Functional multiplicity sounds formidable. In our family, it has been built through something much smaller: waffles and cheese sandwiches, somatic signals, laughter, fear, repair, prayer, and learning how nine people can inhabit one life without requiring anyone to disappear. This is what an ordinary Saturday looks like from inside the Treehouse.
Tag Archives: Plural Family
The Work Inside an Ordinary Saturday
What does functional multiplicity actually look like in ordinary life? This companion analysis looks beneath one difficult Saturday to explore the small practices—communication, co-regulation, somatic signaling, shared agency, attention, repair, and delight—that help a plural family build a life together.
What Bedtime Looks Like
What does bedtime actually look like in a plural family/system? At the end of an extraordinarily difficult Hope’s Day, Dad discovers what his sons have been carrying, what they need to leave behind, and why bedtime isn’t simply how we finish the day—it is part of how we make the next one possible.
When Lived Experience Feels Like Destiny: Listening for the Whisper
When lived experience becomes so concrete that it occupies the entire horizon, it can begin to feel like destiny. On Hope’s Day, amid deep fear and uncertainty, we listen for the Whisper—the still, small voice that helps us see the little things, the longshots, and the possibilities that have not disappeared.
The Press Doesn’t Feel Like a Machine
Two mornings after a flood becomes a day of Rolling Stones, a Heidelberg printing press, watercolor, laughter, and Lake Blue. On Proverb’s Day, we discover something about plurality, creative agency, accessibility, and different people remaining different while accomplishing something together.
Midday Analysis: Justus’s Day — A Companion to “Three Warm Towels”
What does protection look like when something really does happen? A midday analysis of Justus’s Day, and a companion piece to “Three Warm Towels,” examining protection, accountability, truth, trauma, caregiving, and the family’s movement from emergency back toward ordinary life.
Three Warm Towels
We don’t know why the faucet was running. We do know what happened next. On Justus’s Day, a flooded bedroom becomes a story about three warm towels, a little peanut butter monster, telling the truth, caring for our home, and discovering that when plans change, our course doesn’t have to.
The Little Boy Who Told the Truth
When the world asked what comes next, seven-year-old Solis answered in the language of trauma and anger. This is a story about exploitation, employment, freedom, and the little boy who once told the truth—and needed Daddy to hear him again.
Present Presence: The Foundation of Ordinary Life
What happens when the present moment itself can become terrifying? Our plural family calls it a Terror Peek. During the pandemic, a quieter world helped us discover another possibility: Present Presence—the ability to inhabit the life that is actually here, together.
Solis’s Day Is Reclaiming the Sabbath
We stayed home on Sunday because we needed rest. By midday, the journal—and the analysis that followed it—was uncovering something much older about urgency, safety, work, faith, independence, and what it means to reclaim the Sabbath.
