Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. My guest today is Ashley Island. She's the mother of three and author of two books, say Good and Humankind.
She's a pastor and a passionate advocate for building strong relationships. Ashley's currently head of school at Livingstones Academy in Grand Rapids. It's a preschool through elementary school that she describes as a beacon of hope and light in the world. It's diverse culturally and socioeconomically, and it's a school that cares about living in authenticity and embodied justice.
Ashley's been featured in a timely new film called Leap of Faith, which follows a Diverse group of 12 pastors and Christian leaders with politically and culturally polarizing views. They're focused on learning how to talk through their differences, bridge divides between them, to not only tolerate, but love each other. I invited Ashley here today because she has loads of wisdom and inspiration to share for how we can stress less and discover more peace, meaning and joy this holiday season. I'm personally looking forward to what Ashley has to say because this is a challenge that I have every year, paring down to what really matters during the holidays.
Hi, Ashley. Thank you so much for being here, Janet. It truly is a joy to join you. Thanks for having me.
Well, as you know, I've been a fan of your work for a long time. I love your book say Good. So I hope we get to talk a little about that today because it's been. It's just been an important book for me.
It really speaks to sort of my life and my work and what I've been doing. And I love the way that you share the information, what I wanted to bring you on for today, though you. You did a post on Instagram that really caught my attention because I need this. He wrote, before the chaos of the holidays, decide now how you'll protect your joy and your peace.
Say no to comparison and over functioning. Define what looks like success for you and your family. Define how to communicate those success measures to friends, family in laws reject over consumption and overspending. Name an accountability partner.
Schedule in no days when nothing gets scheduled and choose to prioritize Sabbath. May this be our most grounded season yet. So, yes, I'm sure there's other people like me that really have a hard time paring down around the holidays to what really matters, to what will fuel our souls for a new year, us closer together as people and families. And I feel like I really believe in that and I know how to do it.
In daily life with kids, I've learned how to do that now, but something happens to me during these winter holidays. There's like an expectation in me that, I don't know, it makes it harder. I want to celebrate Christmas in a meaningful way, but I sometimes struggle to find that balance. So anyway, I would just love to hear what you have to say.
You have so much wisdom on these topics and. Oh, well, thank you, Jen. I'm starting to love equipping myself, my friends, folks who are in similar seasons of life and even seasons beyond mine of parenting littles with these ideas that joy and a sense of levity and freedom within us is actually possible. We don't have to stay on this incessantly busy train where we are needing to cave to the pressures of what the holidays bring.
And it was actually while on vacation that I had this thought. We were in Wisconsin with our family on fall break and I could just sense my body viscerally responding to what's coming up in the weeks ahead. And it's unique for our family because out of the six of us, and I include my mom who lives with us part of the year, four of my family members have winter birthdays. Both of my girls have December birthdays.
My oldest was born on Christmas Eve, and then my son was born in January and my husband in February. So I've always joked the past couple of years that as soon as Halloween is over begins the craziest time of my year. And the kind of little quip I throw out there is that I'm broke between Thanksgiving and February because we're just spending so much time and money on parties and festivities and gift giving. And those things actually bring me a lot of joy.
My, my number one kind of love language I found is giving gifts. I love buying things for friends. I love receiving gifts. But what I've noticed is that it kind of tugs at my soul in a particular way where things that are really life giving have become the most prescient sources of stress for me.
And I think I'm at a season of life where I want to enter into these busy seasons with a sense of agency, deeply taking in, in a way that I am present all of the good that surrounds me. And so I started to think through how do, how do we do that? And so that's where the thought came from. And really, I think the beginnings of that kind of freedom and the beginnings of that kind of levity comes with a space to think ahead about the lives that we want to live.
What needs to change now so that we can have the space to be more present in the moments ahead of us, these holidays. And what does that look like? Yeah, first, I'd say for any family, it's taking stock of what's currently true. So as seasons change for us, you know, I used to think a year ahead at a time just given our kids stages of life, but now I think kind of more in semesters or trimesters.
