Twelve years HOME!

 Got a text from Gavin tonight with a selfie that made me smile.

Think Krassimir had any idea when he first landed here in MN twelve years ago that there would be this much joy in his future?? :)

Krassimir's birthday!

Seventeen years old - next year he will be officially an adult (whatever that means!) AND will break even on number of birthdays celebrated with his family instead of without. *Almost* there.

As a food hater, there's not much to make for a fun supper, so we did pasta and sauce, which is a less-hated meal, and Rinnah made home made chocolate pudding, which was robust enough to hold seventeen candles!

He doesn't blow, but he's seen enough birthdays that he knows what to expect, and likes have the fuss made over him!

 We certainly don't need any more *stuff* around here, so presents were few, but one thing Matt and I found for him hit the nail on the head - it's a rubber dog toy - a textured ring - and he and his new ring are inseparable!

It doesn't quite work that way...

 Bobbi and I have a nightly routine where I go in and spend about 20-30 minutes with her talking or listening to whatever music she wants to show me, or whatever before she goes to bed. Her sweetest-of-the-sweet kitten, Tihomir, almost always joins us. As we were talking about his sweetness, she goes, "I chose you, Babe - you have to be thankful!"

I teased her back a bit - "So, Bobbi, is that how it works? We chose you, Babe. So you have to be thankful!" We can tease a bit like this when she's in the right mood, and we take every opportunity we have to reiterate our own gratefulness that we did choose her, but it's funny how embedded that notion is, in children's literature, for example (as an adoptive parent, I now read any story that involves orphans or adoption a whole lot differently than I used to!), but even in the default thoughts of someone who knows better, personally!  It just doesn't quite work that way - it isn't that simple!

Adoption, while a beautiful echo of God's own choosing of his people and his bringing them into his own family, is also a story that is born out of something seriously broken, and while that single act of choosing, yes, does change everything, it also only has its meaning in the continuous day-in and day-out living out of that choosing in the same way that a wedding is only a single point from which a marriage grows and develops.

But, to bring it back, we're sure thankful that Tiho is part of our household! He really is one of the sweetest, most gentle-natured cats that we've had.

Although this photo is from back in Sept, I get a kick out of how much Tiho likes to sit in Krassi's eating chair, even with that big adductor pommel in the way!

Gloria holding the sweet baby

He adores all kind of petting - even on his tummy!

And a more recent one of him in Krassi's eating chair. Pretty funny.

Made it to Fifteen!

Not counting Grandma G and Matt, we've reached the final birthday of the year as Mira turned 15 the day before Thanksgiving. In the spirit of giving thanks, we are so grateful for how generally healthy Mira has been over this past year. Especially this year with all of the limitations, it's been very nice to not have her spending weeks at a time in the hospital. Just two years ago was when she spent her birthday not only hospitalized, but in the PICU. (pediatric intensive care unit)

Oh, wait! Looking back at photos, it was three years ago that she was in the PICU on her birthday:

It was Bobbi who was in the hospital on Mira's birthday two years ago:

And since I'm reminiscing about late Novembers spent in the hospital, it was ten years ago that we had our first hospital stay with any of our kiddos when Reuben first got his diagnosis of epilepsy.

That diagnosis was one of two events in my life that break all of my experiences into "before" and "after." Reuben's diagnosis forever changed the direction that our lives would take, including being a major piece of what led us to the events (Krassi's, and then Bobbi and Mira's, adoption(s)) that led to the existence of this blog. Ten years.

[Deleted is the start of some other thoughts that were developing deeper, but I've got to just post this and move on - time is limited!]

Tsvetomira's quilt

 It's finally done. :) I've been taking our movie nights as a chance to do hand sewing (which I do on the quilt binding), and then added a few little touches during the days after, so it's finally DONE!

Matt suggested we keep it in her to-the-hospital bag, which we thankfully have not been using very often lately, so that everyone who sees her with it will know that she is special to us.

She'll never get to see the quilt, or have any idea that it's any different from anything else we use to keep her warm, but we know that she doesn't have to be able to see and understand to still be worth investing time in! Every one of our kids has one that I've made just for them (well, not Eben yet. His is next!)

I tried something new on Mira's - "writing" with the sewing machine!

"Daughter"

"Sister"

"...Sammi."

 Last night, marking four years since we met the girls, we looked at a few of the pictures we had of that first day we met them, four years ago today (Sept 16, 2016). I don't know that Ebby has seen these photos, and he looked at this one with the wheels turning in his head (and, let me tell you, the wheels are ALWAYS turning in that little boy's head!) and after a pause he declared, "Sammi." Sam is a neighbor/second cousin once removed/regular feature around our house kind of person, and yes, there are some similarities between her and Bobbi, particularly the pre-hair cut Bobbi!

That was quite an intense day, meeting BOTH of these girls just a few short hours apart.

