My Easter Week

This photo is one you never saw. It is from last Easter - a holy day that came and went shortly before we opened our home to two more children. Shortly before I had no time for anything other than children and family and keeping up with all the needs. This poor blog was sacrificed for nourishing the family.

This year, this Easter week, I am resting. We are a couple days into spring break which means there is no rush out the door for preschool, no afternoon pick-ups to interrupt nap time. It also means that our two foster children are with their dad for the entire week. He has been doing very well, and it seems that reunification will occur by the end of May.

Right now Benjamin and Sadie are playing in Benjamin's room. They are playing so nicely - something that never happens when Maks is around. That's the nature of kids...two play delightfully, but when a third enters the room, someone gets excluded. Both being five-year-old boys, Benjamin and Maks naturally get together and Sadie gets chased and poked with play swords. (The upside is, such antics are part of her warrior training. In fact, for her birthday we got her a play sword so that she would be able to fight back.) Our household is not actually all that violent, but anyone with boys knows that be it a rock, a stick, or a toy sword...it will get used assertively.

Back to the now. This week has given me time to work in the yard. We are planting strawberries and tomatoes in those Topsy-Turvy hanging containers. I am so excited to try this. The gophers have ravaged our garden and no matter how hard we try to curb them, we are losing. I am going to have to convince my neighbor (from whose yard they emigrate) to join us in hiring a service. Wish me luck on that.  In the meantime, I planted a bunch of flowers that the gophers reportedly don't like, and I am hanging our food from the beams.

I have also decided to tackle our front doors. I hate our front doors - they look like they were primered white and never painted. They have an oval leaded glass cutout that looks pretentious. But to replace the doors now is out of the budget. So I am going to paint them. Boldly. Turquoise. Oh yes, and the thought of that bright door with bright flowers around and butterflies in the air just makes me feel all tickly and happy inside. I have always wanted a whimsical home with bright colors and surprise pieces of art in random places. Such a transformation in a house this large takes time and money, and probably more than any of that, a gigantic amount of inspiration. I find that I stall out for months and then I will be hit with an idea for some room or corner. This is my current one.

One last thing for this week - we get to go camping and climbing in Joshua Tree for a few days. I haven't climbed in years and I will surely be weak and terrible, but the surge of joy I feel to be able to go out and camp and attempt a climb with dear friends more than makes up for it. I want my children to know and love the outdoors; this stuff is important.

So there is my rambling, off-the-top-of-my-head update. May you have a blessed Easter!

Big Change, Big Gratitude

About seven weeks ago, May 30 to be exact, two more children entered The P-Pod by way of foster care: Tati, our 12-year-old girl, and Maks, our 4-year-old boy (we are fostering...this is not an adoption, though that could become a possibility depending on the parents' progress over the coming months). I notified a number of friends and family members by email, sharing some of the facts and needs that we had, and God, through a bunch of human beings, has been caring well for us.

One day I will get around to writing an update. Out of respect for the children, a certain amount of the story will remain confidential. In the mean time, I am trying to say "thank you" as much as I can to everyone who has prayed for or cared physically or financially for us.

At the moment, I am at home working on a slideshow of high school photos that will be shown at my 20th reunion on Saturday. Sadie is napping, and Brent has taken Tati, Maks, and Benjamin with him to volunteer at a bike race. The breeze is blowing peacefully through the curtains, and the house is quiet. (I am hoping that once school starts, there will be more of these moments.)

Quick Update

On Monday, Benjamin will be going to a week-long preschool summer camp. The theme is outer space, something he is extremely interested in. Two weeks ago, Maks got to attend the "wild west" summer camp. The boys are also enjoying a weekly gymnastics class at the YMCA.

Tati has started dance class, although we recently found out that she is expected to take ballet in order to continue in the jazz class. This would be good for her, but she is not very keen on the idea yet, so we are contemplating what to do next. A friend of ours is also giving her weekly photography lessons, and she is super excited about that.

I am still writing and editing for Escondido CITY Magazine - though I have had to cut back on my assignments. I will be writing a piece for PLNU's Viewpoint magazine soon. I won't reveal much here except to say that the fall issues of both these magazines will include pieces on a topic very near to our hearts at The P-Pod!

Sadie is doing a whole lot of everything. She can string words together in sentences. She uses pronouns correctly. She sings, runs, talks constantly, climbs, tosses stuff out of her playpen, and has a preoccupation with brushes of all kinds. Her latest stunts include opening doors and pulling open drawers so that she can climb up them like steps. She is a busy, busy girl.

