And The Award Goes To....

Today's Smart Cookie Award goes to Koala Care! They have invented a seat to put your infant in while using the public restroom. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! How many countless times have I tried to manage the call of nature juggling a 15-30 pound baby? 'Cause no way in h-e-double hockey sticks was I going to put them down on a public john's floor. NO MORE!
This morning I found a nifty little chair with safety straps attached to the wall of the handicapped stall (shopping with three children definitely qualifies as a handicap). Wish I had a camera phone, so I could post a picture. It was a thing of beauty, ladies. Now, Randy can watch me pee in peace and tranquility--while still maintaining a hygienic distance from the floor. You gotta love American ingenuity. But why did they not think of this until baby number 5?
Coming soon (I hope) to a toilette stall near you....

A Perfect Day

I get kissed by the sun each morning,
put my feet on a hardwood floor,
I get to hear my children laughing,
down the hall through my bedroom door.
I have been blessed...

That's my song for today. Except to precisely reflect my life, we would somehow have to exchange the 'children laughing' with 'groaning for coffee milk.' But, for all intense purposes, it fits. We had a big pancake breakfast this morning, dressed and went out to the YMCA for K's first baseball game of the year. It was sunny with a warm breeze blowing up from the gulf. Afterwards, we took them to a McDonald's with an outdoor playplace, and then drove over to Nana's house. The kids played outside on the trampoline and the four wheeler. They blew bubbles, colored with chalk, climbed trees, and I don't know what all. I stayed in the house and made darling sundresses for the girls using my mom's "sew-here-dummy" wonder machine.
Papa had come for a visit several weeks ago, and as always had read the kids at least a dozen story books. One of them was Stone Soup. Somehow, they managed to extract a promise from him to make stone soup with them "one day". One day came today (I told you, the are really speeding up their turn-around time on those promises). Their version of stone soup had a decidedly Tex-Mex flair (think Taco Soup) and went nicely with the ENORMOUS Mexican meal my mom served us all. I know that will be a special memory for them forever..."You remember the time Papa made stone soup with us, just like in the story?"
After dinner, we drove in to town and visited a friend of the family that has been ill for several years. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I hadn't yet taken the baby to see her. We had a nice visit. The kids all behaved themselves and remembered their manners. Back at mom's we indulged in a desert of turtle pie. It was sinful. We came home and put some very, very, sleepy children to bed. The master is drawing up plans for our dream home and I am blogging. Yep, it's been a perfect day

Big Changes

Here is a post that I've been waiting to make for some time. The master resigned today from the church. HE IS NOT QUITING THE MINISTRY. I despise that phrase. If you are a child of God, you're not done with 'ministry' until your dead. He is going to be moving into a new area of bivocational ministry.
This is a decision that was a result of time, prayer, and common sense. This church was not a good fit for us in the first place. They have been the sweetest, most supportive, most loving bunch of folks in the world to us. There is not a contentious soul among them, and after our last church, we needed that time of healing. BUT they are OLD. The music they sing, the way they worship, the structure of the whole church is for OLD people. And they have NO interest whatsoever in changing that. We are not OLD people. We do not want our kids to grow up as the only children in the church. We are not too keen on the Gaither Family Hoe Down every Sunday, either.
Aside from that, we have come to a dividing of the road. We have a lot of mouths to feed, and though we try to be careful managers and good stewards, money is tight. I hope this does not make me sound like a money grubber, but let's talk shop for a moment, shall we? Churches that can afford a pastor the salary that we need don't want a man who does not have his doctorate or at least his masters degree. A degree we have been whittling away on for 6 YEARS, because it takes about a MILLION credit hours to obtain. We could continue to scrape along for three more years for him to finish this degree, but it would be tough. Then, too, he would be trained for one thing and one thing alone: full-time pastorate of a traditional church. Finding and maintaining a position in this ever shrinking career field is what my Daddy always called a crap shoot--excuse my French. So often it is less of an honest and prayerful interview/evaluation process and more of a beauty pageant as you parade yourself before search committees. Frequently, you are judged on criteria that are completely unrelated to Kingdom issues. Who's the snazziest dresser, who has the classiest resume, the catchiest sermons, which translation you study from, the most attractive family (o.k., we definitely have the competition wrapped up on this one), who has the best track record for boosting Sunday School attendance (he's in the toilet here). When you leave your job (which the average tenure for a Baptist pastor is 18 months), you leave your church, town, house, school, friends, etc., to start it all over again somewhere else. We're sick of it. Stop the merry-go-round, we want to get off.
We don't want to be dependent on an income from a church to meet our daily needs. The idea of ministering with no strings attached is very appealing. The problem we have found is that no one wants to hire an ex-pastor. His 7 years of full time experience is a huge black mark on his resume when it comes to the secular field. Employers hold one or both of two misconceptions:
a) Being a pastor is not a 'real' job. Therefore, the applicant
must be lazy, because for seven years, he's been drawing
a salary for nothing.
b) A preacher will try to proselytize my work place.
These are prejudices that in the master's case are grossly in error. The warehouse discovered this through his part time work (where he accomplished more in few hours a day, what some of their full time employees got done in a week and in all that time did not beat anyone over the head with a Bible), and have offered him a salaried position with profit sharing. After a few years, he would be in a position to take over management of his own store.
If the master does not preach, he will shrivel up into a prune and die. Or he will explode. So, he will preach as supply--maybe after a break as interim--and we are scheduled to take part in Walk Thru the Bible orientation in July. We might start a home church. You just never know how God will use him.

