Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and seventy four, which is airing at the very beginning of November twenty twenty two. I'm going to be interviewing Laura Overdeck, who is the founder of the Bedtime Math Organization. We're delighted to have her on the program. You might be asking what exactly is bedtime Math. So she wrote a series of books and has an organization that sends out math problems every day and they're a cute little problems. You can do them with your young kids. And the idea is to, you know, have math be something fun, just like a bedtime story. You do your bedtime story, you do a bedtime math, and just to give you a flavor, I thought i'd read a real quick one from my bedtime math story. I'm holding up this book, which this one is bedtime math. The truth comes out this sun is called whoa, and it says, unless you live on a farm, chances are you don't have live horses wandering around your house. So what the heck do people mean when they tell you to hold your horses? Luckily, it doesn't mean you have to grab the reins of a bunch of horses and hang on to stop them from running down the street. It just means wait a second, or be patient, and comes from the days before cars, when all our wagons were pulled by horses. The question is if you did have to hold down six or eight horses, would you be strong enough to do it? And then there are three levels of problems. So we ones horses each have four feet, while people have two. Who has more? Little kids? If your friend has to hold six horses while you're stuck holding eight, how many more do you have? Big kids? If you are calmly riding your bike at fourteen miles per hour, but your horse starts pulling you twice as fast as that? How fast are you now going? And the bonus if at the rodeo there are twice as many people as horses and there are twenty four feet in total? How many horses are there? Right? So, these little fun problems that you can figure out with your kids. They have answers printed in there too, So if you, as the parent, are brained to edit eight PM as you're putting your kids to bed, you don't have to figure out how many horses, how many feet each horse has, and how many feet each person has and therefore what gets you to twenty four? But anyway, they're so cute and they're fun to do with the kids, and my family has really enjoyed doing them as a way to just have a little bit more fun with math. So, Sarah, after that very long introduction, Sarah's here too, what are your kids doing with math these days? Well, first of all, I just have to say, I am buying that book now because I think that's super cute, and I was doing that math problem in my head and I'm gonna let the listeners figure out the answer for themselves. But my kids, as you know, as I've talked about They are in a Montessori school, which is a little bit different. In South Florida. I know, the public schools all use the common Core math, and so I got a little bit of exposure to that when Annabel was in elementary school, and the Montessori is a little bit different. I think it's probably a little bit more traditional, although they do some really kind of things I've never seen. They teach addition and kind of number manipulation via this grid system called the stamp game, which is something I had never seen before, but my kids have embraced wholeheartedly. They are really really big into manipulatives, even for really young kids. So they'll have kids show like what it looks like to make like three hundred and sixty two of something by like having these big blocks that are one hundred and like you have three of those, et cetera. And my kids, similar to when they were in common Core, there are some problems that I feel like back when we were doing math, you just had to find the answer, like that was all you needed, and now math books are obsessed with like, oh no, no, that's great that you found the answer, but how did you find the answer? And tell me five different ways you could find the answer, and my kids hate that. They're like, I just got it, Okay, I'm just right. But I get the rationale because you you know, if you don't understand how you did it, when the problem becomes more complex, sometimes you may not be able to instinctively answer it quite as quickly. So I get the rationale for that. But man, that is tough for kids totally. And you guys do like some math chat in your own life though, right, like we do. I mean that comes and by the way, this topic, I don't know Laura talked about it in the interview itself was kind of a reader request because somebody mentioned, you know, we're always talking about literacy and books, which of course is also incredibly valuable, and we love our literacy and book selections and family book clubs and book talk, but we don't have the same attention to math. And I have to say, in our household, I think we at least try. We're always like, when there's an impromptu math problem that just comes up in life, we like to kind of pass it around the kids at different levels, and certainly love to point out whenever there is real life application of math because kids will kind of fight you and say like, well, why do I need to know this? But Josh is building a hamster cage with Annabelle, and there's so much math, especially because they started with like one size and they had to change the size, and like that's geometry, it is arithmetic, it is measurements, so much math. So yeah, I always try to think about that, you know, if I'm just talking with a kid, like, oh, can I throw out like hmm, you know, if we're doing this, I wonder like how many more would be if we did this? Or oh that's interesting, you know, so if it's uh thirty two and that was three times that, oh that's a you know see what they come up with, and some of them are you know, pretty quick on the draw with a figuring out the math facts, which is interesting because I'm like, well, I guess that is right. I had and thought it through. Yeah. No, I love this bedtime math concept. And exactly as you said, we had a listener I ask, you know, we're talking about literacy with kids, do we talk about math and science topics with kids? And we totally think you should. It's just you know, it's also great to create just a culture in your house of being curious about these topics. And I came across Laura Overdeck many years ago through some other things she had done in the philanthropic world, because she and her husband have been great supporters of various things like gifted education and educational programs for kids, you know, who are trying to learn more math, and supporting teachers and things like that. And bedtime Math came out of them actually just doing math with their own kids. And so I've written a couple articles about it because I think it's just such a cool concept, and so I was really thrilled that she was willing to come on the program and talk about it. So, without further ado, here is Laura Overdeck, who is the author of all the Bedtime Math books. We'll hear what she has to say. Well, I am delighted to welcome Laura Overdeck to the program. Laura, can you introduce yourself to our listeners? Sure, I'm Laura Overdeck and I'm the founder of Bedtime Math, and you are all so a parent as well that you know you're doing bedtime math with kids as well. I am. I have three children, and I consider bedtime Math my fourth child and it just turned ten years old this year. Well, that's true, and your children are all older than ten though, right they are? Yeah, so teenagers there, and you are a mathematician. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what you remember of learning about math when you are growing up, your experiences that made you know you were interested in this. Sure. Well, I really had two notable things that I think resulted in me really loving math. One was that I grew up in a house where we did not have flashcards or workbooks, pre k things at all. My parents just wove math into daily life. My mom's a great cook, so I was baking with teaspoons and tablespoons and fractions really early. My dad does carpentry on this side, so I was using you know, unsafe power tools at a young age. You got to get the sixteenth of an inch right. And I think that when the maker movement came about in the early twenty tens, that I realized that's what you might have called our house. The second thing is that from seventh grade to twelfth grade I had an excellent math teacher. Every year I really locked out and hit the jackpot. They all not only were very confident, in the material, but because they were confident, they were playful with it. And it's just so important to have that kind of experience so that you not only your learning the material, but you don't have math anxiety. Yeah, because you have a culture around it that's healthy. And I think that's, you know, an issue so many people run up against is you know, people like, oh, I hate math, I hate you know, you never hear that with stuff like I mean, you don't hear that as many people say something I hate reading, I hate words. No, And I know that you've actually pointed that out in earlier posts that you've written. Yeah, I think that parents are very anxious about math when their kids bring home math homework. And that's a real problem right now, is that there are new methods and we have a generation of parents who are not solid on it, and then they kind of freak out when they see