Category Archives: homeschooling

what we know: tools for adoptive and foster families

Posted on by December 23, 2024

How hard is it to read the word “graph” when you know all the sounds? On a good day, not hard at all. But on a rough day when you’re operating from fear and control, impossible.

“What do the letters ‘ph’ say together?” I ask. He knows this.

what we know: tools for adoptive and foster families

Not only does he know this, but I just coached his sister through reading the word “sphere” two minutes earlier, so he just had a refresher course in the “ph” sound. And that might be the very reason he’s choosing this hill to die on – it makes it all the more obvious that he does know, but You Can’t Make Me Tell You.

“Ape,” he says.

We both know it’s wrong. He does a quick extra chore to regroup while I work with someone else.

I ask again. “Ape,” he says, knowing it’s still wrong, it will always be wrong, never in a million years will “ph” ever say “ape,” but if I asked him what his name is right now, he’s just as likely to answer “Hippo.” Or, you know, “Ape.”

Another chore. Wash some windows. Specifically, “Wash the two windows behind you,” I tell him.

He starts doing a third window, though. So I say, “Go ahead and finish that one. You can do three.”

He stops half way through the last one.

“I’m done,” he says. We both know it’s not true.

“How many windows did I tell you to do?”

“Three.” Okay, kind of. I’ll give him that.

“How many did you wash?”

“Four.”

“Really? How’s that?”

He counts the panes, two on each window – one, two, three, four.

“So how many did you wash?”

“Three.”

Because two plus two is three. Because what he’s really saying is, Ef you. You can’t make me.

And I can’t. We both know that’s true. But what he doesn’t understand yet, is I don’t want to make him.

I want him to do it himself. For himself. Because he is loved, and he is valuable, and his days are valuable. I know it’s true. Some days, I think he might finally believe it’s true, also. But not today.

Not all days are like this. It used to be, for years, that every day was like this and worse (so much worse), but now he goes in phases – good days and bad days, great weeks and terrible weeks.

But it’s Christmas time, and right now he’s having some really hard days, because festivities and gatherings and events, oh my. The turmoil this brings up for kids with a background of trauma can be immense, sometimes catastrophic.

But it’s nothing like it used to be.

It used to be, we had to avoid almost everything that involved people because people didn’t know how much their well-intentioned interactions with our kids cost our family.

It was easier to just avoid them. We could at least avoid those triggers…but isolation also cost our family.  

Eventually we learned how to communicate what our kids’ needs were to the people around us – family, friends, our church, our school, our medical professionals. And that quickly helped us discover who “our people” were – they were the ones who respected the boundaries our kids needed. The ones who didn’t, weren’t.  

If this sounds familiar to you, I have some quick resources for you to help the holiday season be more fun than a root canal without anesthesia. Been there, hated that. Some days, as you can tell, we’re still there. But it’s nothing like it used to be.

This post explains the Why Behind the Weird Limits to our people. It helps family, friends, teachers, and other professionals understand exactly why it is such a no no to overstep attachment boundaries with kiddos who have a background of trauma. It’s chapter 2 from Upside Down: Understanding and Supporting Attachment in Adoptive and Foster Families.

Or there’s this: The Upside Down Cheat Sheet is a quick, one-sheet reference. Don’t be afraid to click on it; it’s a free download, no signup required, with a few basic principles to remember. Print it out and give it away as much as you want. If you charge people for it (good luck with that), I will find you…and I’ll ask you to share your savvy marketing skills with me.

And, need the whole book? It’s just 100 (ish) pages – a quick, easy read, and it’s funny. Because I’m funny. At least, my friends think so. You can buy it in stores everywhere or get it directly from us and take advantage of our discounted prices for buying multiple copies. It’s also now available in audio here. Everyone needs this information and we want to make it easy for you to have it, because adoptive and foster families need real support and understanding from their people. If our community can learn, yours can, too.

So that is a look into our fishbowl, seven years into this. At least the windows are clean.

