ByKat Hours Updated
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Coffee Break: Leeza Flat

black Mary Jane flat with double straps

As we've noted before, flat Mary Jane shoes are trending this year — and I really like these options from Dansko. The company is renowned for its comfort, and I feel like these shoes actually look a bit sleeker than most Dansko offerings (which, while incredibly comfortable, I'd usually put in the “funky/fugly” category). I like the double strap, and the fact that the shoe comes in black and a pretty “ballet” pinky beige.

The shoes are $130 at Zappos, Nordstrom, Amazon, and DSW. (Amazon has a slightly older model, the Dansko Lily, on sale.)

Sales of note for 12.5

132 Comments

  1. Looking for gifting help.

    We’ve been through a tough patch recently and want to get my wife a great Mother’s day gift.

    We are early 40s. Three kids in the baby/toddler phase, parents with health difficulties which require a lot of support, and two careers.

    We are in a phase of life where we do not have free time so prefer something tangible as opposed to an experience gift.

    She likes popular fiction, true crime tv, clothes (kinda brooklyn dad vibe), watching sports, music, and nice home things. Not into makeup/skincare/spas. Budget up to $250.

    1. Might she enjoy a Kindle so she can have her books close at hand? I adore mine!

      1. Or other device things like earbuds?

        If she dresses up for work, even Brooklyn dads like jewelry

          1. We don’t know what she likes, but you could try searching for androgynous jewelry if that describes her general style.

            I’m curious if this is a man or woman posting and why it took a suggestion from a message board to think of jewelry for Mother’s Day?

          3. Oh good grief, anon at 4:13. Speaking as married lesbian who is a long-time reader here, when I read the suggestion for jewelry I thought, “Hmm, that’s actually a good idea, I didn’t think of that!” Jewelry might be a classic thing for straight guys to purchase for their wives, but I don’t think it’s an automatic go-to when we lesbians are shopping for our partners/wives, especially for a partner who doesn’t present as super feminine.

    2. What about a really great and sleek backpack? Can suggest brands if that’s of interest

    4. What about a really mice bluetooth speaker to play music around the house?
      Or a book subscription? The bookstore near me does a customized monthly book subscription- you answer a few questions and they send you a boom a month.

    5. Is your phase of life a lot of outdoor kids activities? Maybe a next-level Yeti cup or cooler, maybe monogrammed or personalized

    6. Okay 1 last one – when I was helping my mom in the hospital, it was always cold. Of course she had blankets. But I was cold! But maybe a nice (as in warm, not fancy) lap blanket or inside jacket or sweater for your wife assisting with health care visits, maybe even heated or can be plugged in if your wife gets cold easily.
      The books make me think your wife does a lot of sitting and waiting – how to make that more comfortable?

  2. Looking for a gut-check – how often do you seriously think about leaving your place of work?

    I’m up to 5-7 times a month. I’m a partner at a law firm, in the top 25% of income earners at my firm, about 15 years out of school. My lawyer friends all say they fantasize about different jobs. I don’t fantasize about doing anything else – I really like private practice, I’m good at what I do, I feel lucky to have good clients, I take no-email vacations combined at least 8 workdays a year. I feel like it’s not what I’m doing, it’s where I am. I get irritated nearly daily with firm administration, I have lost trust in the managing partners, I feel like I’m constantly swimming upstream. A good chunk of my clients are “institutional” so I don’t think they’d follow me if I left. I don’t love the idea of starting my own firm, none of the local competitors really seem attractive, I haven’t seriously considered in house. I have felt this way on and off for 3 years but it’s been more and more regular over the last six months. Is this normal, a stage everyone goes through?

    2. It sounds to me like you need to move to a new firm. This is precisely why people lateral to different firms – they like their work and private practice but lose faith in firm leadership. I’d start looking carefully at other firm options.

    3. I consider it a lot. However, …

      How old are you/how close are you to retirement (or moving to your next phase, maybe out of practicing law and into leading a non-profit, for example)? If you are anywhere close, consider that the administrative hurdles at your firm are likely no worse than at any other firm, but at least here you know where all the land mines are and the lay of the land. In other words, if you are close, hunker down and use the time to tee up your next phase.