their kids homework, and so we then kind of cultivate the same problem again it becomes bigenerational. Yeah, yeah, freaking out is never a way to increase somebody's love of something. But why don't you talk a little bit about how bedtime math began. So this is your fourth baby, you're taking care of the three other ones what led to bedtime math. So it really was the most unpremeditated, kind of out of the garage type thing, except I guess you'd say it was out of the bedroom. But when my husband and I both love math, and when we put our kids to bed, we would give them a bedtime story and then give them a bedtime math problem because we all know to do the bedtime story and it engenders reading for pleasure, But you know what about math for pleasure? Well, if you love math, you do the bedtime math problem. And my firstborn was only two when we started this, and you know, we'd count her stuffed animals, we'd count their noses, then we'd count their ears. That doubled everything. And then as we rolled in more children, a second and a third, we just kept going. And what happened, honestly, was that very competitive parents in my town wanted to know what we were doing with our kids because they were very math fluent. People were like, oh, do you tutor? Do you do that thing down the street, And I'm like, no, we just do these math problems at night about whatever we talked about at dinner, pillow forts, flamingos, you know whatever, and parents said, well, could you share those? And again, this was twenty twelve, so ratcheting back to figure out what was going on, and we were kind of having the common core wars, and I think people were just hungry for math to be fun and playful, so I started emailing them out. And so, for those who haven't yet experienced the fun of bedtime math, why didn't you talk a little bit about what a bedtime math sort of set looks like. I mean, you know, you've got your books, you've got your app. When you're getting bedtime math, what are you getting? So whether you're getting an email in your inbox or you can open the app, or you can go on our website, you see the same thing whichever channel you use, and what it is is it's a quick opening, like maybe someone set a record riding a unicycle, so there's something funny about that. Then there are three questions we ones, little kids and big kids, and there are three levels basically because I have three children and I always had a question for each kid. So the wei ones is like pre k it might be a unicycle's wheel is a circle fined four circles in the room, you know, the little kids will be something with adding like if you and three other people ride unicycles, how many wheels? Or if you throw a bicycle in there, you know, and then the big kids might get into multiplication. And the idea is that the answers are on there and you can click to see them. But the idea is it's not a quiz. It's actually a journey to the right answer, because when you're a kid at home and you're relaxed and you're talking to a parent or a sibling or whoever you're doing it with, you have all the time in the world, and so you can really just wrangle with it till you get it. And the beauty of this too is that kids can stretch and try a harder one which they might not want to do in school or have the chance to do, and it just turns math into a journey rather than a judgment. And many of them are funny, too, right, I mean, that's that we try to do that. I mean, I remember one of the ones we were laughing about is, you know, you wrapping toilet paper around something, And I'm like, of course, they're kids love anything involving a toilet paper and wrapping that they're not allowed to do. That really makes a mess. How do you come up with your ideas? Well, you know, to sum it up, I think textbooks take math and try to make it fun. You know, if I stick on a rainbow on their flower or laprichaun. What these are is we take things that kids find fun and then find the math in it. So every topic is math. It's kid appealing and then there's math in it. Kids love to make a mess. They love things that light up, they love vehicles, food, animals. So if you start with okay, I know kids love porcupines, like all of a sudden, you find you can make a math problem out of that. There's actually a lot to say about quills they have, how far they shoot off, you know, like there's plenty to say. So that's really how kind of observing what kids like and then working off that as a launch pad, because there's been thousands of them, now there have been I think we've written like thirteen hundred of them. Thirteen hundred there you go, all right, Well we're going to take a quick ad break and then we will be back with Laura overdeck talking about bedtime math. All right, so I am back talking with Laura Overdeck was the founder of the Bedtime Math Organization. So let's go back to this topic of the anxiety many parents feel about math and kids and how it just seems a little bit more we're less fluent in it than we are in the idea of reading stories to our kids and all that. And in fact, the reason obviously you're doing great things, we goted to have you on for that. But one of the reasons we're having you on is we've got a question from a listener. She said, Okay, you guys have had literacy experts on talking about the importance of reading with your kids and how to read with your kids for X, Y, and Z, why haven't you had anyone done talking about math? And like, well, that's a good question, but it isn't as obvious, is it for many people? It's true, you know, I think there's several things at work here. One is that reading is a little more forgiving than math. Right, math has a right answer or some right answers, generally, and so you are right or wrong when you're doing a math problem. And if you're not facing success right away and you don't have the proper support, it becomes anxiety producing. With reading, you can read a book and write an essay on it or get quizzed on it, and if you got the general idea, you can kind of skatee by. It's not so binary of like right or wrong. And secondly, I think reading you're kind of doing it on the fly all the time. I would argue that you're doing math also, but I think the reading is a little more obvious. You get out of bed right away, you look at your phone, you go outside, look at a street sign. You're always reading, and so in a way it feels like a more casual part of life. In fact, with the pandemic hitting, kids did not slide in reading as much as they did in math, partly because they just have it in their environment without trying. A parent can have some reading. Obviously better to have books in the house, but even without that, you're confronted by words all the time. Yeah, that's fascinating. So there's been more of a slide than in math. That more slid more during the pandemic because the reading kept going, and also then because you just have this kind of cyclical rational thing going where a parent is more confident and playful with reading and so then they're more likely to do it when a pandemic hits. I saw that this was true even among professionals, that when schools were offering summer school, a lot of them are doing just literacy and not math, because I think it was easier to talk the teachers into coming and doing literacy because teachers are math anxious as well. Sometimes. So what do we do about that? I mean, honestly, what do we do? I mean, yeah, it's widespread math anxiety and it doesn't vote well. Well. The good news is is, first of all, if you get down to the neuroscience and I'm not a neuroscientist, but the brain is plastic and you learn every day, you learn all the time. So I truly believe that all these adults out there who are nervous about math, we can all do elementary math. We all graduated from elementary school. We can do this. I have hope because I know that fans right to bedtime math and say, you know, I'm working on counting and adding with my kid, and for the first time I'm in joining math. And that's the thing is, if you start from the beginning with your kid, you fill in your own gaps by the time they hit third and fourth grade, like, you're on a roll with them. So if we could get parents to do that, I really believe we would have success because it is doable. The other piece of this is that there are different methods for teaching things today, So parents, if their kids have a question about the homework, they start arguing about, like, what's the right way to do this. We hear this all the time. Parents are like, I tried to help them. My kid is like, no, you're doing it wrong. The problem is that the dance steps have changed, but the math is the same. And what parents need is almost like a little translator to say, Okay, this crazy lattice multiplication is just multiplying like you did, or this bar model is just like the rows of apples you saw on your worksheet. It's the same stuff. So what we're doing at that time math right now is a whole campaign be part of the equation, and it's to energize parents around getting involved in their kids' math learning and the gaps that have to be closed. And part of it is we're going to build a whole parent corner to offer support on this stuff. Yeah, as you figure out the new ways of doing math. You know, if parents are looking for ways to kind of make their house more math fluent, right like a lot of us, you're like, okay, we need we need books on our