AND......... The Cookies are ON the Tree! They will be eaten off and replaced with fresh ones over the next 2 weeks.... :)
I LOVE Tradition!
The Minich Family Blog: Every Family Has A Story...Welcome To Ours
Saturday, December 10, 2011
More Cookie Festivities!
AND......... The Cookies are ON the Tree! They will be eaten off and replaced with fresh ones over the next 2 weeks.... :)
I LOVE Tradition!
Thursday, December 8, 2011
A Christmas Concert
Tonight, we headed to Highland Park Presbyterian Church to see the Getty's Christmas Concert. To say we had a good time is an UNDERSTATEMENT! We had a GREAT time!
The music was just fantastic. I LOVE Irish Music. The instruments are so interesting and the Irish Pipes are beautiful.
I have to say, They really ROCKED! We had so much fun. The girlies broke into dance and the audience participated in many of the songs.
Everybody got dressed up for the occasion. We also looked at all the fabulous Christmas lights on the way home.
We took our car, so there were 3 in the back and 3 in the front. Alli sat in the front between mom and dad. She snuggled in and all the way there and all the way home, she was just glowing with joy. :)
It was precious to see.
She is really enjoying all the events of her first Christmas home!
One really COOL thing that happened was that we were able to talk to the American Guitar Player.... and He and his wife are hosting a child from Ukraine for Christmas! :) It was fun to talk with him about adoption.
After the concert, the Irish players had a jam session for about 30 minutes for anybody who wanted to stay. It was such a great atmosphere of joyful expression. :)
On the way home, the girls were all saying what a wonderful time they had. I am REALLY glad we went. :)
The music was just fantastic. I LOVE Irish Music. The instruments are so interesting and the Irish Pipes are beautiful.
I have to say, They really ROCKED! We had so much fun. The girlies broke into dance and the audience participated in many of the songs.
Everybody got dressed up for the occasion. We also looked at all the fabulous Christmas lights on the way home.
We took our car, so there were 3 in the back and 3 in the front. Alli sat in the front between mom and dad. She snuggled in and all the way there and all the way home, she was just glowing with joy. :)
It was precious to see.
She is really enjoying all the events of her first Christmas home!
One really COOL thing that happened was that we were able to talk to the American Guitar Player.... and He and his wife are hosting a child from Ukraine for Christmas! :) It was fun to talk with him about adoption.
After the concert, the Irish players had a jam session for about 30 minutes for anybody who wanted to stay. It was such a great atmosphere of joyful expression. :)
On the way home, the girls were all saying what a wonderful time they had. I am REALLY glad we went. :)
Christmas Cookie Decorating
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
Anna and her Friend
Anna and I met Mary Grace and her mom for lunch today. It was a "first" for Anna. :) Mary Grace has been her friend for awhile, and they are both 13 now. We thought it would be fun to go for a "ladies friendly". :) One of many to come! :)
Well, I almost got a picture. :)
And then I got a real one. :)
Twice Abandoned
These triplets were abandoned once by their biological parents, then sent back to Latvia with no explanation by their adoptive parents, and then readopted by a wonderful family who committed to love them no matter what. :) I loved reading this article!
HERE is the full article:
Contact Jennifer Brooks at 615-259-8892 orjabrooks@tennessean.com.
HERE is the full article:
Their mother told them they were going to Disney World.
She bundled the three children on a plane, all alone, and told them there would be someone there to meet them on the other side.
But when the plane landed, they were on the other side of the world. Returned, without explanation, to the Latvian orphanage where she had adopted them less than two years before. And there was no one waiting to meet them.
They were 9 years old.
Evalds, Inga and Ieva.
Blond-haired, big-eyed triplets from Latvia whose world had just come crashing down for the second time in their short lives.
That was almost 20 years ago. There was no international outcry over what had happened to them, none of the shocked news coverage like last year when an adoptive mother from Tennessee returned her 7-year-old son to Russia like a mail-order sweater that didn’t quite fit.
But if the Russian incident was a worst-case scenario for Tennessee international adoptions, Evalds, Inga and Ieva are the other side of the story.
