Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Moving and a reality check.

Packing! Ugh!!! You don't realize how much time, energy and stamina is required to pack all of your family's belongings until you actually pack up and move somewhere. As I've shared in my last post, we're beginning our homestudy to adopt a little girl from foster care. This means, not only do we have a boatload of paperwork, meetings and training to complete...but we also have to move out of our current two bedroom apartment to a three bedroom apartment in our development in the beginning of September. For all of you keeping track, we are: packing and moving to a bigger apartment, completing a homestudy through our county, preparing our family in learning about foster-adoption, getting our home ready for a little girl and homeschooling. My poor iPhone is pinging every five minutes with reminders and deadlines!

Right now in our homestudy, my husband and I have to list all of the places we've lived in, for past 26 years, as part of a background clearance check. We also did this 13 years ago for our son's homestudy.  For those of you who haven't moved around that much, this listing every place you've lived may not seem like a daunting task. However, my husband and I moved around a lot as kids / teens. He and I met in college in North Carolina, became engaged, moved to Florida for graduate school and got married....and moved around some more...and more. In the past 26 years, I've lived in 13 different places and not including the apartment we're moving into next month. On paper, this was an eye opener for me. That may not sound like many places, especially to all those wonderful men and women in the military, who move around so much with their families! If you do the math (and I'm a homeschool mom so I try to make everything a teachable moment), the average is moving every two years! That actually hasn't been the case, as we lived in our last home in Pennsylvania for almost nine years.

We moved up to New York more than two years ago for my husband's work and it was one of the best decisions we ever made.  Don't get me wrong, moving is always a challenge! However, when we think of moving, we usually think of it being as something that will eventually bring a positive or good change in our lives, don't we? Whether we move for our education, careers or home life....we tend to equate moving as a hopeful opportunity for growth. Change is a good thing and in just about every situation in our lives, change = growth. In many instances, that change will require us to move somewhere new.

Now, I want you to picture a scared child or teenager who is in foster care. She has been taken away from her birth family (for whatever reason) and she is very traumatized. She has been placed in a foster home and everything is unfamiliar to her. The past grownups in her life have let her down and she is just trying to keep up with all of the changes and decisions that the new grownups are making for her. She may have siblings or relatives that she wants to see, but maybe the new grownups can only let her see them once in a while. Just when she starts to get used to things in this foster home, the new grownups come back and make her move to another one...and another one. Every few years? Try every few months! She is very scared, mad, hurt and frustrated. She is frustrated because the new grown ups keep moving her around. They make her put everything she has into one bag or suitcase and she takes it every time they move her. The new grownups tell her she can't go home, they're trying to find her a new forever home and this is why they keep moving her around so much. The thing about this little girl...is that she won't give up. The children in foster care? They never give up. They are braver than all of us. They all hope someday for a forever home. And they don't give up.

If we never became a homeschool family, we would have never made the realization that we were blessed enough to adopt a child from foster care. We would have just kept living our lives, focused on regular school and our lives built around a regular school schedule. When I think of our moving into a bigger apartment and all of the positive moves that we've made in our lives, I now think of the moves that children in foster care must make every day. Whenever our little girl finally moves home with us, we have a lot of healing that we need to give to her. I always say that we're blessed beyond measure...and we are....

As a homeschool family, the most important lesson we've learned is not from a book, worksheet or curriculum. We've learned this lesson from God. To always have hope and faith in Him and to never give up. Not only are we learning it from the Lord, but somewhere out there, a little girl is also teaching this very lesson to us.

"Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase." - Martin Luther King, Jr.





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