An effort to tie up some loose ends blowing in the wind . . .
Evening Activities – Current vs Future + Plans
This year, we had a few late-ish activities. C’s soccer ended at 7:15 two nights per week and A’s jazz class ended at 8. Josh definitely does the lion’s share of the later driving. Our nanny does a lot, too. I don’t do zero, but I probably do the least. Last year on a typical Monday (when C had soccer):
- I had a clinical day, and would pick the girls up from ballet which ended at 6
- Our nanny would drive C to soccer at 5:30 (having dropped girls at ballet at 5)
- Josh would meet our nanny at soccer at some point over the course of the practice which ended at 7:15
On occasion, he’d be there for most of it and get to run by the field. Frequently, he’d get there close to the end (our nanny would then drive home from the field which is on the way to her house). Maybe 25% of the time, he would not be able to make it and our nanny would bring C home. I almost NEVER did late soccer driving. I did do some late (8 pm) dance pickups, either with Josh at home or with our nanny waiting with the other kids.
Thus, we are not new to having a rather full evening with some driving and taking turns. I’m more worried about next year because it’s shifted significantly later and the kids (and me) need to get to bed in a reasonable time frame; we’ll be leaving for school around 7:25 and that’s a bit earlier than we are used to currently. I’m sure our nanny would stay late some nights, but I am not expecting that to be feasible 5 days per week.
CAN a person go from an activity pickup to REM cycles in ~60 minutes? That is what I am hoping. And kind of counting on.
(Why does someone have to stay at soccer? It’s a very fair question! The field is about 15 min away and, this being South Florida, there are frequent lightning alarms especially August – Nov. Someone kind of needs to be there to grab the kids when these go off. This is why I am going to work on getting a solid carpool going this year! If not for the lightning issue it would be fine to do drop off / pickup though that is 30 min of extra driving which is . . . kind of significant. Dance is always drop off / pickup and gymnastics is for A and probably could be for G as well, though I can usually get good work done in their waiting rooms so I often stay for her classes since they are not that long. Both dance and gymnastics are within a 10 min drive from our house so that is great.)
Anyway, we will figure it out. 100% plan on playing with the Ideal Week template to see how the puzzle pieces fit — including thinking about things like dinner, time for homework, etc. I suspect Josh will continue to do most of the soccer driving and that the carpool will be really helpful. In some ways, it’s actually BETTER because he is more likely to be done with work on time to be there (and could even use that time to go for a run nearby, so everyone wins). BUT just having the ‘active kid’ period end so late is going to change our household rhythms a bit. I know G would be a mess if she went to be after 9 every night, so we will have to work to avoid that!
YOU GUYS, no Reddit for 1 month and 2 days now! Kae reminded me that it was my 1 month anniversary and I had FORGOTTEN!!! I consider that a huge success — not only was I off of the site but I had stopped thinking about it almost entirely.
I *do* feel better without this in my life. SO, yay.
(I am in no way saying Reddit is inherently bad for everyone. Just that it is for me, personally!)
KID FREE NIGHT
We had a kid free night last night! Our nanny took G for a sleepover, and the other two are at camp, so it was nice (and also weird) to be home with no kids!!! When that happens I always start wondering what the empty nest phase will be like. Fortunately it’s ~12 years away for us so I don’t have to figure things out TOO soon, haha.
(That said, I was reading Sarah’s post about her oldest going to college and thinking “well, at least that’s far away for me” and then I was like “wait, it’s actually just 6 years away omg WAIT WHAT.”)
I mean I knew in the abstract that A has 6 years left before (most likely) college but I guess I never really processed that. A reminder to make the most of this time.
20 Comments
Oof, I always want to be off parenting duty and reading my book by 815 latest. But I love how supportive you are of all your kid’s endeavours. Maybe some strategic lunch and breakfast prep, so there’s more time for sleep.
