Category Archives: adoption

always with me, everywhere

Posted on by August 21, 2013
Next week marks a significant 12-month victory in our family. A year ago, we risked the ocean and stormed two castles and brought two children out of captivity and into a family. For good, forever.

It sounds nice. Victorious, glorious.

But it has been hard, and we’ve been learning to abide in ways we never thought to before. In the midst of other life happenings (because drama never has the courtesy to make an appointment), we have walked many places this year that we honestly did not want to go. We still walk to some of those places every week. Usually, every day…often, more than once.

It’s a grisly battle and there’s nothing romantic or pretty about it.

There have been mornings that I don’t want to leave the bedroom. There are chaotic afternoons that taunt and harass with the voice of the enemy saying, “I told you so.” There are middle-of-the-nights that I fight bloody hell for joy and peace.

It is hardest when I forget that He’s right there in those hard places with us. Sometimes I forget to see the beautiful, I forget that He makes quiet resting places in the chaos, and I forget that He’s holding the needle.

 

But He reminds me over and over and over. He’s always with me. This verse has been taped to our shower wall in a plastic sheet protector for the past several months:

 

You keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed on You,
because he trusts in You.

– Isaiah 26:3

 

 

In the wee hours one morning recently, I gave up trying to get back to sleep. I was tired, but tired of trying, too.
 
We’d been fighting illness and there were eight loads of laundry in queue. I thought I’d get some of it done in a quiet house, drink a glass of water, and go back to bed in an hour or so once I was tired enough to fall back asleep.

 

Tiptoed downstairs. Two cats, one striped and one solid, came padding behind me.

 

 

One of them in particular follows me everywhere, every day. White as a cue ball, she’s everywhere I go.

 

Where can I go from my Sophie? Or where can I flee from her presence? If ascend up the stairs, she is there. If I make my bed in the morning, she is climbing all over the pillows. If I take the wash out of the dryer, behold, she is there. If I hide in the remotest part of the house, even there she will follow me, her right paw will lay hold of the sandwich I am trying to eat for lunch.

– Psalm 139:7-10, modified considerably 

 

 

 

The girl knows what it is to abide, to pursue the presence of the one she loves. To follow the person who loves her best. She loves to be with me, and I love that, too – though sometimes I’d like to keep my bowl of ice cream to myself.

 

 

Despite my grand intentions, the laundry in the dryer was still damp. I set it to running again, wondering what to do. Fold a few blankets. Wipe the counter. Tell the cats to be quiet because it’s not breakfast time yet…in this house, at least.

 

 I looked for my Bible but couldn’t find it. I remembered that it was by the bed, but didn’t want to risk waking up small humans by going back upstairs to get it. 
I grab another book instead, and read this:

 

The Spirit must break our practice of the presence of self, and He does this by forging Himself into our inner being. How often these last years have I been filled with that burning? There were times when I literally felt as though He grabbed my soul with His holy fist and lifted me up before His face with my feet dangling in midair and my tongue protesting, “No, Lord, I can’t take anymore. No more, Lord. I’m weary of the painful growth.”

 

And I realize that the laundry was just a ruse to get me down here to read this, today, this morning, right now. Because I need more of Him urgently.

 

I am learning about those flames which burn but do not consume. I am learning about that fire which releases the odor and fragrance of roses and about that Guest who inhabits the parlor of our souls, who banks the fireplace with ashes to keep the burning low or who uses the billows when the room has grown cold.

– Karen Burton Mains, Open Heart, Open Home

 

 

I check the laundry. Pull out dry things that are wadded around damp towels and reset the dryer. Fold a pillowcase and some underwear, a set of sheets. It is the Sabbath without rest right now – Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and we need healing. But it is quiet and the spirit is resting even when the body isn’t.

 

Sophie is here, quietly accepting the wait for breakfast, though Gus still loiters in the kitchen. It is just me and them and Him and the laundry, breathing in peace and fellowship. It is the day of Communion.

 

The towels are dry and another load goes in. I finish folding warm clothes in a cold room, in bare feet on a hard floor. Put away my empty glass. Stack sheets and towels and underwear, triumphant over another load of laundry, and head upstairs, two little cats following me.

 

He has used His billows to relight the fire, and He banks me in with a down comforter. Victorious, glorious.

 

Contentedly exhausted, I go back to sleep…and He is right there in that place, too.

 

anxious for nothing

Posted on by August 31, 2013

 
I love bread dough. There is something instinctively comforting about warm, rising dough that is as fluffy as toddler cheeks. I love the ppfffffff sound of punching the dough down after the first rise and then dividing it into little loaf portions and tucking them into their pans.  I love folding in mozzarella and sauteed onions and so many herbs that they fall out when you lift the dough into the big loaf pan.

I love watching it rise.
 
And…I really love eating it. Hello, my name is Shannon, and I love, I adore, I highly esteem, I less-than-three carbs and gluten. Don’t tell our naturopath. 

