Living in Scotland

We live in Aberdeen, which is as far north as Moscow. That makes for some dark winter days.

Whenever I tell people that we live in Scotland, they practically get stars in their eyes and ask if it is wonderful.  Sometimes I say yes, sometimes no (it really depends on my mood), but I can always picture what they’re imagining.  If I am feeling particularly rude, I might mention that we don’t live in a castle, next door to Sean Connery or James McAvoy.  We live in a small flat that is cold more often than not.  We get more rain that I could ever have imagined, which does lend itself to lush vegetation and green, rolling hills.  However, we don’t always get to get out and actually enjoy aforementioned backdrops due to the cold, the wetness, and the dark.  While summers are great with a sunrise at 3 or 4am and a sunset at 10 or 11pm, the exact opposite is true for winter.  This morning, I didn’t even bother to open the blinds until 8:30am because there was no point.  We don’t even have to close the blinds to go to sleep November-February because I can guarantee that NO SUNLIGHT will be peeking through during that time.

How much sunlight do you get in winter?

The worst most extreme days are when the sun rises at 9am and sets at 3pm.  That means that Scottish children walk to and from school in the dark.   The peak is December 21st- we get 4 minutes back a day form that point forward: 2 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon.  I personally celebrate those 4 minutes- 4×7=28 minutes a week!  In all seriousness, that much darkness is tough.  Many people suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD).  In everyday terms, SAD is when people feel depressed as a result of the seasons.  Usually, it is the winter’s lack of light that affects people.

How do we cope with so much daylight in the summer and so little in the winter?

Well, these are opposite issues, but I’ll list a few things that keep us sane:

1. Kids tend to sleep more in the winter and less in the summer.  Deal with it, whether you like it or not.  Something about Circadian Rhythm, but their bodies adjust nicely.  We enjoy this and take advantage- if the sun is out, why not delay bedtime or a nap?
2. We usually get to go home (Texas) once a year.  We plan this trip for the winter- we try to overlap it with Thanksgiving and Christmas, so we can enjoy those days with family and miss a lot of the darkness.  This doesn’t work for everyone’s schedule/work, but it’s what works for us.
3. We never travel home during the summer.  Since school is year-round here anyway, there are lots of breaks that aren’t just in the summer we can take advantage of (such as Christmas, see #2), while staying home to enjoy the extra degrees and sun in the summer months.
4. To preserve sleep, we invested in blackout blinds.  They are worth every pound.  I prefer the velcro kind that adheres directly to the window so as to literally black out a room.  While it’s kind of a pain to initially install the velcro strips, once installed the blinds are easy to take off and on.
5. On the flip side, light therapy can be useful, especially if you’re prone to SAD.  My friends call it a “happy light“- true to its name, this happy light keeps us happy instead of wallowing in misery.
6. If there’s a sunny day in the winter (or the summer for that matter!), we drop everything and enjoy it.  There is time to work later, but you can’t count on the sun this far north.
7. We also find that having something to look forward to is helpful: a play date, a real date, movie night, downloaded TV shows from home, a trip, a visit from family, etc.  It keeps our minds off the dreary weather.

Hope that helps anyone out there who hates the winter as much as I do!

I have always prided myself on being efficient.  Give me 30 minutes where I’m not taking care of children (or my husband, for that matter), and I can conquer the world.  I love the feeling of accomplishment and that sweet satisfaction it brings me as I fall asleep.  In fact, one of the hardest things about moving to the UK was the lack of efficiency.  I’m not trying to be the stereotypical arrogant American, but I will say that a country that rains more than Seattle, gets less sun than anywhere I’ve been, and is as far north as Moscow does not seem to be the ideal place to not have clothes dryers.  I can handle not having dishwater- I can physically scrub, rinse, and dry them myself in less time than a dishwasher, so that’s NBD to me at all.  However, I can not physically air dry my clothes.  There is nothing I can do to speed up this process.   Granted using the radiators does help, but that also costs us- we joke that we’re here for a PhD, not an MD.

