Anne Armstrong

Season 2 – Episode 23. Released on August 04, 2015.
Making Quality Family Time (with Anne Armstrong)

INTRO
Today I’m talking to Anne Armstrong, a mother, middle school teacher and a published children’s author from Nashville, Tennessee. Inspired by a statistic that revealed to her how little quality time parents spend with their children, Anne created and launched a project called MyGnomeOnTheRoam, designed to help create stronger, happier kids, and more present and connected adults.

BUMPER
I am Tajci.
At 19 I was a superstar and I was lost inside. I left it all behind, switched continents and started all over. Years later I found myself lost again. This time in the American dream.
This is a story about awakening. About living the life you were created for. About going inward and discovering the joyous and purposeful person you and I are both meant to be.

This is “Waking Up In America.”


TAJCI
Anne, thank you so much for being on the show. I wanted to have an educator and another mom, so when I met you online, through a great program that we both took “RevolutionU” Jonathan Fields… love him.. I loved your revolution called “Gnome on the Roam”

ANNE
Thank you

TAJCI
Yeah and we’ll get to that but let’s start from the beginning just to introduce who you are and was your what I call “life before” your awakening

ANNE
When I was young I didn’t know a whole lot about what I… you know people ask you what you wanna do and I was really clueless about exactly what it was I wanted to do. But I knew three things:

I knew I wanted to be of service in some way, to help people and I knew pretty young that I wanted to be creative because all the rules in the structures around me didn’t seem to be a very good fit even when I was young. And I knew I wanted to be a mom.

My parents are both educators so after high school I went to the College where they both taught and I started out with a degree in social work because that made sense, I wanted to help people. And one day a dear friend of my mother who was also employed at the college came in and pulled me out of one of my classes and said I see here that you’re majoring in social work.

I was like, I’m so excited. She’s like, No. I was like what? And she said, I want you to to help people. That’s a beautiful way to live your life. Don’t marry yourself to it. Don’t get to a place where you don’t have any options. She said major in something else and then do as much social work as you like because I promise you there’ll be a day when you wake up and you look in the mirror and say I’ve had enough. And so I really took head of that because it took her, you know quite a bit of gumption to come in and say that to me. So I did change my major to teaching, and immediately, although I did a lot of Social Work, I worked all kinds of different jobs, teaching felt like the place where I could express that creativity and also I had some freedom. You get summers off, you get, you get encouraged to develop yourself professionally and that just didn’t happen in the social work world.

So that all fell into place and I began teaching but that whole mommy piece was still you know… that the clock was ticking and… and as I started to approach 40 and there was a… there wasn’t… you know, a someone significant, I decided up I was going to take it into my own hands. I knew plenty of wonderful single mothers and thought I would create that opportunity for myself. So I had planned to adopt on my own. And then I met my husband.

Just like on our second or third date I was like, you know I don’t want to be blunt but you just need to know I’m on the Baby Train. And clock’s-a-tickin so if you wanna get on board this train then you’re gonna… you know, you need to know that that’s on my agenda and if not you may wanna…

TAJCI
Right,

ANNE
So he was on board and so… unfortunately my body was not on board and so we started dealing with some fertility issues and eventually we had… we got to the place where we had to say what’s important? Do I want to be pregnant? Which would have been lovely. But the truth was, what I really wanted was to be a mother. And what he really wanted was to be a father. And so we decided to adopt.

TAJCI
Oh beautiful!

ANNE
It was magic. Talk about life turning on a dime.

TAJCI
Yes. And that in itself is such an amazing act of love: to adopt

ANNE
And to be given the opportunity.

You know I’m forever in gratitude to the birth mother who gave us the opportunity Every Mother’s Day I say a little prayer for her.

TAJCI
Yes

ANNE
You know, I knowledge her even out loud sometimes on Facebook or something and to all the others who, I’m sure, it might be a quiet little secret but they deserve such praise.

TAJCI
That’s what I mean, yes it’s act of love in both ways. So here you are: married and the opportunity comes up to adopt. And you have the baby. Tell us about that moment.

ANNE
Well it was quite a moment because we had been prepared to wait a year to two years and within three months… Snowy Saturday morning. My husband had left for work. My phone rang seven in the morning. And they told us not only had we matched with the family but that the baby was born at 3 a.m. that morning.

We had twenty-four hours to get to the hospital, and another state to get in and so… And we had nothing. We had an empty bedroom that we had.

So I jokingly call that 24-hour period my labor pains because I with just manically trying to adjust to being a mom in 24 hours.

