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Episode 162: How to Be Intentional in Marriage, Parenting & Business
903 Plays2 years ago
Find it quickly:
0:00 - Intro + the stress of moving
6:15 - What to do when interruptions happen in life
8:00 - Accepting the limitations of time
9:15 - What to do when it feels like life is preventing you from reaching your goals
10:15 - How to be more efficient if you don't have kids yet
13:11 - What they regret about their pre-kid life
14:05 - A+J's daily routine and priorities
16:45 - The importance of a strong marriage
17:45 - How to structure your day around your priorities
21:00 - Defining your legacy
23:00 - How to set boundaries to avoid regrets
26:00 - A+J's morning routine
29:15 - How to stay productive during the workday (make every minute count)
33:10 - Managing kids' expectations about work
34:00 - What is the bottom line impact of limiting your work time
34:55 - Batching tasks and the truth about multi-tasking
38:00 - Focusing on needle-moving tasks
40:00 - How to incorporate new habits
42:00 - Establishing a smooth bedtime routine
46:05 - Why the bedtime routine with kids matters
50:00 - How to carve good habits
54:00 - Teaching kids to do hard things (any why it's important)
59:55 - Is it too late to instill these habits in older kids?
1:01:11 - Impact of nutrition and exercise
1:10:45 - Turning off the tv
1:14:10 - What to do if you feel guilty about being a working parent
Show notes and additional resources can be found at https://daveyandkrista.com/intentional-marriage-parenting-business/
Recommended
Transcript
Defining Personal Success
00:00:05
Speaker
what is most important to us in life and then fit everything else in around it. And I think it's important to define success for you and don't define or measure your success by someone else's standard or worse your perception about their standard based on what you see on social media. Because I think it is so easy to look at other people's lives and to try to do all the things that everybody is doing.
Introduction to the Show
00:00:33
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
Marriage and Family Life
00:00:43
Speaker
Amy and Jordan are back on the podcast to chat marriage, time management, working from home with kids, and so much more. Longtime listeners might remember that Amy and Jordan were the very first guests on the Brands That Book podcast and that we chatted about a similar topic, but it was a different season of life. It was pre-kids. So it was fun to catch up with them on what life looks like now as they expect their third.
00:01:06
Speaker
Conversations with Amy and Jordan are some of my favorite. I'm really excited to share this episode and hear what y'all think. For anyone unfamiliar with Amy and Jordan, their photographers and educators and their photography education is some of the best in the industry. Be sure to check out all that they have to offer over at AmyAndJordan.com.
Listener Feedback Request
00:01:24
Speaker
And be sure to check out the show notes at davianchrista.com for the resources that we mentioned during the episode. We want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see on the brand set book podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram at Davian Christo. Now onto the episode.
Stress of Moving
00:01:46
Speaker
I'm really interested in hearing more about your move from Arizona to Tennessee. And we just moved three hours away. But I think moving is one of the most stressful, like low key stressful things. And by low key, I mean, it's just
00:02:02
Speaker
I don't think I realized how stressed I was during that six months leading up to the move and then after the move until I was out of that season, you know, and I look back. It's kind of like having your first child, right? Like, I don't know if I realized how much or how little sleep I was surviving on until my first night of sleep and looking back and being like, oh, wow, how did I do that?
00:02:25
Speaker
Right. And then the worst part is the brain blocks it out. And so it's one of those things where it's like the brain blocks it out and you're like, that wasn't that bad. That really wasn't that bad. Which is also so true about newborn life and moving. But then when you see people who are in like the first few weeks of the newborn, like around weeks three and four of having a new baby, when you see them and you're the outsider looking in, you're like, Oh, they're struggling.
00:02:45
Speaker
I remember that. It's the same thing with moving. I remember in college I was in like a human development class where they listed the top most stressful life events for a human and like what would trigger the most anxiety in a human being and it was like death in the family and moving was like right up there with death in the family which seems so extreme but I do think now experiencing a cross-country move with little kids looking back it was kind of I feel like the
00:03:11
Speaker
perfect parallel. You nailed it. Davey is the newborn experience. It's almost like you don't realize how hard it is while you're in the middle of it. And then you look back and you're like, how did I survive that? That was a lot. Yeah. And I think especially when you, you know, when you're sleeping on like a mattress on the ground and you've got like paper shades, you know, over your windows, that's like good for like a month or two while you're transitioning. But when, if you're going on like six or eight months and it's like every time you try to order a bed on Wayfair, it's like, Oh, sorry, that's out of stock. Yeah.
00:03:39
Speaker
We experience that too and i mean we've had a few mutual friends to that moved in the same time and the supply chain issues and trying to get house furnish it's like finally the house is built like what i have no furniture to go and do it you know because there's something very disorienting about being in a house that doesn't have a lot of furniture yet because of the echo right it's just the sound just travels differently and i mean for the first like months that we were in our house we're getting off a card table with fold up chairs and
00:04:09
Speaker
you just kind of you're just kind of making do yeah yeah it was definitely a wild transition but we don't regret it at all we've just really loved planting new roots here in tennessee and experiencing seasons for the first time we could have probably done without the fire flood and near death covet experience but like other than that other than that it was so this minor things
Finding Gratitude in Chaos
00:04:30
Speaker
your your core literally being in a fireball
00:04:33
Speaker
just casually went up in flames with our U-Haul attached to it. But we were just so thankful that everybody, nobody was hurt. And none of our stuff, I mean, of course, our car did go up in flames and was completely totaled. But that was all we lost. It was just a car, nothing else. We didn't lose our photo albums. We didn't lose our baby crib and all the sentimental things that were attached.
00:04:54
Speaker
to that you also we just feel so thankful because back it of course is very curious when he started hearing jordan i talking about our car being on fire he was right by us when we got the call and so we were just trying to tell back it like this is the day that god protected us and all of our friends and all of our things.
00:05:11
Speaker
and a car is just a thing. But yeah, we always kind of say that that car on fire was like the perfect metaphor for how that season was felt. Sometimes when people ask like, how's the movement? We just send them a picture of the car on fire. Yeah, like it's become like a lifelong gift for us. I feel like our poor kids, like we had a basement flooding issue for months after we moved in where it was like anytime there was a hard rain, it was like we were like in standing water in our basement. And our playroom is in our basement.
00:05:40
Speaker
So the number of times that we had to tear that playroom down, clean up the floodwater and then put everything back, Becky got to a point where every time it would rain, he would look at me and be like, dad, get the towels. This one's just a sprinkle, buddy. We're like, it's not normal for water to come in the house, buddy, but you just got so used to it.
Balancing Life's Demands
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, you're all hit with all of it, you know moving stressful but some of those things like a house flood those are Equally stressful events anything you learned in that season in particular?
00:06:15
Speaker
probably the biggest thing we learned in that season. And it's not something that we didn't already know because I think the life is about you learn things and then you have to relearn them or life painfully teaches you and makes you relearn those things. And something we've talked about for years and years and years is that nothing happens in a vacuum. It's like we wish that we could do like a Zach Morris timeout on certain things and just be like timeout and like freeze our kids so we could go get a bunch of work done or like timeout and like freeze our business so we could make a cross country move.
00:06:44
Speaker
or like time out so we could clean up the flood without it encroaching on the rest of our day. Right. And so it's like you want to do these like time outs so that you can individually go do things in a vacuum. And the reality is, is like, it's anything, whether it's like your marriage, your kids, you know, something in your business, you don't just get to pause everything else and go do something and give 100% of your attention to that thing for an unlimited period of time. And so I think that what we just had to learn again, painfully, and maybe this was
00:07:13
Speaker
God teaching us like, Hey, Amy and Jordan, you haven't learned this. So therefore I will teach you again. You know, I feel like our kids tend to make the same mistakes like over and over again. And as their parents were so frustrated, like, why haven't you figured this out yet? And I feel like God was maybe doing that with us through this move, but just getting us to remember that like, we're not going to be able to do everything that we want to do every single day. And sometimes we just have to say, you know what? That's good enough for today. Or Hey, we've got to pause this thing over here because there's something actually urgent and important.
00:07:42
Speaker
over here. Yeah, I think as recovering perfectionists, that is challenging for us and continues to be. And we've been working together for over 10 years now, but it's still difficult for us to accept the limitations of time because we want to make everything that we do and everything we put out as perfect as we could possibly imagine it. And sometimes that perfectionism has ended up being our worst enemy and prevented us.
00:08:09
Speaker
from productivity or from helping people or from sleeping or taking care of our basic needs or time with our kids.
Managing Multiple Roles
00:08:18
Speaker
We've only been parents for four and a half years now, but I feel like the entire parenting journey has just taught us so much. I feel like if you don't learn how to live in the tension, like this is something that Amy and I talk about all the time, is learning how to live in the tension.
00:08:31
Speaker
of like, I'm a parent, I'm a husband, I'm a business owner. I'm also a house manager, right? Because there's landscaping things. And all of a sudden, there's the flood and wait, we have carpenter bees. What's happening? Like we just discovered Arizona. We got termites like we got we got termites. But when you've had trading in scorpions for you know, when you have flood, fire and COVID all of a sudden, you're like, Oh, a termite is eating one of the foundational beans under my house. That is not a problem. Like I'm not stressed about that. That doesn't even make our list.
00:09:01
Speaker
But I think just learning to live in that tension and being okay with it and going through it gracefully because it's so easy. And I found myself in this over the last couple of years, it's so easy to do like the woe is me, poor me act. And think of all the things today that are preventing me from doing what I really want to do, right? Instead of just take on that, it's easy to take on for us to take on a victim mentality of like nobody else's car caught on fire moving across the country.
