Greetings from Kansas, where there’s no place like home! After sloshing around in wet snow, ice and windy conditions in St. Paul, Minnesota last weekend, I arrived home last night in time to rock a couple of girls before bed. The roads were a bit scary around St. Paul, but not bad after I was halfway to Des Moines.


Steph and I had a wonderful time. We slept in on Saturday and then spent all afternoon at Caribou coffee, eating bagels, drinking lattes and doing our respective work. She read the Bible in ancient Greek; I struggled with the ATN database and wrote donor letters. After that, we had dinner at Olive Garden, where she was 3 days short of getting a Chocolate Amore with alcohol. From there we did a little quick shopping and then went to see Enchanted.



Sunday morning I watched her dance with her troupe from Bethel University. Wow. I reflected on all those years of watching gymnastics routines (and taping feet and knees and inhaling ibuprofen) as I watched her graceful moves in time to a live band playing Christian music, before a live audience. Too cool. I was so proud of her!


Beth had a championship meet all weekend and she did great. She beat many of her personal times. Dora complained about the boring weekend and clamored to talk on the phone to me every time someone called. Dora professed to miss me greatly, but when I arrived last night, she ignored me. Been there, done that. This child hears every door beep and garage door opening that ever occurs in this household, but last night she expected me to believe she didn’t hear my arrival. I called her on it and expressed my belief that it must be a pretty scary feeling to realize her heart was becoming connected to mine, whether she liked it or not. She punished me for the rest of the brief night we had together, and again this morning. More fodder for therapy, no doubt. Her therapy assignment this week is to figure out what to do with her anger, and the tip given to her by the therapist was to try to figure out who really is the target of her anger. By her own assessment, she is a two on a scale of ten in terms of how much she is working on her life.


I will be blogging less this month as I kick back a little bit and have more fun. Coming up next is another story of foster care abuses in Missouri.




Photo Credit Nancy Spoolstra, media mom