      Also, I’m the poster who always reminds people here: consider how much you have set aside in your nest egg and how long it has to earn returns before making any changes.

    4. Daily. And sometimes hourly. But too close to a full pension for life to bail out now…

    5. Several times a week at this point. I’ve lost trust and lost faith, even though I like the key parts of my job. I don’t know if it would be better elsewhere, though, and it’s the devil I know. I’ve been in my current org long enough that I’ve pretty much screwed myself over in terms of having lots of contacts outside of here. (Why yes, I’m with the largest employer in a mid-sized college city.)

    6. Your like me! Stick it out and you can retire younger then you think! I figured out I can retire at age 55, draw down partnership retirement draw of $380,000/year for 10 years until I can collect Social Security of about $6000/month, when my draw will go down by $72,000/year so it’s a wash. Unless inflation eats up my money, I can surely get bye, and then some on this amount for my life, and if I get married, and my spouse is older, I could even get more if he has money from Social Security and his job. That’s only 13 years from now, so it’s not that long for me to stick it out.

      1. Oh hi Ellen, glad to see that your career is taking off! Letting me stare at your tuchus has paid off!

    7. When I was unhappy with the constraints on my professional growth, maybe with similar frequency to yours.

      When I left and took a role working for the human embodiment of utter chaos and micromanaging incompetence, every minute of every day.

      Now that I am in a role where I respect my boss and colleagues and have a clear trajectory, almost never. The rare instances I do it is more because I am dreaming of an alternate life and not because I am wishing for escape from my current existence.

    8. I really dislike my job, but I only seriously consider leaving once a year or so on average, usually around review time when I get angry about how underpaid and unappreciated I am. But I’m very limited geographically for personal reasons and fully remote work is rare in my field so usually I casually job search for a month or two, find nothing to even apply to, and give up. If you’re not so limited, it definitely seems worth applying.

    9. When I’ve gotten to the “it’s getting more and more regular” stage, it usually means I’m ready to leave

    10. When I think about it at the end of a long day or week, I stick it out. When I think about it in the way into work… then I’m ready to fly the coop.
      Substitute “cry” for think as needed

  3. Need help finding a tea-length or longer dress for a formal event that fits the theme: Whimsical Garden Party. Budget up to $300.

    5. Sundance catalog might be too elegant to be whimsical, look up Garden Soirée Dress.

    6. Look at Saks. They tend to have more options for formalwear than Nordstrom.

      A few options:
      https://www.saksfifthavenue.com/product/kay-unger-coraline-floral-satin-column-gown-0400020198452.html?dwvar_0400020198452_color=DARK%20MIDNIGHT

      https://www.saksfifthavenue.com/product/sachin-babi-chelsea-floral-one-shoulder-gown-0400019891754.html?dwvar_0400019891754_color=TONAL%20PETAL

      https://www.saksfifthavenue.com/product/liv-foster-floral-halter-column-gown-0400019162718.html?dwvar_0400019162718_color=BLUE%20MULTI

      1. I had never heard of Samantha Pleet until today and now I want half of that shoppe.

    8. I’ve recently discovered Never Fully Dressed, they’re size inclusive and sustainable. I wore a dress from them to a fancier dinner a few nights ago and received a ton of compliments. Only watch out is shipping is from the UK so allow sufficient time for shipping. Here are a few examples:

      https://www.neverfullydressed.com/en-us/collections/dresses/products/sage-lyra-poppy-midi-dress

      https://www.neverfullydressed.com/en-us/collections/dresses/products/palm-stripe-ellis-dress

      https://www.neverfullydressed.com/en-us/collections/dresses/products/havana-short-sleeve-may-dress

