Socializing with other adults can be challenging with little kids, but this concept seemed to work really well. They came over around 4 p.m. — the point on a weekend day when everyone is starting to go crazy and needs some change in direction. They brought appetizers, which was really nice. We had some snacks, then took the little ones up to the play room. They could play there while the adults all had some craft beers from the recent “Beer of the Month” shipment my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas. Peach beer sounds a little strange, but it grows on you! Since both families had toddlers, and we were in the room with them, none of the adults had to skip out on participation to chase after the kids (well, there were a few escapes but nothing major).

Then I ordered pizza and salads from a local place. Thus no one had to cook, and the kids were all happy with the selection. Because the toddlers needed to go to bed, the evening was over by about 7 p.m.

Filling the hours of 4-7 p.m. on a weekend pleasantly — when one has toddlers — is no small thing. So perhaps we will try to repeat this model! My toddler was sufficiently tired out that he slept from 9 p.m. to 7:30 am., which counts as good over here.

In other news: The dining room chandelier I bought for the new house came in a giant box, which is filled with packing peanuts. The box had been sitting there for a few weeks since the chandelier got installed (I lost intensity with unpacking and getting rid of garbage) but the three younger kids just discovered it and have been having a ball with it. They call it the “ball pit” and keep diving in and covering each other in the packing peanuts. Good times.

We went to the Franklin Institute’s Harry Potter exhibit on Sunday. It was fun to see the costumes, and the Great Hall, though I felt like you really needed to have read the books/seen the films to get much enjoyment out of it. I mean, that makes sense, but since my 7-year-old has not done all those things yet, he was not terribly happy during the experience. Oh well. We managed to escape from the gift store, and spent far less cash on pretzels from a street vendor and everyone was OK.

I am reading King John in my Shakespeare reading project. This apparently has the distinction of being one of Shakespeare’s least staged plays.

I ran 6 swift-for-me miles on Saturday morning. And I am about 60 percent of the way through Malibu Rising, so it looks like I’ll probably finish this week. Good, since the book is due back to the library on Friday…

Photo: The “ball pit”

Get up                                                         6:42am
Get ready (shower, dress, coffee)        55 minutes
Get children ready                                  47 minutes
Commute to work                                   52 minutes
Working day                                           7 hours
Pick children up                                     33 minutes
Makes / eat dinner                                 46 minutes
Children’s play and bedtime              1 hour 9 minutes
Household chores                                 1 hour 13 minutes
Work from home                                   1 hour 12 minutes
Go to bed                                                 10:45pm
Spare time                                =             1hour 30 minutes a day

Lisa asked “Does this breakdown sound familiar? Or does 90 minutes of free time sound high to you?” There were a range of comments, but a reasonable number echoed one poster who said “Wow — I’d KILL for 90 minutes of ‘me time,’ even once or twice a week let alone daily.”

These comments always make me scratch my head. No one has to read the New York Times website. So that strikes me as a leisure activity (and yes, I know that someone may need to be at work and is reading it there… but isn’t it amazing how we make space for “me time” during the workday?) I think that 90 minutes of free time is pretty low for a workday, and the tally will be much higher on weekends. Here’s a stat: According to the American Time Use Survey, the average full-time working mom watches almost 90 minutes of TV a day. This is TV as a primary activity (not a secondary activity, like the TV being on during dinner). Just like posting on the New York Times website, sitting on the couch watching TV is hard to count as anything but leisure.

One person’s experience does not define an average. But I personally had over 90 minutes of free time yesterday. I spent 25 minutes running on the treadmill. I read for half an hour while my husband took the kids to the apartment building’s playroom in the evening. My husband and I watched The Daily Show (TiVo’d) for about 25 minutes after the kids went to sleep, and then talked with each other for about 30 minutes before going to bed. So that’s at least 1 hour and 50 minutes.

Now, granted, I work from home, so I don’t have a commute. I live in NYC and don’t have a car, so I don’t drive around places and convince myself that I “had” to do those errands or kids’ activities. I live in a fairly small apartment, so there’s just not much house to keep tidy. We ordered sushi, so there was no cooking (for the adults). Then again, I worked 9 hours yesterday, which is more than most people do, and my kids didn’t actually go to sleep until 10pm. If they’d gone to bed at 8pm like normal 3- and 1-year-olds, I would have had even more free time if I’d wanted it.

As I wrote in 168 Hours, I think modern parents like to claim we have no free time because it’s a way to show how dedicated we are both to our work and our families. We also have this perception of leisure time as meaning something decadent, like a massage at a spa. So if we’re not at the spa, we think we have no free time, even though we’re spending hours parked in front of the tube or hanging out on Facebook. The fact that we don’t use our leisure time well doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

We all like to complain, but there is a big downside to this claim to have no free time. It makes young people — young women in particular — think that there is no way they can build a career and a family and still have time to sleep, exercise, volunteer, read a book, or all of the above. But you can. I hope more of us will start talking about the leisure time we do have as a way to change the conversation from one of “no time” to choosing what is a priority. I have free time. And I’m guessing you probably do too.

