Dear Friends,

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We had a long drive to visit family for the holiday weekend, but it was a great opportunity for me to catch up on some reading thanks to my husband who was willing to chauffer most of the way. I thought I’d share some of the interesting and inspiring articles I read:

There are several good articles in the December issue of Oprah Magazine. I’d love to link to them to make it easy for you, but they don’t have the full articles on the website. Bummer—although I can understand the need to actually sell the magazine in order to be able to keep it going. I’ll paraphrase the main article that really fascinated me. It talks about people who listened to their intuition despite friends and their own intellect telling them it was crazy, even potentially dangerous to do so.

The tile is The Hallelujah Chorus by Aimee Lee Ball on pg 311.

To summarize:
There was a group of boys living in an orphanage in Liberia. Their parents had died or disappeared during the civil war that had taken over their country. They had been chosen to form a cappella choir that would tour the US and raise money for the orphanage. While the boys were visiting the Charlotte, North Carolina area, their orphanage was attacked and decimated.  

This next part gives me chills so I’ll quote it for you.

Lysa, a 37-year old motivational speaker, was going to hear the choir with her then 8-year-old’s Brownie troop. She decided to take all three of her daughters imagining no more than an ordinary day,” she says. “Nothing led me to believe life was about to be seriously interrupted.” But listening to the honeyed voices of the young travelers, she was overwhelmed with a sudden thought: Two of the boys were meant to be hers. She literally put her fingers in her ears to drown out what she assumed was a divine message she didn’t want to hear. At the post concert reception, two boys named Mark and Jackson separated from the crowd, wrapped their arms around her, and called her mom.

…The idea of adoption was crazy, she understood—not even in the realm of possibility—but she made him (her husband) promise to hear the boys sing. And “crazy” became a calling for both of them.

The story goes on to describe how their friends and family gave them every reasonable reason not to adopt these two boys, but they followed their hearts and did so anyway. Not only that, but some of the more ardent opponents ended up adopting a child, too. In fact, through Lysa’s encouragement, several families adopted every single one of the boys and then sent for their siblings and adopted them as well.

The article goes on to describe how each family was “drawn” to a particular child or children and how mysteriously they have become an integral part of their families. A whole community is now raising these young people. If you get the chance to read the full article, do so! Here’s a pic: http://www2.oprah.com/omagazine/200612/omag_200612_adopt.jhtml

This is a link to an article by Gloria DeGaetano, author of one of my favorite parenting books, “Parenting Well in a Media Age”. You don’t have to be a parent to appreciate the message: creating meaning in our lives. http://thepci.com/articles/degaetano_LookingForMeaning.htm

This is the link to an article in Parent Map called Creating a Family Spirit of Giving. http://www.parentmap.com/dec_06/1206_1.htm

This links you to an article from Bright Horizons about the potential pitfalls of constantly teaching your kids without giving them time just to be. http://www.brighthorizons.com/efamily/article.aspx?id=56&mailing=305&user_id=95449&campaign_id=240#continued

Hope you enjoy!

Best regards,

Susan