      And sequins!! https://www.neverfullydressed.com/en-us/collections/sequins

  4. My 16 year old is doing a terrible job of time management and I’m just so frustrated with her. I wrote last Friday about having to pick her up from a school sports game at 10 p.m. and drive her to another school team event the next morning for 3.5 hours. After I picked her up, I learned that she needs to turn in an assignment by midnight(!) so she worked on it until 11:45 p.m. and uploaded it when we had wifi. (Most of the high school teachers are making deadlines midnight now because assignments need to be uploaded, and it’s been just a nightmare). She has practice for 2 hours for one sport but wants to go and practice for her second sport (it’s off season, so optional) for the following 2 hours, which means she will be up super late doing her homework. Please tell me what, if anything, I can do to stop nagging her about managing her time better and getting more sleep? She’s staying up late, barely getting up in time to get to school, she’s gotten sick, lost her voice, etc. and we’ve talked to her so many times about prioritizing health, sleep, etc. Do I just need to let it go?!?

    1. Well you got a lot of comments last time about making her choose priorities and not facilitating her doing everything she wants to do. Sounds like a workload issue just as much as a time management issue, so why not focus on how much she’s doing first.

      1. This. I was overloaded in high school (at the requirement of my parents) and got a lot of grief about bad “time management.”

        If you earn $15,000 a year, no amount of money management is going to get you saving for retirement. You need more money.

        If you’re supposed to have 20 people on your team but you have 7, no amount of good management will make your division functional; you need more staff.

        If you have negative four free hours left in the day after all of your obligations, you need fewer obligations, not “better time management.”

        You sit down with her and go through what each EC requires each week. You go through what her school work load is. You look at sleep. Then you put a hard cap on the number of hours (which includes travel time) for her extracurricular activities.

    2. Dude, she’s doing too much, it’s not a time management problem. As the mom you need to manage this.

      1. +1, and please keep in mind that she might be looking for “permission” to disengage from some of the activities – ie confirmation that she is not a failure and that she simply had too much on her plate for any one human to handle.

        1. This. I’ve literally said to my middle schooler ‘do you need me to be the bad guy on this?’ to third parties so that she can complain about her mom who won’t ‘let’ her do the thing.

      2. THIS. You absolutely do not just let this go. You intervene, you make choices for her if she will not herself.

    3. It sounds like the assignment got done. I think setting certain house rules is fine, but then backing off on the execution would be appropriate. As an example, a house rule could be “we expect you to participate in family dinner on Friday nights,” but then you don’t stress if she mismanages her homework schedule that day and is up late. 16 is old enough to figure this out, I think.

    4. I’d reach out to the school and ask them to reconsider the midnight deadline. I’m sure she’s not the only one waiting til the last minute to do assignments and it’s not healthy for students to sacrifice their sleep like that (and is encouraging bad habits)

        1. I mean parents can or should set these boundaries too BUT why would the school incentivize students staying up too late to do work at the last minute?

          1. And it’s an equity issue. My law school got rid of midnight deadlines and 24 hour exams after it realized those policies penalized caregivers. Even in high school some kids have to take care of their siblings after school, etc. Assignments should be due during the school day so no one gets essentially extra time (obv some ppl have more free time in general, but this is one way to equalize).

          3. As a lawyer, I hate the midnight deadlines. When we had until the Fed Ex plane left, we got the documents copied and out the door by six. With the midnight electronic filing, we all just end up being at work all evening because it is human nature.

    5. I’d say you let it go… but that also means that she pays the consequences. None of this ridiculous (and dangerous!) driving her 3.5 hours at 10 pm. If she needs a ride from you, she gets it during normal driving hours, however you define them, though you might have to be careful about that one if means that she ends up getting a ride from a friend instead, which could be even more dangerous. So you might need some restrictions on driving, but otherwise, let her figure out what works for her. It’s not the end of the world if she gets sick a few times and figures out that she’s pushing too hard. That’s how she learns. Trust me, I’ve been there.

      1. Just adding, if her activities literally require her to be in the same place at the same time, by definition, she’s over-committed and you’re not required to facilitate that. She needs to choose, not drive dangerously overnight or force you to. The rest of it should be up to her to decide, but I think it’s fair to draw the line at things that require your involvement or really do put her life and other people’s lives at risk.