I’ve terribly got a countdown until T is at uni, because I really want to move once he’s no longer in school. So the 11 more years of village life countdown helps keep me sane 🙂
I’m glad Josh can handle a lot of the later night driving. My husband stays up later and wakes up later than me and also seems to have slightly lower sleep needs. But I get up on the weekends with the kids and let him sleep in so it kind of all balances out (by sleep in I mean 7:30 so he’s not like sleeping until 9-10!!). As our kids stay up later and have lower sleep needs, he will be the primary night time parent. I don’t see our kids having a lot of activities though as so far they do not seem athletically inclined, but they are still young. But since 1/2 their genes come from me I feel it is unlikely that they will be in club sports and will instead be in chess club or something to that effect! Time will tell. In MN I know practices can run quite late if your child is in hockey but we are a hard no on that sport (no judgment for other hockey families, it’s just not a sport we care about or have a history of playing).
We will have a kid free week at the end of August and I am looking forward to it! My parents will keep our boys at their lake home for the week after our week long vacation at their lake home. I wasn’t sure if they would be up for that but my mom figured they might be easier to watch if they had each other to play with. I’ve been traveling so much (on a flight back from Tampa right now, this is trip 2 or 3 for July) so am looking forward to being able to reconnect with my husband. We feel like ships passing in the night at times so 5 full days without kids sounds very exciting for us.
We are set to have our first (maybe ever) solo week at HOME without kids. We’ve done some trips together and left them home with grandparents, but this is the first time both kids will be away at overnight camp the same week. I am EXCITED.
University still feels a long way off for us, but our daughter only has one more year in middle school which is…wow.
Congrats on the Reddit streak!
Well, our “empty nest phase” is only three years away, and ack- I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it. I’m hoping that by the time it arrives, it will feel like the next normal progression and not be too traumatic.
It sounds like once you get in the groove of the new routine, it will work. Active- REM sleep in 60 minutes seems feasible!
I have come to the conclusion that there’s no good time for after school kid practices! Last year, my son (then 7, now 8) had soccer practice that started at 5pm, which was SO HARD to get to. His bus doesn’t even drop him off until 4:15, then it was a mad dash to get changed and have a snack and drive the ~20 minutes to get him there (plus the added stress of workdays being cut short). The upside is that we were home by 6:35pm. This year, I think some practices are at 5-6:15 and others are 6:30-7:45 so the later time means no mad dash to get there but creates the bedtime problem that you have! Plus I’ve noticed that this year’s coach ends official practice on time, but then often keeps the kids another 10-15 mins to chat. Which is FINE (in principle) but it pushes everything later and we’ve got a 5 year old that I’m also trying to get to bed!
Maybe the ideal time is 5:30-7pm and I should pick a sport or activity that practices precisely in this timeframe =)
I avoided 4pm dance classes for that reason! Last year we had one and it was too close to the end of school.
5:30-7 is ideal I guess ONLY if you have someone else making dinner… I often find that a 5:30 start time means leaving my house by ~5:10 p.m., if it’s a “close” 10-15 min away practice. Which means if I’m working until close to 5, then I’m obviously not home to start making dinner, OR I will sometimes try to get it started, only to not manage to finish and then have to rush out the door with a half made dinner… gah…. But if I wait to get home from drop off to even start cooking, then some days it can get too late by time all is said and done, or I would have to go in another direction with other child for a different staggered practice….
All to say, I don’t think there is an ideal time if the same one parent is working, cooking, and driving. 🙂 (🙋♀️)
💯 It’s so hard with the after school activities! We just wrapped up an extended baseball season since my older son was part of the All-Star team. We were grateful for the opportunity, but it was a huge commitment! Like, 3 hour practices every day and another 1-2 hours of practice even on game days, several social events, and then travel to the state tournament. It really forced me to rely on carpooling a lot more and I will be planning on doing more carpooling in the fall, as well. It was seriously a win-win because I was happy to return the favor when I could! The kids enjoyed the extra hang time with their friends, too.
