Sunday Update: Reading, Sports, Sleep, Media

The experience of taking four young kids to the bike park
is the exact opposite of how casual I look here.

Hello! Happy Mothering Sunday for UK people! If you are a mothering person this is a day where you get to....? Do mother stuff.  In a sick and evil twist it's also the time change day.  Obviously time change people must hate mothers which is why they put the clocks change on mothers day. 

As a kid I used to hate this time change because I "lost" an hour of sleep.  However as a parent this is a great time change because this morning I woke up and there was a 6 on the clock!  Of course it was 6:15, which. means yesterday's 5:15, so not really any great feat.  Why can't we all just agree to leave the clocks the same time and just get up earlier in the summer? Anyways, this is a completely different rant than I was intending.

This week was a lot.  Ezra was home ill.  Andy and I did a lot of childcare-work-swapping. I didn't feel great and thought I was getting ill. Maybe I am ill? My diet has been 70% bread, 20% cheese, and 10% cake and chocolate.  It's not ideal.

But, it's a new week! And a new month. 

Reading

In exciting news, I got a libby copy of How To End A Love Story and of course I am enjoying it.  It has been a hot minute since I read some chick lit so it's nice to have my familiar narratives back.

I'm still reading Meditations for Mortals as well.  Oliver Burkeman is smart and I have to think about his books and I have been to tired to think, so it's going slowly.

Sports

On Monday I did my 100th Peloton ride! I was so excited that San was able to ride with me.  It felt really fun to have my Peloton friends with me - my colleague joined as well (we were both on lunch break) and  my local sports buddy, and I got loads of high fives.  

• Monday
• 30 Minute Intervals and Arms with Hannah Frankson
  
  
• Tuesday
• 1 hour gym with gym buddy (upper)
  
  
• Friday
• 30 Minute HIIT and Hills with Cody Rigsby
• 10 Minute focus flow with Denis Morton
  
  
• Sunday
• 30 Minute UK Mothers Day ride with Leanne Hainsby-Alldis
• 10 Minute climb ride with Denis Morton
• 5 Minute cool down ride with Denis Morton
• 10 Minute core Strength with Adrian Williams
• 10 Minute focus flow: floor poses with Denis Morton

When I do live rides on Peloton I always filter to the twin moms and give out high fives because twin momming is a lot.  I was rather sad to see that there were no twin moms or momof4 on the Mothering Sunday ride today:

This only shows what people tag themselves, but of the 400 people in the live ride, this seemed to have a smaller percentage of self-tagged moms than other rides I've done.  

Overall, not the best week for sports.  I'm hoping this week I can do more strength training.  I didn't want to ride on Friday or Sunday, but I thought to myself "not because I want to, because I can" and then after I rode I felt much better.

Sleep
The good news is, when the going gets tough, the tough... fall asleep.  Because I averaged 7.5 hours of sleep this week, including the time change.  I guess in some future world it would be great if I could eat a vegetable or meditate or walk outside when life gets hard, but at least I can still go to bed early when life gets hard.

Media

So I have been really really into Taylor Swift recently, which is sometimes a sign of stress and turmoil (last time I was so into T Swift was November, which was the worst month in a long time) but also maybe her music is just really really good?  I am especially into the midnights album.  So so many great lines! So many great songs.  Blarg I just love the whole album.

There was a good Before Breakfast Podcast called "you'll regret it, and that's OK". I feel like almost every decision we make right now turns out to be the un-ideal one, but is also the correct decision based on the information we had at the time.  I'll regret it, and that's OK.

Do you like the Spring Forward time change? Do you celebrate Mothering Sunday or Mothers Day? Do you sleep more when life is hard?

No Typical Weeks - Routines and Logistics Meetings

Laura Vanderkam writes "There Are No Typical Weeks" and it's kind of fun to know two things are true: I'm planning a week, and weeks never go to plan.  This week was such a perfect rendition of a not-to-plan week, but I still made it to the office, we still ate food every night, and I still slept 7+ hours.  