        1. Ugh, meant to write different places at the same time, not the same place at the same time.

    6. If I remember correctly, she plays two sports plus an academic club extracurricular? That’s a lot.

        2. Sports are usually one per season, though. Sounds like she’s on two teams simultaneously.

        3. High-achieving students aren’t consistently turning in assignments at midnight and showing up for academic events on only a few hours of sleep due to a lack of planning.

          I’m also curious what you think over-commitment at an individual level would look like. Since “normal” is all relative to difficulty of class, individual skill/talent, social commitments, family commitments, competitive level of sport and individual role, etc.

        4. It’s not normal in my area for academically high-achieving kids to do two sports at the varsity level. It’s normally one sport + intense academics OR multiple sports.

          Anyway even if it’s “normal” she’s clearly not handling it well so it sounds like she needs to cut back because it’s not working for her.

          1. Really? I did all honors/AP, plus 3 varsity sports plus usually a club on top for a few months a year, and ran student government, often two roles at school and then county/state level, plus a couple of odd clubs. And I worked odd jobs. It was a lot but limiting to one sport would have been terrible for me.

          2. I think these are the years for being involved in everything you’re interested in.

            I played 2 varsity sports (and worked out / trained in my off season), was in several APs, in several time consuming clubs some of which had large time commitments (editor of school paper, mock trial, debate, president of political club). One year I did the school play just for kicks. I never had an official job but I babysat 1-3x a week just about every week. Still had a decent social life.

            Didn’t sleep much, but no one I knew did.

          3. I love that both responses are about themselves and not OP’s child at all. Says a whole lot right there. A kid struggles, and the first impulse is to…compete?

          4. I know college admissions has gotten more competitive, but when I was in high school they told us to focus on depth over breadth for extracurriculars. I did one sport competitively at a high level (not through school), was reasonably successful at and involved with leadership of one school activity (debate) and took a full slate of AP/college classes. No job, and no volunteer work. I got into most of the fancy private colleges I applied to.

        5. Yes, this was normal when I was in high school twenty years ago – I had AP classes, student government, usually two sports and two non-sport extracurriculars at the same time, plus a part-time job. It was completely my own choice; my parents did not encourage or enable me and I got way too little sleep and was an emotional mess most of the time, but I loved everything I did and couldn’t choose what to give up. My senior year I dropped two sports and two non-sport extracurriculars, and it was definitely my best year. That’s also the year I started dating my also very-overscheduled, over-achieving husband.

          We are choosing to be more restrictive with our own kids – not letting them do EVERYTHING they would otherwise want to do – partially because we see how pointless our over-scheduled high school experiences were – parts of all the activities were fun and beneficial, but we would have had a better experience if our parents had helped us prune the lineup a little bit. And partially because I think everything is even more demanding nowadays – all the extracurriculars and sports require even more time and intensity than in my day and online school deadlines give kids the same “always on” feeling that I hate as a BigLaw attorney.

    7. My kid (sophomore) has done the same but not to the same extent. She gets up too early, like at 6, and then later in the week crashes and doesn’t wake up and I have to wake her up. If she is up late (like at an event until 10) she often gets sick the following week, then sleeps basically all day. We have trouble bc our HS starts so early (730!). The only thing that works is making her go to bed early (9) and turning off the internet. She may also be doing too much – 2 sports plus more stuff is a LOT.

    8. In my house, I get technology back at 9pm on school nights (although their school chromebooks stay in their rooms, generally without incident). I have a high schooler and a middle schooler. Schoolwork that late on the regular would likely mean that chromebooks lived with me overnight also.

      And I am pretty firm on fewer / better as a winning mentality. Are you doing anything meaningful in hours 3 and 4 of sports practice in 4 consecutive hours? Or just in motion because you feel like you should? These are real questions kiddo will have to deal with in college where she gets to set the habits and won’t have any guardrails but the consequences.