I’m going to have problems at the start of the day. My 16yr is doing rowing, so for the next 10 weeks he will have rowing on river at 6.45am two mornings each week. Then for the last 10 weeks of school it will be 4 mornings with a 5.45am start! Hopefully he gets his restricted car license in November (I’m based in NZ)
Oh wow! Very much hope he gets the license. Or that the area around the river is good for running, if that applies to you!!
I’ve still got little – littles (big one is 4 and little one, 20 months), and the post-bedtime is so critical to my mental health. I currently get from around 8-9 to myself and it’s wonderful. I know as the kids get older, they’ll be staying up with me and our bedtimes will be more aligned, and I struggle with that a little! But all of the activity sounds both fun and hard!
This topic gives me so much anxiety and makes me feel like a bad parent. Dyl is really good at school and is two grades ahead with math, and she seems to really like it! But activities and sports I basically have to force her. We take her to dog agility which she likes, but she won’t practice unless we nag her. She likes horseback riding, but has told us she won’t compete, and thus I am not willing to shell out 40k per year for a horse and a babysitter to drive her there for her to ride her pony off into the sunset (to say nothing about the risk of c-spine injury). She tolerates cross country because her friends do it but doesn’t want to do meets. I kind of get it because WHAT IS THE POINT? There are 12yo running 5:30 mile pace like wtf I wouldn’t want to compete with that either! She thinks the robotics kids are weird and refuses to do that and also they have practice on Saturdays at 9 which she doesn’t want to do (eye roll – maybe I should just make her). Also with my and my husband’s schedule we are restricted to in-school activities – I would make an exception and hire a sitter if she showed interest in something… but she never does so… We can do dog agility competitions, but only if I arrange everything and I gotta be honest – the trials are all day long (like 8am-7pm) Friday through Sunday and if you want the dog to get a title you have to go every week. No effing way. She likes the idea of getting a job when she’s 14 but while I don’t dispute the utility of having her scoop ice cream for a summer so that she learns to accept verbal abuse from customers I really hope she figures out something a bit more interesting than that. Anyway… it feels sometimes like I ruined her life because I didn’t force her to specialize in some idiotic sport at a young age and that she’s never going to get into college as a result.
Oh yes, she won’t compete at math either because she hates looking stupid in front of people and the other academically inclined kids in her grade are assholes who absolutely would make fun of her if she got a question wrong – all future doctors lol. I knew someone would suggest that so I had to head this off as well.
So anyway, reading about all of this really stresses me out and this is why. Fun.
Forgot to mention my husband and I both work ft (me: academic medicine on tenure track trying to get grants, him: pharma 7-6 most days plus travel – he has the easier schedule and swims every morning from 5-630. I am just trying to take care of myself so that I can survive my job. We have no family help. I could hire someone to drive her… but if I’m going to do that it had better be worth it. Also I like our evening family time and we all need to go to bed at 8:30… so that’s a problem too.)
The super specialization is tough. Neither A or C are in high levels of the sports they do, btw. Really both are on the lowest levels that still compete, if that makes sense. Neither started early enough really either! D may find her thing this year even. Maybe it will be horse competitions, maybe math, maybe something totally different. I think its great that each of my big kids has a “thing” right now but I also know they may change things drastically year to year. Gymnastics is so time consuming I imagine it has a high quit rate. Also it sounds like D is doing awesome academically. Which is not a minor thing. No one in our house is doing super accelerated academics.
Well, it won’t be horse because between random required school events that pop up at the last minute every other week, our work schedule and other activities, and the instructor cancelling half her lessons at the last minute, I finally made the executive decision of no more riding because we just can’t. Dylan has explicitly said she doesn’t want to go more than once per week, and no instructor is going to give a crap about lessons for her unless we lease a horse and come at least 3-4 times per week. And no we cannot find another barn – do you know how hard it is to get horse people to respond to phone calls/emails as a new client setting up a lesson? They are even worse than dog people.
