Flourishing Families with Guest Reilly Flynn

Serena: Hey Everyone, I’m Serena.

Tina: And I’m Tina and we are the Mental Health Mamas.

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Serena: Welcome to No Need to Explain, we are so glad you’re here.

Tina: First, as always, a quick disclaimer.

Serena: We come to you NOT as mental health professionals or experts in the field, but rather as parents with lived experience who are on a mission to normalize the conversation around mental health.

Tina: If you or someone you love is experiencing a mental health crisis, please seek professional support. You’ll find a variety of resources in our show notes and on our website, NoNeedToExplainPodcast.com.

Serena: There’s a saying that necessity is the mother of invention, right?

Tina: Absolutely. There is a long history of people coming up with new ideas to meet some sort of need or to solve a problem.

Serena: Today’s guest fits this description perfectly and has actually sponsored today’s podcast episode. Reilly Flynn is currently a dad of 3 young children, ages 6, 5, and 3.

Tina: And number four is on the way and might be here by the time this episode drops! We have invited Reilly here today to share about an app he has created and it’s called Lome. Reilly, welcome to the podcast!

Reilly: Thank you so much for having me.

Serena: So as we mentioned in the intro, you created Lome out of a need you saw and perhaps experienced yourself as a parent. Can you share a little bit about that with our audience?

Reilly: Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, I’m a father of three, almost four. Also relevant is that my wife is an executive at a Fortune 200 company and so with all that there’s a lot going on in our household and I have a background in being a venture capitalist, an investor in start-ups and have kind of been a tech geek for a long time. I’ve been the guy who has random lights that are connected to the internet that change colors when the Broncos score or you know, completely useless things in my wife’s mind and they’ve come to litter our basement. And yes, of course, along the way there are some things that are helpful. Maybe the ability to unlock a door remotely to allow someone to come in and clean or something like that but these are point solutions. And one of the things that I’ve marveled at, especially actually as I’ve come in to being a father and wanting desperately to be a good dad and needing tools and supports to help me in that is, why isn’t technology in my home more aligned with my flourishing and more aligned with me being the integrated, loving, caring father that I want to be and husband that I want to be in my household. So we started asking this question, looking for lots of different solutions and trying to find an opportunity because as a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, you’re always kind of looking for, where could I find an angle here and provide something of value. But what got me really excited was that this would be something that I could truly build for myself and one of the things that my co-founder, who is also a father, and I talk a lot about is this is a no risk opportunity for us in the sense that even if the business fails, we’re becoming better dads and we’re becoming more…our families are more holistically thriving because of what we’re doing. So really that’s the high level.

And then if we zoom into the specific, basically, as we started diving into, what does our family need? What's the biggest pain? So much of it is establishing weekly rhythms and coordinating all the different things going on. And as we talked to other families and we looked on the internet, we found some amazing planners and some other apps but none of them seemed to fit exactly what we were hoping for. We have young kids and we wanted to include the children in the planning. We wanted something that was built for the home, not built for the workplace and we can talk more about what that means later. We wanted something that felt fun and engaging and could kind of span everything from meal planning to activity planning, homework, chores, etc. And we just couldn’t find a solution that we were excited about that felt beautiful and elegant. And so we said, let’s try to build one and see what happens and that’s how we got here.

Tina: Nice. And there’s so much I like about this app. I love that honestly, I’m such a visual person, I just love all the little visual things that really, I think, empowers kids to be a real active participants in this. So I want to point out, let’s just roll it back for a moment, about the foundation of what you’re trying to do. So on your website you say, “Flourishing Families contribute to a flourishing world, yet there is a crisis of busyness and distraction that is threatening the foundational rhythms and routines of shared family life.” So, just, you’ve said a little bit about this I want you to just share a bit more about your vision for flourishing families. What does that look like?

