My heart is completely bursting with gratitude. About a week ago, Travis’s aunt Jenn let us know that she would be planning + hosting what she called an “Un-garage sale” in order to support our adoption. She had been collecting a ton of really nice items from around her home that she was planning to offer to others in garage sale form. However, instead of putting a price on all of the items, she was planning to allow people to come and take what they wanted from the sale and only pay what they wanted to as a donation to our adoption fund. What a wonderful way to bless us and others at the same time!
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It’s Father’s Day! As a girl who grew up with very little and mostly no contact with my biological father, Father's Day can often bring about mixed emotions and grief for the relationship that I never had with him. He is now deceased, so any hope that I would have had for a relationship is no longer even an option. That alone is a big issue to grapple with much less a day that is completely dedicated to celebrating fathers. However, I count myself very blessed because despite the absence of my biological father, I have some pretty great men in my life.
Consequently, I have settled into loving this day because it is always such a blessing to take time to reflect on the men in my life and how fortunate I am to have them. God has taken my story of loss and blossomed it into something abundantly beautiful. Beauty from ashes {Isaiah 61:3}.
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A couple weeks ago we had my good friend, Emily Blake, take some family photos of us. The main reason we wanted to get the photos done was that we needed some updated family pictures for our adoption family profile book. If I'm being honest though, I was really grateful for the excuse to get some family photos taken. The last time we had even semi-professional looking pictures taken was two years ago when a friend offered to snap some of us as a hobby. {Do the math. That was when I was six weeks pregnant with Raena!} So, it's been awhile.
If you're a parent, you understand. If not, take a look at my Instagram feed. Once you have kids, all of your photo taking efforts shift to trying to capture every last cute thing they do. Any photo that I am a part of is usually the result of me taking a group selfie with my kids or Travis attempting to capture a moment {per my request} mid-motion of the kids and I. Most pictures turn out blurry and few end up in a category I would deem "flattering."
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