What do you know about your house?

I am planning to give birth to this baby here, at our house. It was built about 110 years ago, and I would love to know how many other people we born here. I did a quick internet search and realized it is very easy to find out how much $ houses nearby sell for. It is only slightly more difficult to find out who bought them. It is also not very hard to find out a long-term price history for a house. And, of course, in most cases I could find a history of the owners of a home - though not as far back as 110 years.

Is there a record somewhere of how many people were born here?

Probably not. Amazingly, that information is not useful or meaningful to how we understand our communities, and the places in which we choose to live. It matters more what it cost, than what happened here.

What would it be like if we valued different information about the things around us? What if the most important things when we bought a house were the answers to questions like:

- Were people happy here?

- Was there a successful marriage here?

- Did people raise children here? How many?

- Did anyone die here? If they did, were they at peace?

I'm not arguing that this is how we SHOULD do things, I'm just thinking about how narrow we are when we asses our spaces, and the places where we will live our lives.

When we first moved in, there was a ghost living here. She was a lovely lady and very polite. But soon after, a couple of less polite spirits made themselves at home. With the help of my sister (see my link to her site), we ushered them all out. It was a huge step for our family in feeling ownership over this house. Quite honestly, I felt more ownership after that than I did after we signed the mortgage papers (In that case, we STILL don't own it, right? It is still the bank's).

Here are some tips about finding out more about the history of your home:

http://www.wikihow.com/Research-the-History-of-Your-House

Screen Time

I think I might be pretty weak in this area. Whenever I bring it up, the moms I talk to seem to have a better sense of reasonable 'screen time' limits. My little guy, in particular, would spend most of the day hanging out with one screen or another (computer, tv, wii, ipad) if I let him.

My current rule is he gets 1/2 hour per day of screen games, plus he might watch 1/2 hour of tv at night. But to be fair, that doesn't include the 20 minutes he might play on my phone while waiting in pick-up line for his sisters. Or the times I hand him my phone in a store so I can finish my errands. Or the times he has used up that 1/2 hour, and I let him sit near me in the kitchen playing on pbskids while I'm busy.

If someone has a system for screen times that seems to work well, I would love to hear it.

How much is too much, and how do you manage it?

The "M" Word

It seems to me that people get uncomfortable when I talk about things as being 'moral' i.e.: a moral responsibility, or a moral commitment. However it is one of my deeply held beliefs (yeah, it seems I have a lot of those) that when something you are engaged in has the power to elevate you, and help you access your relationship to the Universal, it is a moral activity.

So, marriage is clearly a moral activity. So is sex, and so is parenting. Actually, so is taking good care of your physical self. If we abandon any of these things, we walk away from our true being. Being your true self is clearly a moral activity.

So to me, in order to engage in parenting to the fullest extent of the obligation, I have to be able to answer some basic questions about the moral aspect of the job. Questions like:

1) what are the moral lessons being taught in my house

2) what is the language being used to discuss moral issues

3) how am I engaging my children in their moral development

The answers are not always easy to come up with, but grappling with the questions is an obligation I owe my kids.

The 'Self' of our child

Here is another personal opinion of mine on parenting:

To my mind, it is inalterable that parents will infringe on the sense of self of their children.

Many of the tasks assigned to parents require this. For example, there are times when I must substitute my judgement for their own, or when I must make them do things they may judge to be counter to their own true desires (my child wants to stay home and work on an art 'project' about which she is excited, but I make her go to school).

Furthermore, just by being in the role of 'Mom' things I say go to the core of the child - things that should not, but do. So for example I might say, "Please stop humming! I can't take it right now!" My child may absorb that she is annoying, and her humming is an irritation. Were she just a friend and not my child, she might in that moment instead think, "Wow, she is overstimulated!" or "What a bitch! I'll hum if I want!" But as my child, my interpretation of her goes into the central arena of her identity.

So, to ignore this, that we tread on the sense of self of our children, is to put blinders on. My continuing (imperfect) practice is to be in awareness of this. I see that I take up space in their central narrative.

I'll let you know when my kids are teenagers and explain to me everything I did wrong, if my awareness of this had any positive impact!

Family Size

I am delighted that we are expecting baby #4 in the spring. Being pregnant with my fourth has been an interesting study in the thoughts and feelings people have about family size.

Many people have said things like, "Oh my gosh, you guys are crazy!," or, "Wow, you're really pushing your luck!" or, "You are going to be swamped with housework when the new baby comes!" or, "You guys sure like to make things complicated!"

It is so different from the response you hear when you become pregnant with your first, second, or even third, baby. It seems as though, for many people, three kids makes a 'reasonable' family size, while four is somehow too big, or too risky.

I am very interested to hear how other people decided they were 'done' (so to speak), and why 4 is the magic 'too big' number.

Personally, when I got married I said I wanted 5 kids, and I have 4 sisters and 2 brothers, so having 4 kids does not feel like giant family (though I am sure there are times when it will! Even ONE felt like a lot sometimes!).

Oh, and one more note about the reaction people have: when I was visiting my sister in LA every one of her friends reacted positively saying things like, "Oh my gosh you are so lucky!" - maybe the 4-is-too-many thing is regional?

Another Parenting 'Big Rock'

My wise older sister, Annika, says that one of the most powerful things she has to offer her kids is her instincts so if she doesn't follow her instinct, she is failing her kids (In this instance, the words 'instinct' and 'intuition' are interchangable). I think she is totally right about this. So, the parenting challenge is to figure out the difference between INSTINCT and FEAR. Letting fear determine the path of any project or relationship is a terrible idea, and I think in parenting it is a mission critical issue.

How do we develop the ability to tell the difference between instinct and fear? My conclusion has been that if I can exercise my instinct in other areas, and develop my ability to feel it in general, then it will be easier to identify when I really need it. Do you have any ideas about how to do this? I would love to hear them.

PS: If you don't get the 'big rock' reference, check out this author's summary of the idea made popular by Stephen Covey:

http://zenhabits.net/big-rocks-first-double-your-productivity-this-week/

Finding Faith

There is that saying that for some people faith is like walking across a river. The image is meant to be one of crossing over - one day you don't have faith, and the next you walk on the shores of faith, and that is that. Others (was it Kierkegaard?) claim that 'faith is the work of a lifetime' (I'm sure Nathan can correct me on that one). For me, there were years when I wasn't even sure what 'faith' was referring to - faith in what?

Then one day I looked at Chris as we grappled with a tough decision. It may have been something about whether to move back to the US or to stay in the UK. I looked at Chris as we balanced our shared desires for our life together and it hit me: as hard as this journey can sometimes be, this would be so much harder if I were I paired with someone else. It would be pure hubris to continue to believe that it was through my infinite wisdom that I made the choice to marry him. In fact, looking back at our meeting at age 14 and his unwavering presence in my life, it was almost laughable that I hadn't seen it before: my relationship with Chris and the love we share was a gift for us from the Universe for this journey, this life.

In that moment, because of my relationship with my husband, I came to believe in a higher power, or, in my lexicon, the Universal.

So, thanks to marriage, I crossed the river.

I think there are many paths in life towards an experience of the Universal. And. as described by Marcus Borj in his book (I don't know how to underline in this program!) "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time," that moment of accessing the Universal is a sensation of parting the curtain and seeing reality from another (truer) perspective. Then, for most of us, the curtain drops. For some that moment is transformative. (Borj argues that every now and then in history there is someone, like Jesus, who never drops the curtain.)

I know there are other means to access that curtain-lifted sensation. Meditation? Chanting? Childbirth? What do you think? Have you had a moment where you have a sensation of accessing knowledge of the Universal?