Diversity?

At first I considered us a not-so-diverse family, plain vanilla, father, mother, 2.5 children, and a dog, living on a fairly average income, then I started considering our everyday lives: packing up a few suitcases and moving halfway around the world, homeschooling, our friends, our extended family… If we’re vanilla, we’re surely at least an organic, imported, French vanilla with real vanilla bean pieces.

Our kids have traveled a fair bit, enough to have broadened their idea of what ‘normal’ is. We’ve lived alongside the ultra-wealthy and among the third-world poor. We have good friends from India, Turkey, New Zealand, Germany, Australia, and Belize; friends that are bus drivers, doctors, corporate stooges, artists, farmers: blue-collar, white-collar, and shirtless; friends that sign their cards Love, Johnny and Larry; friends that are pagan, Jehovah Witness, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, agnostic, Jewish, and Buddhist.

Our kids have homeschooled, Catholic-schooled, private-schooled, and public-schooled. Our homeschooling efforts have included neo-classical, out-of-the-box, unschooling, Latin-centered, and totally-winging-it eclectic, and at times have been only supplementary or complementary to their institutional education.

We have family members that are holier-than-thou, substance abusers, HIV+, suicides, cancer survivors, born-agains, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarian, and at least one No Party Affiliation.

I still think we’re a pretty ordinary, rather typical, not-so-diverse family, plain vanilla, but maybe covered in hot fudge, with whipped cream, a few nuts, and a cherry on top.