Reflections from our Resurrection Garden

"Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."  

Luke 23:34

So many things are rolling around in my head it is time to blog.  A few weeks ago I shared about some of our adoption struggles.  We have been so blessed by an outpouring of support from our friends and family with whom we are truly blessed.  I am happy to report that the last two weeks have been much less difficult.  Healing continues and will be a lifelong journey, but we are learning together to adapt and life has returned to a more peaceful normal for now.  As Resurrection Day nears we are focusing on Jesus' sacrifice for us on the cross.  I complained in my last post that in our struggle withour adopted children "some days I fail miserably trying to help repair or minimize the damage that I did not do."  I should have really said most days I fail miserably, but I was trying to be positive.  As we planted our Resurrection Garden in preparation for Easter and I placed three crosses carefully in the dirt,  I reflected that maybe, just maybe, God was teaching me a lesson.  He took on the burdens and the sins of the world, including my own.  Maybe instead of wallowing in self pity, I should be praising him.  My burden compared to his is nothing, and newsflash I don't have to carry it alone.  First of all he is walking beside me, often carrying me, and he has placed so many wonderful people in my life.  So I contribute much of the success and healing of our week to letting it go, to accepting His gift and letting Him carry what I thought was my burden.  He was just waiting.  Waiting for me to let Him have it.  Waiting for me to get it. Just waiting.

 

Resurection Garden Instructions:

(Sorry I guess I didn't take pictures of the process)

Supplies:

*Large Terra Cotta Tray, like you put under plants (we used a round plastic container from a giant cookie)

*Small Terra Cotta Pot (the tiniest size)

*Potting Soil

*Grass Seed (we got ours from the hardware store where we could purchase just a little bit by the pound)

*gravel (we stole ours from grandpa and grandma's driveway while they were gone on a trip...Thanks!)

*large round rock (yep grandpa and grandmas flower bed)

*twigs to make crosses (we hot glued ours) Make sure to make them long enough to go into the dirt as far as you can so they don't fall over, especially when the cat visits the garden.

 

Lay the small terra cotta pot on it's side in the middle of your tray.  Pile potting soil around and over it.  Place the gravel in the front of the opening of your tomb and place the large round rock beside the opening.  Sprinkle grass seed on your soil and water lots.  Grass starts to grow in just a few days.  The flowers in the picture are a pot of purple flowers one of the boys planted at Sunday School.  They are just sitting behind the garden but you could possibly plant  flowers in your garden as well.

Here is the link to my pinterest board where the idea came from.

**Enjoy**

 



 

In God's Will is Not Always the Easiest Place to Be

My blogging has been a bit infrequent for a while and I really miss it.  Blogging is like keeping a journal often celebrating the triumphs of our family or our homeschooling.  But I have been consumed by things that I don't know how or if I want to share but somehow I feel the need to free my heart.  I have written this post four times, each time erasing or leaving it in my drafts box.  It is just too raw and painful.  When we are further on the other side I hope that I can share more about the journey and what we have learned.

Looking at our family from the outside in it appears that we have it all together. We have all of our five little ducklings in a row walking through the hall at church and out and about. They are polite, well behaved (most of the time), and we generally appear to have it all under control. Yes we struggle with the same behaviors everyone else does at certain times in each child's life but you would think that with child number six on the way, we would about have this parenting thing licked. Dear friends you are sorely mistaken. When we fostered and eventually adopted the parenting rug was pulled out from under us. The rules were changed. Things that are supposed to work, that have worked for us in the past, don't work for our children who have experienced trauma in their past and now loss and no one seems to have the magic answer to helping our children heal.  We struggle daily running different sets of rules and guidelines for different children to meet everyone's needs to feel safe and to keep peace in our home.  Some days it is exhausting and some days I fail miserably trying to help repair or minimize the damage that I did not do.  We are making slow but steady progress but the learning curve seems very steep.
God spent some time working on me this past week.  We hit what felt like rock bottom and sometimes that is what it takes to make a change.  I realized that no matter what kind of day anyone else is having I can only control me and sometimes I didn't feel very in control.  Now pregnancy hormones do not help this any, but that is no excuse...I just have to work harder.  God has placed some wonderful adoptive mommas in my path this week and I have been given hope and I have realized that I am not alone with my struggle or my feelings.  I have to be realistic and realize that there will be days that I cannot humanly meet my children's emotional needs but I can meet their physical needs with as much kindness and love as I can muster and God will have to take care of the rest.
All of our children are such a blessing to our family and I know that we were the ones that signed up for this.   Life may have been easier the way it was but it was also emptier and in God's Will is the best (not always the easiest) place to be. I know that God brought us on this journey and he will bring us through as His family.

"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11

Are There More Children in Our Future?