walls if we want to, you know, our kids to be good readers. What can we do to create households that are math positive? You know, I think it's just a matter of when questions that come up, quantifying them. You know, you can be talking about something that's funny that went on in town and you can be like, you know what, how many people do you think we're there at the park when that happened, Or you could be looking out the window, how many cars do you think drive by our street every day? Or it's just weaving it in, And certainly there's anything that's hands on immediately involves math because items have mass, they have a weight, they have a size, they have a speed. If you're throwing them, you know, and just observing the world that way, it starts to happen very naturally. In fact, there was a big gold standard study about the bedtime math app that found that when parents do this with their kids, their kids end up like three months ahead in math skills in just one year. What was interesting is that it didn't matter whether the families did it seven days a week or just two days a week. They had almost the same gains just doing it two or three times a week. And the researcher's hypothesis is that it's because it changed the conversation in the house whether they were doing it twice or five times a week, the family started to just notice. It just awakened the numbers around people that all of a sudden there were math conversations that were happening in the household. Great, yeah, now, I know we've been trying to do things like you know, driving along the highway, like, oh wow, you know we're going twenty miles per hour and so slow here. I wonder how long it's going to take us to go there? You know, fifteen miles we have to go now, hmmm, exactly. And you know, I think food is just such a great entree. Nobun intended to getting math into the day, because I know that I'm not the world's greatest chef, but I do love to cook. And when the kids were little, sometimes I would just cut their meal into triangles instead of squares, Like we're always cutting squares. Why you know, triangles are cool. They look cool. Sometimes i'd stack things or put you know, toothpicks and make pyramids of anything. Are amazing because the prabid numbers, you know, like one one plus two, one plus two plus three, you know, just lining things up that way and saying to kids, can any number work? Doing that? When you take your chocolate chips or your cheerios, like, once you get on a roll, you find you don't have to think very hard about it. It just happens. And it's so healthy for kids to just see the world through a new lens. Like that next thing you're doing, you're doing the Fibonacci sequence with your cherios, then it could you could you could totally do that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Act and toys and everything else. I mean, you know, are there is there anything like, you know, if we want to have certain toys around the house that are maybe more encouraging of math. Definitely. So board games are great, and you can take a board game that doesn't look mathy like Candyland. You know that pattern of blue, yellow, green, whatever it is, repeats every six. You know, it's mods the way a clock has mods. So you can pull a car and be like, without counting, how many spaces are you going to jump? If you pick the double blue? Like, you can actually like work math into it. I also think anything with dice, Parcheesi's Great Monopoly is great, of course, and I would say not on the iPad, play it on the board, because then you've got to make your own change, work with the bank. It's all really good. I will also admit that when we used to sit and wait for the bus, I would play poker with my kids, like Texas Hold, and they were in fifth grade, third grade, and you would just play poker, you know, and get used to the probabilities and how many cards are in the deck, and you know it's cards. Dice and board games are all great, great ways to encourage kids to be doing more math. Yeah, well it sounds good, But the thing probably we don't want to do the flash cards. You mentioned you were a household with no flash cards, right. It's funny because when I then encountered flash cards in school, I liked them. I liked the guitar game. If you're competitive, you like it, right. But I think flash cards are fine for kids who already like math and are feeling really confident. I don't think flash cards win anyone over, and there are just so many other ways. So as an example that time math, We've actually made a beach ball with numbers all over it. You can actually get it on our website and you throw it back and forth when you catch it. Whatever two numbers your thumbs are next two, You can make any game like you catch it and you have to add them and then you throw it to the next person, or maybe you multiply. You can practice and maybe you make a two digit number twenty three. You know you can. Anybody car I was just pondering, you can do all kinds of things, and anybody who has a beach ball at home if you just take a sharpie and write number the nine digits all over it and throw it back and forth. Kids love chucking things. They just love throwing things, and that's we call it. It's volleyball. Math essentially sounds fun and does this work? Like if kids are feeling like behind in math, I know a lot of people you mentioned that there are these gaps that are needing to be caught up. I mean, if you're you know, dealing with a kid who's feeling anxious about math because of that they know they're behind or anything. I mean, can this all help with that as well? Well? When kids are behind, you know, there are two things going on. One is they might not understand the concept they're working on, like you know, especially once you get up into fractions, like adding fractions and why the denominators have to be the same. The problem is a lot of times we mechanize and we say, oh, like when you add, they have to be the same when you multiply, they don't and kids don't know why that is. So there's that problem. And then on top of it, if you're not sad with your math facts, all the work takes longer. I like to say it's like flying down a highway. If you're doing a big math problem, like a long division problem, you don't have to keep pulling off the highway on every exit ramp to stop and think about, well what is five times for what is eight minus two? And then get on the highway again and then you get off. You want to just fly down the highway and be sinking your teeth into the cool math problem, not kind of the drudgery of the little math facts worked in. So I would say that getting kids fluent in their math facts is something that anybody can do, and it takes away that layer of stress right off the bat, and then you can kind of dig into what is actually going on. That's why we're throwing the volleyball back and forth right exactly. I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about I mean, just switching to a like sort of career focus thing here. You know, you're running the bedtime Math organization. How do you guys decide what to do next? Like you know, as you're you know, like what you know that's precially yours in trying to see what is needed. Often it is reactive. People come to us and say we need X or Y. I'm a big fan of the book Zag. It's a short, quick marketing book that I think is fantastic, and it talks about how much as a painting has like the white space and the painting, you want to do that as an organization, and you also you want to ride a wave. No matter how hard you work, your idea cannot propel out there beyond you unless other people take it and run with it. So it is very hard with math because it's not a popular subject and there is so much math anxiety. But we feel that we've, for instance, hit a nerve with this idea that parents are not comfortable with their kids' math homework, and it causes a lot of tears. And we've realized that when we talk about this with parents, they just ignite. They're like, oh my gosh, that's so true. So with this campaign. There are so many ways this campaign could go. But that's one of the directions simply because we're reading other people in it sense. Yeah, so people send you ideas and you're like, huh, what of all this makes sense? You know what needs could we fill? Then? Right? Right? Excellent? Well, Laura, this is fascinating and I encourage everyone to, you know, sign up for bedtime maths, start getting these problems you can do with your young kids, and then maybe they'll keep talking to you about calculus as they get older and well. And it's interesting because we've always had a pretty steady audience of new people coming to bedtime math, like the original users have aged out and new year'sers have come in and it's so great. But I will tell you, when the pandemic hit, you could tell that was a moment where all of a sudden, everyone felt more urgency because we were just swamped. Our website traffic went up by a factor of twelve because like every parent in America was looking for a way to keep their kid going those first few weeks before we knew, you know, how long we were going to be in this mess. And the point is it's quick and easy to work that into your day every day, especially if you hook at two of routine so you remember to do it. So just when you read your bedtime story, you do your bedtime math. And that's right, you're saying. Both are equally