Stress-Free Fun at Home: Activities to Spice Up Your Routine

In episode 239 of The Pulling Curls Podcast, Hilary Erickson explores ways to bring more joy and fun into everyday life without the need for expensive trips or excessive planning. She shares personal insights on shifting focus from frequent travel to enjoying local activities and hobbies, making the case for finding entertainment close to home. Tune in to discover how simplifying your schedule can create more opportunities for fun right where you are.

Find it here on Apple or Spotify Podcasts

Big thanks to our sponsor Family Routines — if you’re thinking HILARY Who has time for fun? Getting into routines can make more margin in your life for fun!

Links for you:

Weight loss episode (237)

Timestamps:

00:00 Diminishing joy in frequent vacations and travel.
04:10 Enjoy fun at home, rethink the travel.
06:04 Upcoming episodes on miscarriage, motherhood, and parenting.

Keypoints:

• The episode focuses on finding more enjoyment and fun in activities closer to home.
• Hilary shares her experiences with frequent trips to Disneyland and how the excitement diminished over time.
• She references the law of diminishing returns, emphasizing that repeated exposure to an activity can reduce its enjoyment.
• Hilary talks about how frequent traveling disrupted her weight loss journey and overall routine.
• She highlights the importance of finding local activities and events, such as movies, comedy shows, concerts, and theater.
• Hilary realized that local options, like theater shows in Phoenix, can be as enjoyable as traveling to places like New York.
• Emphasis on having fun without the stress and expense associated with travel.
• The importance of making time for local activities, even those as simple as playing pickleball.
• Hilary encourages listeners to share their ideas on fun, local activities via Instagram.
• She wraps up with teasers for upcoming episodes, focusing on miscarriage in motherhood and the scarcity mindset in parenting.

Producer: Drew Erickson

Transcript

[00:00:00.600] – Hilary Erickson

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Pulling Curls Podcast. Today on Episode 239, we are talking about having more fun at home. Let’s untangle it.

[00:00:10.670] – Hilary Erickson

Hi, I’m Hilary, a serial overcomplicator. I’m also a nurse, mom to three, and the curly head behind Pulling Curls and the pregnancy nurse. This podcast aims to help us stop overcomplicating things and remember how much easier it is to keep things simple. Let’s smooth out those snarls with Pregnancy and Parenting Untangled, the Pulling Curls podcast.

[00:00:38.770] – Hilary Erickson

This episode of the Pulling Curls podcast is sponsored by Family Routines. If you are looking to make the margins where you’re able to have more fun at home like we’re going to talk about in here, come join me in Family Routines, where we’re going to talk about different things that will help you have more time to have more fun at home.

[00:00:54.750] – Hilary Erickson

So when Disneyland reopened, I got a magic key, and I went to Disneyland I think maybe eight times in a year. And I had so many friends that were so jealous about it. But I was looking at it like, I’m so tired of being here, which sounds really conceited. I get that. Most people I know would look at that experience and just think, I can’t believe you got to do that. That looks like so much fun.

[00:01:21.080] – Hilary Erickson

But if you guys listen to when my dad was on the podcast, my dad’s an economist, and he’s a big fan of the law of diminishing returns, right? So the more you have of something, the less joy you’re getting out of it. And especially even though I had a magic key, and even though I often can stay at hotels for a decreased rate because I write about them on my website, it still wasn’t as fun as the money that I was putting in, because no matter how you look at it, a Disney vacation is pretty expensive.

[00:01:49.420] – Hilary Erickson

Now, I still love to travel, but I just found that the joy I was getting out of Disneyland, and honestly, most of my trips in general was decreasing the more that I did them. And I also noticed If you listen to my weight loss episode, that was something that I really wanted to do. And I found that the more that I traveled, it really took me off my game of weight loss. And I wasn’t eating a ton when I was on vacation, but I think just because I was out of my norm, I wasn’t going to be able to lose weight effectively if I was doing vacations frequently.

