Local mom inspires ‘growth, gratitude & giggles’ with release of kids’ journal

Katie and Steve Wood with their children: Andrew, Gabriella, Hadley and Austyn

Katie Wood starts each day with a morning routine during which she centers herself to get ready for the day ahead. “I read something positive, I practice gratitude, I do a little bit of meditation, prayer, exercise,” she said.

Nearly every morning for the past six years, the Canton mother of four has gotten up before her children at 5 a.m. to complete the daily routine.

“I became very passionate about having a morning routine when I noticed that my kids benefitted from it,” Wood explained. “When I learned to take care of myself and set the tone for the day, that energy went through to my kids.”

On the days she did not do her routine, she felt the difference and could see a difference in how her children approached their day. But Wood didn’t realize just how much of a difference it made until one morning in the early days of the COVID pandemic when her second daughter, Hadley, pulled up a chair next to her and whispered in her ear, “Can you teach me how to have great mornings, too?”

“I believe she planted a seed in my heart that day,” Wood said.

That simple request from her daughter led Wood to look for a morning journal for her children. “I knew what I wanted,” she said. Wood, a former teacher who is a strong believer in a growth mindset and runs her own business designed to empower people in their lives, combed the Internet looking for something to use with her children, expecting to find a journal quickly. She knew that creating one herself would be a challenge for her as a busy mother who works from home.

“But when [entrepreneurs] identify a problem and a solution doesn’t exist, we create,” she said.

So when she couldn’t find a book that met her needs, she wrote one. A Simple Seed: Of Growth, Gratitude & Giggles is a paperback morning journal that guides children and parents through several short activities. The book allows children to find a purpose to their day before they leave the house in the morning.

A Simple Seed is divided into segments for daily entries. Each day starts with a life lesson and then moves on to a space for three things children are grateful for; a box to write an ‘I am’ statement (such as “I am capable”); a daily challenge, such as Do Something Brave; Morning Giggles; Who Can I Make Smile Today; and the Parent Perspective, which gives parents a chance to share their perspective with their child about something that they learned in their own life. Wood said that sharing the perspective allows for deeper conversations among family members.

Wood’s goal was not to write a book, but rather to create a morning routine for her children. She started by writing down ideas for one child; once her daughter worked her way through a morning routine, Wood began to include all three daughters in the routine. Wood and her husband, Steve Wood, a Westwood firefighter who has helped with the editing of the book and other book-related tasks, are the parents of daughters Austyn, Hadley and Gabriella and son Andrew. Wood went on to post the routines she was doing on social media and received numerous responses.

“I had hundreds of messages,” she said. People asked her where she found the journaling prompts, because they wanted to do the same routines with their children. That was the moment when she decided to put everything together in the form of a book. She began writing in March of 2020 and the book was published last month.

Wood’s goal is to have her children do a journal entry five days a week. A Simple Seed has 100 entries for children to complete, which will take them through a school year but allows for days to be missed. Wood intentionally did not write a book that had an entry for every day, knowing that busy families cannot always find the time to fill in the journal.

“I’m a big believer in grace,” she said. “You do the best you can. If you have a morning you can do it, awesome. If there’s a morning you can’t, don’t worry about it. Tomorrow’s a new day.”

Wood said children who can read are able to do each entry on their own during breakfast. In her own family, one of the two older daughters usually reads the entry to little sister Gabriella, who is in kindergarten.

“I call it A Simple Seed because it’s meant to be simple,” Wood said. “The seed is that we are planting seeds in our kids’ lives, in their hearts, their minds, their souls, so that we are giving them a strong foundation for life. We are helping them create strong roots.” People from around the U.S. as well as Canada, Australia and Puerto Rico have ordered A Simple Seed.

Wood said her daughter Austyn’s teacher at the Hansen School, Mrs. Cunningham, has been doing the morning routine with the entire class this year and is having great success with it. “She’s been amazing,” Wood said of Mrs. Cunningham.

A Simple Seed is one way that Wood is trying to empower children on a local level. Another is a project she undertook at the Hansen, together with her sister Erin Connor and Hansen CAPT President Kristen Ecord, to promote empowering messages, such as “Life is tough, but so are you,” through large decals affixed to the doors of the stalls in all of the school’s bathrooms.

Wood is also involved in an effort to have large stickers with powerful messages placed on the risers of the staircases at the Hansen School. The stickers were ordered from an ETSY artist in Ukraine and have been delivered, but need to be cut and installed.

Wood said the process of writing A Simple Seed was quite an emotional experience for her. “I really feel my kids have learned there are so many things in life you can’t control,” she said. “We could not control the pandemic, but we could control how we responded and how we moved forward. Just the fact that this book brought us together and got us through COVID. It means so much when I see somebody posting a picture with their kids in the kitchen doing this book. It fills my heart knowing that now other kids, other families, get to be able to do this and become more connected. There’s just nothing better.”

Wood has partnered with One Tree Planted to ensure that a tree is planted after a certain number of books are sold. A Simple Seed is available now through amazon.com.

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