The Summit Ranch

A few spots still open for Pause & Restore on June 28.

90 minutes outside at Summit Ranch. Gentle yoga for all levels, guided outdoor mindfulness, and a morning where nobody needs anything from you.

For moms and female caregivers. Mats provided. No experience needed.

Sunday, June 28
10:00 to 11:30 AM
$25

Register here: https://thesummitranchshawnee.as.me/?appointmentType=93145808

When your kid is wound up and nothing is working, give them something to do with their hands.

Last week our ARA group made oil pastel and watercolor process paintings. The instructions were simple: make slow lines, follow the music, watch what happens when the paint hits the pastel. In other words, be mindful of the process.

No product to aim for. Just materials, music, and their own hands moving.

Slow, rhythmic movement regulates the nervous system the same way deep breathing does. Add music and something tactile to watch — watercolor spreading, oil resisting — and you've built a pretty good reset without calling it one.

You can do this at home. Oil pastels, dollar store watercolors, paper and a playlist they like.

The only "rule" is to slow down.

You spend all day helping everyone else regulate. Nobody does it for you.

You're the one who sees the meltdown coming. You're the one who keeps your voice steady when theirs isn't. You track the appointments, the snacks, the sensory stuff, the who-needs-what-when. Summer didn't slow that down. It just took away the one stretch of the day where someone else was in charge.

Here's the thing we say to kids constantly, and it's just as true for you. A nervous system that never gets to come down stays braced. You can't run on braced forever.

So we made a morning for it. Pause & Restore is 90 minutes outside at the ranch on Sunday, June 28. Gentle yoga, time on the trails, a couple of hours where nobody needs a single thing from you. No experience needed. Mats provided.

It's for the moms and caregivers who are very good at taking care of everyone except themselves.

Sunday, June 28, 10:00 to 11:30 AM. $25. Register: https://thesummitranchshawnee.as.me/?appointmentType=93145808

Blue gloves. Hemostats. A barn cat in the egg carton.

This is the Animal Explorers program, led by Dr. Ashley Baker, DVM. Kids ages 8–11 spend their Tuesday mornings here learning real animal science: not worksheets, not videos. One recent session was egg anatomy. They dissected eggs from our own chickens, identified the structures on a diagram, and used actual surgical tools.

Wayne, our trusty barn cat, supervised.

This summer's class is full. If you have a kid in this age range who lights up around animals or science, this program exists and we're already thinking about next summer.

📍 Shawnee, KS | summitranch.org

22 kids. One morning. Horses, a garden, a sensory scavenger hunt, and a lot of washi tape.

Yesterday the Armourdale Renewal Association summer camp came out for a field trip. ARA runs a free summer program for kids in Wyandotte County every June, and Summit Ranch is one of their stops this year.

We loved having them.

June is supposed to be the easy part.

School is out. The schedule loosens up. Everyone gets a break.

And then your kid burned through every activity idea you had by noon on day one. Or they won't wake up until noon and the get-ready fight is somehow worse than it was in February. Or you mentioned the vacation you've been planning for months and they looked at you like you'd suggested something awful. Or they're refusing the camp you booked back in January.

You're not doing it wrong. And they're not doing it wrong either.

Something real is happening in their nervous system right now, and it has to do with how hard they were working all year just to get through the school day. The structure of school was doing a lot of regulating work that their brain wasn't doing on its own. When it's gone, they don't just pick up where it left off.

I wrote about this on the blog this week — what's actually happening, why the family vacation often goes sideways in June specifically, and what tends to help.

Link in comments.

You keep saying you need a break.

Not a vacation. Not a spa day you will never actually book. Just a morning where nobody needs anything from you for 90 minutes.

Pause & Restore is a gentle yoga and outdoor reset at Summit Ranch for moms and female caregivers who are running on fumes.

90 minutes. Outside. Gentle yoga for all levels, guided outdoor mindfulness, and time to sit with your own thoughts for once.

Sunday, June 28
10:00 to 11:30 AM
Outdoors at Summit Ranch
$25 / Limited to 12 spots
No yoga experience needed. Mats provided.
Led by Melinda Nichols, Registered Yoga Teacher.

Register here: https://thesummitranchshawnee.as.me/?appointmentType=93145808

If this is not your thing but you know a mom who needs it, tag her.

This week. Mental Health KC Conference, May 28 and 29.

Program Director + Lead EF Coach, Katie Black, is presenting "The Both/And Brain: Understanding AuDHD from the Inside Out."

The contradictions that are not actually contradictions. The brain that sees every possible outcome at once and gets called an overthinker. The brain that can build a clinical framework from scratch but cannot move the laundry between floors.

This presentation isn't just a trait list. The goal is to get the room as close to being inside it as possible.

If you work with neurodivergent clients or love someone whose brain works like this, we would love to see you there.

Johnson County Community College, Overland Park.
Registration: mentalhealthkc.org

It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and most of the conversation is about adults.

So here's what it sounds like from the other side of the kitchen table.

"Just try harder."
"You're so smart, you just need to apply yourself."
"I know you can do this if you really want to."

And the kid is sitting there thinking: I am trying. I tried to get my shoes on when you said it was time to go. I tried to start the homework when nothing in my brain would grab onto the first problem. I tried to hold it together when my sister got the cup I wanted and it felt like the end of the world and I know that doesn't make sense. I tried not to cry when you got frustrated with me and I didn't know how to explain what was wrong.

When every adult in your life tells you to try harder and you're already at capacity, you don't think "I need better strategies." You think "something is wrong with me."

That's the mental health conversation we miss with kids. Not crisis. Not diagnosis. The slow, daily accumulation of trying your hardest and being told it isn't enough.

The kids who hear this the most are usually the ones working the hardest. They just happen to have brains that do the work differently than everyone expects.

Our Program Director and Lead Executive Function Coach Katie Black is presenting at the Mental Health KC Conference on May 28 and 29 at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park.

Her session, "The Both/And Brain: Understanding AuDHD from the Inside Out," draws on her own experience as an AuDHD adult and her clinical work with neurodivergent kids to challenge how we think about the intersection of autism and ADHD.

This is not a lecture about traits. It is a conversation about what changes when we stop treating the AuDHD brain as broken and start asking whether the systems around it were built for a different kind of brain entirely.

Registration: mentalhealthkc.org