Partly it was that I spent a lot of it on the road. I woke up on August 1st in Miami, enjoying a mastermind meet-up with a group of content creators. It was fun to talk shop and get to know people, including finally meeting my friend and fellow productivity writer Chris Bailey in person.

Then it was only one week until we left for the beach. (In between, I picked up my 11-year-old at camp — he had a great time!) My family has gone to one specific beach on the NJ shore for many years, so the place is familiar, but it’s still different from being at home, and so the memories came pretty thick with that too. We took family photos. We ate at a lot of cool restaurants. We tried different ice cream parlors. I took the little guy to the pinball arcade. I did a lot of runs along the boardwalk.

Then my husband took our eldest off to school and I left for Australia! After an epic flight (Dallas to Sydney is 16 hours in the air — I spent an actual percentage of August in the sky…) I enjoyed running around Sydney’s Darling Harbour, seeing the sights (like the Opera House) and visiting a few of the city’s museums. There are just a ton of restaurants there too. I’d make a point of eating in crowded places because it’s easy to fit one person in, and I figure when there’s so much choice, if a place is packed, people must know what they’re doing.

(If anyone is traveling with kids, there is a fantastic looking playground in Darling Harbor — like the equipment looked adventurous enough that I could see my 11-year-old liking it.)

Then it was home. This past weekend was actually pretty active too — I wasn’t suffering too bad from jet lag as I kind of never switched over in Australia. Most nights there I slept from like 8 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.! On Saturday night this weekend I took my two little guys to the Hot Wheels Monster Truck rally. This was so ridiculous and also a ton of fun. The various trucks looked like Hot Wheels (there was a tiger shark, a “Rhinomite” one looking like a rhinoceros with a horn, a “Skelesaurus,” a Big Foot truck, etc.) They jumped over crushed cars, did donuts, and walked on their front wheels in one case. There was also motocross as an interlude. Definitely a good activity for the 6-12 year old male demographic.

Then Sarah came over! She and her youngest daughter visited us on Sunday and we did some recording and hung out while the kids played. It was too short — only a few hours, as it was a quick visit and she was trying to spend time with her parents too — but it was great to see her!

And the month isn’t quite over, as I’m actually taking a short work trip tonight.

(I’ll also be doing a Substack Live with Meagan Francis today if all goes well! That will be at 11:30 a.m. eastern, just follow me — Vanderhacks — over on Substack.)

September will feature a lot more time at home, though I will take one trip to visit some other writer friends. I’m currently planning to see Melissa Etheridge at Longwood Gardens. I’ll run the September Reset Time Tracking Challenge (please sign up here!). I hope to have most of my rough draft of Golden Hours written, and then I’ll incorporate some new findings from the time tracking challenge. My four younger kids will start school. All our activities, including my two choirs, will start up again. It’s been nice to have Mondays and Thursdays off from rehearsals but I haven’t sung in a few months now and I am missing it. Everything has a season.

I’m talking about “Time Management for Thought Leaders” with the Op-Ed project on Sept 22 in the evening (virtually). If you’re interested you can buy a ticket here.

Toward the end of the month I’ll go to a baby shower for my sister-in-law and my little brother (the baby is due in November). My husband and I will take our soon-to-be 17-year-old out for a fancy birthday dinner. It’s going to be a good month and I’m hoping to get into a good routine with the family schedule. We have a lot going on but it’s only four kids not five and one can drive!

I do hope to make it apple picking at some point (Honeycrisps are a September harvest fruit, not later) so we’ll see if I can convince anyone to come with me. I probably need to make a Fall Fun List soon…

In other news: If you enjoy my writing, would you please pick up a copy of Big Time? My newest book is all about practical ways to cultivate a sense of time abundance. I know many of you have picked up a copy, but if you haven’t yet, I promise the book will make you feel like you have more time. And who doesn’t need that? Links to retailers here.

