Author: admin

• I brought my baby, toddler, and husband with me on a work trip to Palm Springs.
• Balancing parental responsibilities with work obligations was challenging, but not impossible.
• My husband was a huge help, and I’m glad we were able to make new memories as a family.

Being a freelance writer and editor means I have the flexibility to work from wherever, whether that’s on a hospital bed getting induced, late at night after the kids go to sleep, or in a nice hotel on a work trip.

It’s not always glamorous, but it certainly has its moments, and it’s a joy to include my family when possible.

When I went on a three-day work trip to Palm Springs — about a 2½-hour drive from our home in San Diego, but closer to 3½ with all the pit stops — I was happy that the hotel allowed me to bring my 3-month-old, my 2½-year-old toddler, and my husband.

It’d be my first time bringing both kids on a work trip, and our first overnight excursion as a family of four.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was excited to spend time together

The car was packed to the brim with diapers, clothes, carriers, and anything else we could think of for a multi-night stay away from home.

I’d just gotten back from my first-ever work press trip away from the kids the day before, and my husband had returned from a work trip a couple of days before that.

I’d put a lot of work experiences on hold with my first child and couldn’t afford to do the same with my second.

Despite feeling overbooked, I said yes to both trips and was glad to take my family along for the second one; I didn’t want to be away from them again, at least not in such a rapid succession.

And with my husband and me both traveling, we just want to spend a couple of nights together as a family. I knew I’d be busy, but I didn’t know how intense the trip would be.

Navigating work commitments and family was challenging

On day one, I was shuttled around with a couple of other journalists for a three-course lunch and a dessert tasting. During breaks and at night, I rushed back to the hotel to help my husband.

I recall walking into the hotel the first night to him baby-wearing the 3-month-old in a carrier while patting my toddler’s back; both were successfully asleep.

That night, we all slept soundly through the whole night, unbothered. The next day was not nearly as streamlined.

Between scheduled events, I returned to the hotel for a quick break to nurse and was out again.

Meanwhile, my husband was behind on work, since he couldn’t do virtually anything with the two young kids, other than entertain them and explore the hotel.

That night, I nursed the baby and patted my toddler’s back at the same time so my husband could work. I kind of felt like a superhero there for a second.

Once they were finally sleeping soundly, my husband and I hung out in the bathroom since the hotel room was otherwise one big open area, and we didn’t want to wake them up.

We whispered next to the shower, eating the cold mashed potatoes I’d brought back from an event. After that, we both attempted to catch up on work on our laptops and ultimately went to sleep exhausted — but our night didn’t end there.

The baby woke up more times than we could count, and the toddler roused from all the hubbub, too. We were drained and exhausted, and all I could think of was that I had to be up early for a tour of a date farm at 8 a.m.

Despite all the hubbub, I’d happily do this again

I had fun going out for a few hours at a time and being an adult without having to monitor two kids, but I came back to reality every break and evening at the hotel.

Granted, my husband did the brunt of the work while I was out and about, but it’ll remain a family memory and a trip we otherwise would’ve never had.

Even with the disarray, I still got to share parts of the experience with my children: bringing back restaurant dishes to try together, watching my toddler take in beautiful hotel room views, and enjoying nice hotel breakfasts.

Despite long hours and late nights working, we still fit in small family moments into an otherwise work-focused trip. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

• I’ve learned what works — and what doesn’t — when traveling with teens.
• Flexibility matters more than perfect itineraries.
• A few simple strategies help reduce conflict and increase fun.

When they were really little, we used to call vacationing with the kids “babysitting with palm trees.” Now that they’re teens, maybe it’s more like “traveling with jerks.”

I mean, sometimes they’re grateful and engaged. But just as often, it can feel like every decision is getting evaluated by the most ruthless, cool-kid jury of tired, bored, entitled judges.

We travel a ton, and I have come to realize there are tricks for making your vacation teen-worthy, while still having the best time yourself. Some are easy, some are annoying. But when the kids are happy, everyone’s happy, right?

We spend 30 minutes in museums, max

If you do not have museum kids, still go, but limit your time. (If you do have museum kids,your vacations are clearly very different than mine.) This is really the key.

Even in the NYC area where we live full-time, we visit museums regularly, but we don’t stay hours. Yes, you paid all that money for your ticket, but you get to decide how long to spend there. For my kids, 30 to 45 minutes is often more than enough time to see the stars of the show and pick their favorite pieces to talk about over pizza later.

No one gets cranky. No one dreads the visit. As they get older, maybe you can stretch it.

We still do things we can do at home

Yes, we all saw the go-cart place we just passed on the highway. But we are in Barcelona. And why on earth would we waste a precious afternoon in Catalonia doing what we can do 20 minutes from home?

