Our Family

I feel compelled to start this post off by saying, "it's been a HELL of a long time" as I moved from our family blog to Facebook almost 2 years ago however a recent moment in time made me long for more of an opportunity to record conversations within our family, especially with the girls as they grown into little chatters. Stella is 4.5 years old and Savannah is 2 years old.

Here is a recent photo of our family from my 41st birthday celebration yesterday. We're at our new home on Skidmore and my weekend was spent enjoying life to it's fullest and using the excused, "it's my birthday to get my way or away"! haha  Ron graciously accomodates but I know I'll get payback on 1/19!

So, back to the story that brought me back to our family blog ....Last night at dinner, Stella was trying to get my attention while I was in mid-sentence to Ron and as always, we're trying to work on patience and waiting your turn to talk once you've been acknowledged. Anyways, it took a minute but when I asked Stella "what" you could tell she had forgotten what was so important to begin with. She was himming and yaaaaing and saying "well", every 3 seconds. She then said, "why do I have darker skin and Savannah has lighter skin?"  I was a big caught off guard, but then again I see a pattern that I tend to be when big topics come up like, "where did the baby come from" and other stuff that she's started asking in the past 6 months. I kinda like that I'm not ready because then she gets the truest, less thought out answer and we roll with that.  So, Ron looked to me and I did the first thing I thought of which is confirm her observation and then tell her how beautiful they both are. That people all over the world (I didn't mention God this time as I did with where babies come from question at Erin/Justin's house over the Disneyland trip vacation). I put my hand on the table, asked Ron to do the same then asked Stella to put her hands with ours so she could see that we were all different "shades of love". I hope she got it because the moment passed quickly and she was onto something different quickly.  In hindsight I guess, I wanted to write about this conversation because I believe race, skin color, acceptance, denial, history, etc. will be a life long topic of hers and ours just as it is in our society. It's important to me that we raise daughters who are confident and love themselves just as they are short, tall, thick, thin, curly or straight hair, blue or green eyed - just AS THEY ARE! So that they can go leave our sides loving themselves. I feel like if they love themselves and don't focus on differences rather project confidence and find in the world what brings them happiness and joy that it won't matter where or with whom they find happiness, that I'll be happy as a parent that they are happy.  Simply said, but weight of the world to make sure we model and give them reinforcement of how strong, beautiful, kind, smart and loved they are!