Walking in to 2014

Its a new year. 2013 was such a good year for our family…and very very little of our blessed experiences are documented here.

Its time for that to change.

I began blogging to write down the experiences of bringing home an adopted child. That child, delivered from an orphanage in Vietnam at 4 months old, is now anticipating her 8th birthday. That's a lot of years of blogging, with few gaps if any in blogging our life as a family.

I continued blogging because I fell in love with the chance to understand my own mothering and to share my experiences with my children. I wanted them to see in real time (and in times to come) that I was well meaning in the how and what of my parenting. And I wanted them to see that I can see God in our family's experiences. I wanted them to know that being a parent is a hard job, and that it deserves our greatest efforts. I wanted them to see that I am giving them everything I have and then asking for help from Heaven to give them everything they need.

And then, somehow, in 2013 I got to busy to blog. Some reasons for my hiatus were enjoying the last year of having all my children 'in my nest' and managing the experience of building a new nest for our family from the ground up (literally). Meetings for the house mixed with chances to see our kids in action took more than the time I had in the day - there were only so many minutes and none of them were available to write down what we were living.

So blogging fell out of habit.

Now we live in the house we built.
Now our oldest has 'flown from the nest', serving a mission for our church in Houston Texas.

Now its time to blog again.

I'm excited to step forward. With the start of a new year I can recommit to my good blogging habits. I hope to share again with my children and whomever else decides to visit here that I love my work and my role in their lives and that I'm passionate about what I'm doing to guide them in who they're becoming.

I hope I can pepper this year's posts with some of last year's experiences. While many used to read my thoughts each day I don't expect anyone to read here any more. But I do hope this record will be a blessing to my family in years to come. And I anticipate that as I process my thoughts and feelings and record them for my family it will be a blessing to me, too.