It’s been about a week and we are still enthusiastic about bingo 🙂
With sweet animations and soothing music, “Stop, Breathe and Think Kids” seems like it will be a great tool for my kid. He really liked Bulldog’s “missions” to find quiet, weather emotion storms and send kind thoughts to others. The “Square Breathing” fish also helped him learn a calming technique he’s used to get ready for bedtime and settle his body. There are ~15 free missions and another 25 with an upgrade to premium for $60 a year.
We also started exploring the “Ordinary People Change the World” books by watching “I am Martin Luther King” read aloud on YouTube (there are many videos available, note that in the author’s live reading he doesn’t start the story until about 7 minutes in.)
As a family, we’ve been talking a lot about why and how we are protesting in support of #BLM. This book, as well as the “I am Gandhi” book, helped our kid better understand the power of peaceful protest and I was reminded that both leaders really promoted kindness and love as key tenants of their messages. The stories also demonstrated that there is no quick fix to these deep problems. So our family discusses how Dr. King and Gandhi were continually active in the fight for equity, and since things still aren’t fair for everyone, we need to act too. While I know my husband and I aren’t having these conversations about race and justice perfectly, we are having them… choosing to share uncomfortable truths about the past and present over silence.
This has been a colder than usual summer in the Pacific Northwest, so on the one warm afternoon this week, we decided to get outside and play in the dirt. When I was doing research on mud pie making, I found many beautiful, Instagram worthy photos out there (Sparkle Stories and Rhythms of Play had the prettiest). We tried our hand, but it quickly devolved into barefoot mud stomping and spraying each other with the hose. Which was just fine. We got dirty, we got wet, we had fun.