 
Baking bread used to be so intimidating to me. Silly, hmm? It was unfamiliar territory and seemed like a big process. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to tackle it.

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

– Philippians 4:6

So tackle it I did, and then got a little braver. I learned to play.

 

 

 
I learned to make new things, and discovered the love of stretching strips of pizza dough over calzone filling, rolling long thin triangles into crescent rolls, and layering other strips of dough together with a ridiculous amount of cinnamon sugar in between. Nothing fancy, just comfort food…but I’m harboring a longing to try homemade hotdog buns soon. We’ll see.

 
Recently we learned to make doughnuts, and I loved cutting out floury circles, and – the best part – little floury doughnut holes. Oh, joy! Oh, bliss!
 
Oh, dentist!

Just kidding. No cavities so far.
 

 

 

 
Playing is messy but so necessary. We need it from the earliest of ages. When we are little and don’t have enough play and touch and interaction, many things that should just be routine are anxiety-provoking, unfamiliar territory.

Fear comes into play. Literally. 

We learned a little – just a tiny bit – about this during some adoption trainings. We’ve learned quite a bit more, as usually happens, through actual experience. 

Our first experience was during our first trip to Spaghettia in March of last year. We gave Reagan some playdoh – all kids like play-doh, right? – and when she squeezed it, she cried. She was scared of it. 

We thought, Hmm, that’s weird, and found different toys to play with. 

We’ve been home together for almost a year now, and we’re learning more and more. It’s tricky; there don’t seem to be any hard and fast rules about sensory issues. Not all symptoms or characteristics may be present. A child can be both hypersensitive and hyposensitive. And – I just love this – “Inconsistency is a hallmark of every neurological dysfunction.” 

Well. Thanks so much. That’s just great.

 
Anyway, we’re doing lots of play. So many things are new and intimidating, and we focus on making new things familiar so they lose their fear. Messy play, creative play, textures, temperatures, movement, sound…sensory play. Of course, we never called it that before. We just called it…play. The only difference is that we don’t take it for granted anymore.
 

 

 

…My object is to show that the chief function of a child – his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life – is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses; that he has an insatiable appetite for knowledge got in this way; and that, therefore, the endeavor of his parents should be to put him in the way of making acquaintance freely with Nature and natural objects.

– Charlotte Mason, Home Education

She loves playdoh now. And not just for eating.
(Kidding. She’s only eaten it twice…I think…) 

 
Tonight after bedtime, Chamberlain came downstairs with a splinter in her fingertip that, while certainly painful, somehow magically did not become so until after we tucked her in. Vince and I took turns poking with the tweezers amid her shrieks and tears, but to no avail…we can’t pinch the splinter out, the tweezers can’t grasp it, and it’s unavoidable…the dreaded implement must be used.
 
You know the one. 

The fearsome sewing needle. (gasp!) 

Say it ain’t so! 

Actually, I’m not saying it at all. I’m handing her a stuffed doggie that happens to be within arm’s reach and what I do find myself saying is, “I think Pup has a splinter, too. How about you check him with the tweezers -” putting those useless things into her right hand, “while I look at your splinter a little more?” 

It was a stroke of divine genius that didn’t come from me at all. And it worked. 

She is engrossed in Pup’s right paw while I am holding her left paw and poking it with the needle. She has no idea I’m even holding a needle. She hardly notices that I have exposed the end of the splinter and she is jabbering to Pup about how he must be more careful in the woods around the rosebushes… 

I ask her if we can trade. She looks at me with surprise and hands me the tweezers and takes the needle that she didn’t even know I had and continues Pup’s surgery. One more pinch on her rosy fingertip and the tweezers grasp the splinter…and it’s out. 

We look at it together. Out in the open, it’s just a tiny little thing.

Cham toddles back to bed. I toddle back to the kitchen, thinking about what just happened…and He tells me: 

You are the one holding Pup. 

I almost dropped the tweezers. What?
He explains. He says that as we learn about these kids…all six of them…and we look for their owies that need healed and the things they need to learn, and we kiss them and cry over them and are engrossed in their need for restoration and growth…He is holding the needle. He is working on us. 

 
There are owies and impurities inside me, and He is calmly, carefully, quietly pulling them out as I jabber on and on to Him about the pups that I’m holding. Things that used to intimidate me are almost normal now, and I don’t even cry over other things that used to scare me, and I’ve hardly noticed because my attention has been focused on these pups.

As we teach and comfort our kids, He is pulling fears out – these little bitty things that cause so much pain – and brings them out to the open so we can look at it together.

He sends us toddling off, free, showing us new ways to play so we can be anxious for nothing…because He loves to watch us rise.

oh…make them scour the anchor

Posted on by July 13, 2013

It’s a fascinating thing about boys: five seconds after you tuck in their angelic little faces, you close the door, get half a step away from their room, and utter bedlam breaks loose.

