Anatomy of Our Annual Family Meeting, 2024 Edition

How our family regroups before the school year, + 4 FREE templates for your own family meeting!

Our 2024 meeting was a breakfast meeting—a huge hit!

Before we dive in, let me preface with this. This is max-level-cheezy. It’s silly and funny and completely over the top. It’s kind of how we do things sometimes. 😂 All the hoopla is very “The Office” style and it captures my kids attention. If I told them they had to sit down and listen to Bryan and I drone on about “getting back to the routine,” they’d be bored out of their minds and likely tune us out. So… we found a way to make it a little more attractive, engaging, and well… fun. This framework is great during back-to-school time, but works anytime you need to regroup with your people.

After a season of scattering routine to the wind and embracing spontaneity and fun, does anything feel better than slipping back into the comfiness of normal life?

We had a frenetic summer this year—not bad, per se, just a lot of living out of suitcases and putting final touches on my cookbook, AKA the most detailed labor of love I’ve ever produced. So let’s just say that getting our family back home and settled and into the school year and a normal pace of life has been such a sigh of relief. I’m thrilled we are back to normal breakfasts and bedtimes and shutting laptops at a reasonable hour and putting more green on our plates.

Tbh I love a good reset.

My mom friends get it, which is why we have a Meeting of the Mom Minds every year before school. The Ley family knows this too, and they humor me—mostly because I try to make the resets fun.

A few weeks ago, we had our biggest reset of the year: our 2024 Annual Family Meeting. The five of us always huddle up at the beginning of the school year to regroup on chores and allowances, screen time rules, along with general expectations and structure for the school year. We talk about big things we have coming up: work projects or travel that might take Mom and Dad away from the family, school projects and events that need to go on the calendar, upcoming family travel. Things like that.

Our Annual Family Meeting establishes a few things for us:

• Practically, talking about what’s coming up for us helps me wrap my brain around how we need to show up for each other this fall and going into the holidays.

• Emotionally, meeting together and talking about priorities and boundaries for our family puts us all on the same team. When we take a step back and talk about how we’re functioning as individuals and a collective whole, we validate the unique needs of each family member while affirming that we’re going to show up for each other, help each other, and cheer each other on. And after our Annual Family Meeting, each of us feels a sense of a responsibility and has clear expectations on how to do that.
  
  So how does this meeting work, anyway? I’m glad you asked.