I don't normally post "big" posts on the weekends, but I've spent a lot of time at my desk this weekend, watching work emails. We're were finishing up a big project, and my role at this point was largely to watch, answer questions, and standby to jump in if necessary. Anyway, this gave me the time to write up some thoughts that have been nagging at me recently. Fair warning- this is a ridiculously introspective post. If that's going to bother you, click away now! But it helped to write this all down, and since I've shown time and again that I absolutely cannot predict which posts will strike a chord with someone out there... here it is.
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I've been struggling with a lack of motivation at work lately. I have had a hard time figuring out why. I like my colleagues, and I'm well-respected at this job. I'm doing work that I'm good at, and that most of the people I work with value. I've got a great team working for me, and the people I have to collaborate with are mostly easy to work with, albeit with some quirks (but we all have those).
So what's my deal? Why am I daydreaming about finding some other way to make a living?
I figured out the answer while I was out for a lunchtime walk. I use my walks as a time to think. I like to set myself thinking about a hard problem I'm trying to solve at the start, and it is sort of magical how I often have a solution by the end of my walk, even though I don't force myself to think about only that topic. I let my mind wander where it wants to go.
Anyway, on this particular walk, I couldn't come up with a problem to think about. And I realized that lately, I haven't been thinking about work problems on my walks. I've been thinking about posts I want to write, or process optimizations we need at home, or a parenting conundrum, or... anything but work. I thought about that a bit more, and decided that isn't because I'm shirking any work. It is because I don't have any hard problems to solve right now, and haven't had any for at least a month.
I'm busy at work. There is lot that I need to do, and some of that is not trivial. It draws on my experience and on things I have figured out in the past. But none of it is hard for me. The only challenge is one of prioritization, and I solved the general form of that problem a long time ago- these days it is mostly a question of applying that solution to the specifics at hand.
Some people might be happy to find their work life so ordered. But I am bored. I spent some money on some career counseling several years ago, and one of the exercises I did was to determine what my "work values" are- i.e., what things I want in a job. One of my top values was that I want to be working on hard problems.
And I'm not.
And worse... I realized, as I thought more about this on that walk, that I haven't been working on hard problems for a long time. Or at least, the majority of my job has not involved hard problems for a long time.
This may sound strange, since my team just successfully completed a major, high profile project on time. That certainly required a lot of hard work, from me and everyone on my team. But my part of that work wasn't intellectually challenging. Once we worked out the schedule, my contributions were in communications (within the team and outside the team), task tracking, deciding when we needed to make a compromise on what we were trying to accomplish in order to ensure we could complete the project on time, and keeping other people from bothering my team. In short, I was the project manager. And none of those things are an intellectual challenge for me anymore.
One I realized this, I understood why I keep getting restless in my jobs. The intellectually hard part of what I do is figuring out how to get things done in a new environment. Once I've done that, then the execution isn't an intellectual challenge- although it can be a challenge for other reasons. Based on my recent record of employment satisfaction, I'd say that it takes me roughly 6-9 months to figure out how to get things done at a company. Then I get 3-6 months of happily accomplishing things. And then I get bored.
So now that I've figured this out, the question is what to do about it.
I could stay in my current line of work (which pays well, after all) and just devote more of my time and attention to my hobbies- like writing. Perhaps I could tackle some bigger writing projects in addition to writing this blog. The problem is that I can't really cut back on my work hours, and I don't want to cut back on the time I spend with my family, so that would mean squeezing in more time for hobby work around the margins. I'm not sure this would work well.
I could talk to my boss and tell him I'm bored, and see if we can come up with any changes to my job that would fix the problem. Unfortunately, I know full well that the reason I was hired was because I am good at managing projects and getting things done- so it seems unlikely that I'll be able to stop doing the work I'm doing now. And I don't really want more work. I want different work.
I could stay in my current line of work, but change things up to try to get more intellectual challenge. I could go out on my own as a consultant (which is financially risky, so would require some lead time and preparation) or I could try to find a "bigger" job in my current field. I wonder if this would just be a short term fix, though.