[00:02:19.730] – Hilary Erickson

I hope to change that at some point, though, because I still love to travel. Doing it as frequently just wasn’t working for me. But I was like, what am I going to do? I’ve been this Disneyland girl for so long. What am I going to do with my life? And so I really started to look at what I could do at home that could be fun, things I could look forward to that wouldn’t put me off my weight loss game and still have things to look forward to, things to enjoy that weren’t Disneyland.

[00:02:45.430] – Hilary Erickson

And I know a lot of you are looking at me and thinking, Oh, I wish I could go to Disneyland every month. But I wonder if more of you, if you went to Disneyland as frequently as I did at that time frame, if you would start to be like, Oh, maybe this isn’t as fun as I thought. I would like to do other things.

[00:03:00.510] – Hilary Erickson

Let me also say times and seasons for everything. I wasn’t able to do anything like this until my kids were well into junior high, all of them. So two had moved out. Maybe one was in high school, one was in junior high. But I got to the point where I was able to do this, and there is a big part of my life that I was not able to do this for. And if you’re in that season of life, this is going to help you out even more because there are things you can do week to week, day to day, to have more fun at home that doesn’t include an expensive trip or just a lot of stress because going on trips can be stressful to your life, right? Adding all that to your life.

[00:03:35.110] – Hilary Erickson

So I have made a goal to find fun things to do every week or so at my house, and that includes going to movies, comedy shows, finding concerts, theater. Our family loves musical theater, so we’ve booked some theater shows. And in my mind, you guys are going to think I’m insane, I was like, We should go to New York. I want to watch more Broadway, right?

[00:03:54.260] – Hilary Erickson

Guys, there are theater shows here in the Phoenix, the eighth largest city in America, that I can go to that don’t involve me having to fly to New York. But somehow in my head, I was like, I love Broadway. I have to go to Broadway. No, you don’t. You can go out to dinner. You can go to the show. It will be a whole fun thing. And then you can sleep in your own bed and not have to deal with TSA.

[00:04:17.480] – Hilary Erickson

I think so often we’re like, Oh, I need to travel to have all this different kinds of fun when we really could focus on having fun at home. And maybe this is just me, but it was such a revelation to me that I wanted to make a podcast episode about it because I think we could have more fun, more enjoyment, more joy with things that are closer to home that don’t require so much stress because a trip to New York is extremely stressful for me. Trying to book everything, TSA again, all those different things when staying closer to home is less stressful, but still really fun.

[00:04:48.330] – Hilary Erickson

Ultimately, I still do love to travel. I’m hoping to aim for two to four work trips a year. My big dream is to go and speak about pregnancy around the United States at paid speaking gigs to talk to pregnant moms about getting prepared for birth and the realities that they’re going to face with birth and postpartum life. That’s a big dream of mine, so I still want to do it. But also I want to enjoy my time here at home with my family and things in my own bed. Guys, I love my own bed so much. I just want to be able to do it at home, too. So come join me on Instagram. Tell me how you have fun at home. What am I missing? What are some things that I could do closer to home that would be really fun? Again, pickleball. We try and play pickleball a few times a That I have found really fun. And again, sometimes we’re like, Oh, I don’t have time to do pickleball, but somehow I have time to go to a three-day Disney trip?

[00:05:37.150] – Hilary Erickson

No. If you recombobulate your life, you probably have time for that pickleball game, and you can still sleep in your own bed. Has anybody be seeing that that maybe is a highlight for me as sleeping in my own bed. So thanks for joining me on this quick episode. I hope this sparked some ideas for you guys. I would love for you to tell me on Instagram what you thought of this post if you thought it was insane and that I am way too privileged to have gone to Disney so many times that it wasn’t as fun, then let me know that on Instagram as well.

[00:06:04.320] – Hilary Erickson

Stay tuned. We have some great episodes coming up. Next week, we are talking about miscarriage and motherhood and how that can affect your motherhood moving forward. And then the week after that, we are talking about the scarcity mindset of parenting and how that is affecting us. So stay tuned.

[00:06:19.710] – Hilary Erickson

Thanks for joining us on the Polling Curls podcast today. If you like today’s episode, please consider reviewing, sharing, subscribing. It really helps our podcast grow. Thank you!

Keywords:

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