Welcome to another episode of Wild and Precious Conversations. This week is a conversation with my sister and my cousins on our perfectly imperfect family.

Chalk this up to yet another time I thought I was going to get off easy…

After many many hours of deep thought, lots of laughing, and many conversations, text messages, and still more conversations, we have an episode for you.

Obviously, we’re not the Kardashians, so it’s fair to ask why you’d want to listen to us talk about our family.

We’re not the Cleavers, either, so we certainly can’t lecture you on anything close to “Do this, not that”.

What we can do, by opening up a bit ourselves, is to start the conversation.

We are a perfectly imperfect family. We enjoy being together, look forward to talking to each other, and genuinely feel close to each other.

Join us as we explore what makes us “work” — even in light of lots of reasons we shouldn’t.

Beyond this, I am really interested in your family. What makes it work? What do you hold in high esteem? What are you carrying forward into the next generation?

What I talked about:

• First,  We introduce the family holiday at the Hall household. Not for the faint of heart but lots of fun.
• Second,   We realize that the creativity runs deep in our family — was it tolerance or true love that allowed us to create elaborate haunted houses every family holiday?
• Third,  No one gets left behind. We explore how it works in our family that we can expand to include whoever and whatever shows up.
• Fourth,  We realize that, like separating the wheat from the chaff, we have carried things forward into the next generation and simply left the things that didn’t work on the threshing floor.

Onward  to Enriched Environment. We’re still working through connectedness and it seems fitting that the next place to go is to explore our environments. I’m going to look into the Rat Park experiments that took place at Simon Fraser University in the 1970s and learn a bit about the story of Bruce K. Alexander, the man who created Rat Park. Hopefully, we’ll learn a bit how we can create an enriched environment for ourselves and why that is so important.

The  Underbelly Project: A weekly workout for your  emotional strength and             flexibility. If  you’re not afraid to  get dusty and maybe shed a  few tears together, join  me and let’s get  emotionally strong!

And please, if you know anyone who might like to share this journey, share this project. Excited to stay in the arena with you.