Tennessee is where they finally came home, adopted at age 11 by John and Carole Bratcher of Murfreesboro, who had enough love and patience to convince three angry, wary children that this time they really were home and that this family was theirs forever.
“It is possible for kids to recover from a failed adoption and for them to succeed. We have living proof,” Carole Bratcher said, smiling over at her three grown children curled side by side by side on a couch.
The triplets turned 28 last week. Renamed Brendan, Catherine and Elizabeth, they’ve grown into smart, happy, poised adults who can talk frankly about the trauma they survived. The same trauma a little boy in Russia is living through right now.
“I wanted to reach through the TV and grab hold of him,” Brendan Bratcher said. “I would sit him down and tell him it’s going to be OK.”
There have been a lot of questions in the year and a half since Torry Hansen, a registered nurse from Shelbyville, Tenn., bundled her adopted son on a plane back to Russia all alone, with a note pinned to his coat: “I no longer wish to parent this child.”
People wonder how any mother — how anyone — could do that to a 7-year-old. They wonder what happened in the home beforehand. They wonder what it will mean for international adoptions in the long term. But most of all they wonder about that little boy, named Artyom in Moscow and Justin in Shelbyville.
“We know what he’s going through,” Catherine Bratcher said. “The feeling of not being wanted. It hurts.”
“I remember, we were walking up the walk to go to the orphanage,” said Elizabeth — who now goes by her Latvian name Ieva — hugging her elbows at the memory.
None of them has a very clear memory of the flight back to Riga, Latvia. Brendan joked that he was still looking around for the Disney rides. The driver who’d given them a lift from the airport simply dropped them at the end of the long drive, leaving the children to walk the final mile on their own, dreading what their former caretakers would say when they saw them again.
“They said if we came back, they were going to beat us,” Ieva said. “We were taking little baby steps, wondering how bad we were going to get beaten. … I don’t think they were very surprised to see us.”
Two years passed. It was St. Patrick’s Day 1995, and John and Carole Bratcher were just starting to talk about the possibility of adopting a child from overseas. That’s when the agency they’d contacted, Heaven Sent Children, posed the question: “What would you think about 11-year-old Latvian triplets?”
Stunned, the couple asked for some time to think. And they thought about it, as friends came over to watch The Quiet Man and eat the traditional St. Patrick’s Day corned beef and cabbage. They thought about it as they brushed their teeth and got ready for bed that night.
“You still thinking about those kids?” John Bratcher remembers them asking each other, over and over, and getting the same answer each time: “Yeah.”
They talked for hours, prayed about it and talked some more. That Monday, they asked the social worker for the children’s files. Before they even arrived, before they saw the first picture of the children, they’d made their decision.
“They were ours. That was just it,” Bratcher said. “Everything else after that was directed toward bringing them home.”
The adoption moved at light speed, sped by the Latvian authorities’ anxiety to get the children adopted before they aged out of the system. By July of that year, the Bratchers arrived in Latvia to sign the adoption papers and bring their family home.
In some ways, the adoption was the easiest part of the process. Because there was nothing easy about convincing three traumatized 11-year-olds that this new family wasn’t just going to ship them back to the orphanage the first time things got tough.
And things did get tough.
“They were worried we’d want to send them back,” said John Bratcher, who serves as clerk and master of the Rutherford County Chancery Court. “But when we decided (to go ahead with the adoption), a little switch went off in our heads that they were ours, and that wasn’t going to change.”
A forever home is a tough concept for children who’ve been abandoned again and again — first by their alcoholic parents, then by the family that adopted them and raised them in Boston for almost two years.
“When we misbehaved, we used to try to guess, to rate what the consequences would be,” Brendan Bratcher said. “If it was a little thing, we’d guess maybe a timeout. If we couldn’t guess, we’d say they were probably going to send us back.”
Catherine and Ieva laughed, but nodded in agreement.
“I was scared to get adopted. I was afraid we’d just get sent back again,” said Catherine, who remembers crying herself to sleep over that thought, night after night.
But that never happened. Not when they pouted or fought or spit or threw rocks. Not when they poured an entire bottle of bubble bath into the hot tub. Not when one of them accidentally set the backyard playhouse on fire.
