Adoption Books

Just finished a book this morning that I highly recommend. I read it cover to cover this morning, and if you know me that's quite an accomplishment. The book is a story of a 6 week old boy in China that was abandoned in a field after suffering burns over 70% over his body. Apparently his parents so no hope and decided to walk away from him. The story recounts several years of miraculous intervention by people and events around the globe that result in many successful surgeries and ultimately adoption into a loving family. Ultimately it was clearly God's hand and God's providence at work. Though the arduous path was seemingly impossible, it was a series of simple steps set forth in easy motion by the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. The book is called "Saving Levi" and was written by Lisa Misraje Bentley.


The story reminded me of the reason for adoption: to give abandoned, vulnerable children a loving home. To provide the mom and dad and family that they have lost. To ultimately allow God's love to funnel through us to them. To show them that the sacrifices we make to bring one considered "unworthy" into our home, is a small, small picture of God bringing many "unworthy" ones into His home.

I would also highly recommend another book by the founder of our adoption agency Jan Beazely called "The Strength of Mercy." I also read that book back to back on a Saturday and was greatly moved by their love and compassion on their quest to adopt a little girl from Romania.

Go Eagles

The Eagles basketball team completed their inaugural season tonight. It was the first game of a single elimination tournament. Things didn't go well in the game tonight, but we did have a strong 4th quarter. We lost 41-34. The guys played with great effort. It was fun to see how they improved through the year. Overall, our record was 5-8. We played in a 9 team league. Due to strange scheduling, we ended up playing the top three teams a total of 6 times. That accounted for 6 of our 8 losses. We only played the bottom teams once. We ended up in about the middle of the league. The kids have definitely entered a new league and are near-professional (admission is charged at the door - $1 for kids, $2 for adults) but they are still hanging on to their amateur status.

Monday night practices have been a highlight for the three dads. The part of the practice where the dads take on the kids gets intense. I'm pretty sure I've taken all of them to the floor at least once. Any injuries sustained by the kids are not my fault. If I see a gap in the lane, I'm goin' to the hoop. If I see a player trying to drive into the lane and I'm on defense......well let's just say we don't like to give up open layups. As dads, we're also the refs during practice, and I think we call a pretty fair game.

The line-up in the team photo:
Front row left-to right: Tyler "the dribbler", Levi "downtown", David "Mr. speed", and Ryan "crazy defense"
Back row left-to-right: Coach Russ "the rock", Caleb "postin it up", Luke "sky man", Seth "the smooth", and Coach Scott "the cerebral, 3 point shootin, dribble, drive, and dish Mr. basketball"
Not pictured: Pastor Dave "can't cover me, aka the ghost"

Go Eagles!!!!

Evacuation Plan - Done and Posted!

One of the many, strange requirements of adoption is the Evacuation Plan. This is a requirement to include in our home study to have a statement that says we have an Evacuation Plan. This evacuation plan is to be posted in our home. The evacuation plan is to show an overview of the home and the escape routes. Each room is supposed to have two escape routes which may include a window.

As I thought about this, I pondered our 3 or 4 year old girl. After arriving in the United States, she will have little or no knowledge of English. She will not understand the many strange customs that we have. Much of the food we will eat will be new and different. Sights and sounds will all be new.

She will however, have an Evacuation Plan! She will be excited to see it, memorize it, and practice it. That will keep her comforted to know that there is a plan, it is posted, and it has arrows leading the way out of our home. I see her running to the plan to see where the nearest window, door, or other exit is. She will be safe and always will have an exit nearby. I am considering installing small lights along the floor routing to the nearest exit such as those in airplanes and theaters.

Well, enough for now. I have to go post my newly developed Evacuation Plan.

Video

I sent this video on email to a number of families already but wanted to put it on our web to preserve it for ourselves and so that others might see it too.

As I said in my email, this is an adoption from Ethiopia from our agency All God's Children. It shows the road we will walk down and the gates we will walk through. Take the time to watch it. It's worth it.

Ryan and Tyler

Since I blogged about Katie the other day, it has been repeatedly suggested to me by R & T that I should blog about them. So they took a series of photographs of themselves that they felt were very bloggable. So for the sake of fairness, I present several pics of them. One of the pics includes Levi D. Based on the responses I get, I will decide which of the kids are most bloggable and deserve future posts.





Obviously, they have some serious issues.....

Adoption Conference

We are planning on attending an adoption conference in Minneapolis on April 29-30. Click here to read the details about the conference. We are very excited that we will be hearing Steven Curtis Chapman and his wife Mary Beth on Thursday night and John Piper on Friday night. In addition, there will be a plethora of sessions during the day Thursday and Friday covering a wide range of adoption topics. They include topics aimed at families as well as topics aimed at churches who want to increase their awareness of orphans. We are looking forward to learning a lot. We'd love to have others accompany us!

Gma and Gpa Nordstrom will be staying at our house to maintain crowd control over the kids so that we can go. Reminder to self - stock the fridge with Diet Coke before we leave.

Eyes Wide Open

Here is the workbook we completed for our agency. The workbook was over 100 pages and included a lot of information. Some was helpful, some was not. The first page included an assignment to draw a picture of your adopted child as you picture they will look. We were to include with the picture specific details of what their clothes will look like and pay attention to facial features. We were supposed to give them special items on their clothes such as a button or ribbon. Then we were supposed to look at the child and imagine them asking us for something. We were also supposed to write down how the entire process made us feel. Needless to say, I found this quite amusing both trying to draw something that looked human and also trying to imagine interacting with this strange creature I've just drawn on the page. Fortunately, there were a lot of other pages in the workbook that were helpful. The book was called "With Eyes Wide Open." My child that I drew did not look like the one in the picture on the cover of the book.Our workbook was sent to AGCI - they have reviewed it and said that we had fully completed it. I can't imagine the laughter in their office as they looked at the picture I drew. I feel glad to bring joy to everyone in the AGCI office in Oregon.

We also completed about 10 hours of online training. It was also helpful at times and unhelpful other times. All in all though, we did learn a lot about the potential difficulties in international adoption. Specifically regarding the issue of taking a child with no parents from a culture, language, sights, sounds, smells, and touches that they are familiar with and transporting them around the globe. While this can create an atmosphere of terror for the child, we know that God can heal all of these deep wounds and can fill the void that all of us have apart from Him.