How do you capture fall spirit all year long?

In her new book, Fed up with Frenzy (Release Date: August 2012), slow parenting expert Susan Sachs Lipman shares advice and activities to help families join the Slow Movement and maintain a relaxed and joyful life throughout the year.

Slow Parenting is about taking time to disconnect from the busy world around us, deciding what’s really important, restoring a sense of wonder, appreciating and helping one another, and taking time to enjoy and honor life’s simple pleasures in the relatively short time we’re all here together.

Fed up with Frenzy includes advice to help families maintain a frenzy-free lifestyle even during the busy fall back-to-school season:

Create Successful Children – The most valuable and useful character traits that prepare children for success do not arise from extracurricular or academic commitments but from a firm grounding in love, role modeling, and guidance from family.

Improve Physical and Psychological Family Health  – Slowing down for as little as six minutes, can reduce stress for people of all ages. Activities like walking, crafts, and reading significantly lower our heart rate and other stress indicators.

Create Lasting Family Memories and Traditions – Whether playing a board game or baking cookies, the warmest family memories come from moments that seem small at the time. Gestures that come from shared activity and downtime have a way of becoming family rituals.

Fun Fall Activities for Slow Parenting:

• Make Fall-leaf Placemats – Capture the beauty of fall leaves by creating table placemats that can be enjoyed throughout the year.
• Roast Pumpkin Seeds – After carving pumpkins, roast leftover seeds and warm the house with smells of fall.
• Stuff a Scarecrow – These classic fall decorations are great fun for families to make and decorate.
• Build a Family Gratitude Tree for Thanksgiving – Slowing down to give thanks creates calm and solace. The habit of gratitude is a wonderful gift to give to children.
• Fed Up with Frenzy reconnects us to that part of ourselves and our families that somehow got lost in the shuffle of our busy lives.

Susan Sachs Lipman is the founder of slowfamilyonline.com, writes for Christian Science Monitor’s Modern Parenthood blog and is the San Francisco Slow Family Life Examiner at Examiner.com. She is also the Social Media Director for the Children & Nature Network, which encourages and supports people and organizations working around the world to reconnect children with nature.

Please let her know if you are interested in receiving an Advanced Reading Copy of Fed Up with Frenzy for feature consideration, book reviews, author interviews, or obtaining excerpts.