wonderful to snuggle up and do together. So Laura, we always end with a love of the week. This can be anything that is exciting for you at the moment. I'm going to have to put mine out as the Philadelphia sports teams at the moment. I know you're in New Jersey, but I know it's okay. But our Eagles and our Phillies both, you know, doing pretty well these days. So I haven't really gone to many live sports of late, but hopefully I'll get back into some. I guess the Phillies almost over, but the Eagles maybe i'll go see, so cheers of them. How about you, what's what is exciting for you this week? Well, I will tell you. I mean, and this is just such a mathy thing, but I love Google alerts because when you set a Google alert for a word, things just pop up that you would never know are out there on this enormous web that's out there. I finally set an alert for the word math. I had never done it because I was afraid I'd just get delused. But it's all very controlled. But I have renewed hope in this country because some of the things that come up are just people like a teacher doing math lessons with in and out burgers, you know, a farmer having a pre k math program where kids come and like count the sheep and the chickens. I mean, it's just the funniest things come up. It just in a world that's been pretty dark lately. It actually has been a blast to just see people with such initiative and creativity out there, you know, making it better. Awesomeing ahead, Well, let's hope that people listening to this are going to start doing more awesome things with math as well. That's right, all right, Laura, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it great, Thank you for having me. So that was great hearing from Laura Overdeck about bedtime math and how we can be doing math problems along with bedtime stories to help make our kids more comfortable with math and not have some of that math anxiety that unfortunately, I know a lot of people struggle with these days. So Sarah, we have a different question. This is not math related, but we will throw that in. Can you read it for us? Yeah, So this came in hot off the press because I have been taking the kids out to dinner recently. I think it started when, well, Genevieve is in ballet and it's not her favorite thing, but I actually think she's going to really grow to enjoy it because there's it's like she doesn't want to go, but then when she goes, she like skips out of there and is so happy. So I'm trying to just like encourage it. So I said to her, Okay, you know, one of these days, when you go to ballet, I'll take you out to dinner afterwards. And she got super excited about that idea because it ends right around five o'clock. So a couple weeks ago she just called me out on it. Impromptu Hey Mom, like when is our dinner? Can we go tonight? And I was like okay, So I texted our nanny. I took her to dinner, and then of course the other two kids. You know, you can't have a special thing with one kid without making it even at least not in our household. So that begun a series of dinners. So I took both the big kids, both the little kids actually chose the same sushi place, and then Anna Belgi shows a ramen place that had Boba ti. So apparently my kids are only into Asian cuisine and that's fine with me. But the question then came through my blog when I talked about these dinners, and Emily writes, I love that you're taking some evenings to have dinners alone with each kid, the coolest idea. I'm curious how you arrange childcare for those evenings. Do you always have your nanny there for the evening or dinner time, squirrel, or do you have the nanny there as if it were you and your husband going on date night. And she writes that she struggles with extra childcare when it's not essential, like when she's not working, so she wanted to hear how other people use childcare to inspire her to get more creative and probably to give her permission to lean into it more so she can invest in relationships with loved ones, friends are just myself. It's a great question. Yeah, so what do you do? Yeah? Of first, Yeah, so I feel like this has changed, And the main thing that has changed is that most days our nanny does not start her day until noon or even like two thirty three o'clock, because, especially now that I no longer have my GME responsibilities, Josh and I can take the kids to school very easily every day because, as I've mentioned, like this was by design in part, but the school is on the way to my workplace, it starts at a time that works. I can drop them off at eight and make it in time for my clinic at eight thirty. It fits very well, So there's no reason I don't need our nanny to come in in the morning. I do run in the morning, but I usually aim to get back by six point thirty six forty five, so that you know, I just don't need the extra help. And so with that it means that I have continued to want to employ our nanny full time, in part because she only wants a full time job and I want to keep her working for us. So it works for us to not necessarily use full time hours, but to embrace the flexibility that means some night she might stay later, or she might cover a weekend, or you know, do other things, because that's kind of what our family needs. And I think she, you know, thinks of evolved and she is understanding of that because you know, many days she gets to work for just a few hours and she gets paid. We do a full time pay, no matter how many actual hours that she works in the week. Anyway, I feel good about that, and it means that I have permission that you know, it's certainly not every night. Many nights, I don't need her after six o'clock either, so she goes home. But then on some nights, if I have a kid that has a late pickup that I don't want to drag the other kids to, or if I want to take the kids on a one and one outing, that means she can stay later. The funny thing is, you'd think I would use this for date nights with Josh, but weeknight date nights for us are not typically a thing because his work schedule is so unpredictable that I think if I was like, oh, you're going to meet me at seven, like that could lead to so much disappointment if he couldn't make it. That we typically do our date nights on weekends, and that's with a different babysitter. So it's not that we don't do date nights, we're just like not going to do them on a Thursday night. But for book club or taking the kids out or whatever, it works really really well. I get the guilt, like I didn't feel like I had the ability to do this as much when she was working truly full time hours, But this is just kind of how it's evolved. And I would say, if you can swing it or the hours are reasonable, then this is like the most It should be like the least skilled inducing reason of all to use extra childcare. You're spending time with a child, right And if you have a partner that doesn't work until seventy eight o'clock at night, this could be on a rotational basis with your partner where you know, you take one kid out and then they take one kid out, or you figure out some kind of fun rotation there. So I highly encourage and give you permission to try some different arrangements from what you have been doing. I find it really rewarding to go out with my kids one on one. Yeah, I don't have much to add to that other than I totally think that using childcare to have some pleasant one on one time with kids when you do have a brood of them is one of the best uses of it. What makes, you know, time with kids so much more pleasant when you're not referring fights over this, you know, restaurant dinner table if you just have one and you can focus on them completely. I haven't done so much of this because you know, many of the kids are less into cuisines that I might also wish to eat. But I mean I've taken a lot of kids to Italian restaurants. I've taken my you know, Sam, my thirteen year old to Japanese restaurants, and I want to take Jasper out to a Brazilian steakhouse. But I think the others might want to go to that too, So we'll see. This is something I should probably start doing more of. I just need to, you know, get organized and make it happen. In our case, it could either be that you know, Michael was covering because as he's been doing a lot more working from home, that's more of a feasible option. Our nanny also works until seven a couple of nights a week, so because we do have younger kids, getting us through the dinner thing is often really helpful not to have to drag him around to activities as well. And so you know, an early dinner would work on a night where I wasn't driving, for instance. So yeah, I think it's a great idea. And yes, you have our full permission to use childcare for not working time. I mean, I'm just going to throw out here that there are people who are not employed who use childcare for very things. Especially I know a lot of you know, families who have multiple kids, and you know, maybe mom isn't currently employed, but they still have at least part time childcare precisely because of all the driving and such. So throw that out there. You are welcome to use it for things that are not your exact like twenty minutes outside your work hours and no more. It's all good, all right, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Laura overdeck about bedtime math and making math more fun in our households. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.

Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and seventy four, which is airing at the very beginning of November twenty twenty two. I'm going to be interviewing Laura Overdeck, who is the founder of the Bedtime Math Organization. We're delighted to have her on the program. You might be asking what exactly is bedtime Math. So she wrote a series of books and has an organization that sends out math problems every day and they're a cute little problems. You can do them with your young kids. And the idea is to, you know, have math be something fun, just like a bedtime story. You do your bedtime story, you do a bedtime math, and just to give you a flavor, I thought i'd read a real quick one from my bedtime math story. I'm holding up this book, which this one is bedtime math. The truth comes out this sun is called whoa, and it says, unless you live on a farm, chances are you don't have live horses wandering around your house. So what the heck do people mean when they tell you to hold your horses? Luckily, it doesn't mean you have to grab the reins of a bunch of horses and hang on to stop them from running down the street. It just means wait a second, or be patient, and comes from the days before cars, when all our wagons were pulled by horses. The question is if you did have to hold down six or eight horses, would you be strong enough to do it? And then there are three levels of problems. So we ones horses each have four feet, while people have two. Who has more? Little kids? If your friend has to hold six horses while you're stuck holding eight, how many more do you have? Big kids? If you are calmly riding your bike at fourteen miles per hour, but your horse starts pulling you twice as fast as that? How fast are you now going? And the bonus if at the rodeo there are twice as many people as horses and there are twenty four feet in total? How many horses are there? Right? So, these little fun problems that you can figure out with your kids. They have answers printed in there too, So if you, as the parent, are brained to edit eight PM as you're putting your kids to bed, you don't have to figure out how many horses, how many feet each horse has, and how many feet each person has and therefore what gets you to twenty four? But anyway, they're so cute and they're fun to do with the kids, and my family has really enjoyed doing them as a way to just have a little bit more fun with math. So, Sarah, after that very long introduction, Sarah's here too, what are your kids doing with math these days? Well, first of all, I just have to say, I am buying that book now because I think that's super cute, and I was doing that math problem in my head and I'm gonna let the listeners figure out the answer for themselves. But my kids, as you know, as I've talked about They are in a Montessori school, which is a little bit different. In South Florida. I know, the public schools all use the common Core math, and so I got a little bit of exposure to that when Annabel was in elementary school, and the Montessori is a little bit different. I think it's probably a little bit more traditional, although they do some really kind of things I've never seen. They teach addition and kind of number manipulation via this grid system called the stamp game, which is something I had never seen before, but my kids have embraced wholeheartedly. They are really really big into manipulatives, even for really young kids. So they'll have kids show like what it looks like to make like three hundred and sixty two of something by like having these big blocks that are one hundred and like you have three of those, et cetera. And my kids, similar to when they were in common Core, there are some problems that I feel like back when we were doing math, you just had to find the answer, like that was all you needed, and now math books are obsessed with like, oh no, no, that's great that you found the answer, but how did you find the answer? And tell me five different ways you could find the answer, and my kids hate that. They're like, I just got it, Okay, I'm just right. But I get the rationale because you you know, if you don't understand how you did it, when the problem becomes more complex, sometimes you may not be able to instinctively answer it quite as quickly. So I get the rationale for that. But man, that is tough for kids totally. And you guys do like some math chat in your own life though, right, like we do. I mean that comes and by the way, this topic, I don't know Laura talked about it in the interview itself was kind of a reader request because somebody mentioned, you know, we're always talking about literacy and books, which of course is also incredibly valuable, and we love our literacy and book selections and family book clubs and book talk, but we don't have the same attention to math. And I have to say, in our household, I think we at least try. We're always like, when there's an impromptu math problem that just comes up in life, we like to kind of pass it around the kids at different levels, and certainly love to point out whenever there is real life application of math because kids will kind of fight you and say like, well, why do I need to know this? But Josh is building a hamster cage with Annabelle, and there's so much math, especially because they started with like one size and they had to change the size, and like that's geometry, it is arithmetic, it is measurements, so much math. So yeah, I always try to think about that, you know, if I'm just talking with a kid, like, oh, can I throw out like hmm, you know, if we're doing this, I wonder like how many more would be if we did this? Or oh that's interesting, you know, so if it's uh thirty two and that was three times that, oh that's a you know see what they come up with, and some of them are you know, pretty quick on the draw with a figuring out the math facts, which is interesting because I'm like, well, I guess that is right. I had and thought it through. Yeah. No, I love this bedtime math concept. And exactly as you said, we had a listener I ask, you know, we're talking about literacy with kids, do we talk about math and science topics with kids? And we totally think you should. It's just you know, it's also great to create just a culture in your house of being curious about these topics. And I came across Laura Overdeck many years ago through some other things she had done in the philanthropic world, because she and her husband have been great supporters of various things like gifted education and educational programs for kids, you know, who are trying to learn more math, and supporting teachers and things like that. And bedtime Math came out of them actually just doing math with their own kids. And so I've written a couple articles about it because I think it's just such a cool concept, and so I was really thrilled that she was willing to come on the program and talk about it. So, without further ado, here is Laura Overdeck, who is the author of all the Bedtime Math books. We'll hear what she has to say. Well, I am delighted to welcome Laura Overdeck to the program. Laura, can you introduce yourself to our listeners? Sure, I'm Laura Overdeck and I'm the founder of Bedtime Math, and you are all so a parent as well that you know you're doing bedtime math with kids as well. I am. I have three children, and I consider bedtime Math my fourth child and it just turned ten years old this year. Well, that's true, and your children are all older than ten though, right they are? Yeah, so teenagers there, and you are a mathematician. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what you remember of learning about math when you are growing up, your experiences that made you know you were interested in this. Sure. Well, I really had two notable things that I think resulted in me really loving math. One was that I grew up in a house where we did not have flashcards or workbooks, pre k things at all. My parents just wove math into daily life. My mom's a great cook, so I was baking with teaspoons and tablespoons and fractions really early. My dad does carpentry on this side, so I was using you know, unsafe power tools at a young age. You got to get the sixteenth of an inch right. And I think that when the maker movement came about in the early twenty tens, that I realized that's what you might have called our house. The second thing is that from seventh grade to twelfth grade I had an excellent math teacher. Every year I really locked out and hit the jackpot. They all not only were very confident, in the material, but because they were confident, they were playful with it. And it's just so important to have that kind of experience so that you not only your learning the material, but you don't have math anxiety. Yeah, because you have a culture around it that's healthy. And I think that's, you know, an issue so many people run up against is you know, people like, oh, I hate math, I hate you know, you never hear that with stuff like I mean, you don't hear that as many people say something I hate reading, I hate words. No, And I know that you've actually pointed that out in earlier posts that you've written. Yeah, I think that parents are very anxious about math when their kids bring home math homework. And that's a real problem right now, is that there are new methods and we have a generation of parents who are not solid on it, and then they kind of freak out when they see