The Summit Ranch

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

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.

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

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