I’d been to Sydney once before in my life. I spent a long weekend there in college when I was a study abroad student at the University of Melbourne. A friend and I took an overnight bus up to Sydney and saw the sights (including seeing a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the opera house). But obviously that was…a while ago.

Sydney is a long way away for a 22-minute speech. My hosts were willing to pay for four nights in a hotel so I wound up tacking on a buffer day before and a day after my responsibilities for the conference. (I guess I could have stayed longer but there is a lot going on at home as well.) There are no direct flights from the east coast (yet – there may be one in late 2027). So on Friday Aug 21 I flew from Philadelphia to Dallas and then left Dallas at 10:55 p.m. central time, arriving in Sydney around 6:30 a.m. on Sunday the 23rd (crossing the international date line). I will admit that connecting flights make me anxious, but there was no way around it. Fortunately, the first leg went fine. We took off a bit late but made up most of the minutes. I made it to QF 8 in plenty of time.

QF 8 is officially listed as a 17-hour flight. It did not take that long — our time in the air was about 15:45. I’m doing a post for my Substack newsletter in a few weeks on how I spent those almost 16 hours in the air. I’m happy to report that I didn’t get to complete filling time mode until the last 4 hours (and really, the last 2 in particular).

But all time passes, including time in the air. I’ve come to see flying as a necessary evil, and given how far some of my recent trips have been (Newark to Hawaii, Newark to Tokyo, Dallas to Sydney) now a sub-4 hour flight feels like almost nothing.

And the reason to fly? The world is a magical place, and it’s amazing that in less than 24 hours you can go from Philadelphia to Sydney. There’s a Dallas flight every night so you could literally decide to go to Sydney on any given day. I will not be doing that but it’s funny to think that you could.

Sydney is a truly gorgeous city. It was a bit surreal riding from the airport (on the left side of the road) and seeing bare trees, but it is winter there. The weather was pretty mild — I think of Sydney as being kind of like Los Angeles for latitude and so it was really early spring. I stayed at the Sofitel Darling Harbour near the convention center and spent a lot of my time exploring that area.

I had no responsibilities my first day (my buffer day) so on Sunday morning after checking into my hotel, I grabbed a shower and got breakfast, got my badge from the conference, and then went exploring. I wound up walking several miles — through town toward the botanical gardens, and then down the path to see the Opera House. The sky really made it all look amazing (see the photo). I then walked all the way back to Darling Harbor and my hotel. I tried to nap but I’d had coffee at breakfast and it wasn’t happening. So I rested for a while and then went back out to the nearby Sea Life Aquarium.

I worried at first that this was a bit of a tourist trap, and the upstairs exhibits weren’t particularly amazing, but then you descend to a full shark tank and see a dugong, so that was cool. You could walk through another tunnel where the most giant ray I have ever seen swam over me. So I enjoyed the place more than I thought I would!

After, I went back to my hotel and did some work. I grabbed a burger from a nearby place (Betty’s Burgers — apparently it’s an Australian institution because people would remark when they saw me with the bag in the hotel elevator). Then I did a bit more work and started crashing at approximately 6:30 p.m. I fell asleep at 7 p.m.

Obviously this was going to be trouble, but with one wake-up I did make it to 3 a.m. I came to like my early jet-lagged mornings in my hotel room. I’d make myself coffee and I got a lot of work done! Then when the sun came up (6:20) I’d go run, then shower and get breakfast.

On Day 2 I had rehearsals, but not until mid-day. So in the morning after a lovely run around the harbor, I decided to go to the Wild Life zoo, which was right next to the aquarium. Again, I wasn’t sure how great this would be but they had wallabies, wombats, a cassowary, crocodiles, koalas, kangaroos, and a wide variety of snakes. So I saw everything that I would have wanted to see. The zoo was almost completely empty on a Monday morning too (unlike the aquarium on Sunday), so I got to just watch the animals for quite a while. When you sit long enough one will inevitably move and it is quite cool for someone used to seeing quadruped animals move their legs in a more galloping fashion to see them hop.