    9. Okay, I supported you in driving that late because you weren’t asking for parenting advice. Watch a documentary called Race to Nowhere. We purposefully limited AP classes and activities for our son. He went to a state school and he has a master’s degree in a stem field with relevant work experence. They don’t need to take all AP or honors classes, they don’t need straight As, and they don’t need to do every activity. Either you or your daughter are caught up in the over-achievement culture that is destroying teens and young adults. No one could manage all of the things you are expecting of her and it is your job to set boundaries. The fact that you think she has a time management problem makes me think your expectations are the problem.

    10. Let your child fail. It’s very hard to do as a parent, but failing is a powerful learning experience. She is going to fail at some points in life; she needs to learn how to do that in age-appropriate situations. If she decides to do all of her sports, stays up late doing her homeworks, and is then exhausted for school or gets a poor grade on her homeworks, she will be forced to reevaluate. Your job as a parent is not to micromanage and nag; it’s to let her develop the life skills she will need to run her own life. As long as you’re taking responsibility for her, she has no reason to do so for herself. So give her reasonable guidelines about what you are willing to do (when you can drive her), what the expectations are for her academic performance, and the basic parameters about how she can accomplish the things she wants to (like when she can ride with friends or friends’ parents). And then let her figure out how to work within the parameters.

    11. You need to do the opposite of letting it go. You’re enabling this. I would start micromanaging to teach her how to budget time and create a calendaring system that she needs to update. I think it’s easy to have the fallacy that you can do it all until you actually break things into pieces. She also needs to be taught how to say no. It will be a skill that helps her more than any assignment or team commitment. An early no is always less painful than a no that comes from foreseeable conflict or exhaustion. And I would force some hard nos with school as the priority, even though it will be difficult. Didn’t start an assignment early enough? Then you can’t attend practice (and yes, that may possibly mean needing to leave a team). Just because a teacher gives a midnight deadline doesn’t mean the deadline should be midnight. Teach her how to set up “production schedules” now, and it will be a skill that rewards her with whatever she does in life.

      Also, I would look hard at your own expectations and whether you’re contributing to some of the pressure she feels to do it all. The scenario you described last week was one where my own parents would have had me choose between the two events rather than driving into the wee hours and potentially performing poorly for the morning activity. You need to model healthy behavior for her now (weighing each obligation as it comes versus blindly cramming it in) so she feels more comfortable eventually calling the shots on her own. The people I know who are successful treat their time with value, planning like a marathon by being deliberate on easy and hard days.

      1. The daughter got the assignment done on time. Setting an arbitrary earlier deadline and saying she can’t play her sport if she doesn’t make it doesn’t actually teach her anything valuable. I’m not a fan of midnight deadlines, but the daughter submitted the assignment on time. I don’t see the issue here, especially since teenagers’ circadian rhythms require them to stay up late.

        1. +1 regarding the assignment. She might be overcommitted and need help with that, but she got the assignment in by the deadline. It didn’t really affect her sleep in this instance because wasn’t she commuting between the activities? Maybe it was stressful for her, but that is how she learns to get stuff done earlier.

        2. She submitted it on time at the expense of not being able to leave at 10 p.m. for the next event, which not only left her more tired for the next morning’s academic event but also put the burden of driving with little sleep on her mother. The fact that she is repeatedly racing to get in something at the last minute is a sign that she needs to set earlier deadlines for herself. Guess what–as an adult, this turns into the person who is always turning in their work at the last minute and, at best, creating unnecessary stress on those around them and, at worst, resulting in missed deadlines. High school is the time you should be learning better time management. I would say the skill is more important than the individual paper. As someone who has a PM report to me, I see this day in and day out. If you’re barely making deadlines all the time, it’s one of the clearest signs you’re going to end up missing deadlines.

          1. I think the OP meant they left at 10 pm, the daughter worked on the homework in the car, and uploaded it when they got to WiFi. I don’t think they stayed home until it was uploaded and THEN made the drive.

        3. Sure, but I think the problem is that the daughter informs the mom at 10 pm, on an already somewhat harebrained scheme to drive her around, that daughter has to turn in assignment via the Internet by midnight when the plan was to be driving, and it seems like they then had to find wifi or wait until they had wifi. That’s not the same thing as just staying up late. It’s making an emergency out if things that don’t have to be emergencies.

