Story in Pictures

 

 

 

Two of This Week's Three Big Events

 Alyssa performed in a local drama this year for the first time; we were thouroughly impressed with how talented the youth were! It was based on the story of a persecuted Christian in the Roman times. She made a lovely Roman.

Not sure what is going on with Julia's belly in this picture - it doesn't really look like that!

 Last night, we hosted the cast party for the production. The reality of that was the little guys got to watch a movie and eat popcorn in the master retreat while the teens took over the basement and fire pit outside.

  
We actually enjoy having large groups of teens at our house and the basement works great for it!

 Tuesday was our final day of Classical Conversations for Elijah, Bella and I until after Christmas. I'm not sure if I would have signed up to be a tutor if I had known the challenges we were going to face this fall, but I'm glad I committed before I would have made that decision. I have had to dump some other things I wanted to do, but CC has really taught me a lot and I'm pretty fond of my little class of eight. I wanted to show a class picture, but don't want to put them online without permission, so I'm showing our final project on the human body instead. 

The last six weeks we have made body parts while we learned about the human body. On Tuesday we assembled their paper counterparts. Unfortunately, Bella's femur bone got lost between school and home. 

We have another super exciting event coming on Sunday - I'll be back with that.

Always Joy

I have to agree that I think the greatest pain and the greatest joy are both experienced in parenting. We are working through some rough roads with one of our children. While the burden is heavy there, in enters little Elijah who constantly tells me that "I'm the bestest mommy in the world." Sunday he bought me flowers (with his daddy's help) and told me that we could take turns holding them. 

Please no one tell him that bestest isn't a word - it sounds so much more impressive than just best!

Planning

 We had a lovely party for Moriah and Emily last weekend. There are some good pictures on Facebook courtesy of their friends, but I sure didn't take many.

 The weather was rather cold and rainy, but it cleared up for a nice campfire later in the evening.

I am looking at the schedule from now until we travel for Christmas and there are major events on most weekends. Since I also have to fit in shopping, packing and corn-rowing four heads of hair, it looks far from calm and relaxing. I'm just taking it one day at a time, one demand at a time, and lately, one crisis at a time. I hope and pray that our first Christmas away in 12 years will be more enjoyable than stressful. Either way, it will be worth it to see Gabriel and Alayna!

I took my kids to the library this week - small thing for most people but it seemed like a big accomplishment to me with all that we have going on right now!

Party Party

 Today is Moriah and her friend Emily's birthday party here; there is 60% chance of rain but we are hoping for the best! We should have the energy to finish preparing, however, fueled by last night's candy stash. 

Moriah worked an almost 10 hour shift yesterday at Sheetz; Alei and Alyssa dressed up as bank robbers to stand in line at Chipotle and get $3 burritos. 

The rest of us headed to our church's Harvest Party with the usual fun bounce house and hay-ride. 

I'm off to clean...

Plugging On

 Just sitting at this key-board holds a risk that I will start typing as fast as my mind is spinning and before I come up for air, I will have three pages. (The reality is then that I would never be able to hit the publish button, so I'm going to skip that outburst.) Let's just say that one of the 11 has once again thrown at us some parenting challenges that we never anticipated. Dealing with this latest issue has really made me spend time contemplating what makes me feel like a success or a failure; I'm afraid far too many of my feelings are helplessly tied to the irrational decisions that a few of my children continue to make. I will spare you with an attempt of a blogable version of my journey, but it is proving to be a challenge, both in day to day life and in minute to minute living in my mind. 

In the meantime, between appointments and brain-wracking, I am still schooling the children and tutoring at CC. 

This is our current idea of art - draw what you'd like where you'd like

Bella's green person had a sad face - I'm deciding to not over-analyze it; she is a happy girl. 

As soon as I can possibly wrap up a day of homeschooling, the school bus delivers my home-work crew. Tori is blessing us with some recorder practice each night. Check out how seriously Elijah is taking "Hot Cross Buns". 

We are having a party here on Saturday, so I took the kids out a bit this afternoon for some yard clean up time. I am still getting tomatoes! Since the temperature is dipping tonight, I picked some green ones to ripen in the kitchen windowsill in case they freeze. 

"Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion." - Brennan Manning

Broken Children, Hurting Adults

The article below is worth the time if you haven't already read it on Facebook. I posted it a few days ago and comments are still rolling in. While it is heart-breaking and true, there is a whole side of it that appears so simple, yet is so very complex. The reality is that there are thousands of children that need homes in America and across the ocean in every direction. The difficulty is that we are seldom talking about children that can be adopted and raised as a regular biological child (unless they are very young). We are often talking about children that have lived through trauma, often in their biological family and then again in an orphanage or foster home. The truth is that if foster training and adoption classes taught the extent of the trauma that these children often bring to their new homes, adoption rates would plummet. International children generally come with little information to the adoption agency or the adopting family; it is about the largest step of faith that I have experienced. I know case after case of U.S. foster to adopt children that the truth about their backgrounds was not exposed even when the system knew the truth. (There are current law suits now about truths that were withheld that ended up all but destroying the families that took the children in.) While I know the system is broken - I don't have many ideas that I think are better other than full disclosure to adopting families. I think the greatest success would be thousands of Americans that have raised their own two or three children and are empty-nesters (or close enough) being willing to start over and give their time and wisdom to another two or three children that are in desperate need of a home. While I know the children are the greatest victims, I have been overwhelmed lately with several families that now have additional traumatized children and hurting adults from trying to fight the good fight to provide a family to older, broken, adopted children. Our world is filled with so much sadness. 