May your gatherings be filled with joy, and your home be filled with peace and as little aftermath as possible. What you’re doing is hard, but you’re doing a good job. And that’s the truth.

with vision: reading with Grandma

Posted on by April 19, 2022

Kav’s hair was all tufted and feathery-soft after his bath, copper in some lights and red in others. I sniffed him and ruffled it, and before I knew what I was saying, these words came out of my mouth:

“His hair is so pretty.” I paused. “Listen to me, I sound just like Grandma.”

with vision: reading with Grandma

For nineteen years Grandma has called our babies’ hair pretty, and she doesn’t care whether it’s a boy or a girl she’s crooning over. Anyone under ten is fair game.

The next day, we drove the wavy road to her house in forty degree weather. Puddles from the last few days’ rain on the roadside trail were still glazed with ice in the early afternoon, and you could see their frozen lines crisscrossed on their surface. If you grew up in cold weather, you can imagine the perfect crunch these puddles must make if you walked on them. But no one had walked on these ones yet; through miles of the road, they were all still untouched.

Forgive me for going on about the puddles. We’ve been listening to an audio version of Nicholas Nickleby on these drives between Wasilla and Palmer, and Dickens makes me verbose.

It’s a forty minute drive all the way past the river, and Kav’s tolerance for car rides usually expires around the 25-30 minute mark (I don’t think this is Dickens’ fault). So since we don’t make it over as often as we’d like, we planned a two-for-one-deal this time: Stop at Grandma’s house before heading to Dad’s, where the kids were going to rake leaves while Vin put the winter tires on the Stagecoach.

Grandma turned 88 this month. She’s been losing her vision for years; her peripheral vision is still good, but faces are hard to see and reading is almost impossible. She misses driving and seeing people, but she especially misses reading.

And she doesn’t like audiobooks and I don’t blame her; we both must have similar attention spans.

But I was praying about it the week before and an idea struck me, so I asked her about it that day:

What if we could read to her from home? What if we recorded some of our school readings out loud, and burned them to a CD, and gave her a new one every time we came over?

It would be different than a normal audiobook. It would be us in all our mess and glory – Finnegan’s interruptions, questions from the kids, babbling from Kav and meowing from the cats – and it would be less like being alone or being read to by some stranger (professional though they may be), and more like we’re there with her.

And she liked that idea. She also liked knowing that it would be help us with school, motivating the kids to practice reading aloud.

So we’ve been filling the Voice Memo app on my phone with chapters and we’re halfway through several books now…and so far, only one of them is interspersed with me bossing a toddler to stop jumping on the couch, stop wrestling with his baby brother, and stop driving his racecar over the cat.

See? Like I said, it’s just like we’re there.

I called her again a few days ago – her number is the only one I still dial because it hasn’t ever changed – and gave her an update on our progress. Who’s reading what, what’s almost done, which characters get silly voices.

“Some people are just readers,” she said. “Other people read with vision.”

And then she started telling me about when she was a kid. They had poor light in the evening but she read in it anyway; she needed glasses long before she got them, and maybe that’s at least partly why her vision is gone now.

“It was a different world. People will never know what a different world it was back then.” She talked about the rationing in World War II. Sugar was rationed; it was a rare occasion when you could go to the store and see bags of sugar on the shelf. Paper products were hard to come by.

So many things are ever so much better, she said. Our lighting is so much better now. People have no excuse for not being readers these days. It was an altogether different world then.

But that day when we visited, it was the normal, familiar world of Grandma’s house: We dropped off cookies, the boys used her recliner as a merry-go-round, and we fortified ourselves with hugs before heading to Dad’s for yardwork.

And when Finn went up to her for his hug, these words came out of her mouth:

“Look at you, and your pretty hair!” she said, running her fingers through his blond tufts. But we saw that coming, I guess.

growing through it: the fullness that comes after waiting

Posted on by May 12, 2022

Well, friends, with the dry air and spring temps, there’s a new game here at the Lighthouse. It requires two people, or at the very least, an ornery human and an unsuspecting cat.