You know, I work at a school, so that's just a natural thinking rhythm for me. And so with each change of the season, I'm thinking through what are our kids involved in in these next few weeks. And that changes pretty regularly for us because we have kids who are ages 1, 9, 8 and 5. And so they're just starting to get into some of these regular communal activities.
It used to be that my oldest two were playing ultimate Frisbee as part of our school's team, but now that's changed. And my daughter's playing basketball, my son is taking clarinet, and my youngest and my oldest are both in dance. And so we sit down once a month. We just started this, so this is new for us.
After kind of weeks and months of wrestling with how to carve out time, we have family meetings and we talk about the calendar and we talk about what we want to be true. And we include our kids, age appropriately as well as my mom in that discussion to say what excites you about what's coming up in these few weeks, what makes you nervous? And that gives our kids a chance to hear from us as their parents kind of our desire for our future rhythms. So I say, you know, mommy doesn't want to be stressed out and short tempered when it comes to our schedules that are too full.
I want to really be able to enjoy all of you and have moments of slowness versus rushing here, there. So we get to verbalize our collective desires. And I'd say if you haven't, as a family unit, come up with family values, this is something we did really recently and we hung them in our kitchen so that we can be true to those family values even in the holiday season. So first we assess what's true now and then two, through the naming of those desires.
Say, this is what I want to be true for the next run of weeks or months. And maybe there's a conversation that you have a partner. You and your partner kind of are on the same page first. Particularly if there are multiple family stops around the way.
Whether there's a. It's involving travel. And one family usually gets a certain portion of travel, another family wants to stay Home just with their immediate family unit and kids. I know that can be a source of tension.
So maybe there's two layers of that conversation in the naming of desires. But then you get to hear from everyone, and ahead of time you get to hear and verbalize and leave space to name what's really true for you. And sometimes this might take the form of excitement and joy, and other times this might sound more like confession. Like, actually, I kind of want to stay home this year, but I'd encourage families to take the time to create and carve out space to name what's true for you and to leave space for desire before kind of this automatic run cycle starts carrying us through the holidays.
And then I'd say after those desires are named, the good next step is to come up with these kind of agreements that you hold to and you come back to in the way of accountability. And some of those agreements could be with your adult friendship groups just to say, hey, someone check in on me, ask me how I'm doing and setting boundaries with my in laws, or someone check in on me and make sure that I'm taking the me time or the spaces of silence and solitude that I said I'd need in order to make it through these weeks healthily. So friendship is a key part of that in the way of accountability. But then as a family unit, what does it look like to keep each other accountable in really positive ways?
Oftentimes we think of accountability as this negative concept where it's preventing us from doing something wrong or assigning some sort of consequence for doing something incorrectly. Where as I think of accountability and I write a little bit about this and say good as an opportunity to give testimony or to speak positively about what we want our lives to look like and to have others join us along the journey in that way. So those are kind of three simple framing steps that I might use if someone's getting started and trying to stay ahead of this for the holidays, to name what's true now, to kind of leave space and name desire down the same page and then have some sort of accountability measure and boundaries, whether with adults or, and, or with the whole family around what those boundaries could look like in the service of the kind of life we want to live into this holiday season. That's so brilliant.
I love it. This is embarrassing. I have three adult children and they all have partners right now. So that's been another thing for me that I have basically six children now that I want to perform for throughout the holidays because that's the Pressure that I put on myself.
But even with adult children, I have not done that. And it's. That is, I'm absolutely going to do that. Because we could even do it in a chat if we have no other time.
When we're all together before the holidays, we can chat with text messages about, how do you see this? What do you want to do? What's important to you? I mean, that's kind of pathetic that I haven't done with adult kids yet.
It's just so beautiful and brilliant to make everybody feel included. Everybody's heard and, you know, a lot of things that I put on myself, pressures I put on myself like nobody else might care about. Right, Exactly. And yet I feel, you know, like you said, I'm feeling already nervous.
