Ep 191: Your Kid’s Backpack Is Full Of Ants And You’re Still Okay

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Welcome to the Stress Nanny, the podcast where we take the overwhelm out of parenting and help kids and parents build calm, confidence, and connection.

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I'm your host, Lindsay Miller, Kids Mindfulness Coach and Cheerleader for busy families everywhere.

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Each week we'll explore simple tools, uplifting stories, and practical strategies to help your child learn emotional regulation, resilience, and self-confidence, while giving you a little more peace of mind too.

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I'm so glad you're here.

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Hey there, it's Lindsay.

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Today I'm going to share an activity I like to call presence practice.

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This is something I've been working on with my mindfulness kids during the month of October because I think the holidays are a great time for us to practice being fully present.

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Because there are so many sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells as part of the holiday celebrations, whether it's costumes and candy, whether it's meals with loved ones, whether it's lights and decorations and fireworks, whatever it is, there are a lot of different opportunities for us to be fully present by connecting with our senses during holidays.

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So with my mindfulness kids, what I've been doing is working with different activities to help draw their attention to their senses as a gateway or a portal into the present moment.

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So what I mean by that is sometimes when we are like in a really epic moment, we naturally just stop and notice and just take it all in.

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Other times, when we're maybe in a not so epic moment, a challenging moment, or just an everyday moment, we don't always take the opportunity to connect to the present and feel the joy and ease that can come in the present moment.

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And so because we do do it a little bit more during the holidays, it's a great time to practice that type of awareness.

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So whether it's noticing the texture of a Halloween costume or, you know, like uncrinkling the wrapper of can of a candy, like and then putting it in your mouth and mindfully eating it, right?

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Taking in all the textures, all the tastes, what it smells like.

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Whether it's running around outside with friends and hearing laughter down the street and noticing the sun setting, whether it's baking a pie and feeling the dough on your fingertips, and then smelling, you know, as it warms and the house starts to smell like apple and it's so lovely.

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Whether it's noticing lights outside, either your own lights or lights in the neighborhood, whether it's like a Christmas tree smell or whatever holiday you practice, whether it's the fireworks at New Year's or maybe Diwali festivities, whatever the activity is that you're you're a part of during this season.

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If you can give yourself over to the sensory input and allow yourself to just notice all the things around you, time kind of stops.

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And that full sense of awareness, that's presence.

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When we're just in the moment that we're in, our mind isn't racing into next week.

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It's not worrying about what happened yesterday.

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It is just right then, like all of us, our body, our mind, our spirit, everything is like tucked into that moment fully.

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And when we can practice that, what we notice is that we have a clarity of thought and also like the ability to connect in a way that's really, really beautiful.

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When we are fully present and all of us is in the same place at the same time, we aren't distracted or as concerned about things that are like usually tugging away our attention.

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And so if you can just notice the moments that you are present during the holidays, what it will do is give you a springboard into presence for the rest of the year.

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Often we want to capture the moments of the holidays or remember them, or in some instances, and maybe like your newborn just had a blowout, your two-year-old's ripping off their costume while your elementary schooler is racing out the door to trick-or-treat with friends.

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Like some of the moments they're a little bit tricky and we're, you know, we're we're not hoping they last forever.

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But other moments we're, you know, really just all in and invested.

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But even in the moments that aren't optimal or the moments that seem really trying, I find that presence can be a wonderful solve for like modern everyday chaos.

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I'll share a quick example that I shared on the podcast a couple months ago.

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My daughter had been at rowing practice and she was coming home and it'd been a long day.

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We had a lot going on.

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We were all like trying to get everything done.

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Like she was trying to finish her homework.

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I had calls with clients, and my husband was working on some work things he needed to finish up.

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And everybody kind of finished what they were doing.

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You know, we had eaten earlier, everyone finished what they were doing, and we were moving towards bedtime when my daughter grabbed her, you know, backpack for the next day, and we found it swimming with ants.

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And she had like a snack bar that she had tucked away in the pocket of her backpack, and she had eaten it, but there were a little, you know, few crumbs and a little bit of chocolate on the wrapper.

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And while she was at rowing, the ants had gotten into it.

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And so in that moment, I was feeling complete exhaustion because it had just been a really long week.

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And again, all of us were kind of at max capacity.

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It was late, all we wanted to do was go to bed.

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And here we are with this mess of ants, which was now like in our living room and her backpack, like all this stuff had to get washed, and it was just a lot.

