The EMOTIONS CALENDAR: 2020 is waiting for us

This December, I was taking Horea to one of his friends' birthday party. At the radio, in the car, we were listening Europa FM and on the air was the "Parents' Coach"/"Antrenorul părinților" show with Mirela Retegan and the special guest was Gaspar Gyorgy, psychologist and relational psychotherapist. I was not able to listen until the end of the show due to the fact that we have reached the party (way too fast from my point of view). But this show remained in my mind.

After almost a week, when the Xmas spirit could be seen in every corner, I had remembered part from the radio show when they were talking about evaluating your year : analyzing what you have done and how beneficial it is for you as an individual and also for your family to have this type of analysis. The objective of this analysis is to communicate with your loved once and to speak out what was nice in your year, what challenges you had encountered, what behaviors you would love to change , how you can see the relationship with them, etc.. So, with this in mind, I have started to search online for the radio show and I found it on YouTube..

In this radio show I found a lot of useful information, but what I want to share with you is an idea that we would like to implement in our family. Mirela Retegan, from Gașca Zurli, created the Zurli Calendar, a calendar where before going to bed you colour your day according to the feelings that you had using a predefined list of activities. You can order the calendar from Gașca Zurli here: Zurli Calendar

Almost at the same time, while I was depicting all this useful information, we have received from our friend, Sabina Coman, our new calendar for 2020. This is another tradition of our family, but this is a story for another article.  With all this information in mind and the new calendar in my hand I have run to my wife to present her the GREAT DISCOVERY of 2019. She was listening to me, she has added some new ideas and in the end, we have decided to make our own EMOTIONS CALENDAR.

How this calendar works? You choose a calendar you want to use for this purpose and you have a list of questions you ask yourself and your children. The scope is to define an emotion at the end of each question. Each emotion has a symbol attached to it. After the emotion was revealed you write the symbol of that emotion in your calendar.

We have designed this calendar for our family: 2 adults and a 6 year old child. So, taking this into account you will find 7 questions to be asked and 4 emotions to be highlighted in the calendar. See the info graphic for the questions and the emotions we have designed.

At the end of the day you will have a summary of your emotions during that day. Can you imagine how your calendar will look at the end of the year?

Why keeping such a calendar? There are couple of benefits to do the Emotions Calendar activity at the end of each day:

1. Quality time together with the whole family;
2. Sharing your day with the others: the happy moments, the sad ones, the bored and the content times;
3. Identifying your emotions;
4. Having an overview of how you felt in that day;
5. Understanding that each day can bring all sort of emotions and moments;
6. Bounding time with your children;
7. A way to have an overview of your children's emotions and activities (I am not sure how are your children but mine never tells us anything about his day, what he has done, how was his day - except fine, etc no matter what strategies we have applied; and I think that we have to start communicating better as the adolescence period is approaching and this habit might save us  from interesting situations - let's put it in this way).

With Love and Gratitude,

Kids of the Nature