Brent is trying to get back into the swing of riding several times a week. He thoughtfully cut back on some of his riding when the kids came to live with us. The adjustment of adding two more personalities was challenging at first, and I needed a lot of help. But we have settled in now, and Brent and I can pursue some of our hobbies again.

More to come. Soon, I hope!

Fertility, Fostering, and the Future of Our Family, Part II

For Part I, click here.

Fostering has entered our vocabulary. But before I bring you up to speed on that new development, I should fill you in on the past six months of my personal journey.

Somewhere along the way, a college friend of mine who knows a lot about nutrition and holistic health care told me I should try Nutrition Response Therapy. I'm kind of a natural gal, myself, so this appealed to me...all except for the price tag which is not covered by our health insurance. Despite this concern, The Papa and I decided it was worth a try. Or rather, he agreed to give me time to try it out before launching into our next adoption attempt. (When he's ready to run with something, he is ready to run.)

For the past six months I've been seeing a nutritionist/chiropractor who has really amazing results treating infertility. See, our hormones are deeply affected by what we eat, the quality of our nutrition, and the amount of sugar we intake. This is not something that shows up on a routine, Western medicine blood test. My nutritionist has helped me improve my diet, reduce my stress levels, and strengthen my internal organs. He also discovered that I had scary-high levels of mercury in my body and I've been detoxing that.**

**Side note...I sometimes wonder if the mercury in my system was part of the reason God has not allowed me to get pregnant. Recent inquiries into autism have suggested that it may be more related to mercury exposure in the womb than to anything after birth. Mercury is also transmitted through breast milk. If I had been able to induce lactation as I intended, Benjamin would have been exposed to potentially damaging amounts of mercury. I feel very blessed that all that "failure" had a purpose - to protect Benjamin and possibly our future biological child. Now, I may still not be able to get pregnant, but if I do, I will marvel at the precision and care in God's handling of our lives.

Back to the story: After all this time of taking whole foods supplements, eating better (most of the time) and most definitely sleeping better, the doctor has given me the go-ahead to try conceiving. My body is a much more inviting place now, I guess.

At this point, I am not convinced we will ever bear biological children. Though my doctor is sure that this will work, I am not. I still see our child rearing as something designed by God. He may have more children born by other folks intended for us. I don't know. I can only be faithful by taking care of my body the best I know how, praying about the decisions we do make, and keeping an eye open to the opportunities to nurture the children brought into our lives by circumstance.

Which leads me, finally, to fostering.

We will keep trying to conceive, but we are not going to sit around waiting. The Papa and I have looked into foster care and adopting older children through the county. Why not another private adoption? I'll be blunt - the expense. We simply do not have another $20,000 to spend. We're still recovering from the first one, trying to build up our savings. Trying to find money to put toward retirement and family vacations. We do own our house...I guess we could have foregone home ownership and put that money toward it, but we didn't. We bought a place that would provide shelter for an ever-growing family.

Our investigation led us to feel that one day we might adopt a couple of elementary-aged kids who have been in the county system for a while, but that it wouldn't be a great idea right now, with Benjamin so little and all. We did discover, and this is the exciting part, that it is possible to foster exclusively babies and toddlers. We are joining Angels Network.

Through Angels, we will be fostering with the goal of reunifying the child with his or her family. The truth is, however, around 50% of their "long term" placements (4 months or longer) end up being released for adoption. This is sad - it means that the parents and their extended family could not pull it together enough to keep the child. But it's happy as well - the child will be in a stable loving home for that year or so, and the foster family has the first choice in adopting the child.

In either case, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to minister to a child this way. It may be that we care for two or three children before one becomes available for us to adopt. But that's OK. I am learning to trust God's timing.

Won't it be hard to give the child back, you ask? Probably. But this is where I have to say...am I going to let emotional hardship prevent me from loving and caring for a child who desperately needs it? I can't be that selfish. Of course it will be tough. But if God is leading us down this path, and we believe He is, then He will provide the strength for us to give the child back to his mother. It really is that simple. Perspective works wonders.

This week we must complete our application form. We start foster certification classes next week. They will last for about two months. We can drop out at any point, but based on our feelings after the orientation session, I doubt we'll want to. Hearing about the program only got us all fired up. We were grinning the whole 25-minute drive home.

I'll keep you all posted! Whether pregnancy or fostering enter our lives next, you'll hear about it!