Steps in The Journey

While roaming the house, searching for kids, checking the quality of their chores, and taking joy in the things in the post immediately prior to this one, I stopped to look at these two shadow boxes in Chad and my bedroom.  The one pictured to the left is full of mementos obviously from Hunter and Baylor's newborn days.  The shirts are, specifically, what Monkey and Snickerdoodle wore on the days they each came home from the hospital.

The frame shown below contains the T-shirts I designed on-line in anticipation of our trip to Pittsburgh to be matched officially with Anna and Jameson, and they wore these tops the day we drove the final leg of the trip to our Cluver home.  The black "positivity" bracelet was a gift to me from my sister, Remy -- a band I wore for strength every day of the year we waited between the January 2010 airlift and the January 2011 permission to join our family with theirs.



Whereas Hunter and Baylor's items signify new lives arriving upon this earth, Anna and Jameson's collection represent a new family coming into their lives.  The second youngest child in her Haitian family, Anna became the oldest of her new, second family, and Jameson, once the baby, became a middle child in ours.  This "coming home" was marked with changes for far more people than when Chad and I simply became parents for the first time in 1999 or when we added Hunter's first sibling in 2003.  In Anna and Jameson's coming to our home, they were simultaneously leaving their Haitian home.

I hope that we have and that we will do justice to their journey, not simply cherishing their culture and respecting that they have a first family, but honoring always the dignity of each person in all of these relationships and remembering that "home" is a complicated place.