We’re now nearly halfway through our first week of the winter break, and we’ve got two and a half more to go. But, by the end of the day yesterday, my wife and I could tell that we were losing institutional control. Laundry was starting to pile up, the house was a bit of a mess, and the kids were giving us the “I’m bored” routine which is the absolute worst (how many times do I have to tell these people, your entertainment is not my responsibility!). We needed structure, so I called a family meeting. It’s funny, at least two of my daughters were like, we should have done this days ago.

Spoiler alert, our family meetings tend to actually start with very little structure. Usually when it’s called, neither my wife nor myself know exactly how we want to proceed. We just know we want to have a conversation and come to some kind of consensus as a family about how to move forward. To buy ourselves time, I usually have everyone do a slightly tangential (and completely improvised) activity to get us started. In the time it takes for me make up the activity I’ve also figured out how I’ll land the plane by connecting it to the point of the conversation. Anyone who’s ever experienced me facilitate professionally will be familiar with my tactics!

Yesterday I began by having everyone draw themselves three weeks in the future. What would you be doing? How do you feel? What’s happened over the break to help you get here? I choose this timeframe because in three weeks they’d be heading back to school and my wife and I would be reengaging with work, so everyone had a clear transition point to look forward to.

After giving everyone a random amount of time to draw (one minute twelve seconds of course, adults included), we shared our portraits of ourselves in the future. Honestly I didn’t know what to expect, but since my family is usually up for my games, I knew they would at least engage. They did not disappoint. Our youngest two girls (five years old and eight years old) talked about enjoying their break, playing with their friends, getting work done, and cuddles. Our second oldest daughter, ever the achiever, drew a picture of herself “ugly crying” (her words) because she achieved 35% completion in Khan which is her goal for math progress with her self directed learning over break. Our oldest daughter drew herself decorating her new space in the new building on the first day back to school. My wife and I drew various depictions of ourselves rested and rejuvenated at the end of the break.

These drawings then led us to a productive conversation about how we wanted to operate as a family in order to achieve these portraits of the future. We started with our family values around being present, creating margin, and building a legacy, and asked ourselves what might it look like to do these things over winter break? We then created a wish list of experiences we wanted to have together that might help us. Afterwards we engaged in a rigorous debate about our ideal day, because we wanted to get concrete about how all of this fit together. The teenager and tween helped a bunch here because they had their own suggestions about needing personal time and family time, while the littles just wanted to know when they could come downstairs in the morning to eat cereal and disturb us (not before 8am is what we settled on). Last, we discussed how we wanted our time together to feel, and landed on the words restful, relaxing, spa (Olivia and Sloane’s suggestion) and productive. We checked to make sure the things we planned line up with how we want to feel so we’re good to go.

So now we have a plan, and you know how I feel about plans! It’s a start, but certainly only useful if it’s executed well. Let’s see how it goes!

SDW3