Celebrating our PEPS group: 10 years!

1. The Chin/Martin family: Vance and Andrea, Abby and Lily
2. The Chase/Antonoff family: Patricia and Jayson, Alexander
3. The Seroussi/Turner family: Richard and Louisa, Allie and Daniel
4. The Nelson family: Tim and Susan, Eliot and Maddie
5. The Juarez/Wagner family: Wally and Loretta, Jessica and Myriah
6. The Hansen/Kornblatt family: Howard and Sondra, Milo and Ella
7. (The Brown family: Harry and Laurie, Zoe and Evan)

PEPS stands for Program for Early Parent Support. It originated as a child-abuse prevention program for single mothers of newborns. They would meet weekly and talk about the stresses of parenthood, support one another, and form a community. From their website:

PEPS is a prevention program based on the belief that knowledgeable, supported parents will be less likely to abuse or neglect their children. But PEPS goes beyond prevention to promotion, believing that parents who are confident and connected to positive friends and resources will enjoy their children more and help them reach their highest potential.

And amen to that.

Our group was strange from the start. It was a couples group. We met in the evenings, once a week for three months, rotating among our homes. Our group leader, Catherine Scarlet, led us in discussions about parenting, songs, and shared her parenting wisdom. At the end of three months, she cut us loose and we had to fly for ourselves.

We did. We soared.

The group had bonded sufficiently that we wanted to continue meeting. We'd gotten into the habit that Monday evenings were for PEPS. And we were on the path of most groups: we liked each other, we had a good time meeting, we shared parenting triumphs and woes, and we lived busy lives. Our leader, who had provided us a center of gravity had left, and we hadn't replaced it.

Until Sondra had an idea. This idea came from our flirtation with cohousing. We loved the idea of a strong community and the fact that a few days a week we could eat dinners in the common house, cooking only some of the time.

We couldn't replicate cohousing with our group, but we could do one thing: feed each other. So we did. We continued to meet weekly, rotating from house to house, but we had the host cook dinner for the rest.

Anyone who's cooked for a family and for a crowd will attest that cooking for 21 is nowhere near seven times harder than cooking for three. It's twice as hard. And what do you get for your doubled effort? Companionship, to be sure, but you also get 6 weeks off.

And there you have it. The way to our hearts and our time is through our stomachs.

We kept rotating and rotating. We went from meeting in our houses, to meeting (and eating) at a playroom near Greenlake, and now we're mostly in houses again. Week followed week. Every Friday or Saturday either Sondra or I would ask the other, "is it our week for PEPS?" If not, we breathed a sigh of relief. If so, we planned the menu, the buying, cooking, and transport.

And how did we know whose turn it was? Another simple idea: we rotated alphabetically by child name. Abby, Alexander, Allie, Eliot, Jessica, Milo, and Zoe. Remember who cooked last week, and you'll know who's up this week.

We grew from 21 to 27 as the second wave of kids hit the beaches, we lost the Browns last year, and are back down to 23.

Amazing facts:

• No divorces.
• No out-of-state/city moves.
• We take only 4-8 weeks off per year (holidays, etc.).
• Ten years in October!

12:53:21 AM  comment []    

Arab News: Here's what's broken, now let's fix it

What afflicts Arab society in our modern times is not, in the strict sense of the word, backwardness but a more sinister expression of it, what I would call here neobackwardness. We see it in the spectacle of an Arab who seemingly possesses all the attributes of modernity: He has a university degree, works in a high-tech office, speaks several languages, travels extensively, and appears normal to the naked eye, but once you scratch beneath that veneer, you find him infected with the deadly germ of stultifying traditionalism. He is convinced that he has made the leap to modernity, that his transformation is not shallow and superficial, and that he is not, in effect, a mere caricatural Westernized Arab. His peasant counterpart, confronted by his backwardness, will admit it and ask you gratefully for ways to overcome it. Neobackward Arabs, however, will continue, like alcoholics, to deny their affliction.

This from the Arab News. Maybe there is hope.  

12:26:28 AM  comment []    

Not Sarah

This woman looks eerily like my niece Sarah. Insert some platitude about how we're all human. Hope/lack of opportunity. Tolerance/hatred. We start with nearly the same raw material: what do we do with it?  

12:13:59 AM  comment []