YOU CAN’T DO IT ALL (AND THAT’S OKAY)

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the relatable parenting podcast. I'm Priscilla and I'm Josh and wow,

we've been gone for a while. Should we get into it? Please. It's late. It's so late. Josh just got

back from a hockey game and it's literally midnight right now. Yeah, so this is going to be the fastest

episode ever, but don't worry. We will go through everything. We won't cut any corners,

but we'll be more to the point. Anyways, where have we been? That's probably what you're wondering

because the title of this episode is actually not anything related to that. We're going to call it

you can't do it all and that's okay. Why did we name it? We can't do it all and that's okay.

There's a little bit of backstory. For the past month, Priscilla's parents have been in Asia. They

went back to Cambodia to do some medical mission. Super cool to hear all the stories and all the

people that they helped and all the cool miracles that God was able to do. But then being gone for a

month, meant half of our child care was gone for a month. And as you could have expected, there was

a wrench thrown into our routines and expectations. And we had to adjust and unfortunately we weren't

able to do it all. I think that's going to be relatable for many of you because every parent

eventually has to learn that lesson. The hard way like us or not the hard way, you could just

listen to this podcast and then not learn the hard way. The theme of last year, we talked a lot

about productivity and systems and routines and how we get things done. You might have heard the

phrase thrown out a lot, especially by me. I say this all the time that we're so busy, but we're

having fun. It just does seem like the season of life, though, is very fragile. Give one thing

goes out of alignment. It is a domino effect that kind of trickles over into all areas of our life

because it just feels like a very fragile schedule and a very fragile system where we're trying to

pack a lot of things into a little bit of time. It works for us until it doesn't. We went into it

with a different mentality than other times when we've had things in our schedule shift. This

isn't the first time that my parents have gone on trips or that your parents have traveled.

If you guys are listening, we want you to continue going on those trips. We'll figure it out and

you know what? It makes us stronger. Yeah, I'm honestly proud. We had very little disruption to

our priorities. Girls were great. We were able to still hang out as a family and there were very few

bead skips and so I'm proud. Typically, we have some stressful moments, but this time we set proper

expectations and knew what we were going to sacrifice and what we were going to make priority.

And it really set us up for success. I thought the time went by really quickly and it's not that we

didn't record any podcasts in that time. We did record a couple. Persuade does all the editing

and with work and everything, it wasn't possible to throw it in and get it all done without her

basically being sleep deprived and insane. No one wants that. She doesn't want that.

If you know me in real life, I know you're clapping right now and you're proud of me because

one of my toxic traits is that I actually will sacrifice sleep. I have convinced myself that I'm

very low sleep needs because I think I was when I was younger. But now that I'm older, I am not.

I need my sleep and I feel like death when I don't sleep. As we do this podcast at midnight and

you have to wake up at 4.30 in the morning. Yeah, some bad habits don't die. Good to do what you got to do.

My parents are back now. So I can do that every once in a while. This time I'm proud and thankful

we had the right priorities. And that's why it felt like a good time even though it was a hard time.

With that being said, what are some lessons that you think we can take away from this and share

with our fellow parents that are listening? As parents, as human beings, there's constant pressure

to trying to achieve everything, trying to do everything. One of the best things that we did was

we set a proper expectation going into it. Thank you to your parents for prepping us

and telling us way ahead of time that they are going to be gone for a month because it allowed us

time to communicate and talk and discuss what are we going to prioritize? What are we going to sacrifice?

How are we going to survive and thrive during this season? And it's at the tone. I think if we

didn't do that, we probably would have struggled like we have in the past. So that was like the

biggest lesson for me was setting proper expectation and then setting proper priorities and being

willing to sacrifice. Looking for ways to serve you or take things off your plate like doing the

dishes most days of the week or taking out the trash every single time. I tried to do those little

tiny things that you don't really think about. But you were a rock star and I'm super glad that

you were looking out for ways to help because it definitely helped. The first thing that Josh

mentioned was the pressure to do everything. That made me think of a podcast that I listened to

when my parents were gone and cannot remember what podcast it was but I'm going to find it.

I'm going to have Josh listen to it and we'll do an episode around that podcast episode because

I thought it was interesting. We're also going to bring on a guest who can bring insight into

this topic of the pressure to do everything specifically trying to balance work full time and

kids. So I listened to this podcast episode and it was a female CEO of a company, a wealth

management company in Orange County. I believe and she is a mother of twins and she was talking

about her career and she was talking about it in such an interesting way that was very relatable

to me because I work a full-time job. Josh and I have multiple businesses that we are creating

and we also have two awesome kids that we prioritize. They are priority absolutely over all of that

but she's mentioned something that I loved and it's actually cliche. You probably

seen it all over social media but the phrase is that you can have it all just not all at once

and I always like that reminder as cheesy as it is. Sometimes I think I get too ambitious and

too rely on myself where I just want it all. I want to have the awesome career. I want to be the

amazing mom. I want to be the amazing wife. I want to have a really clean house. I want to run

marathons and be faster than I've ever been in my entire life and I want to get up at 4 a.m.

and do my Bible studies. I want it all and it was cool to see a woman, a mother that is ahead of me.