I remember both being kind of awed that Gloria didn't bat an eye about being on Bobbi's lap - she wasn't a super stranger-anxiety sort of kid, but at eight months old, really did prefer Mom, and then Dad, to anyone else. AND I remember being so glad that she napped through most of that first visit with Mira. I was grateful to not have any distractions as we wrestled through the many-layered difficulties of that visit.

Still a long way to go before our days together outweigh the years apart, but to have known Bobbi four years out of her nearly twenty puts us at 20%, which is a number that's starting to have a bit of weight to it!

Thank you!

It has been so encouraging to us to see those of you sharing with Lili! We had no idea what to expect when we started this. So far we've had six people with a whole range of dollar amounts, totaling up to the $4565.56 that you see in the side bar! (Side comment from a number nerd - what a fun number to type! All those repeating digits...)

As I was talking a bit about Lili tonight with Evania (6) and Gloria (4.5) before going to sleep, Evania commented that it reminded her of Jesus' commentary on the widow and the rich man giving in the temple. I agreed with her. The dollar amount isn't so much what matters as the heart behind the giving. As we prayed, Gloria asked God to give Lili the money she needs so she can have a place to live. (So some of the details are missing, but explaining debt is complicated, so that's what she pulled out of it!) Then she asked me where God gets his money! I love talking about this stuff with them. I told her that one way he moves his money around is by talking to his people - when we love him, we love and care about the things/people that he loves and cares about, and because we love him more than our money, we are happy to give where he wants us to give.

The amount that Lili needs to be completely debt free is significant. I don't know that we're going to get there, even with what has been given so far, but that again is God's deal. As any of you are praying over this, would you please pray with us and for us that we would be able to communicate clearly with Lili about what is going on here. Yes, we want her to have her needs met here by the closest thing she may have to a family surrounding her, but as I was thinking today, there are so many places where Paul especially talks about our relationship with God as one of adoption. It is too late for Lili to be adopted by an earthly family, but there is a Father for whom it is NOT too late for her to be adopted. Your giving is giving us a very practical opportunity through which to share with Lili the hope that is offered, not only for this life, but for eternity.

Lifetime orphan

When we adopted Bobbi, she was at the very end of the window of eligibility for adoption. Every country's limits are different. Some make the cut-off as early as 14 years. Some, like Bulgaria, allow the commitment documents that begin the adoption process to be submitted up until the day they are sixteen years old. When we first met Bobbi a few months before she turned sixteen one of the things we told her is that our adopting her meant that she would be our daughter for life - "family" isn't just something she would have until she was a legal adult at age eighteen. We told her that she would be provided for and cared for, and that for any child that was born to us, we intended to spend at least eighteen years ensuring they had a safe place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, and that she was no exception.

Hard to believe this was almost four years ago!

Being adopted means that you are not just no longer a child with no parents, you are no longer a person with no family. Because, for better or for worse, a family is something that you have for life! And children don't stop needing their parents just because they're 18 (or 30 or 40!) and parents don't stop caring for their kids when their children reach legal adulthood.

On the flip side, though, NOT being adopted means that you are not only a child with no parents, but are destined to be a person without a family...for life. Once these kids hit fourteen or sixteen, or whatever the cut off is, they are, for the rest of their lives, orphans. Orphans aren't just cute (or not-so-cute!) little kids. Orphans come in all shapes and sizes and ages and races.

I remember having a phone call with Toni, our adoption lawyer, a few months after Bobbi came home. There were a couple things we wanted to chat about, but one thing that was heavy on my mind was the other young adults living in Bobbi's home. I knew that in the past at age 18 they were either sent off to make their own way in the world, or, in the case of a more significant handicap (either mental or physical), they would be transferred to an adult mental institution. We learned from her that with some of the reforms happening in the system that included the new smaller scale group homes that Bobbi had been living in, some of the children would have the ability to stay there for a few more years of transition into young-adulthood. But the reality of the statistics was sobering: of the young women who "graduated" from state care, 70% end up living a life of prostitution. Of the young men, a slightly higher percentage end up in jail. It's not a pretty picture.

And really, how could it be? For those of you who have kids or have parents who cared at all for you, think about how much time and effort parents put into preparing their kids for life? They encourage them in their education, they help them think about and plan for the future, they help them get their first jobs, learn how to manage money and manage a household. Your family is where you first learn to trust and what it is to love and be loved. Yes, some parents/families do a better job than others, but as a general rule, this is a big part of what parents do. And after you move out at eighteen (or later!) your parents are still there for you.

Born six months after we brought Krassimir home, every interaction we had with Evania carried with it a depth of importance that I hadn't really thought about with my other birth-kids. There's serious life-preparation going on here! (Besides that photo being a serious old-timer! I think Owen's only nine years old there!)

To put it bluntly, the post-communist type orphanage system is NOT one that excels at raising kids in a way that prepares them for adulthood, and there's nothing like putting an unprepared eighteen year old kid out on the streets with a small chunk of cash to make a recipe for hopelessness!!! Suddenly they're out there, with no experience, no support system, no one to turn to if things are rough. If you add to that the additional complications of attachment disorders, institutional delays, institutional behaviors, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.

