Bringing Home Charlie Brown

One of the things I love to do is educate people, probably a good thing since I'm a teacher. ;) However, educating people about adoption and foster care is a big passion of mine. This last week we had the privilege of going out to dinner with a couple who is in the beginning stages of considering adoption from Foster Care. At one point in the conversation Tony said to me, "I'll talk for awhile, you eat." Well, that didn't last long because I had so much I wanted to say. You see all of this experience in foster care and the world of adoption leaves me with so much to share. I could literally talk for hours and hours about our experiences and the knowledge we posses. If you have questions let's talk, if you are even thinking the teeniest tiniest bit, let's converse. If you have time to sit and listen I'll tell you everything I know. There is something so important about face to face conversations about adoption. Our own journey started when someone sha...

Have you ever felt like life was spinning out of control? Like your days, nights, and moments, are going faster and faster, yet you have no say in how things are happening? That has been my last two weeks. I remember before starting this time period I already felt extremely overwhelmed. I HATE when we have something on our calendar multiple nights in a row. There is something about staying home and doing "nothing" that fuels my soul so much. I used to be one that loved to go go go, but these days I long to stay home. Don't get me wrong, I also love going out, spending time with family and friends and creating new memories, but there is something so healing about being home in a quiet house. (Well not quiet exactly, we do have two small dogs who feel the need to defend us against every dog, squirrel, rabbit, and person that crosses in front of our house.) These last two weeks have been filled to the brim with obligations, both self-inflicted and required by jobs, house g...

I said to someone the other day that I often feel that the students who are the most broken and who need the most help are the ones who I seem to find and connect with the most. It's almost as if I put out some type of invisible radar that says, "Hey, if you need lots of love, if you have had lots of trauma in your life, if you need someone to make you feel safe and loved, come find me, we'll be pals." But maybe, there is some invisible force that pulls us together. I have always had a heart for those kids who are "disenfranchised," but after experiencing some trauma of my own, it seems as if more and more of them pop out of the woodwork. Maybe I have this innate ability now to see the hurt past the facade of smiles and nods. Maybe it's that I am pulled to them by some inexplicable energy or force that tells me they need me. Maybe, it's that they feel safe enough in my presence to share their life hurts. Maybe it's because I care more about bei...

Someone recently said to me, "Well you're having a good day today." To which I replied "I always have a good day." The conversation then turned to all the bad things about the other person's day, which got me thinking... It's not that I ALWAYS have a good day, I don't. In fact this morning was pretty disastrous. I was running behind schedule, I kept dropping things, (random but so annoying), my hair WOULD NOT do what I wanted it to, (thank goodness for volumizing dry shampoo!), I wasn't sure I liked the dress I picked out to wear, I couldn't seem to get everything together to leave the house, lost a set of keys, seriously, hot mess express ticket for one! (And oh my gosh my computer did something funky and I thought I lost this post!) BUT I'll still have a good day. I'll still be a bundle of love and positivity for my students once 7:50 hits. I will still love them unconditionally, show them that I care, listen to everything they ha...

    I do not enjoy being hot, in fact I hate it. I work in a school with no air conditioning in the Midwest. It NEVER fails, starting school will most certainly equal 100 degree days. It does not matter if we have had an unusually cool summer with no day above 80 degrees, once school hits, it's an automatic heat wave.     This year was no different when it came to the weather. However, our school got new windows and that made a huge difference. The windows are awesome, well designed, heavy, sturdy, super great for keeping in heat in the winter. That's the problem. These new windows are so greatly insulated that NONE of the heat could escape our building in the evenings. Usually we get some reprieve in the mornings because of the past evening's cool air. Not this year. As you can imagine, the heat was killer. We are in the middle of September now, and it's finally bearable, but guess what, by afternoon it is still hot!     Perhaps all of the stifling heat...

    It's funny, there are times in our adoption process where I am so busy with adoption related tasks that I feel I have zero time for anything else. Yet there are other times where I feel like there is nothing I am doing that is furthering our adoption plan. It's not that I get lazy or burned out, it's just the way the adoption process goes.      In the weeks leading up to "going live" with Lifetime there was SO much to do. Home-study paperwork, profiles to be created, websites to be made, questionnaires to be filled out, and nothing was a one step process. Many things took several tries of being submitted, rejected, fixed, submitted again and then continuing this cycle until finally accepted. However, once everything is "live" most of the "work" for us is done. There is just a lot of waiting... When our profiles get low we have to print more, hole punch them, and then make them look fancy with ribbon, which takes a decent amount of time, bu...

One thing about life is that it is constantly changing. While change is something that I never look forward to, it is something I can not stop from happening, Sometimes the results of change are painful, yet bring about beautiful things. One of the comments I have heard a lot lately is that my husband and I are so good together, so close, so in love, so cute. Yes, yes we are. BUT, have we always been this way? No. Has life been horrible to us, yes. My response when people ask "how" we do it, is always the same. You can't go through what we have been through, survive it, and not become ultra close. There are two options, you become inseparable, or you break apart. Going through infertility, four solid years of fostering, being told we would be able to adopt our son, losing our son, and now in the process of adoption, has forced us to become resilient and reliant on each other. I always say that one of the things that helped us the most during this time was going to t...

Many times the adoption journey is full of wonderful, exciting, busy news. But there are many other times where the only thing to do is wait. I feel like the better part of my life over the last six years has been in a time of waiting. While there is always something going on and something to do, most of it is filler during the waiting for a bigger event. The busy parts of life help life move forward. Being busy is not always bad, in fact many times it is necessary. However, there are parts of life that can be left buried and not to be dealt with, covered by the busyness of things that "must be done." Then one day, you realize it has been years since you started your journey, years of waiting, years of planning, years of organizing and working toward a goal only to be left to wait. There are times when those years seem overwhelmingly long, and moments when they seem to have not happened at all. Such goes the way of life, and yet, the hope is not lost, the dream is not forgott...