Our general weekly routine is as follows:

Monday: Andy cycles with a cycling club
Tuesday: I do sport with my sport friend (Yoga/running/climbing... something else)
Wednesday: Logistics Meeting
Thursday: Andy runs with his running club
Friday: Grocery delivery and hang out at home

This was all fine from a hobbies and equity standpoint as I also had gym morning on Friday, but I've recently started running with a running club on Wednesday (on the few days we did logistics on a Tuesday) and I felt I was giving up 2 of 5 weeknights for family logistics/food which seemed a lot. 

The benefit of a Wednesday logistics meeting: 

• Friday evening grocery delivery worked well - we could get groceries just after the kids went to bed and put them all away so quickly (vs trying to put away groceries when kids are awake on saturday morning. Groceries need to be ordered by 9pm the previous evening). 
• Thursday was a great day to send some low key texts about weekend plans.
• Andy goes to the pub after run club on Thursdays and sometimes stays awake too late and is tired on Friday
• I sometimes get "that Friday feeling" on a Thursday and stay awake too late and am tired.  Friday is like a mini weekend because I have childcare (even though I'm in work, but that's easier than watching kids)
• Friday is tiring and we used to struggle to keep momentum to plan another week right at the tail end of an existing week

 Benefits of a Friday meeting include

• We already spend Friday evenings together so may as well do logistics
• I want to do run club on Wednesday (and another friend would probably do it with me, which would be great because I really like this person but haven't had space to actually make a viable "bid" for friendship, ie a thing we both like doing and works for both our schedules)
• One Tranquillity by Tuesday rule is Plan on Friday.  I can see how it's good - we could make a firmer plan for the upcoming weekend and a lighter plan for the following weekend.

I mean, on balance the Wednesday meetings work pretty well, but the balance is me not going to run club, so we are going to to switch to a Friday plan.  And grocery delivery on... Saturday night? Sunday night?  We haven't quite worked this out.

On a different note: here is a minor house improvement I made last weekend.

The upstairs landing was driving me crazy:

I know it's sort of cheating to just take down the drying rack, but we also were storing way too much in that space.  I've been trying to find areas of the house that we aren't using as much as we should, or where we are using it to store things that shouldn't be stored in valuable house floor space.  See the pile of boxes on the left? That's the Vinted packing shop.  It doesn't need to be out all the time.  I donated a pile of clothes to charity, put the boxes in the attic, but the gift wrapping things in our bedroom, put the Vinted "shop" in my office, and cleared out the entire back corner

When we first had kids we used Kallax furniture in every room.  The Black shelf on the right is our third to last Kallax and I think it's time for it to go to the charity shop as well.  It's just, bigger than needed.  Sometimes lots of storage just accumulates lots of stuff.

Does your week have a repeating flow of events and activities?  Do you have a structured time for personal or family logistics?

Thursday Thoughts: Flying Too Close To The Sun. Project Icarus. I chose to blog rather than Peloton

Andy and I keep telling each other that we are flying too close to the sun.  I call this stage of life "Project Icarus" Fundamentally, we don't really have enough childcare to cover the work we are doing, or the hobbies we have.  We will have enough childcare in June, but we are leaning heavily into using flexi time, using compressed hours, annual leave, and a shifting assortment of days and hours to get our work life done.

I'm never sure where the balance of "being flexible" meets "give up immediately".  Sure, I love having a structure and a plan and goals, but I can also really quickly abandon all of it to watch kids.  On Monday we ended up home with everyone after Ezra had a tummy bug at night.  Thankfully Lily was in nursery all day, so we were just managing 3 kids and via swapping get everything done in work.  On Tuesday we sent Ezra to school, where we were told at 9:05 to come collect him as he was on a 48 hour sickness exclusion (I thought it was 36 hours, oops!).  Now we had 4 kids at home all day, so I spent my day helping and working and helping and working and waiting for the next chaos. It was pretty hard to focus on work, or on kids.  I caught up on work in the evening instead of a sports date with my friend.