00:09:25
Speaker
car catch on fire, right? And I think we all have things in our life like, why are our kids sick again? Or you start to, it's easy to let your mind slip into that victim mentality of, oh, everything is preventing
Overcoming External Obstacles
00:09:38
Speaker
me from the goals that I have for our life or our business or parenting or all of the above. And truly, we all have hard things that are coming at us all the time. They just look different for every person.
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So speaking of kids, last time we recorded an episode together, and this is just, I think, a shame, it's been so long, but you were pregnant with Beckett.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah. So it was 2018. One like 30 year old kid named Jordan. Exactly. You were just dealing with your one 30 year old kid, Jordan. And Beckett was due maybe it was like the next month, right? Cause he has a February birthday. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yep. So it was January we were recording Beckett was on his way. Now you're expecting your third. Do you all remember what life was like without kids? Have you thought about it before? Like, do you remember what it was?
00:10:30
Speaker
We talk about it all the time. And we're like, what did we do all day? We always like, what did we do with all of those hours before we had kids? But I think the answer was we worked a lot. That was how we felt a lot of our hours. Yeah. And I don't necessarily know if we worked more efficiently.
00:10:48
Speaker
We certainly do. Because when I think about that season of time it was or that season there was a season when we were teaching elementary school and building our photography business at the same time and that was just a grind. It was like 6 a.m. to midnight every single day working like two or three jobs and that was exhausting. But then there was a period of time before we had kids when we had quit our teaching jobs and we were both full-time in our photography business
00:11:10
Speaker
And we were just on our time a lot. There weren't a lot of consequences for like, if we started our day at 10am, it didn't really matter because nobody was waking up from an afternoon nap except for us.
00:11:22
Speaker
So we could work until 9, 10, 11, 12 at night or later, and there was kind of no consequence necessarily on the end of that. There was no relational consequence because we were working together, which is such a unique position to be in in the first place. But because we were working together, neither one of us felt neglected. We felt like motivated and fired up to keep working together because we had all these common goals.
00:11:45
Speaker
But now that we have kids, everything has had to change. We've made so many mistakes and learned so much and still have so much to learn because we are only four and a half years into this
Adapting Routines for Efficiency
00:11:55
Speaker
game. But one thing I'm not like in general in life, and you know this about me, Davey, but I'm not a big fan of like once you get through a stage of life or a season of life, looking back and poo-pooing everybody who's in the season that you were just in. So like I'm not the guy who wants to sit here and be like,
00:12:09
Speaker
man, if you're married and you're business owners and you don't have kids yet, like man, your life is easy and just like you get to work all the time and that's why you're successful because you don't have little ones to manage. Like to me, that's just a bunch of garbage. That's a cop out for the person who does have kids. I think that every season of life is beautiful for a different reason. And if you're somebody who's married and you don't have kids yet or you're single, don't have kids yet. And you're in a season where you're building your business,
00:12:34
Speaker
I would just encourage you instead of doing what we did and kind of like my time is my time so I'm not going to have like a daily routine and schedule. I would encourage you to start putting those habits in place now because I think that Amy and I could have gotten more done in less time before we had kids if we had just employed the tactics that we're using today back then. And then so I think that that's just a really important thing I want to say. And I think yeah, our life would have looked probably a little healthier with a little more time for
00:13:04
Speaker
life outside of work too. I wish that we could take the things that we've learned in the last four years and apply them to pre-kid life because… They say youth is wasted on the young, Davey. Is that what they said? That's right. It is interesting because kids do help you see the world and I think just more of an enchanted
00:13:22
Speaker
way than you're able to see on your own. So I mean, I totally agree with you there. And part of the reason I asked about remembering life for kids, because I can't really like I remember things we did, like I certainly have memories with Krista, prior to kids, but I don't even remember what it feels like a world without Jack in it, right? Like it doesn't make sense to me. I heard a priest that I listened to once he said, it's like kids drop out of eternity, you know, and I just thought that was like the perfect way of summing it up. You know, like I just can't even
00:13:48
Speaker
I can't even remember. But I'm excited to dive into this with you and some of the things that you've learned since having kids now that you're running a business. I mean, you all have lots going on like everybody else. I'm excited to dive into a little bit how you structure your day, what that looks like for you and your family, but then also running a business and how you keep a successful business going at the same time. So maybe we just start with your daily routine.
00:14:15
Speaker
I think we would love to start there and maybe take a step back for a second because I feel like the 30,000 foot view matters kind of more than anything else in this conversation. And I think what Amy and I decided early on when we started having kids is we had to come to grips with and recognize the fact that they were only going to be kids for so long. So when you think about children, like 85% of their brain development happens in the first five years.
00:14:37
Speaker
And because we thought fourth and fifth grade that was right at the very end of childhood right kids would be like ten eleven years old and we always say they would come in the fourth grade super sweet and by the time they were leaving fifth grade they smell you know. There's very sweet time from like zero to ten and our kids are only gonna be kids for so long.
00:14:57
Speaker
And so I think when Amy and I decided to start a family and have children, knowing that we were workaholic business owners in our previous life, I think we had to kind of take a step back and go, okay, like who are we and what do we want our life to really be about?
Family Prioritization
00:15:10
Speaker
And I think what we decided was that not that our kids were going to become the center of our universe because we don't believe that. Like Amy and I firmly believe that our priorities should be God.
00:15:19
Speaker
our marriage and then our kids. And our kids know this because I will say to them on a regular basis, hey Beckett, who is daddy's favorite person in the whole world? And he'll look back at me with a big smile on his face and say, mommy. And I'm like, that's right. Mommy is my favorite. Oh, I have to tell a really quick 30 second story that does like melt me. Beckett loves birthdays. And so for each of his birthday parties, we've had a little theme and he gets one special novelty shaped balloon.
00:15:49
Speaker
for his hungry caterpillar party. There was a balloon that was shaped like the hungry caterpillar that was like right in the middle of our kitchen. And the next year we had a big fire truck shaped balloon. And last year we had an astronaut shaped balloon. So the special balloon that he gets for his birthday is something that he thinks about for a really long time. So the last birthday that Jordan had in the day before, I was like, okay buddy, like what should we do for daddy's birthday? And he was like, well, last time you got me a fire truck shaped balloon.
00:16:19
Speaker
And he was like, fire trucks are my favorite thing. Then he paused and he was like, daddy's favorite thing is mommy. So we should get daddy a mommy shaped balloon. And I just thought that was the most precious answer. One of the reasons that we started implementing that was because our marriage mentors had told us that the best gift you can give your children is a strong marriage.
00:16:45
Speaker
And so like Amy and I had to kind of come to terms with this idea that like our kids are gifted to us by God for a period of time. And our job is to steward them well for the time that they're in our home and of course beyond. But that eventually on the other side of it, it's just going to be Amy and me again.
00:17:02
Speaker
And so we recognize that outside of our relationship with God, our relationship with each other had to come first, even before the kids in the season of raising children. So that when we get into our mid fifties, we still recognize each other and still love each other and still our best friends. And so I think as we were thinking about building daily routines and daily schedules, have you ever heard that it's like an analogy? I feel like that public speakers use it all the time. Pastors use it. But the idea of like, there's a glass jar.
00:17:30
Speaker
And if you basically take a glass jar and you put all of the big rocks in first, and then you pour the sand in to fill all the cracks.
00:17:41
Speaker
you can fit the rocks and the sand in the glass jar. But if you put the sand in first, you won't be able to fit all the rocks. And so when we were building and kind of crafting our day, we were kind of like, okay, what are the most important rocks that we wanna make sure if nothing else happens, we do these things every day. And part of the reason for that is we believe that regret is a really powerful motivator, especially for me. Less so for Amy, she's an Enneagram nine. She's kind of like content. She's gonna get the end of her life and probably have no regrets. So I'm speaking for myself here.
00:18:11
Speaker
I'm gonna be like, she's gonna be on her deathbed. How was your life? She's gonna be like, it was good. Like, any gram nine, you know how this goes. But for somebody like me, who's an eight, and Davey, I know you're an eight too. So you relate to this, right? regret is a very powerful motivator. And so whenever we're making decisions, a lot of times we make them based on five years from now, 10 years from now,
00:18:31
Speaker
What boundaries can we put in place in our daily schedule so that we don't look back and have regrets? And within the last, I can't remember exactly when it was, but around the time we were making the move, I think I was feeling really disoriented as a dad because we were trying to sell our home in Arizona, buy our home in Tennessee. COVID was still happening. I mean, it's still happening, but it was the height of the pandemic. We were trying to transition our business and move our whole team and all that kind of stuff. And I had a dream where I was on trial
00:19:00
Speaker
for, I'm not going to say the crime. I would just like to say that Jordan's dreams are always so intense and terrifying. And when you share them with me. Especially in 2020. I think that's an eight thing because I don't have dreams every night, you know, but if I have a dream, it is intense and it's usually terrifying.
00:19:16
Speaker
Yes. When he shares that with me, I'm like, I've never had a dream that terrifying in my entire life. Sometimes I wake up mad at Amy and she's like, why are you mad at me? And I'm like, because in my dream you did X, Y, or Z. And she's like, you can't hold that against me. But it was so real to me. And so I had this dream where I was on trial, I was at my sentencing and I had just been sentenced to life in prison.
00:19:38
Speaker
And I was standing there in shackles when I looked up, everybody in my life who I know and love, family, friends, I mean, literally everybody. It was like, it was almost like it was my funeral and everybody who had ever known me had showed up or anybody who was important to me.