We have a friend named Lili who I introduced briefly a few days ago. She is roughly my age. She was abandoned by her parents to a Bulgarian institution at birth. She has limb differences (she wears a prosthetic leg and has abnormal digits on her hands), but is able to get around independently despite her odd gait. She always has a smile on her face. She loves animals - dogs, pigeons, cats - you name it! She is Roma, which, if you know anything about Bulgarian culture, is in itself a tremendous disadvantage. (Here's a current article outlining a bit of the discrimination the Roma people experience - you can find many more if you're interested.) She was, and still is, and always will be, an orphan.

After growing up in the same orphanage that Bobbi spent most of her years in, Lili hit that magic age of eighteen, but by some stroke of luck was allowed to stay as one of the staff at the orphanage helping to care for the younger children. Bobbi has quite early memories of Lili working with her and the other kids. Lili is the one that Bobbi credits with teaching her how to read.

At some point along the way, Lili's time at the orphanage came to an end, and she made her way to Sofia where she found a job working as a preschool teacher for Roma children. However, she also found "friends" who got her into situations where she made foolish mistakes that ended her up in a huge pile of debt. They used her, and then they left her. So now she's alone, friendless, and with substantial debt looming over her that she doesn't know how she will ever escape. She's got so many counts against her, and nobody to turn to!

She is one of the caregivers that Bobbi connected with on facebook after coming home, and about a year and a half ago, she kind of poured out her heart and her troubles to Bobbi (which I would agree, yes, is not the appropriate channel to do so, but what were her options?) and through an interesting turn of events, we arranged to start sending her a small chunk of money each month so she could rent a tiny apartment. She had been homeless for some time, living at the school where she'd been teaching, and living in constant fear that she would be found out and kicked out. Because she's got these loans against her, the bank skims off most of what she gets from her small paycheck, leaving her in a truly hopeless situation.

When this first came to our attention, we weren't sure what to do. It sounded like a classic take-advantage-of-the-rich-Americans kind of scheme, and yet...the plight of orphans is one that has long captured our attention - a calling that God has put on our lives because HE is a God who cares about widows and orphans, and he is also the one who has told us to give to those who ask (Matthew 5:24). She told us roughly how much she thought she would need for rent each month; we told her we would find a way to get that to her each month. She did some more looking, and guess what - rent was actually going to be about a third again as much as she'd originally told us AND she needed a chunk extra for a signing fee. And, oh yes, a bit more for a hot water heater for the bathroom. Boy did we feel like we were just maybe being taken! But you know what, we decided that was God's deal, and we were going to continue moving forward with it. Would you believe that very week we got a letter from our health insurance company telling us that our premiums for the upcoming year were going to be about the amount Lili needed less than the current year? Have you EVER heard of such a thing from an insurance company??? Nope. Me neither. And so onward we went, knowing that the next year's premiums would probably more than make up for this decrease, but not missing the timing of these two events right now.

Last summer when we made our trip to Bulgaria, Lili offered to let us stay in her apartment for the days that we were in Sofia. We agreed to do so for some of our stay, knowing that she would want us to, and also enjoying the experience of NOT being in a hotel. (We've had a few travel opportunities when we've gotten to do that in the past - a classmate's uncle let six of us crash at his house during a three-day field trip to Chicago when we were in graduate school, or a visit to my sister's when she and her husband lived in Amsterdam.) We enjoyed our time with Lili so much. She was so proud to show us around her tiny apartment, and she made a point of showing us the hot water unit in the bathroom!

She joined us on some of our exploring excursions, showing us some of her favorite places to spend her days and just chatting happily with Bobbi (because her English is about as limited as our Bulgarian!) She wouldn't let us do *anything* for her - not even treat her to a snacky breakfast sandwich at the little outdoor vendor across the street. (A sausage/bread concoction was the equivalent of about $0.75. She wouldn't take it. But she DID happily take Bobbi's leftovers later to feed to the local pigeons in her favorite park area!) We told her we wanted to have her join us for dinner on our last night, and had a time and place all set...and then she messaged Bobbi a few hours before and told her that she wasn't feeling well with an upset stomach and had to cancel. I'm sure it was just too hard for her to accept anything else from us, and that she had no concept of how little it would cost to treat her to something special.

I love this dear woman. I admire her so much. The way she toughs through her disability with a constant smile on her face, the gentleness and concern she shows for the animals living in her city, the delight with which she talks about the children she works with. But she is heavily burdened by the weight of the debt she's under, and even though through us she's provided with the basic necessity of a place to live, she longs to live free. A few weeks ago she unburdened her worries onto Bobbi again and asked her to ask us if we knew of any way to help her. I've been messaging directly with her via facebook (and the infamous google translate) and gotten details on her loans - she's got three different loans against her, two to two different banks, and one to an individual. Our hope was that we could perhaps use the money we've been saving up for the garage next summer to help her get back to ground zero and push our project out another year, but honestly, what we have saved is not enough. In some ways I'm glad, because it means that we, too, are left leaning on God to solve this problem, if he so chooses.

