One More Home

"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." Psalm 147:3 Before I begin sharing with you my thoughts, I need to preface this post by saying it is in no way intended to be a harsh scolding or to make anyone feel bad. Please, please don't take it that way. Instead, I'm hoping that this will give you a chance to stand in my shoes, to read my thoughts, to see things from my perspective. That being said, most of the time when people hear that we are adopting 5 children, that we are actually connected to 5 lives that will become part of our family, that we know their names and ages and have seen a picture of them, the one question we're asked is, "Do you know what happened to their parents?" Now thankfully, at this point in our adoption story, our kids aren't home with us yet and they haven't had to overhear this question. But for the most part, my answer will be that we really haven't been given much information at this point. And...

To update, we hit the 2-month mark on Sunday. Two months. Since that life-changing Facebook post. Since the email that started us spinning in this dizzying journey to bring home 5 kids from a place I have yet to travel to, so we could plant 4 girls and 1 boy in a land they've never set foot on.  I was telling a friend tonight that for all the many times I've shared our story in these two months, for all the many people that have exclaimed that those 5 faces on my phone are precious, for all of the amazement at 5 kids and the joyful well wishes for our family, for every one of those, I hope I've done a decent job at faking it. May my plastered on, upbeat, excited face convince the other person that we're trucking right along on this adventure and we've got it all together, because the inside of me....well it's a bit of mess. In 2 months, we've redone physicals, obtained new certified copies of documentation, been fingerprinted by the FBI for the 3rd ...

During the two tours that Mike was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, we lived through seven hurricanes and several more would be hurricanes that ended up being tropical storms by the time they made it to shore.  I've moved my outdoor stuff inside, I've stocked up on non-perishable foods, and I've even gone to the extreme of filling up my bathtub with water. When I was pregnant with our eldest child, we went through two relative strong hurricanes. We had received a lot of rain that summer leaving the ground soggy, and so I watched as trees swayed in the wind until they finally fell onto the roof next door. And, I can remember the sound of walnuts being launched at our siding from the downed tree. Not to mention how scary it was to sit through one that passed over us in the dead of night and all you could do was stare into the blackness outside and listen to the wind howl while branches and trees cracked and fell, with no earthly idea what the outside world woul...