their kids homework, and so we then kind of cultivate the same problem again it becomes bigenerational. Yeah, yeah, freaking out is never a way to increase somebody's love of something. But why don't you talk a little bit about how bedtime math began. So this is your fourth baby, you're taking care of the three other ones what led to bedtime math. So it really was the most unpremeditated, kind of out of the garage type thing, except I guess you'd say it was out of the bedroom. But when my husband and I both love math, and when we put our kids to bed, we would give them a bedtime story and then give them a bedtime math problem because we all know to do the bedtime story and it engenders reading for pleasure, But you know what about math for pleasure? Well, if you love math, you do the bedtime math problem. And my firstborn was only two when we started this, and you know, we'd count her stuffed animals, we'd count their noses, then we'd count their ears. That doubled everything. And then as we rolled in more children, a second and a third, we just kept going. And what happened, honestly, was that very competitive parents in my town wanted to know what we were doing with our kids because they were very math fluent. People were like, oh, do you tutor? Do you do that thing down the street, And I'm like, no, we just do these math problems at night about whatever we talked about at dinner, pillow forts, flamingos, you know whatever, and parents said, well, could you share those? And again, this was twenty twelve, so ratcheting back to figure out what was going on, and we were kind of having the common core wars, and I think people were just hungry for math to be fun and playful, so I started emailing them out. And so, for those who haven't yet experienced the fun of bedtime math, why didn't you talk a little bit about what a bedtime math sort of set looks like. I mean, you know, you've got your books, you've got your app. When you're getting bedtime math, what are you getting? So whether you're getting an email in your inbox or you can open the app, or you can go on our website, you see the same thing whichever channel you use, and what it is is it's a quick opening, like maybe someone set a record riding a unicycle, so there's something funny about that. Then there are three questions we ones, little kids and big kids, and there are three levels basically because I have three children and I always had a question for each kid. So the wei ones is like pre k it might be a unicycle's wheel is a circle fined four circles in the room, you know, the little kids will be something with adding like if you and three other people ride unicycles, how many wheels? Or if you throw a bicycle in there, you know, and then the big kids might get into multiplication. And the idea is that the answers are on there and you can click to see them. But the idea is it's not a quiz. It's actually a journey to the right answer, because when you're a kid at home and you're relaxed and you're talking to a parent or a sibling or whoever you're doing it with, you have all the time in the world, and so you can really just wrangle with it till you get it. And the beauty of this too is that kids can stretch and try a harder one which they might not want to do in school or have the chance to do, and it just turns math into a journey rather than a judgment. And many of them are funny, too, right, I mean, that's that we try to do that. I mean, I remember one of the ones we were laughing about is, you know, you wrapping toilet paper around something, And I'm like, of course, they're kids love anything involving a toilet paper and wrapping that they're not allowed to do. That really makes a mess. How do you come up with your ideas? Well, you know, to sum it up, I think textbooks take math and try to make it fun. You know, if I stick on a rainbow on their flower or laprichaun. What these are is we take things that kids find fun and then find the math in it. So every topic is math. It's kid appealing and then there's math in it. Kids love to make a mess. They love things that light up, they love vehicles, food, animals. So if you start with okay, I know kids love porcupines, like all of a sudden, you find you can make a math problem out of that. There's actually a lot to say about quills they have, how far they shoot off, you know, like there's plenty to say. So that's really how kind of observing what kids like and then working off that as a launch pad, because there's been thousands of them, now there have been I think we've written like thirteen hundred of them. Thirteen hundred there you go, all right, Well we're going to take a quick ad break and then we will be back with Laura overdeck talking about bedtime math. All right, so I am back talking with Laura Overdeck was the founder of the Bedtime Math Organization. So let's go back to this topic of the anxiety many parents feel about math and kids and how it just seems a little bit more we're less fluent in it than we are in the idea of reading stories to our kids and all that. And in fact, the reason obviously you're doing great things, we goted to have you on for that. But one of the reasons we're having you on is we've got a question from a listener. She said, Okay, you guys have had literacy experts on talking about the importance of reading with your kids and how to read with your kids for X, Y, and Z, why haven't you had anyone done talking about math? And like, well, that's a good question, but it isn't as obvious, is it for many people? It's true, you know, I think there's several things at work here. One is that reading is a little more forgiving than math. Right, math has a right answer or some right answers, generally, and so you are right or wrong when you're doing a math problem. And if you're not facing success right away and you don't have the proper support, it becomes anxiety producing. With reading, you can read a book and write an essay on it or get quizzed on it, and if you got the general idea, you can kind of skatee by. It's not so binary of like right or wrong. And secondly, I think reading you're kind of doing it on the fly all the time. I would argue that you're doing math also, but I think the reading is a little more obvious. You get out of bed right away, you look at your phone, you go outside, look at a street sign. You're always reading, and so in a way it feels like a more casual part of life. In fact, with the pandemic hitting, kids did not slide in reading as much as they did in math, partly because they just have it in their environment without trying. A parent can have some reading. Obviously better to have books in the house, but even without that, you're confronted by words all the time. Yeah, that's fascinating. So there's been more of a slide than in math. That more slid more during the pandemic because the reading kept going, and also then because you just have this kind of cyclical rational thing going where a parent is more confident and playful with reading and so then they're more likely to do it when a pandemic hits. I saw that this was true even among professionals, that when schools were offering summer school, a lot of them are doing just literacy and not math, because I think it was easier to talk the teachers into coming and doing literacy because teachers are math anxious as well. Sometimes. So what do we do about that? I mean, honestly, what do we do? I mean, yeah, it's widespread math anxiety and it doesn't vote well. Well. The good news is is, first of all, if you get down to the neuroscience and I'm not a neuroscientist, but the brain is plastic and you learn every day, you learn all the time. So I truly believe that all these adults out there who are nervous about math, we can all do elementary math. We all graduated from elementary school. We can do this. I have hope because I know that fans right to bedtime math and say, you know, I'm working on counting and adding with my kid, and for the first time I'm in joining math. And that's the thing is, if you start from the beginning with your kid, you fill in your own gaps by the time they hit third and fourth grade, like, you're on a roll with them. So if we could get parents to do that, I really believe we would have success because it is doable. The other piece of this is that there are different methods for teaching things today, So parents, if their kids have a question about the homework, they start arguing about, like, what's the right way to do this. We hear this all the time. Parents are like, I tried to help them. My kid is like, no, you're doing it wrong. The problem is that the dance steps have changed, but the math is the same. And what parents need is almost like a little translator to say, Okay, this crazy lattice multiplication is just multiplying like you did, or this bar model is just like the rows of apples you saw on your worksheet. It's the same stuff. So what we're doing at that time math right now is a whole campaign be part of the equation, and it's to energize parents around getting involved in their kids' math learning and the gaps that have to be closed. And part of it is we're going to build a whole parent corner to offer support on this stuff. Yeah, as you figure out the new ways of doing math. You know, if parents are looking for ways to kind of make their house more math fluent, right like a lot of us, you're like, okay, we need we need books on our