TAJCI
Yeah and those of us who’s been through, you know, all my goodness I need this and this and so many shopping trips but really in reality you don’t need any of that you just need an open heart and open arms to receive and that sounds like that’s what you did.

ANNE
Well that and a trip to Target. And my sister has seven children so… I think at that time she only had four, or five. I guess she had to have five because she has a set of triplets but… Anyway, so a couple of panicked phone calls to her about what kind of bottles to buy.

TAJCI
So here you are with the baby Did you get a manual? I’m just kidding.

ANNE
They did not give us the manual, but the nurses were very lovely…

But what happened was I had this blissful six weeks of time at home with him and and it just, like we were talking earlier went by in a blink, right? And then it was time to go back to work. And I was not a person who really pictured myself a stay at home mom and but I’ve certainly could feel him in his absence when I was at work.

I just very quickly felt like I blinked and he was walking. And I blinked again and he was you know his curls were going away, and he was becoming a little man and so you know, I was rushing home at the end of the day and trying to squeeze dinner and laundry and time together and as you know, he got older, he wanted more time and needed more time than when he was a baby.

So it gets more difficult and now I look at my sister with seven kids and I started to wonder how does anybody ever have quality time and maintain their sanity at the same time?


 

BREAK
Anne lives her dream life as a mother an educator but soon starts wandering, how does anyone balance parenthood with everything else?

Up next: Anne’s waking up moment in which she decides to create a possible solution.


 

TAJCI
So you’re working as a teacher at that time?

ANNE
Right. The Christmas that he turned three we started this little Christmas tradition maybe you’ve heard of, called Elf on the Shelf.

TAJCI
Yes!

ANNE
So, he named his elf Addy, which is dangerously close to his name, but it’s beautiful, and he thinks of him very fondly even now. But when Addy went back to the North Pole you know, to stay with Santa over the rest of the year, after Christmas was over, he was really, really sad. Like tears were shed on multiple occasions and I found myself really sad as well.

And I was like, you know, what is this about?

And I realized it was about having a little moment together every day that was unique and creative and I had wanted so much to share it with my sister who has seven kids and I thought they would love this and it would be so great for my sister as a kind of a way to do something cool with her kids, but her family is Jewish so they don’t, you know, they don’t celebrate Christmas.

So I started thinking, how can we do something like this, but add and change it enough so that there’s an educational piece, that is about… it was a little bit more about connecting then just, you know, the mischief that elf get up to. And so that was sort of, a seed that was planted.

So I talked to my husband about it and asked how he would feel about me going to work part-time. Told how I was feeling, you know. And he’s so great, he’s always been so tremendously supportive of who I want to be and what I wanted to do. He is like, we’ll make it work. We’ll figure it out. And it was so funny… you know, I still had a half a year to teach full-time, but just having the space and the “okay”, the thumbs-up from him, within three weeks, the idea for the book that I wrote bubbled up in a dream. And I woke up frantically writing about it.

TAJCI
And so so you were really.. what you were desiring was more time, more quality time to connect with your child, because of the time passing. Is that how…?

ANNE
For sure. And also like some parameters for like what is enough? You know, ’cause I feel like, maybe especially as mothers, I can’t speak for fathers because I’m not one, but there’s always that feeling of, am I doing enough for my child? And you can always find a mom who’s doing more. And you usually find a mom who’s doing less, but we, I think we so often compare ourselves to other mothers, like the ideal mother in our mind. It always seems like everybody is doing more.

TAJCI
Because they are doing it differently. Different stuff, so you can always have something that you are not doing like everybody else, which is yeah, this is true. But we do beat ourselves up over that.

ANNE

So I was looking around, just poking around and I found a statistic that said that average family spends only less than 40 minutes per week of connected time.

TAJCI
Wow!

ANNE
I was blown away by that. I mean you certainly spend time, and

I just read the other day in a magazine that the average child has 12 minutes of conversation with a parent a day. Eight of those minutes are barking commands. Change your clothes. Get ready for dinner. Not mean, but just you know the things that we do to help guide them through their day so that means only four minutes are good questions and and real connected conversation.

And so the idea was, how can we create little… how can we smash that? That’s what my little revolution is. So we call ourselves a “Glitter and Glue Covered Revolution.”

We wanted to inspire families to just take little pockets of time that might otherwise be wasted. 15 minutes is enough to blow that statistic that we just talked about out of the water.

