She entered my life in the heart of Texas. We were strangers there, temporarily assigned by the Air Force while my husband received training. We had been married only 10 months before and here we were alone in the middle of flat nowhere meeting her for the first time. "It's boy!" my husband first said and was quickly corrected by the doctor's official pronouncement. I was absolutely flabbergasted that I would have a girl. I had just figured it would be a boy 'cause first born boys run on my side. But there she was, perfect and beautiful and tiny in my arms. From the beginning she was a gift. Oh, the fun of naming her and dressing her in pink and knowing she was our very own! God knew we needed her. Right then. Ten months after we took our vows. In the heart of a strange land. On our own. Without the usual fanfare you'd expect with a first born. We were a real family now, just starting out on our adventure together and God knew we'd want to share it with her. It shaped us. It changed us. It grew us.
And she's been there for all of it. The five states. The 10 moves. The next 5 siblings--including 2 adoptions. The different career paths. The hard choices that changed our lives.
She's given us joy, beauty, laughter, sweetness and encouragement all along the way in the different stages and places. She's provided some frustration here and there as any child will do (there was a reason my husband called her the Banshee after all) but that's to be expected when training a human being from scratch. The best joy is to see her now loving Christ and desiring to follow Him.
As I look back on these years that have so quickly flown, I see the cute little girl proudly holding a baby brother. I see a strawberry blanket wrapped around a blond head. I see cheetahs and horses wearing holes in jeans. I remember the phone call to "Please tell your daughter to quit kissing my son". I hear elaborate plans being laid for neighborhood fun, saving up for a horse, making movies, selling paintings and art. (Oh, my. She IS her father's daughter.) I even hear the tiresome bickering between siblings..wait that's coming from the other room...
I hear friends giggling and see guacamole face masks and star wars films being reenacted. I see bike races and garter snakes. I can still hear her grandpa giving her his final advice to marry someone who knows Christ--she was only nine, but she listened intently and seriously. I see her bravely leaving her own dreams to walk the long lonely walk on the first day of high school into the unknown. I see her emerge 4 years later a beautiful, confident, and joyful leader. It's been quite the ride. She's been the perfect gift for us, selected by a good and kind God to bless us these past 18 years. Today we pack her up and take her to college. Not too far away, but far enough. We will step back and let her spread her wings. I can't help but hear the prophetic words from strangers as I held her in my arms back in Texas: "Enjoy her. They grow up so fast."
Friday, August 22, 2014
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Lessons Learned
It was "one of those days"--too long for a facebook post but not really worth blogging about. But I'm going to blog it anyway....
It started with a realization that time is running out to get my girl ready for college, that today was my last chance to do grocery shopping for camping, that we will be gone during high school registration, that my son still hasn't taken that test at the community college he needed for advanced history...or something like that, and that camping is just the day after my daughter gets her wisdom teeth out and THAT happens...tomorrow. Which brings us back to this morning when I realized I needed to go with her to the airport to drop off her friend Sarah, because Ikea is at the airport. Ikea! Nuff said about that. So here it is... advice from those who've left a child at the airport curb intending to pick them up again in a few minutes:
1) Make sure your children know your cell phone number for when they send you off to the cell phone waiting area at the airport.
2) Make sure they haven't left their cell phone in the car with you.
3)Make sure you don't listen to the radio in the cell phone waiting area just in case they call their own cell phone (because of #1) which is on vibrate.
4)Make sure your child knows that pay phones exist.
5)Make sure your child knows what to do when separated, because them WALKING to the cell phone area while you have driven back to the airport to have them paged? Just doesn't work out well.
6)If the dash board starts vibrating while trying to call your child, it really isn't a good sign. In fact, it's a bad sign. Check the tiny cubby underneath the dash. It will be the beginning of a nightmare.
7)Know what your child is wearing. Calling home to see if your younger children remember will lead to disappointment.
8)Know that when you page your child on the white courtesy phone, you are now stuck at the United ticket counter until they respond to your page. (Unless you finally get a call from your husband informing you that your child is waiting at the parking pay stations.)
