Being Grateful

In adoption language, we have received LSC (Letter Seeking Confirmation). This is a major step on the adoption journey - it means several things. It is one of the official places where you step forward for the particular child, it is one place where you can be denied a particular child, it is the end of one set of paperwork, it is the beginning of another set of paperwork...

One of the cool parts about this mile-marker is that we can now send care packages. I think this varies from institute to institute and agency to agency, but for us - now is the first time we could do that. Well, at least for the youngest, Kade. Kai is in Beijing and they do not accept care packages (This in itself is more complicated than it seems - one of the things that we are finding about the second time through the process is that it is not easy to decipher motives for some of the players in this story... but that is an entirely different post).

So, we are putting a care package together. Actually, we are putting three care packages together: one for Kai when he gets here, one for Kade now, and one for when he gets here (with the same stuff in it since odds are he won't come back with much of it). What should we put in the package?  Many, many waiting children have nothing. They might share a toothbrush (if they want to brush their teeth), maybe there is a single closet of clothes and once a week all the kids get in line and grab what they can (age order? pecking order? who knows?). This means the last child may wind up with clothes that aren't warm enough (Beijing is cold in the winter), don't fit or whatever! This is also not true for all institutions. The temptation is to send everything. But really it is not a good idea for all sorts of reasons. It can make it hard on the children if they receive a lot of gifts while none of their friends do, some orphanages don't pass along the things to the kids anyway, it can just be too overwhelming, and it all has to fit into one small box.

But this time of year it gives a very natural place to talk to our kids about how many people in the world don't have anything. We love doing Angel Tree and Operation Shoebox with our church anyway, but thinking about all the kids in the world who don't have enough food to eat, much less a special toy (much less a roomful of special toys) has tremendous impact when you start packing a small box for one special child at a time! So we start packing a small box for Kade: a coloring book, a stuffed animal, maybe a blanket, a photo album with pictures of our family (thankfully Kenley and Kellin can help us label the photos in Pinyin and characters).  I cannot imagine the thoughts that will go around in this little boys head at the sight of our family! Joy? Fear? Relief? Excitement? All of that I guess. On top of this our perspective towards the care packages changed when Karwen was able to talk about her experience.

But really, how cool is it to think about what an impact one little stuffed animal will have in a child's life? How grateful should we all be about what we have? How much more beautiful would the world be if the joy of Christmas was for others! The kids really get it and have so much fun trying to think about how much these little things will mean. One thing about this whole process is that it really does help you think about life outside your family. When we go shopping for groceries the first things we get are for Manna on Meridian. When we say grace before meals, we start to really think about how thankful we should be to have warm food. When we say a prayer with the little children and kiss them goodnight, we can also say a prayer for all the little ones who are alone. We can look forward to the day when Keely and I have six little foreheads to kiss goodnight!