Every year around this time, there is a flood of memes highlighting the busyness of parenthood once school starts. It’s time for football sign-ups and joining Girl Scouts and running PTA bake sales. It’s the era of dinner being served at 4 p.m. or 9 p.m. because you’re at gymnastics meets all evening. It’s meme after meme about how running our children’s extracurriculars is basically akin to a second job, and then it’s followed by well-meaning Instagram accounts and TikTok influencers sharing how, actually, they don’t sign up for activities outside of school and work because they actually value their family time.

I get it.

But I hate the way we try to force family connection into a box. Much like I hate how the phrase “self-care” has become synonymous with “If you aren’t getting a hotel room by yourself once a month, you’re doing it wrong,” family connection doesn’t have to exist purely at the dinner table or over a board game. I firmly believe that family connection can be found anywhere and at any time — while your toddler takes a bath, as you tuck them in at night, in the car ride to school.

What works for one family doesn’t always work for another, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Different personalities, different dynamics, different priorities — it all amounts to each family having to choose what’s best for them exclusively.

And for my family of five, extracurriculars really work for our family connection. The soccer practices, the tap classes, the early-morning chorus club, the piano lessons — when we describe our weeks to families who don’t have activities or our friends without kids, we’re met with a resounding groan of “that’s too much.” It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But some of our sweetest moments come from this routine. Of letting our girls share all their thoughts in the car. Of the quiet walks down to the field, free of distraction, where they tell us what happened at school. Of the drive-thru dinners where I’m not trying to multitask with pots and air fryers and dishes and instead can just talk to them and listen.

My husband coaches our two oldest daughters’ soccer teams, which means we spend a lot of time at the soccer field each week. And as the girls watch each other practice, as I chase their baby sister around in the grass, and as we all walk back to our minivan, my husband telling them how proud he is of their work, giving each of them specific praises for something they did, I can just feel the glow. Like a health bar in a video game, our family connection hearts pulse: ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

We leave the fields and head to the McDonald’s drive-thru, where we get our girls their Happy Meals and take them home, talking the whole time as they eat, shower, and get ready for bed. We snuggle them, capping our day with stories and reminders to pass with the inside of their foot and to make sure not to take it too personally when someone steals the ball from you. We kiss them goodnight and we go downstairs, where I wash their soccer gear and my husband orders us dinner so we can have a little quiet, at-home date night.

Some nights, our girls have to be in separate places at the same time, and my husband and I divide and conquer. We take turns shuffling one to tap while the other watches from the porch as one daughter walks to her piano teacher’s house. But those tiny commutes — the drive to dance, the walk home from piano — are filled with connection. Everyone comes home at the same time and shares their favorite part of the day. I set the table for dinner while my 5-year-old shows me her tap moves, while my 10-year-old plays the piano to show us her new skill, while the toddler runs — always running — in circles around us, delighted by all of the busyness of the day.

I can think of so many top-tier mom moments for me — you know the ones. When everything is just working. The kids are happy and the atmosphere is right and there’s a little core memory sliding down the tracks in your brain and you just know that you need to take a little extra second to soak in whatever’s happening right then. And a lot of those mom moments have happened during the busiest, most fraught days of our week. Like coming home from soccer practice once and everyone rolling down their windows so we could scream-sing “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus. Or the time we were on our way to run errands and everyone was cranky and over it and the sky suddenly opened up, pouring rain, and we all had to run screaming and laughing to the car.

And bing bing bing. ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

It’s not that a low-key Saturday with zero plans doesn’t make us glow. I love nothing more than a rained-out soccer morning, showing my girls how to play Solitaire, putting cinnamon rolls in the oven as we all veg on the couch, a Harry Potter movie playing in the background.

But that’s because family connection comes in all ways. It’s not an either/or. If it works best for your family to keep a light schedule, to stay low on commitments, then I’m so happy for you.

And I’ll keep you up some McDonald’s on the way home from soccer.

Samantha Darby is a Senior Lifestyle Editor at Romper and Scary Mommy and a PTA soccer mom raising three little women in the suburbs of Georgia with her husband. Her minivan is always trashed.