On Wednesday I went to the office all day. I have not been to the office since December.  It was good to go and see people, but I got basically no work done.  Andy said that one of the weird things about being mostly remote is that when you go to an office every day you get used to doing work in an office, and when you go to an office almost never you get used to the office being an unproductive social day.  This is probably very true - I bet people in the office more were accomplishing far more work than I was. My in office day was definitely less productive than my least productive work from home day.

Today Andy and I were supposed to go mountain biking (we both booked annual leave for our March adventure - a double date actually, with a couple we get on with super well) but unfortunately Ezra wasn't healthy enough to go to school.  Our nanny was here with Aubrey and Clara and Lily, but we couldn't really leave her with a poorly Ezra as well. At the last minute we changed around and Andy went biking while I un-bookd my day of holiday and went to work instead, while Ezra napped and read next door.

New stage of life unlocked: when sick kids lay around entertaining themselves rather than needing to be continuously held/snuggled/entertained/medicated.  Obviously I don't like having sick kids, but this version is much preferable to previous iterations!

I have done no sport since Monday.  On Tuesday I canceled sport with my sport friend because I had spent too much of the workday helping with kids and needed to catch up in work.  On Wednesday I got back from the office at 8:15pm and was in bed by 9.  Today I had a poorly Ezra and didn't think. I could focus on exercise, although that's not really an excused because I could have carved out 15 minutes easily.  I managed to get a decent amount of work done which was good.  

I know that when things get chaos it's good to stick with routines that support, but my daily planning has not happened, my food tracking has been terrible, and I haven't taken a vitamin since monday.  My screen time was 2 hours yesterday.

Tomorrow I should be able to get a Peloton ride in.  Unless Lily is ill. Or Aubrey, or Clara, or me. Or Andy! Or someone else, or some other minor disruption. 

Today I felt so unfocused and un-present that I wanted to figure out what my priority was and I realized it was "make it through day without neglecting poorly Ezra."  Anything else was gravy.  I did two loads of laundry.  I guess I've exceeded expectations for today.

Do you lean into or out of routines when life is... destabilizing?  What routines do you keep and what do you abandon?  Have you been ill recently and isn't sickness season supposed to be over soon?

Sunday Update: Reading, Sports, Sleep

Sunday again and it's officially spring.  Every day is currently 5 minutes lighter than the day before.  Which means in 2 weeks we will get an extra hour of daylight a day.  It's honestly a bit excessive, I'm really happy for the sun to come up at 5am and down at 7:30 and never get longer than that.  I guess I probably should not have moved to Wales and instead moved to... Albuquerque. Or Tehran.  Maybe Wales is ok, even if it gets too light in the summer and too dark in the winter.

Reading

I finished All The Money in the World by Laura Vanderkam this week.  It's a really interesting premise - how does money make people happy?  I like the argument towards seeing money as a tool for happiness.  I told Andy this and he said that buying lots of bikes would make him happy so he should buy lots of bikes.  That's not really the point though, my first road bike ever cost £250 and made me so happy.  My last road bike ever (or at least, untill I become a road rider again) cost £600 and also made me happy, but possibly less happy than that first bike.  It's the hedonistic treadmill - we always tend to return to a base state of happiness and so you can't just buy lots of stuff to make you happy.

There was also an interesting chapter on how spending money on other people can make us happy.  I know it's easier when you have money to share money, but also I don't think there is a threshold above which you have money to share and below which you don't have any money to share.  Actually, there are definitely points where people don't have money to share, but there is a lot of mid ground.  Anyways, I've decided to try and be more generous with people and see if that increases my happiness (or ruins my budget - we do have a gifts budget so I can at least monitor what we are spending).  Last week a colleague who I like had a baby and I gave £10 towards her work present.  A friend of mine went into surgery this weekend and I sent her a gift voucher for a food delivery service.  Both these things made me happy.