Reilly: Yeah. I think I’ve read a good bit but just like your disclaimer at the beginning, I don’t claim to be an expert or all knowing in this but it seems like generally accepted wisdom in this is families in which each member feels known, understood, and supported on their journey of becoming. And different people might say becoming who they want to be or becoming who they were born to be or created to be. Different people would, you know, depending on your worldview. But when a family member feels those things, they flourish and when all family members are feeling that concurrently, at least the majority of the time…of course in families we have to, we have to go for a majority of the time because in any shared environment, especially in a family environment where we’re all growing and developing, there’s gonna be days that don’t go that way. But I think the goal would be that. So then we asked, how does that actually happen? And that’s when we got into this idea of wow, there’s busyness and distraction and the ironic thing as a technology company is, you can trace a lot of this to the technological revolution and I don’t know how philosophical you want to get but we think there’s kind of a three-pronged crisis that’s caused…not necessarily caused by technology but it’s exacerbated by technology.

And so we would say busyness, distraction or loneliness, and overwhelm or overindulgence. And these three things lead us to a place where it’s very difficult in any shared environment, whether it be the workplace, friendships, other communities you may be a part of, but especially the home, this is difficult. Now, how does technology contribute to this? I’ll try very quickly to hit the…our belief on the high points in terms of the research we did. You know, busyness, it’s never been easier to find things that you should be doing. And it’s never been more pushed in our face that we should be optimizing our lives. Self-improvement has always been a book category, throughout the ages, right? It goes back to Roman times. It’s not a new category but I think with the accessibility of information and with technology being able to augment our feeling that we can span whole geographies with our ability to reach and do things and accomplish things I think this gives us a false sense that we are robots to be further optimized and if we fall too much into that, we will completely fill our schedules and we will always feel guilty that we’re not doing enough. And this leads to cycles of guilt and shame and that actually, if we come back to the home, what does that do in the home? Well, on one side it can lead to homes where moms and dads feel like they have to fill up schedules and they feel like their children need to be optimized and there’s some ideal or perfect way that things can be and once it’s achieved then the wheels will all be greased and things will move in a particular direction. And all this does is it squeezes out those moments that are most beautiful and it squeezes out the moments of improv, the moments of development and it squeezes out even opportunities to communicate about how things are going. So it’s not that doing things is bad. In fact, I like doing things. I think it is important to think about optimizing our schedule but I think if you take that metaphor and you take it too far, you end up in a place where you’re overly busy. And if you talk to people, this is a fascinating thing to me, you ask anybody, everybody says, oh, I’m busy. It doesn’t matter if they’re, you know, one of the most important CEOs in the world or the president or if they’re just a random person you meet on the street. Everyone has this feeling of busyness and so I wonder about that. Maybe that was too long on busyness.

But then we can get into loneliness. Well I think we’ve entered a new moment where the relational planes are completely new, right? We can interact with…you and I or the three of us are interacting across geographies, in real time and it sounds great and we could have the video on if we wanted to. And this is very disorienting for, kind of, our root senses because it leads us to believe that we can be in touch with anyone at any time. And that, the down side to that is that can trick us into not being present with those we’re actually with because you’re always thinking, gosh, maybe there’s someone else I could be talking to and this is hard in families, especially with older kids but really for parents, for…because work can always interject and so distraction. We have these new sensory inputs and new sense. You know, one of the things that’s fascinating about the human mind is we are incredible users of tools. We, from the very beginning, whether it was a stick or fire or different things, we can, in technical terms, like neuroscience, we recruit tools in an incredibly efficient rate to solve problems. And so one of the things that’s happening is our brain feels loneliness and instead of doing the thing that might be hard which is walking down the hall and knocking on the door of our child or sitting and listening to a conversation that you don’t necessarily want to listen to, we recruit a tool to overcome that loneliness and it puts us into a place where we’re further disintegrated with the family that’s with us. So this is a risk. This is a problematic thing.

