Christmas Tree Ornament Photo Challenge

I love setting up our Christmas tree.  Every year we smile over the ornaments as we bring them out of the box.  We laugh at some of the stories.  We may even be saddened by some of them.  They all tell a story.

The stories are worth sharing!  So, I created the Christmas Tree Ornament Photo Challenge.

Tomorrow starts 24 days of photos and stories behind some of the ornaments on our Christmas tree.  Join in the fun!

Simply take a photo of a meaningful ornament.

If you can tell the story behind it within the limits of Twitter, go ahead and tweet.  If your story is too long, like many of mine will be, feel free to blog about it and then tweet the link to your blog.  Now, I'm not on Instagram after all the security scares from a while back, but feel free to upload there too!  Of course, we always have Facebook!  Use Facebook to upload your photo and tell us the story in the photo description.

Use the Hashtag:
#XmasOrnamentStory

For Shame!

I shopped on Thanksgiving.  [Insert gasps of horror and finger wags from naysayers.]

I have never done this before.  Heck, I'm not even a Black Friday shopper, you guys.  Why would I go out into the crazy crowds and fight people and fight traffic, get stressed out, et cetera, et cetera?  I prefer to have my Christmas shopping done before Thanksgiving, if at all possible.  I just prefer to enjoy my Thanksgiving weekend, the peace of it, the smells, the food, the parade, the relaxation, the start of the holiday season.  I love to put up our tree and deck the halls.  That's my typical Thanksgiving weekend.

I'm not against Thanksgiving or Black Friday shopping at all.  The debate annoys me.  I mean, to each his own, right?  If companies want to open their stores, let them.  You can choose to shop or not.  What good does it do to argue such an inane topic?

I should just stop there.  But...

So, why did I shop on Thanksgiving?

I shopped on Thanksgiving because the store of my choosing (Walmart) offered tremendous sales and guarantees on things we needed.  GASP!!!  Yes, I bought things for ourselves and not gifts for others.  Shame on me?

No.

You see, we are cheap!  I'm sure there are people in this country who are cheaper than I am.  I'm sure there are people who wash out ziplock bags in order to reuse them and save a dime here and there.  I'm not that cheap.  But when it comes to bigger ticket items, we simply don't buy them if they aren't necessities and I would never buy something big unless it was on sale or I had a coupon or gift card.

The week before Thanksgiving the hard drive on our 1 and only computer crashed.  I lost some data.  The important stuff was recoverable (we think).  Having a second computer in our home, with 2 kids who happen to use the laptop for multiple homeschool subjects, plus a mom who has a house to manage, a book in process, bills to pay, is something we quickly realized as a big benefit to our family.  Paying half price for a PC laptop seemed to be better than waiting until after the craziness of the Thanksgiving weekend and paying hundreds more.  Despite the fact that I have a rebuilt hard drive on the older laptop, it still seems on the fritz.  I don't and can't trust it one bit.  I was willing to brave the craziness to save hundreds of dollars and a new, reliable laptop.

Sure, I get the opinion that stores shouldn't even be open on a holiday.  I get that.  I may even agree with that.  Everyone deserves a holiday to be with family.  But think about it, do pastors ever get a holiday off?  No, my husband has had to work every Easter, every Christmas, year after year until we left ministry.  We never had a family holiday completely, solely together, without work.  And what about our military?  They never get a holiday off.  They go years without celebrating the day with family!  But I digress.  If I agree that stores shouldn't even be open, then maybe I shouldn't have participated in Thanksgiving Day shopping.  I get that line of thinking, but the stores were open and we had a big-ticket need.

I do not appreciate it when people say that shopping on Thanksgiving isn't what the holiday is about.

