Sixteen years ago I was beginning the third trimester of my first pregnancy. I’d just quit working (Tony wanted me to enjoy the last few months on my own terms.) We’d just moved into a brand new house that we’d spent the winter having built and I was nesting fiercely. We were painting a nursery and devouring every book on babies and parenting that we could lay our hands on. I even went so far as to invite friends we admired much to dinner so that we could ask them how they made their family so perfect. With great kindness and much grace, Judy didn’t laugh me out of my own kitchen.

Last week when we piled out of the van at a rest stop somewhere in Ohio and I followed my herd as they chattered and jostled each other toward the building, laughing ahead of me I had the realization that my kids are bigger than the Staley kids were when I nervously prepared dinner for the “perfect family” and settled in to take notes from their “perfect Mama.”

The memory made me smile. Having dinner with their oldest son, Sean, who we crossed paths with in Germany a few years ago and who’s now back in the states, made me smile even more. He was Hannah’s first babysitter. Tony babysat for him. He’s an outstanding man, a definite tribute to his mother’s passion and dedication

I’m far from a perfect mother. I still think of Judy often and aspire to her example and that of a couple of other excellent moms that I’ve had the privilege of knowing over the years. We’ve been so blessed to find ourselves in communities of wonderful parents who strive together for the best of our children, collectively. I’m grateful for that.

I have been reflecting, of late, on what I’ve learned so far, 16 years into my motherhood, and what I wish I could go back and tell myself in the weeks before my first daughter was born. Perhaps some of it will resonate with you, or with a young mother you know: (more…)

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I have odd parents, and that is what I love about them.

My father was a Texan geologist turned yacht salesman, and also a professional classical musician. He was the type of man who told the same jokes over and over again, and no one seemed to get them. My mother I’ve given the nickname ‘posh Brit’ because that is exactly what she is: an English woman with a love of the designer clothing and jewelry, as well as great food. However eccentric they were when I was growing up, they still had facets of being very conservative. They were Catholic and my mom has a thing with being super, super clean. She can cook almost anything, and all of us delight in the feasts she spends hours preparing.

I, on the other hand, have never been conservative. I sleep in late, can’t clean to save my life, and never pictured myself being a parent. I had taken on my father’s love of the arts but didn’t want to have the rigidity that the school system pushed. I wanted freedom and choice. And for some reason, I believed that family was a ‘cop out’ and not something that interested me. Indeed, boarding school had made me believe that an academic career was the most important thing I could achieve.

Now that I am a mother, I look back on that image I had and feel saddened. I went off to school in the 8^th grade and basically grew up 24/7 with other kids, in a very strict academic world. We all felt suffocated and on top of each other, with no privacy. Kids were scared to emote for fear of being ridiculed. It had its perks, but the downside was very apparent.

I loved reading, and still do, but eventually that environment lead me to where I am today: an unschooling mother and family activist.

When I was just twenty and had moved to the States, I met my husband and was engaged by twenty one. This was something I had never envisioned, that I could have such intimacy and trust with someone so soon. I pictured myself as a rogue archaeologist, living in a tent somewhere. Instead, I had moved to LA and gotten married soon afterwards. It was the best surprise I could have asked for! We’re inspired by travel and living outside the box and yet we value the traditional family model, in the sense that family is first.

We don’t schedule it in, we schedule everything else around it.

Nowadays, to have such a view is indeed rogue. To not send one’s kids off to day care and then school and pursue a career is almost frowned upon.  Kids have become used to spending little time with mom and dad, and as one homeschooling  mum put it ‘ home is like a hotel, where kids check in and out’.

But things are changing.

Old school family values are becoming trendier (really!!) with mom blogs popping up all over the place, sharing their day to day routine with the world. One blog in particular infuses the radical notion of actually enjoying motherhood above all other pleasures, and it attracts readers who are not only single, but also hard core feminists who for one reason or another find themselves attracted to the image of a happy, smiling, and religious family.