I digress, as usual.  My point is this- part of being efficient is multitasking.  Why not make a phone call while washing dishes (that’s what the shoulder is there for, right?)?  Or, why not prep dinner while the kids munch a snack and are relatively contained?  Or why not watch a girly DVD while on the elliptical?  I guess for me, I kind of got to the point where it was getting more challenging to draw hard and fast boundaries.  I mean, I stay at home so I can rear our kids.  That’s the point of me giving up the job I loved- it wasn’t a hard choice for me- I loved my kids more.  For me, that was the best choice.

So, I find that the god of efficiency (and therefore multitasking) has robbed us of quality time and even thorough results. For example, that phone call while washing dishes was not as thoughtful as it could have been.  The dishes weren’t as clean as they should have been.  That time with the kids sitting, smiling, and enjoying life was missed while I cut some vegetables that could have waited.  I am beginning to agree with this website:

Simply put, multitasking is trying to do too many things at once… Pressure in the modern workplace leads many of us to think that if we can do two things at once, we could save time, take on more and be more satisfied. What actually happens is that more mistakes are made, so we have to do tasks more than once, effectively lowering our achievement levels and creating frustration for those we work with and ourselves.

Now, I’m the first to admit that efficiency and multitasking can be very valuable resources, especially in the workforce.  Obviously, I am at home with my kids, but while one goes to preschool, the other naps, and that is when I work- than and after they go to bed.  I do love time with my husband, too, so getting as much done in as little time possible is essential for us.  However, I am not willing to sign off on lower quality work.  For me, I just need some time and a quiet place to think, free from distractions (don’t put me close to a sink, or I’ll try to get to work there, too).  I’ve found that sometimes I just need to focus on one task at hand and do that one thing well.

Being a mom and working from home isn't always as seamless as I'd like.

I work from home.  This sounded like such a good idea – my husband can do his thing, I can do mine and still take care of our little ones.  It has been a lot more challenging than I anticipated to say the least.

Here is a slice of daily “work” (in no particular order)

-Mama, I need you to check my bottom – 2 minutes to enter bathroom where 3 year old is bottom-up

-mailman knocks on door – 1 minute to explain he has come to _____ Road, not _____ Street, which is why the address is wrong

-mail contains info on getting kids’ swine flu shots – 5 minutes to read, 5 minutes to email husband to get his thoughts on whether we do the dreaded jabs

-daughter wants to play Clifford game before Mommy “works” – 15 minutes

-cell phone buzzes its sad little low-energy buzz – 2 minutes to find it, 1 minute to plug it in

-phone actually rings – 2 minutes to go see who it is and decide to ignore it b/c I’m supposed to be working

-3 year old needs one millionth toy she can’t reach in her “room time” – 1 1/2 minutes to chastise her for yelling down the stairs that connect to 1 year old’s room that has no door and which houses him sleeping (hopefully) and 3 minutes to go upstairs and retrieve said toy

-stare at passers-by through living room window- 1 minute

It all adds up (38 1/2 minutes) – and that was just the first 40 minutes of me sitting down to work.  I’m not kidding.  I’m still thrilled to be a stay-at-home mom, but I can see why few want to hire us.  We’re not very focused.  Who continues to crunch numbers, for example, if her 2 year old is throwing up on the new carpet?  (“Just a sec honey – hold it in, just one more minute while Mommy hits save…”)

Here are a few of the things I do to actually be a mom and accomplish my work:

1.  Work during sleep times/parent during wake times.  I don’t care how tired I’ll be, my kids will only be young once, and I am not going to miss it.

2.  Coordinate their naps – even if it means hard work.  Since I had #2, I have worked from home.  From the day I brought him home, he and my older one have slept at the same time- not for the same amount of time, but they go down at the same time.  Now that my older one has dropped her nap, she has “room time” where she plays by herself in her room.  This gives me work time, her a break, as well as a creative outlet that all the experts say is necessary for a well-balanced child.

3.  Turn off the phones/ringers.  I can call back later.

4.  Check email at beginning of work time to see if there’s anything urgent, then close it out, so I don’t see new ones coming in.

5.  Use white noise.  It helps drone out the neighbors and gives a peaceful hum that keeps me task-oriented.  (Here is a free white noise generator I like that you can try out.)

6.  Set reasonable expectations and goals and communicate those with boss – I can only accomplish so much during my work hours.  It’s important that my employer know my situation and know that my kids come first (so does my husband for that matter).