Because somehow, it will be an adventure, different than the place back home in interesting and unexpected ways, and you will all actually have fun. Do it.

We like to explore cities in different ways

Take a city tour of Budapest, but do it riding a three-wheeled Segway. My kids love to look for the weird way to sightsee now, and they actually learn a ton about our locations.

In Marrakesh, we toured the city from the vantage of Soviet-era motorcycle sidecars. Sometimes there are age restrictions that mean you have to skip, but when it works, it’s hard to beat.

Know what your kids are into and plan around that

Are they a teen club kid? If so, amazing! When you go on a beach vacation, that means you’ll have a lot of options. We’ve loved Grand Velas in Riviera Maya, Mexico, any Club Med (the new one in Miches, DR is incredible), or Beaches in Turks and Caicos. The best possible outcome is that they make friends and have the best week doing their own thing with their peers. If teen clubs aren’t their thing, don’t make it a thing. Nothing is worse than having your mom force friends on you.

Take cool classes

We do a cooking class wherever we go now. In Santa Fe this year, we took a super interesting one, making sauces from the region. We learned a ton about the indigenous history while also developing a POV on the ubiquitous local question: “red, green, or Christmas?” In Bogota, we learned how to make delectable smashed plantains that my kids now request whenever they see them on a menu and compare to their memory of what they tasted like in Colombia. In Fez, we made a full 5-course meal from a private home deep inside the medina.

My kids both love to cook (we do too) so this is a destination “souvenir” that we cherish and refer back to again and again.

Screen time is flexible

If only they would put the phone down, they could appreciate the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime view. But spending every minute traveling (and maybe sharing a hotel room) with your parents can be tough.

If they are spending more time than you’d like on their device, but still otherwise engaged, I let it slide. Offer to help by being the photographer and shoot them in 4,567,354 poses for their one IG “post” of the trip. There. Now you’ve made it a family activity.

Divide and conquer to do what everyone loves

My son loves golf — I couldn’t care less. So we build in some divide-and-conquer time when we each do what we love. (And hey, they’re teens now, so they don’t need me every minute!) I walked the Canyon Road galleries in Sedona, having the best morning of my life, while my son took his dad to play nine holes against the most spectacular, surreal red-rock backdrop. It was his favorite day of the trip.

• Marta Milans is an actor currently starring in Peacock’s new series, “M.I.A.“
• She gave birth to her first daughter at 42 via IVF.
• Here, she shares what it’s like on her journey to baby number two.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Marta Milans. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I got married in 2021. I got pregnant naturally shortly after, but sadly, it was an ectopic pregnancy. My doctors found out I had some uterine problems that needed to be addressed.

I didn’t want to waste more time, so I jumped right into an IVF journey.

I went to my native Spain to receive IVF treatments. It was successful, but it was a ride.

My baby was born when I was 42

There’s a clinic in Valencia called Equipo Juana Crespo. Dr. Crespo is a legend. She clocked the problem, and I had some surgeries to prep myself. I then did a bunch of IVF cycles back-to-back to try to get a healthy embryo. We put in two and hoped one would stick.

We had my baby daughter when I was 42. She is now 18 months and is perfect, everything I could hope for.

No one prepared me for how lonely the IVF process is, and how hard it is on your body and mind. Everyone reacts differently, but hormones, at least for me, changed what I thought was real. It took me into a darkness, and it was hard for me to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

At one point, I had vertigo, lack of sleep, lost a lot of weight, and had suicidal thoughts. It changed my personality completely. No matter how amazing your partner is, it’s on you to share these things with them. They won’t understand what your mind is going through.

I called my doctors and said sorry, I don’t want to die to become a mother.

We have to do IVF again

I only had two embryos, and we implanted both. That meant that if I wanted to have another child down the road, it would require more IVF.

I lost my grandmother, but before she passed, she told me, “Don’t worry, when I get to heaven, I’ll send you a baby girl.” I decided to have faith that it would work.

I now want baby number two, and we have to go through it all over again. I’m more prepared this time.

Biology is biology, and our ovarian reserves go down, and our eggs get worse. It’s harder to become a mother later in life, but it shouldn’t be something we don’t talk about. We shouldn’t have to suffer in silence and pretend like it’s not happening.

I want people to know that you can do it all — have a career and have a baby later in life

There’s so much stigma around fertility later in life. I chose to have my career, and I shouldn’t be punished for that later in life just because I want to become a mother. I booked an amazing job on Peacock’s “M.I.A.,” but I was three and a half months postpartum when we started filming. I had also just evacuated our home in Malibu from the fires. I had to fly back to LA to test for the job, then move my family to Miami, and began shooting two weeks after we moved.