After the zoo trip I had rehearsals for my main stage presentation. The hall where I was speaking was positively cavernous (seating for several thousand) so that was pretty cool. My “handler” did a good job getting me everywhere I needed to be (I find it funny to have a handler/host but it was a huge conference — I could have gotten lost easily). After we finished I saw that the Art Gallery of New South Wales was still open for a bit, so I hopped in an Uber to get there. It’s right by the botanical garden but this was a lot more convenient than walking there!

I don’t know much about Australian artists but I enjoyed seeing some of the names that came up again and again (like Grace Cossington Smith) and getting to know their work. The museum also has an extensive collection of both historic and modern Aboriginal art.

After a happy 90 minutes there I walked past the Opera House again (wading past all the barriers being set up for the Sydney marathon, which is this weekend). I decided to stop for an early dinner at a place on that harbor where you could see the Harbour Bridge. With my fish and chips I ordered a “VB” (Victoria Bitter — you say “Vay-Bay” though I didn’t, because I’m obviously American and that would be weird). This was my drink of choice when I was in college in Melbourne and it was fun to drink it for old time’s sake!

(Though I mentioned ordering this to my handler and some other people and got a laugh — I guess it is more of a college drink, kind of like if I went to a bar as an adult and ordered Milwaukee’s Best. Though trust me it tastes a lot better than Beast.)

I walked back again, this time as it was getting dark. I made it to 8 p.m. before falling asleep. That meant I was up at 3:30 a.m. Progress.

I didn’t have time to run in the morning on my third day (Tuesday) because I had an early call. We went backstage and I got my hair and make-up done. I was on stage for my 22-minute speech — 9:07 to 9:29 — and I’m happy to report I ended 30 seconds under the buzzer. You never want the time management speech to go long! I think it went well. The rest of the day I had various other conference activities like a meet and greet where people could take photos with me and then a reception. I did manage to get to the gym for a 30-minute run in the afternoon.

My last full day — Wednesday — I woke up and went for a longish (3.5 mile) run around the harbor. Then, after breakfast, I went to the Australian National Maritime Museum, which was just a 5-minute walk from the hotel. The exhibits themselves were fine — they had some Viking treasure, and I enjoyed the exhibition on maps. Europeans really had no idea that Australia was there in the early 1600s, but there were more and more hints. For instance a very famous shipwreck and mutiny happened there, and in the course of this some of the survivors mapped some of the coast line. Then by the early 1700s the de Wit map has most of the coast line of Australia and New Zealand charted. These maps are never 100 percent accurate (I collect some old maps myself) yet I still think it’s amazing how accurate they are given that they couldn’t see anything from above.

The real draw of the museum, however, is the ships outside in the harbor. I went on a submarine, a destroyer, and a replica of Captain Cook’s ship. On a Wednesday morning there was almost no one there so I could look at whatever I wanted without feeling rushed (and without getting stuck longer than I wanted to be…I can’t imagine living on a sub — they make me so claustrophobic, though I guess they’re not that different from airplanes…).

After I visited Abbey’s bookstore — an extensive book store not far from Darling Harbour. I spent a lovely hour there just looking at various titles. Then the rest of the day I mostly worked with a little walking around — including getting one more VB from a restaurant on the water. I fell asleep around 8:30 p.m. and slept until 4:30 a.m. — and then it was time to go home, so the fact that I really never switched over so much is what it is!