I have never worked so hard in my life as I'm working right now. I'm writing a book, I'm doing this podcast. I'm trying to keep up with other things, social media and stuff. It's very all consuming.
And I'm feeling very nervous about how am I going to be the holiday queen. Yes. And make it all magic for everyone. Why am I still doing this?
My kids are adults. But it's so interesting, the patterns that we set for ourselves and how hard it is to break out of them. Yeah, that's so true. And I would be surprised if not almost everyone resonated with that sort of idea that we've given ourselves and have been assigned for ourselves these roles that we play.
And for some of us, it might be holiday queen. That's definitely true for me. I'm our family's party planner. I of order all the gifts.
I'm the one who is project managing the holidays for us. But I'll tell you this, one of the things that I realized, changed and shifted this perspective for me was actually grief. And I, we don't talk about this a lot in the scheme of our daily lives, all the time. But just to name it, for a lot of us, there is something we grieve during the holidays.
And it's not always the loss of a person. Sometimes it is the loss of agency or the loss of the idea of what we thought was true about ourselves. But meeting that grief and naming it actually helped me realize my own limitations and allowed me to settle in really more humbly to. You know what?
I'm not this savior of my family that can do everything. I am limited. I do have limited energy. And once I really released this facade that I could do everything, that's when I became more present and so, for me, the question isn't just, like, what do I desire?
That's part of it, but it might be really powerful to say, like, hey, guys, if I were to offer you one thing this holiday season, what would be most important to you? Whether that's wearing my daughter hat or my mom hat or my partner hat, as a wife, like, what do you need from me in order for the season to be most meaningful? And honestly, my kids just want me to spend time with them most of the time. Yes, they love gifts, and, yes, they love surprises.
But one of the ways that we have kind of systematized that in our family. My husband had a brilliant idea. He. He's never been one to be caught up in all of the Christmas magic.
I mean, he'll put together a kitchen set if I ask him to, but I'm really the one that cares about the look and the feel and the smells and the aesthetic of the holidays. For us, Christmas is a big one. But he just said, ashley, what if instead of kind of sucking our souls dry by trying to find the hottest gifts for our kids and staying up so late and not getting rested that we can't enjoy Christmas morning because we're up late the night before wrapping gifts? Like, what if we gave our kids a choice?
And that choice has become, hey, kids, we can either do a traditional Christmas with gifts, and our youngest still believes in Santa. And so we're kind of playing into that a little bit. We can either do that, or we can do a family trip. Two out of the past three years, our kids have chosen a family trip.
And honestly, Janet, that has been such a sigh of relief for us. And I realize there's some privilege in that we are able to do family trips, but we budget very wisely. Throughout the rest of the year. We make intentional financial decisions so that we can have that as an option if the kids choose that.
But I remember those trips. We did one cruise and one trip to San Diego as a family the last two out of the three years. And those memories have become so precious. Our kids are still talking about them, but I don't think we would have gotten there had we not kind of met ourselves in our own limitations as a couple.
And then for me personally, especially over the past year, I think I'm letting go of the cape in a sense, because grief has kind of worn me down in the most beautiful way. Yes, it's been hard. Last year, I lost my dad and my first cousin kind of within a month of each other. And then I received A pretty kind of crazy diagnosis the week after my dad's funeral.
And so meeting my limitations in that way actually made me more present to the things that matter. And I'm just kind of not giving in to this temptation of belief that I can only be an effective and present and loving mom if I run myself then and have nothing to give by the end of it. That's just a lie that I've believed in the past that I'm choosing not to believe now. But the dialogue around that, both within myself and between the people that I love the most in my family, has truly been one of the ways that that permission has come to me more easily.
I'm sorry you've had all these losses. Thank you. They've been hard, for sure. I see what you're saying, though, also, because even this time of year, without specific losses, it's that feeling at the end of the year, as you're talking, I'm thinking to myself, maybe that's also a reason that I want it to have this splashy ending.
You know, not just that it's Christmas, and I love Christmas, and I love all the ambiance of Christmas and the aesthetics. And like you, I'm in charge of all of that. That's been my thing in the family. But it's also the.