Or I could try to find a new line of work. I lean towards doing this, but that opens up another huge area of introspection. I've done well in my current career- it seems like pushing my luck to toss it all in for a new career, and if I do, it seems unlikely that I'll get yet another chance if my second choice goes poorly. So it seems that I should make that second choice carefully.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about what I might want to do. About 18 months ago, I was unhappy in my job (it was a different job), and thinking that I needed a "life reorg". I even wrote a series of posts about it. My post about my "core competencies" is particularly relevant here. I had identified "organizing information" and "getting things done" as my core competencies. In fact, I think those collapse down to one: organizing things. Unfortunately for me, what makes me happy is organizing information, but what I've found people to pay me to do is organizing people and projects.
So I've got a lot to think about. How to get back to doing something that I really enjoy for work? (Note that I don't hate my current work, I'm just a bit bored by it.) Could I find a way to get paid to lose myself in masses of information and organize it? How to fit all of this in with my larger ambitions? I don't know the answers to any of these questions yet. I guess I know what I'll be thinking about during my lunchtime walks for awhile!
Feel free to give me advice in the comments. What would you do in my shoes? As always, I may or may not actually take any of the advice I get, but I enjoy reading other people's perspectives.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Friday, March 30, 2012
Weekend Reading: The Kids Are Cute Edition
We're midway through the final weekend of one of the big, high profile projects I mentioned in my post about "big careers" and work-life balance (a.k.a. "the mental load post"). We're bringing it in on time, too. I don't have many hands on tasks this weekend, but I am on call if there are issues, and I need to monitor my email. And it has been a grueling week. So let's have some lightweight weekend reading links, all about cute kids.
First, Mommyshorts has had a couple of really funny posts about the words toddlers mispronounce.
Then, Parisienne Mais Presque writes about house hunting with a preschooler.
And finally, my husband found this video that I'll be sure to think of next time I'm complaining about how Petunia climbs on the things:
Happy weekend, everyone!
First, Mommyshorts has had a couple of really funny posts about the words toddlers mispronounce.
Then, Parisienne Mais Presque writes about house hunting with a preschooler.
And finally, my husband found this video that I'll be sure to think of next time I'm complaining about how Petunia climbs on the things:
Happy weekend, everyone!
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Unexpected Benefit of Day Care
When I went back to work after my first baby was born, I- like most working parents- worried a bit about what I'd miss while my baby was in someone else's care. I figured that was just the trade off I'd have to make so that I could keep working.
I never thought I'd end up thinking that missing something was a good thing... but I do.
Petunia was looking at a book of shapes. She saw the diamond, and said "dimen" and made a diamond shape with her fingers. Then she saw the heart, and patted her chest and said "ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM." I was surprised- in a wonderful way. I had never taught her those things, and neither had my husband. She learned them from day care. It was such a cool thing to be completely surprised by something she had learned, like getting a surprise gift from someone.
Petunia does a lot of cute things right now. She's at that age. She calls band-aids "nay-nays" and insists I put one on if I get a scratch on my arm- after she's noted Mommy's owie, and kissed it better, of course. And she's learning a lot of things, too. She's almost got her alphabet down, and she's getting much better at jigsaw puzzles. But few of these are surprising. I've been helping her practice her alphabet, and I do the jigsaw puzzles with her. I kiss her owies better, so it is no big surprise that she wants to kiss mine better. Her telling me that her heart goes "ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM" was a complete surprise, and that made it even more delightful. Thinking back, I remember having a similar reaction when Pumpkin first sang us "I'm a Little Teapot," complete with actions, back when she was about two. I knew the song, of course, but had never tried to teach it to her. Her day care teacher, on the other hand, had an entire lesson plan built around nursery rhymes.
I missed watching my kids learn these things, but in return I got the happy surprise when they showed me their new skills. I know that I'll be having more and more of these moments as my kids start school, but for some reason I never thought about how fun they would be. I expected to miss my kids during the day- and I do. I didn't expect to also find myself happy to think about my kids off at day care during the day, learning things without me. But I do.
I never thought I'd end up thinking that missing something was a good thing... but I do.
Petunia was looking at a book of shapes. She saw the diamond, and said "dimen" and made a diamond shape with her fingers. Then she saw the heart, and patted her chest and said "ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM." I was surprised- in a wonderful way. I had never taught her those things, and neither had my husband. She learned them from day care. It was such a cool thing to be completely surprised by something she had learned, like getting a surprise gift from someone.
