{"id":2967,"date":"2010-09-23T22:41:26","date_gmt":"2010-09-24T02:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cynthomas.com\/photocardblog\/?p=2967"},"modified":"2010-09-23T22:41:26","modified_gmt":"2010-09-24T02:41:26","slug":"om-big-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cynthomas.com\/journal\/om-big-house\/","title":{"rendered":"OM :: The Big House"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Most everyone gets to choose where he or she lives. Some have circumstances choose for them. Either way, no one should have to justify where she lives.
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\nThis week, I’ve been to two houses for playdates. Both were at houses we had not visited before. Both houses were huge. In the area that I live, this is a trend. New construction means huge houses. We’ve seen them being built, having lived here for about seven years and we (my husband and I) always wondered who would live in them. Now I know.
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\nBoth families were sweet with regular kids like mine and moms doing what moms do everyday. The playdates were a success, in my opinion. But I must admit, I’m uncomfortable. I’ll try to explain why.
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\nI’m gonna riff a little homage to George Carlin. When you have kids, they come with stuff. Lots of stuff. I know there are people that choose to live without this stuff, but I’m not that person. We do try to be conscious of our choices, but we still have stuff. So the stuff needs to go into other stuff. And that stuff gets placed in rooms. How many rooms? Well, that comes down to your choice of home. We live in a modest house. It’s not small, but no one would walk in and exclaim that it’s large. And we’ve filled it with our stuff.
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\nOkay, so multiply what you imagine my stuff adds up to by 3 or 4 times and you get the sum of the huge houses’ stuff. It’s the suburban edition of Cribs. Now, I’m really not judging these families for their choices. I’m trying to understand why it made me uncomfortable and I’m still processing that “why.” One reason I can point to is that we try to teach our boys to appreciate what they have and to comprehend what others don’t have. It’s a difficult lesson to teach kids and I think they struggle when surrounded by stuff.
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\nMy moment this week is recognizing this uncomfortable feeling and trying to understand it. We’ve chosen this community and this will not be last time we’ll be in a huge house, enjoying the company of another family. I’m a BIG fan of live and let live, so I want to identify my weird feelings and then let them go. Stuff shouldn’t matter.
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\n\"om<\/a>
\nOM is *one moment* and is a meetup designed to notice & relish a moment in everyday life. The meetup idea was created by Linda at her blog, a la mode stuff<\/a>.
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\nIf you’d like to participate in OM, just click the button and you’ll be taken to Linda’s post explaining it all.
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