Can less time actually make your life with kids easier?
Remember when a Friday could start with "what are we doing tonight?" Like, nothing planned, every option on the table, footloose and fancy free... can you imagine? Crazy.
And then you have kids and all of a sudden there's this tiny window between pickup and bedtime, and a morning that's basically twenty minutes of lunches and shoes and getting everybody out the door. For a long time I saw that as the thing standing between me and the life I wanted to be living, and lately I've started to see it a little differently.
A fence around the field
There's this book, A Beautiful Constraint, that I bring up on probably every other podcast episode, and I have never actually read it. But the idea has stuck with me so hard, because there's a study in there where they watched a group of kids play in a big open field with no fence, and they all just kind of huddled together in the middle. Then they put a fence around the field, and the kids ran all the way out to the edges and explored the whole thing.
Parenting put a fence around everything
That's honestly what having kids did for us. All of a sudden we had this finite amount of time, and childcare hours, and I physically cannot work out in the evenings, so we had to actually sit down and ask, okay, when does working out work for each of us? When are we motivated to do it? When can we actually fit this in? And it made the decision so much clearer because there just weren't that many options! I have to personally be somewhere else to work out, so mine goes in the morning, and we tested a few things until it stuck.
Foundation and flow
My worst nightmare is having the same day every single day.
I'm the person who gets home from a morning workout with twenty minutes to get the kids out the door and thinks, now seems like a good time to make sourdough. So for me it's rhythms, a bit of scaffolding, some really good foundations put in place, and then everything else gets to be more free-flowing... and if you're more of a same-breakfast-every-day, same-schedule-every-week kind of person, you probably want a lot more of the structure, and that's wicked too.
Knowing which one you are (and which one the person you live with is!) makes the whole conversation so much easier.
We love a recalibration
When our daughter was a newborn, in the middle of the pandemic, we'd sit at dinner and basically have these little meetings... "okay, we've been doing this at night with her, we've been doing this in the morning, let's try this next time," or, "you go for your walk at this time and I'll do this." And that habit has stuck with us, where either one of us can come to the other and say, okay, this was our agreement, this is the way we've been doing things, and here's why it's not working for me at this time. Then we recalibrate from there. It always could be better, but it means nothing we decide has to be forever.
Why is it all in my inbox?
And obviously, I'm still recalibrating. We have one kid in kindergarten and one in preschool now, and somehow every single school email lands in my inbox, the forms, the reading practice, the WhatsApp groups that are all moms. It's literally just one email address you write down on one form, and then boom, the whole system is over here with you. So that's the next conversation on the list, probably on a car ride home.
Want more of this?
This week on the podcast, my husband Scotty Barr is back! You might remember him from Episode 21, where he shared the story of eight heart surgeries in eighteen months, right as we were bringing our daughter into the world. Five years later, we get into the four-day work week he never gave back, why he doesn't have work email on his phone, how he rebuilt his health with strength training and (yes) boxing, and how two total opposites keep recalibrating.