I was pumping in my trailer and putting milk in the fridge for my 4-month-old baby. Call times were 4:45 a.m. My daughter was waking up once or twice a night. I navigated that with my husband. I’m glad I have my support system of women, friends, my mother, and my grandmother in heaven. I’ve been very lucky, because I could not have done this alone.

I think once you become a mother, you realize you can do anything. I’ve birthed a human. I am unstoppable.

• I didn’t take piano lessons as a kid, but wanted my kids to learn an instrument.
• My oldest fell in love with the piano, and soon after, I started taking lessons, too.

My grandmother is a pianist. As often happens, the pendulum swung the other way with my mom, who neither had an interest in taking piano lessons nor in making her kids do so. I vowed to throw the pendulum back the other way with my kids, enrolling them in piano lessons even though they showed no interest.

As fate would have it, my eldest fell in love with the instrument. Soon after, I signed up for lessons, too. This fall I’ll begin my 10th semester as an adult piano student at our local university’s music education program.

Over the years, I’ve learned to read notes and play chords. I performed an arrangement of Billy Joel’s, “Piano Man,” and Burgmüller’s “L’Harmonie des Anges,” for my recitals. The more I advance, the more I realize I am years away from the confident sight-reading necessary to fulfill my original vision of being able to plop down at the piano and play any pop song or carol in front of me. But that doesn’t matter to me so much

Sure, there are many reasons I could quit, but I find there are many more to continue. In total, I spent about $6,000 on piano lessons for our family last year, and about $2,400 of that was for me. The investment was worth every penny.

Music is great for my brain

Many parents know and understand the advantages of having our children learn how to play an instrument. No matter what our age, adults can benefit, too. A 2025 study found “playing an instrument was associated with a 35% reduced dementia risk.”

I saw the value firsthand when I attended ‘Your Brain on Beethoven,’ a public concert put on by the Music-in-Medicine Initiative. While the musicians performed the “Archduke Trio,” a “Brain-Computer Interface and EEG brain dynamic data visualization” provided real-time feedback on how the music affected the pianist as a performer and the audience as listeners.

Even without a Ph.D. in neuroscience, I can feel the positive impact of music each time I play. Oftentimes, my lessons feel like a literal mental workout.

The concentration required to learn is meditative

As a parent of two, time is difficult to come by, so getting myself to sit down at the piano is the hardest part. That resistance quickly dissipates as soon as my fingers strike the keys, when the concentration required to play each note is so all-encompassing I can only focus on the task at hand.

Stepping away from a lesson, I often feel relaxed. My stress seems to melt away during the 45 dedicated minutes when I do not check my phone or email, or think about what I should do next. I get the same boost when I practice, as long as I take a minute to silence my phone.

Courage begets more courage

Learning something new is daunting. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the more I tried and failed, the more courage I had to do it again. Successes are delightful, but making it through failures while sitting at the piano bench is truly thrilling.

I might not free solo a mountain, but surviving my heart threatening to beat outside my chest while performing a piano recital is a wonderful reminder of aliveness, without any physical risk.

At my last recital, my hands shook so visibly that it was noticeable from the back row. I played through the adrenaline, managing to hit the notes and extract some musicality despite my strong physical reaction.

I gathered with the other adult students after our performance, and we congratulated each other. We all pointed out what went well. Instead of dwelling on mistakes, I took the compliments. Learning as an adult is not about being the best. It’s about being the best version of yourself. It’s a lesson I both learn and can pass along to my kids.

• Moving abroad made AI a practical tool for navigating daily life.
• My children have watched me use AI to solve problems and answer questions.
• The experience has shaped how I think about raising kids in the AI era.

I was writing the week’s menu on the Miele fridge in our Spanish apartment when I noticed the freezer temperature indicator flashing two dotted lines. I had no idea what it meant. So I pulled out my phone, opened Claude, described what I was seeing, and within seconds, I was troubleshooting it. My 7-year-old watched me go from clueless to unstuck in under a minute.

Nine months ago, I moved my family of four from Connecticut to Las Rozas de Madrid. We’re all learning Spanish one day at a time. I knew there would be a lot of figuring things out on the fly. But operating daily life in a new language and culture is humbling in ways you can’t fully anticipate until you’re in it.

So I’ve turned to AI when life throws something at me that I don’t yet have the language or knowledge to handle.

I use Claude all the time

In just the last few weeks, I’ve used Claude to chat with a doctor via our insurance app when my son came home from school with a hematoma. And then to translate bloodwork results and research the right supplements to order. And again, to understand an audit letter from Agencia Tributaria (Spain’s tax authority) about a package our neighbor had sent us months earlier.

What I didn’t anticipate was that my kids would be watching. Not passively, but quietly absorbing.