The million dollar question that everyone wants to know is are we done adding children into our family.   For those who don't know our story, we currently have five children, two through adoption and three biological.  Much of our family journey has been a struggle about control.

When we first married, we decided to start a family right away.  Monte was in his early thirties and I in my mid twenties.  We struggled through some mild infertility issues and were blessed with our oldest child, a beautiful girl, now eleven.  Almost two years later we were blessed with a bright and happy baby boy, now nine.  Our family could have ended there but we are so glad it didn't.  Within a few years we struggled again with infertility to have a third child.  When our son was six, we decided to look into adoption through the foster care system.  We were looking at it more as a way to grow our own family than helping children.   During our foster care training there was a time when we decided that this was too hard and the children might be to "damaged" and we wouldn't be able to handle their needs.  Our worst fear was that we would have to send them back home and it would leave our hearts and family broken.  We wavered many times but finished the class and decided to take a placement of three beautiful babies all under two and a half years old.  We fell in love with them and eventually with their mom and it was bittersweet to send them home to her.  During that nine months with them God taught us to give up control to Him.  We could not control the foster care system or the choices of their family and we certainly could not control the outcome for our own family.
 
Our second placement was two siblings, a four year old boy and three month old baby girl.  This time we were more prepared to trust God to control their fate and that of our family.  Shortly after their placement, we learned that we were expecting a baby boy.  Many people asked if we were still planning to go through with their adoption but God was working in our hearts.  He was teaching us about His perfect timing and control.  We trusted that God would care for us no matter what.  Don't get me wrong we are human and definitely had our moments when doubt crept in and we wondered if God really knew what He was doing.  His overwhelming peace came time and time again.  Our commitment to them never wavered and we were up for whatever God had in store for us, although I was convinced that God was giving us a baby because He was going to take them from us but He did not.  God knew that if He gave us another biological child when we wanted him, we would never know the love of adoption and His plan was to bless us not once but three times over.

"Children are a heritage from the Lord,
offspring a reward from him.
  Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
  Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court."

Psalm 127:3-5

After our youngest was born we were sure that we were done (I didn't say God, I said we).  Outside pressures told us that we had already surpassed the point of normal in the world's eyes because we have more than 2.3 children.  But God never called any of us to be "normal."  During the last eleven years, God has been slowly and quietly working on our hearts.  We were learning through His scriptures and hearing other large family's stories that children are a precious blessing and that God's timing and control is so much better than our own.  There came a point where God had blessed us with child after child and had provided for us time and time again and it seems crazy to tell Him to stop.  If we were offered an inheritance from someone on earth we would never turn it down.  If we were offered twenty inheritances we would never turn any of them down.  Then why would we turn down blessings from our Heavenly Father.  Is money more precious than our Children?  In His Word, God tells us that money is the root of evil and children are a blessing, a reward from him.   We prayed so many times for all of these blessings, I am not quite sure how the prayer goes that tells God to please stop blessing us.  It means that we take back control and tell Him how we got this now, thanks for your help, but we don't need it anymore.  We certainly don't want to have that conversation with God.  There is an overwhelming peace in the knowledge that God is in control and we like it that way.

So where does our family go from here?  Honestly we are leaving it in God's hands.  If you ever met our littlest surprise blessing you would know that God makes no mistakes.  We cannot imagine our lives without him or any of our children for that matter.  Adoption is also an experience that has changed us to our very core and through it God has challenged us to become better people.  More children is certainly not out of the question because we know that with God in control He will continue to bless and care for us.

*Family Size is a personal choice between husband, wife and God.   This is our personal journey.  I encourage you to look into God's word and listen to Him to see how He is leading your family.  We should not judge those families who have no children nor those who have ten, we do not know their story.  I believe God does not have the same plan for each family and we are certainly unique. 

Adoption...Can We Love Them As Much?

As we explored foster care and adoption one question came up for us over and over again.  Could we possibly love them as much as our biological children?  When our biological children were born, there was this immediate overflowing sense of love.  A love that words cannot even begin to describe.  A love so deep that your heart aches to its very core.  Now when we first learned that we were expecting  it was exciting but over nine months time our love grew and grew along with them until we nearly burst with the anticipation of their arrival.  Even though it felt like this unconditional love happened all in that instant in reality it grew for ten months as they each grew in my womb.  Upon their arrival each baby reciprocated our love and trusted us to meet their every need.

Adoption is very very different.   When you foster children in your home the initial plan is always to return them to their biological parents.  Appropriate extended family placements are always a second choice and if no one is able to take children then they are available for adoption by foster families.  There are no guarantees that any child will become a part of your family no matter how much you love them.  As foster families we naturally guard our hearts.  The process takes time, years in fact.  We wait as parents attempt to change behaviors and jump through legal hoops to bring their children back home to them.  During that time we love but we love as if the child isn't ours, because they aren't, and we guard our hearts and brace ourselves for the heartbreak that easily could come.  Children long to return home to the familiar no matter how dysfunctional and loving others only brings deep emotional conflict and feelings of disloyalty to their "real family.  In our experience even babies mourn the loss of the familiar and of that connection with their birth families.