9)Pray. And don't think too much about the news.
10) When you are finally reunited and the day is basically gone and you are both emotionally and physically drained, and you are very thirsty, and Starbucks is OUT OF LEMONADE for the shaken iced tea lemonades, don't sip your child's iced coffee. It is NOT satisfying and will only suck the moisture from your tongue and leave a horrible aftertaste and you will only regret it and further confirm that you will never,ever, ever be a coffee person.
So after all of that, we did do Ikea and really didn't care any more. You can't decide between yellow, gray or pink for your dorm room? Who cares? Just throw a little of each in the cart. It doesn't even matter.
And then, to shorten the fiasco, Ryan offered to do my Winco shopping. I gave him bits of my list at a time over the phone--loudly. I was in Target. He was in Winco saying "what?" and I was shouting random things like: "Little Smokies!" and "Macaroni!" in the towel aisle.
Then we finally met up at Costco and did THAT, and then I rode home with Ryan in his car. (Have I said how great my husband is? He is great! Because of him we got home an hour earlier with his help.) So we rode home in his hot Hyundai with the windows down, shouting our conversation over the rush of air and enjoying the beautiful sunset with our daughter following behind. Tomorrow, we will be up early for the wisdom teeth extraction and another adventure. I am wondering if back at PDX they are still paging her every fifteen minutes..... I guess we'll see in two weeks when I go back to pick up my Virginia family.
It started with a realization that time is running out to get my girl ready for college, that today was my last chance to do grocery shopping for camping, that we will be gone during high school registration, that my son still hasn't taken that test at the community college he needed for advanced history...or something like that, and that camping is just the day after my daughter gets her wisdom teeth out and THAT happens...tomorrow. Which brings us back to this morning when I realized I needed to go with her to the airport to drop off her friend Sarah, because Ikea is at the airport. Ikea! Nuff said about that. So here it is... advice from those who've left a child at the airport curb intending to pick them up again in a few minutes:
1) Make sure your children know your cell phone number for when they send you off to the cell phone waiting area at the airport.
2) Make sure they haven't left their cell phone in the car with you.
3)Make sure you don't listen to the radio in the cell phone waiting area just in case they call their own cell phone (because of #1) which is on vibrate.
4)Make sure your child knows that pay phones exist.
5)Make sure your child knows what to do when separated, because them WALKING to the cell phone area while you have driven back to the airport to have them paged? Just doesn't work out well.
6)If the dash board starts vibrating while trying to call your child, it really isn't a good sign. In fact, it's a bad sign. Check the tiny cubby underneath the dash. It will be the beginning of a nightmare.
7)Know what your child is wearing. Calling home to see if your younger children remember will lead to disappointment.
8)Know that when you page your child on the white courtesy phone, you are now stuck at the United ticket counter until they respond to your page. (Unless you finally get a call from your husband informing you that your child is waiting at the parking pay stations.)
9)Pray. And don't think too much about the news.
10) When you are finally reunited and the day is basically gone and you are both emotionally and physically drained, and you are very thirsty, and Starbucks is OUT OF LEMONADE for the shaken iced tea lemonades, don't sip your child's iced coffee. It is NOT satisfying and will only suck the moisture from your tongue and leave a horrible aftertaste and you will only regret it and further confirm that you will never,ever, ever be a coffee person.
So after all of that, we did do Ikea and really didn't care any more. You can't decide between yellow, gray or pink for your dorm room? Who cares? Just throw a little of each in the cart. It doesn't even matter.
And then, to shorten the fiasco, Ryan offered to do my Winco shopping. I gave him bits of my list at a time over the phone--loudly. I was in Target. He was in Winco saying "what?" and I was shouting random things like: "Little Smokies!" and "Macaroni!" in the towel aisle.