00:19:52
Speaker
And they said, do you have anything to say before we take you away? And I was like, yes. And I started going around to each person who was standing there and asking them to fill a different role in my kids' lives. So I was like, will you take him to have this adventure? Or like, will you talk to her about this when she gets to be this age? Will you make sure every day that she knows that she's loved and she's cared for? And will you make sure to do this? And I went to each person and did that. And then when I had finished, right as they were taking me away,
00:20:22
Speaker
I heard a voice say, don't miss it. And I woke up and I really felt like.
00:20:29
Speaker
in that moment, God was saying to me, you have an opportunity to do all the things that you would ask people to do if you were suddenly taken from your children. And that dream that I had really kind of like set a new course for us in terms of how intentional we were with planning every moment of our day to make sure that it always, always, always factors in God and our marriage and our kids first.
00:20:54
Speaker
And then we build in everything else around that. Because what I didn't want to happen is I didn't want to get to have a 10-year-old and look back on the 10 years of Beckett's life and feel like I missed it, feel like I missed the opportunity to have an experience with him or take him to do something because I was too busy with work that couldn't wait. I mean, we had the experience about six months ago of Amy's grandfather passing away. And it was really remarkable because he knew by about November, he knew that he only had a few months left to live.
00:21:22
Speaker
And so we got into this routine every night where we were calling grandpa just to check in with him while the kids were doing bath time. And he would ask about, you know, about the day and how the kids were doing. And, you know, we would have just great conversations. And what really struck me wasn't the things that he said. It was the things he didn't say.
00:21:41
Speaker
I mean, this guy knew he had weeks to months to live.
Reflecting on Family Values
00:21:45
Speaker
He never talked about his 40 year career at Texaco, you know, in the gold watch that he got for being a great employee and a great manager and all that kind of stuff. He never talked about his home, how nice his house was. He never talked about any of his belongings or possessions except for things that maybe had sentimental value.
00:22:04
Speaker
He talked about his kids and his grandkids, and that was the main focus of every conversation that he wanted to have. And it was a really good reset for us to just remember that when we get to the end of our life, we are not going to care necessarily. We'll be happy that we worked hard, and we'll be happy that our business made a difference. But the things that are going to matter the most in those final months, weeks, days, hours are going to be a handful.
00:22:29
Speaker
of people we loved and people who loved us. And something that we've talked a lot about just as a couple is this idea that we want to live the story that we want to tell one day. And because we are humans and we're sinful and we have selfish flesh, and that's just what it is, right? As humans, we tend to think about ourselves first.
00:22:51
Speaker
I know that I need boundaries on me for me to make the right decisions. I need boundaries. That's why we have a budget for our money. I need boundaries on my money or I'm going to spend it all. I need boundaries on my time or I'm going to waste it all. Maybe Amy can talk a little bit about our daily schedule, how we've designed it so that we don't have that regret 10 years from now that we can look back and say, we made deposits every single day into our kids' love tanks, into those bank accounts. And anyways,
00:23:18
Speaker
I think that Jordan's right on as far as we wanted to identify what are those big rocks in that metaphor or those foundational boulders or stones or whatever you want to call them. What are the things that we want to put in place and then let everything fill in around that? We started talking about our daily work days.
00:23:37
Speaker
we currently work Monday through Friday. And so what do we want each one of those days to look like and start with because we've had all different types of starts to our days, especially I remember before we had kids, sometimes we would let what was ever at the top of our phone dictate how our day started. And we would react to whatever notifications were at the top of our phone or whatever news story was coming our way or whatever social media post or email or at the beginning of our career, we didn't take control of the day.
00:24:06
Speaker
And so we realized one of the things we needed to do is. And Davey, I don't know if you've noticed, but if you start your day with a news website, it is never good, bro. It's a terrible, terrible way to start your day. I just texted a friend that I started my day with the news and then like a news podcast. This is like, I love to run in the morning and help me clear my head. It was the worst way to start my day.
00:24:29
Speaker
It makes you feel like the world is coming to an end, which that's been happening for over a decade now the world has been coming to an end, right? So instead, we put a boundary. That's what you'll kind of hear us say over and over again, I think is like we had to put boundaries on ourselves because we don't have the self control unless we kind of make a commitment to each other.
00:24:49
Speaker
Like we have to put these boundaries in place because we are so much happier, healthier, more fulfilled, more productive, better parents, better spouses when we put these boundaries in place. So the first thing, the only thing that I will open on my phone in the morning is a
Morning Family Time
00:25:04
Speaker
Bible app.
00:25:04
Speaker
And I also have a devotional app on my phone and the reason I've always envied people that can like pick up their like old school like paper Bible and like go sit somewhere else and like drink their coffee. But I realized I almost had to replace the habit of reaching for my phone and ingesting something that I shouldn't and instead ingest something that
00:25:25
Speaker
allows me to start my day with my biggest priority, which is my relationship with God. And then as soon as that's done, closing the phone and not opening any other apps, no Instagram, no emails, no news, nothing, and shifting our attention to our kids because our kids wake up early. And so we've structured our workday where we have about 90 uninterrupted minutes with our kids each morning.
00:25:50
Speaker
And it's one of our favorite parts of the whole day, whether we go on our back porch and we snuggle up and read books together, or we work on writing, or we do crafts, or sometimes Jordan will play little tickle monster games with them. And then we have family breakfast together. And we just recently started doing a little devotional with the kids in the morning. It's like preschool age, very simple, a few sentences.
00:26:14
Speaker
Our kids thrive on that quality time and starting the day that way. And we love that too, because then it's like no matter what happens in the workday, we had all this beautiful quality time together. No screens. Nobody's on a device. We're just getting this intentional time to be together. And it's just like a really good way to start every day so that by the time we walk into the workday, we've already hit some of our most important priorities before the workday begins.
00:26:42
Speaker
So I love that structure to our mornings. And then once we're working, we really do try to create a clear boundary between work hours and parenting hours. And that came from one of my favorite books, 168 Hours by Laura VanderKam.
00:26:58
Speaker
where she talks about, we all have the same amount of hours in the day, but it seems like some people get so much more done than other people. And I'm going to get curious about that and figure out exactly why that is. By the way, Davey, I don't know anybody that gets more done in a day than you. I know, I feel like you should be. I can't keep up with you. You're a thoroughbred.
00:27:21
Speaker
Every time we hear from Davie, it's like, oh, yeah, I'm like doing this on the farm or I just got back from a run or I mean, we're just impressed at the amount of quality things that you Well, I've learned a lot from you all and and that's the great thing about having good friends Right is that you know I just surround myself with a lot of people who are smarter and better than I am and I
00:27:40
Speaker
try to take notes from them but i think a lot of what you're talking about resonates so much specially that morning time and how valuable the morning time is cuz the only part of the day where no one has placed any demands any of their demands on you yet you know and so it really is i mean almost every time i decide to sacrifice my morning you know and that includes like sleeping in my day does not end up how i want it to go
00:28:01
Speaker
And so that's why, to me, it's worth it for me to wake up as early as I do just because I can order my day properly and going back to the sand and the rocks. For me, it's being able to get those first things first, you know, before you try to get the second things. A great C.S. Lewis quote about that where you can't get the first things if you put the second things first. But if you put the first things first, you can get the second things too, right? So I'll find – he says it more elegantly than I do. So I'll find that throughout the show. You nailed it.
00:28:29
Speaker
And I think two part of it, I think what Amy was kind of chipping away at too is like, before we had kids during work hours, it didn't really matter if something interrupted our day.
Enhancing Productivity with Deadlines
00:28:37
Speaker
We could just kind of like squirrel and go pivot to that. And it was no problem. And we could make up the time later and let the workday kind of drag.
00:28:45
Speaker
But for us, my work day ends at 3.30. Amy's usually works until about 4.30. And that's just because I try to hit the gym for an hour every day because I think health and fitness and nutrition are so important. And when you are 35 and a half, you're closer to 50 than you are 20. And so I realized that if I want to have good health span and lifespan, I have to start that now. But what we've realized is when we only get about a six hour to seven hour work day, 30, 35, maybe 40 hours a week,
00:29:10
Speaker
We have to make every minute count and we've kind of had to almost, it's going to, this is going to sound intense, but we've almost kind of had to look at everything that we're doing in our workday. If it's not something that's really important, if we allow ourselves to get distracted by something that is not important, we have kind of come to look at that as stealing from our children. That might sound a little bit intense, but I do think it's so easy during a workday. If Amy and I sit down at the beginning of our workday and get okay,
00:29:35
Speaker
What are the three things that we can do today that will move our business forward? We call them needle movers. Like what will be a needle mover in our business today? Because I do think when you're a business owner, there's a million things you could do every single day. But getting up and deciding what are three things that I can start and finish today that will move my business in a positive direction. And then what we do is after we set those one or two or three goals, we set artificial deadlines on them.
00:30:02
Speaker
So we'll get, okay, cool. We're sitting down to work at nine. We're going to be done at four, or at three, let's say. We have six hours. Let's divide these into two hours, two hours, two hours, and attack each of those with a vengeance. Especially if we're working on a bigger, more long-term project. We're not always going to get it done in one day, right? But we can accomplish many goals within that larger project, within that day, and set deadlines.
00:30:27
Speaker
And even if we don't necessarily hit the deadline, that competitive part of us kicks in, like we got to be done with this at 10. You'll hear us say a bazillion times throughout the day, like, okay, we will be done with this by two o'clock, whatever it is that we're working on. And sometimes it bleeds till 2.05, 2.10.
