We cover lots of topics in this week’s episode — how the podcast itself gets made, how we get ideas for various things (podcasts, blog posts, newsletters, etc.), how we see childcare evolving long term, our dream travel destinations, advice on returning to work and how to answer loaded questions after maternity leave.

Please give the episode a listen! We also recorded an “ask me anything” video for our Patreon community members; you can learn more about joining here. We do mailbag episodes every few months so feel free to send more questions! laura@lauravanderkam.com is a good way to reach me.

In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah and I share strategies for planning summer, from booking childcare and camps and vacations to planning fun for you.

In the Q&A we tackle a question about the mental load/time cost of home ownership (I accidentally listed this as last week’s question…whoops!).

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

(Side note: Not so many mom-son pairs in the audience! We joked that they really needed to re-purpose some of the men’s rooms in that football stadium for the evening!)

It was a gorgeous night (75 degrees) and a great show. It was also incredibly long — about 3.5 hours, and 44 songs. It struck me that in an era when you can get individual songs whenever you want, and watch the music videos for those songs whenever you want, one thing live entertainment can provide is to be a real experience. Requiring some serious stamina of the audience could be part of that.

To say nothing of the stamina of the performer. Whoa. She did that show three nights in a row after doing it three nights in a row the previous weekend, and so forth. I really appreciated that Swift acted happy to be there, and you didn’t get the sense that this was just another day on the job, which one could imagine happening somewhere in the middle of dozens of shows. She seemed very aware that some people had waited hours to log on to score their $99 Verified Fan tickets, and others had no doubt spent insane amounts on the secondary market. At one point she said something to the effect of “whatever effort you went through tonight to get here, please know that it is very appreciated.”

As for my effort — it wasn’t that bad on the ticket obtaining front. I bought my tickets on Stubhub six months ago and paid what I felt was a very reasonable price considering what I saw tickets going for later.

The logistics of getting to and from Lincoln Financial Field, on the other hand, felt more intense. We took off at about 4:40 p.m. from my house. In light traffic, you can get there in less than 30 minutes. We didn’t pull into the far parking lot until about 6:10 p.m. (to be fair, this turned out to be more Friday rush hour traffic than Taylor traffic). Then we hiked about 15 minutes to the stadium. And that was better than the departure! We stayed until the end of the concert, because, well, we wanted to hear the Midnights songs. But after arriving at our car at 11:55 p.m., I didn’t even bother starting the car until 12:55 a.m., because no one had left our parking lot in that time. I finally got onto the highway (about a mile away) around 1:15 a.m., at which point it was the 30 minutes home it should be.

So, into bed a little after 2, then up at 6:50 with the toddler, but back to bed a little after 8 and I slept until 11! And now it is a memory that I think will stick with me — more so than many Friday nights. I imagine that is so for lots of people who were in the stadium — something that live entertainment can do that you don’t necessarily get from just listening to an album.

In other news: As for a little adventure…my husband and I wanted to go to a party one of his colleagues was hosting Saturday night. We didn’t manage to get a babysitter, but then I had a realization that some of the young women posting on the babysitter list where I look are 17-year-old students at my son’s high school. (Note: when we hire sitters, they are not generally charged with supervising the older three kids, who tend to hang out in their rooms or watching movies. They are there to watch and entertain the 8- and 3-year-old.)

So I put my two older boys in charge, each splitting the time, an hour and 15 minutes apiece at what I felt was a reasonable rate. And then I left the party early (my husband stayed) to make sure all was good. And it was. When I got home, my 13-year-old was playing a game with his little brothers wherein he dressed up in the inflatable dinosaur costume and chased them and they shot at him with Nerf guns. Good times.

I will be careful not to abuse this (and I pay!) but the prospect of not having to hunt for a sitter for “peak” times when it’s hard to land one really has me giddy…

Since I seem to wake with the sun in the summer, this new schedule opens up possibilities. This morning I was home alone with the four younger kids (the oldest of whom is almost 13). I decided it would be OK, if I woke up long before them, to go run laps around the yard and up and down our driveway (which is quite long).

So that is what I told the older kids I would do (so they’d know where I was if they woke up and I wasn’t there). I only ran for 20 minutes because if the toddler did wake up I didn’t want to leave him in his crib too long. But all went smoothly. I managed to run before the heat of the day hit. I came back, made myself some coffee, took a shower, and then managed to read my Shakespeare for the day (Much Ado About Nothing) before anyone stirred.

We have been in the little kid phase for a long long time. But slowly that phase is ending. The 2-year-old woke up dry and successfully tried the potty (!). The kids helped me with making dinner and with taking the trash out last night. The older two have been making their own lunches for camp without me reminding them. It’s interesting to see how time changes as children grow up. I may be able to build a morning routine yet! (Well, until the school year starts and we have to be up at 6:30…)

In other news: A few weeks ago, I mentioned my friend Katherine Chen’s new historical novel, Joan (about Joan of Arc). She got a nice write-up in the New York Times about it — please check that out!

This was a much more relaxed weekend than the last one. On Friday night, I met a friend downtown for drinks and dinner. It was so nice to do something like that again! She was in town assisting a mutual friend of ours, a prolific romance novelist, who was signing books at the Indies Invade Philly convention. My friend sent pictures the next day of lines down the hall, which just made me so happy that people were treating authors like rock stars.

On Saturday, the seven of us plus Max the dog met some of my husband’s colleagues at Wissahickon for a hike. The fall leaves and stone walls and rushing water were just so beautiful. The kids amused themselves by trying to catch falling leaves — harder than it looks, even if there are a lot of them.

On Sunday, I’d arranged a few hours of childcare for the toddler, and used this time to go for a run amid all the pretty fall leaves, and play Christmas carols on the piano for a while. Well, and clean the house because we had another showing this morning.

Then it turned out that schools were unexpectedly closed today, for very tragic reasons. So we all wound up going for one more fall hike this morning. We didn’t know Mr. Hughes (my kids feed into the other high school in the district) but I’ve been pondering a lot since we got the news just the image of him leaving the school on Friday afternoon, and no one knowing in that moment why school wouldn’t open on Monday. Life can change so much in an instant. It’s easy to go about day-to-day life forgetting this, and then sometimes you get a sudden reminder.

The wind has now kicked up a lot and the leaves are falling fast off the Japanese maple in the picture on this post. It turns out that now is the time to plant these trees, though, so we bought some for the new house, so (hopefully) there will be future falls with bright red leaves as well.

So I was fascinated to see a recent study from the CDC finding that there’s another reason to like center-based childcare. Kids in childcare are much less likely to watch too much TV.

In Oregon, public health types surveyed 2-year-olds’ TV viewing. They found that only 7.8% of 2-year-olds in childcare centers watched more than 2 hours of TV per day, whereas 23.2% of children who were home with a parent (i.e., in the “no childcare” category) watched more than 2 hours per day. The report noted that it was possible parents were unaware of TV watching in childcare centers, but said this was unlikely, as 89% of childcare centers do not use TV with toddlers, and the mean viewing time in centers is only 0.1 hours per day.

I’ve written before on this blog of the difficulty of finding any evidence for the effect of maternal employment on children. While individual studies may find one statistically significant data point (which then get turned into huge headlines), overall, it’s mostly a wash. This study may point toward one of the reasons for the ambiguous results. Perhaps kids gain something from having the one-on-one time with a parent who is out of the workforce, but if the parent is more likely to put the child in front of the TV than a childcare center, then some of that benefit disappears.

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