A Thanksgiving discussion with my wife on what we are grateful for when it comes to our family and how we work together to make parenting decisions that shape our family.

Summary and Quotes

[00:01:00] – Our Thanksgiving morning

[00:02:22] – Gratitude for our kids independent play

[00:06:25] – Emphasis on physicality vs sports

[00:18:36] – Result of kids artificial limitation of movement on a daily basis

[00:28:00] – What am I grateful for

[00:32:55] – Overview of my initial hesitation to do this podcast

Quotes from the Episode:

“Play should not be dictated by adults. Play should be unstructured. The kid or kids should be making the rules, figuring out what they need.” [00:07:33]

“I think also we’re trying to instill a pure joy for moving that moving is not a chore and it’s not something to check off your, to do lists that it’s something you do because it, it’s joyful and it makes you feel good.” [00:16:55]

“If you can continue to see moving your body as the play it, it doesn’t have to feel like work. It doesn’t have to feel like something to check off and you can can consistently be plain with your own movement in your own physical capabilities.” [00:17:51]

“But because I had not developed that physicality in K through 12. It took me a lot longer to become comfortable with what my body was capable of because I had focused only on grades.  Athletics was not a focus of our household when we grew up. [00:24:19]

“if something’s more difficult, then you’re less prone to want to do it. Which makes it more of a challenge.” [00:26:36]

 

Transcript Below

Father- So this episode is going to be a little bit different because this is the first episode where you will get to meet my wife and today is Thanksgiving in the United States and we have gone through the entire day and we decided that at the end of the day would be a great opportunity to just kind of talk to each other about what we’re thankful for. We went through this with the kids already. And it was really interesting to see what our kids were thankful for. They always surprise us. And so with that, how was your day?

[mother]- I had a good day. I mean, I really appreciate the fact that we’ve made holidays, not about big giant celebrations. I suppose it helps that we’re cross country from our families, but, you know, today, I guess from the outside looking in, maybe it looked like any other day. We started the day with a family favorite activity of exercise, which is something that’s really important to us. And I hope that because it’s really important to us, our kids are seeing that it’s an important thing.

So [father] ran a 5K with the kids. The three-year-old was in the stroller, and the six-year-old was running. This was (our six-year-old’s) third 5K, which is awesome. We’re really working hard on pacing when we do a 5K run and not chasing all the other kids, but trying to go at a pace that he can run consistently and because daddy was off running, I got to go do a CrossFit workout in a park with a gym that’s brand new to town that hasn’t yet opened, but they did a free community workout and a gorgeous park. It was freezing cold, but it was sunny and the nearby mountain had snow on it and it was gorgeous. And so we were all home by like [10:30] AM and showered and pretty much spent the rest of the day in leggings doing normal, around the house things. The kids were really engrossed in their Legos and their Play-Doh independently for a long time. Both of them have relatively new buckets of those things, so they’re entertained for a long period of time, which. Is awesome because we love independent play. We love creativity, and we have very limited screen time, if any screen time in our house,