Um, I disagree with you there.  You see, I am very thankful that God has brought us out of our financial hole.  I am so thankful for how He has provided for our every need when we were in the midst of adoption and 2 job losses.  God asks us to be wise with our money and shopping on Thanksgiving was a wise decision for our bank account.  I was thankful that my mother-in-law could watch the kids for a couple of hours.  I was thankful that I could get a break without them and have some fun with my husband - a rare treat.  I was thankful for the smiles and laughs and conversations I had with other holiday shoppers.  That kind of interaction doesn't happen on a regular old Thursday when I run to Walmart.  And I am thankful that we'll have a new, reliable laptop that should be free from crashes for a number of years, Lord willing.

I was impressed by Walmart's organization.  Sure, they moved things around that didn't jive with their store map that I printed out at home.  But their staff all knew where things were and I found the line for the laptop fairly easily.  From an operational standpoint, it was quite impressive!  Only 1 shopper was rude to me.  Another was a jerk to everyone by just cutting in line while the rest of us patiently waited for the tickets for a sale item.  Other than that, shoppers were all very nice, polite, offering smiles, and good conversation while we waited.  We made the most of it and tried to spread some holiday joy.

We picked up a couple of deals for the boys' Christmas gifts too and I'm excited to see them open them on Christmas morning.

No, I'm not trying to be defensive.  Understand that is not my heart at all.  I don't care what you think about me, because my worth isn't found in what my readers think.

I simply write to ask you to realize that not everyone shopping on a holiday weekend is a greedy, self absorbed, unthankful, ungrateful, anti-family, credit card loving, he-who-has-the-most-toys-wins, American Consumer.

I don't know if I'll ever shop on Thanksgiving or Black Friday again.  The deals might be too good to pass up and it might be worth the trip if we are in need of a big ticket item again.  In the meantime, I can say that I did it once and it wasn't awful at all.  I think we got a great bargain and we had a positive experience.

If you're staying in today, then have a great day with your family.  If you're going out shopping, I hope you get great bargains!  If you're working today, I hope your workday is great!

Peace.

The Daughter We Never Met

My 6th grader and I started a new book in homeschool today:  Daughter of the Mountains by Louise Rankin.  So far, all I know from chapter 1, is that it's about a girl growing up in Tibet, in the Himalayas.

I couldn't get through the first chapter without tears falling.  The image of the main character makes me miss the daughter we never met.

If you've followed our adoption story over the years, you know what we limped through:  a country shutdown.  There are more recent developments to the story to add, though, and I think this update will be worth the read.

We worked on our paperwork for 9 months, then got stuck in a holding pattern for 4 months while the Nepal government was in flux, and then our dossier went off to Kathmandu and we were finally, officially waiting for our daughter… in Nepal.  We were family number 74 to be matched to a child -- only 73 families ahead of us.  It could have happened any day, literally!  Instead, while visiting family in Chicago, we got the call that knocked the wind out of us.

The US State Department, in all it's wisdom, shut down the Nepal adoption program on allegations, taken from dated UNICEF reports, that the Nepal adoption program was corrupt.  Our adoption agency called to tell us that our dream of a Nepali daughter was over.

We lost a year of paperwork, blood (yes, literally - we had physicals and lots of blood work), sweat, tears and prayers, not to mention $12,000.

We were never to know a brown skinned, brown eyed, dark haired Nepali girl in our home.

Devastation.  Suffocating grief.

We waited for a month or two, per our agency's suggestion, with hopes that Nepal would re-open.  It did not.  We nervously, prayerfully, picked ourselves up, brushed ourselves off, cleaned our wounds and started over again with China Special Needs.

Fast forward to last year.  We had our China girl home, our lives were settling into Texas.  I received word through an organization called Both Ends Burning that investigations led them to believe the USDOS made a known, horrible mistake and that the organization was going to do something about the Nepal shutdown.  I was invited to a series of conference calls with the organization and other Nepal families.  What I learned reopened old scars.