Then we finally met up at Costco and did THAT, and then I rode home with Ryan in his car. (Have I said how great my husband is? He is great! Because of him we got home an hour earlier with his help.) So we rode home in his hot Hyundai with the windows down, shouting our conversation over the rush of air and enjoying the beautiful sunset with our daughter following behind. Tomorrow, we will be up early for the wisdom teeth extraction and another adventure. I am wondering if back at PDX they are still paging her every fifteen minutes..... I guess we'll see in two weeks when I go back to pick up my Virginia family.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Confessions of a Not Great Mom
Okay, I'm going to get real tonight. You will feel better about your own mothering. I promise. I am going to let you in on one of my biggest failings. It is something my husband will shake his head at, and my very healthy and active family and friends have probably long suspected, but I am a Fast Food Drive-Thru Queen. Someday I will be a healthy and active person too, but not now. It's just "not my season". (This is acceptable Christian homemaker lingo that releases us from self-inflicted guilt. I am all for it.) Some day it will be my exercise-regularly-and-drink-arrugala-smoothie season, but for now it is my know-every-value-menu-between-Enchanted-Forest-and-Intel-season.
I'm good at it. There is a real science to ordering for a family of 7 (now 8), which I hate to say, my husband has not yet mastered. You never pull up and just throw out one person's order and then wait for the rest of the car to figure it out, adding a burger here or a fry there. This causes confusion and panic and invariably, tears from the back seat, and is also rude to the person taking the order. Instead, always, always yell at everybody as you are pulling into the parking lot, letting them know where you are (because their heads have been buried in their electronic devices and they will be clueless and dazed), and let them know the price limit, telling them to figure it out NOW.
There are 3 cars ahead of you, and you want their decisions by the time there is only one. Then, when you do pull up, you can rattle off in an orderly fashion: 2 bacon cheddar McChickens, 6 cheese burgers, 1 cheeseburger Happy Meal for a boy child with chocolate milk to drink, and 6 regular McChickens. Then they tell you to please pull forward into the burger purgatory space because your order will take a little more time. Once you have your order, you instruct the child in the front passenger seat to count how many sandwiches and fries you've been given. If the number matches up, you move on--it doesn't even matter if it is the correct type as long as there is enough. You just go with it. Don't push your luck! Then, and only then, pull out of the lot. And that is how it's done, Folks.
How? How could it come to this? (I know I am now officially fallen from any pedestal that I may have been wrongfully placed on.)
Tonight, I, myself, was forced to admit how bad it has gotten lately. My two middle schoolers and I were on our way 45 minutes north to a special youth group event. We needed a quick dinner. I mentally ran through my options and decided that our home town McDonald's would be faster than our mid-way Arby's (cheaper too. Bonus!) I informed them of their price limit and my son remembered a bogo offer on an old receipt if we just called and completed a survey for a code. I handed my daughter the receipt and my phone and told her to go for it. If she could get the code by the time it was our turn, they could order the "good stuff". Well, it was a very thorough survey. We didn't make it. But it did bring to light how ridiculously often we'd eaten at fast food in the past 30 days. (Really, you should know it's bad when you are in line at McDonald's with a still fresh Arby's ice tea in you cup holder.) But officially admitting that you are in the top bracket for how many times you've eaten fast food in the past 30 days is very humbling.
"Don't fill in the 'other' space", I panic and tell my daughter when they want to know which places we've been. "We've already told them enough!" Not my proudest moment.
While this practice is not good or socially or politically or medically accepted, I feel like I've had my reasons. Now, I will admit that while it is true we are not even doing sports right now, so I don't have that excuse, I do have a few excuses that I will share such as.....a brand new baby. And if I need to add to that: home schooling, co-op teaching, youth group hosting, unending dental, orthodontia, and medical appointments, birthday parties and graduations and even a hospitalization that have all been a part of our spring.
So, this is my season: Survival. Imperfection. Chaos. Blessings. French Fries. Large ice teas. Gluten. Let my failures encourage you who are actually handling the craziness with much more preparedness and grace. And let my failures encourage those of you who can relate that you are not alone. Someday I might just get my act together. But for now we will pray the Tim Hawkins prayer: Lord change the molecular make-up of this junk to that of a carrot.
