So I’ll just check in here to say that overall, things are going better than I had probably expected. The kids are still in full honeymoon phase when it comes to behavior, which has given us some time to bond before they let it all hang out. The sibling situation, however, has been tougher than I’d expected. Well, if I had really thought about it, I would have expected it to be this tough, but I was so focused on being worried about the kids’ trauma behaviors that I hadn’t spent much time thinking about how the four kids would need to adjust.

So we pretty much have non-stop bickering most of the day. Sometimes we’ll get a break for 15-20 minutes where everyone’s getting along, but pretty soon, “He’s being mean to me!” “No, you’re being mean!” “No you are!” “No you are!” rings through the air. The two firstborns clash the most. I imagine it will be several months until everybody settles in to their new place in the family and learns how to push and not push each other’s buttons. Each kid is used to the dynamics of the family unit they’ve been living with, and they’ve been completely comfortable in their previous roles. It’s going to be a long few months.

I’m thankful for school. The timing I had hoped for is exactly the timing God gave us…a few months to settle in before we attempt the summer vacation with full days together. Right now everyone gets a break from everyone else for part of the day. I think this is especially good for Jake, who thrives on routine and is notorious for having a tough time transitioning to new things. The littlest guy is settling in fine at home when everyone else is gone, which is nice. The afternoons are pretty hectic, with everyone wanting to play with everyone else, but everyone wanting everyone else to play exactly what s/he wants to play and how s/he wants to play it!

But things are good overall. Super tiring, but good. Bedtimes have been much easier than I’d hoped, so Greg and I collapse on the couch and are free after about 8:15ish. We need the break and are so thankful for it. Right now the rest of the family is upstairs watching Wreck It Ralph for some down time after a full day. Everyone’s already jammied up with teeth brushed and showers and baths are done. I’m looking forward to the couch with my book club book tonight.

Life is very full, very hard at times, very frustrating, and very fulfilling. I know we’re doing what God made us to do, so that makes it feel right.

AND the usual fostering nonsense is already beginning…they told us Tuesday that the parent visitations which were supposed to be two hours once a week for each parent are being increased to two hours twice a week for each parent. Really? At the two year mark? We haven’t even had the kids placed with us yet and we’re already dealing with undocumented heart conditions, parents being much more in the picture than we thought, increased visitations, and I don’t know what else.

BUT Greg and I have really both felt from the first week that this is the match God wants us to take. God sure is tricky. We told Him a few months ago, “Okay. We won’t quit. We will take kids again, but here are our conditions,” and gave Him and the county a list of criteria. He then matches us with a sibling pair that fits perfectly and makes it clear to both of us that these are the ones. Only then does He reveal that one has a major heart condition and that the father may be able to work his case plan and get them back despite the long time frame. Oh boy. I thought Greg would bail when those two red flags came up. But we both still felt God’s leading to take them. And then a few weeks later, He reveals that they’re doubling the parent visits which makes us fear that the social worker may be crazy like our last one. AND they tell us that they were mistaken…parental services have not yet been terminated like they originally told us. Really?! And still, we don’t feel like we should stop the placement. God, You are a tricky one, getting the right kids into our home by whatever means necessary, even by withholding important information until the last second.

So we head into this placement which involves a ton of family members who at any moment could step up and decide to take the kids back. A placement which doesn’t look promising for adoption, like we’d wanted. It’s possible, but we won’t get our hopes up. (She says now, before they’re in our home and become part of the family and her sanity and impartiality depart forever.)

Anybody have any suggestions for blog nicknames for these kids? The girl is 5, almost 6, and the boy is 4. I’m guessing it will be a while before I write here again as things settle down.

Jake’s Tennis Team at their first match!

This is a new experience for me…sitting inside typing a blog post in a quiet house while the boys roam the street together with their friends. This stage of life came upon me quite suddenly. I can hear the shudder of the handball against the wall next to the garage, and the muffled shouts of the kids negotiating and re-negotiating the rules of the court. About an hour ago Jake burst through the door asking if they could chase a stray dog who was running toward the next street over to find out where its collar said it lived so they could return it. With all of this chasing and handballing and paper-airplane throwing and scooter racing, their afternoon passed in boyish bliss. I finally made them come in for dinner if only for 15 minutes, then they were right back out again.

Our street has 27 kids who are elementary aged and younger! Around the corner there are at least another 10, and probably more whom I don’t know. Within a few streets walking distance I wouldn’t be able to even count how many kids there are. When we thought about moving into the quiet canyon nearby, this was the reason we decided to stay in the end. Of course, even with all those kids, you rarely see anyone playing outside.

In fact, the only reason my kids are playing out there right now is because we don’t have our usual tennis lessons tonight.

Out of all the kids on our street, there are only seven or eight who are regularly free to play when the boys go ask them. Three of those are rarely allowed to come over and definitely don’t just play outside with whomever. That leaves four or five who can run around and spend time making their own fun. The rest of the kids are at boy scouts and sports and day care and music and art or are watching a sibling do those things at their lessons.

We are one of them on some days. And right now we only have two kids! Imagine what life will be like when we add some more bodies to the bunch!

There is a real knack to finding the balance between over-scheduling and under-scheduling. I want to expose my kids to lots of things and let them see what kinds of activities they enjoy. But by the time you’re in third grade around here, you have to commit to big chunks of time to be involved in almost anything. The kids on the street aren’t rallying up to play a game of basketball or baseball or soccer anymore. They do ride bikes together, but all the “sports” are left to the coaches and official teams. What’s a parent to do?

