Go hug your kids and Thank God for them....

Since the kiddos were adopted at an "older" age, I really have virtually no information about them before they came to be in the care of Barbara Walker. At that time Katharine was 2years 10 months, Noah was 15 days, and Maddie from birth. Still, there isn't much information to give as they were with foster parents and I can't exactly contact them directly to find out what my kids were like before coming home. In reality, anything that happened before they ever came into contact with Barbara is basically inaccessible information. Can you think about how many times you have told your kids about "the day they were born?" That is a story we can not share around our house, not to any of the three, but the oldest is feeling the brunt of this missing information. As we were trying to do Language Arts this week I had to skip over many of the lessons as it was writing things that had to do with her "birth story." I could have changed it to the "coming into our family story" but my nerves got the best of me and I decided "sweeping it under the rug" was the best technique at the time.

All of this on the heels of getting translations back from a sweet young woman at our congregation. No we are not going through another adoption (yet), but we translated our kids Haitian homestudies. Much of the information I knew, some was still yet shocking to me. At any rate I cried and cried at the thought of my kiddos former life...and then cried and cried for the siblings they all have down there.....and then for the thought of their birthmoms who deal with this on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I love the Haitian people. It has amazed me to see things through Nerriils eyes...to have so little but to be praising the lord through everything...and to yet be more content than we find ourselves as Americans. While this goes through my mind,I shudder at the thought of "if my kids were still there."

Somethings that were mentioned were kids lives were referred to as timid, fearful, awkward, severe malnutrition, orange hair, poor, and unstable. *sigh* Sometimes you wish you could just take a big eraser and make it all go away.....but yet as adoptive parents we have been given the much more difficult task of teaching our children how to "recover" and pray that they grow in the understanding that it is all by the grace of God.


I have been really frustrated lately...kind of falling in a rut....gettin to be a lil' bit ornery.....I think this huge reminder of what my kids came from, and what I need to be, was in perfect timing.