Introducing Our Family to Yours

Welcome, to Stand In The Arena...the blog arm of the Family In The Arena movement.   

We wanted to introduce our incredibly blessed family - Mr. & Mrs. P, along with our two sons, Thing 1 and Thing 2.  We live in a home we remodeled ourselves with the help of Youtube in a "flyover state."  We've both been in the working world for about 15 years as adults, Mrs. P as a professional educator, and Mr. P in crisis management.  

In my (Mr. P) profession, the old "I'm not an expert, but I've had experience at..." mantra rings true for us and our content creation.  I don't think any of us would say we're experts necessarily at Raising Adventure, Plan Family, or even FIRE for Adventure...because I'm not sure what an expert in those things would look like...perhaps a well-balanced, happy, and "better than I deserve" family.  If that's the case, perhaps, we are in fact experts in those things.  Expert or not, we've learned a lot over the years, made mistakes, course-corrected many times, and are in a great spot today.  

As we talked through some of our favorite blog/vlog personalities out there, we gave some serious conversation and thought to this section.  Trying to walk the tightrope of demonstrating competency without being an arrogant braggart, is indeed a fine line.  As we went back and forth, we came up with a few high points to try to demonstrate how our backgrounds and past selves lend credibility and being to build trust with you, dear fellow Family in the Arena.  

Raising Adventure - 1,000 Hours Outdoors finishers x2, our youngest took his first road trip at 9 days old, road-tripped (with babies/toddlers/preschoolers) to all of the lower 48...several times.  Across the country (mostly on those road trips), hundreds of museums, zoos, camping nights - so many novel experiences.  (We'll show you how you can do the same in a cost-effective way if that becomes part of how you define adventure).  

Plan Family - served in roles of and helped develop strategic planning, education plans, tactical plans, etc where we take the emphasis out of the final product and focus it where it should be as Dwight Eisenhower said, on the planning process itself.  We've created many professional and personal plans over the years for organizations and families.  On our website, we'll provide tips/tricks/best practices/lessons learned alongside some tools/templates that you might find as a helpful conversation starting point for making your family more organized in order to deploy your resources (time, energy, money, etc) to live your best life.  

FIRE for Adventure - we firmly believe that money is not everything...but in many ways, everything requires money.  To that end, we've learned over the years how to best leverage your financial habits and resources to create a life of maximum "now and next" options to enjoy as a family.  Similar to the other parts of Family in the Arena, this section is loaded with tips, tricks, tools, and best practices to maximize the financial components of how you do life.  

You're certainly welcome to join us for any part of the resources...or all three.  For us, we view our lives as fairly connected (home, work, fun, etc), and doing better at one, over the years generally has meant we do better at the others.  

Throughout our posts and future content, I'm hopeful we'll get to build this venture into a form of community and we'll share more details of who we're becoming and how we do life.  We're also hopeful that along the way, as we build this community, you will contribute as well to help make this movement something bigger than ourselves writing in an echo chamber.  Both of us have done a lot of teaching in our lives and firmly believe we learn as much as we teach from the front of the classroom...so feel free to chip into the conversation.  As we've said in some of the other section introductions, from our family to yours, we're challenging you to determine what you want out of life, then use some of our systems to build your arena...and finally to actually do life.  Stand in the Arena. 

Happy trails to you and yours, 
Mr. & Mrs. P along with Thing 1 and Thing 2