Petunia does a lot of cute things right now. She's at that age. She calls band-aids "nay-nays" and insists I put one on if I get a scratch on my arm- after she's noted Mommy's owie, and kissed it better, of course. And she's learning a lot of things, too. She's almost got her alphabet down, and she's getting much better at jigsaw puzzles. But few of these are surprising. I've been helping her practice her alphabet, and I do the jigsaw puzzles with her. I kiss her owies better, so it is no big surprise that she wants to kiss mine better. Her telling me that her heart goes "ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM" was a complete surprise, and that made it even more delightful. Thinking back, I remember having a similar reaction when Pumpkin first sang us "I'm a Little Teapot," complete with actions, back when she was about two. I knew the song, of course, but had never tried to teach it to her. Her day care teacher, on the other hand, had an entire lesson plan built around nursery rhymes.
I missed watching my kids learn these things, but in return I got the happy surprise when they showed me their new skills. I know that I'll be having more and more of these moments as my kids start school, but for some reason I never thought about how fun they would be. I expected to miss my kids during the day- and I do. I didn't expect to also find myself happy to think about my kids off at day care during the day, learning things without me. But I do.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The Limits of Imagination
Last week, I came across a comment that seemed to imply that women who balance motherhood and careers, and have "utterly crazy lives, scheduled to the hilt" are (1) not really happy, and if they write a post saying that they are happy, they are just trying to convince themselves that they are happy, and (2) that they aren't enjoying their kids, because they would need to take time off from work to do that.
My first instinct was to write a comment in reply saying how strongly I disagree with that implication. I was busy and had a fair amount of schedule in my life before I had kids- that's just the type of person I am. I am definitely busier now, but my pre-kid life was not some sort of schedule-free nirvana. In fact, "schedule-free" and "nirvana" don't really go together in my book.
I am also enjoying my kids very much, thank you. I love watching Petunia when she decides she'll put her PJ bottoms on by herself, or when she decides she needs to give her sister another good night kiss, and directs me to wait in her room while she goes and does that. I love how Pumpkin and Petunia both want to help me weed our front garden, even though they are completely ineffectual at it. I love listening to Pumpkin explain things to Petunia. I love listening to Pumpkin read. I could go on and on, but the point is just this: the idea that I am somehow missing out on the everyday joys of having children- that I am not in fact enjoying this journey- is completely wrong.
If my blog posts say that I am happy, then I am actually happy. I do not need to convince anyone else of that, and I certainly don't need to convince myself of that. If I am not happy, and I feel like writing about the reasons, then I will do so. One of the reasons I blog, after all, is to help me figure things out. You can believe that I am truly enjoying the journey, or think that it is just the corny subtitle to my blog. I don't care. I know the truth.
But then I decided (based in part on the rest of the comment, in which the writer says she does not yet have kids but will take time off to enjoy them when she does) that this comment wasn't about me.
Oh, it was perhaps written with my post on how I "have it all" in mind- she was commenting on a post that referenced FeMOMhist's blog carnival. But even if she was responding directly to my post, her comment wasn't about me, because she doesn't know me.
The comment was, in my opinion, about the person who wrote it, and the limits of her imagination. She imagines life with kids and a career, and can't see how she would enjoy that. But she can't stretch her imagination enough to see how someone else may in fact enjoy that life. So she projects what she thinks onto the rest of us- which would be no big deal if it didn't feed into the ongoing cultural angst about mothers and work.
But to be fair, imagining how someone else feels can be hard, particularly when that other person is living a life you do not live and cannot even imagine yourself living. I run into the limits of my imagination quite a bit, too. I frequently come across blog posts or comments from women my age or younger who are deeply unsatisfied with their work-life balance, often because their partner is not doing much (if any) of the parenting, or because their partner does not support them in their career. These are not the occasional "gosh this sucks" sort of thing (which I suspect we could all write), but posts and comments that make it clear that the author is really, really unhappy with how her life is playing out. These are also not generally comments and posts from women with no options- they usually also make it clear that they have education and either have or had a career.
I honestly cannot imagine the reasons why those women let their lives be that way. Was it a big surprise when their partners turned out not to view them as equals? Why do they tolerate such inequality at home?
And I know that these thoughts are unfair, because there is a larger culture at work as well, feeding into the expectations of both the women and their partners about what their home and work lives will be. Kids change everything, and I suppose that it can be hard to tell how your partner will react to parenthood. Heck, I was surprised in some ways by how I reacted to parenthood! But still, I cannot imagine living my life in that way. If I were that completely unhappy with how things were, I'd have to change something.