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So we found ourselves a few minutes later standing on the front porch, like the my husband, my daughter, and I shaking out everything in her backpack.

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And we just kind of stopped and looked at ourselves and laughed.

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And like, we, you know, there are a lot of different different options for responses in that moment.

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But here we were outside on, you know, like a late summer evening.

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We were all tired.

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So we're aware of all of the things, right?

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But like we're looking around, we're we're noticing the the hilarity of the situation and choosing to tune into that while acknowledging our frustration and exhaustion.

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Like those things all existed right there.

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But we just like stopped and noticed and laughed.

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And sometimes you stop and notice and cry, right?

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And that's okay too.

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But I think in this, in this example, what was interesting is like we were wanting to be in bed, right?

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And like we could have been thinking about all the things we had done that day and or all the things we were going to be tired for the next day because we were not going to be sleeping anytime soon.

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But what we did was we just stopped in that moment and didn't fight it.

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We didn't, we just accepted what it was.

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We accepted ourselves as we were in that moment, and then we made a choice about how to respond.

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And the power of presence is just that, right?

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Whether we're in a really chaotic moment or whether we're in a moment that's just lighting us up from the inside, we can respond on purpose to any moment that we're in when we accept the moment and we accept ourselves.

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And so when we can practice that type of presence and practice just being fully in that moment, it's easier to accept it.

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It's easier to work with it.

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It's not easy in general, but like the fight is often what pulls us out of the present.

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We're fighting what's going on.

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We're fighting someone's response.

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We're fighting the way something turned out, we're fighting a circumstance that's beyond our control.

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And the fight pulls us like it gets us in our head and pulls us out of the moment.

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Or we're wishing it was something else, or wishing there was a different way to approach it.

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And we can wish all those things, but if we can just kind of let those things go for just a minute and accept, like, oh, I'm really wishing this moment was different, and here I am, right?

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Hold them together at the same time.

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That's what in that's where the power of presence comes in.

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And so I think the range of moments that we experience over the holidays from like these really elated opportunities to connect to also like the crying moments when we had a really grandiose idea about how something was going to turn out and it really didn't go that way.

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Like the range invites a level of acceptance that gives us such good practice.

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So again, you're going to have moments that are amazing and it will be easy to be present to them and easy to accept them.

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And then my invitation is to use that as a springboard and allow and invite yourself to presence in all the moments that you can, in other moments that aren't so easy, that are like a mess and going not the way you wanted them to.

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And if you can embrace again the moment and embrace yourself in that moment without fighting it, you will have a sense of clarity about how to move forward and how to like help that moment serve you or at least get in your way a little less than you would if you're fighting.

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So here's the invitation one more time.

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Notice the sights, notice the sounds, the tastes, the textures, the smells.

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When we were outside like shaking out stinky rowing clothes in a stinky rowing backpack in the night with the summer air on our skin and the smell of somebody's bonfire a few streets over, like those things, they all slow it down and they make the important things rise to the top.

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And the stuff that's not as important sifts down.

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So when you practice that type of presence, you invite yourself to continued experience with the kind of clarity that comes when you can let go of thoughts about how things could have been, let go of what you wish was going on instead of where you actually are, and really accept yourself in the moment fully.

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Give it your attention and give it all that you've got, and then you can move from it with a little more freedom, and you're not as taxed by your response, right?

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So often when we're fighting the present moment and wishing something was different or trying to make it different or bemoaning the fact that it isn't different, we block the creativity that can come and we just give ourselves we give ourselves over to our head.

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And what we really need that at that time is like the presence and the clarity that come from tuning in.

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So just like with my mindfulness kids, I'm gonna invite you to notice the textures, notice the sounds, the smells, the sights.

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Just really, really be present and notice anything you can during this holiday season.

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And again, you don't have to be present 24-7.

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That's not realistic necessarily.

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But if you can as much as possible notice those moments and tune into them, it'll be great practice for the rest of the year when presents can really serve you as well.

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Thanks again for listening.

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Until next time, I wish you a fully present holiday season.

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Thanks for listening to The Stress Nanny.

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If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to share it with a friend who could use a little extra calm in their week.

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It helps other parents find the show and join us on this journey.

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For more tools and support, head over to www.thestressnanny.com.

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Remember, you don't have to do stress alone.

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Together, we can raise kids who know how to navigate life with confidence and ease.

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Until next time, take a deep breath and give yourselves some grace.