7.  Honor my work schedule/commitment – if it’s 10 hrs/week, work 10 hrs/week.  I am creative as to how I get it in (such as going to a coffee shop on a Sat morning, which is a welcome break for me from a normal day or working all during the week so that I have the weekend off), but I always honor my commitment, which keeps me employed.

8.  No computers from 5-7pm.  These are the fussy times for the kids and when my husband comes home.  My family gets my time when they need it, no question.  (My husband has the same rule and our marriage has changed as a result – we pay more attention to each other and the children, and we all have thrived.)

Is this website something you could have written (minus the reference to TS Eliot anyway)?

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

You probably could have written the 1st paragraph, if not the second.  How about the next two, though?

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

The example cited above is pretty severe, but it does remind us how unproductive and potentially dangerous distraction is.

What distracts you?  Is it as simple as noisy coworkers or as complicated as trying to accomplish too many things at one time?  What can you do to limit your distractions and live life more fully?  Really- think about it.

Oh my gosh.  I thought I would never get off that plane.  Babies were screaming nonstop- seriously.  And they weren’t even mine (I did bring 2, so that was a relief).  When my littlest one finally quit squirming and pointing at anything illuminated and saying “yight” and actually started to snooze (thereby allowing me much-needed rest), another child would wail…or a man would cough for the 100th time…or the flight attendant would loudly ask if I wanted something to drink…regardless of intent, they all interrupted any semblance of peace.  So, we did finally disembark and head toward our flat in Scotland.

Oh, our flat…while I really do enjoy life in the UK, it is not exactly peaceful.  I have mentioned before that my children are less than quiet.  Lying in bed trying to get over jet-lag, listening to hear if my children were struggling to sleep, I was shocked to hear how many noises assaulted me- car doors slamming, our neighbors having a conversation next door, the  local dogs yapping, the garbage cans being dragged out to the street, etc.  I said I was shocked- that’s because we normally use a white noise machine to drone out the ambient sounds.  However, this time (last  night), we couldn’t risk it since we had to be attentive parents for the sake of our jet-lagged children.

So, this is my ode to white noise.  Thank you for blocking out life so that I can sleep.  We will meet again soon.

Getting distracted at work can be pretty dangerous….and possibly embarrassing.

When I’m distracted at work, I don’t fall out of my chair or cause a computer to become animate and literally jump off my desk.  Maybe it’s because I’m your average female and don’t stare at men walking by.   Or maybe that’s not true at all.  I may be happily married and thus uninterested in checking guys out, but I do stare at people…a lot.  I look at their clothes and hair, picture a similar style on myself and either store it for future implementation or discard it altogether, possibly feeling pity for the poor soul currently wearing said style.  Regardless, I do find myself distracted quite a bit, and not just visually.  In fact, it’s conversational distractions that get me the most.  Never mind my resolution to gossip less, throw some juicy tidbit in my ear shot, and I am a goner.  Bless my heart- and the person’s being maligned.

What about you?  What distracts you?

This many windows in a row is not a quiet affair.

Life in the UK

My family of 4 lives in a flat in the UK.  This is our 5th place to live.  You see, each time we have changed careers or started a new grad school or had a baby (twice), we have moved.  We have owned 3 houses, 1 condo, and now we live in a flat that we let by the year until my husband completes his PhD.  Each place has had its own challenges, but this last move really got to me.  We were able to enjoy the symphony of flat life: crying babies, angst-ridden teenagers, domestic disputes that inevitably ended in raised voices and slamming doors, and hungry seagulls…not to mention our own noises.  Good grief.  Hubby needed to study, kids needed to sleep, and  I needed to work.  Noisy seagulls and angry teenagers skipping class outside my window were not exactly my idea of a peaceful nap time or a productive work environment.

So how did I reclaim my peace of mind?

White noise.  I’ll say it again- I love white noise.  I wish we had a better word in English to explain my admiration for this phenomenal invention.  Simply put, white noise adds just enough low-level background sound to cover intruding sounds.  I can turn it up or down as I need, and there are even units that self-adjust to cover varying levels of distracting noise. There are lots of options- some for the kids while they rest, some for better focus while we work or study, etc.  Here is a free one you can try out to see for yourself.  I think you’ll agree- white noise is fabulous. 

Good-bye seagulls.  Hello peace.