Surrounded By Teens

My last kiddo is 13 today. They are all currently teens and will be for a few years. They all, at one point or another, loved dinosaurs. Whilst I loved the times when they were younger, having teens is pretty awesome. They are interesting and interested. Conversations are often deep, rarely boring and they are independent in lots of ways.

We still do academic and non academic learning and I am still taxi-img around but the ways they are independent are starting to give me more time and freedom to pursue my own interests, like art and teaching art. It cycles, with some periods needing lots more direct involvement from me and some periods meaning I need to be available if help is needed. There are periods though, where everyone is self sufficient, getting on with what they need or want to do, and the need for my direct input is less.

Those periods, when I am needed or might be needed, got me thinking about how limited an amount of time I had as a new mom-and a mom of toddlers and younger children. I hadn’t really understood then how important creating was for me personally. So I didn’t deliberately choose to make space. I did dabble in lots of crafts, jewellery making, scrapbooking, polymer clay (miniature food for dolls houses was fun), knitting, stamping, card making and more. They were often. Things I could pick up and put down, not things I worked on in one longer sitting. As they got a little older we would do art together, we still do sometimes, but less of late. I’d quite like to change that.

I think I would have enjoyed my mindful moments videos back then. Having my supplies ready to go so I could take advantage of just 5 minutes to breathe and create. Not only that I think the mindful approach would have helped my inner dialogue be kinder around art. I was thinking about this yesterday and I filmed a few 5 minute mindful moment videos which use really simple supplies (paint, water, brush, paper) in a little gap of quiet that I nabbed. I’m hoping to get these edited so I can start putting them ‘out there’ regularly and with maybe a really short 1 page PDF.

I love the idea of having 52, one for each week of the year and I really love that they will be free. It feels right that they should be available to anyone and it feels really do-able in terms of time. Find 5-10 minutes to watch the video, then find 5 minutes to do it. I think I’d like to include some ideas in the pdf about how changing just one thing can create another exercise. I’m pretty excited about this idea right now.

Today however will be including birthday celebrations, cake, pizza, games, cuddles from my giants (all my kids and husband are taller than me now so I refer to them as giants). Maybe a walk and I’m hoping to grab 5 minutes to have a mindful moment in my new Seawhite watercolour notebook.