The trip home was long and…hard. It started fine – the flight from Sydney took off on time and while I knew we were potentially going around storms, it looked like we’d get in more or less on time. I read for a bit and worked for a bit, and then around 5 p.m. Sydney time (5 hours into the 15 hour flight) it just got bumpy. It was not the worst turbulence I’ve been in certainly. But it was just relentless. Like the next 5.5 hours it really never stopped. I watched these Will Smith nature documentaries for a while. Then I tried to sleep (7 p.m.) and I know I went in and out for about 3 hours because some parts went faster. But I was aware of a lot of that time. Finally around 10:30 I really did go to sleep for the next 3 hours or so, using my ear plugs to drown out the loud snoring of the guy next to me (why….). We got to the gate at 1 p.m. central time in Dallas, and my flight to Philly left at 2:26 so it was a little tight for an international connection, but I had Global Entry now, so I breezed through that, and security. I had to connect terminals so that took another 10 minutes, but I made it to my gate by 1:45, which is when the flight would have boarded. Philly was in an air traffic delay pattern though (lots of weather and such) so we were delayed a bit. We did get in the air around 3:15 central, meaning we would land 7 p.m. eastern.

And we did! And then…we sat. First, it was that we had to wait for traffic to clear to get across the runways. Then some other plane was given our gate. Then we didn’t have a gate. I knew we were in trouble when we went off to some far corner of the airport to park — airplane purgatory. You wait there for a while. The pilot had no idea what was going on. “Ops” as he called it was in meltdown mode and not taking his call. We finally pulled into a gate at 9:30 p.m. — 2.5 hours after landing. We sat on the tarmac basically as long as the flight from Dallas.

Needless to say, I was a bit of a wreck at this point coming after 24 hours of travel. I felt so bad for my fellow passengers with connections — a lot of stuff out of Philly was canceled with the storm but there were people trying to make overnight flights to Europe. This was incredibly frustrating for everyone. I made it to my car at 9:50 (walking through the whole airport — I’d parked in the D garage since we were flying into C originally…but the gate we got was on the far end of the A terminal…) and was home at 10:25.

The good news is I did manage to sleep from 11-6, so perhaps I’m right back on east coast schedule! Anyway, recovering and digging out from not being home for 3 weeks today. And enjoying looking at the pictures. Sydney is really lovely — but I actually know I’m most likely going back in 2027 for something else. Not looking forward to the flying but I am looking forward to seeing that part of the world again!

In this week’s episode, Sarah interviews Elisabeth Frost, a long-time friend of Best of Both Worlds and the blogger behind Optimistic Musings. She recently returned from a multi-month adventure in Europe with her two school-aged kids (and husband, who was working remotely). She talks about how they managed the logistics and schooling (they took an entire semester out of regular school) and all they saw. If you’ve ever thought about taking an extended trip with your family, this episode is for you! With the rise of remote work, it is becoming more possible, even if you don’t quit your job. And if pulling your kids out of school isn’t really an option, there are day camps lots of places around the world, so a summer stint somewhere might work.

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

Anyway, it was a good two weeks. We started with family photos. My family was not particularly happy to get into our matching jeans and white shirts and hit the beach with others seeing us. But I think the pictures came out well. Project Christmas Card is well on its way to being done!

We had a couple good meals out. For instance, we hit Toast in nearby Asbury Park, plus Lili’s and Iron Whale on the boardwalk, and Sea Grass in Ocean Grove, plus a place in Pt. Pleasant (about 25 minutes away). We explored a handful of area ice cream parlors, expanding from the normal one. My eldest and I had some good iced oat milk vanilla lattes.

To counter all this eating I did a lot of running on the boardwalk. Never too far (my max was 4.7 miles I think) but frequently enough that I went most days.

There was a lot of beach time. Some beach visits were better than others, of course, but the good news about being there two weeks is that the less awesome visits get taken in stride.

On the activity front: we hit the pinball arcade in Asbury. My little guy spent a lot of time working on his Skee-ball game (current best score 210, he’s hoping to beat that in the future). My husband took the kids to Spiderman and took some of the kids on a fishing trip which was a bit more adventurous than planned when the boat broke down and they had to be picked up by another boat. (Note: he wasn’t captaining! We had rented a boat with a captain for the afternoon.) I took the two kids who enjoy shopping to an outlet mall nearby that had a Hollister, Aerie, J. Crew, an Old Navy and an Uggs. Talk about a win.

