Michele's Back!

Excuse me while I dust off my keyboard a little this afternoon. It has been a very long time since I wrote here!  I have randomly thought a few times over the last several months about writing again and I have resisted because, well, I'm a little lazy and also I have a love/hate relationship with the internet :) But, after I got the carnitas in the crockpot earlier, I asked Kendra if she would be open to me writing occasionally and she graciously said yes, so here I am!

The last time you heard from me was January 2015, when I wrote about adoption and how sometimes the things God asks us to do are the hardest things we've ever done. Everything I wrote there is absolutely true and I still absolutely believe it.

I wish, though, that the ending of that story was a happy one. In July 2015, after parenting those two precious girls for seven months, we had to make the very hard decision to not go forward with adopting them. 

No one goes into an adoption believing it isn't forever and it wasn't a choice we made lightly. Many tears have been cried and our family is still healing. Just because the girls are gone from our family doesn't mean that we have forgotten them. Here we are, nearly a year later, and we still grieve. Every time we have uncovered a baby girl sock that was stuffed in a corner, or we see a beautiful dark-skinned toddler with braids or we find a forgotten video on my phone, we think of the girls. I have asked God many times - WHY?? 

I don't have an answer, honestly. But I know we were listening at the beginning when we said yes to the girls and we were listening at the end when He said "you are finished now." 

What have we learned? God is our God in the good times and the bad. What I believe about Him when we are celebrating is what I believe about Him when we are mourning. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And I'm so very glad because I'm frequently a big, weepy mess who isn't sure of much of anything.

What is our family up to now? Our children are 12, 10, 9, 5, and 4. We are entering the realm of homeschooling high school this coming year with our oldest and are considering very seriously keeping our youngest home from preschool this fall instead of enrolling him at the fabulous Christian preschool he attended last year. My husband still travels many, many weeks during the year. We have jumped into the deep end of gluten free, dairy free eating because our 5 year old's health issues. I am the crazy lady singing along to Twenty One Pilots and Laurie Berkner in the car. I'm also the one that deleted the Kindle app from my phone because I just can't be trusted having a book so close all the time. 

Thank you so much, Kendra, for letting me catch up with our readers. I look forward to talking more with you soon. As always, you can keep in touch with me on Instagram or here on the blog.

Michele