Interview Series Part 2: Sarah Interviews Laura

Published Nov 24, 2020, 10:00 AM

The tables are turned, and now Sarah gets to ask Laura some of the same fun (yet revealing) questions, and also adds in some different ones! Laura reveals the inner core of her middle school self, some little known intel on the family pet, her most-eaten meals, her thoughts on the various stages of parenting, and also gets to allocate a theoretical $1M gift. There is an unexpected tangent into science and anthropology that is quite interesting, too!  

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Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. 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 one hundred and seventy three. Last week Sarah was sharing all about her life as I interviewed her, and so this week she is interviewing me. So, Sarah, let me know what I should tell you. Well, I can't resist starting with the question that you gave me, which I thought opened window to my soul. Tell me about middle school, Laura, Oh, my goodness. Yes. So we moved when I was in middle school. So I started. I did sixth grade in North Carolina and I moved then summer before seventh grade and started seventh grade in Indiana, South Bend, Indiana, and this school had some issues which I could now see, you know, as standard, Like I was a nerdy girl, you know, I was going to stand out for that regardless and being new on some level, I mean it was it was two schools coming together for seventh grade. So it wasn't like everyone to each other, but a lot of people did in fact know each other, and so I was new in town as well, and you know, it was not really the best time of my life, I guess we could say. I and partly I had worked ahead a bit in my previous school, so that had been a school that was more oriented toward accelerating people. So when I got to this new middle school in Indiana, among other things that happened is that I was given a math book in seventh grade and just told to sit in a table by myself and teach myself. And so I tried. It was hard. I kind of lost much of the year. And it's had this horrible thing that would then happen when we had substitutes. Like so I was sitting in the back, like looking at this book, you know, by myself, at the table by myself. We had a substitute. They started screaming at me, like I was being you know, you know, unsubordinate, insubordinate how do you say it? Uh, So that had to get worked out that in fact, this was what I was supposed to be doing. And so then I offer I proceeded to then make fun of me every day for the entire time that the sub was there. Yeah. So anyway, Wow, Then in eighth grade, the school, you know, through various things. I'm sure my parents had part of this too. I wound up taking a bus every day over to the high school and doing math over there. And now you have a middle schooler. Yes, but we're in a district that is more oriented toward academic you know things. I also think, I think we're in a different time, like I think maybe the Nerds Day Nerds Day just early oh gosh, you know. And well, what's funny about this, I think about, you know, personality, how this shapes is. I'm not sure that my competitive strengths aren't necessarily in math. I would say that I am better at writing than I am at math. But that's what you become known for, because that's the thing that then stands out that people are prepared to sort of recognize as a difference than somebody or that should be at least dealt with. And so yeah, it's sort of odd to me that I, you know, here, I am a professional writer and everything. I've spent my middle school years being known as the math nerd. So there you go. Interesting, all right, the math nerd. I love it. I like you though I joined the cheerleading squad. We'll build it all out there. But in your case it was to be. It was totally it didn't work. So what is the meal you eat most often? Well, probably pizza because you know, kids insist on having make your own pizza night. We either dons, you know, we almost never do delivery of stuff, but we do the frozen pizzas in the oven, so the kids will have Adjorno's cheese pizza. And if we've thought I had, my husband and I have some nicer freezer pizza that we've we've gotten with more adult toppings. Or we do make your own pizza where we have the dough and then we can put our own toppings on it. So yeah, we we sometimes do steak on the weekends, like Michael will grill steak. We probably have that fairly frequently as well. So both both good meals not bad to you know, eat frequently. Yeah, I like both of those things, especially pizza. Okay, what is one thing about parenting that has surprised you? Not necessarily something you're surprised that you do, although you can you can do that, but just in general, let's see, you know, I think I spent a lot of time babysitting, so a lot of the kid's stuff was more you know, not not so surprising for me. I guess I certainly did not like pregnancy at all. I would say that you don't know how icky it is. On the outside. It looks like, you know, nice glowing round people, and it's like, no, you know this other human being inside you that is battling for space and they're kicking and punching you constantly, and you know you're uncomfortable and such for much of the time. But you know, then you get a really cool cut out of it. And I obviously knew I liked kids, so that's the that's a that's a good part about it. I like to think I'm a fairly laid back parent. I know that I probably would come across as given that I'm right about time management, productivity. People might think I'm A type A