There was nothing they could do that could make their parents give up on them, or give them up.
Again and again, Carole Bratcher said, she showed them their adoption certificates: “This makes it like you were born to us. This is how it’s different this time. We couldn’t have sent you back even if we wanted to.”
A counselor once told Carole that she’d given up trying to convince adoptive parents that things might not go smoothly once their child came home. Every prospective parent, the counselor said, was convinced that the power of love could overcome anything — post-traumatic stress, language barriers, culture shock.
“People think, it’s going to be so wonderful, they believe their love will fix it all. Believe me, that’s not enough,” she said.
Yes, you need boundless love. But you also need support and you need a quality Carole Bratcher — raised in a family of 10 on a farm in Iowa — had in abundance, a quality her husband shared: a work ethic that just wouldn’t quit. Together, they worked on the kids’ behavioral problems, their post-traumatic stress, their separation anxiety and their trust issues.
“We worked at it like it was our job,” John Bratcher said. The new parents lined up a vast support network of counselors and teachers and church youth ministers and friends and family. They went to every game, every Boy Scout meeting, every parent-teacher conference. They sat up for hours with a Latvian-English dictionary, helping the children puzzle their way through homework.
They knew that behind every tantrum was a child who desperately wanted the home and love they were offering.
The orphanage shot video of 11-year-old Brendan tearing through his closet, looking for his “good” shirt, wanting to look his best for the photos they were sending to an unknown couple in Tennessee. When the Bratchers sent a book of photos of themselves and their home in Murfreesboro, the children carried it around with them everywhere. On their first morning together as a family, the children scrambled to make all the beds, eager to impress their new parents.
“Why did you do it?” she asked the woman who answered the phone. Their first adoptive mother burst into tears. “She apologized and apologized.”
The woman in Boston had her reasons. Problems in her marriage. A 13-year-old daughter who didn’t take kindly to close-knit triplets invading her home.
The triplets were a handful.
“We were 8-year-olds being 8-year-olds,” said Brendan, who remembers sliding down the laundry chute in the three-story house in Boston, going to Red Sox games and golfing with their adoptive father.
And even at the first adoption, the children were suffering the effects of early childhood trauma and their abandonment in the orphanage.
“When you adopt a child, they may act calm at first … but you’re going to see what they went through,” Catherine said. “What I knew was somebody not liking me. What I knew was being hit with a belt. I didn’t know how to process” being treated with love and understanding.
“They’re going to scream and kick and show you absolute hate and tell you ‘I hate you,’ ” Ieva said. “But it’s a defense mechanism. It’s too scary to get too close to you. It’s safer to say ‘I hate you,’ to throw rocks at you.”
The Bratchers went into the adoption well prepared for the troubles they’d face. They agreed to be interviewed for this story in the hope that other adoptive parents would get the help and support if they start to feel overwhelmed. Because things can get better.
It took years, they said, for the children to finally relax, to feel safe and secure. They started bringing home academic awards and sports trophies. Brendan became an Eagle Scout and bought his own home at age 22. The good days started to outnumber the bad.
Bratcher leafs through photo albums chronicling years of family vacations, three-cake birthday parties, holidays, horseplay in the backyard, prom night, graduations, hugs for Mom and Dad.
“That right there,” Bratcher said, tapping an early photo of one of his daughters hugging him tightly around the neck, burying her head in his shoulder. “That hug right there. Every bit of it was worth it.”
She bundled the three children on a plane, all alone, and told them there would be someone there to meet them on the other side.
But when the plane landed, they were on the other side of the world. Returned, without explanation, to the Latvian orphanage where she had adopted them less than two years before. And there was no one waiting to meet them.
They were 9 years old.
Evalds, Inga and Ieva.
Blond-haired, big-eyed triplets from Latvia whose world had just come crashing down for the second time in their short lives.
That was almost 20 years ago. There was no international outcry over what had happened to them, none of the shocked news coverage like last year when an adoptive mother from Tennessee returned her 7-year-old son to Russia like a mail-order sweater that didn’t quite fit.
