S Club Mama

I can't remember why I wanted to read "Every Bitter Thing is Sweet" by Sara Haggerty, but I'm glad I did. I wasn't that in love with it when it started. I wasn't taken in by her sorrowful account of infertility; maybe because I have a friend whose story is so similar and familiar to me. I completely understand that infertility is a hard pill to swallow and foreign to someone like me. I have tried my very hardest to be comforting and patient and gentle with my friend and so I put forth the same while reading this book. I ended up really falling in love with the struggles of the Haggertys. That sounds strange but so often in books, we don't see the struggles, and so we feel like our lives are wrong if we struggle. Yet here is this author telling us of her struggles to love her husband, to fill a void of an empty womb, to mother these children not knitted in her womb but fully in her heart. I came to love that openness and appreciate her being so vulnerable...

Today I was hanging out with a couple of my girl friends when J told us about a Proverbs 31 devotional she'd read about a month after school started about pre-deciding. She said she has taken the devotional farther by creating questions based on what if situations her kids may encounter at school (or other places). They pick one at dinner and then discuss what they would do. She and her husband are helping their children pre-decide their actions. She said one of their situations was "what would you do if kids were using bad language at school?" They went through and answered and when one reaction (pre-reaction?) was not appropriate, they were there to address it. I LOVE THIS IDEA! We do a TON of pre-teaching around here but mostly for things we know are going to happen: what to do if something upsets us at school, what to do at baseball practice, what to do in the bathroom. But I love the idea of taking situations that aren't predetermined and talking about them op...

Big A and I have always talked about adopting one day. Life has come at us fast with all the moving and biological children and group home foster children that we've had in the past 6 years, so it hasn't really been a discussion topic until lately. We have several friends who have adopted or are looking to adopt, both domestically and internationally. So I wanted to read more about it and "Becoming Home" by Jedd Medefind was a really good place for me to start. image via Amazon Basically this is a really condensed version of things we can do to help the international orphan crisis. We, as Christians, are called to be involved in this through the Scripture verse James 1:27: "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." (NIV) What does it mean to look after widows and orphans? I didn't really learn anything new about t...