A Family That Meditates Together, Stays Together.

So I downloaded a guided meditation app and my kids LOVE it.

One day the little munchkins were little hurricanes of emotion. Hyper, angry, hyper, sad, hyper, more hyper, giggling machines, leave-me-alone! machines, hyper.

At bedtime they were all over the map and even stories didn’t calm them down. My wonderful friend Shanna gave us LED rope lights and I set them up just in time. I asked the kids to grab pillows to sit on and switched on those lights. We sat in semi-darkness and I queued up our guided meditation app, Stop, Breathe & Think, then turned it on.Hunter shuffled around and when he got distracted I reminded him to look at the lights and listen to his breathing. It worked! Izzy giggled at first but quickly got in to it. Now we do it as a family for five minutes just before the kids go to bed.We do it as a family, all of us in a circle.

I also use it whenever the kids are being crazy, cranky, judgmental, or seem to need alone time. Izzy won’t do alone time unless there is a purpose to it and this is the perfect reason. The app gives stickers for certain milestones and that also motivates the kids…and me. Who are we kidding? I haven’t gotten tired of stickers or rewards, so I guess I am a giant child in some respects. I still collect stickers and put them on stuff. I have a Twilight Sparkle sticker on my Kobo and it’s one of my fave things. I also stickered up my laptop with cupcakes and birds and flowers and Hello Kitty. So yah, the sticker reward system is still amazing to me.

Hunter loves it so much that he requested we do meditation yesterday morning together. He did 15 minutes in total, 5 minute meditations each. I don’t think he would do it without the app yet, but maybe someday.

So this is our new routine. May it continue. I always start things with the best intentions and a lot of times it falls by the wayside before I remember it. “Didn’t we used to do a chore chart and Izzy fed the cats and made her own bed instead of all the chores falling on to me? Oh yah, I should enforce that again!” It’s just sometimes at the end of the day I am so tired that I forget to ask the kids if they’ve checked their chore chart and picked up their toys and packed their lunch and on and on. Then they go to bed, I survey the damage, sigh and do it myself. I know, it’s a terrible system, but baby steps I figure! I never thought I would be so ….granola? Is that the right slang term? Now I suddenly care about meditation and pesticides and ground water pollution and all of that. My kids know what meditation is, what yoga positions they love, how food is grown, what recycling is….I am happy about this but surprised at myself. How hipster am I? Heeheehee.

What do you do as a family that bonds you together? Do you have any family rituals that solidify you as a family?