Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week we'll continue on this theme of transitions for younger children. Some of you may have even been engaging in the workshop with Tara about how to transition children and dress them warmly with the rains coming up here in the northern hemisphere, fall almost upon us in the rains coming in the southern hemisphere, the spring rains, and how to dress children well for that.
And I sure hope you've been able to access that workshop because I don't know anyone like Tara who knows more about how to dress children so that there is no such thing as bad weather in terms of your world with them. But here's the unusual thing that I was thinking about sharing with you is that I received an email from an old friend, someone I'd worked with in a school I was helping with, and she wrote a most lovely email about how to transition her son in nap time because it really wasn't going well. And I thought, you know, that is a beautiful story.
So I wrote to Elise and asked if I could read this out and share it with you. And she said, of course, it was really gracious of her. So I just really simply want to read out what she discovered about how to help her little son into his nap time.
So she starts off the email with, I wanted to write to you about a recent nap time idea I had with my son that seems to be going really well. My boy is almost two, and I was going through a little nap time revolt with him recently. I know I'm the governor, but we also don't cry it out.
So it's hard to find a balance. I was thinking about the nature of sleep and the process of going through our own day backwards just before bed. The idea that all we need to digest in our lives in order to sleep is an idea I've heard that you mentioned many times.
But I wasn't always sure how to help him digest it. He doesn't do any screens in any form. And I ruled out fresh air, play, rhythm, hunger, time to wind down, media, etc.
as to the reason why he wouldn't sleep. Then I had an idea. I've been trying to figure out more time in his day for oral stories and thought I could probably blend the idea of processing the day backwards with my storytelling.
So here's our nap time routine that works. Lunch, storybook in the living room with Daddy, brush teeth, and then in the room I rock him in the dark and tell him a story. But it's about his own day.
I use animal imagery for now because that's mostly all we see because of the pandemic. So it's either a deer or a hawk, etc. that does whatever he did in that morning.
So for example, this morning he took lettuce from our garden to the chickens at the farm and then he played in the creek with some wild berries, pulling out the stems and rolling the seeds down the water. So I told him a story of a hawk who plucked a lettuce from our garden and then flew it to the chickens and then the hawk played in the creek with the cherries. It's been great because the hardest part of coming up with oral stories is having ideas and material, but using our own lives gives me a starting point I can easily embellish.
And doing this triggered something in his little brain where he simply closes his eyes and falls asleep after I lay him in his bed and sing him a song. It's been pretty amazing. I always end the story with the animal tucking into the wood somewhere and falling asleep.
It's simply a story about a wild animal he sees all the time with imagery he can easily picture since it just happened to him. It's been fun, love, Elise. What a simple and beautiful way to transition a little boy, a little child, into sleep.
I hope that was clear in that you simply take the morning that he's had and the three or four main events that have happened that morning, whatever they were. It could be out in the garden and digging, or it could be down the park, or it could be a rainy old day in his drawing and playing with blocks. And then you might have the animal figure be a squirrel playing with blocks.
It could be any number of different animals, and you walk it backwards. I hope you caught that one in Elise's email, that you start with the event that he just experienced just before he or she or they went to bed and was laying in the bed, and you take the most recent thing that the child did, and then the one before that, and the one before that, and now you're getting towards the maybe even breakfast. And you work it backwards, backwards, backwards, because it's the most recent event that he'll remember the most vividly, and that gets him on the kind of imagination train, so to speak, on the tracks, because he can remember that very clearly.
And so the animal did that, and then the little squirrel or the hawk or the bear or the fox, whatever it is, the kangaroo, the wallaby, whatever animal it is, does that activity, and then does the one before, and the one before that, until it takes him right the way back to his wake-up time. And of course the wake-up time is closest to sleep again. And then the animal tucks in to go to sleep, so that with the child identifying so strongly with the animal, if the little squirrel gets his mossy blanket and tucks underneath and says a big, yawny, ah, off to sleep now, then the child is so identifying with that character that it's a very easy step to fall asleep.
A huge thank you to Elyse for that email. That is just a real treat to receive. And as always, if you want to do a bit of a deeper dive into some of the challenges you're facing as a parent, please don't hesitate to contact me via our website.
You'll see just a request to consult with Kim right there. And I'm always very pleased to arrange a meeting time to talk about how you can parent in the way you want to parent best. And finally, just a little reminder about Tara's workshop in dressing children in the rainy season.
She wrote to me recently as well saying, and she said, Dressing children to be comfortable in cool, wet weather is the key to spending time outside with your child in the rainy season. Then she went on to say, ask a good question actually, do you feel ready to dress your child for outdoors, for outdoor school and for the rainy season? And she goes on to say that how to discern which fabric to choose, how to layer, and how to feel as warm as possible, and how to create a little more ease around getting a child in and out the door in a way that's easy and stress-less is the key to the rainy season, having children interact with nature. Anyway, that is what Tara wrote in as well.
And I hope you can catch that simple little workshop that she's offering. It's free. It's great.
Hope you can do it. Okay, that's it for this week. Bye bye for now.
