a new normal...

sorry it has been almost 2 months since i last posted. the holiday season is always busy, but this year there was an extra special twist. i welcomed 2 foster boys to my home on december 16th, and my life radically changed. the easiest thing to do here to catch you all up, would be to post pictures, but alas, the rules of foster care do not allow me to. so you will just have to wait to see my handsome boys until you meet them. they are 11 and 14 - definitely outside of the age limit i had in mind, but the Lord has had different plans than mine from the beginning, so that shouldn't surprise me. i bet you are wondering, "so how's it going?" well the answer i typically give is "it going okay. we are adjusting." and that is the truth. there are days that are awful and there are days that are fun, but most of the time we are just okay. just enough grace and strength to make it through today. we are all adjusting. you see i am going through all of the new parent adjustments - going from being single and thinking about me to being single and caring for two kids. but i not only got 2 kids, i got 2 autonomous jr. high kids who have come from a really hard place. who came with opinions and experiences and just a different worldview. they have been completely uprooted and have had lots of new people involved in their lives telling them what to do. so it has been a delicate dance of establishing authority, figuring out how to connect, getting to know one another, and just adjusting. i was glad we had all of christmas break, but i was very thankful for a routine to start with school and basketball. i knew it would be hard to parent, so much repetitive teaching, so much to do, so little sleep, so much laundry, so little alone time, etc. enough of my friends are parents and i see enough parents in my job that those things were not as much of a shock. but i forgot to calculate how much i was going to have to unteach, reteach and teach. these boys have had someone else teaching them things for 11 and 14 years. i am working hard to figure out what they know, what they don't. correct what is wrong and catch them up on where they should be. and this applies to all areas of life - social, emotional, physical, and spiritual. the weight of this all hit me when i realized how little time i have with them, even if get to keep them. this weight coupled by 1 step forward of progress and 3 steps back some times was killing me. i have had to remind myself many times that jesus is the one who saves them, not me. and i think it is funny that i can trust jesus with saving the world, but not with saving my kids. the other hard adjustment is that we have so many people that have a say in how we do things in our house (case manager, case worker, CASA, their mom, therapist, psychiatrists, etc). i don't care for that very much and neither do the boys, but it is how the system work so it is what we have to do. i hope to post more, though i am sure my posting will be infrequent for awhile, to share what god is teaching me through all of this. sadly i will not be able to post pictures of the boys or our adventures, so you are just going to have to take my word for it.