“Not your typical family…”
…That is how a friend described me and my little tribe recently. Up until that point I hadn’t really thought much about it. I mean, we’re all trying to get through this life doing the best we can for ourselves and our families – but how often do any of us take the time to sit down and analyze how we’re doing?
I haven’t, at least recently. But my friends comment, “not your typical family” caused me sit back and take stock. Not Typical? There was no negativity in the comment of course, but I hadn’t really thought of us as anything other than typical before; it was time to take a look in the mirror! Let’s see:
- Okay, so I have 4 kids… that’s not unheard of, but certainly more uncommon now-a-days.
- My wife switched careers to take up the role of ‘Mom’ full time. We’ve always thought of this as a more traditional move on our part, but very few others in our circle of friends have taken the same course.
- We decided early on to try and feed our kids as healthy as possible, so: no fast food, minimized processed goods, no canned or boxed foods… only good home-cooked meals. We even started buying the majority of our food locally through the Farmers Market. This is an ongoing struggle – but we’re improving all the time.
- We like to think of ourselves as a pre-pro-green family; meaning, we’re pro-earth-friendly and have been since before being pro-green was the ‘cool’ thing to do. I suppose that’s fairly typical now-a-days… but we’re really good at it
- This one dovetails with being pro-earth a little, but we are also anti-consumerism… we buy second hand, participate in local ‘swap’ groups and have learned to ignore the modern consumerist marketing machine (it helps that we don’t have any TV service!)
- Oh, and then there’s the whole Homeschooling thing.
- Did I mention that we don’t watch TV?
Okay… so possibly my friend is correct, maybe we aren’t typical – but really we’re just trying to take life on our own terms, and provide for our children the way we think they should be provided for. I know we’re not the only ones by any means; in a global sense… but locally we seem to be a rare breed and it’s not very often that we run into other families on a similar path.
So welcome to our unconventional life! We hope that our adventures will inspire other families to take more control of their lives in some small way and hope you’ll come back and share your own unconventional adventure stories with us!