Welcome to The Sunday Reset, our series brought to you by the legends at My Food Bag where well-known Kiwi women tell us how they actually spend their Sundays. The fridge clean-outs, the wellness rituals, the shortcuts they swear by, and the stuff they happily ignore, it’s all up for a yarn. Some are wildly organised, some are running on vibes and dry shampoo, but all of them are real, candid and a fab insight into how Kiwi women prepare for the week ahead. This month we chat to broadcaster Toni Street, one of the most familiar faces (and voices) in the country, and a mum of three who has spent the better part of two decades getting up at an hour most of us would deem insulting! Between radio, three kids and a winter sports schedule that has her and her husband Matt zipping around all of Auckland constantly, Toni’s Sundays swing wildly between full-tilt chaos and blissful nothing.
In this chat Toni gets very real about decision fatigue, the manky cushions she can’t quite bring herself to replace, and why a spa is the single best thing she’s found for stopping the treadmill – and check out our previous editions here!
Capsule x My Food Bag
Kia ora Toni! Let’s start with the obvious one. What does an average Sunday look like for you and your family?
I feel like Sunday for us can be from one extreme to the other. It’s either a complete day where we are just recalibrating and sorting ourselves out after a manic week, or it’s insane. The Sunday before last was insane, because it’s the middle of the crossover of the sports season. Mackenzie had tag trials, because the summer sports are starting to have their trials now, so we had to get her to tag trials. Juliette was preparing for the Big Sing in Christchurch, so she had a big two-hour singing rehearsal. Mackenzie had her hip-hop session. Lachie had a birthday party. My husband and I were literally out of the house driving in opposite directions for about three or four hours on that Sunday, and I thought to myself at the time, ‘well, this isn’t the normal Sunday reset that I’m used to!’
Zero to 100!
Yeah! Sunday’s either manic in our house, or there’s nothing on. And I like those ones!
Right, so whether you’ve got your zero Sunday or your 100 Sunday, is there anything you always want to tick off?
What I always want to do, no matter what, is try and get out the door and do a beach walk, just the five of us. We have this crazy schedule where everyone’s going in different directions, so Sunday is the one day that we can actually go and walk as a family. During the week I’m always at radio and the kids are getting ready for school. On a Saturday we’re always out the door, because Mackenzie and Lachie both have early morning rugby, so that’s not an option. Sunday’s the one day we can get out and walk as a family, and it just feels like having that nice constant. Take a breath, get down to the beach, have a coffee, let your dog go for a run. So yeah, I like a Sunday morning where it starts like that.
It sets such a good tone for the day.
It does. It sets a really good tone if we can just get out the door and do that, and then usually a Sunday for us is a home-cooked meal and a movie night at the other end of the day. So whatever we’ve got on during the day, it’s just nice, we all get together.
And you’re a My Food Bag family too, obviously!
We’ve been a My Food Bag family on and off for many, many years. I remember when we had Juliet, who’s about to turn 14 – it was a lifesaver because at the time I had accepted the job to host Breakfast TV literally on my due date.
ON your due date?!
Yeah, the head of news and current affairs said, “Toni, can we meet? I want to discuss something important with you.” And I said, “Yeah, we can, but I am literally due to give birth today, so can you come and meet me close to the hospital?” I went and had this meeting and they offered me the breakfast job – they wanted me to start in 12 weeks. That meant I was only going to have 12 weeks maternity leave. I remember it throwing me into a bit of a spin, because it was my first baby. My Food Bag was part of the process of being able to do that, we just tried to streamline all areas of our life so that we could make it work.
The decision fatigue is still real though, isn’t it?
The decision fatigue of what to have for dinner really gets to me. That’s the single greatest thing about My Food Bag for me, it just decides for you. You don’t spend hours going, what do we feel like? What do we want? It’s kind of just done. Over the years I’ve done quite a few different iterations of My Food Bag as well. We do Serve 6 at the moment, but I’ve done Fresh Start when I’ve wanted to lose weight in the past. We’ve done Bargain Box for the family friendly meals. We’ve done so many iterations, and we keep coming back to it time and time again.
Hearing you talk about that 12 weeks, it’s such a snapshot of the culture back then. Do you think that conversation would go differently now?
I was obviously a lot younger, and it was a major break in my career, so I wanted to make it work. Probably now I would give myself more time, but also the breakfast shift was quite good for kids, because it meant that I was getting up and leaving at sort of 3.45, and then I was able to come back at 10. So I was able to spend all day with my baby.
It just put a bit of extra pressure on me, so I had to be quite disciplined that I didn’t just fully have no sleep. But then mums have no sleep anyway, so it’s like, well, I might as well go and do this thing! It kind of worked in a weird way, and here I am still doing the super early shifts, because it works around the kids. Some days the alarm goes off and it’s such a grind to get up, but I try to tell myself that the reason I’m doing these early shifts is because I get flexibility for the rest of it. That’s what motivates me to keep going.
The job has changed so much too. Nothing about what we do now looks like it did 15 years ago in journalism and media!
It’s just crazy. The job’s just so varied now. Radio’s a part of it, socials are part of it, podcasting, it’s just so different. You had one singular focus, and now I find I’ve got to be really careful not to burn out, because you’ve got your finger in so many different pies and you can constantly be feeding each one.
So on a Sunday, are you one of those people who looks at Instagram and all the amazing organisational storage hacks, or do you watch it and think, what on earth are you doing?