00:30:43
Speaker
But then we're like, we're past our deadline. We got to cut it off. And that has really helped as far as productivity goes. And the old pre-kids version of us would have just rewritten that one line 17 times and spent an hour perfecting that one thing. But the artificial deadlines allow you to do it like 85% done and good is better than perfect.
00:31:04
Speaker
And that kind of goes for like during the work day. It's like our family, our friends, everybody in our circle knows that during work hours, we are highly focused on work only because it's so easy to get distracted. It's so easy for a text to come through. And then all of a sudden you've been texting back and forth with somebody for an hour and it might be a good thing. Like Davey might, you might text me in the middle of a work day and I see your name pop up and I'm like, Oh, I love Davey. This would be fun.
00:31:29
Speaker
This would be fun. I want to text with him about like, whatever, like the political soup du jour is, you know, I would love to text with you for an hour. But what I've had to realize, I've had to discipline myself to pause and say, even though I love Davey and I would love to text with Davey, my children are more important than Davey in my order of priorities. And if I give 15 minutes to Davey right now or 30 minutes to Davey for something that's not in my top three work goals, then basically what I'm doing is I'm saying that Davey is more important than
00:31:58
Speaker
the work priority or more important than my kids are more important than my wife and i think that that could be something that if we all started to adopt that approach mentality i think that we would have healthier marriages and strong relationships with our kids because i think that a lot of people when they're working or the court at work.
00:32:16
Speaker
It's so easy to get distracted by social media, get distracted by a text. Oh, somebody calls. Let me pick the phone up and call them and talk for 30 minutes. What happens is it sets you back on your work goals. So now you either have to decide to do a less good job at work or to extend your work day.
00:32:32
Speaker
and all of that steals from your employer if that's yourself it's going from yourself or steals time from your kids and i think expectations are also just so important like we're married and we're business partners so it's like our kids know that four thirty every single day.
00:32:48
Speaker
our workday is done. And so they're very content that we're not with them during the period of time that we're working. But at 430, they come bounding in to our office, our bedroom, wherever we're working. And we need to be ready. And we need to be ready. Because if we want to try to work till 432, it is a meltdown central.
00:33:09
Speaker
we've learned. And that's because they have their expectation. We have created a routine and expectations at 430. It's our family time. And so even if they feel like they're getting cheated out of two minutes of that family time, it just is devastating in their little toddler brains and world.
00:33:27
Speaker
I want to ask you about results doing that as well because something that I've noticed in my life, one thing that I've done is I've taken email and Slack off of my phone completely. And it's been sort of a game changer because intuitively, I would think, well, with those things on my phone, I can answer things on the go. And so maybe that's a less work. I think what happens, it leads to working all the time. But what I've noticed since taking those things off my phone is when I sit down, I'm much more productive because I've given myself those boundaries.
00:33:54
Speaker
Now is work time. Now is the time to answer those emails. And it's not, you know, as I'm on my way to the pool with Jack or, you know, whatever. But what I've noticed in setting those boundaries, I might not be able to complete something the same way I would have completed it, you know, if I had, you know, no kids and I had all this time. But I haven't seen like a huge diminishing result there. And so that's what I'm curious about is like, what has this done to the bottom line for you all?
00:34:21
Speaker
No, that's a great question. Well, I think that you hit on it, right? Which is the first thing you have to do is make a distinction between multitasking, which is a myth and align. And more of Andrew cam in her book, 160 hours talks about this that like, that multitasking when you're trying to use your brain,
00:34:37
Speaker
to do two things at the same time your brain literally can't do it so it's you can't be sending work emails and talking to your child and be doing both things well because they both require the same part of your brain whereas you could listen to a podcast or take a work call while you
Batching Tasks for Efficiency
00:34:56
Speaker
go on a walk.
00:34:56
Speaker
While you clean the kitchen, because your body can do the walk or the cleaning on auto mode. And so you really can accomplish two things at once, as long as it's one thing that requires your mind and one thing that requires your subconscious slash your body. Right. And so I think we found the same thing is that we are way more productive when we batch tasks.
00:35:17
Speaker
which is if you're, you know, think of the analogy of an airplane, right? It's like, when does an airplane use the most fuel and energy on takeoff, right? It uses it on takeoff. When does it use the least amount is when it's cruising, right? When it's just chilling up in the air. And so if we're constantly checking email, and then we turn over and we respond to a DM on social media, and then we talk to our kids for a second and we're bouncing between activities,
00:35:40
Speaker
every time that you statistically, every time you bounce from one focused activity to another focused activity, it literally takes your brain minutes to get settled into that new activity. And it's a total waste of time. So to your point, I would say that we're way more efficient and productive by batching tasks and saying, okay, every day at this time, I'm gonna
00:36:01
Speaker
crank out all my emails. Every day at this time, I'm going to crank out my DMs, and then I'm going to set aside this time to read with my kids. I'm going to set aside this time for something else. We have found that it's made us a lot more productive, a lot more efficient, and a lot happier. I'll never forget when I was a brand new mom, Becky was just a baby, and I was just coming out of a maternity leave and trying to figure out what does it look like. I have this heart just melting for this new baby that I want to be with every second of the day.
00:36:29
Speaker
I'm thinking he's young. He doesn't talk yet. He just sits in his little bouncer. I can put him right here and get some work done. I found very quickly that that was a myth inside of my head that I could be productive at work while having my baby right next to me. I found that what it was doing was making me feel like a bad mom and a bad business owner at the same time. I was getting way less done than I wanted to. When we started drawing clear distinction between
00:36:58
Speaker
This is like our parenting role and it is completely separate from our business owner role to your point of turning off our notifications, not allowing things on our device on our phone. When we're with our kids, we're not answering text messages. We're not checking emails. We're not looking at social media. We're trying to keep those two things completely separate.
00:37:18
Speaker
And then we put the kids down. Maybe we have a nice 20 to 30 minute window where we batch respond to text messages. And like you said, we end up getting them done quicker and we're still able to have relational touch points with people. But we're not allowing that to steal minutes to make our kids feel like they're not the priority when
00:37:38
Speaker
we've spent all this time away from them during the day we want to make sure that the time that we are with them that feels so intentional and so quality that they don't feel like they're missing out during our working hours. I was going to say that I think that before we kind of implemented a lot of these things to your point, Davey, I think that we focused a lot of our time on low value tasks that made us feel good because they were familiar and comfortable.
00:38:01
Speaker
And I think, especially, you know, we're photographers, right? But I don't think it really matters whether you're a photographer, a creative, or in some other industry. It is a lot easier to go into your website and play around with the fonts for six hours than it is to actually go, what is the hard thing that I need to do to move my business forward? Because usually the hard thing is the new thing or the unknown thing. And we found ourselves a lot years ago, drifting through days,
00:38:31
Speaker
Where we get to the end of the day and we feel like we haven't gotten much done and it's because we haven't because we have been trying to perfect like one color tone on our website and get it right right or make sure that like everything on the nav bar was perfectly lined up.
00:38:46
Speaker
instead of focusing on a thing that would actually move the needle. And I think something that really helped us, and this goes for like our work day, but it also goes for like our personal time and our time with our kids, because those things are interconnected.
Interconnected Personal and Professional Life
00:38:58
Speaker
You can't separate them, right? It's like how you perform in one area of your life will affect how you perform in the other area of your life. And so if you're drifting through your marriage and your parenting and not being intentional there,
00:39:11
Speaker
Will drift over into your business and vice versa or if it doesn't drift over it'll catch you at some point and so one of the things that really really helped us and we read it about two years ago and then we read it at the beginning of this year was the book atomic habits by james clear and i think sometimes it's easy to look at other people's lives and think i don't know how he does it.
00:39:32
Speaker
I don't know how she does it because you see someone in your life or someone on social media where it just seems like, wow, they do all of these things every single day. I could never do that. And James Clear, I was going to call him James that I realized when I was a friend, but Mr. Clear has a principle in atomic habits that I know you're familiar with, Davey. It's called habit stacking.
00:39:53
Speaker
And the idea is that most of what we do on a daily basis is unconscious. Like we do it unconsciously. We just do it because it's subconscious. But so it's like sometimes we think I could never do that. But if you can just put one new habit in place and master that one new habit for like a week.
00:40:15
Speaker
Once that new habit is ingrained and you start doing it automatically, it doesn't feel that hard to do that habit anymore.
Building Positive Habits
00:40:21
Speaker
And then you can stack another habit on top of that and another habit on top of that. And a good illustration of this would be like our bedtime routine with our kids is Amy for a long time, Beckett was in like a mama phase and so only wanted Amy to put him to bed. And then we got into a situation when our second, when our daughter was born that mom couldn't do both bedtimes. So that responsibility of putting Beckett to bed fell to dad.
00:40:43
Speaker
and I don't know if this is the way you guys are but like we were just kind of bad at bathing our kids like in the early years like we would get to the end of the day and we would be so tired and we'd be like ah they're fine they don't smell they're too bad their kids they don't sweat and so we realized we kind of came to a point where we were like you know like once a month is probably not enough um
00:41:03
Speaker
So let's just do, let's start bathing them every day. So we started putting a habit in place of just every night at 6 45 setting a timer that goes off and it's like this fun dance music and it signals for our kids that is bath time. So it's like one of the like typical iPhone alarms, but Jordan like made up this little dance that the kids do. It's so excited when the alarm goes off. It's like the Pavlov dog, you know, like triggers like they're so excited.