So this is where we begin...skepticism instead of trust, fear to love again from both parent and child, deep sorrow and emotional scars and pain.  Parent and child have endured years of the ups and downs that the system offers.  Somewhere along the way, we came to the realization that we had to stop guarding our hearts.  We had to open ourselves up and give them all the love that we had so that we could all start to heal.  It would never work if we didn't.  And even when we did there are no guarantees that there will be happy ending.  We can give them all the love we have but only God can heal their hurting hearts.  In the meantime we will be there as they work through each hurt and as they ache for the family that they lost.

These two adore each other and do not know or understand the words biological or adopted. 
They just know the deep love of being family.

Can we love them as much?  With adoption the love grows differently.  It is the kind of love that sneaks up on you slowly and quietly.  It is the kind of love that takes time and one day you realize that you would miss them deeply if they weren't there.  Its the kind of love that makes you realize your family will never be the same and you will take the good times with the bad times and wouldn't want it any other way.    Our family may look different than even we expected but we love them all just as much.

"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11

God isn't finished

Today we signed that paper work that officially closes our foster home.  By our request we were given the paperwork months ago but just couldn't bring ourselves to actually sign it.  In October our license expires and classes and time would be required to renew.  We have adopted children through the foster system, which was our original intent but our hearts still ache for those little ones still there and for those families, mostly living in poverty, still hurting each day.  Unfortunately we cannot fix all of the hurt, only God is capable of that.
Through the journey of foster care and later adoption, our support system has been incredible.  First of all our family who has loved our little people right along with us and listened to our frustration and tears as we agonized along with our children through the process.  We have also been blessed by a wonderful team of social workers and staff at Youthville who were at our side through every bump in the road.  We felt cared for and valued.  During this time, God really laid on our hearts that He is in control and that we need to trust our family, whatever that looks like, to Him.
For now God has given us five wonderful blessings (two through adoption) and they need our time and attention to heal and to continue growing into a family. We are still open to God's plan for our family and if we feel called back to foster care we will go.   Today is bittersweet but we know that this isn't the end...it is just the beginning.  God isn't finished with us yet.

"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."  Jeremiah 29:11

Blessed

This evening I watch Gracen fresh and clean from his bath as he toddles across the floor with a smile from ear to ear.  He recently learned to walk and he is so proud of his newest and greatest achievement in his short life.  As parents, it is amazing to us as well to watch God's miracle walk across the room.  All of our children have done it yet we still look on in awe and wonderment of this little being that God created.  Gracen is at my very most favorite stage.  He is becoming his own little person yet he still needs his mother's cuddles to reassure him that all is right with the world.  I hold these moments dear.  I know from experience that all too soon these milestones will become a cherished memory. 
Gracen has taught us much about the Grace of God.  He was the child that we longed for seven long years but God said no.  God knew that if he gave this precious child to us to soon our family would miss out on even more of his wonderful blessings.  If we had been given Gracen when we first asked and longed for him we would have never experienced the joy of adoption and we would have never known Conner and Veah.  God saved this blessing for the perfect time and in the process he blessed us not only once but three times over.
We don't always know or understand why God blesses us when he does.  Sometimes our journey is full of sorrow and deep pain as we wait and watch others be blessed.  Why not us?  Why not now?  Sometimes, most often years later, we can see the plans God had for us.  Other times we can never make sense of it all.  In these moments of darkness and discomfort God reminds us that this is not our home.  We long for the contentment that this world in those moments cannot offer.
Gracen reminds us every day of God's deep love for us and of his plans to bless us in His time.  In those moments of darkness we could have never even dreamed of the wonderful plans that God had for our family.  Because of Gracen, we wait patiently with anticipation to see what God has in store for us next.  We are learning that God's plans are so much better than our own and we are truly blessed.

ADOPTION DAY

I woke up this morning to a pile of dishes with dried on cake and ice cream.  A sleepy toddler runs screaming through the house with a head of wild curly morning hair and a purple balloon streaming behind her.   A baby cries as the pain of teething (four teeth at once) as the exhaustion from yesterday overtakes him.  As they eat pancakes, three school children count down the days until their public school journey ends and their days of learning at home begin.  Then they fuss and fight as Monte tries to get them out the door to school.  Vaeh drops a toy on Gracen's head because he gets a passy and she doesn't and at the moment she really wants one.  It all feels normal.  Nothing has changed.  We were a family and we still are.  The only thing is that we now have an Adoption Decree that says "that the said minor children be, and they are hereby adopted by the Petitioners...as their children and their adoption by them is hereby adjudged and decreed...and the said adoptive parents are entitled to all the rights and subject to all the liabilities of that relation."