Here’s how you play: Create a charge by running your hands back and forth on the couch (or just sit there long enough to accidentally create friction), then touch someone within reach. If you induce a loud zapping sound, some screaming, and cause the other player’s hair to stand on end, you win.

growing through it: the fullness that comes after waiting

In the spirit of science and brotherly affection, one of our kids actually got a few siblings to hold hands together to see if the current would fly through the chain and nearly electrocute the person on the end. I’m happy to report that this has been unsuccessful so far, but we’re having people over soon and I suspect they may inadvertently participate in the troubleshooting process.

I’ve been going through an old journal as research for the next book – speaking of painful, healing, hilarious, and wretched experiments – and in retrospect I’ve noticed that particular season of our lives was not all that different from taking someone’s hand and getting electrocuted.

And really, I struggle with how to write about the hard situations when they involve others. It’s come up in conversation a few times recently with friends (and a husband) who are also writers – this quandary of sharing our story when it overlaps with the stories of others. I’ve prayed about it and here’s what God answered:

Write about your past as though you were now close to the people who caused the pain. Write about it as though the sins were atoned for – because they are – and as though the relationships were restored – which they can be, through surrender on both sides. You are only responsible for your own surrender, but you’re not off the hook for praying for theirs. Writing about your past in this way leads you to write the truth in love with compassion and maturity, as you should.

So there’s that, and we’ll see how it goes. Anne Lamott also gives hilarious and accurate advice in Bird By Bird, but I can’t quote it here because if I did your content filter would block my website.

But in the summer of 2013 there’s a journal entry where I wrote out Isaiah 55 in its entirety and what He was speaking to me through each verse. And one of the things He said was, You will tell people to spend time with Me, searching Me, being honest with Me in their day-to-day dilemmas and drudgery.

Several months later I started writing some of the earliest content for what became Oh My Soul, which wasn’t even birthed until a full five years after those earliest posts.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

– Isaiah 55:10-11, ESV

Fullness takes time. The waiting is hard and there’s no substitute for steadfastness, for the grit it takes to hang on to His Word when nothing seems to reflect it in the reality you see.

There’s no substitute for the time it takes to grow through the process of living. In any given half-decade, we all go through loss – and gain – that we never could have anticipated, touching hands with many people. Some of them let go too soon and leave us grieving. Sometimes we’re the ones who let go after getting burned too many times. And other times, we hold on for dear life through all the mayhem – because these ones, they are our people.

If He had told us ahead of time the loss and gain we would experience in the last five years, we never would have believed Him. Sometimes keeping us in the dark is a mercy that helps us toward obedience. We are not simply unsuspecting victims; this unknowing is actively doing a work in us for good.

…Getting old is our secret weapon. Readers come to books for many reasons, but ultimately they’re looking for wisdom. That’s something writers can offer only after we’ve accrued it, like scar tissue, usually by surviving things we didn’t want to deal with—a process otherwise known as aging.

– Barbara Kingsolver

And looking at it that way, I don’t really want to know what the next five years will hold. Just yesterday we lost someone we loved. And even though we knew it was coming, I’m not sure that grieving in advance makes it any easier, or if it just prolongs the process.

For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

– Isaiah 55:12, ESV

Life requires troubleshooting and the unknowing is unnerving. But the fullness that rewards us at the end of waiting only comes from learning from life’s friction instead of just getting burned by it.

We get to choose if we want to be more mature at the end of our hard times or not. You can tell the difference if you hold yourself to the same standard you set for those who hurt you, or if you make excuses for yourself without offering grace to others.

You can go through it or you can grow through it – we can learn the hard way, or not all.

Weeks after this game started, I’m still getting zinged from the couch several times a day, and more often than not it’s completely unintentional.

At the end of the night, I’m sitting on the couch with Bingley, and neither of us have learned our lesson. I reach down and barely touch him before zap – he gives me a black look. The tip of his ear is practically smoking and my finger is numb.

Like I said, you can learn the hard way, or not at all.

And I could tell you what he was probably thinking, but I’m pretty sure that would activate your content filter, too.