00:41:28
Speaker
And then we do bath time. And what was amazing was once we started just doing bath time every night at 6.45, starting that bath time, then it was really easy to right after that add on brushing teeth right after, because it was natural, we get you out of the bath, let's brush teeth. And then it was really natural after we brushed teeth to have like five minutes of WrestleMania with dad on mom and dad's bed.
00:41:50
Speaker
And we started stacking these habits where now all of a sudden I'm taking Beckett upstairs and I used to feel so tired. I don't know if this is like a parent thing and you feel this Davey, but when I start putting the kids, start their routine for bedtime and stuff, I feel toasted. Like I could just pass out. I never feel tired, you know? But I would feel so tired. And then
00:42:10
Speaker
At like eight o'clock after i would lay back it down i would bound down the stairs and have the second wind and i'm like am i got two or three hours energy. Do you realize it's not that i was tired at seven o'clock it was that i didn't have a plan.
00:42:26
Speaker
for seven to eight o'clock. And once I started putting a plan in place for how are my bedtime routine with my son was going to go, all of a sudden I got excited for it and I had a lot of energy. And so it started by us and also catchy titles and gimmicks are great with kids. So it was like to get my kid up the stairs, to get Beckett up the stairs, instead of just saying, hey, it's time to go upstairs, let's go to bed. I was like, okay, who wants a donkey ride up the stairs?
00:42:50
Speaker
And I put him on my back and he would ride the donkey up the stairs, right? And he makes the clip clop sound. And now all of a sudden you would go from him being like, I don't want to go to bed. And then Jordan would be like, who wants a donkey ride? And it was like an immediate change in the brain. And then all of a sudden he's like, donkey ride. Yes, let's go. And so it was easy to get him upstairs and like go potty, put jammies on. But then here's the really interesting part is I was in a habit and I just, where I was just reading three stories to Beckett in his bed,
00:43:16
Speaker
And then i would kiss him good night and i would turn off the light turn on a sound machine you know turn on the fan and i walk out and i had this kind of epiphany moment after we read a book called the relentless what is it called the ruthless elimination of hurry and which is a great book by the way for any parent.
00:43:34
Speaker
which Jordan was reading. This was on a kid free trip we went on, which felt just like the most incredible thing ever. But I was also reading habits of the household. So two books that we really recommend and go really well together, the ruthless illumination of hurry and habits of the household. And we kind of like took the ideas of each author and started stacking them into each other to create this new bedtime routine that is just so much more fulfilling and feels just more significant and a better way to end the day.
00:44:00
Speaker
And so what I started doing with Bex was I started reading his stories just like I always did. And then I had this epiphany of like, what is something 10 years from now that I want to look back on and feel proud as a dad that I taught my son ex during the bedtime routine? And so something my dad used to do with me when I was little is right before he had put me to bed, we would get down on our knees and we would pray the Lord's Prayer.
00:44:22
Speaker
And so Beckett's four and he didn't know the Lord's Prayer because I'd never taught it to him before. So after stories, I implemented a new thing where we got down on our knees and we said the Lord's Prayer together. And it took him a few weeks to finally like learn it and memorize it. There's some hard words in there, like trespasses. Yes, trespasses. But those are the cutest words, right? Like when they try to say those.
00:44:43
Speaker
And so I got into this routine where we did stories, then we did the Lord's Prayer, and then I put him down and I left. And then I thought to myself, what if I added something else on top of that? And so then I was like, well, what if we do the Lord's Prayer and then I pray for Beckett? So we started doing that. I was like, what if we do the Lord's Prayer and then I pray for Beckett and then we pray for other people? And then it was like, what if we do the Lord's Prayer and I pray for Beckett and we pray for other people and then I sing him a hymn so that he can start to learn some of the traditional hymns?
00:45:09
Speaker
But this didn't all happen. No, it happened over the course of like a couple of months. But pretty soon, like we had this whole bedtime routine that took like 3045 minutes. That was he got so excited about and it was so fulfilling to me. And if you had asked me like a month before we started that routine, if I would have been Kate, if I would have told me some dad out there is doing this routine, I would have been so snarky, right about like, Oh, yeah, cool, super dad, like, glad that he's so much better than everyone else. But what I realized is that like, I did have the capacity
00:45:37
Speaker
To create an amazing bedtime routine that I would feel that he would feel proud to replicate with his son one day or that he would tell other people like I want to create a bedtime routine for him or when he's talking with his friends when he's you know in his twenties and thirties he's like yeah my parents did blank every night.
00:45:52
Speaker
We had lunch with a couple that we really respect that's far, far ahead of us in parenting. Their first one just graduated from college. Their others are headed toward college now. And one of the things they shared with us is that they've always prioritized. And we really, really admire them as parents. And their children are incredible. So when you see families- And their names are Davy and Kristin. Definitely don't have any college kids. That's for sure. I wish I could freeze time right now, but go on. If so, what are your skin secrets?
00:46:22
Speaker
When we see families where the kids are just those exceptional kind of kids where you think, man, if our kids could be like that at the end, I want to glean wisdom from them. So we're of course, whenever we're with couples like that, that's one of the first things we're asking them or is like, what were some of those like staple things in your life? And they shared with us.
00:46:40
Speaker
the bedtime routine was something that they focused on all the way through, not just when their kids were little, they started it when they were little. And it continued all the way through middle school, high school, all of those tough adolescent years. And they told us the thing that we found is that our teenagers
00:46:58
Speaker
when we would snuggle into bed with one teenager alone one on one that is when everything would come out when are you release what was causing stress in their life what they were worrying about what they were wondering about the best conversations happened laying in their beds right before bedtime.
00:47:15
Speaker
And they said like that really started when they were little and it was a foundation we laid and then continued and almost like we couldn't even seen the fruit that would come from that later if we hadn't started it early and that really left an impression on us. And so when we're doing all of these routines now,
00:47:32
Speaker
we're trying to keep that long term big picture in mind of like how will this impact when our kids are middle schoolers and when they're in high school and in a time when a lot of teens tend to draw away from their parents could we create a safe space where they know.
Fostering Children's Growth and Resilience
00:47:48
Speaker
They have a safe, warm, connecting routine that they can count on where they know like everything that I share here is safe. And so that's kind of like our big picture idea in that is like, not only are we creating an experience for them now, but what will that then mean for them as they continue to grow?
00:48:06
Speaker
And I think too, it's the idea again of like live the story that you want to tell one day. I mean, I remember when Amy and I got engaged, something that was really impactful for me is one of the first things that her mom and dad said to me is we've been praying for you since before Amy was born. And I was like, what?
00:48:29
Speaker
They were praying for me before Amy was even born praying for the spouses of their future children. And so when I would hear something like that, I would think to myself, you're just a better person than I am.
00:48:41
Speaker
That's why you did that. And that's why you were able to do that every day for 18 plus years, you know, before Amy and I met. And I realized is I don't necessarily know. I mean, in this case, Amy's parents, they are wonderful people. But I think that Amy's parents probably just had a really good habit in place. And they had a cue for that habit. And in the ruthless elimination of hurry, he talks about this idea of like, when you close the door after you put your kids down at night, your hand is already on the handle.
00:49:08
Speaker
keep your hand on the door handle and pray for them before you walk down the hall. And for me, that was a habit that I was able to implement with our kids after I put them down was like, I wasn't, this is gonna sound terrible. I wasn't praying for my kids on a regular basis. Like I wasn't taking time every day to pray for my children. And when I read that book, I realized I have an opportunity every night when I put Becca down, I can close that door, my hand is on that handle, I can get down on my knees outside of his door,
00:49:39
Speaker
protection and for his future spouse and for his future spouse's parents. And I can take 60 seconds and just pray for my child and then walk right across the hall to Emily's bedroom and do the same thing. But if there wasn't a designated time for that, it just wouldn't happen. It's like we, I think all of us have the best intentions for every area of our life. It's like we all love the idea of like praying for our kids or love the idea of intentional time with our spouse or whatever. But it's like until we have designated time where it's carved out and predictable,
00:50:02
Speaker
and I can pray for him and for his
00:50:09
Speaker
But just something else gets in the way or distracts us and it doesn't happen. And that's at least been our own experience is that if we don't have like a carved out habit in place, it just doesn't happen. It gets missed because something else gets thrown our way and then we forget and get distracted and good intentions just aren't enough at least in our house. Like I'm a better dad today, not because I have good intentions, but because I have good discipline, you know, and I have good habits that keep me in the boundaries.
00:50:36
Speaker
Yeah, and I know for Krista and I, one thing that we've noticed recently is date nights. When we think of date night, right, we always think like, well, we got to get a babysitter and then we got to go out, you know, and that takes some work. So one thing we've been doing lately is once a month, we will make sure we get out of the house, you know, kid free, get a babysitter.
00:50:53
Speaker
But we decided, you know, even on the weeks that we don't do that, we can still have a date night. You know, we put the kids down and then we go to sit on the front porch together. And we spend, instead of, usually that time would be spent reading and we go to bed super early, you know, which is a decision because we get up really early because we wanted, like you all, we want to be done our day by three o'clock, which is when Jack will get back from preschool and then we can go and have an adventure with him. That was one thing that we realized lately is like, you know, we always say, oh yeah, we need to get a date night on the calendar, but there's opportunities to do that.
00:51:20
Speaker
even without doing the full-fledged going out for dinner. That also struck me too, just while you're talking about your bedtime routine, is the capacity of a child to participate in that, which is interesting. I think there's this slow burn or there's this temptation for us to think maybe like, well, our kids aren't really old enough to understand that, so why do we do it, right?