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But read closer into the study and you’ll see that while gender differences are stark, most parents of young kids sleep OK. The University of Michigan used data from the American Time Use Survey, which records how Americans actually spend their time. As opposed to how we think we spend our time. This is a critical difference, because it turns out that even parents of young kids aren’t up with them in the middle of the night that much.

On any given day, 32 percent of working moms of children under age 1 reported a sleep disturbance related to the baby. Just 11 percent of working dads did. But consider that most babies don’t sleep through the night until 3 months or later. If you consider that probably 25% of moms of infants have kids under age 3 months, and much of the time mom is probably nursing the kid (which means dad isn’t particularly helpful when the child wakes up hungry), this means that post 3 months, mom will get to sleep through the night the vast majority of the time. Given how many horror stories I heard when I was pregnant the first time about children who never slept, I would have been quite excited to hear this statistic.

After age 1, things get even better. Some 10% of working moms of kids age 1-2 report a sleep disturbance related to the child (2% of fathers do, leading to headlines about the disparity). Only 3% of those with kids age 3-5 report a kid-related sleep interruption.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had several opportunities to cite a statistic from the American Time Use Survey: the average married mom who works full-time and has kids under age 6 sleeps more than 8 hours a night. People have trouble believing it, in part because of the perception of parents always waking up in the middle of the night. But past the first few months, this is a relatively rare occurrence.

I know it is for me. It may happen 10% of the time (I have a 14 month old, so this sounds about right). And yes, this past year has taken some adjustment for me on the sleep front. The kids, at least during the summer, got up a lot earlier than I wanted. But I learned that if they were going to be up at 6AM, I’d go to bed at 10PM. Now that it gets lighter later in the morning, they often sleep until 7AM, so I can stay up until 11PM. It’s not perfectly ideal, but I do sleep enough, and I’m happy to learn I’m not alone.

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In this time of tight budgets and lean staffing the left-behinds are saying “enough.” They flock to online forums like The Childfree Life and STFU Parents to vent about being taken for granted because they have no children. “You can work all the holidays, you can take the weekend trips, you can work late when your colleagues have to run home for the soccer practice or the recital,” said Laura S. Scott, Roanoke, Va.-based author of “Two Is Enough” and founder of The Childless by Choice Project. “There’s an assumption that the childfree don’t have lives outside of work. There needs to be an acknowledgement that all employees, whether they have children or not, need work-life balance.”

This is one of those tricky issues where I can certainly see both sides. I think parents benefit when flexible work arrangements aren’t just about kids. Indeed, some offices have found that people of all genders and family situations pitch in to figure out flexible arrangements when the issue is framed in terms of planning for snow storms, terrorist attacks, etc. In many offices, the vast majority of workers could work at home on occasion, and may need to in some circumstances. The fact that parents do it because of sick kids or school holidays doesn’t have to enter the conversation.

Also, people in general are willing to work more when they have some control over their schedule. I sound like a broken record citing the recent IBM/BYU study finding that people who could work from home sometimes and set their hours could work 57 hours per week before feeling work-life stress. Those stuck in their cubes? 38 hours. Why talk about the mommy track when you can talk about getting all your employees to work more?

I also, as a parent, cringe when other parents use their kids as a carte blanche to get out of anything. I will go to great lengths to not do this. Once, I convinced a babysitter to leave her real job at 3pm to pick up my older kid at daycare when it was closing early for snow (unexpectedly) and I had to give a speech (perhaps she worked with parents and they understood!). One of the main thrusts of 168 Hours is that it is entirely possible to work full time and still spend plenty of time with your family, exercise, volunteer, sleep enough, etc. That means that children are not an excuse for letting all the other parts of your life go.

On the other hand…. I have attended tons of work-life balance panels, and often there is some attempt to include a single man or woman who volunteers or does triathlons or what have you. No one ever asks this person questions because fundamentally, the audience is thinking this: there is very little, besides elder care or caring for another sick family member, which approaches the 24/7 nature of parenthood. Someone has to be with small children 168 hours a week. If it’s not you or your partner, then it’s someone else that you or your partner has arranged. A triathlon or 10-hour per week volunteer commitment does not place the same demands on a person. Even if you worked 60 hours per week, and slept 8 hours per night (56 per week), this leaves 52 hours for other things. More than enough time to devote 15 hours to athletic training. I think this is why panel audience members never find this particularly impressive.

And then there is the larger question of which extracurricular activities society should privilege. If no one did triathlons, the world would limp along. If no one had babies, the species would die out. Perhaps some people would be OK with that, but it’s hard to build a society without the breeders. And the reality is that all childfree folks were once children themselves, who someone bothered to tend and nurture — even if it occasionally meant asking a colleague to cover.

I’m curious what other people think of this.

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