Almost every night, same thing. No talking, I tell them. No goofing off, I tell them. And absolutely, under no circumstances, no wrestling, I tell them.

Smiling nods. Suppressed giggles. I am prepared. I shut the door…wait…and kaBOOM. Someone has set off Roman candles while simultaneously doing the high dive off the bunkbed.

Okay, maybe not exactly that. But it sounds close.

So we’ve had enough. Not tired, boys?

(click to enlarge)

We’ve had them swat mosquitoes, pull weeds, do push ups, scrub lawn chairs, clean out the rain gutters, anything we can think of at the moment to help them decide that being in bed is a good idea.

Moms also need to keep boys’ little minds and hands busy. It’s in their best interest to do so. My father once said about our energetic toddler, “If you let that kid get bored, you deserve what he’s going to do to you.” Shirley’s stepfather, who has a South Dakota accent, once said after baby-sitting our kids for a week, “Oh, der good kids. You just gotta keep ’em out in da open.” 

– James Dobson, Bringing Up Boys

Tonight I was proactive. I had two of the boys run ten laps around the house right from the get-go. Problem was, I didn’t expect one of them to take a drink out of the hose somewhere around lap seven, and then decide that his brother also needed a drink…while he was running…and not expecting the full force of thirty-degree water to hit him in the face as he rounded the corner.

My grandma raised five boys, and she let all of them live to tell about it. There’s a story about one of the boys – I won’t mention who, but (cough) he’s the one most closely related to me  – he was sitting on top of a cardboard box with his pocketknife, just stabbing the box, over and over…and the only reason (he says) he got in trouble for it was because…his little brother was inside the box.

It’s a miracle that I’m here to tell you about this, really.

Yesterday one of the boys hid Iree’s much-loved locket in the tiny crevice between the floor of our garage and the pavement of the driveway, wedging it in just perfectly so that it fell (!) beyond reach and vision. Thirty minutes later, after chipping concrete and poking around with a flashlight and a hacksaw blade, Vince and Mattie emerged victorious, and fifteen hours later the perpetrator was still working off the consequences for it, carefully filling in the crevice with dirt and doing a few other chores just for good measure.

This afternoon, he put soap on Reagan’s toothbrush. Ha ha.

 This gave me occasion to observe that when men are employed they are best contented; for on the days they worked they were good natured and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good day’s work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, finding fault with their pork, the bread, etc., and in continual ill humor, which put me in mind of a sea-captain whose rule it was to keep his men constantly at work; and when his mate once told him that they had done everything, and there was nothing further to employ them about, “Oh,” says he, “make them scour the anchor.” 

– The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

So tonight, this particular little man is on the back deck. After expressing that he really wanted to run laps after bedtime, he learned that not everyone gets the consequence he is hoping for…and he is out there with a commission to get ten mosquitoes and a yogurt lid to display them on as evidence.

Minutes of whining, sulking defiance, and halfhearted mosquito-swatting pass. He has thrown the yogurt lid out onto the lawn and declared he won’t do it. It starts to drizzle, because God loves me.

“Mom!! Iss raining!”

“I know!! You should probably start obeying soon and get those mosquitoes!” Smile.

Furrowed eyebrows, and I can see he is considering it.

I check on him a few minutes later. He’s got four of them on the lid, and he catches my eye.

“Dere’s no ‘oskeetoes!” he protests. I can see them hovering around the back of his head. One of them lands and he swats. Examines his hands, all ten fingers, and scrapes the remains of his prey onto the lid. Shrugs and pouts, letting the lid tilt carelessly as he scans the horizon for sympathy, for release, for another mosquito – he suddenly realizes what he is doing and rights the lid quickly, but too late – he’s back down to four mosquitoes.

He looks through the window, but can’t see me – Sophie’s sitting on the counter in front of me and I’m ducking behind her in muffled hysterics.

He inspects the floor of the deck. Sadly, not only is the mosquito that fell off of the lid not there, but no other dead insects have chosen to lie in repose in that exact spot for his sole benefit, either.

Attachment issues come into play, and he tells me that he is done as often as he can make eye contact, with six, then eight, then nine, then eight again, and finally twelve (you heard me mention attachment, yes?) dead or dying mosquitoes. Eventually he is sent to bed without much further drama, and I didn’t have to drag him (or drug him) to get there. Win.

Tomorrow, Vince will be home at bedtime. It will be our almost-sacred date night and we’ll have no sympathy for disturbers of the peace. If they pull another stunt, we will take orders from friends who need help lawn mowing, weed-whacking, dandelion-pulling, driveway sweeping, garden watering, leaf-raking, window-washing, or any other anchor-scouring you can think of. You can even play the Imperial Death March for them while they work; I’ve heard they like it.

But maybe you shouldn’t ask them to water your garden. One of them might get thirsty…and decide to use the hose…on someone else.

Smile.