#family

Christmas Does Not Belong to Me

12.18.2018 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 1 Comment

I just want to make sure we have OUR Christmas. I’ve said it to my friends and my friends have said it to me. Somewhere between college graduation and thirtieth birthdays Christmas becomes super, super busy. And we feel like it’s all about other people. All about extended relatives. All about work parties or neighborhood parties […]

How We Advent (And Advent Music)

12.01.2018 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 1 Comment

When I was about ten my dad first introduced us to the old custom of Adventing before Christmas and Christmasing until Epiphany. At first, it was quite difficult for me to accept. My dad and I had many debates about how early was too early to turn on the real Christmas songs and all the […]

Homeschooling Preschool

02.26.2018 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 2 Comments

Our oldest child is only 4.5 so we certainly don’t have a lot of homeschooling experience. But since I’m about to have a “homeschooled preschool” graduate, I thought I would share our general plan for these early years: When in doubt, do less (in terms of academics.) Every year since my oldest was a baby I’ve had […]

The Third Child

01.16.2018 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // Leave a Comment

I’ve only been a mother to a third child for six weeks (well, technically about eleven months,) but I’ve long known about the stereotype of the third child. Really, it’s the stereotype of any subsequent child— that parents kind of care about each one less and less. Or at least, that each one receives less […]

How to be an ENFP but also get things done

08.07.2017 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 5 Comments

I’m a Myers-Briggs type ENFP. As with any personality type, there are positive and negatives to this: on the one hand, I can be passionate, relationship-oriented, good at improvising, and creative; on the other hand I can be disorganized, procrastinating, impractical, and bad at planning ahead (Anyone else with a “P” in their type, and […]

First Trimester Salad

04.29.2017 by Elizabeth Hanna Pham // 2 Comments

I’m just trying to survive. That’s always been my mantra during the first trimester of pregnancy which has always been fairly rough for me. This one has been particularly rough as I try to adequately feed, nurture, referee, and entertain two rambunctious toddler boys. I pretty much always feel like curling up in bed and sleeping […]

“There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I found this quote well described my own experience– consistently reworking my idealism, being surprised by it, sometimes even losing it only to discover it all the more fully. I know we will never find all the answers, but how thrilling it is to find ourselves getting a little closer to the source and summit of things, a little closer, as we work our way through the “degrees.”