I am still reading Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.  It's just good.  Also, once I got used to reading physical books again I decided I like physical books.  I might read more of them.   Kindle books were great when we had babies in the room, but now that I'm not waking up at night anymore (yay!) and reading for an hour or two it's nice to stick a bookmark in a chapter book when I'm done at night.

Sports

It's been another awesome week for sport.  I am still ravenously hungry all the time but I am at least enjoying all the sport that's making me over hungry.  I also got to do a workout with San on Peloton again - yay! On Monday I am going to be a total Peloton nerd and do my 100th ride and I've invited all 5 of my Peloton friends to join me.  Maybe this time I'll get a shout out... maybe! Either way, 100 rides since buying the Peloton in October feels awesome.

• Monday
• 35 minute Peloton while watching Emily in Paris season 4
• 20 minute evening yoga flow
• Tuesday
• 1 hour yoga flow class IRL (I've done 5 in person yoga classes now, so 1/3 of the way to my 2025 goal of 15 in person classes)
• Wednesday
• 20 Minute Full Body Strength with Ben Alldis
• 5 Minute Core with Ben Alldis
• 10 Minute Upper Body with Ben Alldis
• 10 Minute full body stretch  with Ben Alldis
• 1 hour run with local run club at night (it was a sprint session - ouch!)
• 10 Minute Focus Flow - Healthy Back with Kristin McGee (because I thought sprinting had hurt my back but it was OK)
• Thursday
• 20 Minute pop-punk ride with Bradley Rose
• 10 Minute HIIT ride with Denis Morton
• 10 Minute Focus Flow for Riders with Ross Rayburn (and San!)
• Friday
• 30 Minute Low Impact Ride with Hannah Frankson (live!)
• 15 Minute FOcus Flow for Runners with Denis Morton
• Sunday
• Junior Parkrun - 2k run with the kids
• 30 Minute Intervals and Arms with Olivia Amato (live!)
• 20 Minute Queens of Pop ride with Ally Love
• 15 Minute Full Body Stretch with Ally Love

It's been a really fun week of sport.  Here's me running super fast at night:

Sleep

This is where it's less good.  My rolling average is 7 hours.  I went out to dinner with a friend and stayed up until 11pm on Saturday.  11pm!!!  Also, I've been waking up at 5 or 5:30, before the twins wake up, but without enough time to go back to sleep or do anything useful.  Usually by the time I get downstairs I can hear Aubrey talking.  Also, Andy and I watched a TV show on Friday called Severance because my slow cooker came with 3 months of Apple TV.  <----(That sentence is so mid-life middle class I can't even)

This week we have no evening activities and I'm not doing the run club due to being in the office on Wednesday so hopefully it will be a more sleep week.  Then the clocks spring forward on Saturday so that will be its own nightmare.  Since our kids already go to bed super early it's actually the easier time change for us... although let's see if I say the same thing in two weeks.  Time changes are the worst.

Are there any ways in which money has been a tool for your happiness in the last week? Have you watched the show Severance?  

Thursday Thoughts: Working Moms and Overheard at the Cafe

I heard two moms talking at a cafe.  They were both talking about their kids entering school nursery and how nice it was to get 2.5 hours a day to themselves now.  Their kids must have just turned three, and newly qualified for 2.5 hours of free school a day.  The one mom asked the other if she was thinking of going back to work

"Not really" said the mom "because I would still have to pay for wraparound, and it would be like £300 a week in childcare, so it doesn't really make sense".

I've thought about this a lot recently.  I live in a place where lots of moms don't work or work very part time.  Not in the LA "yummy mummy" way, but in the "it just makes sense for me to watch kids" way.

It's interesting to me that the decision to leave the job market seems often be a financial one.  However the decision to leave the job market when kids are young eventually keeps one out of the job market specifically because of the decision to leave.  Childcare costs make this decision more and more difficult - the most expensive childcare is for the youngest children.  

Childcare gets cheaper as they enter school, but if one has been out of the job market for 5 years then even cheaper childcare now can't keep up with the salary loss of a career gap and re-entering the market.