I also spent a lot of time just sitting on the porch feeling the ocean breezes. The house we rent has an absolutely spectacular porch. Much as I love my “real” house it does not really have anything like that so my two weeks enjoying that porch are a treat each year.

I was a little emotional leaving (I had to leave two days early for a work commitment) as we start to have the weight of tradition and nostalgia with this place. I remember taking family photos when my little guy was a baby. I remember all the kids being a lot younger in past years — and this year my husband had to leave at another point to take our oldest to his new school (Vanderbilt in Nashville, for those who missed that announcement). Even the little guy is not that little (though still little enough to throw the occasional tantrum…). I hope year to year that we’ll get another year, another summer, though nothing in life is ever guaranteed. So I make sure to treat these beach days as little jewels, special because of their rarity.

Life changes and every back-to-school season is different, but this year we’re continuing with the celebration of new routines, fresh starts and, of course, school supplies. In this week’s episode of BOBW, we share what’s ahead for us this year (with kids ranging from a college sophomore to a first grader) and our challenges and hopes.

In the Q&A we discuss how we might remember to think about something in the future. This is a very useful skill – and not hard once you have a good system!

Please give the episode a listen. You might also consider joining our Patreon community where we’ll be discussing back-to-school season (and meal planning!) in our monthly Zoom meet-up tomorrow, August 19, at noon eastern. These meet-ups are recorded for folks who can’t make it live. Membership is $9/month. Hope to see you there!

Amy Morin, today’s guest on Best of Both Worlds, is the author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, and the new The Mental Strength Playbook. She is a psychotherapist who has also experienced a lot of tragedy herself (including losing her husband when she was 26 years old). She talks about the strategies that helped her and have helped others too.

In the Q&A, Sarah and I talk about ways to help a friend going through a tough time. Please give the episode a listen!

I will be driving up to camp on Saturday to get him. I’m hoping it all went well. I did get to talk to him for 6 minutes last night. I’m pondering some discussion topics to make the drive home be more entertaining.

The 16-year-old has been getting up early this week to drive himself to a camp that is 50 minutes away. All I can say is thank goodness he can drive because I’m not sure how that would have worked in the schedule. He is putting gas in the car on his own!

In another “big kid parenting” category, my daughter has been needing to collect names/contact info to serve as references for a volunteer tutoring gig she is applying for. So this has been a discussion of how to figure out which adults know you and can vouch for you. This is more character reference than job skill reference as 14-year-olds don’t have much work experience. But she has figured it out.

Anyway, I’ll be on a much lighter posting schedule the next few weeks – perhaps doing some BOBW and content posts. Speaking of which…here’s this week’s content!

Over at Before Breakfast I interviewed Ruby Ryba about how to stop scrolling. In the shorter episodes, I talked about why you should “Buy extra tickets” and that “A working vacation beats working on vacation.” Every summer I am reminded that being able to work remotely, and being willing to do a little work while being on vacation, means I can take a lot more time away than if that weren’t the case. I know not all jobs are like that, but many people work differently now than in the past. Remote work doesn’t always have to mean “from home.”

Over at Vanderhacks, my Substack newsletter, I wrote that “You won’t come back to it.” The sad truth is that your future self is not going to have any more energy or time than your current self. So only take on what you know you can realistically do. A project you stop in the middle, like a photo book, could stay in the middle for…a while. Lots of people have emailed me that they needed this one!

(Though, counterpoint: This week I finished a book that I started in 2018, abandoned, and then came back to it. So there is that. Though since I remember nothing of the first 40 percent of the book from 2018…it is possible my husband bought it on my Kindle/Amazon account and he is the one who started reading it and abandoned it…Also, I think Shutterfly has their unlimited pages promo going on if anyone needs an incentive to finish their photo books.)

I also wrote that “After 5 p.m. it’s Friday” — one mindset shift to have more relaxed evenings.