Because of the internet, blogging, and social media, people can connect with eachother like never before, and learn from one another’s preferences. Magazines like Bust interview women who ( gasp) love their arranged marriage, despite catering to a feminist, women’s lib loving crowd. We are hungry to learn about other lifestyles, in order to properly discern what is right for our own, instead of shutting the door on anything outside of our comfort zone.

Nie Nie Dialogues is an inspirational read to check out, showing how a maman of 5 balances her desires and her family’s needs, as well as being an airplane crash survivor and burn victim. Her book Heaven Is Here is out of April 4^th and shows her heroic journey of recovery to physical and mental wellbeing, after having been in a coma for 3 months. I feel uplifted reading about her daily life and how she views the role of motherhood, and it certainly drives me to complain less about my own life and responsibilities.

The Wiegands is another motivational blog about a young artistic family of 4 living in Texas. Casey Leigh chronicles her life and the losses and hardships she has encountered on her journey in parenthood. Readers comment on how she makes the ups (her new pregnancy) and downs ( her miscarriage, her son’s asthma) so touching and real. Her writing is accessible and her story shows how we all struggle, but how we deal with it is what matters.

Are you unconventional yet drawn to the traditional? Where do those two ideas collide in your family and how do you make it work? Where do you find your inspiration?

This article was written by Elizabeth Kelsey: Wife to William, Mama to Kaya, currently writing from Phuket, Thailand where her family is living and learning together.

Hank Debruin & Tanya McCready have been married for 17 years and started their husky family before starting their child family.

They now have four children, Logan, 12, Dustyn, 10, Michaela, 6, and Jessica, 4 years old. They live in Haliburton, Ontario, Canada, in a stunning wilderness area full of lakes and ridges and hills which sits on the doorstep of Algonquin Park and their life revolves around dogs!

We first profiled them in Dec. 2010, just before Hank ran the Yukon Quest race, in Canada in early 2011. Right now, as this interview is republished, Hank is out on the trail running the Iditarod! You can follow the race and his progress at the official race site.

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The arrival of a new year is always a time of reflection and vision. Reflection on where we’ve been, what we’ve accomplished, personal growth and family development over the preceding year. A time to look forward, make plans and renew our dreams and vision for the twelve months stretching out before us like a clean blackboard on the first day of school.

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. They seem an exercise in futility to me, but I do make New Year Wishes and spend some time renewing the focus of our family, defining our dreams and laying out the path we hope to take in big, general, terms in the coming year.

Here are a few ideas that I’ve found helpful this year, and links to a few folks you might want to meet.

1. Choose a word to meditate on

I’ve often reduced a New Year’s Wish to a few words that I’ve repeated to myself throughout the year to keep my focus, remind me of my goals and to help me move forward in the direction I wish to go. Last year’s words were:  Live With Presence, Purpose & Joy. The year before that: Love, Peace, Renewal.

My friend Kiran Bradley posted something recently that challenged me to distill it further, to get it down to just one word for the year. I’m not sure I can do it, but I’m going to try. It needs to be a word that will affect all areas of life, or reflect desired growth, or otherwise move us forward. A word we can meditate on daily.

Her word for the year?

Altruism.

That’s a really good word. There are so many ways that could affect daily life, the lives of my family members, friends, strangers, the world, in a positive manner. So many ways it could change me, change us. I’m tempted to steal it, but I won’t. I’ll come up with my own word.

What’s your word?

2. A Theme For Your Year

 Maybe one word for the year is too narrow. Maybe you need something a little bigger. Maybe your year needs a theme. An over-arching subject to help you unlock your potential. Something bigger than yourself to work towards and work at each day. Or maybe something small, and personal, and completely internal that you keep chunking away at a little at a time.

In 2007 our theme was Launching The Edventure Project. We worked every day towards the goal of cutting loose the bowline on life and starting our open-ended world tour. It was a really fun theme for the year. This year my theme is much smaller, it’s centered on working on incorporating The Four Agreements into my mind on a daily basis. It matters to no one but me, but it still matters.

