Celebration day

Sorry I was going to add a video clip to my last post... apparently I'm not as tech savvy as I had hoped. We celebrated Olivia's fifth birthday this last week (only two weeks late) but I found it was a lot easier (because life is supposed to be easy *insert sarcasm*) to not do it on her actual birth date. Usually on the kids birthday's and the days leading up to them my heart is so heavy for the mother that walked the last few days with her baby within. I am burdened at the choice they had no choice but to make. All the emotions of that are with me and I can't even imagine because it's not something I have had to experience. After a few years I've done my best to continue through the guilt of having received something so undeserved from someone's eternal pain but it still comes to me occasionally. My kids might wish that I would have those feelings rush over me about the time I'm ready to discipline :-) So anyway sorry... got way off track there. We had a GREAT birthday party filled with my girls favourite things... her friends, FOOD, and flowers from her daddy. I'm so thankful that she has changed our lives to be so much more than we could have thought it might be. Saturday - the day after I was doing some serious cleaning (pizza sauce off the kitchen floor, cupboards, stovetop, cake, sprinkles and icing off the living room floor, etc) and said out loud, "I can't believe I live this way" It was meant to be a negative statement but as I heard myself say it I realized that it was so good. Yes 10 years ago I agreed to marry someone and I had my life figured out and it was quite neat, organized and relatively predictable... not so much anymore but it's so much more full of life and Christ then I could have ever dreamt! So yeah for celebrating my sweet little Sapphire - you are my gem!

Changing the culture...

I continue to wonder why there are still children waiting - is it the system, is it our mindsets of what we think 'the perfect family' should look like, is it finances, fear, us not wanting to 'affect' the kids that are in our homes already? I really struggle with this one.