I don't comment on those posts, or reply to those comments, because I know that my answer of "well, if you don't like the way things are change something" would be neither welcome nor helpful. In fact, I am not sure why I keep reading them. Perhaps I am looking for the one that can stretch the limits of my imagination a bit farther, because I'd rather not project what I think onto other people, either, and I suspect that understanding why these women put up with the crap their partners dish out would help me understand why my culture is so unsettled by happy working mothers.
---------------------------------------------
I think I'll just apologize in advance to all of the people this post will offend. The usual caveats apply. If the anonymous commenter wants to take some time off to have kids and that is what makes her happiest- hooray for her. I just want her to recognize that maybe the people who have made different decisions also did so because that makes them happiest. And if you are in the group of women who are deeply unhappy with your work-life balance- I truly am sorry and wish you could be happier. I just don't understand why you don't make some changes to increase your happiness. Feel free to try to explain it to me in the comments.
My first instinct was to write a comment in reply saying how strongly I disagree with that implication. I was busy and had a fair amount of schedule in my life before I had kids- that's just the type of person I am. I am definitely busier now, but my pre-kid life was not some sort of schedule-free nirvana. In fact, "schedule-free" and "nirvana" don't really go together in my book.
I am also enjoying my kids very much, thank you. I love watching Petunia when she decides she'll put her PJ bottoms on by herself, or when she decides she needs to give her sister another good night kiss, and directs me to wait in her room while she goes and does that. I love how Pumpkin and Petunia both want to help me weed our front garden, even though they are completely ineffectual at it. I love listening to Pumpkin explain things to Petunia. I love listening to Pumpkin read. I could go on and on, but the point is just this: the idea that I am somehow missing out on the everyday joys of having children- that I am not in fact enjoying this journey- is completely wrong.
If my blog posts say that I am happy, then I am actually happy. I do not need to convince anyone else of that, and I certainly don't need to convince myself of that. If I am not happy, and I feel like writing about the reasons, then I will do so. One of the reasons I blog, after all, is to help me figure things out. You can believe that I am truly enjoying the journey, or think that it is just the corny subtitle to my blog. I don't care. I know the truth.
But then I decided (based in part on the rest of the comment, in which the writer says she does not yet have kids but will take time off to enjoy them when she does) that this comment wasn't about me.
Oh, it was perhaps written with my post on how I "have it all" in mind- she was commenting on a post that referenced FeMOMhist's blog carnival. But even if she was responding directly to my post, her comment wasn't about me, because she doesn't know me.
The comment was, in my opinion, about the person who wrote it, and the limits of her imagination. She imagines life with kids and a career, and can't see how she would enjoy that. But she can't stretch her imagination enough to see how someone else may in fact enjoy that life. So she projects what she thinks onto the rest of us- which would be no big deal if it didn't feed into the ongoing cultural angst about mothers and work.
But to be fair, imagining how someone else feels can be hard, particularly when that other person is living a life you do not live and cannot even imagine yourself living. I run into the limits of my imagination quite a bit, too. I frequently come across blog posts or comments from women my age or younger who are deeply unsatisfied with their work-life balance, often because their partner is not doing much (if any) of the parenting, or because their partner does not support them in their career. These are not the occasional "gosh this sucks" sort of thing (which I suspect we could all write), but posts and comments that make it clear that the author is really, really unhappy with how her life is playing out. These are also not generally comments and posts from women with no options- they usually also make it clear that they have education and either have or had a career.
I honestly cannot imagine the reasons why those women let their lives be that way. Was it a big surprise when their partners turned out not to view them as equals? Why do they tolerate such inequality at home?
And I know that these thoughts are unfair, because there is a larger culture at work as well, feeding into the expectations of both the women and their partners about what their home and work lives will be. Kids change everything, and I suppose that it can be hard to tell how your partner will react to parenthood. Heck, I was surprised in some ways by how I reacted to parenthood! But still, I cannot imagine living my life in that way. If I were that completely unhappy with how things were, I'd have to change something.
I don't comment on those posts, or reply to those comments, because I know that my answer of "well, if you don't like the way things are change something" would be neither welcome nor helpful. In fact, I am not sure why I keep reading them. Perhaps I am looking for the one that can stretch the limits of my imagination a bit farther, because I'd rather not project what I think onto other people, either, and I suspect that understanding why these women put up with the crap their partners dish out would help me understand why my culture is so unsettled by happy working mothers.
