It’s school conference time here in Minnesota.  Here in Minnesota where it has snowed twice already in mid-October.  For those not from around here that is early even by our standards.  I was a little bitter about it when the snow fell on October 10th, but I’ve since adjusted my perspective.  I’ll just plan to be in Cebu during January and February.

A pretty cool thing happened in Raymund’s parent-teacher conference.  I was talking to his teacher about all the standard progress things, when we began to discuss a "floating" teacher who helps drill down on specific things with Raymund and other kids.  I asked if she was connected with the ELL program (English Language Learner).  Raymund’s teacher looked at me kind of perplexed and told me it was standard for all the kids to do this.  Then she asked, "was Raymund in ELL?"

That was the best question I’ve gotten at any conference.  Raymund has lived in the U.S. since July 27, 2007.  The language he learned in his childhood was Cebuano.  In fact, when he sees something startling or funny he’ll still point and say "A LA" loudly in classic Filipino fashion.  But he has become quite an English speaker.  Last week he corrected an older sibling on their incorrect usage of the past tense.  He actually said "past tense" and Theresa and I about fell out of our chairs.

It’s cool to see the progress their making.  It’s not fast, or always easy, but it comes.  It’s coming for all of them.  We do this thing around the house now where I ask them to think of taking "10 Extra Seconds."  It’s an idea that if they’re in a room, and something is messy or out of place, they take the 10 extra seconds to make it right regardless of whether or not they did it.  They will announce their acts of "10 Extra Seconds" to me when I come home.  To think these are the same kids who couldn’t close a screen door behind them, or understand complete sentences, when they got here.  I’ve seen plenty of biological kids blow it on the screen door thing…and it’s pretty cool to see how far our kids have come.

I’ve visited my blog several times lately trying to decide what to write.  I’ve gotten stuck every time.  The thing is, my mom passed away three weeks ago yesterday.  She was incredible, and I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss her.I hadn’t actually planned to write a blog about any of it.  It seemed so trite.  I just felt like Mom deserved so much more than some blog entry.  I finally changed my mind.  For one, I don’t think I can write about anything else (talk about things that feel trite) unless I write something about her here.  It won’t be a writing I do for healing (that’s what journals are for), but she deserves at least this.  My mom loved this blog–she was hands down its biggest fan.  She honestly printed entries and saved them so we could always go back and look at them.  She loved the news I was sharing with people about the kids, and she told me all the time how she loved to read my writing.  In my life I have never wondered one time if my mom was proud of me…I have always known.  I became who I am because of who she was–including a man of faith.  She loved that about me more than anything.

Her love for our kids went way beyond this blog.  When you adopt older kids one of the early questions an expert will ask you is: “how does your extended family feel about the adoption?”  There was never any doubt about where she stood on us adopting: she stood with us no matter what might come, and she was thrilled for us.  She and Dad bought us a basketball hoop that I turned into a court in our driveway, and then went ahead and bought a hoop for them–the kids needed to have fun at their house too!

I could go on and on with stories about her.  How in our house you basically got a day and a half for your birthday, she would sit us on her lap and rock us in her chair the night before saying “this is the last time I get to rock my X year old”.  She actually did this when I was in college, ignoring my argument that I would crush her–I remember how much we laughed about it, and I’m reminded how safe I always felt with her–even as a ‘tough’ college kid.  The day after our birthday we got to eat cake for breakfast, because homemade cake spoiled too quickly.

I have this picture in my mind, its been there since the day I got the worst phone call in my life.  It’s an image of three little birds nestled under their mother’s wing.  There is a storm around them, but the little birds are oblivious to it.  All they know is that they are safe.  My mom did not have an easy upbringing, but she somehow found strength in herself in it, and vowed to do things much differently when she had a family of her own.  In the history of the world I don’t know if anyone’s ever done a 180 like she did.  I know I thanked her for that at least once…I could have told her every day.

The English language has a cruel characteristic.  When we speak and write we modify verbs to indicate whether they are past, present or future.  Talking about my mom in the past tense feels awful.  But there is at least one statement I can make without having to make any verb changes.  Mom, you are my hero.  You always have been.  That doesn’t have to change, that doesn’t have to be quarantined to the past tense.  I hope I told her that.  I am my mom’s son.  You can’t separate her from me any more than you can take away my skin or my bones.  The hole in my heart won’t ever go away, and I don’t want it to, but healing will come around it and I will grow, and I will keep putting one foot in front of the other.  And the God who went to a cross for both our sakes will hold my life in his hands, just as He has hers.  And me knowing that is the greatest legacy she could give.