walls if we want to, you know, our kids to be good readers. What can we do to create households that are math positive? You know, I think it's just a matter of when questions that come up, quantifying them. You know, you can be talking about something that's funny that went on in town and you can be like, you know what, how many people do you think we're there at the park when that happened, Or you could be looking out the window, how many cars do you think drive by our street every day? Or it's just weaving it in, And certainly there's anything that's hands on immediately involves math because items have mass, they have a weight, they have a size, they have a speed. If you're throwing them, you know, and just observing the world that way, it starts to happen very naturally. In fact, there was a big gold standard study about the bedtime math app that found that when parents do this with their kids, their kids end up like three months ahead in math skills in just one year. What was interesting is that it didn't matter whether the families did it seven days a week or just two days a week. They had almost the same gains just doing it two or three times a week. And the researcher's hypothesis is that it's because it changed the conversation in the house whether they were doing it twice or five times a week, the family started to just notice. It just awakened the numbers around people that all of a sudden there were math conversations that were happening in the household. Great, yeah, now, I know we've been trying to do things like you know, driving along the highway, like, oh wow, you know we're going twenty miles per hour and so slow here. I wonder how long it's going to take us to go there? You know, fifteen miles we have to go now, hmmm, exactly. And you know, I think food is just such a great entree. Nobun intended to getting math into the day, because I know that I'm not the world's greatest chef, but I do love to cook. And when the kids were little, sometimes I would just cut their meal into triangles instead of squares, Like we're always cutting squares. Why you know, triangles are cool. They look cool. Sometimes i'd stack things or put you know, toothpicks and make pyramids of anything. Are amazing because the prabid numbers, you know, like one one plus two, one plus two plus three, you know, just lining things up that way and saying to kids, can any number work? Doing that? When you take your chocolate chips or your cheerios, like, once you get on a roll, you find you don't have to think very hard about it. It just happens. And it's so healthy for kids to just see the world through a new lens. Like that next thing you're doing, you're doing the Fibonacci sequence with your cherios, then it could you could you could totally do that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Act and toys and everything else. I mean, you know, are there is there anything like, you know, if we want to have certain toys around the house that are maybe more encouraging of math. Definitely. So board games are great, and you can take a board game that doesn't look mathy like Candyland. You know that pattern of blue, yellow, green, whatever it is, repeats every six. You know, it's mods the way a clock has mods. So you can pull a car and be like, without counting, how many spaces are you going to jump? If you pick the double blue? Like, you can actually like work math into it. I also think anything with dice, Parcheesi's Great Monopoly is great, of course, and I would say not on the iPad, play it on the board, because then you've got to make your own change, work with the bank. It's all really good. I will also admit that when we used to sit and wait for the bus, I would play poker with my kids, like Texas Hold, and they were in fifth grade, third grade, and you would just play poker, you know, and get used to the probabilities and how many cards are in the deck, and you know it's cards. Dice and board games are all great, great ways to encourage kids to be doing more math. Yeah, well it sounds good, But the thing probably we don't want to do the flash cards. You mentioned you were a household with no flash cards, right. It's funny because when I then encountered flash cards in school, I liked them. I liked the guitar game. If you're competitive, you like it, right. But I think flash cards are fine for kids who already like math and are feeling really confident. I don't think flash cards win anyone over, and there are just so many other ways. So as an example that time math, We've actually made a beach ball with numbers all over it. You can actually get it on our website and you throw it back and forth when you catch it. Whatever two numbers your thumbs are next two, You can make any game like you catch it and you have to add them and then you throw it to the next person, or maybe you multiply. You can practice and maybe you make a two digit number twenty three. You know you can. Anybody car I was just pondering, you can do all kinds of things, and anybody who has a beach ball at home if you just take a sharpie and write number the nine digits all over it and throw it back and forth. Kids love chucking things. They just love throwing things, and that's we call it. It's volleyball. Math essentially sounds fun and does this work? Like if kids are feeling like behind in math, I know a lot of people you mentioned that there are these gaps that are needing to be caught up. I mean, if you're you know, dealing with a kid who's feeling anxious about math because of that they know they're behind or anything. I mean, can this all help with that as well? Well? When kids are behind, you know, there are two things going on. One is they might not understand the concept they're working on, like you know, especially once you get up into fractions, like adding fractions and why the denominators have to be the same. The problem is a lot of times we mechanize and we say, oh, like when you add, they have to be the same when you multiply, they don't and kids don't know why that is. So there's that problem. And then on top of it, if you're not sad with your math facts, all the work takes longer. I like to say it's like flying down a highway. If you're doing a big math problem, like a long division problem, you don't have to keep pulling off the highway on every exit ramp to stop and think about, well what is five times for what is eight minus two? And then get on the highway again and then you get off. You want to just fly down the highway and be sinking your teeth into the cool math problem, not kind of the drudgery of the little math facts worked in. So I would say that getting kids fluent in their math facts is something that anybody can do, and it takes away that layer of stress right off the bat, and then you can kind of dig into what is actually going on. That's why we're throwing the volleyball back and forth right exactly. I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about I mean, just switching to a like sort of career focus thing here. You know, you're running the bedtime Math organization. How do you guys decide what to do next? Like you know, as you're you know, like what you know that's precially yours in trying to see what is needed. Often it is reactive. People come to us and say we need X or Y. I'm a big fan of the book Zag. It's a short, quick marketing book that I think is fantastic, and it talks about how much as a painting has like the white space and the painting, you want to do that as an organization, and you also you want to ride a wave. No matter how hard you work, your idea cannot propel out there beyond you unless other people take it and run with it. So it is very hard with math because it's not a popular subject and there is so much math anxiety. But we feel that we've, for instance, hit a nerve with this idea that parents are not comfortable with their kids' math homework, and it causes a lot of tears. And we've realized that when we talk about this with parents, they just ignite. They're like, oh my gosh, that's so true. So with this campaign. There are so many ways this campaign could go. But that's one of the directions simply because we're reading other people in it sense. Yeah, so people send you ideas and you're like, huh, what of all this makes sense? You know what needs could we fill? Then? Right? Right? Excellent? Well, Laura, this is fascinating and I encourage everyone to, you know, sign up for bedtime maths, start getting these problems you can do with your young kids, and then maybe they'll keep talking to you about calculus as they get older and well. And it's interesting because we've always had a pretty steady audience of new people coming to bedtime math, like the original users have aged out and new year'sers have come in and it's so great. But I will tell you, when the pandemic hit, you could tell that was a moment where all of a sudden, everyone felt more urgency because we were just swamped. Our website traffic went up by a factor of twelve because like every parent in America was looking for a way to keep their kid going those first few weeks before we knew, you know, how long we were going to be in this mess. And the point is it's quick and easy to work that into your day every day, especially if you hook at two of routine so you remember to do it. So just when you read your bedtime story, you do your bedtime math. And that's right, you're saying. Both are equally