Sunday Update: Reading, Sports, Sleep

While March may not be a great month for me, April is usually better because I have moments of "this might be getting easier".  For instance, right now clothes are drying on the line and not on the upstairs landing

The big kids have been playing together and mostly not fighting for almost 90 minutes

All of us got out for a walk this morning to a historic building and ate hot cross buns near some cannons (as you do)

On the downside, Andy and Lily are both ill now, but since it took Ezra a week to get over this illness I'm not expecting any miraculous recovery from Lily.  Aubrey and Clara may be ill, but they also may just be 1.5 year old toddlers with all the associated toddler feelings.

Reading

I was really enjoying How To End A Love Story but... it's rather R rated.  I've realized I enjoy reading "curtain romance" more - where the naught bits are the literary equivalent of panning to the curtains in a film would be.  This is... not that.  However I listened to the recent Ezra Klein interview with Jonathan Haidt and now I am keen to read The Anxious Generation and The Righteous Mind - both on hold at the local library.

Sports

• Monday
• 30 Minute Upper Body with Ben Alldis
• 10 Minute Focus Flow for Riders with Denis Morton
• 10 Minute Full Body Stretch witH Ben Alldis
  
  
• Tuesday
• 30 Minute Legs and Core with Ben Alldis
• 10 Minute Full Body Stretch with Ben Alldis
• 1 hour run with run buddy (4.7 miles, 600 ft up and down)
• 10 Minute Focus Flow for runners with Denis Morton
• 10 Minute full body stretch with Ben Alldis
  
  
• Wednesday
• 1 hour trail run with ladies run club (4 miles)
• 10 minute full body stretch with Ben Alldis
  
  
• Thursday
• 30 Minute Taylor Swift Midnights Ride with Ally Love
• 10 Minute Focus Flow Hips with Denis Morton
• 10 Minute evening stretch with Matty Maggiacomo
  
  
• Saturday
• Local parkrun 5k (32 minutes, pushing the double pram for the first third)
  
  
• Sunday
• 20 minute Pop ride with Hannah Frankson

Unfortunately because the aforementioned kid and husband generic illnesses I didn't get my midday Pelotoning in this weekend.  It also feels a bit silly to be on a stationary bike for 30 minutes when I could be doing outside sport, but also I can't be doing outside sport because I'm nominally watching sleeping toddlers.  Ezra and Lily (6 & 4) are not quite old enough for me to start a peloton ride while I am responsible for watching them.  It's nice to write this review because I felt like I hadn't done any sport this week when actually I haven't done much of sport in the last three days of this week.

Sleep

This time change has been great for sleep.  Somehow all the kids are sleeping somewhat reliably until at least 6:30.  I haven't woken up to the sound of crying with a 5 earlier on the clock in... weeks.  It's great.  I'm fairly sure I slept in to 7am once this week.  Overall my average is 7.75 for the week, including a night where I had to settle a poorly Lily from 10-12pm (although I got an hour of that back when we both took a nap the following day)

At nursery drop off on Friday it was "Happiness Day" where the kids could wear something that made them happy.  Andy and I remember to let Lily pick a happiness day outfit, which was apparently a goldilocks dress:

A mom showed up with her daughter and said "oh dear, is it non uniform day?" and another person said something about happiness day and I joked that I was about 1 for 10 in remembering different non uniform days.  A dad in the queue volunteered that he "doesn't keep track of any of it, that's mums job!" and I really wanted to say "yeah we employ a nanny to manage all of this for us" because if he can brag about his immense logistical privilege of offloading the school mental load onto his wife then why should I feel bad about offloading mental load onto a paid employee? But I did not say this.

I also realized that sleep is really the only thing that allows us to do this school thing.  We could not figure out the theme days days, clothes days, happiness day, odd sock days last year.  Because we had newborn twins. No wonder we couldn't remember anything.  It wasn't a systems problem (What if we wrote it in our calendar?) or a "go in the right order" problem (what if we packed lunches the night before?) or a reminders problem (what if we put sticky notes on our door for things that are happening the next day?).  It was impossible to do these things because it was impossible to do these things with twin babies.  Now that we have toddler babies and get enough sleep it is possible to remember days and pack lunches.  There's no planning or life system that replaces sleep.