And then, sorry, I feel like I’m going down this path, but I’ll just finish with exhaustion, no, with overwhelm and I think we’ve never lived in a more abundant society and the problem of living in abundance, even for people who don’t have as much today, especially in the west in the US, we have more than we’ve ever had and we don’t know how to make sense of it, And so the challenge, we’ve been brought up and our instincts are all wrapped up in a scarcity mindset. There’s not gonna be enough. I have to eat, you know, I have to eat this meal. I have to do this thing. And we overindulge and it doesn’t matter if it’s food, if it’s some sort of other vice or if it’s just like information. We can gorge on information so we overindulge and that leads to our senses and our bodies being overwhelmed.

So all of this, if I bring it back to maybe what I’m supposed to be talking about, all of this actually is, it’s not new right? These are all instincts, these are all there but I think in this moment in our culture today we have a lot to deal with and it’s why there’s a crisis, a mental health crisis, It’s why there’s…you know, everyone’s feeling exhausted, busy. It’s why we’re having problems with everything from obesity to just scrolling endlessly on social media apps and everything. And so that feels like, gosh, if we could do something to counter that and my argument would be, one of the fundamental units we have to counter that is shared family life. If we look at the home and we look at what we’re trying to do, there’s something pure that every parent comes into. And I’ve talked with parents from all walks of life. They have this aspiration. They want to be present with their child. They want their child to have a better life. And it doesn’t matter…I mean, I’ve talked to all sorts of broken home situations and the parent would at least almost every time, the parent would say, I wanted to do it differently. I wanted to, you know… And so there’s this pure aspiration when you’re a parent and there’s this expectation or hope when you’re a child for what that could be and I think there’s a unique opportunity to build a scaffolding around the home and we can talk more practically about what Lome is doing with that but I think that that’s what I get excited about. That’s what energized or motivated what I’m doing because I felt all those tensions in my own home and I long to overcome that but I need help to do that and I need little nudges and I need things along the way. So the most foundational thing that we came back to is we said, you know what, all these things happen in time. We have to carve out time. We have to be intentional about what we do with our time and how we spend it.

So I think I’ve said enough for a minute, but what do you think? That was a lot of philosophical thinking but I would love to hear your thoughts on how you’re experiencing that in our culture in this moment.

Serena: Yeah, so there’s so much there that you shared that I can…

Tina: That is a lot to unpack!

Serena: It really is and, you know, I think one of the things that stands out to me is this idea of never enough, right? That scarcity mindset and I’m even gonna bring that around to feeling like we are never enough as people, as moms, as dads.

Reilly: Wow. Yeah.

Serena: Yeah, like…you know and I think that is technology driven. I think there’s, you know, constant comparison to other people’s lives that we didn’t have growing up and our kids have now. So you talk about technology being addictive, I think you said that, I’m not putting words in your mouth and you know, I think of my teenager, right, who is really having a hard time right now, along with all of her friends, disengaging from this virtual schooling to in-person schooling and having a phone in her hand all the time. So, all that being said, I can imagine that people listening might think, ok, why should I have another app? Why should I have more technology in my life? So tell us why Lome is different and how it might contribute to all of this that you just spoke about.

Reilly: Yeah. Well, I would say, I would back up and say so like when we asked the question, how do we counter this? We came to believe that there’s just practice…we need practices. We need kind of counterformational practices because the reason we can’t moderate our intake is because there’s nothing that stops us. The only thing that can stop us is being, putting some intentional blocker, right? The only reason that I don’t check my phone in the morning is because I charge it by the front door and not…I literally, I had to put a physical barrier. I had to intentionally put it someplace else because otherwise it’s so easy just to pick it up. There’s nothing stopping me, you know? And so that ability to moderate but it takes that intentional premise and I think one of the things that is interesting for us is like, what are those counterformational practices? What are those things that teach and help each one of us to live it? So I would say it’s hearing and feeling consistently that you are known and loved just as you are. And how do we get that right? Well we have to have moments where we just sit with people, we listen to them, that you do feel known and understood and supported. You have to have a sense that people are around you and I think that is, that people who are there physically with you because one of the things that’s so problematic about technology is that it makes it feel like we’re not alone until we actually need something and those connections that feel so instant, all of a sudden are so feeble and frail and distant. And even though we’re all far apart today and we’re talking live, if I really needed something, if my house was on fire, you would be unable to help me. I mean, maybe you could make a phone call but physically you would not be able to help me. And so people knowing there are people nearby who can help them.

