They're great for spotting mice





Little girlie announced out of the blue the other day: "Mommy, I have weasel eyes."

"Oh, do you?"  (I'm used to this kind of comment coming from Derrick, my seven-year-old.  He has hawk eyes, and is half dog, half cheetah, and half eagle.  He also has little understanding of fractions!)

"Yes.  I have big weasel eyes."  Then the conversation disintegrated into an argument between the two children over whose eyes were better.

These proclamations about weasel eyes went on for several days.  I could not figure out what she meant until one afternoon:  "Mommy, I do have weasel eyes.  Weasel is kind of like brown."
Weasel -- hazel.  Yeah, they do sound alike.

Waiting for Superman

Apparently, I can't write only about foster care, without writing about teaching too.  Teaching is as much my passion as parenting is.  Just as fostering is about rescuing those children who have been harmed by their parent(s) choices, for me teaching is about reaching those children who would otherwise be sidelined -- the timid children, the naughty ones, those that find learning harder, the advanced children who beg for more challenging learning.  I love teaching!
I watched Waiting for Superman last night.  (I know I'm a little late to the conversation, but I'm cheap and had to wait for the library to get it in.)  Wow.  The light of day reminded me that I do have children, a house, a dog, and a fish; I can't really just pack up and move to the inner city to make a difference teaching in a lousy school.  But let me say:  it is a crime that children have to enter a lottery in order to get a decent education.  It is a crime that for every one child who succeeds, ten children are sent back to their failing schools.  It is a crime that the child who wants desperately to learn and grow is held back by poor teachers who cannot be fired.  It is a crime that great teachers, who are making a difference in the lives of children -- especially in the lives of children who have no other options -- can be let go before poor teachers who have been babysitting for decades.  If we must keep poor teachers, send them to teach in upper-class schools, schools where the parents have other options.

National Foster Care Month

May is National Foster Care Month, and I've been wearing my little blue ribbon faithfully.  Many people have asked about it, allowing me to (briefly) point out some of the needs of foster care in our state and county.  Tomorrow I get to share in our middle school chapel about how I came to do foster care, and how middle schoolers (and their parents) can help foster kids.

When I was seven years old, I went to a private Christian school in Hesperia, California.  My teacher's name was Mrs. Thompson.  She was rather large, and black hairs stuck out through her nylons on her legs.  But I loved her.  Surely there could be no teacher so caring as Mrs. Thompson!  And she read to us every day.  One story she read was Star of Light, by Patricia St. John.  The story tells of a fatherless boy who rescues his blind baby sister from being sold to a beggar.  The boy takes this baby to a city where a missionary lives.  The missionary opens her home every night to feed street children and tell them the gospel.  The boy, Hamid, sets his sister Kinza on the missionary's doorstep, hoping the lady will have pity on the blind girl.  Of course she does, and everyone lives fairly happily ever after.

This story was the first time I realized that there were children in the world who did not have parents caring for them.  I made a vow in my young heart that when I was old enough, I would run an orphanage for kids with no homes. 

One of the lessons in Toddler Boot Camp: how NOT to drown

Well, fast forward 21 years, and I realized that I couldn't actually start an orphanage single-handedly.  Foster care seemed to be a good way to get my feet wet.  So I signed up to take in school-aged children.  I got a call for a baby boy.  Isn't that how foster care works!  Of course I took him, and now he's my own son.  I gripe frequently about "the system", about children bouncing in and out of care, about never having a "settled life".  But the truth?  I love doing foster care!  I love taking small children through "toddler boot camp", where they learn to eat properly, talk, play in the dirt, bathe, and sleep through the night.

There are so many books to read

My computer was down for over a week.  I read seven books in four days.  Then I took my laptop to our wonderful computer girl at school.  Good news: I have a brand new Windows system.  Bad news: all my old documents and photos are gone.  I can remember most of the important documents (did I really want to hang onto my Master's action research project?), and the kiddos I have in front of me every day.  But I would have liked to keep the photos of them when they were tiny and round and cute.  It always helps to look at old photos when you can't stand your children anymore!

See, he used to be so dang cute!  Then he learned to talk -- I mean, really talk:  "Mom, why do you always...?"  "Always" usually means twice in the past year.  "You only want me to be slave labor!" I'm sure there are lots cheaper/easier ways of getting slave labor than raising an adopted child!  "I'm going to go live with my tummy mom!" Did I scar him for life when I told him they wouldn't let preschoolers live in the jail?