Rethinking Traditions From Your Childhood At Home

The Power of Life Cycles.

This past weekend we celebrated my son’s 7th birthday. As the day approached, I realized that turning seven-years-old held a lot of weight. I can recall hearing quite a few people refer to turning seven as a point where something pivotal happened in their lives— huge changes that marked a point in time. 

Already he’s been transitioning into a new title of being a big brother which also means he’s no longer an only child and there’s a certain amount of new responsibility that comes with him independently taking care of certain tasks. There’s an air of maturity that comes with this new structure in the home. 

From what I know from continuing to study Astrology, I know that age 7 is when you have your first Saturn Square and it is also an 8th house protected year.

A Saturn Square is when transit Saturn (where it currently is in the sky) makes a “square”, a challenging/frustrating aspect to where Saturn was at your time of birth (found in your birth chart). Saturn is a planet associated with responsibility, duty, maturity, authenticity and time, overall.

With these indicators, it can be a really enlightening though tough time or it can be a heartbreaking time all around. The thing that will determine how things go is the environment he’s apart of, school and home.

I love his school. They are the kind of school that greets each child by name each day at the doors. It makes all the difference with that simple gesture, that “I see you and you matter” gesture.

Connection Through Writing.

As we got closer to his birthday, I decided to create a new tradition: the gift of thoughtfully crafter hand-written letters from those you love and who love and support you. Each letter was full of words of affirmation, words of encouragement and words of truly seeing the God in you.

Seeing you as you are as a child, seeing you beaming with unlimited potential.

I have been on a mission to leave behind primary resource documents for my kids and possible future descendants. I’m doing this in the form of journaling. I have been journaling for the past 3 almost 4 years straight and when I go back to read a little bit of the entries, I’m amazed by my growth from 2017/2018. So much has happened since then.

I remember in 2017, I was researching my roots, trying to see who came before me and seeing if they may have had breadcrumbs of who I could be. I was just beginning my self-discovery journey. Thankfully, my parents have done a great job in keeping photo albums and a couple of letters from their parents. I only have stories my parents tell about my grandparents to go by, not physical journals, primary resources. I want to change that. I want my children to have these primary resources to be able to go back and read real personal accounts from someone they know and love. I want them to be able to look within themselves, of course, and I’d love for them to look within their roots, too. Not for answers or breadcrumbs, but for encouragement when times are tough, like now.

Integrating The New & The Old.

Another thing I’ve seen recently was from Story Worth, a service where they send you or your loved one journal prompts over a course of time and at the end of the year, they bring the entries together to craft a keepsake book to hold and keep for years to come. I’ve got two recordings I did with my dad where we spoke about his time serving in Iraq, recalling his experience on 9/11 and family questions, especially birthdates and birth locations for those who had record of that. I’ve been meaning to transcribe the videos so I can have a written copy of the chat. I’d been thinking of even creating a book, something like what Story Worth creates, but I want it to be a time-capsule of sorts, too.

I hope you feel inspired to create new traditions with your loved ones or revamp the old ones you cherish!

take care,

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