The Best of Both Worlds Patreon community has had several great discussions going this week. We’ve talked about whether it’s possible to take two weeks away (and how people have done this) and also how to get a good vacation split between new places, familiar places, and seeing family (or traveling with family). We also have a thread talking about mom guilt – what people might feel guilty about or not. Screen time comes up more frequently than, say, work.

I’d also love if you’d grab a copy of Big Time. I got a copy for my Kindle the other day to see what people are highlighting. Apparently a lot of folks like the quote in the ringmaster chapter that chaos and complexity are not the same thing. I like that quote too! I’m hoping to have a long career writing books, and part of that is making sure that the current and previous books continue to sell. So thank you for buying the book, and thank you for supporting me and my work.

In the meantime, we’re trying to do family photos this weekend. Wish me luck!

I began this month at a gathering of other content creators/thought leaders, which was really fun. I am always a fan of growing my network and nurturing relationships in what is sometimes a lonely business. Among other things, I met my friend Chris Bailey in person. Chris is a productivity author (The Productivity Project, Hyperfocus, How to Calm Your Mind, Intentional) and he and I have chatted by Zoom probably every other month or so for the last 8 years. But we had never met up in person. Now we have!

So what’s on the agenda for the month? The big thing: Two weeks at the beach. We do this most years, and will be renting the same house at the Jersey shore that we have rented since 2019. We’ve been figuring out what we want to do. There will be reading and downtime and waves and ice cream. I plan to run on the boardwalk and just walk around town (it’s fun to spend a few weeks in a very walkable community). I’ll get iced oat milk lattes with my eldest and maybe go to the pinball arcade. We’re taking family photos and I made a reservation for seven at a restaurant on the board walk. While I love exploring new places it’s also fun to build family traditions going to the same place. Sometimes it’s hard to get the balance of these things right (since vacation time and money aren’t unlimited) but I think this year I’ll hit a good spot. The kids have already been sorting out who gets which bedroom.

Then after that I have an epic work trip planned! More details about that after it happens but suffice to say it meets my goal of giving an interesting speech this year. In the meantime, my husband will be taking our 19-year-old to school. He and I just FedExed his boxes through this program that stores your stuff and brings it to your dorm room. (The upside of this is that they can fly, rather than drive, because he is going somewhere different this year than last year but more on that later too.)

After I return from my trip I’ll likely be recovering a bit but I do have tickets to the Hot Wheels Monster Truck rally in Philadelphia with my two little boys. I’m hoping Sarah (podcast co-host) will be coming to visit after her earlier trip this summer unfortunately couldn’t happen. Her parents live near me so these visits can be a two-fer, so fingers crossed! My husband and 16-year-old are likely doing a diving trip. I will likely end the month in NYC for some professional meetings.

Speaking of work…I’m planning to finish a very very rough draft of Golden Hours. And then I will finalize my survey to get more experiences and quotes and details for the book itself. You can sign up for September Reset Time Tracking Challenge here (which will be running Sept 14-20 — this is an opportunity to track time as part of a group, and contributing data and stories to the book is totally optional, but I hope people will consider it!)

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a fun August read — for the beach or the plane — please consider picking up a copy of Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance (links to various retailers here). I’m really happy with how this book turned out, and I’d love to give it the audience I think it deserves. Thanks for your support!

But I know the topic comes up, and today’s episode of Best of Both Worlds explores the topic. Sarah interviews Dr. Jennifer Reid, a clinical psychologist with an expertise in the areas of guilt and shame. Her book, Guilt Free: Reclaiming Your Life from Unreasonable Expectations, is out now.

In the Q&A, a listener wonders exactly when in the parenting journey you can expect to sleep until you feel like waking up. If it’s any help, I’m mostly there with my youngest being six. Different kids and families are different, of course but the sleep-deprived early years tend not to last forever.

If you enjoy this episode, you might consider joining our Best of Both Worlds Patreon community. Every week, we have 3-4 discussion threads going on topics related to work and life. We also have monthly Zoom meet-ups (our next, on August 19, will be a back-to-school and meal planning extravaganza). Membership is $9/month.