          Look, I was (and am) a type A overachiever who still over schedules myself and has ADHD – but my parents did not enable me to the extent you are. At the time I was pissed – think of how much more I could have done!- but now I am grateful that I had to learn to calculate transition times, plan ahead, etc. I set up my own scaffolding that has served me through my degrees and career. Help her set those up; don’t become the scaffolding (easier said than done I know, though I am still a parent of younger kids).

      2. Yeah agree with this. I’d sit down and map out what’s on her plate for the next 2-4 weeks and literally how it will get done. And that includes blocking agreed amounts of time for school work, sleep, chores, and fun that isn’t pre scheduled. If the math isn’t mathing, then something has to change.
        It’s also okay for you to have limits – eg you will drive up to X hours a week and beyond that she needs to get a ride with a trusted driver or can’t do the thing.
        With anyone but especially young people it’s not helpful to have these conversations about how many activities in the abstract-really helps to make it a concrete question of scheduling to ensure she stays healthy and can do well on the priorities.

    12. Work with her to develop a schedule that includes sleep, time to eat, time for school and time to do homework. Then add in the extra curriculars that fit. The issue isn’t the homework, it’s that she needs help to learn that it might need to be done a couple days earlier because 10pm – 12am is not a time slot open for homework because it is for sleep. Taking care of your health is a life skill more important than any homework assignment or extra curricular activity.

      1. I recall an article in Glamour or Mademoiselle or a similar magazine in the late 1990s with a pie chart showing parts of your life for which you need to dedicate time. It was a game changer for me that there was a piece of the pie called “life management.” This was showering, eating, grocery shopping, laundry, paying bills/balancing checkbook etc.

        The posters above who say that you and your daughter should sit down and list all activities and how much time they need (and which times of the day/week they need) are correct. I am writing to add that the list should include “life management” time in addition to school, homework, EC 1, EC 2 and sleep. I don’t know what “life management” means in high school (likely not grocery shopping, laundry and bill paying), but she has to eat and shower every day at least.

        1. I’m that person!

          At that age, “life management” is a combination of downtime (you need to decompress); time in case something runs long (game goes into overtime, traffic snarls your drive home, teacher throws a big assignment at you); time with your friends; time with family and extended family; and time for chores – even if that’s just cleaning the bathroom once a week and folding her clothes.

    13. Dr Lisa Damour had a podcast episode a few months ago that positioned it as teaching your child how to “effectively deploy their resources.” They can’t do it all, and now is the time to learn when to give your best, when to give just enough to get by, and when to say no. It’s an important lesson many adults haven’t let learned! But truly high achievers (however you want to define it) have figured this out, and perhaps you can coach your daughter in that direction.

    14. well i was kind of like this in high school, though i was not a last minute person because that made me too stressed. i don’t know if this is a time management problem, but more like an overcommitted problem. she got the assignment done in time, but is sacrificing sleep/health/wellbeing by burning the midnight oil. i was frequently up until midnight or later in high school doing school work and then up at 6:30am due to extra curricular involvement + HW + the ridiculously high expectations i set for myself. i will say college was much less work in comparison, but was burnt out by age 24. is she a sophomore or junior? i would suggest letting it go for the rest of this school year and then over the summer help her figure out what her priorities are. like what is the purpose of playing all of these sports? being in good shape? she enjoys them? thinks they will help her college applications? as a high school student it is so easy to get on the hamster wheel and not know how to get off. but it is already March, so at this point I’d wait until summer.

    15. I was your daughter. I started my days at 4 am and didn’t stop until after midnight. I eventually collapsed at school and was hospitalized for severe exhaustion (it was bad enough that the hospital staff called CPS). That may be where she is headed if you don’t put some hard parameters in place for her. When I got released, my parents put hard rules in place, including a strict time for homework to be done and a strict bedtime for week nights. Even if homework wasn’t done, oh well, go to bed and accept the consequences of it. I was very annoyed with them but it worked and I figured out how to do what I wanted to do in the free hours I had – I learned how to prioritize. And one of those was giving up lunch with my friends and a lot of homework over lunch in the library to have more time for sports practice. If she doesn’t learn this now, college is going to be rough when no one is around to reign her in.