This kind of, how do we get through this year of ups and downs of all the things that have happened, you know, some really hard things and. Yeah. So there is that feeling that in itself, like, I usually have a good cry on Christmas night or something the day after or something in front of, like, a fireplace with, you know, all my little lights and candles and stuff. It's not necessarily a sad cry, it's just all of this life.
Yeah. And I wonder if, like, the end of the year is a release for a lot of us that somehow we've made it. And I don't know what our different markers of success are for each of us or our families, but there is something about reaching the end of something that even though it's good, there is a sense of transition that's forced. And for some of us, transition is hard, even if it's for good reason.
And so I desire to be really present to those transitions because I know they teach me something. I'm also realizing as my kids are getting older that I think I've given myself this idea that I need to play all the roles in order to create the story and craft the narrative that our life is good and our kids actually have so much brilliance in them. And I'm learning to let go of some of the roles that I've assumed so that my kids can shine differently. You know, I've been this one woman play for so many years and I'm going, no.
We've got this really cool cast of characters in my family. And even though our family is complex and our extended family is filled with hard stories and hard parts of it, you know, I'm, I'm a piece of it and not the whole thing. I can give my husband the joy of, you know, being a chef in our family. He loves to cook.
I don't have to stress about what we're going to eat and he can play his part. And my son is like a master engineer in his eight year old mind. And how can I give him a problem that maybe I'm facing that he can help solve? And my oldest is a creative and so how can I have her help me decorate the house in a way that's unique to her style?
And so I'm just learning to let go more. But as we reach those natural endings, and for many of us it's the end of a, of a calendar year, I get why there would be tears because there's been so much leading up to this culmination of putting a stamp on for us. Right now it's 2024 and did that matter? Was it meaningful?
Did I do what I needed to do in order to make the most of my life and the time that I had? And so, yeah, the holidays are a really natural time for that release to happen. And I'm not surprised at all that you would find yourself in front of a fire and I'm imagining my fireplace with a cozy blanket and a cup of something warm and going, yeah, that's a really reflective time for me. And how do I not miss that?
Yeah, somehow I always find my way to that. But I love your idea about delegating. That's so brilliant because that just raises everybody up. That just makes everybody more feel more involved.
And I would love to go over some of these specifics that you shared just to kind of hear your take on them. So the first one you said is say no to comparison and over functioning. So how do we say no to comparison? That's a really hard thing.
I mean, I love the advice that actually I heard Susan David say recently, which is keep your eyes on your own work, just like in school. And no, that's where you have the power. That's what you're here for. What do you think about that?
Like it is hard to not get caught up in the comparison. Yeah, it is. And I'd say for me it's about my inputs. So if I'm choosing to allow inputs in my life that give me myriad opportunities for comparison and that's where my mind and patterning is actually going to fall.
But if I choose instead to limit my inputs in holiday season, it's almost like we have to do the opposite. The opposite of where our days in our cultural patterning are taking us. So if things are picking up and we're seeing more ads and life seems more hurried, it's almost like we need to do the opposite thing and slow down. And so I'd say, as opposed to consuming all the media or just kind of saying yes to all of the scrolling that we can be tempted to do, at least I can be tempted to do, I give myself more space to not have any inputs at all.
And so for me, that is silence in the morning. I try to get up at least an hour and a half before the rest of my family and just have time to sit and think about my thinking. And that helps intercept the second source where comes back from our own thinking, our own sense of self. I can really evaluate, how do I see myself right now?
How am I talking to myself? What is the conversation like in my own head? Am I as kind to myself as I would be to a dear friend or a family member I love? Or even does it line up with the kindness I would extend to a stranger I see in a public space?
If I am more charitable to those around me and not as kind to myself, then it doesn't matter what those inputs are, doesn't matter what the work is, even if it's really good work. And I'm choosing to keep my eyes on that really good work. I think there's something about evaluating our relationships with self, that kind of source, this idea of how our comparison meter gets ramped up or put in check. And so I'd say in a time and a season where we can be the most prone to comparison, having a really gentle sense of self and a really charitable and kind dialogue with ourselves is the start of keeping comparison at bay.