wonderful to snuggle up and do together. So Laura, we always end with a love of the week. This can be anything that is exciting for you at the moment. I'm going to have to put mine out as the Philadelphia sports teams at the moment. I know you're in New Jersey, but I know it's okay. But our Eagles and our Phillies both, you know, doing pretty well these days. So I haven't really gone to many live sports of late, but hopefully I'll get back into some. I guess the Phillies almost over, but the Eagles maybe i'll go see, so cheers of them. How about you, what's what is exciting for you this week? Well, I will tell you. I mean, and this is just such a mathy thing, but I love Google alerts because when you set a Google alert for a word, things just pop up that you would never know are out there on this enormous web that's out there. I finally set an alert for the word math. I had never done it because I was afraid I'd just get delused. But it's all very controlled. But I have renewed hope in this country because some of the things that come up are just people like a teacher doing math lessons with in and out burgers, you know, a farmer having a pre k math program where kids come and like count the sheep and the chickens. I mean, it's just the funniest things come up. It just in a world that's been pretty dark lately. It actually has been a blast to just see people with such initiative and creativity out there, you know, making it better. Awesomeing ahead, Well, let's hope that people listening to this are going to start doing more awesome things with math as well. That's right, all right, Laura, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it great, Thank you for having me. So that was great hearing from Laura Overdeck about bedtime math and how we can be doing math problems along with bedtime stories to help make our kids more comfortable with math and not have some of that math anxiety that unfortunately, I know a lot of people struggle with these days. So Sarah, we have a different question. This is not math related, but we will throw that in. Can you read it for us? Yeah, So this came in hot off the press because I have been taking the kids out to dinner recently. I think it started when, well, Genevieve is in ballet and it's not her favorite thing, but I actually think she's going to really grow to enjoy it because there's it's like she doesn't want to go, but then when she goes, she like skips out of there and is so happy. So I'm trying to just like encourage it. So I said to her, Okay, you know, one of these days, when you go to ballet, I'll take you out to dinner afterwards. And she got super excited about that idea because it ends right around five o'clock. So a couple weeks ago she just called me out on it. Impromptu Hey Mom, like when is our dinner? Can we go tonight? And I was like okay, So I texted our nanny. I took her to dinner, and then of course the other two kids. You know, you can't have a special thing with one kid without making it even at least not in our household. So that begun a series of dinners. So I took both the big kids, both the little kids actually chose the same sushi place, and then Anna Belgi shows a ramen place that had Boba ti. So apparently my kids are only into Asian cuisine and that's fine with me. But the question then came through my blog when I talked about these dinners, and Emily writes, I love that you're taking some evenings to have dinners alone with each kid, the coolest idea. I'm curious how you arrange childcare for those evenings. Do you always have your nanny there for the evening or dinner time, squirrel, or do you have the nanny there as if it were you and your husband going on date night. And she writes that she struggles with extra childcare when it's not essential, like when she's not working, so she wanted to hear how other people use childcare to inspire her to get more creative and probably to give her permission to lean into it more so she can invest in relationships with loved ones, friends are just myself. It's a great question. Yeah, so what do you do? Yeah? Of first, Yeah, so I feel like this has changed, And the main thing that has changed is that most days our nanny does not start her day until noon or even like two thirty three o'clock, because, especially now that I no longer have my GME responsibilities, Josh and I can take the kids to school very easily every day because, as I've mentioned, like this was by design in part, but the school is on the way to my workplace, it starts at a time that works. I can drop them off at eight and make it in time for my clinic at eight thirty. It fits very well, So there's no reason I don't need our nanny to come in in the morning. I do run in the morning, but I usually aim to get back by six point thirty six forty five, so that you know, I just don't need the extra help. And so with that it means that I have continued to want to employ our nanny full time, in part because she only wants a full time job and I want to keep her working for us. So it works for us to not necessarily use full time hours, but to embrace the flexibility that means some night she might stay later, or she might cover a weekend, or you know, do other things, because that's kind of what our family needs. And I think she, you know, thinks of evolved and she is understanding of that because you know, many days she gets to work for just a few hours and she gets paid. We do a full time pay, no matter how many actual hours that she works in the week. Anyway, I feel good about that, and it means that I have permission that you know, it's certainly not every night. Many nights, I don't need her after six o'clock either, so she goes home. But then on some nights, if I have a kid that has a late pickup that I don't want to drag the other kids to, or if I want to take the kids on a one and one outing, that means she can stay later. The funny thing is, you'd think I would use this for date nights with Josh, but weeknight date nights for us are not typically a thing because his work schedule is so unpredictable that I think if I was like, oh, you're going to meet me at seven, like that could lead to so much disappointment if he couldn't make it. That we typically do our date nights on weekends, and that's with a different babysitter. So it's not that we don't do date nights, we're just like not going to do them on a Thursday night. But for book club or taking the kids out or whatever, it works really really well. I get the guilt, like I didn't feel like I had the ability to do this as much when she was working truly full time hours, But this is just kind of how it's evolved. And I would say, if you can swing it or the hours are reasonable, then this is like the most It should be like the least skilled inducing reason of all to use extra childcare. You're spending time with a child, right And if you have a partner that doesn't work until seventy eight o'clock at night, this could be on a rotational basis with your partner where you know, you take one kid out and then they take one kid out, or you figure out some kind of fun rotation there. So I highly encourage and give you permission to try some different arrangements from what you have been doing. I find it really rewarding to go out with my kids one on one. Yeah, I don't have much to add to that other than I totally think that using childcare to have some pleasant one on one time with kids when you do have a brood of them is one of the best uses of it. What makes, you know, time with kids so much more pleasant when you're not referring fights over this, you know, restaurant dinner table if you just have one and you can focus on them completely. I haven't done so much of this because you know, many of the kids are less into cuisines that I might also wish to eat. But I mean I've taken a lot of kids to Italian restaurants. I've taken my you know, Sam, my thirteen year old to Japanese restaurants, and I want to take Jasper out to a Brazilian steakhouse. But I think the others might want to go to that too, So we'll see. This is something I should probably start doing more of. I just need to, you know, get organized and make it happen. In our case, it could either be that you know, Michael was covering because as he's been doing a lot more working from home, that's more of a feasible option. Our nanny also works until seven a couple of nights a week, so because we do have younger kids, getting us through the dinner thing is often really helpful not to have to drag him around to activities as well. And so you know, an early dinner would work on a night where I wasn't driving, for instance. So yeah, I think it's a great idea. And yes, you have our full permission to use childcare for not working time. I mean, I'm just going to throw out here that there are people who are not employed who use childcare for very things. Especially I know a lot of you know, families who have multiple kids, and you know, maybe mom isn't currently employed, but they still have at least part time childcare precisely because of all the driving and such. So throw that out there. You are welcome to use it for things that are not your exact like twenty minutes outside your work hours and no more. It's all good, all right, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Laura overdeck about bedtime math and making math more fun in our households. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.