I hope there’s a rocking chair for us in heaven, but for now I’ll soar as high as I can here on earth.  I love you Mom.  I always will.

Amy’s home on a well-deserved furlough, and just came to see us in Cambridge.  Our missionaries always deserve their furlough year, but usually we have a 3-years-in-the-field, 1-year-back-in-the-States cycle.  Amy was in the field for 6 years!  She had some breaks in there, but nothing like what she deserved after working that kind of schedule that long.I like having missionaries on furlough.  They’re likable people who come with lots of stories from Cebu, and their schedule helps a guy with a memory like mine keep track of when things happened.  I find myself remembering what year something happened by remembering who was on furlough then.  The older I get the handier this becomes.

I promised Amy I’d tell my new shoes story. I got new shoes yesterday and had an old can of that water-repellent stuff you can spray on them.  Since I was concerned about the smell I decided to bring them down into the utility room and spray them there.  A more thoughtful person might have brought them outside.  Mary Joy was chatting with me while I gave them a good dousing out of the perfectly usable, but leaky can.  It was getting to the end of the night, and Mark had gotten in the shower around this time.  So, I was spraying when the water heater started up.

Wow.

The whole memory unfolds slowly in my mind so I can remember in some detail a 3 to 4 square foot space igniting in flames which ran up my arm (without injury), of course lit up the shoes and even caused a flame to sit on the outside of the spray can.  All I could hear was the sound of me whacking things with the shoe box and Joy screaming for Mom to come downstairs.  It was a pretty exciting 9 seconds.  A pretty exciting 9 seconds you might want to avoid.  Learn a lesson from me and take the shoes outside. Or, just don’t be a sucker and skip buying the stuff in the first place.

It’s been a couple years now since Theresa and I were in the "waiting for our kids" mode.  Looking back now I have to laugh about what seemed important then.  The rooms had to be painted, somehow we needed to come up with clothes, beds and bikes for all of them without knowing sizes or having them there to know what they liked.  The things we concerned ourselves with were important, but I would have prepared differently if we had it to do over again.

I would have picked a good devotional for us to do together each day (it would have been Josh McDowell’s Family Devotions).  We should have toyed with some new recipes and come up with 7 more solid meals that we liked and could count on when we had the kids here.  A regular meal rotation took a long time to get to!  Of course, them thinking normal American foods were normal took a matter of months too.  The other big thing is that I wish I would have thought more about discipline and consequences.

The weirdest surprise I’ve had in parenting is that I have a hard time coming up with good consequences.  You have to be creative to land on something appropriate and that will actually prompt a change.  Theresa is much better at this, she’ll come up with consequences that relate to the crime so they are reminded again what they did wrong while they’re serving the time.  She should teach courses on this!  If it were up to me I’d probably just implement the same consequences for everything.  They’d be scooping dog poop for every infraction.

Lately the challenge has been lying.  The other day I had a glass of milk.  The milk was almost gone, but I didn’t have time to replace it.  I knew the next child to have their milk was going to have to go to the garage and get a new jug in order to have their required morning glass of milk too.  It led to a conversation that included three bold-faced "yes I had my milk" lies.  Our kids have made bigger mistakes, but I can’t remember being this disappointed.  I actually had to walk away from the conversation to remind myself not to take it personally and to think about what in the world the consequences should be for this.  Eventually I came up with something, but it wasn’t until the next day that the real consequences were enacted at supper time.  I told the child in question they had to have their milk.  They insisted they drank it in the morning…repeatedly.  It eventually led to a declaration like "I promise I’m telling you the truth this time."  And that’s when the real consequence and the real lesson came clear.  Of course I told them that I simply couldn’t believe them because they’d broken my trust just the day before.  That visibly hit home.  I could see sadness on this face that dad couldn’t trust them.

I wish it always worked out that way.  Sometimes I’ll just have to settle for a poop-free lawn.

I’m currently taking a class called Transforming Public Policy which has a reputation for being the most challenging in my public affairs degree program.  So far the reputation has been deserved.  I spent 5 1/2 hours today with my project team.  We haven’t met for less than 3 hours a week (oh of course that’s on top of class) since the semester started.  There’s just no way around it.  The policy issue we have to impact is just too big to divvy up tasks and throw together at semester’s end.  On top of that I’ve been the TA for a grant writing class the past couple of Saturdays.  Not hard labor, but I’ve just been gone from home too much.

Theresa and I have learned that with our family if something in our pattern changes, we see some fallout coming down the line.  For instance, if one of us is out of town the kids are usually really great about stepping up in the absence of one of their parents.  But, a day or so after that parent comes home, we’ll notice a handful of behavior things come up at once.  Or, when we get together with old friends from CSC the kid(s) of ours who saw a close friend or one who was close in age might struggle for a day or two afterward.  It’s almost like the nostalgia of CSC comes back to them and we go through a short readjustment to family life after the reunion has ended.

