Happy Birthday!

I think its fitting to start this new blog today on the 19th birthday of my oldest child, my daughter Stick. She was the one to begin this large family of many kids. And the one to teach me lessons first. So a Happy Birthday to my daughter and the birth of my new family blog.

What is, or why, TOPIC JAR? Its a sort of anagram of all the letters of my children's first names. In order of age- R T P I O C J A. I love anagrams and our life feels very much like one, at times.

 (The definition of Anagram:  An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; for example orchestra can be rearranged into carthorse. Someone who creates anagrams is called an anagrammatist.^[1] The original word or phrase is known as the subject of the anagram.)

 A rearrangement of family life as it is normally.What I mean by that is we take family and make something "new" or different from it. We don't do things like "mainstream" families. We're not exactly "normal" anyways so why should we? Haha. We run in all different directions, creating our own path that fits us.

And Topic Jar seems so fitting. I'll be sticking to posting about our family life here but on all sorts of topics that pertain to our life. 

Our life includes-

* Natural Parenting- parenting in a way that comes naturally to us, following our instincts. For us this consists of: cloth diapering, co-sleeping, breasting feeding, home birth, home schooling, not vaccinating, not circumcising, baby wearing, and meeting the needs of each child as an individual.

* Special Needs- every child has special needs as an individual but some of children have special needs beyond the "normal" scope. These needs include: ADHD, ODD, Aspergers, SPD, anxiety issues, and Amniotic Band Syndrome (our youngest was born w/o her right hand).

* Life our way. We try to live a simple, naturally based life. What this includes is: Raising chickens (for eggs), planting gardens (but no luck growing anything in them! Haha), decluttering possessions often (less is more, quality over quantity), eating as well as possible (organic when we can get it, free range meats when we can get it, whole foods, no HFCS/fake foods), cooking and baking, no paper products in our home (save for when we have guests and by them a roll of tp- not everyone can get into family cloth), healing naturally first (tradtional/modern medicine only when really needed), repurposing/recycling  often. And dreaming of self sufficiency.

* Pagan spirituality. We are Pagans, we celebrate the earth and many Gods and Goddesses. My husband practices the Norse faith, his primary being Odin. I, myself, align with Gaia and the Earth herself. And as my children have aged they've found their own ways. We love our Gods. They are the origins of all that is holy today. The scared holidays of today's worlds are based on those of our past Pagan rituals. By practicing the old faith we honor our ancestors and true history. We honor our Earth and her control of all life and energy on her.


We'll see where we go from here. But my goal is to be informative, light and whimsical.

If you've come over from my other blog, Thank You for following! The readers are why I write! I'll soon have a FB page for you to follow for this blog too. Please comment on posts, share with your friends and feel free to contact me with topics you'd like to see me cover. I love reader participation!

When we can live freely, only then are we truly Free!