    16. What I tend to do with my 16yo is to be frank with her that I can’t/won’t drive her to everything. Especially if it’s more than 10-15 minutes away, she needs to tell me about it at least 24-48 hours beforehand. As for the staying up late, I empathize in that I’m a night owl who is motivated by hard deadlines (and have been since high school). I’m hard*ss about attending school and being on time, but if my kids have to dress in a rush and grab something to eat on the way out the door, that’s on them.

      Frankly, I’d be nixing the optional sports practices going forward, to the extent possible. My kids aren’t sports kids, but I’ve had to have the talk with both of them that sometimes, you don’t get to go to optional things for your extracurriculars because you have academic or family commitments.

    17. No, you don’t need to let it go. You need to talk to your daughter about making some hard choices. Health comes first. Academics come second. Extracurriculars are a distant third. And that’s not even factoring in family time, which IMO, should be a priority. And stop facilitating madness like driving across the state in the middle of the night so she can do everything. I have a high schooler and I gotta say, I don’t think I would do that.

      1. As long as she is not failing, I don’t always agree that academics is second. A happy B who has fun actitivties can be better than a stressed out A.

        1. What I’m getting at is that she can’t be late to school, missing assignments, blowing deadlines. The very basics.

      2. This was my family’s values too: health > academics > extracurriculars, family time, down time and social life which were all fairly equal. I don’t think my parents would have been ok with me quitting all extracurriculars, but as long as I was doing something, they were fine with me making space for downtime and friend time too. I’m very glad, and plan to have the same approach with my own kids.

    18. To stop nagging, you have to reframe your goal: it’s not “make my 16 yr old ‘good’ at time management”; it’s “set the health& safety guardrails so my 16 year old can reasonably make her own choices within them”. So you (plus other parent) need to sit down and figure out what’s non negotiable to you both – if that’s that you can’t drive her places after midnight because you’re not a safe driver that late; or, you need her to have at least X hours a night with no electronics/sleep time; or whatever else it is. You set and communicate the health and safety limits, and let your daughter succeed or fail within those. You have to not make “how can my kid do all the things she wants to do when she wants to do them” your problem. Maybe the paper gets turned in late, or she skips a practice – maybe the coach is disappointed and she decides she’s ok with that, or maybe she decides to drop 1 of the teams — those are all decisions and consequences your daughter can navigate; your job is just to set the non negotiables.

    19. You set up important parameters and then let her deal with them to learn how to prioritize. For example, if sleep is an issue, tell her all screens are off by 10 pm, including homework stuff. That may mean she screws up an assignment or two, and then figures out how to get her stuff done earlier. If homework is an issue, tell her she can do her second optional practice after she demonstrates a week of getting homework done first.

      Nagging is not going to help. But neither is just throwing up your hands. You have to provide some tools/structure and then let her learn to deal with that structure. And that means you let her stumble, you follow through on these (very small) consequences, and you deal with your own relationship to her choices.

    20. Why aren’t you parenting? You should have said no to the midnight drive ridiculousness. You should say no to the extra sports practice. You are in charge!

      1. People are getting so up in arms about a one-time midnight drive. It’s just not that big a deal. Obviously it would be a different story if it happened every week, but it does not mean that OP is a terrible parent or that this kid is crazy overextended. Sometimes conflicts happen and you have to make some inconvenient scheduling work. You don’t let your team down because you don’t want to drive at night one time. Parenting is also teaching your kid the value of honoring a commitment to others.

          1. Is it? Or is it one tough scheduling night that got more annoying because teen is invested in a lot of activities? Tweak the system, sure, but the calls to “you need to actually parent” are so overblown. I can’t be the only one who would love to have a teen who is actively engaged in sports rather than scrolling TikTok alone in her room.