And then just practicing rhythms of hey, we turn that off or there are alternative things you can spend your time on, right? That ability of overindulgence or that addiction that you’re talking about will… You can say, don’t do it but actually it’s way more powerful to form with your desires. You know, neuropathways get formed stronger and other things happen when you are actually positively moving, you know, showing a different positive way to do or live things. So all of this is to say…I’m trying to bridge from all that gobble-de-gook I said earlier.

All that to say, my first thing was, we as a family desired deeply to create space and time to live together. And we have to implement practices and so, you know, my first thing was, what are the rhythms and routines we need to implement? And we were like, well, we need a weekly family meeting, we want to have family dinner, we want time and space that’s unplanned, we want time away from screens, we want time for play, we want rhythms of responsibility and rest. Each one of these things, right? And we want to be intentional about how we do it. And what I found was, it was very hard to put those things in my work calendar. I’m a geek, right? I have all these apps and tools and devices all around me but I couldn’t figure out how to put like, rest, on the calendar. I couldn’t figure out, you know, family time doesn’t necessarily happen at ten fifteen for 45 minutes at this park. It happens after breakfast as long as it’s warm enough and it happens at the park that happens to be least crowded because it’s COVID or whatever. You know, whatever the thing that’s happening. And so you have to be way more flexible. So when we built Lome, we sought to build a system that would support that. And my first thing for any family that I talk to is it doesn’t matter if you use Lome or not, but try to develop a system. And I would assume actually, if people are listening to your podcast they already have something. They have a degree of intentionality in their home. But the question would be, how many of those practices are you adopting and what do you need help with?

And so the first thing Lome does is it gives you the place to capture those intentions and to share them and empower every member of your family to participate in them. And so the kids can see, it’s very visual as you referenced before, the kids can see, oh, this is what’s for dinner tonight. They don’t just sit down at the table and whatever’s served is served. Now of course my kids still complain even if they’ve known for days this is what we’re having. It doesn’t completely eliminate all the normal things that happen in parenthood but it does, it does give you the opportunity to include them. I put a picture of my mom, you know, Grandma’s coming this weekend and they can get excited and look forward to that.They can count the number of days until that and there are these developmental opportunities.

We have morning routines and bedtime routines that are very visual. You can also do a chart like this where it’s just very visual and it kind of looks more like a game board and kids can work their way through it. I think really, on each of these fronts… And then I think another kind of layer that we tried to build in was, I at least was having a hard time in these moments that I had with the kids. Maybe it was a Saturday afternoon, I was tired from the week and was trying to figure out, gosh I have three hours, everyone’s awake, the weather’s nice or the weather’s not nice, what can I do with them? And I’m normally relatively creative and intelligent person but I really struggled in those moments and I just needed a little nudge and then I would pick up my phone and go back to a blog or go to Instagram and I would get completely lost and an hour would go by. And then finally I’d find something and it would take too long to implement and the kids would be hungry and da-da-da. So we implemented what we’re calling an inspiration engine. In this you have the ability to just scroll through and find…think of them as, almost like little bullet points of ideas. It’s not a full blog post. It’s not a full recipe. It’s just, hey you need a meal for tonight? Here’s some examples like tacos, pasta, it’s a little bit more detailed than that. Oh, you want…you need an indoor activity? How about build a fort or the floor is lava or whatever. These are not…they’re things we all know how to do. It just is that little nudge and you get a few ideas. You find the one you feel excited about, that feels right for the moment and then you can go do it.