But yeah, she is doing great academically. It’s been really cool to see her take initiative and learn how to study and learn on her own even though her teachers literally do not care one bit about her or any of their other students.
SESB I’m wondering why it costs $40000 to go horse riding or own a horse??!?! And why do you have to compete? Like why? I own horses and it doesn’t cost me that much and I also don’t compete. I enjoy spending time with them and I ride 3 times a week plus I’m training one of them to be ridden. I’m in Australia and here not everything is a competition. Horses are kept in paddocks all year round. If you want to have a riding lesson here you call up and make an appointment and have a lesson or a trail ride. It’s $60!!! Why in America is horse riding only available to the wealthy?
Where we live a weekly lesson is $70ish for a 30 min group lesson but owning a horse much more expensive. I thinks she was also including childcare/driver costs, too. Horseback riding is a very pricey activity compared to many though!!
So, if we leased a horse so that my daughter could ride seriously (i.e. more than one time per week), it would cost about $800 per month to board it, plus lessons ($70 or so once per week). Then there are vet bills (a few thousand per year), farrier ($200 every 4-6 weeks), and the cost of tack and other equipment. If you compete, there are registration fees. Also, you need to trailer your horse to the competition which also costs $. Many people purchase a new vehicle and horse trailer to do this so that they have the freedom to go to competitions independently (I have not included this cost in my figure). I would also have to pay childcare to take her to the barn. Let’s say I pay for this 3 days per week, for 3 hours each time, I estimate that would end up being about $100 per day since it is difficult to find someone willing to do short term hours for less than $25-$30 per hour (plus taxes). *Technically* the childcare alone would be over 15K, but I rounded down. You can totally mess around with weekly lessons… which is way cheaper. But you will not be able to improve at the same rate or compete seriously. And over time the trainer has lost interest in us because we are not willing to take the next step.
So, that’s why.
SESB – I think you need to embrace the mindset of “good for you, not for me.” There is no one right path for activities for kids IMO. Mine are so young right now that it’s too early for me to say we will never do X or Y, but similar to you, we are not set up with family help, a nanny, or schedule flexibility that would allow us to have our kids participate in activities with really aggressive schedules. I grew up in a rural area so club sports were not a thing. Kids only did school-based sports which had pretty reasonable schedules. My goal is to expose our kids to a lot of things and demonstrate the importance of living a healthy, active life. My husband and I are both casual runners so they see mom and dad exercising and I am careful to say “mommy gets to go for a run” rather than making it seem like an obligation.
But I wouldn’t have a doomsday outlook on your daughter’s chances of getting into college just because she’s not in X activities. I honestly loathed the time spent in athletic activities. I had no natural ability and no one to work with me on those skills because my parents were very busy and had 5 kids. So particicating in sports was actually negative for my self esteem because I was just so terrible (the only basket I made in my life was for the OTHER TEAM!). To be clear, I was very busy in high school but I was busy with piano lessons, speech, drama, music, etc and I was the statistician for the girls/boys basketball teams and the football team. So I was very involved and busy, but not in a stereotypical way.
This all sounds so familiar, from growing up in a larger family in a rural area, to taking a very relaxed approach to kids’ activities, to making sure they see their parents doing things other than managing a household, too.
Sports absolutely ruined my self-esteem as a kid because I was so incredibly average, and the better athletes had no patience for that. I was much happier when I could be involved with school activities that had nothing to do with my athletic abilities, or lack thereof. Possibly due to my own experiences (and my kids’ lack of interest in doing anything at a serious level), our sports involvement has never progressed beyond the YMCA leagues. And thank god, it honestly sounds miserable for family life.
Other families, however, thrive under that schedule and truly seem to love it. It really is a “good for her/not for me” situation.
That said, I now have a high schooler who is still too young to drive. Getting him to and from extracurriculars has become a whole deal. Especially because some of his musical ensembles continue meeting in the summer and we both work full-time in the opposite direction of his school. At least it’s temporary, and I’m happy to have him involved in school activities.