The first few days I was recovering from my Slovenia/Venice trip + jet lag. The first big “landmark” of the month was the various celebrations for July 4th weekend. On the 2nd, my family went to the Longwood Gardens fireworks and fountain show with lots of patriotic music. Then on the 3rd, we had friends over for a pool party and a few fireworks. On the 4th, my husband and I went to watch the France vs. Paraguay World Cup match downtown. The weather was boiling, but this was quite the spectacle, and it was fun to say I’ve now seen part of that competition live. That night we saw the Narberth fireworks, which were not bad for a small municipality! It started storming after that, which broke the heat, thank goodness. On the 7th, my husband and my two older boys and I went to see Sarah McLachlan perform at the Mann. This was something I had wanted to do for a while, and it was a beautiful summer night after the weekend heat had cleared. So a good memory for sure.

The next weekend was consumed by my niece’s wedding celebrations. On Saturday we went to Princeton for a brunch, then drove into NYC to go to the American Museum of Natural History. We saw the dinosaur bones and giant whale, then walked around Central Park (briefly seeing the reservoir). We went to a reception in northern NJ and chatted with various relatives before heading home. Then the next day we went to the actual wedding and reception in northern NJ, which was lovely. Much food! My niece and her husband met through competitive ballroom dancing so it was fun to watch their first dance. It was also fun to watch my little guy dance in his dress shirt, pants, and tie. I think he’s been seeing videos of break dancing or something, because he was spinning on the floor at times.

Then, immediately after that weekend (as in up bright and early Monday!) I took my daughter and my oldest to Boston for a few days. My daughter hung out with her cousins for the week, and my son and I stayed in Boston near Fenway so he could do some shadowing at a nearby hospital. I had fun exploring the city and going out to eat with him. I particularly enjoyed the roof top bar of the hotel. It’s always fun to work in a new place.

We had lost power at the house for a few days in here after some storms – the net result was that we finally threw out (among many other things) the old stored breast milk that had been lingering in the garage freezer (yes, it took me a while to get rid of it…even if no one was going to use it that stash represented a lot of time!)

The next weekend was supposed to be the Summer Ale Fest at the zoo, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I wound up going out to eat twice — one family dinner, one date night dinner. Then I took my two little guys to Ocean Grove for our first beach trip of the summer, followed by watching the end of the World Cup.

The next two weeks were fairly low-key, just normal work and pool time at night. My husband and I went to a Phillies/Yankees game on Friday the 24th and then on Sunday the 26th we took our oldest out for his belated birthday dinner at Friday Saturday Sunday, one of Philadelphia’s three Michelin starred restaurants (we are now looking into eating at the other two — It’s fun to have a project!). We said goodbye to the 11-year-old, who is at sleep away camp now for a while.

I gave a speech on Wednesday the 29th (local, so I drove myself there) and then on Friday I traveled to a work gathering of various creatives/content creators, which was cool. Lots to think about, and lots of nice dinners and chats.

I knocked several annoying tasks off my list, including going to the dentist, getting a mammogram and then getting a follow-up mammogram (good times, but seemingly fine). I got approved for Global Entry (which involved an extra trip to the airport), and getting my volunteer clearances so I can volunteer in the schools.

I went on two bike rides (wish this was more) but spent a lot of time in the pool — I went in 18 times over the course of the month. I’m doing reasonably well with my intention to drink my coffee outside in the mornings.

I’ll do another post looking forward to August, but the key thing for my household is that the month is still completely off school for my younger kids – they don’t go back until Sept 8th. So while I’m seeing a lot of back-to-school content out there (I’ve even been producing some to get ahead of my August content deadlines) I’m not really in that mindset. Well, my oldest is going to school in August, but not the rest. I also plan to take some significant time off in August. Or at least I hope to!

How was your July?