or the other, and the feeling of those swift flights down the mountain with the powdered sugar snow on all the nearby evergreens is probably going to be one of my memories of this winter.

I don’t know if it’s clear in the balance what is worth it, but that is why I have the rule to have “one big adventure, and one little adventure” each week. It is easier not to do things, but doing things tends to create the memories that define time. This weekend has still featured a lot of down time and screen time. So probably best to do something else, and the rule nudges that impulse along.

Did you have any adventures this weekend?

In other news: “One big adventure, one little adventure” is Tranquility by Tuesday Rule #6. In case anyone wants to mark their calendars, the book will be out on October 11.