I guess we'll just have to use that coupon code next time.
I'm good at it. There is a real science to ordering for a family of 7 (now 8), which I hate to say, my husband has not yet mastered. You never pull up and just throw out one person's order and then wait for the rest of the car to figure it out, adding a burger here or a fry there. This causes confusion and panic and invariably, tears from the back seat, and is also rude to the person taking the order. Instead, always, always yell at everybody as you are pulling into the parking lot, letting them know where you are (because their heads have been buried in their electronic devices and they will be clueless and dazed), and let them know the price limit, telling them to figure it out NOW.
There are 3 cars ahead of you, and you want their decisions by the time there is only one. Then, when you do pull up, you can rattle off in an orderly fashion: 2 bacon cheddar McChickens, 6 cheese burgers, 1 cheeseburger Happy Meal for a boy child with chocolate milk to drink, and 6 regular McChickens. Then they tell you to please pull forward into the burger purgatory space because your order will take a little more time. Once you have your order, you instruct the child in the front passenger seat to count how many sandwiches and fries you've been given. If the number matches up, you move on--it doesn't even matter if it is the correct type as long as there is enough. You just go with it. Don't push your luck! Then, and only then, pull out of the lot. And that is how it's done, Folks.
How? How could it come to this? (I know I am now officially fallen from any pedestal that I may have been wrongfully placed on.)
Tonight, I, myself, was forced to admit how bad it has gotten lately. My two middle schoolers and I were on our way 45 minutes north to a special youth group event. We needed a quick dinner. I mentally ran through my options and decided that our home town McDonald's would be faster than our mid-way Arby's (cheaper too. Bonus!) I informed them of their price limit and my son remembered a bogo offer on an old receipt if we just called and completed a survey for a code. I handed my daughter the receipt and my phone and told her to go for it. If she could get the code by the time it was our turn, they could order the "good stuff". Well, it was a very thorough survey. We didn't make it. But it did bring to light how ridiculously often we'd eaten at fast food in the past 30 days. (Really, you should know it's bad when you are in line at McDonald's with a still fresh Arby's ice tea in you cup holder.) But officially admitting that you are in the top bracket for how many times you've eaten fast food in the past 30 days is very humbling.
"Don't fill in the 'other' space", I panic and tell my daughter when they want to know which places we've been. "We've already told them enough!" Not my proudest moment.
While this practice is not good or socially or politically or medically accepted, I feel like I've had my reasons. Now, I will admit that while it is true we are not even doing sports right now, so I don't have that excuse, I do have a few excuses that I will share such as.....a brand new baby. And if I need to add to that: home schooling, co-op teaching, youth group hosting, unending dental, orthodontia, and medical appointments, birthday parties and graduations and even a hospitalization that have all been a part of our spring.
So, this is my season: Survival. Imperfection. Chaos. Blessings. French Fries. Large ice teas. Gluten. Let my failures encourage you who are actually handling the craziness with much more preparedness and grace. And let my failures encourage those of you who can relate that you are not alone. Someday I might just get my act together. But for now we will pray the Tim Hawkins prayer: Lord change the molecular make-up of this junk to that of a carrot.
I guess we'll just have to use that coupon code next time.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Red Profile Books, Sleep and More Waiting
Sometimes God allows situations where you become keenly aware that you are not the least bit in control. The adoption process is one of those.
We are at the point in our adoption journey where I am at a loss for what I should do. We had such a flurry of potential birth moms for a while, with all of them choosing other families. This isn't too surprising for us since we have 5 children. We aren't prime real estate. But still, we thought by now, somebody would have looked beyond the cover of our profile book and let God open their hearts to us.
With encouragement by our program director, we re-did our profile book. We made it bigger, less about our family, and more about us as a couple and our desire for another child. We even made the cover red because red is the color of choice we are told. And since then we have heard exactly nothing.