00:51:44
Speaker
And I think that's a slow burn, right? Because at some point, you realize, well, that moment has passed when our kids understand that, and to a certain extent, it's almost too late. And I think, like, I don't know if you all have noticed this about, like, memorizing the Lord's Prayer, for instance, but I do something similar with Jack, and we've memorized a couple prayers, and we're learning a new one right now.
00:52:03
Speaker
And it's one that I also don't know. So this is the first one that I taught him where I don't already have it memorized. I kid you not, he's further along memorizing it than I am. Like his memory is insane, right? The brains are so much better than ours. When I started teaching Beckett, the first one that we did was Amazing Grace. And then we moved on to Come Now Fount. And that is a long hymn with a lot of words like interposed and further. And he not only learned it faster, but what you're saying is really interesting and here's why.
00:52:32
Speaker
I think that kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. And they're a lot more perceptive than we give them credit for and capable. And here's what I mean by that.
00:52:42
Speaker
A few months ago when I started this new routine based on this book, Ruth's Elimination of Hurry, he said that one of the dads said that one of the things he said to his kids every night before they would go to bed is he would say the same thing every night. He would say, son, do you know that I love this? I just want to interject that this is actually from Habits of the Household. Oh, sorry. Habits of the Household. Excuse me. Habits of the Household. Yeah. I'm getting them completed. He would say, son, do you know
00:53:06
Speaker
that I love you when you do good things." And his son would say, like, yes, dad. And he would say, do you know that I love you even when you do bad things? And he'd be like, yes, dad. And he'd say, who else loves you like that? And then he would say, God does. And he was like, that's right. God loves you no matter whether you do good things or bad things. And mom and dad love you no matter if you do good things or bad things and nothing that you could ever do.
00:53:30
Speaker
could separate you from our love. We will always love you no matter what. And what's interesting is the first couple of nights that I did that with Beckett, he like really listened and was like really into it. And then after a few nights of doing it, he would start to cover his ears and he'd be like, I already know this dad. I'd say buddy, I have something important to tell you. Dad, I already know this. But here's the interesting thing. Talking about like ideas penetrating into your children's hearts and into their minds and their souls.
00:53:56
Speaker
After about a week or so of me doing this, a couple nights in a row being like, I know this dad. I don't want to, don't say that anymore, dad. I already know it. One night he looked up at me and after I finished saying that, he said, dad, and I love you even when you spank me. And I just thought that was so clever for a four, almost four and a half year old that he, but he understood when I told him, I love you even when you do bad things, he connected.
00:54:25
Speaker
even when you have to discipline me, you still love me because nothing could ever separate you from my love. And that was just a powerful moment. And I think, you know, along the lines of what you were saying with like learning and whether you're a person of faith or not, you know, whether it's like learning hymns, whether it's learning prayers or whatever, there were a few times while we were learning, you know, come now found where Beckett would start to cry in the middle of it because he wasn't getting it. And he was like, this one's so long. It's so hard when
00:54:52
Speaker
I'm never going to learn it. I'm like, buddy, you will learn it. We're just going to keep at it night after night until you do. And it's the same way he felt when he first tried the monkey bars. We want our kids to do hard things because when you learn how to do hard things from a young age, it is hardwired into you forever. And we all know that the best things in life, whether we're talking about getting married, having children, those are some of the hardest things. Starting a business, moving, these are some of the hardest things.
00:55:20
Speaker
But the hardest things always yield the greatest rewards you know and so i want to teach our kids from a very young age that you should look forward to doing hard things because they were fine you they make you better and what you get on the other side of it is so much greater than if you just drifted through.
00:55:37
Speaker
And like with Emily, Emily's only two, and she loves to communicate, but her enunciation is just not quite what her brothers want at this age. So she's a lot harder to understand. She's street smart though, David. She is. She is so street smart, but she- The younger one has to be, right?
00:55:56
Speaker
She's just got to be a little tougher to hang out with her big brother. So with Emily, I just think to your point of allowing kids the opportunity to reach a higher potential and just more than they might even be capable of is when I started first praying with Emily, she couldn't say any words. But I would say, who do you want to pray for? Do you want to pray for Mama?
00:56:17
Speaker
you want to pray for a dad. We'd start with very simple things like that. And now she interrupts me mid-prayer to start rattling off her list of all the people that she wants to pray for. And sometimes it's our electrician who was in the house that day, or sometimes it's the helicopter that she saw at the park. And so the list is always kind of baffling to me of who she decides to pray for that day.
00:56:41
Speaker
but she gets so excited to do it. And even though half the words aren't necessarily legible to an outside listener, I've got that, like, you know, when you have that parent here and you just know what your kids are saying, even though it's very hard to understand, but she's only two, but she really does get it. She understands like, oh, these are the people that we're thankful for and we're going to talk about them.
00:57:01
Speaker
And I think it would have been a temptation to be like, well, she's only two will do this when she's older. But because I have that picture kind of like starting with the end in mind that like old Stephen Covey seven habits that starting with the end in mind, I know that I would love to be it when she is 17 years old, I would love to be able to pray with her in her bed at night and for her to feel comfortable with that.
00:57:25
Speaker
And that has got to start when she's two and just continue to stack and build from there. So I think just having that big picture vision has helped me kind of push through when I'm like, I could, there's this selfish temptation that I have as a parent of like, I could just put her to bed.
00:57:40
Speaker
put her in her crib and like get more me time. Yeah, I just want to say that out loud because that is like something that crosses my mind nightly. It's like I could just like skip this tonight and she wouldn't know because she's two. It kind of goes with anger to quote one time that said, you know, keep your head in your heart where your feet are planted.
00:57:57
Speaker
We are correct shell say that one time and you realize with anything that you do you have a choice to be fully present or partially present so it's like if you're reading with your kids you have a choice you can intentionally read with them and read with some and some pizzazz and do fun voices and ask questions and find vocabulary words and help them to learn or you can just read it monotone as fast as you can.
00:58:20
Speaker
to get through it. And skip pages. Yeah. Which we've definitely skipped pages before. I have admittedly skipped a bit. We'll let Jack pick a book. So there's books that we read just because they're a good story and we want to read something that has substance to it. But then Jack was in the habit for a few weeks. And this is when he was younger. He had a book of 100 trucks.
00:58:42
Speaker
you can only go through that list so many times before you're like, this book needs to disappear in the middle of the night. I need to get rid of this book. So I've definitely been there. I mean, it's so interesting what they pick up on. And one of my favorite things to do with Jack is to go to Daily Mass with him on Thursdays during the school year. And I would just bring him and I had no idea whether he was picking anything up. He'd be playing with his cars there.
00:59:03
Speaker
And you know, one day, you know, there's call and response, right? And so the priest says his bit and then everybody else starts saying their bit and Jack's sitting there and he's like saying it and I'm like, what is happening? I wanted to hold him up and be like, do you all see this? Do you see what's happening right now? I know there's other moments too where it's like just humbling where it's like, I snapped at Jack the other day because I lost my patience. I've never snapped on my kids.
00:59:30
Speaker
Well, a few minutes later, so Jack, you know, stop what he's doing. A few minutes later, he comes to me, he goes, Dad, I forgive you. And I was just like, Oh, man, that cut, you know, that cut deep. I felt so bad. I was like, you know, I hadn't even apologized yet. So much that kids teach us, right? And Dave, as you were saying that one thing that came to mind to you when Amy was talking about starting with n languages to there's gonna be somebody listening to this conversation right now whose kid is six.
00:59:52
Speaker
or whose kid is 12, right? Or who doesn't have kids yet, because we're all at different spots on this journey of life. And one of the things that I know is I am somebody who tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it's like, since I wasn't praying for my kids from before they were, every day before they were born, I'm just not going to pray for them at all, because I want a perfect record, right? It's too late. I miss it. It's over.
01:00:12
Speaker
Cause I want, you know, it's like going back to those school years, right? I want a hundred percent and the 99 isn't good enough. So I'd rather not
Starting New Habits Anytime
01:00:18
Speaker
take the test. Like, you know, I don't want to play the game at all. And what I realized is that's the wrong approach, right? It's like the best time to start is right now. And if I hadn't started this new routine, and again, I'm not speaking from a place of authority on this issue because I just started this bedtime routine with Beckett a few months ago. Okay.
01:00:34
Speaker
So, but we've been doing it consistently for a few months now and it just feels so good and I'm so glad that I didn't let my old way of thinking interrupt or interfere with the rest of his life, right? Because every night that we have that precious time together from ages four until, you know, 18, I still have all that time. So anybody who's listening who's like, man, I kind of just put my kid down or I kind of, you know, I kind of just drifting through this. If you can just reframe it as the best time to start is right now.
01:01:02
Speaker
I think that's something that's important to echo and I'm the exact same way where I'm like, well, you know, it's like, I mean, perfect. And I want to ask you about nutrition and exercise and how that works in your day. I won't, I know you all are busy, so I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but with dieting, right? Like I either, you know, if I take like a little cheat of, I don't know, snacking on whatever, I kind of tell myself, you know, well, why not have the entire bag? You know, I already messed up. I might as well just
01:01:26
Speaker
I might as well eat the entire bin of Hershey bars. And then that way, you know, it's a double effort because then I get him out of the house, right? So I feel the same way. I think it's wired in, man, because we see this in our children where it's like Beckett is just like Amy where he can have like a bite or two of ice cream and then go, I'm good, Mama.
