And so you see, we are a happy family!

fam·i·ly

ˈfam(ə)lē/

noun

1. 1.

   a group consisting of parents and children living together in a household.
2. 2.

   all the descendants of a common ancestor.

   
   

When I was single and living thousands of miles away from my family of origin, I came to an eventual realization that I, just me, was a family. I felt this was especially true when I was living on my own and running my own household. So I had no spouse or children, but the things I was doing with my life and time were for the benefit of my household as it was and as it would/could be in the future.

My life with Blake is the same. We are just two right now, but we are a family. As Meg from A Practical Wedding would call it, we are a baby family.

When I first got married, I realized with startling clarity that I hadn’t just said vows and had a party; I’d created a brand-new family. It was a new family, a baby family, and it needed protecting and tending to. In the earliest years of marriage, we spent a lot of time nurturing that new entity. From: Letter From The Editor: All In The Family

And that's what Blake and I are doing. During our courtship, engagement, and in the ten months and 17 days of our marriage, we are constantly making decisions and doing things to benefit our family as it is now and as we hope it will be. Sometimes those decisions are the obvious and big ones, like what kind of law Blake wants to practice and how we should manage our budget. Sometimes those things are small like what we're going to have for dinner this week or that we like wooden toys that foster imaginative play (even if that means I later buy a puzzle that fits the criteria at a thrift store only to find out our children will not be learning about the letter V if that's all we use to teach them the alphabet).

Each day, we are shaping ourselves and our little baby family to be the kind of entity we want to be. We're deciding our priorities and the things we want for us and for our future children, both the serious and the silly. (e.g. Only the first Land Before Time in our household, thank you very much.)

We're trying to live a purposeful life, and it makes all the difference.

Fist pumps for road trips! (August 2013)