Merry Christmas!

I haven’t posted in so long I’m not sure where to start… we’ve sort of been in a funk around our house… sooo many little every day things remind us of the girls and we’ve been feeling blue. Jimmie said he heard some sort of statistic that when you break up with someone it takes a week for every month you were with that person to get over that person. And to compare the girls leaving to a break up is a fair comparison so he said we should be over them in six weeks… so by that line of thinking we should have been over them at the end of November… to be very honest… I still have really selfish moments where I sort of hope something at grandma’s didn’t work out and they had to come back to our house… but that is totally selfish and for the girls’ well being I really do hope they are happy at grandmas and that they stay there as long as they need to…

It might help us to get over that hump if we had other children in our home right now but the calls are very scarce these days and I asked our worker if maybe it had to do with the holidays and she said judges are sometimes very reluctant to remove children during the holidays…which I can totally understand and really, as long as the child isn’t being harmed in some way, it’s a good thing.

Sometime in November we did get a phone call for 2 little ones… a 3 month old and a 1 ½ year old. I was actually in Ohio having a girl’s night with my sister and the cousins Mandy and Chelle when I got the call and because I was in Ohio, I obviously had to say no at that time. But then they called a few days later when I was home with the same little ones that still needed a more “permanent” placement. And I still felt that I had to say no. The 1 ½ year old had a sever seizure disorder and I just felt that with us living so far out in the country and the fact that there would also be a 3 month old to care for on top of the fact that I’d probably flinch every time the 1 ½ year old blinked funny… not to mention Jimmie was regularly working out of town during the week at that time… I still had to say no… and I really hate to tell them no but they encourage us if we feel uncomfortable for any reason to say no… I was talking to my worker earlier this month and telling her how I really hated to say no and she told me it was a really good thing that I said no…she said the 1 ½ year old’s heart stopped and foster mom had to do CPR to revive the child and then rush him to the hospital… oh my heavens… I probably would have had a melt down!

Well I hate to make my whole journal entry about foster parent stuff… but that’s what is going on in my life right now so if this bores ya or doesn’t make sense… sorry…

But it helps to type stuff out here… this past Saturday Jimmie and went to a SNAP event… SNAP is Kentucky’s Special Needs Adoption Program… special needs could mean a sibling group (which we’re all about) or an older child as well as what comes to mind… some sort of handicap or medically fragile… but there are over 400 children just in Kentucky alone who are just waiting to be adopted and every year that goes by… the older that child gets… the less likely it is that that child will be adopted because people want that perfect little baby… not a teenager with baggage… see this is why I feel that Jimmie and I are doing exactly what we should be doing at this point in our lives… I really feel the Lord laying a burden on our hearts and preparing our hearts for something… I’m not sure what… but I can almost physically feel the Lord’s guidance on this path that we’re on. I’ve never really experienced anything quite like it.

Anyway… we went to this SNAP event on Saturday… basically it’s an opportunity for children who need and want homes to be seen and met with people who are wanting to adopt. Santa came and there were presents for all the kids and they had a craft table set up for the kids to do crafts. But it was a fairly unstructured event and we were just encouraged to mingle with the kids… I’m not a mingler in normal social settings… let alone abnormal social settings such as Saturday was… so immediately I was uncomfortable and totally out of my box. Jimmie, who is a master mingler, also felt very uncomfortable. He kept saying he felt like he was at a meat market… and it really had that feel… but despite our feeling uncomfortable, I was able to just sit and observe some of the children and I have to say one little guy, who reminded me so much of an African American version of Isaac, caught my eye and I fell in love.. he is just this happy little face and he was so polite and well mannered and, as any 11 year old boy would be, he was just interested in playing with the other kids and seeing what they got for Christmas presents. He also had sisters there but apparently they wouldn’t be adopted as a sibling group, which I thought was odd. Anyway, we are requesting more information about him and his situation.

I’m telling you what… the whole thing just made your heart break and if I had a big enough house, we’d probably have taking them all home… I mean can you imagine yourself when you were 14… now imagine that for some reason, you have no home to call your own… no mom and dad… and where you are living, for any reason, could just up and change tomorrow…. And you may or may not be living with your brothers and sisters…

There was one teenage girl there that was toting around a toddler that looked to be around 3 years old. Jimmie suspected that they belonged together. When we got home we looked the girl up on the SNAP website and we discovered that she is a 16 year old girl in foster care, raising her child in foster care… that makes me tear up just thinking of her. Jimmie really wanted to ask about them. I think his heart broke for her… because when people think of adoption, they think of the shiny happy baby not the teenager raising a toddler scenario… I told him as much as my heart goes our to her.... I wasn’t ready to be an instant grandmother… lol…. seriously, I think we need to get more parenting skills under our belt before we think seriously about adopting a teenager...

Well… if you take away one thing from this journal entry… let it be this… be thankful for the simple things… be thankful that you have a home to call your own… hug your children extra tight and be thankful that God gave you your excellent, even though imperfect, parenting skills… and most importantly… be thankful for the simplest most complex gift of God’s Only Son…

Our church is doing a cantata Sunday evening entitled “That Name Jesus”… there’s a portion of the narration that lists every book of the Bible and amazingly enough, I had never realized this, but Jesus is mentioned in every book of the Bible… not exactly the name Jesus… but nonetheless, it’s obvious that Jesus is referred to in every book of the Bible… a simple name… a simple gift… with lasting, life-changing results…

Remember the reason for this holiday season and gather those that you love and love you around you and be thankful… just be thankful…

Merry Christmas!