And that’s what we really want Lome to be is very referential. So a lot of technology is designed to drag us in and make us…their metric that they’re trying to establish is time spent engaged, right? Engagement time with the user. We actually want the opposite. We want you to come in, of course you have to spend the time to set it up and plan and whatever, but we want you to spend as little time in the app as possible. You come in, you get what you need and you go and spend time in the real world. And we think of it a lot more like your thermostat which is an incredible piece of technology in your home but it’s not something you spend hours looking at, hopefully. It’s the sort of thing that you just, you adjust it, it sets the temperature and environment for your home and you move on. And then you can live the life you want to live more comfortably. And so, yeah, I think what you can expect from Lome is that it would be a very thoughtful system that we’ve built to be flexible, customizable and inclusive for all members of the family so that as you’re doing those practices, as you’re trying to live life in the real world together, shared life, you have a system that you can use to augment that. It’s not gonna do those things for you, right? It’s at the end of the day, it’s just an app and it comes empty just like your planner comes empty but it gives you, hopefully, a set of tools and that scaffolding to be, to better capture your intentions and expectations, better collaborate as the week goes on and include all the members of your family.

Tina: That’s awesome and you have let us play around with it a little bit. So I love so many things about this as you were talking and I’m going to try to piece those all together in a way that highlights some things. So, there are so many implications with this that I just want to kind of talk about for a minute. So I think the idea that we’re so busy is one thing. The intentionality is huge, right? To be very intentional with your family. I think the idea of…so I’m thinking as you’re talking about this, the idea that this is almost a training tool for your kids in some ways. I think a lot of times, I think of Serena with her paper planner, she literally has a paper planner. I have too so I’m just gonna call myself out on that. But I think in some ways, that’s like the private thing that the mom or the dad has, right? This is like a totally, “here we are”. This is who we are. This is the busyness that we can see and part of the benefit of that is, so many families are so overscheduled, right? So to be able to see all of this in a way that everybody is just so transparent, right? Like, wow! I remember thinking with my kids when they were little, we used to limit them to two things, right? You could have two things and when you joined you had to finish. But I think a lot of families do a lot of things, right? And so to see that all on a calendar or to see that a parent’s working a lot of time versus spending time with the family, there’s just a beautiful transparency about that. So that’s one thing. I think the idea for me, it’s very calming to see all this stuff. Those routines kind of almost, you know, like Candy Land, kind of Candy Landed out there if that’s a verb, just layed out in a way that it doesn’t belong to the parent saying here are the things that have to get done. They’re there. They’re things that have to be done. It’s kind of like setting that timer, right? It’s not you. And I think this has huge implications to benefit families like ours, right Serena? So do you want to say something to that?

Reilly: Yeah. The first thing is, there’s nothing wrong with a paper planner. No really. Honestly. If you have a system that’s working, use that system, right? That’s our whole… I think for us, what my wife and I found was we did need a shared space, even before, even before we had kids, we needed some sort of more digital shared space that was, you know, easily accessible from a lot of different places. We have a customer who, you know, they have a white board in their home that’s been the, you know, the gospel or the version of this and the positive thing about it is they have a system, right? The negative thing is, if they’re at the store they can’t always remember what’s there. If they're out and about… If one of the spouses changes something on it and the other doesn’t see it that day and then all of a sudden someone misses a pickup or does something like that. There are all of these things where, you know, these digital tools can give you something else. But I think our idea and our vision is very much so that it could be that shared space. Because I do think, I do think that there’s something powerful about inviting the kids in. And there’s also something really powerful about building a shared space. You know, the home is really unique in that, you know, in our mobile big world we have all these individual devices and things are more and more customized to use, right? Our social feeds and everything, these algorithms dial it in and tell us it’s all about us but in the home if somebody leaves dishes out, like at least right now there’s nothing that cleans that up, right? And someone else is sharing that space with you. And so there are these implications where with kids who are kind of dependent on you for pickups, drop offs, maybe keeping track of application deadlines, all these different things, it’s shared. And so how do you include them in such a way that you’re empowering them to build those habits over time, to participate and maybe even, we’ve found in our family, maybe even shoulder a little more of the burden than you thought they could of in terms of choosing the meals or making things or any of that sort of thing. So I do think there’s something really beautiful and powerful about thinking about, hey, what’s the shared space. For couples a shared space can be a Google calendar and a lot of families do that but it’s a lot harder to include the kids, especially if they’re younger and don’t have their own device. So we do see a lot of power in that. I think we would encourage everyone to try and find ways to include the kids and to also be thoughtful about how flexible is your system because you do live a pretty mobile life.