So I'm going to do something on this blog that we have not been comfortable doing for ourselves. I'm going to ask you who are reading if helping this woman is something God would have you do. I really don't think I've currently got enough readers that even with your help we're going to erase her debt entirely, but wouldn't it be amazing if she could get a small sense of what it is to be part of a family and know what it is to have a group of people rally around her to help her out?

She shared something with me this morning [well, the morning I started this post!] that I'm going to (via the aforementioned infamous google translate, so bear with some of the awkwardness) share with you:

"Hello, dear dear family! I want to THANK you again for everything you do for me and for my existence in the big city of Sofia. I grew up in an institution without parents since I was a child and I had not prepared myself for the real reality of life, despite my advanced age and long years of loneliness and only loneliness. I made mistakes in my life that I want to correct and be filled again with a smile on my face...I haven't received a clean salary for a very long time because I have a loan...I want to be independent and not have any loans and credits. To pay rent and everything - electricity, water, food..."

She continued, sharing her dreams of someday being a wife and mother, and living a responsible life. But she feels trapped by the despair of the weight of this debt that is over her and she has no way of paying it back. On her meager salary (and I don't believe she's able to be working at all now with the pandemic, which I'm guessing is why this is coming to a head again with her), her debt is slowly growing as she just does not have the means to pay it back, so she sees no way out. So much in her note from this morning grabs me. First of all, her "I had not prepared myself for the real reality of life." I read that and I think, first of all, I admire the way she takes full responsibility for where she's at. She's not blaming those who took advantage of her. And second of all I think, we humans weren't designed to have to prepare ourselves for the reality of life - we were designed to have families to help us with that! And communist-era Eastern European institutions have never been known for their great skills in preparing handicapped, ethnically persecuted children with the tools they need to be successful in life! And the loneliness - I have blogged only tangentially and superficially about the ugliness of what abandonment and neglect does to a baby, toddler, young child, teenager because I don't want to dump all of Bobbi's junk out on the internet for everyone to see, but let me tell you it is UGLY what it does to a human being to grow up without someone to love them!!! It damages so many fundamental things about what it is to relate to those around you - who to trust and how to trust and even the ability to trust, and then, as in Lili's case, she tried to trust - wanted to trust, wanted to love, but with no skills whatsoever, got burned, and everything nasty that you've ever believed about your own unworthiness and unloveableness gets thrown back in your face. Lili amazes me with her ability to keep on, to NOT be afraid to dream, and that's why I'm going to use this connection that I have with those of you who read this blog to ask: would you be willing to share some of what you have been given to make a difference in the life of this orphan for whom it's too late to have a "real" family, but to whom we have been given the opportunity to be a family to her?

Matt and Bobbi with Lili last summer as we were leaving Lili's apartment for the last time. Yes, this is the apartment on the seventh floor with the elevator that sometimes works...and sometimes doesn't. YOU try walking up seven flights of stairs with a prosthetic leg! Lili is amazing.

Walking through Lili's favorite Dog Park by the European Union building.

As we've mulled this over for the last few weeks, we've decided to not go with a formal fund-raising platform. In the spirit of being family I'd rather go about it in a more personal way and through that avoid the fees associated with using internet fund raisers. Please see her, and ask if this is something you are supposed to be doing. If you want to help her out and have our address, you can send a check, or drop something off at our house. You can use paypal (glewwes at gmail dot com). If you don't have our address, but would prefer that method, send me an email. Matt and I were able to send enough extra with our last transfer to her to pay off the smallest of the three loans and part of what she owes the individual. Whatever we collect between now and the end of August I will send to her at that point when we send her rent.

The pain and loneliness of being an orphan doesn't stop when you turn eighteen. We have a chance to do something about it for this one! Will you help us be Lili's "family"?

"Because I am artistic"

Without being here day in and day out, this may not have as much meaning to many of you as it does to me, but Bobbi came out of her room the other day talking about how she's looking forward to her birthday (which isn't until November!!!) and hoping she gets more art supplies (colored pencils, nice coloring books, etc) because she is artistic.

Hearing her describe herself in that way - an honest way and more importantly, a positive way is pretty thrilling. She's struggling lately to fight against her tendency to spend all of her empty hours in front of a screen, and pouring herself into her artistic efforts is a great way for her to do that.