Mother and Daughters

I have two daughters. The oldest looks like me. I mean she is an exact replica. People at church, friends of the family, strangers on the street comment on the remarkable resemblance constantly. I've had to correct Abby for interrupting them, "I know, I know, I look just like my mom." Usually accompanied by a slight roll of the eyes--which also looks like yours truly. I even found myself glancing at a picture and thinking, "I don't remember ever seeing that picture of me before." Oh, that would be because it isn't me in the picture--it's Abby. I don't know if the uncanny physical similarity will continue past puberty or not. I do know that of the three daughters in my family, I look the most like my mom. I seem to see her face staring back at me in the mirror more and more these days. So, there is a good probability that Abby and I will always catch attention as a striking mother/daughter pair.
I have often wondered if this would somehow hurt Marina. I've known that at some point we would face questions, but yesterday's slapped me right upside the head.
When I am out with the children, I am usually out with The Children. As en masse, a unit, a bundle. At these times, people can not pick out that Marina is adopted. As a coincidence, K and Marina share many physical similarities. They have the golden blond hair and bright blue eyes. Their facial features are somewhat the same, and they are both thin. But yesterday our "link" was off playing baseball, and I took Abby to ballet with Marina and the baby in tow. John usually takes her, and I thankfully get out of sitting in the waiting room with the dozen or so other Mommies (what is wrong with me, that a gathering of my own sex and social strata makes me so uncomfortable?). Abby skips into ballet. And I sit down with Marina in my lap. I noticed that one of the other mom's was staring. I caught her eye, expected her to compliment Marina's french braids. But what came out stunned me for a moment.
"She [indicating Marina] must look like your husband?"
Uh, um, uh....How foolish I felt! After all the articles, books, and websites on frank adoption talk to be caught off guard, left stuttering, and stupid?
"Actually, Marina is adopted from Russia."
Well, you know that opened a whole can of worms. How long has she been home? How old was she? Where in Russia? A friend of my cousins adopted one from China. (This one always makes me think, "So?") Are any of the others adopted? I've fielded these questions before, but not with complete strangers. We don't keep Marina's adoption a secret, but neither do we make a public service announcement. If it comes up, it comes up, but for the most part, it doesn't. This felt like a press conference. And with Marina sitting there soaking it all in. I hope I did right by her. I'm not sure. On the one hand, I feel like it is important to give people information, demonstrate the beauty of adoption, and encourage others to get involved, maybe even consider adoption themselves. Then again, I don't want her growing up feeling like a charity project, a life size souvenir, an object of curiosity on display.
So what do you think, did I handle this right? Should I have just stated, "She looks like her older brother." Selah. Period. End of conversation--and true as far as it goes. Would this make Marina think we were ashamed of her adoption?

For Passion Week

From the mouths--and sometimes the no. 2 pencil--of babes comes truth. This time, a powerful representation of Christ's sacrifice. I found this picture Tuesday morning under Abby's chair. See the torrent of tears falling from his followers' eyes?

Marina is THREE!

Happy Birthday to Marina! Birthday celebrations for her began on Friday at the park and are to be continued. Sunday she left church looking like an overloaded burro. She could barely tote all of her loot. There are some definite perks to being the pastor's daughter in a church of all elderly people. Today Daddy will take her out on her birthday date. My sisters will bring her presents to the family lake house this weekend and we will have cupcakes with the cousins. The following Monday we will celebrate with the master's family in Norteast Texas. More cake, presents, and party. It's turning out to be a birthweek not a birthday.

But this is THE day. Three years ago a young woman in Russia gave birth a few weeks early to a baby girl. The young woman's name was Marina. She was sick. She knew she could not take care of this new little life. This was her fourth pregnancy; her second child born. Within days she would sign over all rights to her daughter. There is no indication that she ever held her. Some faceless hospital staff person named the child Olga.

I did not expect to feel the sorrow I do for this young woman. I am not a romantic person. So feeling a strong connection to some person I've never even met took me by surprise. It has been one of the most amazing facets of becoming an adoptive parent. I have no way of knowing if she is still alive on the planet, and yet, she is here with me always. And on today of all days, I'm so sad for her. Glad and sad. Glad that little Marina is mine. That she is here with us. So thankful that she did not try to parent a child in her life condition. But so sad that she is missing out on knowing this wonderful person. Is she thinking of her? Does she wonder what became of the tiny baby she gave birth to three years ago?

My prayer today is that God will whisper to her, "She is well. She is happy. She is loved."