---------------------------------------------
I think I'll just apologize in advance to all of the people this post will offend. The usual caveats apply. If the anonymous commenter wants to take some time off to have kids and that is what makes her happiest- hooray for her. I just want her to recognize that maybe the people who have made different decisions also did so because that makes them happiest. And if you are in the group of women who are deeply unhappy with your work-life balance- I truly am sorry and wish you could be happier. I just don't understand why you don't make some changes to increase your happiness. Feel free to try to explain it to me in the comments.
Monday, March 26, 2012
An Unusual Sort of Getaway
We're just back from a long weekend with my parents, who live in a suburb of Phoenix, AZ. My aunt and uncle were in town, and the family planned an early celebration for my grandparents' 70th wedding anniversary. I wanted to be there for that, and thought the kids would have fun visiting their grandparents, so we figured out the logistics and off we went. My husband had just taken a couple of days off when his parents were in town, so he couldn't spare any time off. I could, but didn't want to drive over to AZ with the kids on my own, so we decided that my Mom would fly over to join us on the road trip. My husband would fly over on Friday night, go to the party and hang out with us on Saturday, and then we'd drive back on Sunday.
It was a pretty good plan. But nothing went quite as planned. The basics all happened as we planned- but everything was just a little bit off.
First of all, we were all sick. We all caught a nasty cold, starting with my parents a couple of weeks before the trip. None of us were likely to be contagious, but we weren't feeling like going out and having a lot of fun. Of all the travelers, the only one who felt really good was Pumpkin, who shrugged this cold off in a just a couple of days.
Then, Petunia's usual post-infection mild constipation turned for the worse, making the drive over pretty miserable for her- she screamed in protest when we got her back into her car seat after our mid-morning break and after our lunch/play stop. She cried and screamed "Mommy! Help! Poopies!" for most of our first evening at my parents' house. I finally had to go get some laxative for her to sort things out.
Finally, we got spooked by the specter of the vacation tummy bug, and ended up making only a brief appearance at the anniversary party. My cousin hosted the party, and one of her kids got sent home from day care after throwing up. We are still a bit traumatized by the great Hawaii Christmas Norovirus incident, and were more than a little afraid of the thought of trying to drive home with vomiting children... so we bowed out of the party and just swung by for a little while when the party had moved outdoors. (It turns out that we need not have worried- the poor kid had gotten four teeth in quick succession and probably just had an upset stomach from the teething drool. Better safe than sorry, I guess.) We did go around to spend more time with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle that evening, and the kids played happily while we visited- so at least we didn't miss out on seeing everyone.
But, you know what? It was still a nice little mini-vacation. It was great to see my grandparents, and to give them a chance to see the kids- who behaved better than I dared to hope during our visit, leaving my grandparents and my aunt and uncle with a false but flattering opinion of our children! (They are cute, but they are not usually so angelic.) The kids had a lot of fun at Mimi and Boppa's house, even if we didn't get in the fun outings we had expected. I got the chance to lounge around a bit while the kids were entertained by my parents. I even read a book.
So, despite the general air of feeling not quite well that hung over the trip, I'm glad we went. The alert reader may notice that our travel plans were quite different from those we employed during our California Road Trip- on that trip, we tried to keep the driving to only a couple of hours per day. On this trip, we drove from San Diego to Phoenix (a six hour drive if you don't stop) in a single day.
Frankly, I was surprised at how well the drives went. Both directions, we left in the morning and stopped in Yuma for lunch and a good long play at the West Wetlands park, which is a truly great park, with a "regular" playground and a gigantic castle "imagination playground". On the way over, I decided to break up the morning drive by stopping at the Desert View tower outside of Jacumba. The kids were moderately impressed with the tower and the view and not at all impressed with the large number of unleashed (but incredibly docile and non-threatening!) dogs roaming around the place, so they would not explore the rocks nearby as I had hoped. We really should work on getting Pumpkin comfortable with dogs again- and I guess now we need to work on Petunia, too, who hadn't previously shown any fear of dogs.
I wish I could say that I have figured out the secret to keeping young children amused in the car, but that would be a lie. Petunia slept a lot, which obviously helped. Pumpkin read, colored, and played with a felt board my Mom had made her. I had my Kindle Fire with me, and she played with it a bit, but mostly preferred to read or look out the window. She napped a little bit, too.
