I am “toast” today after having guests in my home for the past 10 days. It started with my cousin Trina and her two boys; daughter Stephanie and her boyfriend arrived the day Trina left; two days later son Kyle and wife Marie arrived with her parents and sister along too. We plowed through a phenomenal amount of food that took me three days to prepare in advance. We took a very cold horseback ride yesterday after a fabulous Easter brunch. Most of my guests left at 5 AM this morning so Kyle could get to his 1 PM class on time, and... more

It was a twenty year struggle, start to finish, before Wilbur Wilberforce was successful in abolishing the slave trade in England. As mentioned previously, he submitted a bill to Parliament every year for 17 years in a row. The bill finally passed in March of 1807, by a large majority. If one does the math, you realize we are on the eve of the 200 year anniversary of that date.

But Wilberforce didn’t stop there. Twenty six years later, and three days before he died, as a result of his efforts slavery was abolished... more

I just returned from taking Beth to her sleepover tonight. Such a normal, fun thing for a kid to do. Sadly, Amy didn’t do those normal things. The young hostess of the party tonight is also an adoptee. She’s Beth’s age, and is a swimming buddy. She hails from Eastern Europe and spent her first five years in an orphanage. Although she had some adjustments to make upon her arrival, her mom has found her to be a very easy child. When I met this young lady tonight, her eye contact was spot-on, her face was relaxed and sported a natural... more

Part One Part Two Part Three

Midway through my story, the pastor asked me directly… “What part does God play in all of this?” I have had that question posed to me quite frequently of late…

I spoke with a struggling mom last week... more

Part One Part Two

My bottom-line goal for meeting with the pastor was to convince her to let me speak to all the congregational care pastors, so they would all be aware of what services were available for struggling foster and adoptive families right here in their own community! I believe that mission was accomplished,... more

Part One

My primary goal for visiting with the head of congregational care was to make her aware of the presence of the Attachment Disorder Network, and the services we could offer to families struggling with emotionally disturbed, attachment-affected kids. I know for a fact that there are many adoptive families in the church. When I spoke a week ago to the local county foster parent association, I was told over half of the... more

Sunday was a blur, starting again at 5:20 AM and spending half the day at the swim meet. Both mornings of the meet I sat next to a very interesting woman named Janet, the mom of five kids, all swimmers (now or in the past) with my daughter’s team. This mom had been involved in swimming for 7 years and boy, did she teach me a lot! And guess what? I taught her a few things too, but not about swimming…

Although she is not currently using her training, Janet has a Master’s degree in Speech Pathology and audiology. And as I told her... more

I spoke to a room full of foster parents tonight. I spent an obscene amount of time yesterday working on my presentation… rearranging my slides and editing Nancy Ashe’s amazing video from our conference last year. I never could get PowerPoint to play the videos right in the presentation… I finally decided I would just open them separately in Window’s Media Player. I even downloaded a program designed to address that and it didn’t play the clips correctly.

So today I burned a DVD and headed off to speak…. And once again was plagued... more

It seems inconceivable to me that I could be so overcome with emotion merely by reading this book, and that it would take me a few days to recover. I thought I was further down the path than this. After all, my tough kids are gone. I’m the one who holds the hands of moms these days, not the other way around. Actually, I have been holding moms’ hands for a decade now, even as some of my close ADN friends were still holding mine. I was once told by a therapist that I should not have started ADN until after I had “recovered” from my own experiences,... more

I feel as if I have been hit by a Mack truck today. I could explain it away as just physical fatigue as I try and catch up from a wild weekend followed by a non-stop past 3 days. Or I could just acknowledge what I think it really is… emotional overload from reading and processing Deborah Hannah’s book.

I spoke with Deborah several times yesterday. We have much, much in common. Except I was surprised and saddened to realize she really, truly did make this walk entirely alone. She never knew of the existence of ADN (although someone somewhere... more