Family

When I first found out I was pregnant, I freaked out (I think "Holy S***!" were my exact words), but then I became very reflective. I wondered "why do people have children anyway?" "What is the point in starting a family?" (I should've actually been asking these questions BEFORE I got pregnant!)

Anyway, the only reasons I came up with at first seemed fairly petty on the surface: i.e. I want to pass on my genes...I want to take care of someone...everyone else is doing it...or I guess that's just what you do after you've been married for awhile.

As Aaron and I explored this question together, family kept coming up again and again. When I think about the most influential relationships in my life...I think family. When I think about who I call when I'm having a bad day or who knows me maybe a little too well...the answer is family. Who are the people that I can't live with and can't live without? Family! From my last few posts you can probably tell that family is pretty important to me, and this is exactly why Aaron and I wanted to start our own family...to continue that legacy, to expand our family.

My Uncle emailed this quote to us the other day and I think it is a beautiful way to consider family:

Through the ... honoring of the dead, the generations were bound together in a stabilizing continuity of obligations, so that the family was not merely a couple and their children, or even a patriarchal assemblage of parents, children, and grandchildren, but a holy union and sequence of blood and fire stretching far into the past and the future, and holding the dead, the living, and the unborn

in a sacred unity stronger than any state.

Will Durant, "The Story of Civilization "