Of course, all along the way I have had my questions if we are in the right program, if we should pursue an independent adoption, should we go international or maybe do a state adoption? I've poured over waiting child lists. I've considered fasting. We've held family prayer meetings. I've prayed through sleepless nights. I've read blogs. I've prayed for the right attitude. I've packed suitcases to meet birth moms who didn't pan out. I've wept. I've prayed some more.
This morning as I was pouring over Psalms, trying to gain some encouragement, God led me to Psalm 127. I am familiar with this Psalm. It is read at child dedications, weddings--even church business meetings, etc. But today He opened it up anew to me.
Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain.
Well, I can feel the truth of that in the very center of my being--the "labor in vain" part. I feel absolutely helpless. Suffocatingly helpless.
It is vain to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labors....
Hmmm.... new profile book? Agonizing throughout the day if we are in the right program? Agonizing throughout the night at times? Agonizing that we might be altogether crazy to do this at all?
For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.
Even in his SLEEP??? Even if they don't have the ideal profile?? Even if they are sure that they will fall short when compared to other families??? "EVEN in his sleep." I must let this wash over me and cool my fevered thoughts.
Behold, children are a gift of the Lord....
Children are a GIFT! We don't haggle about gifts. We don't tell the giver "Hey! You are late with my gift!" We don't set deadlines for gifts. We don't worry about gifts. They are a bonus! They are a surprise. They come easily. We don't worry ourselves over them. They are provided FOR us. The giver is working to get it, to provide it, to present it beautifully--all when the giver is ready--all for the purpose of blessing.
I am reminded that my Father is the Giver. He gave us this desire. We know that this is a Biblical desire. We've taken the steps to say we are open to His gift. It's up to Him. Now...if I could just rest in this....you might even say: "sleep".
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Psalm 37:4
We are at the point in our adoption journey where I am at a loss for what I should do. We had such a flurry of potential birth moms for a while, with all of them choosing other families. This isn't too surprising for us since we have 5 children. We aren't prime real estate. But still, we thought by now, somebody would have looked beyond the cover of our profile book and let God open their hearts to us.
With encouragement by our program director, we re-did our profile book. We made it bigger, less about our family, and more about us as a couple and our desire for another child. We even made the cover red because red is the color of choice we are told. And since then we have heard exactly nothing.
Of course, all along the way I have had my questions if we are in the right program, if we should pursue an independent adoption, should we go international or maybe do a state adoption? I've poured over waiting child lists. I've considered fasting. We've held family prayer meetings. I've prayed through sleepless nights. I've read blogs. I've prayed for the right attitude. I've packed suitcases to meet birth moms who didn't pan out. I've wept. I've prayed some more.
This morning as I was pouring over Psalms, trying to gain some encouragement, God led me to Psalm 127. I am familiar with this Psalm. It is read at child dedications, weddings--even church business meetings, etc. But today He opened it up anew to me.
Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain.
Well, I can feel the truth of that in the very center of my being--the "labor in vain" part. I feel absolutely helpless. Suffocatingly helpless.
It is vain to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labors....
Hmmm.... new profile book? Agonizing throughout the day if we are in the right program? Agonizing throughout the night at times? Agonizing that we might be altogether crazy to do this at all?
For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.
Even in his SLEEP??? Even if they don't have the ideal profile?? Even if they are sure that they will fall short when compared to other families??? "EVEN in his sleep." I must let this wash over me and cool my fevered thoughts.
Behold, children are a gift of the Lord....
Children are a GIFT! We don't haggle about gifts. We don't tell the giver "Hey! You are late with my gift!" We don't set deadlines for gifts. We don't worry about gifts. They are a bonus! They are a surprise. They come easily. We don't worry ourselves over them. They are provided FOR us. The giver is working to get it, to provide it, to present it beautifully--all when the giver is ready--all for the purpose of blessing.
I am reminded that my Father is the Giver. He gave us this desire. We know that this is a Biblical desire. We've taken the steps to say we are open to His gift. It's up to Him. Now...if I could just rest in this....you might even say: "sleep".
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Psalm 37:4
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