But if the Russian incident was a worst-case scenario for Tennessee international adoptions, Evalds, Inga and Ieva are the other side of the story.
Tennessee is where they finally came home, adopted at age 11 by John and Carole Bratcher of Murfreesboro, who had enough love and patience to convince three angry, wary children that this time they really were home and that this family was theirs forever.
“It is possible for kids to recover from a failed adoption and for them to succeed. We have living proof,” Carole Bratcher said, smiling over at her three grown children curled side by side by side on a couch.
The triplets turned 28 last week. Renamed Brendan, Catherine and Elizabeth, they’ve grown into smart, happy, poised adults who can talk frankly about the trauma they survived. The same trauma a little boy in Russia is living through right now.
“I wanted to reach through the TV and grab hold of him,” Brendan Bratcher said. “I would sit him down and tell him it’s going to be OK.”
There have been a lot of questions in the year and a half since Torry Hansen, a registered nurse from Shelbyville, Tenn., bundled her adopted son on a plane back to Russia all alone, with a note pinned to his coat: “I no longer wish to parent this child.”
People wonder how any mother — how anyone — could do that to a 7-year-old. They wonder what happened in the home beforehand. They wonder what it will mean for international adoptions in the long term. But most of all they wonder about that little boy, named Artyom in Moscow and Justin in Shelbyville.
“We know what he’s going through,” Catherine Bratcher said. “The feeling of not being wanted. It hurts.”
“I remember, we were walking up the walk to go to the orphanage,” said Elizabeth — who now goes by her Latvian name Ieva — hugging her elbows at the memory.
None of them has a very clear memory of the flight back to Riga, Latvia. Brendan joked that he was still looking around for the Disney rides. The driver who’d given them a lift from the airport simply dropped them at the end of the long drive, leaving the children to walk the final mile on their own, dreading what their former caretakers would say when they saw them again.
“They said if we came back, they were going to beat us,” Ieva said. “We were taking little baby steps, wondering how bad we were going to get beaten. … I don’t think they were very surprised to see us.”
A second chance
There were no beatings. Instead, the orphanage launched an international effort to find them a new home. The clock was ticking. In Latvia, children are expected to leave the orphanages at age 16 if they aren’t adopted, and the few families willing to take the children in weren’t willing to take all three.Two years passed. It was St. Patrick’s Day 1995, and John and Carole Bratcher were just starting to talk about the possibility of adopting a child from overseas. That’s when the agency they’d contacted, Heaven Sent Children, posed the question: “What would you think about 11-year-old Latvian triplets?”
Stunned, the couple asked for some time to think. And they thought about it, as friends came over to watch The Quiet Man and eat the traditional St. Patrick’s Day corned beef and cabbage. They thought about it as they brushed their teeth and got ready for bed that night.
“You still thinking about those kids?” John Bratcher remembers them asking each other, over and over, and getting the same answer each time: “Yeah.”
They talked for hours, prayed about it and talked some more. That Monday, they asked the social worker for the children’s files. Before they even arrived, before they saw the first picture of the children, they’d made their decision.
“They were ours. That was just it,” Bratcher said. “Everything else after that was directed toward bringing them home.”
The adoption moved at light speed, sped by the Latvian authorities’ anxiety to get the children adopted before they aged out of the system. By July of that year, the Bratchers arrived in Latvia to sign the adoption papers and bring their family home.
In some ways, the adoption was the easiest part of the process. Because there was nothing easy about convincing three traumatized 11-year-olds that this new family wasn’t just going to ship them back to the orphanage the first time things got tough.
And things did get tough.
“They were worried we’d want to send them back,” said John Bratcher, who serves as clerk and master of the Rutherford County Chancery Court. “But when we decided (to go ahead with the adoption), a little switch went off in our heads that they were ours, and that wasn’t going to change.”
A forever home is a tough concept for children who’ve been abandoned again and again — first by their alcoholic parents, then by the family that adopted them and raised them in Boston for almost two years.
“When we misbehaved, we used to try to guess, to rate what the consequences would be,” Brendan Bratcher said. “If it was a little thing, we’d guess maybe a timeout. If we couldn’t guess, we’d say they were probably going to send us back.”
