Senior Night

The Basketball Cheer Squad

me and Anna

Snowy Week in Review

Our backdoor after the kids came in from playing outside...

Lily and her snow lump.

Penny

Rosie and her rowdy brothers

Little Miss Cutestuff

Henry

Jamie G.

Lily and Harry take in the snowstorm from inside.

Happy Valentine's Day!

The Love Pig Under Snow

February 2010

Cub Scout Cool

Jamie G and Racer 10

Jamie ran his pinewood derby car with his Cub Scout pack and was excited to win one of his heats and come in third in another. Karl was just as fired up about the whole deal. This is his first year as a boy scout and he really likes it. He especially likes how incredibly cool he looks in his official cub scout shirt with kerchief and lion cub slide... he says, as he dons his cub scout shirt each week... "this uniform makes me look kinda like a cop." To which, I can't help myself from singing"... bad boys, bad boys- whatcha gonna do?"

The terrible impossiblity of adopting from Haiti now.

Haiti 2005

I am very much saddened by the acts of the 10 missionaries who tried to illegally move Haitian children into the Dominican Republic. One month ago, before the earthquake hit- it was just barely possible to adopt a child from Haiti. The process took several years and was full of uncertainties. Although Karl and have been drawn to the kids in Haiti for years, we decided that we didn't have the emotional stamina to go through with the process and decided to adopt from Ethiopia instead. Ethiopia is also a lengthy process, but adoptions receive at least some support from the government. They are very careful with the adoptive parent requirements, but there is a small but likely amount of cooperation between agency and the government. Much less so in Haiti, and now, with all this terrible press, Haiti is unlikely to ever again honor intercountry adoptions.

It is impossible now, even with such a need, to adopt a child from Haiti.

The children who arrived in the US the week or so after the quake were children who were in the process of being adopted. Each child had a family who had been trying to finish the process and bring them home for a very long time...probably years. There are many more who are still in the process who are caught in limbo right now. Maybe they were waiting on a single signature, or maybe their paperwork was destroyed entirely- there is no way to tell if they will ever come home. I know of several adoptive parents who are in Haiti right now trying to speak to whoever they can in the embassy to get permission to bring home their newly adopted children. They are doing this because these are the rules- and they agreed to follow the rules when they asked to adopt a child. At a certain point in the process, (after being matched, but before we can travel to bring our children home), there is little we can do but hope and pray that that our children are safe. As much as we might like to, we know that we can't really just go scoop them up and rescue them from their terrible reality. Which is exactly what the missionaries attempted to do. I don't know what their intentions were, although it's likely that they wanted to help the children- who knows. The sad reality is that by ignoring the rules, they will cause so much more suffering and hardship to those few children in Haiti who may have been given the opportunity to have a family and will now do what they can to survive without parents.

Darlene Etienne

I have heard that two weeks is about the longest span of attention that can be offered to those not directly involved in a disaster or tragedy. After 14 days or so interest is lost and people have moved on.
That's human nature.
On the 15th day post earthquake, a French rescue team pulled a 17 year old teenager out of the rubble that was once her school. 3 days is considered the longest a human can survive without water. Miss Etienne survived 15 days. No one can really understand how she managed to survive trapped without food or water for so many days.
I can't begin to wrap my mind around how she managed this but I think that there is significance in the fact that she made it one day longer then the 14 day given attention span.
Darlene Etienne.