The other thing I wanted to say is my…one of the fun things with a lot of the families has been, gosh, we’ve never visualized our schedule in this way. And we’re very specific. We designed it to be a weekly planner because we think that taking things one week at a time, yes, of course there are times you need to look out and whatever but taking things one week at a time is another way to kind of make sure you’re focused and when you start to look one week at a time and the kids are involved, they start to say, gosh, that’s a lot of soccer this weekend we have. Or like, I really wanted to go do this thing but now I have to sit through these other games and it creates a dialogue that has been kind of interesting to watch that wasn’t necessarily an intention of ours but it’s giving someone a tool like this opens the door to have these conversations where even the kids can start to recognize, hey this doesn’t seem to be going the way we thought or it doesn’t look like this week is gonna enable me to realize my hopes and dreams. And you can talk about that tension ahead of time versus you get to the weekend, the kid sits at the soccer field all day, gets to the end and is like, well, I really wanted to play with Timmy and now I don’t have time and it’s like, well, we could have talked about that a little while ago had this been planned.

Tina: Right. Yeah, no, totally, that totally makes sense and again that kind of ability for everybody to see transparently what’s going on and maybe, you know, your son or daughter doesn’t want to spend four hours on the soccer field and that is a conversation. And I just want to circle back to one more thing because I can’t say this enough. It seems to me that the predictability of this, the transparency and predictability really would benefit families with kids with special needs or mental health struggles, right? We like to be predictable. We like to know what happens. Even a happy snow day for some people is not necessarily a happy snow day for other people.

Serena: Right.

Tina: Right? Because it’s not predictable. So I think that is a beautiful thing about this app is that everybody gets to see what’s going on and contribute to that in a predictable way. Love it.

Reilly: And I would say one of the most amazing things about building this is software is so flexible. We can change and build and extend. We can add in new features and so if there are people listening to this that have children with special needs, that’s been something we’ve been encouraged to pursue. I won’t say we have a lot of users right now in that category but we’re also pretty early in our journey as a company and we would love to make sure we understand that user base and maybe even think about what are ways we can develop our app proactively to be a tool for those users. I can give my email address. It’s reilly@withlome.com and yeah, I would love to hear from people with ideas or thoughts on the app.

Serena: Yeah, that’s great and I was gonna add in here that you were kind enough to let us explore the app with our families and my 7 year old can’t get enough of it. She wants to get in there and play on all the things but that’s kind of her personality. But again that visual piece is super useful for so many different families, I would say. So when you created this app, and maybe that’s shifted a bit now, but who would be most interested in Lome? Who do you think would get the most use out of it?

Reilly: Yeah, I think… Well, we’ve built for ourselves first and foremost and for families with kids at home. And so the app is relatively flexible and extensible, customizable. One of the things that my co-founder has a seven year old and almost nine year old and they, we have an image creator so you can upload images and do all these things and they love that because it really makes them feel like they’re kind of making it their own and it reminds me of my door as a kid where you would put the stickers or do the different things there’s. And so it’s just an opportunity to feel like you’re making a mark on. So I think it works for that. Actually, there’s no limit on the number of users you can have per household so it’s a per-household cost so it also works for families where the kids are a little bit older. They can, on their own device, have a login and be able to log in and do everything they need. So it’s very effective for families with kids at home. I think we are actively continuing to build things like a better homework integration. And so for families with a ton of homework, they might want a Google classroom integration or some of these types of things. We don’t have that yet but we do plan to have it. So there are things like that where you might have a particular need that we can’t serve but it also might be coming. I would say, if the kids start to get too old or if they have their own systems could be but we allow google calendar integrations or other calendar integrations and so we’re seeing even a kid…if a kid has their own calendar, all those calendars can be integrated into Lome to make it easy to have that shared space. So I don’t know that there’s a limit. It certainly initially is built with younger kids in mind, kind of below 10. Just that’s who we’re building for and some of the visuals I think lean that way but because as we’ve built features like you can upload your own images, you can kind of customize everything it doesn’t have to look too cute or kiddy in any way shape or form.