Catherine and Ieva laughed, but nodded in agreement.
“I was scared to get adopted. I was afraid we’d just get sent back again,” said Catherine, who remembers crying herself to sleep over that thought, night after night.
But that never happened. Not when they pouted or fought or spit or threw rocks. Not when they poured an entire bottle of bubble bath into the hot tub. Not when one of them accidentally set the backyard playhouse on fire.
There was nothing they could do that could make their parents give up on them, or give them up.
Again and again, Carole Bratcher said, she showed them their adoption certificates: “This makes it like you were born to us. This is how it’s different this time. We couldn’t have sent you back even if we wanted to.”
A counselor once told Carole that she’d given up trying to convince adoptive parents that things might not go smoothly once their child came home. Every prospective parent, the counselor said, was convinced that the power of love could overcome anything — post-traumatic stress, language barriers, culture shock.
“People think, it’s going to be so wonderful, they believe their love will fix it all. Believe me, that’s not enough,” she said.
Yes, you need boundless love. But you also need support and you need a quality Carole Bratcher — raised in a family of 10 on a farm in Iowa — had in abundance, a quality her husband shared: a work ethic that just wouldn’t quit. Together, they worked on the kids’ behavioral problems, their post-traumatic stress, their separation anxiety and their trust issues.
“We worked at it like it was our job,” John Bratcher said. The new parents lined up a vast support network of counselors and teachers and church youth ministers and friends and family. They went to every game, every Boy Scout meeting, every parent-teacher conference. They sat up for hours with a Latvian-English dictionary, helping the children puzzle their way through homework.
They knew that behind every tantrum was a child who desperately wanted the home and love they were offering.
The orphanage shot video of 11-year-old Brendan tearing through his closet, looking for his “good” shirt, wanting to look his best for the photos they were sending to an unknown couple in Tennessee. When the Bratchers sent a book of photos of themselves and their home in Murfreesboro, the children carried it around with them everywhere. On their first morning together as a family, the children scrambled to make all the beds, eager to impress their new parents.
Rebuilding trust
A few years after they came home to Murfreesboro, Ieva dialed a Boston number from memory.“Why did you do it?” she asked the woman who answered the phone. Their first adoptive mother burst into tears. “She apologized and apologized.”
The woman in Boston had her reasons. Problems in her marriage. A 13-year-old daughter who didn’t take kindly to close-knit triplets invading her home.
The triplets were a handful.
“We were 8-year-olds being 8-year-olds,” said Brendan, who remembers sliding down the laundry chute in the three-story house in Boston, going to Red Sox games and golfing with their adoptive father.
And even at the first adoption, the children were suffering the effects of early childhood trauma and their abandonment in the orphanage.
“When you adopt a child, they may act calm at first … but you’re going to see what they went through,” Catherine said. “What I knew was somebody not liking me. What I knew was being hit with a belt. I didn’t know how to process” being treated with love and understanding.
“They’re going to scream and kick and show you absolute hate and tell you ‘I hate you,’ ” Ieva said. “But it’s a defense mechanism. It’s too scary to get too close to you. It’s safer to say ‘I hate you,’ to throw rocks at you.”
The Bratchers went into the adoption well prepared for the troubles they’d face. They agreed to be interviewed for this story in the hope that other adoptive parents would get the help and support if they start to feel overwhelmed. Because things can get better.
It took years, they said, for the children to finally relax, to feel safe and secure. They started bringing home academic awards and sports trophies. Brendan became an Eagle Scout and bought his own home at age 22. The good days started to outnumber the bad.
Bratcher leafs through photo albums chronicling years of family vacations, three-cake birthday parties, holidays, horseplay in the backyard, prom night, graduations, hugs for Mom and Dad.
“That right there,” Bratcher said, tapping an early photo of one of his daughters hugging him tightly around the neck, burying her head in his shoulder. “That hug right there. Every bit of it was worth it.”
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Framing Memories One Piece At A Time
some of the artwork the kids have done over the years. I need to start framing
more of the girl's work. All of these pictures are hung in various parts of the house.
