The 24-Hour Diaries: Early Mornings, Meetings, and 3-Minute Workouts

A little about me: Hi! I’m Julie Schechter. I’ve been (at various moments) a ballet dancer, a lawyer, and a start-up founder. Right now, I work what I call an “email job” (operations at a tech start-up), and I write (I’m working on a novel, but I’m also on Substack at The Point). But the role that holds the most time/energy/joy for me is taking care of my two-year-old, Jude. He’s a wild animal, and I couldn’t love him more. Here’s what a day in my life looks like right now:

5:00am - My alarm goes off. My husband is a real gadget guy, and so we have a sunrise alarm clock that also has sounds. It’s somehow set to owls hooting (?!) which Jude must have accomplished by pressing some unknown sequence of buttons, because neither of us can figure out how to turn it off. It’s a weird way to wake up, but not so weird that we’ve devoted any brainpower to fixing it (the number of issues that languish in this category are striking).

5:15am - Head downstairs to make coffee. I listen to a podcast (either The Shit No One Tells You About Writing or Bad on Paper) and unload the dishwasher while the coffee brews. Then, I take a mug upstairs to my office and sit down to write.

I am not a morning person (anyone who knows me in real life would die laughing at the truth of this statement) but I recently figured out that if I’m always going to be tired anyway (and I have a toddler, so: I am), I’d rather be a little more tired and have some carved-out time dedicated to writing. It’s only been happening for a few months, and I’d say I get up and do it 70-ish percent of the time, but it makes a huge difference in how grounded I feel/pleasant I am to be around afterwards.

6:30am - The Hatch light in Jude’s room turns green. He’s been awake for a little while, just booting up (we have the slow-start gene in common) but now he bounces to standing, calling out, “The green light turned on! It’s Morning Time!” He is pumped. I keep writing, and my husband goes in to get him. Hearing their interaction from down the hall (“HI Daddy! Did you get good dreamies??”) is one of the cutest moments of my day.

7:00am - My husband works East Coast hours, so by now he really needs to get online. He brings Jude into our room, where I’m getting dressed and throwing on some makeup. I work from home, and the rest of my company loves a hoodie, so my outfit is pretty casual. Not so casual = my dirty mirror and the pile of stuff I need to take to Goodwill that’s languishing in the back of this photo. Whoops. Those seem like tomorrow problems.

7:15am - We head downstairs to eat breakfast (strawberries and waffles for Jude, avocado toast for me) and play with trucks. There are…so many trucks. (Parents of slightly older children, will we ever move on from trucks???) 🙏

8:15am - We make it to Trader Joe’s, armed with a shopping list generated by my husband. I am a disaster in the kitchen, so when we divided up household tasks, he happily took on everything related to food: planning, cooking, etc. But I’m happy to do the actual shopping, especially since it breaks up the morning at home and gets us out into the world. Jude’s newly obsessed with flowers, and so we pick out one bouquet for home and another to take to my mom, who watches him a few mornings a week.

8:50am - We get to my mom’s house, and she lights up when she opens the door and sees Jude standing there holding the flowers in his fat little paws. This is basically the whole reason we moved from NYC back to my suburban hometown outside of LA this past October. That transition has been really tough for my husband and myself, but these little moments of connection and relationship between my parents and my kid are pretty incredible.

9:15am - Back at home, groceries unloaded, in front of my computer and ready to work. Kind of hilarious to feel like you’ve lived an entire day before the “workday” starts, but I have a feeling every parent reading this identifies. I summon the Eye of the Tiger and head into a block of meetings.

1pm - Jude must be down for his nap, since I get a flurry of photos from my mom. Seems like they had a pretty great day at the duck pond (what is it like to be a toddler and just have people curate adventures for you?). It’s so funny to see him out in the world with other people. Like, I intellectually know he’s a separate person, but I don’t quite believe it until there’s photographic evidence?

3:30pm - My husband goes over to collect Judo, and pretty soon they’re back and our house is full of noise again. I’m technically still working until 4pm, but it feels like I’ve been away from the little guy forever, so I go downstairs just to give him “a quick kiss.” Shockingly, he is unwilling to let me just dart in and out (what is this, my first rodeo?) so I tell my husband he can take the first workout shift. He heads to the garage to lift weights, and Jude and I go for a little neighborhood walk. No one “stops and smells the flowers” more literally than a two-year-old (I love this full-body commitment).

4:30pm - My husband has finished his workout and coaxed Jude into the other room with more trucks, so I turn on a HIIT workout video in the living room. My solo lunges and squats last about 3 minutes before Jude comes zooming in, crawling on top of me while I’m trying to plank. I really need to start going to classes outside the house, but I just haven’t made it a regular thing yet. I mentally commit to booking a Core Power class for tomorrow as I use Judo as a weight (which honestly works pretty well).

5:30pm - Quick shower while my husband makes dinner and Jude “helps.”

6pm - We sit down to eat. The dudes have made chicken thighs and a “salad” (aka cucumbers and tomatoes) but Jude is now protesting passionately that he has never liked any of these things, “Not ever!!!” I offer to read him a book if he’ll just give them a try, and the second I open to the first page, he’s merrily chomping away. Mommy got played.

7pm - My husband takes Jude upstairs for a bath, and I clean the kitchen like someone’s timing me. If I can get this done before bedtime, I can actually relax once he’s down. Never has there ever been a better motivator.

7:15pm - I can hear that bathtime’s over, so I head upstairs to Jude’s room. Time for stories! How does the top of his head smell so good? I sniff it more than is socially appropriate while I cuddle him and read, but he’s two, so he doesn’t know enough to protest.

7:40pm - I close the door to Jude’s room and walk downstairs to join my husband on the couch. We look at each other, both hoping the other person has a genius idea for what we can do during our one sacred hour of downtime that will be relaxing, intellectually fulfilling, make us feel closer as a couple, and honor the fact that we’re both physically and mentally exhausted. As usual, neither of us has figured this out, and so we watch Culinary Masterclass on Netflix. (It’s a Korean cooking reality show, and honestly extremely good “turn your brain off” TV.)

9pm - This is our “oh hey, it’s time to start getting ready to go to sleep” hour, and it disappears faster than any other time block I’ve ever experienced in life (I swear there’s some kind of vortex involved).

10pm - Lights out!

What was a hard moment?

I’m not feeling super aligned career-wise right now, so the context-switching moment when I sit down to work my “actual” job is always pretty tough. I love (most of) parenting, I’m getting back into the flow of writing, and it’s hard to balance a third thing. (But that third thing pays the bills, so: it would be good to figure that out.)

What was a good moment?

My husband or I can do all of bedtime, obviously, but I’ll do pretty much anything to get home in time to read Jude his stories and sing “You Are My Sunshine” as we sway above his crib. Right now, he isn’t fighting sleep (crossing my fingers that stays true) and so it’s an easy, sweet ritual where I get to be reunited with my little baby again, just for a few moments.

What’s something you’re loving right now?

Ilia’s Balmy Tint Hydrating Lip Balm in Wanderlust. I have super irritable skin (lip products in particular are tough) and I’ve gone through zillions of these. They only ever make me look more pulled-together, and I can put it on without a mirror/one-handed. Win!

If you’re a mom and want to be featured in The 24-Hour Diaries, I’d love to hear from you!