What could your theme be this year; personally, or for your family?

3. A Vision Chart

 I’ve seen lots of versions of this project, personally, for families, for corporations. The basic idea is the same: Create a chart that is full of your vision, or your dreams, for the year.

This is a really fun one to do as a family. Everyone chooses a few things that they’d really like to do, see, become, learn, or accomplish in the coming year and you create a poster out of it. Perhaps you cut pictures out of magazines or print them off of the internet. Perhaps you draw your pictures, or you write big, bold words. Perhaps you use art, or music, or poetry to represent your vision. The possibilities are endless!

When you’re done, you have a wonderful graphic interpretation of your vision, something to look at every day and keep you focused.

Encourage a combination of big, grandiose, “crazy” dreams as well as small, personal, intangible dreams and everything in between. Don’t allow anyone to belittle anyone else’s vision. Don’t ever say, “We can’t do that,” or, “That’s impossible!” The point is to dream big dreams together, imagine the possibilities, become energized by life and for life. The sky’s the limit!

What’s going on your dream chart?

4. Things You can do without

 I found this a fascinating thought.

My friend Melissa Banigan brought it to my attention through her New Year’s post on her blog. She didn’t make resolutions this year, instead, she and a few friends wrote down on slips of paper things they could do without this year, things they intended to do without, and then tossed them into a fire together.

How refreshing is that?

Instead of trying to change things, trying to recreate yourself, trying to cram more, better, faster, skinnier, more productive things into your already bursting at the seams life, why not let some things go?

Why not create some space in your life and mind?

Why not weed the garden and then see what lovely things plant themselves in the fertile ground of you?

Things I can do without this year:

• Guilt
• Drama
• Expectations

5. Create Your Own 12 Step

I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have a big dream, or a big goal. Some people wear them on their sleeves. Other people hide them quietly in the back of their hearts, under a pile of old books. Everyone has one.

So why don’t more people achieve them? Why don’t more people live their dreams or reach their goals consistently?

Lots of reasons:

• Life overwhelms us
• The devil is in the details
• Time & Money concerns
• Lack of focus

What I love about Justin Mussler and his family is that they have a big dream, a huge, overwhelming goal, they wear it on their sleeves and their working it out in front of the whole world. That takes a lot of guts! What if they fail and everyone sees? They won’t. Justin has made this coming year in to a 12 step program for reaching their goal. Well, a 52 step program actually, one step per week.

Couldn’t you do the same thing? Take your big dream and break it down, month by month, week by week and cut that massive, hard to swallow elephant into bite sized pieces! It’s the way any overwhelming task gets accomplished.

Where would you be in 1 year with focus?

• Out of debt?
• Living in a foreign country?
• Traveling for a living?
• In a new career?
• Speaking a new language?
• Adopting kids?
• Changing the world through volunteer work?

Why can’t you be there? Why CAN’T 2012 be your year? Your kids’ year? Your family’s year?

The answer: It can be.

What will YOU do in 2012?

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This time of year there is a lot of talk about gifts, what we’re giving, what we hope to receive. Much of the giving centers around children and creating a magical holiday for them.

Within the circles we run in there is also a lot of discussion about how much is too much, minimizing the materialistic, consumerist driven aspects of the holidays and focusing instead on the intangibles, the things that really matter. It’s got me thinking about the gifts that we give, as parents, to our children, not at holidays, but everyday, over the long haul of a childhood. The gifts that affect who they ultimately become. The gifts that were given to me and how to intentionally craft those into the next generation.

I’ve given it a lot of thought and there are many really important gifts to give our kids, but I keep coming back around to one: Self-Sufficiency. Maybe you’d argue that there’s another, more important gift to give, and that’s okay, because there are certainly many that are indispensable. It’s not like we can give only one gift to our kids, we give hundreds of them, every day. But for me, Self-Sufficiency is the best gift my parents gave me, and the one I’m most determined to pass on. Let me tell you why. (more…)