Bringing Home Charlie Brown

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...