Did I even have a chance to post about how we re-did her room in early March? On our weekend away, we discovered something at IKEA that we thought could revolutionize the way Bobbi uses her room. We've wanted to get her some sort of a work surface for reading or drawing, but weren't sure how to fit it into her room because space was already tight as it was. Well, IKEA had it. Within a week of our days away, thanks to Craigslist and a trip to IKEA, she was all set. I just looked back and found some photos:

There used to be a dresser in the corner where the desk is now. It was a nice dresser, but it wasn't something that Bobbi could use on her own. Pre-surgery, when she was kneeling on the floor, she could get down there in front of it and pull open the two lowest drawers, but the uppers were too high for her, and she can't get into it with her wheelchair. It also took up a lot of room both itself and with the clear space needed to get the drawers open. The new system is amazing on many counts - she's got a desk with great clear space for her wheelchair to get under, and the little bins and open shelves are accessible to Bobbi on her own. And there's *just* enough room to open her door and get her wheelchair in and out of the room.

But that's a digression. The point is, Bobbi's got a great space in her room to hunker down and get to work.

Her favorite media these days is colored pencil, but she's got a great collection of markers and crayons as well, and often will use a combination of all of them depending on what she is doing.

Please note that these do not photograph well, but that said, here's some examples from a coloring book of faces that she's been working in a lot lately.

This one is not yet completed (the flowers in her hair aren't done yet as well as some other details), but she's got a great sense of color and blending, and her shading abilities keep improving. Look at the careful attention she paid to the fine grain of the hair!

And here's a closeup so you can see a bit more of what she's doing with the face - the range of colors that she uses in each drawing, layer upon layer, is fascinating to me.

And here's another example (also still unfinished). Look at the fun variation of colors in those tiny little birds!

The tiny leaves get me - each leaf is gradated from orange to yellow to green in different proportions. It's striking in real life, and the photo only hints at it.

Both details above were taken from this picture, showing the degree of fine attention that she's paying to each tiny bit of the drawing.

Not only have her artistic abilities consistently grown since we met her and especially since she started putting in regular time on it, but other character qualities as well. Her ability to deal with disappointment is one - just last night she started one that she'd had me print off the internet, and she was dissatisfied with how it was coming, so rather than blow up, throw everything onto the floor and declare that she's never going to color again, she asked me (yes, with some frustration in her voice - I get that!) if I could print her a new one, and today she did it again, and was pleased with the results. Because she is artistic and she is not a failure. And artists just keep on being artistic even when something doesn't turn out the way they'd hoped.

(Two more just for fun...and to show the range of what she's interested in.)

A day in the garden

The summer before we met and brought home Bobbi and Mira (but after we'd started the process) was a sort of idyllic year as far as our yard and gardens were concerned. Gardening has long been a hobby of mine, starting with a bleeding heart that my grandparents got for me and my parents let me plant in a little foundation garden behind our house and moving to a little 10x10 vegetable plot that my dad dug up in the back yard as we got older. When I was twelve we moved and I got to help my parents design the landscaping for the bare naked yard (brand new house) and my dad double-dug two beautiful 5' by 20' veggie garden beds that I thoroughly enjoyed. I can't remember at all what degree of success we actually had with the garden, but I DO remember how much I loved the planting and watching things grow.

Matt comes from a long line of farmer/gardener/yard-putterer stock. The almost-one-acre yard that we live on is what's left of his grandpa's truck farm from which he used to take produce to the St Paul Farmer's market. Our current vegetable garden is about 2000 square feet, and was the "kitchen garden" on Grandpa's property. His grandma (who I never really got to meet because her Alzheimers was quite progressed by the time I met Maty) had been an amazing flower gardener, and the yard is still full of all of her old beauties - peonies, iris, and many other treasures. We still get fruit every fall from the old apple and pear trees that his grandparents planted, and raspberries in the summer from the ones they used to eat off in the summer. One of our favorite things to do together when the kids are in bed (or during the day with them!) is putter in the garden - weed, plant, move, plan.

That summer before the girls came home was almost too good to be true. The weather was great, I wasn't pregnant (so the ground didn't seem like it was a mile away!) and Gloria was a content enough baby that she was happy to just be around, but didn't feel the need to be constantly held, so we spent many delightful hours outside. Oh yes - that was the year our neighbor worked at a garden center, and all summer long was bringing home off-casts that didn't look good enough to sell, but just needed a little TLC to be just fine, so we had a great influx of interesting plant material - everything was simply ideal. (I blogged a bit about it here.)

The years since then have been not so good in the gardens. Yes, we've gotten out there a bit, but it's been a sacrifice that I've felt that something that means so much has been taken away. This year, however, has come in a way that it feels like a smile of delight from a Father who knows me. There is so much that inspire worship when you're out in the middle of what he has created!!

With yesterday's incredibly beautiful and mild weather, on a whim we brought Mira outside. It's not super easy to get her in and out of the house (oh, I'm so ready for that ramp we're dreaming about!) but earlier this spring we reshaped some of the hillier parts of our yard so we have a more wheelchair friendly path to the back yard for Bobbi, and decided to try it for Mira!

Here she is in the shade of the huge crab apple tree (which every year shades more and more of the veggie garden!) where she won't get a sunburn, but can still feel the wind in her face.