Adoption day began with a big reminder from God that we are not done leaning on Him and trusting that He will take care of us.  On the entrance ramp to the interstate the Yukon lost power and lights on the dash started flashing.  My mind raced..."any day but today Lord PLEASE."  You see we have a small problem.  Our family cannot pile into just any vehicle and go on our way...we have become to big for that.  Some family was ahead of us and some behind but the vehicle combinations wouldn't work.  I called the lawyer frantic and said "we are trying to get there but the Yukon won't run."  "We can't make court!"  He said that he would try to get the judge to push a couple of his other cases in front of ours which would buy us a little time.  After that the judge would just have to sign the paperwork without us.  All this work for the judge just to sign and us to get the paperwork in the mail seemed heart breaking.  We had all waited for our day in court for 21 long months.  Before I knew it Monte was on the phone with his dear friend who has a repair shop and also rents out 15 passenger vans!!  We drove limped the Yukon to his shop and he met us there (they weren't open yet but he was luckily on his way through town).  He tossed us some keys and we moved carseats, strollers, coolers, diaperbags, oh yeah and kids in record time.  I have no idea how fast that big van was going, I didn't really care at the time,  but we made it to court only five minutes late!!  WE MADE IT!!

This sign made me chuckle after our stressful morning!  Maybe they wouldn't even let us in after all!!

They did let us into the courtroom, disruptive children and all.  The judge was very kind...he gave the kids adoption day bears and took pictures with us.

Next we were off to the Zoo with grandpas and grandmas, aunts and uncles and a very special cousin...

As we looked at the zebras (in the background) we take a moment to REMEMBER and to LOVE.  Conner and Vaeh's mama loves zebras and when we see them we think of her with smiles.

We ended the day with a small family party...balloons, bubbles, cake, homeade ice cream and our own in house entertainment!!

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THANK YOU to all of our friends and family who have encouraged and helped us along the way.  To our families...words cannot express our thankfullness for how you have learned to love these two little blessings right along with us.  We love you all!!

**No one wins here today...a mama lost her babies and two children grieve the loss of their mother. We remember that they have one family that could care for them but two families that love them.  Someday when they are older they need not choose one family over the other,  with each they will have a unique and special bond.

Please God don't send us to Africa

As adoption day draws very near we reflect on the journey...

When I was a child I actually prayed to God PLEASE DON'T send me to Africa.  I will do anything but don't send me to some far off place.  Missionaries often shared in our church of their calling to go abroad and I was terrified that God would call on me.  God knew my heart and he did call me eventually not to go to Africa but somewhere just as scary.

Monte and I had struggled through infertility issues twice in the past and we desperately desired more children.  God said NO...not until you go to "Africa."  Not until you step out of your comfort zone and do something for Me.  God knew our hearts for children.  Something you might not know about Monte is that he is as much or even more of a sucker for cute babies than I am.   God gently and quietly led us to the world of foster care (not too much of a far cry from Africa).  God knew we would do anything for the larger family that we desired and we did.  We didn't do it because we were feeling God's leading or because we wanted to do GREAT and HONORABLE things.  We did it because we were selfish and WE wanted more.  Believe it or not God used our selfishness and He turned it into BLESSINGS. 

Along the journey "to Africa"  God taught us to be obedient and to trust in him.  It wasn't always easy but we learned that Gods Peace surrounded us when we stopped trying to control what really wasn't in our control.  We learned that In reality none of the children in our home, biological, foster or adopted, are ours. They are God's and He will care for them and because we are His He will care for us.

In "Africa" God taught us hard lessons about forgiveness and Grace.  We cannot truly love the children in our care without loving and forgiving the family from which they came. Even as they become a part of our family they will always be a part of their birth families. The more we embrace that, the more we embrace them. 

We found out that "Africa" wasn't so bad after all.  We still don't always understand the language or the culture and it is still scary but we have grown to love Africa.   Our eyes have been opened to a world of poverty and broken hurting families that make our hearts ache.  A world that we would rather forget.  But out of that broken and hurting world God gave us two beautiful blessings.  I am sure we will visit "Africa" often.  We will be out of our comfort zone many times in the days ahead as we deal with the hurt and brokenness that only God can heal.

When dear friends or family tell us that we are just such wonderful people for caring for these children look closely and you may see a smirk on our faces because WE REALLY DIDN'T WANT TO GO TO AFRICA.  But we are glad we did!

That's all for now...the natives are getting restless.

^"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."
Jermiah 29:11