The temperature rose quite a bit this week — it’s about mid-50s around here right now — and it is pouring down rain. So all the snow is gone and in its place we have mud. This feels much less festive!
I went in to my 5-year-old’s kindergarten class to read yesterday (Pete the Cat and the Perfect Pizza Party — always a hit. The art at the beginning has all sorts of random things on pizza including SOCKS. The kids loved that.). His birthday is over the holidays and so we need to do something before or after. I will admit I do struggle with making his birthday “special” as we are almost always traveling and I’m not going to bring big presents in the luggage. But I did schedule his birthday party for a weekend in January and a lot of friends will come to that, so that’s good (I put on the invite that siblings could come too and I got a surprising number of people sending me messages thanking me for that — seems like an easy way to increase attendance!).
Anyway, this week over at Before Breakfast I interviewed Lisa Canning, a former HGTV designer turned author and coach who also happens to have 11 kids. We talked holiday organization and such, so be sure to check that out.
In the shorter episodes, I touched on two of my favorite topics for this time of year. First, a reminder to prepare for the week after Christmas (I’ll talk about this in my weekend newsletter too). There is so much build up to Christmas and then people are often off school or work for some time afterwards (or if you’re not off work, there can be some disrupted routines for sure with different childcare arrangements and the like). It’s best to think about what to do with this time so it’s not a wash. And then, the reality that January comes right after December. I have to remind myself of this every year — January feels like it is far in the future but…it is not. So things like an early January birthday party do in fact need to be planned in November or December like you would anything else that happens in 4-6 weeks.
Over at Vanderhacks, my Substack newsletter, I wrote about “How to become a bit more of a morning person.” Many kids suddenly become morning people on Christmas morning…because there’s something exciting waiting for them. Every day can’t be Christmas, but figuring out how to put something exciting into the morning might provide a reason to get out of bed. I also suggested that you “Name your breaks” in order to make them more purposeful. Behind the paywall I wrote about “How to plan a 2026 project.” Google’s AI created me a Mozart calendar for 2026, but we’ll see if I follow that or just go chronologically.
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