I’m an ebb and flow-er. I’ll have moments where I’ll get home, and I think a lot of women my age can relate to this, and I’ll suddenly have this burning desire to tidy everything within an inch of its life. I’ll move the couch around, I’ll change the side of the room the coffee table’s on, and then I feel much better. And then there are days where I look at it and go, actually, I don’t care. I don’t care that everything’s out of place. So it flip flops on any given day. It’s a one or the other type scenario with me. But it’s almost like the more out of control my life gets, the more the little things out of place in the house irritate me.
Yes! Because it’s the little things that push you over the edge on a random Tuesday, when yesterday you didn’t care at all.
Absolutely. At the moment, I look at my master bedroom and the cushions are so manky, and I know they need to be changed. But am I going to change them? I don’t know. Probably one day it’ll just really tip me over the edge, and I’ll rage out and I’ll go buy the cushions, and then I’ll feel better about my life! But for now, I don’t have the motivation to do anything about them. You get so overwhelmed that there are too many things in the house that need doing, and it just feels all too much, and then I kind of freeze and do none of it.
I cleaned out my wardrobe last night and I feel so clear headed. Plus you find things you forgot you owned, which is basically free shopping.
It’s funny you say that, because I wore a pink coat to work this morning, and everyone’s like, “I love your coat,” and I was like, “Same! I forgot I had it.” It was tucked away in the winter coat section of the wardrobe, and everything’s packed so tightly that I can’t see it. I quite like the colour coding, that works for me. And I feel the same when I clean out the kids’ wardrobes, but then sometimes I find there’s not enough room, and that tips me over the edge.
And then it’s “we need to move house”!
I go through those cycles all the time too. We’ll even get to the stage of getting someone in to appraise it, and then two weeks later, I’m like, ‘no, I like where we live!’ It’s very emotional being married to me, I tell you!
Do you do any meal preppy stuff or getting ahead for the week?
Sometimes I will get inspiration and I will make overnight chia puddings, and then I’ll have that for maybe three or four days of the week. But at the moment, I’m in a real reset mode from being in the crazy winter sport months, because I coach two things and I help out with a third, and my husband coaches rugby. The winter months for us are really full on, we’re out late, so coming into the spring period I start to get a bit more control over my life again. My husband coaches basketball as well, so winter is just full-on coaching multiple winter sports, and then I start to get a bit more balance back when we get into spring. So I’m about to get into the period where I’ll probably be doing a lot more of the Sunday prep. I’ll start baking a bit more, and I get the Thermomix out. I love doing a good banana loaf for the kids for their lunchboxes, some chocolate chunk cookies. Now that our schedule’s a bit clearer, I’ll be in prep mode a lot more than I have been in winter.
What about the mental side of the reset, for you as a person rather than you as a mum? Or is that a bit of a pipe dream with three kids?
Sunday is definitely the slowest day for our family, so I feel like I have the time on a Sunday to look around the house and go, okay, what do I need to do? I do a bit more goal setting, and we have time to have the discussions. What are we going to do this summer? Where are we going to have Christmas? We’ve started having those conversations, so I like it from that perspective. And you actually have the time to have some conversations with the kids and talk to them about how they’re feeling about school, and are they doing enough prep for the musical. So I feel like it’s a conversation day. It’s a day of connection with the family, probably the biggest day for us.
Do you romanticise those conversations at all? Are they over a nice glass of wine, or are they on the go?
No, those are slow conversations over a cup of tea if it’s in the morning, a coffee, or if it’s after three, four o’clock, wine or a gin and tonic. I love a good Sunday tipple, because it just feels like you’re celebrating the fact that you’ve still got the day off.
A G&T is the perfect Sunday afternoon drink, isn’t it? There’s just something about it.
Sitting down with a G&T is quite nostalgic for me, because my nana and grandad used to have the G&T and some chippies with dip, so I love that combination. I remember sitting with them and watching sport, so it’s definitely got a romantic notion for me. And the chips are so specific for me. It’s either I love sour cream and chive chips, or I love the salt and vinegar Snackachangi. If Snackachangi is an option on the flight, there’s no way I’m picking the sweet option. I’m always going for the savoury.
Snackachangi over the Cookie Time, every time?
Oh, all day!
When things spiral a bit out of control, is there one thing you do that makes you feel like you’ve got your life together, even if you haven’t?
Life spirals out of control quite a bit, to be honest, so that was probably a very accurate description! Do you know what I have been doing a lot more recently? Just stopping, and actually allowing myself to do nothing. For a long time I felt like I just had to be productive every second of the day, and just went from one activity to the next, and actively telling yourself to stop and do nothing is okay. So for me, one of the things that I do, and I’ll do it with the kids a lot, is we go and have a spa. I don’t know whether it’s the sound of the spa, which kind of gives you that almost white noise and puts you into a meditative state, or whether it’s the warm water, but having a spa works as a real circuit breaker for me.
And no phone in there, either.
I can’t have my phone with me. I don’t have my laptop. It just allows me to stop, and it’s really good thinking time when you’re in the spa. It allows me to get out of my head, get out of doing, stop, relax. When I have a spa, it allows me to reset and rethink, and then I normally feel like, ah, okay, I can go again now. You need a circuit breaker when you feel like you’re on a bit of a treadmill in life, and for me, the spa provides that.
Right, that’s it, I’m badgering my husband for a spa pool.
It’s so therapeutic. I love it. It actually becomes quite a lifeline.
Wanting to refine your own Sunday reset? Check out myfoodbag.co.nz to find the perfect bag for your whānau!
