Shelton Shenanigans

Mersi Jesus      We did it!   We went to Haiti; we took cold showers; we didn't drink the water; we ate new foods; we played with kids; we toured villages; we experienced traffic like you'll never find in the US!   We shopped at Papillon Enterprises; we learned about sublimation at Life SA; we saw the sewing centers and walked through Pathways Academy. We worshiped with the local church, played with a lot of kids, made some life-long friends, and we made it home safe and sound!   Now we are grappling with all kinds of questions, observations, ideas, and perspectives on reality that we will never fully comprehend.   I'm warning you now that this may be a very long post, or series of posts, as my mind is racing and my fingertips can't begin to keep up.   So grab your favorite hot beverage and find an easy chair, and I'll do my best to describe our first encounter with Haiti to you.           From the moment our...

Haiti Bound      Two weeks from now I will be in a hotel room, preparing to fly back to the United States with an entirely new perspective on Haiti and our adoption.  I will have experienced Haitian culture up close and personally, willly have held orphans in my arms who may or may not ever have a family adopt them, and I will have worshiped with a local church right in the center of orphan care.  I will meet women who dedicate their lives to scores of children not their own, and I will be broken.      No, this trip doesn't actually have anything to do with our family's adoption.  Our paperwork is still sitting on a desk waiting to be submitted, where it will likely stay for another eight months.  There is nothing I can do about this but pray, which I do, but in the meantime, my heart says I must do more!      If there is one thing I have already learned from our adoption journey, it is that adoption is not "the" ans...

Lately Ive been thinking about how my life has changed since we started down the road to adoption.  We have done an awful lot of work for what doesn't feel like an  awful lot of movement, and my normal looks quite a bit  different than it used to.   Here's a short list to better illustrate what I mean: Prior to adopting never had I ever: Blogged about anything whatsoever Expressed an opinion on Facebook Experienced pangs of homesickness for someone I've never met Sold personal belongings on Craig's List Wept publicly so much that no one even considers it unusual anymore Also, never before adoption did I ever: Know what paper beads were, much less wear them all the time Know that 80% of the world's orphans result  from poverty and feel compelled to do something about it Have a psychiatrist diagnose me as  "despicably healthy" and tell me what a great choice I made in marrying Steve based on his personality assessment Walk a constant tight rope between ...

It took me until I was thirty to realize that I am an encourager by nature.  I'm not sure why that came as a surprise to me; I just thought everyone made random phone calls, sent impromptu texts and emails, and took great delight in surprising someone unexpectedly with an uplifting thought or word.  I now realize encouragement is one of my spiritual gifts  - along with sarcasm and over-complicating things, which I am sure you will find in one of Paul's lists of the gifts of the Spirit, probably in Romans! Anyway, I have unintentionally created a pattern for myself of sending my "just because" thank you notes  on Thursdays.  I'm sure I am extra inclined to be grateful on Thursdays since that is my last workday each week, but what I have discovered is that those little impulses to tell someone they're doing a great job, or I noticed the little things they are doing well, actually matter to the people on the receiving end of the notes.  Again, who knew?  ...

We have now reached a point in our "Finish the Race" fundraiser that is similar to where we are in the adoption journey.  We are a little more than halfway through, pushing toward an an eventual conclusion, but without a clue what the end result will be!  To further complicate matters, my creative brain is shutting down and I'm running out of ideas as to how to keep the campaign fresh and interesting, despite my great passion for it.  There is a very fine line between keeping people up-to-date and informed and badgering them to death to buy a tee-shirt.  The cheerleader/business woman in me says,  "promote, promote, promote," and the tired suburban mom in the middle of soccer season says "enough  is enough!"    Conveniently, this shirt by its very existence pushes me forward, as it is, after all, intended to encourage me, and people like me, to finish what we've started, even if its hard!  All kinds of sports analogies and parallels can be d...

On January 2, 2015, Steve and I were on course for what was shaping up to be a great year.  We had just dropped off our dossier paperwork in the mail and were heading to North Carolina for a family get-away.  Steve had been nominated, and all but guaranteed a promotion, we had pre-approval to build a new house, and we were anticipating a referral by late summer or early fall.  We would meet out daughter before Christmas, and everything was coming together for her expected homecoming in early 2016. Within days, all of that crumbled as Steve’s position was canceled, which led us to cancel the contract for the house, and Haiti changed the number of applications they would accept.   The new trajectory of our journey is for our paperwork to begin being considered sometime this fall,  a nine-month or so wait for a referral (summer of 2016),, a two-week bonding trip shortly thereafter, and then several months of waiting before we return to Haiti to finally br...

Let me tell you a little secret about adoption.  It is wildly unpredictable!  Just the time you think you have it figured out and you know what to expect, you don’t.  And when you think there couldn’t possibly be another difficult question for you to consider, you’ll get a call or an email from your agency, or your social worker, or a random friend or relative that will spin you around and leave you dazed and confused. That just happened to us….again!  In the midst of my blogging about the weight of the waiting, the timeline, the decisions, and all of that, we were notified by our agency that Haiti has made some changes to their quota for dossiers, and that as a result, our wait time just increased another six months!  Our dossier, now on its way to Chicago, has several steps before it is legalized and ready for submission, which is okay because it may not be able to be officially submitted to Haiti until as late as October!  Our agency sent out an email...