I love having those memories around. And I think they like seeing their masterpieces of long ago being cherished, just like they are. :)
Saturday, December 3, 2011
An Alli Funny
Tonight the girls were watching an old Popeye cartoon. Olive Oyl was startled and "jumped out of her shoes and stockings".... They were left standing in the shape of her legs. Alli said, "Oh wow! There is a cartoon with somebody else with fake legs!"
When I thought about it, that is exactly what the cartoon looked like...but who would ever think of that!
LOL
Christmas Memories
I can't believe the Christmas season is already here! Christmas isn't about getting.... after all it isn't OUR birthday. It is about the ONE who GAVE!
GOD sent HIS Son; the baby in the manger, Jesus Christ, who grew up and became our Savior.
But in our society, Christmas goes hand in hand with giving of gifts. And everybody likes to give gifts, including us. We just don't want that to be the focus of the holiday. That is partially why I already wrapped everything and put it under the tree. I didn't want the anxiety of wonder to permeate the season. They now know they have gifts. We will open them when the time comes. It seemed to be a relief for Miss Alli to know. Now we can concentrate on other things. :)
I am so excited for Miss Alli to have her first Christmas with us. She cannot wait to put cookies on the tree that she can "eat off". LOL
This excitement comes from one of our lasting traditions of baking cookies and putting them on the tree. She LOVES the idea.
It is so important to build those lasting memories with our children through family rituals that we repeat each year.
She was able to pick out a Child to buy for from the angel tree and talk about what she wanted the little girl to get. This was new for her to be on the "giving" side of things.
As we sat around the table tonight she listened intently to all the stories we were sharing about Christmas's past, and and it was painfully obvious to me that she was saddened that she wasn't here before.
She has been inserted into our family, and while she feels very much an integral part of our lives, old memories remind her that she was obviously not there, and that is hard for her and for me too.
Honestly, I forget sometimes that our girls were not born to us. It seems like they have always been here.
So we started sharing old funny stories about each of the girls and we all laughed until we cried, and then Alli said, "Mama, tell me something more about me! Are there more funny things I have done?" I didn't have as many funny things I could come up with for her, because she just hasn't been here that long, and she wasn't here when she was 5 or 6. My heart hurt for her loss. :( As all the girls went away from the table full of happiness of hearing fun stories, including Alli, I looked at Mike and said, "We need to make every effort to make sure we catch fun memories for her, so we can bring them up for her later. " He reassured me that as time goes on, there will be plenty of fun moments to remember. But it still made me sad for her. 11 years of her life is GONE. We know NOTHING but a few tragic stories and her fun hair bow story. :(
So we will do our best to make memories for her that she can build on from here on out. We love our little girls so much.
Looking forward to a memory making Christmas!
As we celebrate this Christmas, I am so excited to help the girls make those lasting memories of Celebrating the Birth of our Savior.
These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things
JOY!
There is a certain joy that comes from the gift of children. I remember when my guys were little I enjoyed them so very much. That has not changed abit! I enjoy them now too. They will always be cute, and funny and sweet. :) We had 4 boys in 4 years and 9 months. Two of them were less than a year apart and they grew up together in a sort of "herd". :) All little, all elementary and then quickly all teens. What a JOY to have 4 teen age boys in the house at the same time! They had a variety pack of personalities and needs just like any kids do. We had IEP's and walkers and wheelchairs around....casts, stitches and surgeries; but most of all we had joy. :)
So now it is the girls turn. They are even closer in age. For girls within 20 months of each other. Two are now teens and the others will follow rapidly. They too are growing up in a rather "lady like herd". :)
Once again, we have special needs around. Instead of walkers, we have extra body parts, sometimes a wheel chair, casts, surgeries and stitches, and even a handicap placard so Erika can open her door wide enough to get out of the car and back in. But most of all, we have joy!
So now it is the girls turn. They are even closer in age. For girls within 20 months of each other. Two are now teens and the others will follow rapidly. They too are growing up in a rather "lady like herd". :)
Once again, we have special needs around. Instead of walkers, we have extra body parts, sometimes a wheel chair, casts, surgeries and stitches, and even a handicap placard so Erika can open her door wide enough to get out of the car and back in. But most of all, we have joy!