Me spending so much time away from home had a similar effect this weekend.  Behavior things came up while I was gone, and when I got back home, that I would have guessed we were past.  Nothing devastating, but a lot of little things added together.  Some of it seemed to be based on the pattern change of dad being gone so much.

So we convened a family meeting to talk about it.  It’s sounds so prescribed, but I wish we did this more than we do.  One of the things we talked about was an analogy between our family and a sailboat.  We took a picture of a speedboat and a sailboat and talked about how the two were different.  The kids really ran with it.  They figured that the sailboat was harder to learn how to use, was slower and could go farther.  We came to the exact point Theresa and I wanted to make.  A family is a little like that sailboat.  It’s not easy.  Everyone has a job to do that the others are depending on, and they have to do it well.  It takes commitment and it takes work.  But, when everyone can trust and be trusted you’ve got quite an amazing thing.  That sailboat can go forever with just a little bit of wind.  For Mary Joy that means a dad to walk her down the aisle, if they have kids it means a grandma and grandpa to call for free babysitting, for all of them it means having parents and siblings to call on for years to come.  And, it means Theresa and I have had unmatchable meaning added to our lives because we get to do all those things with them too.

The speedboat is easy, but it just wasn’t meant for the long haul.  We’re fully invested in the hard work, risk and reward of our sailboat.

Setting: the Buley minivan heading home from church.

Dad: So, Mark what did you guys learn today?

Mark: We learned about patience.

–small talk omitted–

Dad: So, who’s one person you can show more patience to?

Mark: Um, probably Raymund.

Mom: That’s a great idea!  So, Raymund what what did you learn about patience?

Raymund:  Um…well…(a few moments pass).

Mark:  OH COME ON RAYMUND!!

You can’t make it up.  Have a good week.

I wigged out on the kids a few days ago.  Yea, wigged.  Usually I’m the more laid back of the parents in the house, but when I get on a kick it can get pretty serious.  I came home Monday into the entry room off our garage, the one the people who live here use every day, and decided that I was not okay with our house looking like a pig-sty.  I herded my lovely children in and spoke very clearly about my expectation that shoes and boots would be put together properly (in pairs the way the good Lord intended when he gave us two feet).  Also, since I went to some work making cubbies for everyone before they came home I highlighted that them looking like garbage receptacles was also a problem.  So, after my speech I left them to clean up.  5 minutes later I went back in the entry room and it looked almost exactly the same as when I left them to clean it.

 

Maybe you’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Remember when Ferris looks at the camera and says: “Here’s where Cameron goes berserk?”  Well, this is where dad goes berserk.  I took all the shoes and boots that didn’t fit my definition of properly put away and really put them away for the remainder of the week.  I also threatened to begin taking blankets off beds that weren’t folded and clothes left on the floor.  I’ve accumulated quite a variety of blankets and clothing items since that time.  I’m not sure if we’re getting anywhere or not.  They might just be going to school in clothes a size small and obscure shoes from the back of the closet soon.  I’m not sure this will work.  I told Mitch what was going on (in fact, to highlight how blessed we are that we have such minor things to deal with with our kids) and he thought it made sense given the fact that someone has the duty of picking up shoes as a job at CSC each night.  Not here.  In fact, my 9, 11, 12 and 15 year-old already know what self-sufficiency means.  I talk about this concept (believe me we’re still in the concept phase) with them regularly…hopefully we’ll get closer to it before graduation.

 

That’s the news from home.  As far as your favorite ministry in Cebu goes, I’m all about the cold hard cash lately.  At our fourth quarter CSC board meeting in mid-November I gave our members the harsh financial reality we’re facing.  They’re used to this report at the Q4 meeting, but these numbers were a new high.  We needed $360,000 before year-end to make budget and make all our commitments for 2008.  This is how my annual ulcer starts.  This is how my predecessors’ annual ulcers started.  Roger, our Office Manager, has been sending me new numbers regularly and today the report said that we need just over $224,000 before the end of the year.  At lot left, but we’re actually making progress.  Paul feels good about our chances, citing the fact that CSC donors have proven an awfully committed bunch during every other economic downturn in the past.  If we make it I’ll go berserk in a much more positive way.  I’m praying we do.  Anyway, I’ll start posting updates as to where we are through the end of the year.  This will go through early January as we get the last of the 2008 post-dated envelopes.  Enjoy the 12 days of Christmas in the meantime…I’ll write more later.