My 7-year-old experiences Claude as a sort of magic answer machine. On the bus to school, when he wants to learn everything there is to know about diamonds, I open it up, and we go deep together. He asks questions, I read him answers, and they spark more questions. He has no idea what the technology is. He just knows he can get answers to all the things he’s wondering about. I love that my not knowing doesn’t mean he hits a dead end. I learn alongside him.

My 10-year-old knows exactly what Claude is. He’s been watching me use it for months — and recently, we used it together for the first time on something important to him.

He wants to write a fantasy novel — he has the whole thing mapped out in his head. But he’s a perfectionist, and the gap between big idea and completed 30,000-word book felt impossible to him. He could visualize it, but he couldn’t see the steps — and was paralyzed by it. So I told him Claude could help.

We sat down together, and he watched me write a detailed prompt. From that, Claude built a road map — and I watched my son go from stuck to gleeful as he read it. Every phase and milestone was broken down into small steps he could take to turn his dream into reality. For the first time, this thing he wanted so badly to do actually felt doable. I asked Claude to build him a printable workbook to work through character development, plot, setting, and scenes. With a goal of 250 words a day, he can have the first draft done in four months.

While he nodded along to many of Claude’s suggestions, he pushed back on others. He disagreed with the editing process. He had a better way. It might take longer, he said, but it would make the final product better.

My kids also use Claude

In that moment, I was so proud. He didn’t blindly accept what came out of the tool. He thought critically, took what made sense to him, and discarded what didn’t. The road map didn’t write his novel. It just cleared the way so he could. Without it, a dream that might have been abandoned entirely became something he could start today.

As a mom, I’ve thought about whether any of this is good for them. Whether I’m modeling curiosity and resilience, or just handing them an easy button to outsource the hard parts.

Then I think about my older son on that bus. He didn’t hand his thinking over. He used a tool to get out of his own way so he could start the thing — and then trusted himself to take it from there.

And I think about my youngest, who’s so full of questions all the time. The answers Claude gives don’t dim his thinking; they just intensify it.

Here’s what I think they’re absorbing: that not knowing doesn’t have to be a dead end. Sometimes you just need to know the right question to ask.

We’re all still learning Spanish — figuring out this new life in Spain. Most of the time, I still don’t know what I’m doing. But I open Claude, ask a question, and keep moving forward. My kids are learning to do the same. And honestly, I think that’s one of the best things I can teach them. That everything really is figureoutable.

• Realtor.com ranked the 11 states where you can avoid spending more than 30% of your income on housing.
• The 30% rule is used as a benchmark to help households avoid becoming “house poor.”
• The states are mostly located in the US’s interior, including Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana.

Most of us have heard the golden rule of housing: Don’t spend more than 30% of your income on housing. Known as the 30% rule, it’s a benchmark financial experts often cite to help households avoid becoming “house poor” — meaning you have little savings left after paying monthly housing costs.

Unfortunately, for many Americans, that standard works better in theory than in practice. Realtor.com data shows that in most states, households earning the median income cannot comfortably afford a median-priced home without stretching their budgets too thin.

It’s a reality shaped by the same persistent strains on housing affordability: high mortgage rates, high home prices, and economic headwinds such as inflation, which continue to drive up the cost of everyday necessities like food and gas.

The good news is that Realtor.com has identified 11 states where homebuyers can still afford homes without overburdening themselves financially. The majority are located in the Midwest, and surprisingly, not a single state in the South — a region often associated with lower living costs — made the cut.

“Midwestern states tend to have stronger labor markets, which keep incomes high relative to home values,” said Joel Berner, a senior economist at Realtor.com. They also “have less of a lower tail of household incomes than the Southern states, so more Midwesterners end up able to afford homes.”

Here are the 11 states where a household earning the median income can afford a typical home without spending more than 30% of its income, according to Realtor.com.

11. Minnesota

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 29.9%
• Median household income: $88,572
• Median home-list price: $388,212

10. Maryland

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 29.8%
• Median household income: $99,340
• Median home-list price: $434,302

9. Missouri

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 29.5%
• Median household income: $69,725
• Median home-list price: $301,158

8. West Virginia

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 29.4%
• Median household income: $60,185
• Median home-list price: $259,523

7. Pennsylvania

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 28.5%
• Median household income: $74,855
• Median home-list price: $312,487

6. Michigan

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 28.3%
• Median household income: $70,131
• Median home-list price: $290,329

5. Indiana

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 28.3%
• Median household income: $71,469
• Median home-list price: $295,810

4. Kansas

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 27%
• Median household income: $74,030
• Median home-list price: $292,632

3. Ohio

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 27%
• Median household income: $70,196
• Median home-list price: $277,348

2. Illinois

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 26%
• Median household income: $80,648
• Median home-list price: $307,674

1. Iowa

• Share of median income needed to afford a median-priced home: 25.4%
• Median household income: $75,991
• Median home-list price: $282,886