You can come up with your own questions. The most important thing is that it’s a time to listen to each other and share each other’s lives. <\/p>\n
The timeline<\/h2>\n
Tape some A4 pages together so you can draw a line about 50 cm long. Draw two lines about 5 cm apart, so that you can color the timeline itself. Make a mark every 4 cm, so one year is 4 cm. (You can of course choose other distances if you want.) Start by choosing different colors for different places you lived in, and color the line year by year with the color you chose for each place. <\/p>\n Then mark important events in your family’s life, births, illnesses, deaths, moves, changes of school, divorces, vacations – you decide together what you want to include. Feel free to draw pictures or paste cards of houses you have lived in, schools your children have attended, pets you have had, friends, places you have liked, etc. <\/p>\n Then have each family member draw a curve over the timeline, showing how they felt during the different times – peaks when they felt good and troughs when they felt bad.<\/p>\n When we do the timeline together as a family, it’s a good opportunity to remember together what it was like and talk about it. When we remember together, we create a shared history. We can laugh together and we can cry together. It can help you as a parent to understand how your child experienced life – and to realize that some of what you remember as a parent is not remembered by the child, and some of what you have forgotten is actually remembered by the child. You have different pictures of what happened. When we draw our timeline, we get a common picture, which brings us together. <\/p>\n The curves can also help us understand why we reacted so differently in different times, and can help us understand each other.<\/p>\n Put the timeline on the wall, and keep drawing on it as time passes and new things happen.<\/p>\n For children who have been through many and\/or big changes, it can be an amazing experience to travel with the magic truck on the timeline. The magic truck can travel through our life, and from each time, each place we can load it with things we miss. It could be a friend, a kindergarten, a climbing tree, a house, a certain kind of food, smells, sounds and all kinds of experiences. <\/p>\n Draw a big truck on a large sheet of paper, and then draw in everything you miss. Talk to each other, ask each other and tell each other what you are drawing. <\/p>\n When we make the magic truck together, it becomes clear to us what we miss, and it helps us to both rejoice together and mourn together. The most important thing for us humans is not to get everything we want, but to be able to say what we wished for and miss what we did not get and what did not become. Then we can leave and move on. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/5.150.195.194\/~familjegladje\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/DSC_0188-Version2.jpg\")
<\/a>Sometimes we are not really aware of what our life has actually been like. A good way to see what has happened, and also to create a shared history, is to draw a timeline of your family’s life together. <\/p>\nThe magic truck<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Once you have filled the truck with everything you miss, you can travel with it once more across the timeline, and outside the truck draw or write everything you are glad you had to leave behind. It could be a stupid friend, a teacher who wasn’t good, a nasty dog, a car that was always breaking down. <\/p>\nEmotional heart<\/h2>\n