I am so glad I have stayed in work (which I obviously wanted to do as well, but I feel there is a lot of pressure against that decision here) because I can afford childcare.  I can afford childcare because I stayed in work.  When all my kids are in school I will be able to afford... other things.  

My husband and I make roughly the same salary now.  I have never heard him or his friends lament how so much of their salaries go to cover childcare.  I have never seen them calculate their take home after childcare.

I guess it's odd to me that there is financial pressure to leave the workforce when kids are small, because childcare is so expensive.

Then there is financial pressure to stay out of the job market when kids are a little bigger, because only lower salary jobs are available to returners.

Then there is financial pressure to get a job when... kids enter secondary school?  By the time getting a job makes sense, the monetary value of the kind of employment available is so low that it seems one may as well not work at all.

I wish I could more often express the sentiment that I am not *loving* the experience of childcare now, but I am *loving* continuing to develop professionally, not stagnativing my career, and making enough money to employ someone else. I love feeling like I am financially contributing to my family, and knowing that every pound we pay in childcare now will be a pound we can put into something else later.  

If I wasn't working, every pound I saved by not working would decrease in value over time - lack of earnings does not benefit from compound interest.  

There is no inflationary bonus on housework... there is just more housework.

[Obviously if you love staying at home with kids then great! Do that! But when people say "are you thinking about getting a job" I feel those people should answer "no, I love staying at home with kids and doing pick up and that's what I want to do" rather than "no it's not worth it financially".]

Sunday Update: Reading, Sports, Sleep

Happy Sunday! The sun is out but it is COLD.  It's still March.  

This week had some really good things.  For example, I had Tuesday off work and I hiked up a local mountain with a friend and it was great

On Wednesday, I was doing a cheeky midday workout and I saw that San was doing a Peloton ride and I joined her!  It was super cool to know someone I like was doing the same ride as me at the same time as me.  I don't know that I would have bought a Peloton without reading how much San loved it, and I can say I still love my Peloton rides just as much now as when I first bought it in October.  Thanks San for the eternal inspiration and I'm so glad we finally rode together!

On Wednesday evening I went running with a local ladies run club.  I'm so glad I got out with them, the first time with a new group is always scary but they were nice and I will definitely go out with them again.

I love getting stronger and knowing that I will never be pregnant again so all the work I do to get better and stronger will not get reversed soon to have babies.  I can actually see and sustain improvement.  It's great.

Reading

I started reading again.  Real books.  I'm reading both of these now:

I find All The Money In The World interesting, but I feel it might be written for me - a semi frugal middle income earner.  It's interesting to think about how infrequent big things (houses, cars) don't necessarily give us as much joy as frequent little things (lattes, meals out).   

I thought about this when we bought our most recent car.  Our previous car was £500.  Our new car was more than 20 times that.  I asked Andy "is this new car twenty times better than our old car?" It turns out it was, because our new car fits all our children (along with other benefits) which is twenty times better than not having a car we can use. Also, it brings me frequent joy to drive a car that does not feel like it's going to fall apart on the road.

I know Woody Allen is an awful person, but books like this remind me of his quotes about money:

"Money does not give happiness, but it procures a feeling so similar, that it needs a very advanced specialist to verify the difference."

"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons"

Sports

A great week for sports again.  Yay.

• Monday
• 15 Minute Peloton ride (it was supposed to be 30 but instead it became 15)
• Tuesday
• 7 mile hike up and down a mountain. Yay!
• Wednesday
• 20 Minutes Arms and Shoulder Strength with Rebecca Kennedy
• 20 Minute Standing Core Strength with Rebecca Kennedy
• 20 Minute 90's Ride with Cody Rigsby (and San!)
• 10 Minute Lower Body Stretch with Ben Alldis
• 1 hour Run with Running Group
• Friday
• 1 hour gym with gym buddy
• Saturday 
• 30 Minute Broadway Ride with Bradley Rose
• 30 Minute Full Body Strength with Katie Wang
• 10 Minute Stretch with Ben Alldis
• Sunday
• 10 Minute Glutes and Legs with Ben Alldis
• 10 Minute Chest and Back with Ben Alldis
• 10 Minute Upper Body Strength with Ben Alldis
• 30 Minute Sundays with Love ride
• 10 Minute Full Body Stretch with Ben Alldis

I learned this week that on Peloton app you can "stack" classes and that's what I did on Sunday and it was fun.  I made a list of classes and did them one after another.  