That's so wise. One thing that I gave up a few years ago was doing the Christmas card with the family portrait. Oh my gosh. Which was all on me.
I had to make everybody do it, figure it out. I had to get it done in a way that I liked it. I had to do the address list, all that. And that was just another thing And I happened.
But then when you get all these beautiful cards. I know, guilty still, but that was me being kinder to myself. Yeah, it's disappointing because you want to put that out there. And everybody loves to receive a card from you.
And everybody loves to see what your families looks like now and how you all are. And it's just. I can't. It's too much.
Yeah. It's funny, I was chuckling because that's one of my favorite things to do at the holidays. So that's the one thing I haven't given up. Because for me, it's like, I love a good administrative project.
I love a good Excel sheet and color coding and, you know, just seeing names. But I've turned it into almost like my creative project for the holidays. And so every year we kind of pick a different mural or cool artistic spot in the city. And that's fun for me.
It's restful for me to find that space for our family. And now my daughter helps me coordinate our outfits. And so I've had to say, you know, what are the things that could be really stressful for other people that are unique to me? And bringing me to life during the holidays, that's going to be different for all of us.
And so it's really knowing ourselves and going. How do I define rest? Is it. Is it truly just doing nothing and binge watching a good sitcom and kind of having a slow day, or is there something more active that could be part of my rest repertoire, if you will?
And so I love that we're so different in that regard, because the thing that you're choosing to say no to, and I'm like, oh, that brings me so much delight. Yeah, that's a yes for me. Yeah. Well, I have to say that when you said going away for the holidays, like I could go after for New Year's or something like that, but my whole life I've been at home on Christmas and I just cannot imagine something else.
So I feel like that's really important to me just to be home and taking it all in instead of out somewhere, you know, and that's just me. But I know a lot of people do love traveling and I have the whole thing with family trip. We just did one. It was for a memorial service for my father in law and we just did one.
But it was so fun to have this extended family trip and excuse for it, even though there were lots of feelings all around, but it was mostly just such a positive thing. And I thought I wanted to more families of course, now my family is six kids, it's eight of us. So it's growing, growing, growing. But it is so beautiful, like you said, the memories.
And all the time we have this picture of us all in an elevator in New York and my mother in law, who's quite elderly and she's in the picture in a wheelchair and we're all like just our faces are all in it. And I love it anyway, those kind of moments that you'd never thought were a moment, you know, but then it was. Yeah, but that's the beauty of paying attention, you know, something that you think or underestimate, having that sort of weightiness to it. I love that you're going, yeah, that was, that was a moment that was really beautiful and meaningful to our family.
Even though, you know, no one planned for that piece of it necessarily. But how cool that you and your family were able to honor your father in law in that way. And I'm sorry for your loss and I'm also grateful that you're able to kind of reflect on that time together in a positive way. Yeah.
So then you said, define what looks like success for you and your family. So you've done that really well, like explaining how to have a family meeting and discuss. And I totally down for that. I think that sounds wonderful.
Define how to communicate those success measures to friends, family, in laws. And this is where I thought that your book say Good is really about that. How to speak, your voice, how to, you know, know when to say, what to say, how to say it, who to say it to. And yeah, I think that is a hard one for a lot of us.
It is. And I think there's wisdom in who to assign to certain conversations if there's multiple people in the family. And so I know early on my parents taught my husband and me that, you know, if it's dealing with a certain person's side of the family, then that person has a conversation. And so that kind of gave us a good rubric for anything dealing with my husband's side of the family.
He was going to have that hard conversation. Anything with my parents, I was going to have that conversation. And it's about timing as much as it is about content and the what. It's about the spirit of the conversation as much as it is about the content of the conversation.