kind of person, and I am one hundred percent not in much of my life. I very much like, yeah, it'll be okay, we'll deal with it. Most things aren't that big a deal. Is that more in parenting or in general? Probably many things. You know, parenting gives you more opportunity to see that, just because there are many opportunities too for things to go wrong. But you know it's you know, bad grades, they happen, fights they happen, you know, things get lost, but one way or another, you keep powering through. And so yeah, I don't know if I thought I would be slightly more type A than I am, but I just you know, life's too short. I love it. Okay, Well, laid back parent, tell me about what you think your first big travel adventure as a family of seven will be. Well, let's see once things open back up. I don't know how many trips we will take as all seven of us. I mean we do some sort of general family stuff, like I think we're going to go skiing this winter. I think, barring you know, new developments, so going someplace for a couple of days, seven all seven. But obviously the baby's not gonna ski, so I'll be just like in the house with the baby all the time while Michael's out with the other kids doing skiing. So but you know, in the future, I think we may split up some. I think we may not bring the baby on some trips in order to let the big kids do some fun stuff that they will not be able to otherwise. I mean, you think about stuff like amusement parks, they are really so much better for kids who are aged five and up than under age five, and so with those, I'd like to do them without the baby. I think I'd like to do more international trips, you know, with the older kids. For instance, I did a trip not internationally because we can't really do that right now, but you know, in the US with the big three kids in mid September, and that was a lot of fun. I think I'll do some of that with that split, knowing that I will probably get to do a lot of travel with Alex and Henry when they are the only two kids who are home. So I anticipate doing some more you know, spring break and summer and Christmas trips, maybe internationally with them when they're teenagers and my older kids have moved out, So I think it's okay that they're not getting to do some of that stuff maybe now and then. Yeah, so anywhere is a pain, Like it's just hard, Like you can't even rent cars some places that have space for all of you. So that's why I was so curious, like is there going to be a party bus for your family? But you know, when we went to London with the three big kids in two thousand and eighteen, like we could, we had such a hard time renting a hotel room because you couldn't rent a hotel rooms for five people. You couldn't even really rent them for four. So we kept finding out like we had to do two everywhere. So I mean, if like you could only do three people in a hotel room, places like we're having three rooms. We don't even have that many adults. Like how, I don't know, it's there's all sorts of limitations here. I think you may be a vrbob all right, so what this is along the same veins? I don't know why I was in a vacation questioning mind, what is your most and least favorite disney World rides? You can sell Disneyland, Well, we've been to Disney World more off in the Disneyland. So you know, I really like stuff like Avatar Flight of Passage, Like you know, you're flying, it feels like you're flying and you are looking at the screen these beautiful scenes that make it feel like you are really traveling in a way that you wouldn't otherwise. So you're flying on your banshee through Pandora. I really like that one. I also just like the these are both at Animal Kingdom, by the way, the Kilimanjaro Safari, just because I mean seeing game in the wild and I'm putting that in quote March you guys can't see this, but you're in Disney, so it's not really the wild. But Michael and I went to Africa on our honeymoon and it was really cool to see animals from a jeep. And you know, with Disney you're getting to see all of them. You don't have to drive for six hours to see all the animals, I you know, or you could go walk by tigers or something. So those are really cool. In terms of ones, I dislike anything that's like really spinning or drive, so like the teacups, like you know, I mean, why would you ever go to anyone just to go on the teacups, but people do because they're like in Disney or whatever. Those just just make me feel sick. Or any sort of tilta whorl type, you know, thing that's not right at Disney, but anything that spins a lot, just I try to get the kids to go on by themselves or try to convince Michael to take them. Okay, what is your favorite distance and place to run? Well, I mean I like running slightly long. You know, past ten miles starts to hurt, but probably somewhere between five and ten miles is good to feel like you've really done a workout, but you've not killed yourself for the next six days or something like that. So you know, doing a ten k or something like that is probably a good distance anywhere that's really beautiful. I mean, right now I'm doing a lot of trail runs just around my house because we're recording this in late October, which is peak leaf season. So even just running on a trail, you know, half a mile from my house is just this gorgeous autumn scenery, which I really love. But overall in life, I love to run on the beach. So anytime that I am near a beach and can run. One of my favorite runs ever was when we were on vacation in San Diego and we were near the beach and I was able to go run along the cliffs for about five miles or so