01:01:44
Speaker
And he's just content, like Amy could just work on a pint of Jenny's ice cream and she could work on that pint for a month and just a little bit here and there. If I have one bite of the ice cream, I'm having two pints. And we see that with Emily. Yeah, that night with Emily, our daughter, she's the same way. It's like there's just no boundary on that. Yeah.
01:02:05
Speaker
Well, that's why the carnivore diet's been great for me, because I can only eat meat right now. I'm only doing this 45 days or so. But so the rules are very clear. And I like that, you know, there's not like, oh, well, and you can have a snack at night. It's like, now we're going to completely eliminate that temptation. But you mentioned going to the gym and exercising and
Health and Well-Being
01:02:20
Speaker
things like that. And I know that I find even when a lot of my day stacks up how I want it to stack up, if I don't do something physical, my mental space sort of falls apart. And so I wonder if you guys find something similar to be true, or how you build
01:02:34
Speaker
You know, I imagine that you go to the gym alone, like you're not bringing Bex and the kids to the gym. No. Yeah. So how do you incorporate things in for yourselves individually that you want to do? Any tips there? Oh man, that's a great question. I mean, I think one of the things when the weather is good that we enjoy the most is getting out in the morning for like a 30 minute walk.
01:02:52
Speaker
I think because we work from home and our kids are here all day, right? Even when we're working, they're here being, being watched by someone else. We really enjoy taking like a half hour walk together in the morning as like we call it our commute, right? It's like a lot of people who have a traditional job, they get a 30 minute commute to like listen to a podcast or talk on the phone to somebody and kind of transition from parent mode into work mode. So when the weather's good, we do like to do that. As we're recording this, Amy is about six and a half months pregnant. So, um, more, more.
01:03:22
Speaker
Oh boy. So for her in the afternoons, if she can catch like a cat nap, that is better for her at this stage than like working out. This is my third pregnancy. So in the last four and a half years, I've kind of been either pregnant or nursing or both kind of the last like four years perpetually. So for me, I would rather replace the gym time with either like nap time, nursing time, or a walk. Like I love just being able to go on a walk. So
01:03:48
Speaker
If we don't do it in the mornings, a lot of times in the afternoons, we'll do it with the kids and putting them in the stroller, getting fresh air and walking together as a family. So for me in this current season of life, I'm not necessarily looking to like muscle, what's it called? Obviously, I'm not a gym person. Strength training, there it is. Like strength training is not in my personal goal list, but it is for Jordan. And I find that
01:04:11
Speaker
I think Jordan has shared with me before that he almost feels selfish when he takes time to go to the gym because it feels like something that's just for him and I really encourage him that I really believe it's for the whole family and that he should reframe it because I think when he does get that time a it's like really helpful to have.
01:04:27
Speaker
a strong husband who can lift car seats and do, you know, some of that father tasks where he can carry kids on shoulders when they're crying and just all of those kinds of things. And I also just notice a difference. The chemicals, the emotional state, he's like happier, more focused. And just, I really believe he's a better husband and father when he gets that time in the gym so that it's not just for him. It's really for the whole family. I've started to try to implement that at the end of my workday. Cause what I found for me is that again, I need that transition from like work,
01:04:57
Speaker
time into dad time. So if I can go work out for 30 minutes or an hour, right up from that 330 to 430 window, it kind of helps me with that afternoon dip. Like a lot of people get that dip in the afternoons and they feel a little bit tired. I find that on the days that I work out in that window, I have so much more energy from 430 until, you know, 830.
01:05:14
Speaker
And we've identified that's the hour that Jordan is the writer of our business. He does a lot of writing. Writing is really hard for him that last hour of the day. So it's like we're trading not very good work output for a really great reward that comes from working out.
01:05:32
Speaker
The one thing I would say to Davie, and I know you probably found this to be true too, is that I feel like about six months ago, I just went down the nutritional podcast rabbit hole, and I have probably consumed hundreds of hours of dietary and nutritional information. I think the biggest change for me in the last six months- That ribeye is a superfood. Yes. I'm sorry, but go ahead. I think what I realized was, and I'm still dialing things in, but I was
01:05:58
Speaker
somewhere between 210 and 215 a couple of years ago, like summer of 2020 was probably was at my heaviest and I was about 215. When I started at the beginning of the year, I was close to around 210. I'm about 190 right now. And I don't exercise every single day. Most of it has come through diet. And I think once I kind of did like a reductionist thing where I just pulled out, pulled everything out of the diet that wasn't nutritionally dense and just became aware of choosing foods that were high in nutritional density
01:06:26
Speaker
and low in calories and focusing mostly on eating protein and fat and getting your two hundred grams of protein a day since i was about two hundred pounds at the time that's like eighty percent of the battle is just what you eat and so for me i used to feel frustrated a couple years ago. I would go and work so hard at the gym for sixty minutes or ninety minutes and i would see no results and no gains.
01:06:48
Speaker
And then that would become discouraging. And so then you're kind of like, well, the heck with it. I'm just going to eat what I want because I'm not seeing gains. But all of a sudden, I mean, within weeks of me going on a super high protein, high fat, very low carb diet, cutting out sugar, processed foods, all that kind of stuff. Once you get past the first couple of weeks or a month and you don't have that like sugar addiction anymore or that bread addiction anymore,
01:07:12
Speaker
you start to see these crazy changes in your body and then you go, Oh my gosh, I am making progress. And then it's easy to stay on that train. So I've noticed like, you know, the more energy to get out of the bed with the kids in the morning and be excited about it. And just like more energy, like he just implemented that. We call it WrestleMania where he like throws the kids around at night.
01:07:31
Speaker
He just started doing that a couple of weeks ago, but that is at the end of a really long day where we're with the kids and then we're working and then we're with the kids again and we've done dinner and bath time. And the fact that I'm always amazed that he still has energy to like physically throw the kids up in the air and shove them onto the bed. And I really think that that's come from the health
01:07:53
Speaker
It's like it's also connected and one thing I would just say for anybody who's listening is interested. There's a guy named Mark Sisson who wrote the primal blueprint and he basically has a food pyramid that kind of takes the traditional food pyramid that the government put out and kind of flips it on its head and he's about 70 years old and he could take anyone he could take us both down at the same time.
01:08:13
Speaker
And there's another guy. So he's a great resource for somebody who's looking to start on some kind of a new health and diet journey. And then another guy I follow his name is Dr.
Aging and Fitness Goals
01:08:22
Speaker
Peter Atiyah. And he has a really interesting philosophy surrounding health is he says, do you follow him to you follow him? Yeah, great podcast.
01:08:29
Speaker
Great podcast. So he's like almost 50 years old. He looks fantastic. He's got like JLo, right? Like JLo is 50 and she looks like she's 25. I'm like, how has she had the same face for 30 years? Right. But his whole thing is he says, you know, what my goal is at 50 is I want to win the Centurion Olympics. So he basically says when I'm a hundred years old,
01:08:48
Speaker
I want to be able to do these things. And so he makes a list of all the things he wants to be able to do when he's 100. He's like, I want to be able to travel when I'm 100. So I want to be able to lift independently. So he's like, I want to be able to walk up a flight of stairs independently with two bags of groceries. I want to be able to take my luggage and put it in the overhead bin without assistance. I want to be able to squat down and pick up my great grandkids.
01:09:10
Speaker
And he started to identify all these things that looks that that is success for him at 100. And then everything he does with his diet and exercise is aiming toward that goal. And I think it's so powerful because I think it's Simon Sinek who says with the right why you can endure anyhow, I have stopped looking at diet as a negative thing.
01:09:28
Speaker
Like I am not sad at all that I don't eat ice cream anymore, right? I'm not sad at all that I've cut all these things out and that my diet has totally changed because I feel so good physically. And I know what my goal is. Like my goal is to be able to have enough energy to do WrestleMania with the kids. My goal is to be a really active grandparent in my 60s and 70s. And I know that that work has to start right now. And Amy even found a woman the other day on Instagram. It's fascinating. She's a fitness influencer and she's like 75.
01:09:56
Speaker
Her name is Joan. Joan, it's like work out with Joan or exercise with Joan or get fit with Joan. And she was like when she was 70, she had arthritis, she had diabetes, she was super overweight. And then her daughter who's a personal trainer was like, we need to fix your diet and exercise.
Quality Family Time
01:10:11
Speaker
So over the last five years, she's been on this health journey.
01:10:13
Speaker
Bro, she's more ripped than almost any guy that I know probably squats and benches more than you do or I do. And she's 70. So that just amazing. So there's it's never too late, right to start. Yeah. And the thing about habits to like one thing that I was a real eye opener for me was when Jack was born.
01:10:33
Speaker
Being an apparent for the first time, I was so tired at the end of the day, but I felt like after I put Jack to bed, I was like, this is me. This is me time. And you know, what did I do? I usually just like turned on the TV and I'd watch TV for, you know, an hour or two, and then I'd go to bed. And one thing that we've cut out is when Jack goes to bed, we basically go to bed too, but we go and we read together or we have our date night, but it's time for us to maybe to talk a little bit as well. You read together, Davey? Got it. Yeah, exactly.
01:11:01
Speaker
While he says the word read did you know Jordan did you hear that they read y'all? I think you sure is speaking
01:11:18
Speaker
Well, regardless, we don't watch TV. It's one thing I just don't miss. I do not miss not knowing what was going on with the latest show. And that's not to say we watch no TV ever anymore. But it's one of those things where it's like, no, I don't miss that. I don't miss necessarily sleeping in till 7.38 in the morning, even though maybe on an occasional Saturday, I'll do that now.