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Our Society
Erika and I were headed to Scottish Rite Hospital yesterday to have her leg adjusted and to get new straps, as her velcro had worn out.
As we were driving towards the hospital, Erika wanted to listen to Christian Radio. I am typically not a radio listener, so I was shocked at the commercials on the Christian Radio Station.
This is just a part of what we heard:
Give the gift of a new body for Christmas.
The commercial was from plastic surgery group that was advertising surgery as a GIFT!
So if you aren't satisfied with your face or your stomach or your hips or your nose, you can FIX it!
Then, there was the commercial for the "perfect smile". This was all about cosmetic dentistry. Not dentistry that is needed because you have a tooth ache, but because you want your appearance to be better and your smile to be white!
Erika and I looked at each other after several of these "bombardments" with dismay. I can't believe how we as a society in America, are so infatuated with how we look in the mirror that we feel that we need to spend billions of dollars a year for cosmetic procedures, let alone cosmetics in general!
We had a little talk about it in the car, and then went on to our appointment. In the doctor's office, we had a long appt. Staying in a small room can drive one to do insane things, like, turn on the little TV in the room.
Yes, we did. We found a cool cooking show, but there were commercials. To our utter SHOCK, there was a commercial about BUTTS. I am not kidding. That is what they called it. Apparently there is this kind of "cusioned" underwear women now wear to make their bottom look bigger? (like anybody needs a bigger bottom in America) Or, to make it look shapelier.
What was even more shocking was the interview with the construction workers who said they admired big rear ends... and then the women who was doing the commercial actually suggested these things will help you pick up guys and have more partners for intimacy.
With that, the TV went off and we settled for a lesser form of insanity. Silence.
When we were on our way home, I brought up our day's delve into FLESH and discussed how sad it is that people don't accept themselves for who they are.
In the media we here all sorts of reports about young girls who have eating disorders and have low self esteem. That same media then turns around and tells us all the reasons we should not be satisfied with who we are, and that we should pay 10's of thousands of dollars to change our image!
It is SO HARD to compete with media that says, "You are not ok unless you are perfect." As I tell MY daughters that who they are on the inside is the most important thing and the most APPEALING thing, to the RIGHT PERSON. That who they are IN CHRIST is all that matters. The value one has as a person has nothing to do with the outside, but everything to do with a living spirit on the INSIDE.
They are learning what true friendship is and what shallowness is.
I have some very brave girls who, in spite of their outward differences, carry themselves in public with confidence.
I feel sorry for those in our society who have to achieve bodily perfection in pursuit of happiness.
When they get "there", whatever that is..... happiness will not be there, but the emptiness of a white washed sepulcher full of dead men's bones.
And I am really sad that Christian Radio is carrying these ads.
Sarah's Funny
Sarah was doing vocabulary:
"Mama, why would they use such an awful word for something so nice?"
What is the word?
She said, "Engaged", but she pronounced it "Engagged". LOL
"Mama, why would they use such an awful word for something so nice?"
What is the word?
She said, "Engaged", but she pronounced it "Engagged". LOL
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
An Alli Update....
We are ready to send our first post placement report for Russia. As I read our social worker's words, I wept.
Why? Because I am so happy inside. I am happy because a little girl who's life was total chaos and destruction from the moment she was born is now HOME...
I wept because the Lord has redeemed her.
I wept because when I see her smile, her GENUINE smile and her joy, and I see the changes she has made, I am just overcome.
Friday will mark our 9th month together. Alli is a JOY!
She was helping me wrap a Christmas present tonight and taking total glee in the fact that her sister was going "to really LOVE this present!" :)
The changes we are seeing in her are remarkable.
She is joyful, she works hard on her school work, she is helpful and kind. She shares her love for her sisters and us all the time, and expresses her joy in her prayers.
She is herself.... and she is liking herself. :) I could go on and on, but it would be a book.
I am just amazed.
I am so thankful that we are able to be a part of her life. Both Mike and I are in awe of what the Lord has done in our lives and in her life.
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