My Benjamin His name was Benjamin* and I was in my first year of teaching in a small, rural school. He was not an attractive child and the layers of dirt, grime and smell did not help his likeability. He rarely spoke and sat in the corner of my classroom, and could have easily been forgotten. He had passed through… Read More
There are things that I wish you understood about my kid. I realize that he is one of 29 other children in your classroom and you really don’t need one more thing on your plate. But, the more I understand about trauma, the more I realize how much it affected my entire classroom. The extent of my training for childhood… Read More
I wanted to write a post about one of my biggest failures and learning moments while fostering. Not a very flattering post, but I want to always be real about the difficulties of this journey. It doesn’t help to pitch cupcakes and rainbows, when the reality is that most know that I can’t cook and we all know a storm… Read More
It’s like running with scissors, we’ve all heard this warning in grade school while picturing the first hapless victim who ran and fell. A schoolyard martyr born from a cautionary real-life tale so the rest of us could remain safe. There are similar warnings in foster care and adoption, urban legends mixed with grains of truth. Stay far from the… Read More
If you choose the road of foster care and adoption, you are choosing pain, brokenness, and sorrow. You are choosing sleepless nights and exhausting days. You are truly loving the least of these, but with it comes pain. You are willingly unpacking baggage filled with loss, shame and fear with every child that enters your home and it will spread… Read More
There’s always a story behind a picture and this was no exception. We were standing in line at Disney Land when a cast member approached us and knelt in front of our son, Israel. He introduced himself and after a little back and forth banter, I interjected that our son was learning English. He stood and asked where our… Read More