01:11:37
Speaker
One thing that I noticed this past Lent, I gave up caffeine. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I thought, actually, this is going to be the easy thing. The first week, just headache from the time I got up to the time I went to bed, for the first two weeks, I did not feel myself. I felt tired. It was incredible how much of an effect it had on me. And it wasn't until about day 40, 42, somewhere in there, like right towards the end of Lent. Right from one quarter.
01:12:02
Speaker
Yeah, right when we went over where I'm realizing, man, I feel great now. I just had more energy than I did when I wasn't all caffeinated up and I was on a lot of caffeine prior to that. But, you know, that timeframe, I thought it was so eye-opening. You know, I could have been like, oh, I'll give up caffeine for a week because that's really how long your body needs just to desensitize from it, I guess.
01:12:21
Speaker
And that's kind of why I picked 45 days for this carnivore diet that I'm doing is because I know the first two weeks, like I'm not going to probably feel good, you know, but if I give up, then I'm not going to reap whatever potential benefits I could reap. So God's never asked me to give up caffeine or reading.
01:12:38
Speaker
No, but I think that's so good. And when you were talking about no TV, I remember it's often that if someone comes to our house for the first time, they're like, they kind of look around and they're like, where's your TV? And we don't have a TV in our living room, which is where most people obviously keep their TV. And we did that really intentionally because
01:12:57
Speaker
I read a book that really influenced me called The Life-Giving Home by Sally Clarkson. And she was just talking about the whole book is kind of structured around creating a home and a place where people really want to be that focuses on your priorities and the things that matter most. And so we just decided quite a while ago, like we didn't want our home to center around a screen and make that seem kind of like, oh, this is the center of our family time.
01:13:21
Speaker
So we don't have a TV in our living room and it's not like we never watch anything. Like sometimes Jordan and I will like pop up a laptop late at night and like watch a fun show together that we're both excited about. But we really only do that if it's like something that was recommended by somebody that we really love and that we're both interested in so that it's like something we can do together kind of like a date night. But I feel like our family time there is such an increase in quality when there's no default to the screen being on because then we
01:13:49
Speaker
something that Laura VanderKam says in 168 hours is when you're a working parent, the best thing you can do when you're with your kids is focus on nourishing their hearts, souls, and minds. And that if you can focus on those three things when you're together,
01:14:04
Speaker
kind of filling up their love tanks and quality time and education and teaching that that time can be so valuable even if you're not with them every hour of the day because I think that really spoke to my own mom guilt of being a working mom thinking like, gosh, I want to be with my kids.
01:14:20
Speaker
every hour of the day sometimes. And then other days I'm like, that is the hardest job in the world. And I feel thankful that I do get a quote unquote break from my kids to work. But basically having really set goals for like, what does this time with our kids look like so that it doesn't feel like it's dragging on and that it feels purposeful and fulfilling.
Reducing Screen Time for Better Family Connection
01:14:40
Speaker
And that has really helped, I think, make us look forward to the parenting role section of our day.
01:14:46
Speaker
and also implementing, like you said, having regular date nights, time where we know we can be completely away from the kids.
01:14:53
Speaker
and have conversations where nobody interrupts us. Momma. Momma. Momma. Momma. And, Davey, also just something important to know that statistically speaking, couples who do not have a TV in their bedroom tend to read a lot more. Well, we don't have a TV in our bedroom. And they're good readers. Oh, my God. They're good readers. And so for any husbands, I'm just saying, for any husbands who are listening to this right now, this is the offer that I throw out to the guys. Of course, nobody else can see Jordan winking at the word read.
01:15:23
Speaker
But David, this is what I say to husbands all the time. If you want to read more in your marriage and you want to be a better reader,
01:15:31
Speaker
while your wife is gone to maybe she's at work, she's at the grocery store, she's out for an errand, take the TV out of your room and put it in the garage. Go put in a closet, go hide it and don't say anything. And when she comes back later and says, where did the TV go? You just tell her, I would rather spend my time focusing on you instead of a screen. And you will notice that reading time go up. It is just
01:15:56
Speaker
Well, we don't have a TV in our bedroom, but we do natural family planning. I'll say in this season where Krista's still breastfeeding and just right off having another child, that there's not a ton of reading, not a ton of extra reading going on right now, which is unfortunate. Which we relate to because we know exactly postpartum life is a whole different life. That's right.
Personal Definition of Success
01:16:18
Speaker
That's right, but I do I mean I appreciate all that and we've definitely been in seasons where Jack has watched or been in front of a screen Too much and without fail we notice a change in his behavior right away, you know Reason enough it just feels like it's never ends up being worth the trade-off It's like a temptation because you could get an hour like we get an hour to ourselves But then afterwards we're like, why did we do that? Yeah, exactly
01:16:43
Speaker
Well, we've covered a lot. I know you all have so much going on and you know a lot to probably to get through until before 430 here and I would hate to be I certainly don't want to be stealing any time and I don't want to be the cause of any sort of meltdown at 432 so Anything else that y'all were hoping to share and if we haven't got to yet
01:17:03
Speaker
I think one of the things we were talking about as we were thinking about this conversation is this idea that for all of us, we all have to decide what is most important to us in life and then fit everything else in around it. I think it's important to define success for you.
01:17:19
Speaker
And don't define or measure your success by someone else's standard or worse your perception about their standard based on what you see on social media. Because I think it is so easy to look at other people's lives and to try to do all the things that everybody is doing. And pretty soon we don't even know what we're doing or why we're doing it. And instead just trying to define what does success look like on a given day for us and then doing that.
01:17:45
Speaker
I think business success, of course, is important, but almost that long-term, fast-forwarding to when we're grandpa's age and we only have a few months left to live, when we look back, what are the daily habits where we're going to look back and say, man, that was success when our kids were four, two, and newborn, or that was success when our kids were teenagers, or that was success for us as a couple, prioritizing and making time on the calendar to be just married without kids for a little while.
01:18:14
Speaker
If we have some of those long-term big picture goals in mind, it helps inform those daily habits and makes them easier and less of a burden and more of something that we could get excited about. I think something that struck me recently was somebody said something like, you never know when it's going to be the last time.
01:18:31
Speaker
And that doesn't that's not like a morbid death thing. It's more like, you know, with our kids, like sometimes there's something that there's a word that they mispronounce every single day. And then one day they just get it. And they're never going to mispronounce that word again. And we're our kids are currently in a stage where every morning at seven a.m., we hear these pitter patters on the ground and Beckett comes bounding into our room and he wants to jump into bed and he wants to snuggle and he wants to wrestle and he wants to play. He wants to bear in the cave.
01:18:59
Speaker
there's gonna come a time when 7 a.m. will hit and he won't bound in. And that'll be it. It'll be over. And so, I mean, hopefully he's not doing it when he's like 16. That would get weird, you know? But I just think that I want to try to live in a way, not like an, again, like a morbid way, but like live in such a way that I want to appreciate everything that's in front of me every day as if it could be the last time. Not because someone's gonna die, but just because,
01:19:26
Speaker
Yeah, well, and especially with little kids, it's like, you never know the last day you're really going to swaddle your baby or the last day before they don't need help up the stairs anymore or the last day, you know, there's just so many lasts that end up coming and you don't necessarily know until it's not happening anymore. And in life, man, there are, you've heard the analogy of like there are glass balls and there are rubber balls and you know, you can drop a rubber ball and it'll bounce back and that is your business, you know, that's whatever.
01:19:56
Speaker
but those glass balls when you drop them they crack or they break and sometimes they can be repaired sometimes they can't and sometimes even if you repair them they still bear the scars of that drop and so you know i think about my marriage with amy my relationship with my kids those are the glass balls that are completely non negotiable.
Prioritizing Relationships Over Business
01:20:14
Speaker
and i'll fit in everything else around it because your business will have seasons where it does really well it'll have seasons where it struggles a little bit more but the most important thing is to keep the constants in your life consistent.
01:20:28
Speaker
Well said. I think that's the perfect place to wrap it up. Where can we find you all? I'm going to include this in the show notes, of course. I encourage people to go back and listen to the first episode that we recorded together, which I think was the very first podcast episode. Is that right? I think it might have been. First three, I think maybe it was even the first one that I recorded in getting ready to release the episode. You were like, get these people on the podcast because no one's going to listen to the first one.
01:20:56
Speaker
Let's see, where can people find us? Well, we're on AmyandJordan.com.
01:21:00
Speaker
We're on Instagram, Amy, well, I mean, I am on Instagram, Amy underscore Demos. In our conversation, this is appropriate for a conversation about work-life balance. Jordan actually cut his Instagram a long time ago and it's just been wonderful for all of us. So yeah, if you want to see Jordan's face, you're only going to find it at Amy underscore Demos. Now nobody's going to go there because they don't want to see this face.
01:21:22
Speaker
That's great. And we didn't talk about education at all today, but you guys put out some of the best education out there. So if you are a photographer listening, you should go out and check out their education for sure. And I feel like this is one of those conversations where one day what we'll do is we're going to be in person together. We'll record a conversation like this, and we'll let it go for four hours, which is what it would go for naturally, I think. And we're going to make that happen as soon as you're out of the newborn stage. So we'd love that someday, which probably feels kind of far off right now.
01:21:52
Speaker
It does, but I know it'll be here before we know it. It's all going so fast. Give Krista and the kids a hug for us. We always treasure the time that we get with you and with Krista, and yeah, we would love to do that. Likewise, and I always feel so encouraged talking to you all and so full, so I really appreciate that as well, but thank you for your time. Hey, thank you, man. Love you, buddy.
01:22:18
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.