2024 Family Intentions (or, The New Year is Finally Here!)

To say that our new year has had a bit of a ragged start would be a bit of an understatement. All of us have had one respiratory illness or another since early December, with the latest player to the field being COVID. We had 17 days of various members of the house testing positive, isolating, masking, and testing, testing, testing. We're all finally negative, though recovery continues to be slow (and now our older two kids both have the cold that is going around!) We’re slowly finding our feet and getting the new year underway.

We decided to enter into 2024 trying to be more intentional about who we are being called to be as a family. Sometime in early December, we were having a conversation with Michael about consumerism - how our cultural obsessions with buying new things made us unhappy, was hurting the planet, and would not be sustainable going into the future. We talked about how they had more toys than the richest kids did two hundred years ago and what it meant to be content with enough. 

Michael said, “I think we shouldn’t buy ANYTHING for a year!” We bargained him down to three months, which became our first commitment as a family this year. We’re buying nothing beyond necessities until Easter. We’ve limited our spending to gas, groceries, personal care items (we’re still going to get floss if we run out!), giving to our faith communities, and obviously utilities (keep the electric company happy). At the same time, we’re picking up more quality family time together: board games, activities, and outdoor activities that can help recenter our family on something beyond screens and new toys.

The cookbook that will be 
the foundation of our 
recipe selection

The second intention is: One Family, One Meal. Practically, I’m really tired of feeling like a short order cook at times, and sometimes I get into the pattern where I have no idea what I’m going to make for dinner. I enjoy meal planning a great deal, but there are times when I don’t have the capacity to think about what we’re going to eat for the coming week when I grocery shop, so I just throw items into the cart based on what we normally have on hand. Also, our kids are not always adventurous eaters. Don’t get me wrong, they eat a lot of vegetables but they don’t do a lot of things…mixed together. Casseroles are out of the question. I made cheesy potatoes the other day and there was a less than enthusiastic response. They aren’t always keen on things that have seasoning. But they’ve made a commitment to try new things this year, and so each week, we - as a family - are going to pick a recipe and make it together. Our Thursday night meal will be something new for us to try together. The kids will get to pick one meal each week, on Wednesdays we’ll make pizza, and then it’s leftovers and adult picks for the rest of the week. 

Michael cooking 
quesadillas while we were
all isolating from COVID

Part of it is to get our kids to eat different foods, but the other part of it is trying to help our kids learn how to be grateful for what the earth has produced for us to eat and for the work of the many hands who grew, tended, harvested, processed, packaged, transported, and cooked the food. We are aware that our children have culturally-conditioned food aversions: that it is now a norm that our kids don’t need to eat anything that doesn’t instantly hit those pleasure centers in the brain - and the food that does that also happens to be highly processed, not very healthy, and, as we’re learning now, can have long-term health consequences that we don’t yet fully understand. However, living in mutuality with the Earth and learning that eating is first about community, and not about a hyper-individualized expression of personal preference, is not the norm. This requires learning new skills and attitudes for how we approach our food (both for us and for them.) By no means do we want to force distasteful foods on our kids, but we do want to teach them how to be grateful for the food that is available to them; especially as we begin to homestead and they learn more deeply the connections between animal, soil, and table.  

So far (in the past couple of weeks we’ve had the capacity to try it) it’s gone over OK. Cauliflower Paprikash was a bust (The onions! The onions!). Roasted broccoli with lemon and feta was accepted. When I made chicken curry the other night, Michael was excited about it (though the spice level exceeded his tolerance.) This week we will try a bean and cheese casserole topped with cornbread. 

No extra spending has been a bit easier, since we're not big shoppers anyway, but picking up intentional family time has proved to be a bit more challenging, mostly since we're exhausted and still recovering our energy from COVID. It's an invitation for us to evaluate how we're all spending our time and how we can recalibrate our priorities to make space. 

So, we're easing our way into the new year. After all, it's like the meme going around the internet this time of year, that January was the free trial period, with February being the real start to 2024! But maybe progress like this means that change will last, as opposed to diving in head first only to be overwhelmed by all the new changes and slipping back into old ways of being. In any case, I feel like these shifts, and the grounding beneath them, will prove foundational and fruitful, especially for our kids, as we continue to raise them to follow Jesus on our little two acre island of sanity.