After a while, Bobbi decided to join us, too, which is a pretty common passtime for her these days. Sometimes she'll bring her Bible out to read if it's not too windy. Sometimes her iPad if she's close enough to the house to still get wi-fi, and sometimes, like today, she just comes out to see what we're up to! Matt put her to work watering the gladiolas.

Here you can see Matt hilling potatoes, Reuben settling down with his iPad (at least he's not wandering!), Mira all wrapped up in her blanket, and Bobbi leaning in with the hose.

Lest you miss this, let me bring to your attention the joy that it is to have Bobbi contributing to this venture! It's a joy to have her interested, it's a delight to have her contributing meaningful work to the well-being of the garden, and such a great way for her to get to see in real life how God has designed all of these systems to work! She, remember, helped Dad cut the potato sets, so she's been involved to some degree already with the garden, but to have her out there working with us is fantastic. It's one more little thread that is getting woven into our lives as we live life together. Starting from sixteen years of none of those connections makes these interweavings that much more significant.

And for the record, Krassi did not come out yesterday. But's he's been out plenty of other times this spring! He still really only has his one ASL sign ("I want!/Mine!") but he gets a lot of mileage out of that one. We can ask him, "Krassi, do you want to go outside? Or do you want to stay in the house?" Once he knows the two options, I'll ask again with a pause in between, and it's usually not too hard to tell which one he's looking for! So he's not left out, here's a photo from a few weeks ago. I love how great he looks lounging in these chairs! He gets up there from laying on the grass all by himself! In and out and in and out all afternoon.

Bobbi's new baby

It's kitten season again, and our neighbors are fostering again, and we've been having some visits from the kittens. Bobbi's got a favorite, but we've got to wait a few weeks before they're fully ready to be "adopted."

We're looking at the one in the middle.

Meet Tihomir! Or Tihomira. We'll wait for confirmation from the vet this time. ;) And while Tihomir/a was happy with Bobbi, everyone else spent plenty of time with the other two as well!

A precision time table

I think mentioned here that Bobbi was ready to initiate a search for her birth family, and we started with just a simple post on facebook that we asked our friends, and particularly our Bulgarian friends through the Bulgarian school here where we live who have lots of Bulgarian friends in Bulgaria, to share the post, thinking that was an easy (and free) way to start.

As we suspected, nothing came of it, so we went to the next step which is to hire a private investigator that used to work with our Bulgarian adoption lawyer who has helped a number of other families that we know of also find their children's birth families.

We liked his policy that we don't pay until he finds something. Once he has a report to give, then the transaction happens, and following that, he'll deliver the information he has collected - photos, video, and responses to a variety of questions that he asked family members.

We have prayed for years that the timing of this would happen at just the right time. When we first contacted the investigator, no one had any idea the whole world would be shutting down in the very near future!! I was fully prepared for this to bring a delay in the whole process, but amazingly, he and his team were able to locate Bobbi's birth family, get the information they were seeking and get back to Sofia before things ground to a halt over there.

Just tonight we got the email saying the report is ready. We expect to have it within the next few days, depending on how quickly the payment processes.

Starting last week, our church has been live streaming the morning worship service. Last week there were about 100 people at church, meaning just over half of the congregation stayed home. It was during the Sunday School hour that the announcement came from our MN government about schools shutting down and recommending no gatherings over 50 people, followed quickly by the no more than 10 recommendation. So far MN has not yet ordered us to stay home, but *we've* been staying home because of the make up of our household! This morning our pastor adapted an article written by John Piper called "Don't Waste Your Cancer" and spoke with us about how to not waste our pandemic. The regular sermon following our sermon series in 1 Samuel will be available to us via pod cast tomorrow. ;) One driving point was that even this (perhaps even especially this) time is designed for our good, and that we will waste this time if we are not viewing it in light of God's goodness and his glory and the work that he is hoping to accomplish. With that as a backdrop, I am interested to see what develops with the timing of this new page in Bobbi's life as she, for the first time, is going to get to see someone who "looks like her."

Poison

The poison of the lies engrained in the worldview that develops in a child who is abandoned and then left to grow up in an institution runs deep. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

On a lighter note, three of our girls performed with the Bulgarian dance group this past week. Leah's in the back row, Rinnah in the middle row on the far right, and Gloria's in the front a little nervous with her hands up by her mouth.

Bobbi continues to delight us with her artistic skills. She prefers coloring to drawing, so finds line drawings on the internet that we print out for her, and then she gets to work, layering on crayon, marker, colored pencil, oil pastels, until she ends up with something like this:

zoomed in a bit so you can see some detail

And, believe it or not (well, we always say we'll know it's going to happen when it actually happens!), Matt and I are going to get our two days away to think with no interruptions at the very end of this month! We've only been thinking this was critical since September, and here it's finally happening. I find it humorous that it will overlap with leap day. Can't think of a better thing to do with an extra day of the year! We'll be coming home for the night time stuff, but Matt and I *should* get 8am to 10pm one day and then 8am to 5pm the next day.

