my new blog

Here is photo of our current smaller family, just thirteen of us living at home. We can all fit in the 15 passenger van now.

I decided to finally catch up to the rest of the world and start a “blog”. I started our newsletter yahoo group in 2001 during our first adoption of Anna from China. Many of you have walked beside us since the beginning. You’ve gone through our “virgin” adoption walk of a screaming grieving toddler and on to adoptions of every other kind. You’ve been beside us as we brought home deathly ill babies and we went without sleep for months on end. You bore with my whining and impatience during the long waits for every new child. You have listened to my worries of parenting scarred and abused older children and my complaints of angry teenagers. You have prayed with us as we limped through Jonathan’s battle with aplastic anemia; and you wept with us at his death after the bone marrow transplant. I hope too that along with my struggles you have also shared in our joy and awe at how God has taken two very flawed people like Mike and I, and created a wondrous thing. Every family is miracle and every child a blessing. Mike and I still marvel God brought us together as a family and chose to make us HIS people. That He chose to make us so RICH in blessings and children, that He LOVES us so much. He uses us in our puny weakness and grows us up into HIM through each and every adventure and battle. I pray that you will continue to share in our unfolding story and that God would bless your life through it.
Thanks for being interested enough to read what I write and for supporting us with your friendship. Keep praying for us. God is ALWAYS good. It is just very hard still sometimes missing our Jonathan. It feels like we are doing good hard “grief” work. It is a summer of learning to live a lot of changes. Jonathan gone forever….. Mommy back home fulltime after being away so much with Jonathan….. Big girls Hope, Haimanot, and Roza gone at Job Core. This week we are going camping at Jubilee Lake. With the medical challenges of the last few years we haven’t been there in a long time. I am so excited to be there. It will be some of the kid’s first time fishing and swimming in lake. And we can count on it being cooler on top of the mountain than the 104 degrees it is here at home.
Mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance,
Julee