I did pick up some ideas to make the driving (and flying) portion of our upcoming Texas vacation easier: I think I will get each kid her own clipboard and pouch of appropriate crayons/markers, and stock it with papers for coloring. I will also take along some small plastic bags to use to pass snacks to the backseat- we don't let them snack in the car very often, so getting a snack is a treat and serves as a good whine-diffuser. But really, I'm have no idea why the kids tolerated the long drives so well. I I am officially accepting the universe's offer of two good travelers as payback for the fact that neither of my kids slept through the night much before they turned two (heck, Petunia still doesn't reliably sleep through the night, and she is two and a half already). I wonder if the universe thinks this also covers the fact that the kids won't eat vegetables?
It was a pretty good plan. But nothing went quite as planned. The basics all happened as we planned- but everything was just a little bit off.
First of all, we were all sick. We all caught a nasty cold, starting with my parents a couple of weeks before the trip. None of us were likely to be contagious, but we weren't feeling like going out and having a lot of fun. Of all the travelers, the only one who felt really good was Pumpkin, who shrugged this cold off in a just a couple of days.
Then, Petunia's usual post-infection mild constipation turned for the worse, making the drive over pretty miserable for her- she screamed in protest when we got her back into her car seat after our mid-morning break and after our lunch/play stop. She cried and screamed "Mommy! Help! Poopies!" for most of our first evening at my parents' house. I finally had to go get some laxative for her to sort things out.
Finally, we got spooked by the specter of the vacation tummy bug, and ended up making only a brief appearance at the anniversary party. My cousin hosted the party, and one of her kids got sent home from day care after throwing up. We are still a bit traumatized by the great Hawaii Christmas Norovirus incident, and were more than a little afraid of the thought of trying to drive home with vomiting children... so we bowed out of the party and just swung by for a little while when the party had moved outdoors. (It turns out that we need not have worried- the poor kid had gotten four teeth in quick succession and probably just had an upset stomach from the teething drool. Better safe than sorry, I guess.) We did go around to spend more time with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle that evening, and the kids played happily while we visited- so at least we didn't miss out on seeing everyone.
But, you know what? It was still a nice little mini-vacation. It was great to see my grandparents, and to give them a chance to see the kids- who behaved better than I dared to hope during our visit, leaving my grandparents and my aunt and uncle with a false but flattering opinion of our children! (They are cute, but they are not usually so angelic.) The kids had a lot of fun at Mimi and Boppa's house, even if we didn't get in the fun outings we had expected. I got the chance to lounge around a bit while the kids were entertained by my parents. I even read a book.
So, despite the general air of feeling not quite well that hung over the trip, I'm glad we went. The alert reader may notice that our travel plans were quite different from those we employed during our California Road Trip- on that trip, we tried to keep the driving to only a couple of hours per day. On this trip, we drove from San Diego to Phoenix (a six hour drive if you don't stop) in a single day.
Frankly, I was surprised at how well the drives went. Both directions, we left in the morning and stopped in Yuma for lunch and a good long play at the West Wetlands park, which is a truly great park, with a "regular" playground and a gigantic castle "imagination playground". On the way over, I decided to break up the morning drive by stopping at the Desert View tower outside of Jacumba. The kids were moderately impressed with the tower and the view and not at all impressed with the large number of unleashed (but incredibly docile and non-threatening!) dogs roaming around the place, so they would not explore the rocks nearby as I had hoped. We really should work on getting Pumpkin comfortable with dogs again- and I guess now we need to work on Petunia, too, who hadn't previously shown any fear of dogs.
I wish I could say that I have figured out the secret to keeping young children amused in the car, but that would be a lie. Petunia slept a lot, which obviously helped. Pumpkin read, colored, and played with a felt board my Mom had made her. I had my Kindle Fire with me, and she played with it a bit, but mostly preferred to read or look out the window. She napped a little bit, too.
I did pick up some ideas to make the driving (and flying) portion of our upcoming Texas vacation easier: I think I will get each kid her own clipboard and pouch of appropriate crayons/markers, and stock it with papers for coloring. I will also take along some small plastic bags to use to pass snacks to the backseat- we don't let them snack in the car very often, so getting a snack is a treat and serves as a good whine-diffuser. But really, I'm have no idea why the kids tolerated the long drives so well. I I am officially accepting the universe's offer of two good travelers as payback for the fact that neither of my kids slept through the night much before they turned two (heck, Petunia still doesn't reliably sleep through the night, and she is two and a half already). I wonder if the universe thinks this also covers the fact that the kids won't eat vegetables?
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