Tina: Nice. So you’ve shared you email. Tell listeners where they can find Lome, how much it costs, all that good information.

Reilly: Yeah. Thanks. Lome, so L-O-M-E, it’s like loving home put together. So withlome.com/noneed is a website, a landing page we put together just for your listeners. But withlome.com is our website. We have a seven day free trial because we are focused on, we want to provide value in weekly planning. So you can try it free for seven days and then it’s six dollars a month so relatively inexpensive. You can cancel at any time. It’s not an annual contract or anything. We hope that in trying it for a week, you’ll see the power in it and then you’ll adopt it and it will be a system that helps your family but if it isn’t we would love to hear from you why. Or if there’s some feature that would make it better for your family we would also love that. You know, we’re in the really fun phase as entrepreneurs where we’re growing and users are adopting and paying for this thing but we still have a lot of growth and dreams and plans for what we want to accomplish long-term. So we love to hear from our users and potential users on what should be built.

Tina: Awesome.

Serena: That’s great. Yeah. Thank you. So before we bring this episode to a close, we have one more question for you. We know you’re busy with three young kids and one on the way any day now, you know, all the things you’re doing. So tell us about how you think about self-care or maybe ways you find to fill your own cup.

Reilly: Yeah, thanks. I think this is the hardest thing as a parent. I know it’s something you all talk about because there’s guilt in feeling like if I take an hour away or a day away or a night away, I’m not investing in the things, this opportunity that I have. But, yeah. I think my wife and I have also come full circle and we believe that modeling healthy rest and healthy self-care is actually a really good way to kind of teach our children that. And so we try and give each other, we aim for one morning a week where one of us doesn’t have to participate in the prep time. And that enables me to…I can read or I can work out or I can go into the office. And then on the weekends we try and give each other a couple of hours. Those are kind of our weekly rhythms. Longer term, on a more quarterly basis, we try to get a little bit of time away. And then I think for me, what fills my cup is spending time in prayer, spending time reading and so I do try to make time during my work day when it’s easier or those days when I get up early. Although I will say our kids have not been sleeping super well so it’s been hard to get up early and have the moments in time that we want. But yeah, it’s a really good question. It’s something we absolutely need to pursue and the thing that’s been so important for my wife and I is being intentional about it so that we’re both getting it and that’s required. For us to sit down and have the conversation, hey, I need this time or how can I get this here or there. Otherwise it doesn’t just happen. It requires that intentionality and so Lome also has helped us do that although, again, any system. But it’s so important to have that conversation with your partner in order to align and provide.

Tina: Well and to make sure that our kids understand that we are not the Energizer Bunny.

Reilly: Right, yes!

Tina: We need to sit down and charge our batteries, right? So Reilly, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing all about Lome with our listeners! And we encourage people to check it out!

Reilly: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you sharing your listens with me and again, as I said, anyone feel free to reach out.

Tina: Awesome. Podcast friends, we are, as always, grateful for all of you listening and supporting us. You can help us out by visiting Apple podcasts, leave us a review, subscribe and please share with others. You will find lots more content on our website NoNeedtoExplainPodcast.com. You can also find us on Twitter @mhmamas, Instagram @noneedtoexplainpodcast and on Facebook as well!

Serena: And this is your gentle reminder to take good care of yourself while you are also taking care of your people.

Tina: Thanks again for listening!

Serena: Bye!

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