She's where I see myself one day to see her journey and how she actually accomplished that

in a healthy manner. To hear her a very accomplished person that I admire say you can't do it all

and that's okay. She said it in a little bit of a different way like she said you can't do it all

just not all at once. I put a lot of pressure on myself to try and do my best at literally every

single aspect of my life and overload my life at the same time. Going into this season I feel like

this was a God moment. I really don't know where it came from because I have not really been

able to do that in past seasons but I feel like God very strongly made it clear to me that I was

going to have to let go of some control in this next month while my parents were gone. You also

talked about shifting from productivity mode to prioritizing mode. What did that look like for

you exactly? Maybe walk us through what your day looked like before my parents left and then what

your day looked like while my parents were gone focusing on prioritizing instead of being ultra

productive. When your parents are here there's a little bit more leeway to extend my

workday. My job is very flexible but at the same time you're expected to work beyond your eight

hour days sometimes. For the last four or five months I've been trying to do extra work,

bring extra value outside of my normal role because this is how I was brought up. If there are

areas where you can help improve, go lead and try and make things happen while your parents were

gone. I had to have a strict cutoff time instead of working beyond my normal 8 to 5 hours. I cut

off right when I was expected to be done and that allowed me to one be with the girls right away

and then build into the rest of the evening while you finished up work. It allowed me to spend

some good quality time with them. There are moments when I could work out in the living room and read

data and pull spreadsheets and prep for the next day. I don't prefer to do that. I like having

three screens but for this month or so I did that a few times and it helps I had to I guess you

can say sacrifice for the better good of the family and do it all over again. So what about you?

Is there anything that you feel like you had to let go of that you normally would do if your

parents were helping out? Yeah I can think of two big ones that I focused on this month for sure.

There's probably more. One of them was a clean house. That one is hard for me because not only do I

like a clean house but I also find it hard to function in a house that's dirty. Thankfully the

house was not that dirty because Josh stepped in and took over so many things that I normally would

do. I cut a lot of social commitments. I made sure that we had enough energy for the week or

specifically that I did. Josh actually does well with Leslie but I get really cranky. Didn't want

extra reasons to fight this month. This sounds weird because it sounds selfish but for my family

I really needed to make sure that I got enough sleep. The other thing was similar to Josh being

very mindful of the hours that I was putting towards work. My job is also very demanding and

the work load requires that I work more than eight hours at least at this time because I'm pretty new

so unfortunately for this month as pertaining to work I had to force myself to not work after

the kids went to bed. I am working my eight hours during the day and that's it. After work I'm

hanging out with my kids and then I'm going to bed. No staying up until two a.m. four a.m.

whatever crazy stuff that I did took get ahead and catch up with work. I'm giving them my eight

hours and that's it. Once my dad's back then I can go back to what we typically did before.

There's one more thing I forgot that I had to give up for me for me. I was on a tear filming

videos for work wisdom. I think I did six or seven videos and then I made the conscious decision

to let it go for that month. I joined this 30 day video challenge and I only made five days.

The other two videos that I made didn't make it out of editing. I feel honestly that piece and I

felt God really answering a prayer. Is this the right time to be moving forward with this? He was

like no you need to focus on serving your family and making sure everything's good. I'm excited to

get back to working on that stuff. I'm excited for you to get back to working on that stuff.

Work wisdom is the business that I always refer to when I say that Josh and I have multiple

businesses. One of them is this podcast. One of them is work wisdom and a third is entering the

chat next week. We had to put all of that aside, especially you, the podcast. We still recorded

episodes. We just didn't have time to edit them. I'm proud of what we did last year so I felt like

taking a break of however many weeks it is now. Three weeks was not going to do anything detrimental.

I just looked at the stats this morning. I thought I was going to look and see that we had zero

downloads because we had a bit posted anything new in three weeks but I was pleased to see that we

still had a good amount of downloads for putting out absolutely nothing. Work wisdom is just so

young and fresh. You had so much momentum before my parents left that I felt so bad that I was

constantly checking in on you. You were at peace about it. You were like, it's okay. It's going

to take a back burner for this season and it's okay. I felt so bad but I also was very grateful

that you were at peace about a decision that was very beneficial towards our family. Now that my

dad's back, I'm excited for you to be energized about work wisdom again. We'll talk more about work

wisdom on another episode. There's a lot of letting things go. What were some non-negotiables for you?