If you spent 15 minutes three days a week with your kids in connectedness, like putting down your phone, being in a moment, having a moment together, you know, we’re all about adventure, so having an adventure. That you’ll begin to really truly blow that statistic out of the water and studies show that there are so many benefits for your child, not only for your child, but for you, for your family if you can do it. And lots of time people are encouraged to read a book, to… eat dinner together. But sometimes those things are not feasible, so we designed all kinds of ways you could spend fifteen cool minutes together every day and we turned that into an app.

TAJCI
Oh, wonderful!

ANNE
As a way to… just add that creativity that Elf on the Shelf gives you to little pockets of wasted time.

TAJCI
Yes and what I found when my kids were littlerer you know, between the toddler years, it was really easy to… wasn’t really easier, but it was easier to find stuff that we could all together even then the the littlest one was maybe a baby or two and the oldest was seven, so like, with your sister the age range is even wider and it’s harder to do something together.


 

BREAK
Waking up to the statistic of how little time an average American family spends in meaningful connection, Anne creates adventure kit “Gnome on the Roam”

Up next: how can you be more present to your family in small pockets of time?


 

TAJCI
So your app.. So tell me, it provides something to do. What…
is it age?

ANNE
It’s ageless. We really have worked hard to find… we divided the days into.. we gave each day a theme. And so we have Make it Monday where you, maybe making a recipe or maybe you’re making some kind of craft together, but it’s all designed to be able to fit into fifteen minutes or more if you like.

TAJCI
And you actually give suggestions. Like you have a list of here is what you could do.

ANNE
We even have started to build a little YouTube library of how to craft activities and things like that.

TAJCI
And sounds like you are your app, your “Gnome on the Roam” provides an opportunity to really just be present and create that time.

ANNE
And just to come up with something unique.

It improves discipline issues and self-esteem issues all kinds of things. Just from that. Those little moments of being fully present.

TAJCI
And I will take that to a place where, you know those little moments are… then become these everyday moments of awakening and connection. And really, moments of grace.

ANNE
And you give yourself the opportunity let your child be your teacher too.

TAJCI
Yes!

ANNE
There are so many times that Aticus will say something and knock me on my tail with you know, with his wisdom coming…

I call him my tiny Buddha some times. “Cause He’s so quick to forgive and he reminds me sometimes, he’ll just you know, he’s very wise little soul.

TAJCI
Yes, and we can’t hear those little wise souls and kids are wise. We can’t hear them if we’re constantly living in our noise and if we’re not present. The one thing that I used to do with my children is is really, we would connect through music.

We sang a lot at home. Obviously they traveled with me when I did the concerts and, one of the best moments for me was when they would come at the end of the concert and sing with me and I could I could watch them grow right there on the stage with me singing and we always sang the same song.

It was such a gift. That was my 15 minutes when we, really, truly were present to each other. So I music is one way to connect. And then I wanted to find a good song for your story and I sent you a few of my songs and you picked Wynken, Blynken and Nod.

ANNE
I did almost immediately when I saw the list. There’s a great movie that I haven’t watched in years, “Dennis the Menace.” In that movie they are babysitting Dennis. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, who are this older couple who live next door.

Dennis is this wild child who’s always kind of rattling Mr. Wilson’s cage but… they’ve never had children and so he kind of… is a jolt to them, or at least to him. Well he’s spending the night and Mrs. Wilson goes to put him in bed and she tells him the little story “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” and he drifts off to sleep. She goes to bed and as she’s telling her husband about it she says you know I remembered the whole poem that my mother used to say to me. I remembered it by heart. And she sits there quietly for a minute and she says: I would have been a good mother.

And I just… at that point when I watched that movie I wasn’t a mother and I cried every time I would see the movie even though it was hilarious… that moment I could feel her… that little hole in her heart as I shared it with her. So when I saw that you offered that I thought that was that’s the right one.

TAJCI
So thank you so much Anne, for your work that you do in the classroom and obviously out of the classroom. And with your own child and as a woman and as just as who you are, a beautiful soul.

ANNE
Thank you so much.


 

SONG
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,—
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,”

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew;
The little stars were the herring-fish
That lived in the beautiful sea.
“Now cast your nets wherever you wish,—
Never afraid are we!”
So cried the stars to the fishermen three,

All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam,—
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home:
‘Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought ‘twas a dream they’d dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea;
But I shall name you the fishermen three,

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one’s trundle-bed;
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea
Where the old moon rocked the fishermen three.

END

To connect with Ann and her work and work and stories of many of other guests on Waking Up in America, visit us on WakingUpinAmerican.net and also connect with us,
let us help you and inspire you to live the life that you are created for. Thank you for watching and see you soon!

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