Sleep

We have been on a sleep mission lately.  I have averaged 8.2 hours this week, which I did not think was possible.  I thought I couldn't sleep more than 7.5 hours a night.  Maybe it's because I'm doing more sport, or maybe it's because other stressful things have resolved, or maybe it's just catching up from years of not sleeping, but it's great.  On multiple nights I slept straight through from 9pm until 5am.  On Friday I slept from 9pm to 6am.  9 hours of sleep.  Dreamy.

Habits Update

Y'all wanted to know more about my flossing habits right?  Well my dentist appointment was this week and they basically said I had the best teeth in Wales.  That's not a great benchmark, but it was almost unmotivating in how wonderful my teeth apparently are.  I mean if I can undo a year of floss neglect in 4 weeks of intermittent flossing then what is the point of good dental care?  Also, is floss itself old school?  Does everyone use TePe brushes or floss picks now?  I will still try to keep this habit up.

Another habit - Food.  I have been tracking my food for a while and was suprised at how generally unhungry I am as long as I get a decent meal at 10am ish.  That all ended this week when I have been ravenous all the time. Maybe it was my hike that broke my hunger levels, but I have been eating everything.  I figure I will go back to eating like a normal person soon, but last week for lunch I had a cheese sandwich and a slice of quiche and a bowl of pasta because I was just hungry.  I pretty much eat whatever I want usually but I am trying to make sure I eat fruit for at least once meal or snack, in addition to whatever other things I want to eat for that meal/snack.  Tracking has shown me that I definitely eat vegetables every day but I have to remind myself to intentionally eat fruit.

Do you eat fruit every day? Do you find your hunger levels vary a lot week to week (or month to month?) Have you slept more than 8 hours in a row recently?

5 Phone Thoughts on a Friday

This week I joined a local running group.  I signed up to facebook in order find the group, found where they run from, and then joined them.  When I got there I was told I needed to sign into the group with an app, which I didn't have because I generally try and avoid apps.  Luckily I was OK to run with them once and we did hill repeats and it was nice to run with some new people. 

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During the social run the social runners took a lot of photos for instagram and facebook.  Life must be a lot different when it needs to be continually documented.  I am torn though, because I do love all-female running groups, and I imagine a lot of the facebooking and instagramming makes for better community and a more inclusive running.  The group did say that they were a very inclusive club, although apparently that doesn't extend to including the app-less.  (this is a bit unfair, I think I can go back, but I probably have to figure out how to make an online account for the website for the app.  I don't think they'll be super happy if just show up without App-RSVPing again)

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There was another app-less runner in the group.  She was from New Zealand and said that her phone was a New Zealand phone and therefore she couldn't get UK apps.  That is a good reason to not get apps!

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I always find it hard to explain why I don't want to get apps, and I usually laugh and say I'm generally don't do phone stuff and app stuff (which I realize is a ridiculous thing to say).  People will very quickly try and show me things on their phones, like how easy it is.  I find it interesting that the assumption is that if I just understood how *easy* apps were then I would want to use them more.  I just... don't want to do more phone.  I wanted to run.

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We bought Ezra a secondhand coat and it has a phone pocket.  He asked if he could have a phone, to put in the pocket.  I think I might get him a pack of playing cards, because it is the same size as the pocket, and I'm pretty sure that would satisfy his pocket filling desires for now.  Lily also decided to ask for a phone, and I told her she could have one when she turns 16.  She told me that will take one hundred years.  Touche.