Like, didn't they must get done? Hands down, the kids and our marriage. Those were the top. I was

horrible about doing my Bible study and prioritizing Jesus in that particular style. I had a lot of

momentum before my parents left because it was a new year. We didn't episode where I was like,

I'm going to show up to the meeting every single day and do my Bible study and I could have done

better in that area. I'm not going to try and make a bit of an excuse. I could have done a way

better with that but I do feel like I grew closer to the Lord. It wasn't because of Bible studies

unfortunately but a lot of prayer and definitely a lot more reliance on him during that month. Those

were my two biggest non-negotiables. I want the kids to not feel the pains that were feeling in

this season of having less help. I want them to still be the priority. I want to be present with

them still. I don't want there to be any excuses for that and I want to have a good attitude. I

don't really want them to see me at my worst or really exhausted or like impatient because even

though I was really tired. If there was any time for me to give in to that, this would have been

it but by the grace of God, I feel like we did a good job of making decisions so that we would be

our best for our kids. And then for our marriage, our kids are so cute and awesome that I feel like

we do a good job of sacrificing for them, I guess you would say. Sometimes something that I let

suffer during these seasons is our marriage. We'll fight a lot when seasons get harder. Josh and I

don't fight that much to be honest with you but when we get tired, I'll get a little argumentative

or I'll have more expectations when I'm like tired. Unspoken. Yeah, unspoken ones and that usually

leads to arguments and a more rocky relationship. I'm growing in a good way because I was determined

while my parents were gone, whatever you have to do to not be selfish and nitpicky and naggy and

basically letting the tiredness get the best of you in terms of our relationship, you need to do

those things so that you're not like that. Even though your parents are gone and you're having to

really balance a lot more things with a lot less help, that's something that's not allowed,

figure it out and find a way to be good not just for your kids but also for your husbands.

I think we did pretty good not for pictures. Similar to you, obviously our marriage and then

the girls and not to sound like I'm better than you because I'm not but I started a

Bible in a year plan on the Bible app and I have not missed a day. Yeah, it's been really cool.

I've been reading the NLT version which is more of a paraphrase less like word for word and

it's like a whole new book, a whole new story. It's been really cool. I went a couple years where

reading the Bible was like pulling eyelashes out of my eyes. This year the Lord's really warmed my

heart towards his word and it's been encouraging to hear it and absorb it and enjoy it. It's been

incredible. So thank you Lord. There's that and making sure work was handled. Those are my

non-negotiables. I love that and I love to hear that you haven't missed a day of your Bible study.

You're gonna have to share with us what that Bible study is because I can't tell you how many

Bible in a year plans I've started and not finished. That's not me. It's not the plan's fault.

I'm curious which one you're using. I'll send it to you so you can put in the show notes. It's

the machine Bible and a year plan and it's two chapters in Old Testament and two chapters in

the New Testament. So I'm gonna have to check that out. I like that it flips between Old and New.

That's cool babe. I think that we learned a lot in this season and it's fun to be on the other

end of it now and get to share it with our audience. If you feel like you're in this season,

know that every parent goes through a season where you have to figure out some sort of roadblock

or some sort of adjustment period and always want to encourage you to prioritize proper expectations

and ultimately try and serve on another and you'll get through it. Keep going. If you fight,

try and get through it quickly, move on and forgive and love even more.

Like Josh mentioned, we recorded two episodes while my parents were gone. I just didn't edit them.

So pardon some of the verbiage in those episodes because I truly thought when we were recording them

that they would be posted and edited on time. It's gonna feel like a flash to the past

with some of the ways that we say things because it is but that's okay because I know that

you guys understand. Next week I'm excited because it's an episode that Josh and I recorded

and it's a format that we want to start with the podcast. I'll let our past selves explain

that to you next week. It's a fun one. It kind of relates to this episode. I guess it's the

opposite of this episode because it's talking about redeeming productivity. From there we'll be back

to regular scheduled podcast episodes. We'll have the front half of the month be Josh and I

as you're accustomed to and a guest episode at the end of the month. The guest episode for February

will now be posted at the end of March and it will be my parents. They will be talking about

what they were doing in Cambodia. It was fun interviewing them. Bummed that it wasn't up in February

but it will be our March episode. We'll just carry on from there with hopefully no more hiccups

business as usual. Thank you so much guys for listening to this podcast. Episode we're still

to be back in a rhythm. If you are not subscribed to our podcast please subscribe, find us on YouTube

and TikTok and all the social platforms. We appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for listening

and we'll see you next week. Bye friends.