Tsvetomira

Mira got some beautiful hair things for Christmas gifts this year. There's so little that she wants (nothing!), but gifts like this make me smile as I think back to a conversation I had with our Bulgarian adoption lawyer the week that we picked up the girls. Toni told me that night that she was glad that Mira finally had a family (after having a few other families commit to her and then decide not to follow through), and almost in tears she said that for Mira she didn't care if she ever learned to walk or talk or sit or anything - she just wanted me to make her hair pretty. Every time I brush Mira's hair, or put it up in braids, or even just throw a quick hair band in before we race out the door, I think of Toni. Toni passed away somewhat unexpectedly (but not entirely unexpectedly - she had a number of health complications due to a car accident earlier in life) a little over a year ago, and along with the smile, there's also a sadness that I don't get to send this photo to Toni! So all of you get to enjoy it for her with me.

I think I've written briefly in the past about what a great place Minnesota is to live if you have a disability. It is. We are self-employed, so have no employer through which we can get health insurance, so for years have independently purchased a high-deductible plan for our family (as in, we pay 100% of our health care costs up to the high deductible and then the insurance company pays 100% after that). That in itself always kind of feels like we're cheating since the plans come for one or two adults, and then one, two or three-or-more children. We have three-or-more. So that means we pay the highest possible premium, but it also means that for the last ten years we haven't had to jump into a higher bracket even though our family has more than doubled in size! Additionally, our four children with disabilities all qualify for Medical Assistance as a secondary form of insurance, so anything that our primary doesn't cover for them is covered through MA. This means that if those four kids have enough medical bills to meet the deductible before any of the rest of us need to see the doctor each calendar year, we don't have to pay a cent (beyond our premiums). Because it usually takes an average of four weeks for our four to reach the deductible, all the rest of us have eleven months of the year to go for free. (Broken arms, weird foot spots, ear infections, eye surgery - done.)

But that wasn't really what I wanted to mull over today, but rather something related. All four of the kids with disabilities, in addition to secondary insurance, also get some additional funding via a grant that we can use for disability-related items that insurance will not cover. This summer we learned that Mira, because of the highly medical nature and degree of her needs, qualifies for some extra funds that will cover the cost of paid nursing staff here in our home! Well, qualifying was a great first step, but it wasn't until almost a month ago that the agency we were paired with was able to find a nurse to match up with Mira. But we have one now, and she's been great. "J" comes three mornings a week to help with Mira's morning routine to free Matt up to get to his work sooner, and she's been able to add so much to Mira's life! Mira's cares don't take four hours of solid work, so J has time to do stretching, to get her more frequent baths, and to fix her hair (J's only child is a little boy who's not into having his hair braided, so now she has a creative outlet!!) Her son goes to school about a mile from our house, so she's able to drop him off before coming here, and we have the flexibility in our needs that when the kids in our district have off school, we just give her the day off, or have her switch to another day that week, so she doesn't have to arrange child care. It works well.

She's only been working with Mira for about a month, and only three mornings a week, but it has been so sweet watching the way she interacts with Mira. She will sing to her while bathing her, and even when she's filling Mira's med syringes and mixing up her feed solution for the next 24 hours, she'll bring Mira into the kitchen with her and talk to her while doing so. Yes, she knows that Mira can't hear her, but it's the overall attitude that Mira is a real person worth treating as such that matters to me. On the days when we're not really sure where Mira's at, it's so helpful to have someone who can listen intelligently to Mira's lungs and that that person knows Mira in particular and isn't just listening once every four months like a doctor does! J has also learned how to do some range of motion exercises with Mira (we arranged a single therapy session with Lori, Bobbi's PT who also sees Mira occasionally, so J could learn the specifics), and Matt has taught her how she likes her hands rubbed. Mira is one happy girl on the days that J has been here!

But it's been tough for me, too. *I* want to be the one who can devote hours of time to Mira. *I* want to be able to hold her and rock her and massage her tight muscles, and because she's my ninth child out of ten, I simply can't. I struggled with a similar thing when Reuben was three years old and we were considering sending him to a special ed preschool. I was a mom who home schooled her kids! I didn't want to send any of my kids off to someone else. I wanted to give them the best of me all by myself! It took realizing that even as a mother of *just* three kids, I couldn't match the student-teacher ratio that they were offering Reuben for me to be okay with having Reuben spend three mornings a week at school.

All of those things put together (and more) have put me in a place where I am realizing that although I've poured the last fifteen years of my life into this thing called "mothering" I'm not sure I really know what I'm doing! What IS my role as a mother? As with anything that I do in life, if I'm going to do it, I want to do it well ("Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord") but I'm not sure right now that I know what doing it well looks like, so I don't know how to tell if I'm doing well! What does it mean to do a good job at being Mira's mother? And not just for Mira, but for each one of these children that I have been given, because I realize (and this is nothing new), that what each one of them needs from me is different.