I learned that those families who had been matched with Nepali children at the time of the shutdown were able to bring them home.  It cost them thousands of dollars more and an agonizing amount of time.  I can't remember the number of families, but it was somewhere in the 80's.  Hang onto your hat for this next sentence, the one that makes me want to move out of this country of ours:

In all cases, international attorneys were able to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Nepal adoption program was above reproach, that the children were indeed true orphans, that no bribery existed, that the entire program was on the up and up, completely legal.  In… every... case!  And the USDOS knew it!  Our government is to blame for our loss, for our heartache, for our lost dream.  Our government is responsible for removing hope from a child crying out for love of a forever family.

It still makes me sick to my stomach.

You can say that it just wasn't God's plan.  You can say that we weren't supposed to have a Nepali daughter.  You can say that we now have the daughter we are supposed to have.   But those words aren't helpful, friends… ever.  God sets the lonely in families.  The Nepal shutdown was the work of evil, the work of an evil force that will stop at nothing to keep the lonely living without love and care, without family.

How can I possibly miss a daughter I never knew?

Don't question it.  I miss her.  I  have a bracelet from Nepal that I bought for her through Tiny Hands International, an organization that serves and brings love and hope and the Gospel to the street children and trafficked children of Nepal.  I intended to give that bracelet to our Quiet Tiger once she came home, but I couldn't.  It simply doesn't belong to her.  It belongs to my lost Nepali daughter.

The daughter we never met.

The Debate

This post is going to be controversial, and as much as I hate confrontation, I'm going to post.

I think it's safe to say that most adoptive parents hate it when people say, "Oh, that child is so lucky to be adopted and home now."

I understand the debate and I agree with it… but only in part.

Adoption is loss.  Period.

My daughter lost her birth family.  She will never know who she looks like, her mom or her dad.  She will never know if she has a biological brother or sister in China.  She will never know her birth country, her dialect (yes, we can teach her Mandarin, but those Yulin folks have a unique dialect, I'm told).  Even today we deal with the brokenness of her past.  I would be remiss if I didn't even mention how unlucky it is to be tied down in an orphanage crib for 23 hours a day and horribly malnourished for nearly 2 years.  There is absolutely nothing lucky about that.  Nothing, nothing, nothing!!!  Some days I exhaustedly wonder if we'll ever be free of that brokenness and trauma.  It's a mess raising a child with a broken past!

She will have questions to which I will not have answers.

Loss.

Adoption is loss.  And that loss is… not... lucky.

I agree with that.

And while I don't particularly like the word "luck" and prefer the word "blessing," I'm going to stick with the former for the sake of the original statement that causes debate.

My daughter was adopted.

She was given a second chance.

Regardless of whether it was my family or another family that adopted her, Quiet Tiger is lucky to have a second chance at a happy, healthy life.  She is lucky to have a mom and a dad who fought for her and to have siblings to play with and pets to chase.  She is lucky to have food, shelter, medicine, care and love.  She is lucky to live in a free country.  Those are good things that she didn't have before!

And with that short paragraph, I just made many adoptive families very mad at me.  How can I possibly think that my daughter is "lucky?"  The fact of the matter is...

Some children don't get that chance.  

Our lost Nepali daughter never got that chance.  Some kids in China are labeled "un-adoptable" and aren't getting that chance.  Children who age out of adoption programs lose the chance.  Children in Russia aren't getting that chance.  Children in Guatemala aren't getting that chance.  Children in Kyrgyzstan aren't getting that chance.  Children in our own country are confined to a broken system and aren't getting that chance.  Those kids are living in worlds where they don't have a chance at family, at hope.  Those kids aren't lucky.

Will I tell my daughter she's "lucky?"  Yes (again, I'll choose the word "blessed"), but that yes comes after talking about her past and her hurts and acknowledging all the grief,  all her unknowns, all the pain that I cannot possibly fix.

What's more, we can introduce her to Jesus.  Only our Merciful God, our Healer and Comforter, can repair that brokenness and give her a hope and a future.

And that is not luck.

That is redemption.