and it was just gorgeous, I mean utterly gorgeous to run with the drop to this pounding Pacific surf, the wide open sky, and you know, I love it. So it makes you feel like you could run forever. Sounds amazing. We're going to take a quick break, and I just made up a new fun question. Okay, my new made up fun question. If your family was going to get a pet, and maybe they already have one that I don't know about, what would the pet be. Well, we have fish. We have a hermit crab named Luna. So Luna is a little Luna Conway has been charted around to various things my poor kids, because I don't really want any other pets. We had a Blessing of the Animals service outdoors at church and Ruth, who is the owner of Luna, brought Luna to be blessed. So Luna Conway, the permit crab, has received his or her blessing. I don't really know. Permit crabs you know their gender, and yeah, that's what I would stay at. But my family is working really, really really hard on the dog. Michael is working from home for the foreseeable future, which means that until the dog is in a position of being trained like I would not have to deal with it. We have identified one child, namely Sam, who wants to take full responsibility for it, so it's not one of these diffuse things like who wants to empty the dishwasher. Nobody wants totand up the dishwasher, and they definitely want to argue about who is not doing it if your siblings are doing it, So we shall see. It may happen. I am not excited about that possibility. But if I don't have to do anything, which I know that many people have said that that's an impossibility, like Mom always winds up doing everything that I've said, Like if I wind up doing everything, we're going to have to find another home for the dog, Like I'm not doing this, but if they are willing to take that on, my husband is the backstop, then I guess that it may happen. Wow, that was not expected, but exciting. Okay, we're going to go back to babyhood. What was your shortest and longest period nursing a child, And do you think you'll be the longest with your last one because it's like the last one. Yeah, that tends to happen with the last one, doesn't it. So currently, of the older four, Jasper was the shortest, and partly that's just because he was my first and it, you know, never I didn't know as much about what I was doing to sort of keep milk levels up, like you know, in my mind, since I was working from home, I didn't need something like a pump because you know, I'm working from home. I just nurse the baby when I have to. But then if you miss any feedings, you're behind, and so it very quickly catches up with you. I didn't know that you should pump an extra bottle a day just to keep it up, which I knew for the second one, and then that made it much easier. So Jasper was two about eleven months, but that last sort of two or three months was very minimal, just you know, once at night in the morning. Ruth we were to eighteen months. She would probably have gone for a long long time, but that seemed, you know, okay, eighteen months there. Yeah, Henry may goo for a while. I mean we're at ten months now. He is actually still nursing a lot. You know, he gets a pumped bottle in midday. We've sort of worked that out so I have less interruptions. But you know, I do morning, afternoon, night, middle of the night, sometimes multiple times middle of the night. And you know, I think the daytime ones will end in the next you know, probably by one, right, that's when that tends to go, and then he'll be eating more sort of switch over to milk for that. But the nighttime and morning ones, I don't see any real reason to stop that anytime soon, especially since I'm not traveling apart from him all that much, you know, except for if I again, like if you do fun trips with the big kids, So yeah, I could. I could see that going probably to at least you know, eighteen months, like I did with Ruth, and then we'll see from there. Awesome, All right, what do I have here? Well, I'm going to also throw you a dinner party, and you are going with your husband, but you can invite any four other people that you would like. Who would they be? Yeah? See, this is hard because I don't know if there's like famous people that would really be all that. I mean, you know, it could be fun to have somebody who would probably be a good conversationalist if they were in their professional mode, like somebody like you know Oprah or you know any of the hosts of like you know Savannah Guthrie or you know, these these people who do televisions, they have like they do their life professionally talking with people, but you know, they probably don't keep that up in their social engagements. I'm not sure. You know, it'd be fun just to get together with friends. I like, I like having dinner with friend. You know, it's fun to have dinner with you and Josh, for instance. I enjoyed that, you know, so I'd probably be more oriented toward toward things like that, just you know, having a dinner with friends, rather than you know, somebody famous or powerful or historical or I mean, maybe if I could bring back Virginia Wolf but she promised not to be crazy like during our dinner, I don't know, we'll see that is awesome, Yeah, I had. I mean, I thought through this one. Not to hijack your interview, but I thought through and I was having trouble too, because the people that you're really excited to see that would be kind of intimidating. So that's kind of hard. It's like you wouldn't relax. Like I was like, what if I spill wine on myself? Like Michelle Obama? I like, this is great, And I'm like what if I have