About

About slowlivingfamily.com

I used to move fast.

Not because I loved it. But because fast felt like the right answer to everything. More efficient. More productive. More on top of it. The kind of life that looked, from the outside, like someone who had things handled.
What it actually was, was burnout waiting to happen.

And it happened. That was over a decade ago and life has shifted since then.

I have three children now. A boy who is eight, a girl who is six, and a girl who is four. Two years between each of them, which means there was a long season of my life that was simultaneously the most full it had ever been and the most rushed.

Full of children and noise and need and love and the particular exhaustion of never quite catching up with yourself.

I didn’t slow down because I read about it somewhere.
I slowed down because I ran out of road.

Because my son showed me, without meaning to, that his energy made complete sense outdoors and none at all when I was trying to manage it into something smaller.

Because my oldest girl taught me that sometimes the most useful thing you can do for someone who is upset is simply sit down next to them and say nothing at all.

Because my youngest taught me that the more I pushed, the harder she pushed back – at the dinner table, at bedtime, at every moment where I arrived with an agenda and she arrived with her own.

Because my children, collectively, were more interested in being understood than being managed. And understanding them required something I hadn’t been practicing.

Attention. Patience. The willingness to slow down long enough to see what was actually happening rather than what I needed to happen next.

Slow Living Family is new.

It grew out of years of figuring things out quietly – of noticing small moments, of getting things wrong and trying differently, of gradually understanding that the life I wanted for my family was already here, mostly, in the ordinary days.

It just needed more space than I had been giving it.

This is where I write about that.

Not as a method. Not as a system to follow or a set of principles to master.

Just as honest reflection from someone who has been paying closer attention than she used to.

You will find posts about raising children – and what the children have taught me about presence and patience and the particular art of getting out of the way. About rhythm and home and food and the quieter work of understanding what children are showing us, especially when it doesn’t fit easily into expectations.

You will also find ebooks here – longer, more considered guides on the things I have learned and keep learning. Written for parents who want to go deeper than a blog post allows.

I am not an expert in the formal sense.

But I have three children who have required me, repeatedly and without apology, to become someone more patient and more present than I was before.

That is, I think, its own kind of education.

I’m glad you’re here.
– Heather