        2. The post is literally asking about an ongoing time management problem. Responses are addressing load in the day and how it’s managed/prioritized and the degree this juggle needs to be taught or learned the hard way. One might even say it’s about teaching how to manage commitment to oneself.

    21. I just realized the deadline for a project was Friday night at midnight? That yea he is a jerk.

  5. Did anyone read the NYMag piece about Andrew Huberman and his sociopathic behavior in relationships? I want to discuss! It feels very on-brand for someone so fixated on optimization and control. I work in tech and know a lot of guys who are obsessed with him, and some who almost seem to fit his personality type to a T.

    1. I haven’t read it, but he, as an influencer, pisses me off. He engages in the kind of magic thinking that you can control everything about your life and health and you just can’t…

      1. My mom loves this kind of magical thinking, and it pisses me off a lot! At the same time, my mom is in fabulous health (she lifts weights, does pull ups, stays active, does every lifestyle change for her condition, etc.). So I guess it is motivating her to take control of what she can? At least Huberman’s info isn’t just a bunch of woo.

        However maybe it is even more annoying in a young tech bro!

        1. It’s an improvement over the more common type of magical thinking: that everything will always work out, whether you put in the effort or not. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t meant to be!

          So I can see how this would appeal to people steeped in magical thinking. It takes their current destructive (and depressing – external locus of control) magical thinking and replaces it with different magical thinking, albeit something that will at least reap some positive results.

      2. That kind of magical thinking especially bothers me when it comes to pregnancy influencers. It’s so irresponsible and dangerous to tell women “your body was made for this, f*ck the hospital system, babies always come out” and encourage freebirthing or worse. I still feel scarred after reading that NBC article about freebirthing from a few years back where a mother who was deep into the online communities lost her baby to a preventable stillbirth.

    3. My jaw literally dropped when I read the article. It is just such gross behavior. I also was pretty amused by the side digs at the legitimacy of his work, his lab, and his credentials.

    4. I got halfway through it before my palms started to sweat. I dated a male (“man” gives too much credit) like that in college. He cheated on me, was horribly controlling and demeaning, talked about how his ex was crazy (it took me a while to figure out that she was probably a great person and he probably spoke that way about me to subsequent girlfriends), and really got off on tearing down smart, accomplished, athletic women.

      1. Wow…. just…. wow.

        It’s pretty shocking, and it actually surprises me a little. I work in his world. Kinda sad.

        The number of well maintained older Palo Alto housewives with the hots for this guy is large, and honestly I wasn’t aware his popularity spread so far.

    6. Just read it and it was jaw dropping.

      Will there be any consequences for him? My guess is no. (I will unfollow him on IG, so at least there’s a consequence!)

  6. I am holed up in a hotel room in downtown Houston, and the weather could not be more gorgeous. I have about an hour and a half more work, but then I’d love to get outside. What can I do besides just walking around. I have a car or I could uber.

    1. Drive to the Japanese Gardens. Where you will indeed just walk around but it will be prettier than downtown.

      1. And then, if I were you, I would enjoy a margarita and chips and salsa somewhere nearby on a patio. Maybe at the Mi Cocina on Westheimer. Or Ninfa’s would be the classic Houston marg. What a nice afternoon! Enjoy.

      2. Great suggestion.

        Discovery Green. Walk the bayous, which you can do from downtown.

  7. I found a brand new, with tags, The Fold Belleville top at my local goodwill yesterday! What a find!

    2. Wow!! How much did you pay?!

      I got a leather max mara skirt from goodwill for $10 but I’m not sure if it’s real. (I’d also have to lose 75lb to fit in it, but that definitely might happen, right?)

      1. It was $7 or $8 – whatever their standard shirt price is.
        It’s a little too big for me but I think it’ll be perfect on my sister :)
        It’s a beautiful dark pink color.

        1. Oh my God. That is beautiful. I hope your sister loves it.

          I think that is the find of the decade. Harder to stumble on good stuff these days.

          1. I know! There’s nobody in my real life who would understand, but I knew people here would get it.

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