Last night, Daniel said no.
We had been considering volunteering Saturday morning, and our five-year-old son did not want to go. There were fears and associations wrapped around it, but eventually the answer became very simple.
Daniel did not need to become brave enough.
We stayed home.
By Saturday morning, something else had become apparent: staying home had not merely protected Daniel from something he wasn’t ready to do. It had made room for the rest of us.
Solis had told Daddy the night before that even if we stayed home, he was afraid he still wouldn’t get time with him.
Daddy remembered.
There were boys who needed holding. Boys waiting for their turns. Breakfast. Prayers. Interruptions. Anxiety. Nicknames. Kisses. An old drawing of a cruise ship. Blueberry waffles with peanut butter.
Nothing had been devised to demonstrate anything.
It was Saturday.
At midday, after looking back over the journal with ChatGPT, we realized that this was exactly the kind of ordinary life we hope Notes from the Treehouse can make visible.
Seven years ago, when we were first beginning to understand ourselves as a plural family/system, what would it have meant to find another family somewhere out there simply living?
Not explaining themselves.
Not defending their existence.
Not offering ten techniques for managing plurality.
Just living.
Children needing what children need. A Daddy trying to give eight sons enough of himself and sometimes getting it wrong. Brothers waiting for one another. Someone becoming impatient. Someone needing reassurance. Someone wanting waffles.
There are children here.
There is family here.
There is ordinary life here.
And there can be a future here.
The Wireframe
We journal our life as it happens.
That means the journal can look a little like the enormous multicolored 3D wireframes we used to build when we worked in architecture.
We could spend countless hours lost inside those models. To someone walking past the computer, they might have looked incomprehensible: thousands upon thousands of lines crossing one another in three-dimensional space.
But we knew what we were looking at.
Then we would render it.
Suddenly there was light, material, shadow, reflection, depth.
The rendering hadn’t created the architecture.
The architecture was already in the model.
That is something like what these analyses with AI have become for us.
We live first.
We journal while we’re living.
Then sometimes we step back and render a view.
And occasionally we see something we couldn’t see while we were inside it.
Today, the rendering told us something very simple:
Daniel said no. We stayed home. And life happened here.
So we stopped analyzing and went back to living it.
Hidden People
We lay down together.
Daddy held Daniel.
Then Justus.
We looked for something everyone might enjoy watching and eventually found an animated program called Hilda.
The first episode was called “Hidden People.”
That seemed promising.
There were invisible elves. There was a strange magical landscape. There was a deer fox.
At one point Solis essentially wanted to know what a deer fox was.
Then we realized:
Why do we need to ask?
It’s a deer fox.
For a little while, we could stop requiring everything strange to justify itself.
The show was nutty and irreverent and trippy in exactly the way we needed.
The little boys reacted constantly. Some of the older boys became quiet and disappeared into the story.
Daddy realized something too.
He sometimes expects his older sons to signal while they are watching something with him because he wants evidence that they are there and enjoying themselves.
But perhaps being quiet is how they enjoy it.
Perhaps Daddy can stop asking for evidence and simply let them watch.
So we did.
Then we ate mini quesadillas and remembered that there was Greek salad in the refrigerator.
Ordinary life.
One Little Thing
Then something unexpected happened.
Hope wrote a letter to Ben Stiller on August 21, 2025.
He was 14 then, as he is now, and he wanted to thank him for Severance.
One line in particular had meant an extraordinary amount to him:
“We are not parts of anyone.”
Hope wrote about being a plural boy in a nine-person plural family. He wrote about what it meant to hear something on television that unexpectedly came so close to his own experience.
For a year, we had talked about sending it.
We hadn’t.
This afternoon, suddenly there was an overpowering feeling:
Send the letter.
Justus wanted us to do it.
Proverb helped.
Daddy held Hope.
We found the letter, made the small revision we had wanted to make, found a current contact for the Severance team, and included a link to Notes from the Treehouse.
Then the journal says:
All right, Hope, Godspeed.
Sent.
3:53
A year and a day after Hope wrote it, his words finally went out into the world.
Proverb responded with a feeling of satisfaction.
Completion.
One little thing.
We Missed You
Not long afterward, Paul texted.
We had worried about not volunteering today. We wondered whether people would be disappointed in us.
Instead, Paul wrote:
“Hi John, hi Everyone —
I missed seeing all of you today.”
He told us that someone was praying for us.
Another friend sent his love.
That was all.
We had said no.
We had stayed home.
And relationship persisted.
Taking Back the Octopus
Toward the end of the afternoon, Daddy spent a few moments face-to-face with each boy.
Jude kissed Daddy back.
Luke appeared when Daddy asked, “Where’s my Luke?”
Justus felt needy, and Daddy reminded him that he is allowed to feel needy.
He’s a kid.
He has a dad.
And finally Daddy came back to Daniel.
There is a nickname we have used for him:
My little urchin who lives under the sea in the octopus’s garden where we’re happy and we’re safe.
The words grew from one of our favorite Beatles songs from early childhood, “Octopus’s Garden.” It became part of Daniel’s language of affection and safety: a little urchin, under the sea, in an octopus’s garden.
Recently we stopped saying the whole thing.
Someone associated with a painful part of our life had used an octopus as a metaphor, and somehow the octopus became contaminated too.
Today Daddy decided that was enough.
Octopuses are God’s creatures.
Nobody gets to take them away from Daniel.
Daddy told him:
“You loved the octopus. You get to continue loving the octopus.”
Daniel signaled repeatedly.
And maybe that is what happened today.
We stayed home.
We reclaimed Saturday.
We watched something ridiculous and magical.
We ate blueberry waffles with peanut butter, quesadillas, Greek salad, and ice cream.
We sent a letter that had been waiting a year.
We discovered that people could miss us without punishing us for being absent.
We became frightened.
We found one another again.
Daddy held his sons.
And a five-year-old got his octopus back.
Nothing about today was devised.
Nothing was performed to demonstrate a principle.
We were too busy living it.
Last night, Daniel said no.
We listened.
And then Saturday happened.
Notes from the Treehouse 