Because why not? If you listen to BoBW, you will know that Laura has tracked her time quite literally for years. I find it fascinating, but even my very Upholder/Planning/Archive-happy tendencies do not make this an easy feat for me. And I’m okay with that! But every so often I think it’s incredibly valuable to revisit the extremely important question of what I am choosing to do with my time.
And I feel like it would make a fun blog mini-series, so here we go! A week in the life. This week, no one is on call (yay!) and it’s essentially a ‘regular’ work week for me. For reference, A is 7, C is 5, and G is 16 months. Here we go – Monday (yesterday) was day 1!
4:30 up, coffee, work on podcast prep & email (prep most of 2 upcoming episodes & send emails to Laura)
6:00 Beachbody 21DF Workout – Upper Fix. For the record books, I used 8-12 lb weights and did 26 total ‘regular’ pushups and 18 modified ones. Someday I will do them all the traditional way!
6:30 shower, feed G, wake up A & get her breakfast, leave for work right as nanny arrives (after an unfortunate ~7 min lost searching for my keys. Not typical and it was very annoying and 100% my own fault!)
7:55 arrive at resident AM report (5 minutes late, but I had told them to get started and already knew the case). Ask probing questions & try to bring out learning points in the case. Wish that a GI specialist was there and vow to be more aggressive about getting faculty to attend these! (We are a BRAND new program this year so it’s understandable this is still a point for improvement). Resident did an excellent job presenting though, so that was nice!
8:30 walk ~100 feet to office next door to hospital. Starbucks that I ordered via delivery (sometimes life just necessitates these things) has arrived on my desk! Eat scone + drink cappuccino for 10 min, then dive into patient calls / seeing patients / etc. EPIC (electronic health record) in-box is always quite full on a Monday and I was off Friday too so, yeah. Plenty of calls/messages to address.
12:30 a physician scientist from the UK is here to give a talk on type 1 DM and exercise. Bring lunch to session (which I preordered from Starbucks along with breakfast – hello fruit/cheese box). The talk was excellent! I learned a lot.
1:30 afternoon patients are here! Dive back into calls / messages / etc.
2:30 I am feeling mildly fried (focusing for ~6.75 straight hours will do that) and allow myself a 30 min email / blog reading break. (No insta though b/c I am on hiatus.) I answer a few of your comments too!
3:00 more patents, calls, etc.
5:15 attack work email (which means clean out and dealing with residency-related issues rather than clinical).
6:00 drive to local medical school 30 min away for “Peds Club” panel night – serve on panel along with leadership from 3 other local pediatric residencies + residents from each program. Have mind-blowing moment when a podcast listener (also pediatrician / revered medical student advisor) recognizes me! Enjoy speaking on panel and interacting with the very cute and eager medical students. (PS reflect on how it seems like about 5 minutes since I was in their shoes.)
8:45 drive home
9:00 home; eat late dinner & talk with Josh. Kids are in bed. Other than date nights I cannot remember the last time I came home to a quiet house, so I savored it and felt exactly 0% guilt. I also got to try on my new glasses, the first pair I have purchased in exactly 12 years (they are really just for nighttime/emergencies). First Warby Parker experience is a win since my last pair cost me approximately $700 and this pair was $240 and they are both equally hideous because my prescription is like -12 and there is literally zero way to make a pair of glasses look good at that strength, at least for my face. So yeah. And yay, I guess!
10:00 read about 10 pages of Commonwealth and then pass out.
In summary, this day included ~12 hours work (more than usual), ~70 minutes driving, almost zero kid time (I fed G in the AM and that was about it – and this was an anomaly too, since she still typically nurses AM and PM), 1 hr of Josh time, 30 min exercise, ~45 min of leisure (reading/etc), 1.5 hrs of podcast (semi-leisure) and 7.5 hr sleep.
Day 2 tomorrow!
PS: A’s bday was this past weekend and I am happy to be done with Family Birthday Party Season (December – early April in our house!). Check, check, and check. We had a party at a local children’s museum (Young At Art) and I had a mild conniption when I arrived to find out that despite responding to and confirming my party catering order & craft project request, someone completely dropped the ball, never actually passing on any of this information to the appropriate staff.
In the end, it was less than ideal because we had a number of hungry parents and kids and our food did not arrive until 11:30 (party was slated for 10-12). I was honestly embarrassed, especially since I don’t know the families we invited well, being new to the area! The unicorn cake I ordered as part of the whole shebang didn’t come to fruition, and I know A was very excited about it 🙁
BUT A was a (somewhat surprisingly) good sport about that (distraction of presents helped I am sure . . .) and they took off almost all of the charges AND gave us a voucher for a free future party, so I guess I am at peace with all of it. Maybe I’ll even do a toddler bday party for G there next year with my voucher.
Lesson: maybe call party venue day before EVEN IF you have received an email confirmation and therefore should not really have to do this. (Although honestly, the idea of having to do this makes me irritated because an email confirmation from a person in charge of parties should be . . . confirmation. Just saying).
Okay! Back tomorrow.
7 Comments
Ooh LOVE this and looking forward to the whole week. for the record, I also use 8-12 lb weights for UF and I have regressed from doing all the pushups on my toes to having to modify most because my shoulder has been hurting 🙁
Wow up at 4:30 and bed at 10 pm …I know you said this wasn’t a typical day, but just curious, how much sleep do you find you need a night?? I unfortunately seem to function best on 8-9 hours … meaning if I get to bed at 9:30 my earliest wake up call that would leave me functional would be between 5:30-6:30. I used to get away with less but now I find I really suffer if I get less than 8 hours for a few nights in a row.
I need about 7-8 hrs, and seem pretty ok w 7 especially if I get a longer catchup once in a while! I know this varies a lot, though.
Looooove this idea. I am pining for the day my kids sleep in enough for me to work out in the AM again. Although I have to say one thing I have really confirmed through this type of post as well as real life conversations is that my kids, especially the older one do not sleep as much as other kids. I may need to just accept that I cannot use sleep as reliable child care the way many people can. I have access to full time child care despite not working quite full time (roughly 75% depending on the week) and I no longer feel guilty about using some extra care time for exercise a couple days a week. It would be interesting to tally up my number of child focused hours the way you do in the next post- I suspect it would be high. Unfortunately my driving hours are probably also higher than I want to see in black and white….
I’m a first time new mom and would love to feel like I could exercise before my 7 month old wakes up. I do feel like I would have the time and energy to exercise before he gets up, but with breastfeeding I just feel like it would be way too uncomfortable to do much movement before feeding him. While I realize everyone is different, I’m curious if there has been a particular month mark after having babies that you’ve felt able to exercise (especially run) in the a.m. before feeding? I’m hoping that point is sooner than later for me, but may be resigned to perhaps feeling too full and uncomfortable in the mornings until I’m done breastfeeding.
I never had that problem probably bc I never had babies that slept well overnight while breastfeeding! So I didn’t have 12 hrs of milk production in there … just several. I know everyone is different here! I did use the Juno bras which felt supportive enough. Now it’s a non issue even w the twice daily breastfeeding… just not as much volume of milk.
Thanks for the bra recommendation – I will check that out! I’m going to choose to be grateful for good sleep over being frustrated by lack of morning exercise for now 🙂