like spin it to my teeth? Like So, I mean, it would be cool to meet some of these people, but you know, if we're talking like a dinner party, I guess it's just a different vibe. Okay, so low key friend dinner party. All right? Do you I think you asked me this as well, But do you ever imagining? Do you ever imagine retiring or do you think that you will continue to write and speak forever? Like do you have an end goal in mind? Or just one day at a time? Yeah, I mean I I don't see myself ending writing because that's just so much a part of who I am is just creating content about stuff and expressing myself in that way. Now, whether I would do it in the format that I currently do is a different matter. I mean, speaking I enjoy, but you know, I probably would not find myself interested in getting on a plane for a one hour speech in Chicago to some group that whatever you know at age seventy five, like, I feel like I will get tired of that. But you know, it's both of us have chosen careers that it's not really one hundred percent about you know, the money or anything like that, and so it's a separate question from whether you need to work or not. If you enjoy what you do and you really see it as the way you contribute to the world, then there's no reason to stop doing that. And I think in both of our cases we've continued doing it even during a time that I think socially many people would have been accepting of us, saying, oh, well, I shouldn't be doing this now and there's something else I should be doing in terms of like you know, raising children full time for instance, that we've kept doing it during time when it would have been you know, there would have been an out if we wanted to write. And so no, I don't. I don't think I would ever stop writing. I plan to keep doing that. Okay, good, because I want to just keep reading. Your book would be like time management for eighty year olds, like what I'm doing eighty year olds are going to need some specific advice geared to their age group. In fact, that might work right differ things like I, you know, maybe I'll allow myself to get more eccentric in my old age and we'll write about whatever random thing I want to. I just came up with your next How about like relaxed parenting lessons from a mom of five? There's something to that, but file that one. Okay. The one million dollar charitable gift is now in your hands to distribute. So where's it going? Yeah, So, I mean I've thought about this, you know. I definitely like things like, you know, if I'm doing locally. I think there's a big need for like food pantries and stuff, especially now, and a million isn't enough to do much. But I think if you concentrated it locally, if I gave to food pantries in Philadelphia and New Jersey, like, it would make a difference, and in a small geographic place now sort of longer term, as I'm thinking about those, and maybe if we added a zero or two to this number, I like these. There are a couple of programs out there that provide fellowships for cool ideas and the idea is, you know, you give say a somewhere like you know, fifty to one hundred thousand dollars a year as a stipend for somebody who's doing something really cool, so they can you know, scale it up, like they have a little bit of time to make the idea bigger, to you know, bring other people on board for it. And so one of the things that I've always thought is kind of my economics thing here is is using more like free market economic principles, the libertarian side of me in here for solving social problems. And one, you know, I think I'm thinking about this. I interviewed a hedge fund manager many many years ago who among the charitable things he was doing was a program that paid math teachers extra. And the idea was that if you are coming out of college and you have a math degree, you have a different set of options and jobs available to you than if you are coming out of college with let's say an English degree. And so if you want to go teach, you are taking more of a pay cut than the people who have a degree that is not necessarily as associated with with high paid things. And so in order to get really good people into teaching math. He would pay them more. And you know, like school systems can't do that very easily in terms of collective bargaining. It's very difficult to pay some matter teachers more or things like that. But somebody coming in from the outside, sure, why not, they can give them money. And so that was what he was doing. And I thought that was a really cool idea as a way to like raise the caliber of you know, math teachers for instance. So but that's like the kind of thing that I think would be a really I would want to find ideas like that and fund the people who had come up with them, who you know, then they could bring in other people as well, so that you know, and bring in other sources of funding, and they could network with each other too. Like that would be part of the fellowship program, is that, you know, we'd all get to gather twice during the year and talk about their ideas. Free Market Economics Foundation Fellowship, the Vanderkamp, the Vanderkam Fellows. Yes, I got a Vandercam to do this. That's not kind of good, I gotta say, Well, I love that. Okay, Well I'm also going too since we do have a few minutes left ask you the other great question you asked, which is, and it may be similar along the ones of what you just mentioned, but what strikes your eye when you are looking at mag seen titles or you're browsing and your clickbaiting, like what what gets you all excited to click on it? Clickbait? Is different than what