This isn't so much something particular to adoption as it is to being a mother in general, but I do think that being mother to children we adopted brings some of these things to the forefront of my mind. Mothering children with significant disabilities brings some of these things to the forefront as well. The whole goal of raising "independent, responsible, compassionate human beings who know and love Jesus" is a tidy package that just doesn't translate nicely to nearly half of our children! And the questions that our four bring to me make me look at the other six differently, too. My slogging through this over the last few months is likely in part why posts have been brief and only skimming the surface, and I think it's important that those of you who read, and have been reading know that life around here is more than just a series of happy snapshots. :) (Though a steady stream of those happy snapshots are definitely also part of our reality, too - don't get me wrong there!) But I'm definitely looking ahead to this new year as an opportunity for a revitalized vision and direction. It's been a goal of mine since September to find a day and a half or two day stretch where Matt and I can get away and have some focused time to talk about some of these things together, and it hasn't happened yet, but I'm still hoping! It takes a lot of coordination to get the two of us out of the house at the same time. 😊

Busy week

1) Tsvetomira had a birthday! As of Monday, she's 14 years old. We ate ice cream with sprinkles in her honor, and sang (with one of us touching her so she could at least feel what we were singing!)

2) Matt finished the shelf that separates the opening between the living room and his office! Along with that, he was able to put in the last piece of floor trim in the living room, so the living room is finally completely done. Now all he has to do for the west addition that we began over six years ago to be finished is to do a bit of sheetrock mudding, sanding and painting on the doorway into his office. Not bad.

3) Tsvetomira qualifies for nursing-level care, and has officially been approved for up to 38 hours a week as of July, but we haven't been able to find someone, until this week! On her birthday, we had a nurse start her training. She'll come three mornings a week for about four hours just to help with Mira's morning cares in the hopes that a) Matt can get to his desk sooner and b) we can keep closer tabs on how she's doing overall and hopefully catch her declines sooner. It's a great arrangement. Her son goes to school a mile and a half from our house, so she drops him off and comes here. When school's off, she can stay home with her son as those days are generally more flexible for us anyway.

4) Bobbi, for the first time, was told by a person she had just met that they couldn't tell at all that she had an accent! It's definitely still there, though diminishing continually, but it was kind of cool for someone to be that surprised that she was born in a different country and didn't start learning English until she was 16 years old!

5) Daddy and Mira, after a six month hiatus, have made their trip together down to the ER at Regions to check out her lungs. She's such a tough call to make. Over the afternoon she just went downhill, so after pie at church tonight, they headed down. Of course, he reported that they got there and she was satting at 96% on room air, instead of the 90% or lower that we'd been seeing while she was on oxygen here at home. But they said her lungs sounded "wet" which they didn't yesterday when our nurse was here, and they'll be doing x-rays. Very probable that she'll be admitted to Gillette. But still, six months in between is a definite record for her!

6) Our friendship with Gillette began nine years and one day ago today. It was two days before Thanksgiving, 2010, when Reuben went into Gillette as a "normal" kid and on his second day had his first two really big seizures, and BOOM, just like that we had a diagnosis of epilepsy the day before Thanksgiving.

"Before" we knew anything

"After." Still just our sweet little baby boy.

It was exactly nine years ago today that I woke in the night needing to use the bathroom (ten weeks pregnant with Rinnah), and walked to the hallway bathroom instead of risking using the in-room one and waking Reuben. It was standing outside that bathroom door that I had the revelation: I'm not afraid to adopt a child with special needs because I am already the mother of a child with special needs. I just didn't know it until today. It almost made me want to ask Matt if he wanted me to run Mira down tonight instead of him, just to walk down that same hallway on this anniversary. Never did I dream what God had in store for us, and it's humbling to look back and remember those little steps he was already taking to prepare us for this and whatever still lies ahead.

6b) Ebenezer is, within a week, the same age that Reuben was when we got Reuben's initial diagnosis. It's been an interesting anniversary this time around as we have another 16.5 month old little male human around the house - but a very different one from Reuben.

 

 

We call Eben our Duplo Man because he loves to build and disassemble these towers! He's really picky about the blocks he uses - they have to all be the same size - none of the double tall or double wide make it into HIS towers!!

7) And tomorrow is Thanksgiving! Our church had its annual Pie and Thanksgiving night tonight, and the theme this year was Ebenezer, as in a time of remembering how God has helped us up to this day as a way of encouraging each other to trust in his continued care into the future. Fitting, I'd say!

?) I didn't mention it, but we've been without Big Blue for three weeks!!! After an original estimate of $12,000 to repair it, we found another smaller shop that could do it for less, but it would take longer as they didn't carry the parts on hand, so would have to order them piecemeal as they needed them. For a few thousand dollars in savings, we went for it. It's SO nice to have our vehicle space back as of yesterday! We were grateful that Owen has bought himself an old pick up truck that seats five, so we could at least still get to church on Sundays while down our big vehicle!