And so I think a lot of the intentionality in that and I say how to communicate those success measures on purpose because the how oftentimes gets lost in the anxiety of the what. And so to plan ahead and say, you know, I want to be at ease when I have this conversation with my mom or my mother in law, whoever it is, or, you know, I want to feel confident and bold when I say, you know what, dad, we're actually choosing to stay home this Christmas instead of making the long trip. And here's why we decided that. And is there an alternative way that we can be together or kind of hold the tradition differently for whatever reason?
And so I think the way that we see our family members matters. If we go in kind of seeing them as adversaries, then it's going to be an adversarial conversation. But if we can be generous in how we see the people that we're setting those boundaries with and communicating those success measures to, then I oftentimes think that's half the battle of having the hard conversation and assuming that whatever bond or love is there is enough to hold you and keep you beyond that hard conversation. So, you know, sometimes we assume that because people know us well that they can read our minds.
And I'm just learning the more and more as I do life that, you know, no one can read my mind. No one knows exactly what I'm thinking. So how can I get ahead of some of the anticipation of that and really be brave and showing up in ways to advocate for what our family needs? I love that.
I really needed your book, like I said, and it reminded me of so many things that kind of bolstered me. I'm not a person who would ever be described as somebody that wants to make their voice heard. The only reason I have a voice out there is because the message that I want to share felt so compelling that I pushed through, really being a shy, more introverted person. So, yeah, that is what can compel us to be brave, like you said, is because we value something so much, whether it's the time that we spend with our families during holidays or, you know, something else, social justice or whatever that we're talking about.
It's. It's that weight of that message that will push us over the edge. Yes, talk about it. Yeah.
But I also think, just to give you so much credit, Janet, I think it's also the way you communicate your passion and your heart to people that's so compelling. I know. That's what got me through so many hard times with my littles and listening to your podcast episodes and engaging with you online. It's not just what you believe in and what your, your passion is.
It's the way that you communicate that to Others, I think you have a companioning spirit about you that comes alongside. And that's what I want for anyone who is choosing to say yes in a season to something that they love or want to uphold as a value, it's just as much about how we hold that value or how we communicate what we believe or want to kind of pour ourselves into that matters. And so kudos to you and also an encouragement for others to say who you are while you are doing these things absolutely matters. And how you show up in spaces while you are doing the planning and kind of the carrying out of the event or the travel or whatever it might be matters just as much as the what.
So thank you for kind of showing us the way in your work. But also I'd say for others, there's so much to that adage that we hear on airplanes, like, put on your oxygen mask first. Because as we are carrying out our gifts and talents to the world, how we hold them and who we choose to be in the midst of all that really matters. Thank you so much, Ashley.
Your words are really an honor. So you're. Tears my eyes, but thank you. I really appreciate that so much.
Reject overconsumption and overspending. Yeah, I don't know. Hill's monitor is. Yes, I know.
I love that you said that about gifts, because it gave me, like, this huge relief when you started out at the beginning saying you love giving gifts, because I don't give gifts all year. I mean, I give them a birthday gift maybe, you know, but this is my time when I give gifts, and I really do like that part. But I need to still, like, cut it way back and know that that's enough. And I guess that's really maybe one of the hardest things.
And yeah, it is a privileged thing to say, too, because even when there's one gift from each of us around a tree, it looks like X mas right there, you know, because we've got eight of us each giving each other one gift. And it looks sick. Like, it looks like something's wrong with this family. They're so over the top.
I mean, really. But anyway, any secrets to that? Oh, gosh, I. I mean, I'm not the first person to think of this, but we kind of gave ourselves this rubric with our kids.
We said, what's something you want? Something, Something you need, something to wear, something to read and something for someone in need. And so if I hear my kids in September say, oh, Mom, I really, I really want the next book in a certain series, and I'LL drop that down on my notes in my app. And so it kind of helps me practice restraint.
And sometimes those gifts don't come in the form of a formally wrapped present. So if we do a traditional Christmas, like something to wear, I've just decided I'm giving my kids matching socks. And they love that. It's become a tradition for us in their stocking is we all get, like, matching family socks, or I get cool sweatshirts for my kids that kind of match, and they've kind of fallen in love with that.