They Break, You Know

By: Liz Curtis Faria in Being Honest, FEATURED SLIDER 

 

It was something about the phrasing that got to me. Something about the cadence of his words, the staccato of his speech.
“Nobody loves me. Not even my mother who gave birth to me.”
It is an odd turn of phrase, isn’t it?
Not even my mother who gave birth to me.
He was buckled into the backseat of my Toyota, still too little to sit up front. At seven he had already moved more times than the total number of years he had been on the earth. And this time, like the times before it, he moved with his belongings in a trash bag. A suitcase, at least, would have added a small degree of dignity to the whole affair – to being “placed” in another and another and yet another foster home before reaching the 3rd grade. Trash bags break, you know. Trash bags can’t possibly support the contents of any life, and certainly not a life as fragile as this.
They break from the strain, eventually.
This move was harder for Stephen than most. It was a home he thought he would stay in, at least for awhile. He had felt affection there. When I went to pick him up, after his foster mother gave notice that he could no longer stay, he came easily with me; head down, no reaction on the surface of it. It was only when he got into my car that he began to sob the kind of aching sound that leaves you limp in its wake.
He could barely get out the words. Nobody loves me. Not even my mother who gave birth to me.
Months later, in a repeat scene (another foster mother, another removal), he would put up a fight. He would run around the living room, ducking behind furniture, refusing to leave. But on this night he had no fight in him.
That was Stephen at seven.
Nine-year old Stephen grips his report card in sweaty hands. We’re headed to an adoption event, where we will meet families who want to adopt an older child; families who do not automatically rule out a boy like Stephen with all of his long “history.” And he wants to impress them, these strangers. He wants to win them over, and so he brings his good report card along as tangible proof that he is a child worth loving.
A child should never have to prove they are worth loving.
Twelve-year old Stephen tells me that I’m his best friend. I’m his social worker, and he should have a real best friend, but I don’t say this to him. We’re at a taping for Wednesday’s Child, the news spot featuring children who are up for adoption. Stephen is engaging on camera. Maybe somebody will pick him this time. Maybe he is offering just enough evidence, at twelve, that he’s a boy worth loving. And he is lovable, truly. But it is not enough. A family never comes.
Years later, long after I’ve left the agency, I get an email from my old boss asking how I’m doing, and ending with a short P.S. “Stephen is in DYS lockup after running away from his foster home. You need to adopt him.” My stomach drops. I’ve had this thought many times. I should adopt him myself. But I don’t.
I heard about his murder from a friend who had seen it in the news. Shot outside a party over some foolish dispute. Dead at 18, dead just as he became a man. Not my Stephen, I prayed. When I realized that it was really him – that it could be no other – I sobbed gripped by the kind of anguish that leaves you limp in its wake.
The newspapers ran very little about the murder, as if it were an afterthought. Barely worth a mention, really. Anonymous strangers posted nasty comments online: “Just another gangbanger,” they said. You don’t even know him. You don’t know the first thing about this boy. You don’t know that as a child he would trace letters into my back with his finger to pass time at the doctor’s office, asking me to guess what phrase he was spelling out. “I ♥ U” he traced between my shoulders, the last time we played this game.
Stephen had been wrong, that night in my Toyota. His mother did love him, in her way. She was there, at the funeral. She greeted me kindly. I think she knew I loved Stephen as I knew she did. We both failed him in the end, and that joined us I suppose. Neither of us could give him a family.
There were no photos from Stephen’s childhood at the funeral home. No images of the green-eyed boy with the sweet smile to remind us of what had been lost. There were no pictures of Stephen with his brothers, and so I printed up snapshots of the four boys together, taken on a supervised visit, and brought them to the funeral to give to the family. It was something I could do, against the larger backdrop of nothing I could do.
There were very few social workers at the funeral, and none of Stephen’s many foster mothers. Stephen spent more of his life being raised in the system than out of it. If you claim legal responsibility for a child, you best show up at his funeral. You should show up when he dies. He was yours, in a way, wasn’t he? You owe it to him. And if he did not belong to you, then who did he ever belong to?
His mother was there, at least. His mother who gave birth to him. I hear the echo of his voice from those many years ago.
Somebody does love you Stephen. I want to tell him. But it’s too late.
Stephen was the one, for me. The one who embodied all the failures of a system so broken that to heal it would take far more than the casts that heal the literal broken bones of the children growing up within it.
They break, you know. These kids we leave behind. Eventually they break.
November is National Adoption Month. For information on adoption from the foster care system, visit the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption.

*Stephen is a fictional name for a real boy the world lost.

A Bit More San Francisco

Here are a few more shots of San Francisco. This was the view from our hotel downtown. It was only three blocks to Chinatown, so we headed there several times.
 

  
Here's the world famous Golden Gate Bridge, which does have a barely visible golden gate under it on one side.

  
We saw a lot of the city and surrounding area. Recognize this shot from the old TV show "Full House"?

I have always been interested in real estate; it must stem from my mother toting me around to open houses as a child. I started looking at their housing market. Check out these houses - nothing like a 3 bedroom, ONE bath little house for $525,000. Downtown, you couldn't even get a rundown town house for under 600,000. 

 Want to live in Sausalito? It's considered the Beverly Hills of San Francisco. These houses were wild. They are built on about four levels of the hill overlooking the Bay and Alcatraz. The top has a road behind them and the bottom has a road in front, but the middle layers seem to only to reachable by steep stairs or these elevators that run up the side of the mountain. Can you imagine moving? Or just buying a couch? Oh, and they cost about 10 million. (I'm yet to figure out what the tens of thousands of people do for a living that can afford the housing market there.)

 Our last day we headed out of the city to Muir Woods, a redwood forest. The pictures don't really portray the true grandeur of the place.
 

  
I really liked this quote from John Muir -
 

 We really enjoyed our time away.