Three years

It's been three years since I've been here. I stopped writing here on purpose but now I'm ready to be back, writing bits and pieces to keep a record of our family life.

There's no way to recap three years, nor would I want to. Some things are the same: living and working in the same spots, traditions for holidays and family time and such, homeschooling the kids, et cetera.

Some things are not the same. Billy and I, we've GROWN. In every sense of the word. Grown in confidence, in perspective, through facing hard things head on and letting them change us to become change-influencers in our worlds.

Our family, it's grown too! The biggest change of all is that we added sweet baby N last July through the astonishingly God-touched process of his adoption. We are in relationship with his birthmom (blessing to us all). My hands were the first to touch his body as I got to deliver him and immediately start skin-to-skin and breastfeeding. It's a one-in-a-million story really (babies are miracles, aren't they?). With adoption, we realize that there is a wound in him that he doesn't realize yet. Someday I know he'll have thousands of thoughts and emotions to sort. But today he's extremely loving, affectionate, and energetically happy. I'm soaking that in. Deep. And I pray that our love (and our family and community's big love) and eventually his Heavenly Father's love will lessen the hurt's influence. [I have tons of thoughts on adoption and I'm working those thoughts out experientially, through our story and others'. Sometimes I imagine those thoughts will get set into words here. And if we adopt again, that will grow my perspective too.]

So with this blog...I'm not trying to get a zillion readers or to write for anyone or anything in particular really. Just writing to chronicle. To remember God's faithfulness. To occasionally process out loud. To help my feeble memory in the future and to give my words a place to land.

It's nice to be back.