It doesn't have to be this extravagant kind of display, but that kind of a rubric for me has helped me as a gift giver, practice restraint. So for those who don't love gift giving as much, maybe there's another practice, like, pay attention to the people in your lives. And as they light up envisioning kind of an activity or something that they're getting interested in, a new hobby or a place that they'd like to go, maybe it's a gift card or an experience versus a thing. But we can get creative in the ways that we're paying attention to one another and also withholding and trusting that the relationship is enough that we don't have to prove our affection through the things that we give.
And that's. That's the kind of takeaway for me, is my family loves me no matter what, and it doesn't have to be quantified in the number of gifts under a tree. Beautiful. Okay.
Name an accountability partner. I got a big O. And I read that because to be, it's like, okay, this means I'm really doing it. You know, like, when you tell someone you're going on a diet now, it's like not only to judge my head, but I've got another judge over there.
But as you said, you can make that a positive thing that somebody's just on your team helping you, not pointing a finger when you're crossing a line or something like that. Yeah, we can make it about celebration and transformation versus restriction. And so I think when we invite people, you know, love us and are for us into that kind of accountability becomes kind of a regular, disciplined celebration stitched into our everyday lives. And that's the way I like to see accountability in these regards is how are we celebrating my transformation and me becoming someone new even as I'm an adult and leading a family?
And so it's the rethinking of that relationship to accountability, I think, has been really key for me. Help me know if I'm on track. On track that I want to be on. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I like that. And then schedule in the no days when nothing gets scheduled. I'm actually good at those because I really don't like schedules very much at all. Like, I have to say I love the spontaneity of things, but then I find that I'm also, you know, rushing on, doing things in less minutes.
Not forget about time management. I don't have any, like, organizational love for, like, you know, spreadsheets. No, sorry. I'm the other.
I'm your other brain. I love it. It's funny because I actually love spontaneity in relationships. So if someone were like, hey, kids are down.
You want to hang out by the bonfire? I'm like, yes, I want to do that. I just know, especially with our family's unique breakup of birthdays and events happening around November, December, January especially, that I have to plan ahead of time when we are just doing nothing. And it doesn't matter how compelling it is or how tempted I am.
Like, there just has to be a regular rhythm for us where we have nothing going on. And so our family tries to practice Sabbath. So that's one day a week that we just don't work. Where I don't do chores, dishes, the laundry can wait, where it's really restful and we are prioritizing fun and togetherness and feasting.
But it may not be every week. For certain families. It could be, hey, what's the one day this month or the one day of Thanksgiving week where we're just not moving or we're defining rest, whatever rest looks like for you, because it's not always doing nothing. It could be going to your favorite spot in the city or spending time with another family that just brings you life.
You could spend hours with them. You know, we can define rest differently, but how do we plan that ahead of time before there's so many other events and especially school age kids, all the school events and the calendaring and the extracurriculars that can take up the holidays and before you know you're stressed out. So kind of wiggle those in ahead of time. And so that when you do get busy, you know that there's a sigh of relief coming up in your schedule that you can look forward to.
Wonderful. Well, you are such a gift, Ashley. Thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom and all your great ideas and just connecting with me. I really, really appreciate it.
This has been so fun. Thanks for having me and thank you for all you do to encourage us in our parenting journeys. Well, everybody read Ashley's book, say Good, and I just purchased her first book, humankind. I'm also enjoying that.
I'm in the middle of reading it. I'm wishing you all a peaceful, joyful holiday season. And you, Ashley, with all your birthdays and Christmas and the New Year and Thanksgiving, whatever anybody celebrates, well, I think we've earned it. But we don't need to earn it.
We all deserve a wonderful season. We do. And thank you for sharing how we can make ours more joyful as well. Thanks for having me, Janet.
I hope we get to talk again soon. Yeah, me, too. Me, too. I'd love to.
Bye, Ashley. Bye, Janet.