Just learned some big news from El Salvador this week that does very much affect our adoption – in fact all adoptions there. 

At 8:45 on Thursday night, Sonia Cortez de Madriz was sworn in as El Salvador’s Procuraduría General de la República [Attorney General].

Stopped off to grab a gallon of milk on the way home from one of the boys’ classes the other day, and here was the conversation at the check-out:

Clerk:  Are those your kids?

Me: Yes.

Clerk:  Well, they don’t look like you. Read the rest of this entry

Got the email confirmation yesterday evening that Lucy has booked my flights!  It’s becoming more real that I’ll be in El Salvador in less than 4 weeks!

Aside from firming up coverage for the boys while I’m gone and going about daily life responsibilities, I’m trying to squeeze in my Spanish lessons on Rosetta Stone and read up on the culture.  So I’ll share pertinent facts as I find them.

Today’s surprise:  El Salvador had a 10-year record high of 4,365 murders in 2009, majority gang-related.  Read the rest of this entry

Right before Fred and I adopted the twins, we went through a season of reading up on parenting, attending workshops, stalking observing parents we knew and really admired, and then talking through everything we’d seen and heard to develop a plan for how we felt we could best parent these little boys who were coming.

And we knew we’d be hitting the ground running, since there were two of them and both squarely in the “terrible twos” phase.  (Turned out their twos were delightful; the threes were more challenging, but still not that bad… brag, brag, our kids are awesome.) 

Something that stuck with me in the midst of all that – and in my career at the time, since I was a manager of two departments at work – was the idea of developing a short list of core values we wanted to pass on to our kids.

Successful businesses all do it.  Many people do something similar every New Years (whether or not they keep up with them in the months to follow).  So why wouldn’t we, as parents, want at least one fixed target, something we could measure, when it came to rearing our kids? Read the rest of this entry

One of the non-priority results of our latest home improvement endeavor is that I now have a room dedicated to doing school with the boys during the day.   We’re homeschooling rather than sending them to all-day kindergarten this year, and that’s going so well that I think we’re going to continue with it for some time to come.  It’s certainly not for everybody, and we’ll see what we can handle when our current adoption finalizes, but for now it’s working well for us.

And so it has justified getting it’s own dedicated space. 

I spent the last week organizing our stuff and then laminating and hanging wall-charts that go with what we’re learning this year, and at this point, the room’s pretty much all it’s ever going to be for this school year anyway.

And all down-low where short people can see (makes me smile every time I walk through).

And so I post for the benefit of our friends who have already done the same and whose ideas I’ve already stolen and for those who love to steal ideas as much as I do:

Read the rest of this entry

Well it’s been nearly 3 weeks since my last post, but I would like to beg “good excuse.”  Not so much “the holidays” as “Fred and I undertook a bit of a large home-project, and I’m only just recovering.”

Since we knew he’d be off the week between Christmas and New Years, we decided we’d use that time to paint the first floor of our house all one neutral color.   

That, of course (if you know us at all well), led to “well why don’t we just take out the walls and bulkheads we want to remove before we bother to paint the whole place?”

‘Cause that’s not over-committing or anything.

And so we did. Read the rest of this entry