I've What I've been randomly obsessed with lately is reading about early human evolution. I don't know if you saw that one coming, but a little because if your reading reports a little of that theme in your boot blogs, there are in the course of human history there were other human like species that were on the Earth concurrently with Homo sapiens in some cases and in some cases private prior to Homo sapiens, and we're just like learning about them now, Like the Neanderthals, the Denisovans. You know, there's Homo Heidelborganzas, the Flora, the Floris island in Indonesia, there was like this hobbit species of humanoids. So there's all this crazy stuff and you know, in one vers version of human history that you think of as like oh well, you know, coming up from chimpanzees like this straightforward evolution, but it wasn't like that at all, Like there were species that came and then it went extinct, and that there were you know, then genetic mutations that branched off, and then there are others and so then what led to the point where then you know, Homo sapiens became the last ones about forty thousand years ago. And there's many theories, but a lot of it's speculation because we don't really know. I mean, we're basing this based on like a set of knuckle bones and a layer of ash found in a cave somewhere in you know, Iraq, right, Like that's what the level of you know, the fossil evidence that's there, and so people have to speculate like what happened. And so I find the Neanderthals just fascinating. And so I've read like literally five books in the last month on early human origins and so that's my current topic of obsession. But I go through these like I went through a Civil War phase like two years ago that I read like literally ten books on the Civil War are from different not not perspectives by good different people who were in it, like you know, different grants, memoirs, like you know, Frederick Olmsted, who also designed Central Park, was also a correspondent who traveled around the Antebellum South and wrote all sorts of things dispatches from his time there. So that was fascinating to read. You know. Anyway, what is one of those theories about how about what about how how the Homo sapiens went out? Well, so, I mean there's idea that the ancestors of Homo sapiens were sort of evolving in Africa, there was like a bottleneck at some point, like it went down to very small numbers. But at the same time, you know, there had been a spread of this Heidelbergenza species into Europe and that evolved into the Neanderthals. And then something happened around fifty thousand years ago that that you know, they were able to capitalize the Homo sapiens were able to capitalize on their cultural advantages, on their brains, developing new things, and they were able to spread out and as they came into Europe and other places, they just you know, displaced another species. Same as you know, there's evidence when when Homo sapiens came into across the land bridge from Asia into the Americas, like all the massive megafauna died out within about like a thousand years of them getting there, and it's probably the exact same thing that happened, Like, you know, the competition for resources with other humans is just like you know, humans reproduced slowly, so if there's one fewer baby per year, like a species will die out. And the same thing of like if you were hunting one more mammoth a year than you should have, like the mammoths will die out. So it's probably a very similar dynamic. We're like displacers. That's so interesting, although in the case of the Neanderthals, there were things that happened in the course of the displacing, which is why there's a lot of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans as well. Yes, I've read you can actually find out like how much much the handles all you are. I think I'm saying it wrong though it's supposed to be neander tal or something because it's German. But Peo will accept multiple pronunciations on this podcast. Well, that was fascinating. You're right, that wasn't a deep dive I necessarily expected. Well, one last question. We're twenty eight minutes in what is your love of the week this week doing date nights again? Oh my goodness, Like you know, it had been seven months, and then we realized that we have a window of time on like Monday evenings that works. And so for the past you know, a couple of weeks, like every other week or so, we've gone out to a local restaurant. It's not very full or you can sit outside, and it's kind of sad. I think a lot of these restaurants will not be here in a few months, which is horrible and terrible, but you know, doing what we can to try to get back out there eating at some of them. And it's been really nice to have some time when the kids are not on top of us, you know. Although curiously enough, we now actually have some time during the work day when there's no kids on top of us because there are a few hours of overlap when all the kids are now at school. So there you go, Well that is wonderful. Well, this was fascinating. We learned all about bad Disney World rides and Laura's soon to be foundation someday, as well as yes, exactly some anthropology stuck in there. So that was fascinating. We'll have to do this again exactly. I enjoyed this and I enjoyed interviewing you last week, so there we go. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. This episode, Sarah has been interviewing me. We'll be back next week with more on making work in 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.

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