Giving of ourselves

With Thanksgiving around the corner, our local homeschooling group had a Packing the Boxes day for Operation Christmas Child.

We arrived early after coming from back to back gymnastics classes for the girls and having lunch. We brought in the bag, well Mommy brought it in, of both school supplies and toys to sort them on the tables. After the teenagers set up the tables, we grabbed our bag and went to work sorting our stuff onto the right table. We had pencils, pens, erasers, stencils, and toys. Each of the bulk items had to be opened up. After our stuff was sorted we helped with the candy table to make sure that the candy didn't hit the floor and if it did, we picked it up.

After all of this we had to sit to listen to a meeting about how to pack the boxes. After we got the go ahead, we ran over to the boxes even though Mommy told us to walk, picked out our boxes and got to work. We packed up everything in our boxes: hairbands, bracelets, plastic horses and pigs, bags of rice, soap and washcloths, pencils, pens, highlighters, notepads, stencils, boxes of crayons, and more into these boxes. We don't know how many boxes we packed up but we know there were quite a few we did up. We also did up letters to put into 3 of the boxes. We might get a pen pal from another country.

We got tired out and had to leave but the boxes were being prayed over before they were being shipped out.

Mommy started planning and purchasing after last Operation Christmas Child Packing Day and we hope that she does it again for next year.

Also a local Boy Scout troop was picking up canned goods to restock the shelves that at some local pantries in our area are completely bare. We participated in that as well by picking out the canned goods from our own pantry to give food to others who have very little or none whatsoever. We are sure this won't be the last of us giving food to others in our community.

We are working on a box of goodies to give to a friend of Mommy for the mission that she works at in Mexico as well so we need to go so that we can pack up that box and do some more good toward others!!

National Adoption Month...

I sit here and think this month about how my family came to be. We adopted 3 children from Korea. This month is a very happy month if I can totally disregard the fact that there was loss, a huge loss you might say, with two of the parties in this. One party had no say in the matter whatsoever.

Here's how my family started: a woman, me, and a man, my husband, wanted a family. We researched and decided upon Korea. Less than a month after our application and homestudy, we got our referral, our son. We did our required paperwork on this end and paperwork was done in Korea. Finally our son came home to us. He had trouble bonding to me. I tried everything to help him out (taking a bath with him, being the only one to feed him, sleeping with him, being the only one to change his diapers and clothes, etc.) but it took him 3 months to bond to me after he got chicken pox from the vaccine.

6 months after he came home we got a phone call from our social worker, he had a sister. We went back into the process and adopted her. Our reason was that we wanted to keep the family together...we knew family was important in Korea and it was important to us for this reason. Less than a year after he came home, his sister came home.

Over a year later we found out that they had a sister and would we like to adopt her. We went back into the process and we went to Korea to do the touristy things but also to see the county where our children were born, to see their foster mothers, to be in the minority for once in our lives to try to understand what it might be like for our children and more.

That is our happy story of how our family went from 2 to 5 members but another story is in play here.

A woman that I have never met half way around the world gave birth to a child. For whatever the reason, she couldn't parent her child. That child was given to an adoption agency and they found a foster family to raise that child until that child was given a permanent family.

To some degree, I feel horrible celebrating this month. To celebrate something that causes somebody so much pain and loss is something that I have trouble doing. I feel like I perpetuated the system by adopting and it does not matter where I adopted from.

The First Mom should have the universal right to parent her child which is her primal right as a mother to do so. In some areas of the world that is not true...other people make that choice for the First Mom, others coerce the First Mom into believing that her child will have a beautiful life somewhere else (without her) and tell her that she will forget the ache that she has in her heart. Instead we should support organizations that support First Moms and their rights to parent their child. We should only use adoption as an absolute last resort.

The other half of me is honored that my husband and I were given the ability to love and parent these children. These children are so funny, so witty, so clever, so fun to be around some days, so caring, so creative with their play, so smart and so sad at times for the stuff that they have lost. Yes they have each voiced their own sadness in their own words without any prompting from anybody else. They have each pushed me away at times only to come back to me to tell me they love me and ask for a hug. I never thought for a moment when we started the process to adopt in 2004 that we would have 3 children and that it would be easy. Each of them miss their foster mother sometimes it's just for a few minutes sometimes on and off for days. I'm here to try to comfort them and suggest way to communicate with their foster mothers.

I am here to ride out the rough waves no matter how tall they might be, to listen to my children, and hug and kiss them when needed.

If you want to celebrate adoption month, open up the records. Don't keep any secrets regarding adoption. It only hurts the child you say you are trying to protect.

If you want to celebrate adoption month, support the organizations that support the First Mom/family parenting the child.

Lastly if you want to celebrate adoption month, support the child who might be going through some rough patches in their lives and the adoptive parents who might need support as well.