After spending over 16 years with Ralph Lauren Corp. in N.Y., SUSIE MCCABE joined Under Armour as Senior VP/Global Retail in October. While the transition has been pretty smooth from a work perspective, it has been more challenging on the personal side. McCabe’s family is still living in New Jersey, where her 16-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter are finishing out the school year. She spends three or four days at the office in Baltimore, then makes the three-and-a half-hour drive back to her family for the remainder of the weekend. With the house in New Jersey scheduled to be sold at the end of June, McCabe spends the vast majority of her free time touring homes around Maryland, looking for the perfect place for her family to begin its next chapter. Despite more house hunting this weekend, McCabe tells THE DAILY she will find time for fun with the family.
GET YOUR GAME FACE ON: My son plays soccer very competitively and my daughter plays soccer and lacrosse. So the weekends are generally very focused on the two of them and getting them to-and-from activities, trying to confirm who can drive where and whether the games overlap or are even in the same state. This weekend we’re taking advantage of the fact that my son has a soccer game against a team in Bethesda (Md.) on Saturday, and are all coming down and going to look around (at houses) and do a big tour.
LIKE A GOOD NEIGHBOR: The areas that we’re looking to live in Baltimore feel very similar to where we are now. There’s a lot about Baltimore that feels like New Jersey. There’s a lot of character and there’s a lot of diversity, which is kind of what we’ve looked for in the area that we live at home. We’ve always liked to live someplace where we can meet people that we might not meet on the sidelines of our kids’ games -- people who have different interests but are still very good friends. That’s what we’re looking for in our neighborhood here, and we think we’re going to be able to find it -- hopefully soon.
DINNER IS SERVED: I think we’re all pretty exhausted, so there’s generally no cooking by either parent on Friday nights. It’s all about take-out or pizza and really just trying to reconnect with the family. We don’t go out much. It’s more about spending time at home, grabbing dinner together and watching a movie or a sports event. We like this place Arturo’s, in Maplewood. It’s got great brick oven pizza and really, really wonderful meatballs. My daughter loves the Thai food restaurant Wild Ginger, and she orders the same thing every week -- the chicken satay -- and then we all try to explore other things. One of the places that we will go is a little bit of an institution in Jersey, which is called Star Tavern. They have their own system for how people line up to get the pizza and if you haven’t been there before, it’s obvious.
CALM BEFORE THE STORM: I prefer not to have to set my alarm on Saturday mornings, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I sleep late. I like getting up and being the only one up in the morning, so I can sit and have coffee by myself and just have some quiet time and plot out what I’m going to do for the day. I usually have things that I have to get done that fit around the kids’ games. I like being able to prepare myself for the day, but not schedule as much of my life as is scheduled during the work week.
A POLISHED LOOK: I don’t do it every weekend, but my daughter and I do like getting manicures and pedicures together. It’s something that I can take her to go do and it’s just the two of us. I wish we did it every weekend but we try to go two times a month. It’s a little scary because I think I was 25 when I had my first manicure and she’s a lot younger, but it’s something that we do together. Then we usually go and stroll the downtown and the surrounding area. It’s a couple hours just the two of us and it’s a little bit of a decadent treat.
FAMILY MATTERS: On Sundays, we like to go to church as a family whenever we can -- when there’s not a sporting event that’s conflicting with it -- and then we like to grab a family brunch. There’s a great bagel shop that we love that we go to. But one of the things that we’ve done as a family is we will use Sunday nights for a family meeting, where we try and go through all of the activities for the kids for the coming week. We talk about things I might have from a travel perspective, whether my husband is teaching, and we try to get organized around who needs to be where and when. We read it all these years ago in Real Simple magazine. It said if you run your household like you run your business you would go through all of this at the beginning of the week.
