About Me

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I've been married to my husband, Michael, for almost 25 years. I'm a mom to a biological son and an adopted son from Colombia, and I'm also a spiritual mom to my adopted son's older brother, who I claim as a son in my heart. I'm bilingual and love to work with and relate to Spanish-speaking children and families. I've been a teacher to students from all sorts of backgrounds and cultures for the last 20+ years. I'm also an author and a certified Biblical counselor. I'm in a new empty nest season in a new location far from where I raised my boys, so I'm definitely in a stage of rediscovering myself, my interests, and my purpose.

Surviving the Valley Series

Surviving the Valley Series
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Sunday, June 22, 2014

Family Camping

As soon as Mike got off work early on Friday, we took off to go camping as a family for the next five days.  We purposely chose a campground in Austin so we could see a few specific people.

Friday night, Juan David had a reunion with the family that hosted him and his sister through Kidsave back in 2008.  They hadn't seem him in almost six years.  We will always be grateful to them for opening their home to them that summer, thus bringing Juan David (and his sister) into our lives. 

 

On Saturday, we arranged to meet one of Juan David's childhood friends from the same orphanage who moved to Texas in 2011 via adoption.   He and his mom came to the campground and stayed the entire day late into the evening.  We feel so incredibly blessed to have made this connection and immediately connected with the mother.  She is an amazing Christian woman who has so much in common with us.  We all loved watching the boys reconnect, realizing that it gave us another part of their childhood that we missed out on.  We plan to stay in touch and keep the boys involved in each other's lives.  They even came back on Sunday to take Juan David to church with them, which he told us was very much like our own church. 

Photo: Old friends, new friends. Boys who grew up together, moms who just met. We have more in common than we could have imagined. 


Later on Sunday evening, we invited another friend to the campground who also adopted three Colombian boys through Kidsave.  His boys are all young adults now, the youngest being 18.  They all played soccer together for a bit and we just talked about similar experiences.  He is also the one who connected us with our lawyer in Colombia who helped us get Juan David's case reopened.  Without his help, I highly doubt we would have followed through to contact the lawyer, so God definitely used him to play a big role in our story.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of their visit. :(

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