I have spent the last few days doing something I knew was coming, but perhaps wasn't quite prepared for emotionally.

My husband and I flew to Virginia to move our oldest son in for his freshman year at a senior military college, and then came home to immediately put our oldest daughter on a plane to begin her sophomore year.

There are still two kids at home to keep me busy. The house is not empty. Life is certainly not quiet.

And yet, my heart feels a little stomped on.

Watching my son, with his newly shaved head and military uniform, march away into a boot camp-style week of college orientation opened up a well of tears I did not realize I needed to release. Pride in seeing him move toward the future he has worked for mingled with memories of him as a baby, chubby and sweet. Somehow, in that moment, I could see both versions of him at once.

I miss them. I feel unsettled. At moments, I have the strange sensation that pieces of myself are missing.

Lately, I have been reading The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry, and one thing it has reinforced for me is just how important it is that we learn to recognize and process our emotions, and that we help our children learn to do the same.

That sounds simple enough. But I think recognizing that this matters is half the battle.

So much of our instinct, especially as parents, is to make difficult feelings go away. When our children are sad, disappointed, anxious, angry, or lonely, we want to reassure them. We want to fix the problem. We want to tell them everything will be okay.

And sometimes, of course, reassurance is exactly what they need.

But feelings do not always need to be fixed.

Sometimes they simply need to be noticed and named.

I am trying to practice that myself this week.

I am not going to let these blue feelings swallow me, but I am also not going to pretend they are not there. I can say: I am sad. This transition is hard.

I can also remind myself that these feelings make sense.

I am proud of them.

I am excited for them.

I am grateful that they are growing into people who are ready to step out into the world.

And I miss them terribly.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

So over the coming days, I am going to be a little easier on myself. I am going to dip into my own toolbox of healthy coping mechanisms, the things I know help me feel grounded, connected, and more like myself, and trust that these feelings will soften as I move through them.

And it makes me think about how much harder this work can be for children.

If a week like this can leave me, a grown adult, feeling completely off balance, how much more important is it that we give children the language and tools to understand what is happening inside them?

One of the things I love about having a children's shop is finding products that can help families begin these conversations in ordinary, low-pressure ways.

The I Heard Your Feelings Conversation Cards are one of those finds. Each card presents a situation and invites children to think about what someone might be feeling. Sometimes it can be much easier for a child to talk about the feelings of a character in a picture than to immediately explain their own.

And somewhere in that conversation, they begin learning something important: feelings have names. Feelings can be talked about. Feelings change. And having one does not mean something has gone terribly wrong.

Explore the I Heard Your Feelings Conversation Cards

Maybe that is one of the most valuable things we can teach our children.

Not how to avoid sadness, disappointment, anger, worry, or grief.

But how to recognize those feelings when they arrive, make room for them, and know what helps them move through to the other side.

It is something I want my children to know.

And, apparently, something I still need to practice myself.

This post is a little more personal than what I usually share here. But I often think of Brimful as the kind of shop that could just as easily sit on a little corner somewhere. If you walked in after the weekend and we found ourselves chatting across the counter about how our days had been, this is probably what I would tell you.

So this is what is on my heart.