I have always been determined to guard my kids’ free time as they get older. I want them to develop a strong imagination and know how to entertain themselves in a quiet and peaceful setting at home. Thankfully, the boys are pretty good at that now!

There’s another side of life, too. I want them to have a chance to try piano and art and language and sports. To be on a team or to learn to lose gracefully at an individual sport. To work hard and see results. To gain confidence through meeting challenges on a field or a court as well as in a classroom.

But I don’t want to give up too much family time either. I know that the years of influence are slipping by quickly. I cherish our meals as a family and our nights playing games. It won’t be much longer before they don’t want to read together before bed or ride bikes as a family to the frozen yogurt shop after dinner.`Each conversation we have after school as they snack is my precious chance to influence their world view towards heaven. I don’t want to crowd all that out just for a chance to join a team or earn a badge.

Right now we’re in limbo, waiting for our future kids to join the family. We’ve got quite a bit of free time in the afternoons, which is great. Wednesday is our busy day with snack, homework, piano, dinner, tennis and bedtime. But it’s our only busy day and I can handle it. Mondays we have tennis for an hour, and Saturdays we spend the morning as a family at the tennis courts. It’s a sport where there’s plenty of family interaction even during lessons, which is a big plus. Sundays we spend the morning at church. Tuesdays and Thursdays are totally free. And Fridays we invite friends or our church group over for the evening.

I was reading something recently about how kids can strain their bodies if they aren’t diversifying their sports when they’re young. I know there are plenty of kids who burn out mentally after playing a sport from age 5-15. Just when it’s time for that elusive college scholarship that all the parents are chasing for their kids, the kids don’t want to play anymore. We actually know one high schooler who turned down a tennis scholarship because he was tired of playing tennis and just wanted a regular college life. We know another high schooler who accepted a football scholarship and played college football, committing pretty much his entire life to the sport for his four years of college. In the end he was drafted to the NFL and deferred his last classes and college graduation for it, only to be cut from the practice squad of one team and then turn down another NFL team when they later tried to recruit him. He was done. And out of all the high school kids we know through Greg being on high school staff for the past 9 years, I think those are the only two who had a chance at money for their sport. But we all think that our kid is going to be that one kid, right?!

I won’t lie…I’m the same way! Our boys have shown considerable talent at tennis and I have already wondered if they could have scholarships in their futures. I know, I know, crazy mom alert. Lucky for me, before I got too carried away, Greg set me right and reminded me how rare those scholarships are. I found some information online that backs him up. And I read that athletic scholarships are actually only given to about 2% of the total number of kids playing high school sports. Wow. Here is a great article about it. And another one here. Sigh. I guess the tennis scholarships shouldn’t be our goal after all. I know that somebody will get that tennis scholarship (which, by the way, is more likely to be close to $2,000 rather than $10,000), but odds are, it won’t be my kid even if he’s the phenom of the county (which he isn’t…yet!)

So if athletic scholarships aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, that takes some weight off my shoulders. I know there are many families who seem to enjoy the busy busy busy involved with most sports around our area. There is a thrill to cheering the kids on and hanging with the other parents all weekend and on weeknights. I do love the camaraderie, but there is a serious limit to how many things I’m willing to sacrifice from our lives to give the kids the sports experiences I think they need. With my new perspective on the college scholarship situation, now I can make my scheduling decisions based on how my kids will learn and grow from each experience we choose for them, and that includes our family time. There are great things to learn from organized sports, from unstructured time, from family bonding, and from negotiating the world without a coach close by.

I’ve told the boys that my goal is for them to have a group to connect with in high school (to keep them busy and out of trouble!) They need to be on a sports team or in the band or theater during high school. If they don’t want to learn to play an instrument, they can run cross country in the fall and track in the spring (I believe those are still sports where they don’t cut anyone, right? Maybe swimming, too? It was when I was in high school!) If they keep going with tennis and instrumental music, they can do band in the fall and tennis in the spring. Heaven forbid Tyler decides to go out for football…oh my. I wouldn’t be surprised and if he does, we would be out there cheering with the best of them!

For now, I can schedule our kids to have just the right amount of sports experience without sacrificing all of their unstructured play time or our family dinners which studies have shown over and over again to be a top predictor of student success in college. They can learn the value of being on a team and the fun of winning together without practicing/playing five days a week and being on the traveling All Star team. They can learn about hard work paying off in whatever sports we choose, as well as in their schoolwork. I want them to have time to dabble in piano and guitar and art and constructing ramps for their cars in the backyard. I want them negotiating the social systems of the kids on the street as they make up wars and battles (they’re playing Hunger Games lately! Ugh!) Most of all, I don’t want to get to the point where we’ve lost our family hang out time…the time when they’re learning our values and we’re talking about the big and little things of life and faith. And of course, there’s got to be time for academics. Because all of those articles I read about athletic scholarships say the same thing…academics are where the money’s at! Hmmm…maybe a scholarship could be in the future after all! For now, I’m enjoying this schedule we’ve got right now. When we get more kids, who knows what the future has in store.

We met the kids last night! What cuties they are…wild and crazy cuties that I’m sure will be a handful if we bring them home!

I say “if” because I’ve never seen social services move so slowly! Maybe my expectations are off because we got our first two boys within hours of being certified as foster parents. And we got Midge right away from an ESH home when they called us, too. But these kids’ Auntie told social services in February that she wanted them to move into a foster home, and it’s now mid-April! There was a change of social workers in there, which always drags things out, but still.

I also say “if” because there are two big things for us to consider when accepting placement of these kids.

First of all, it would very much be a foster placement rather than an adoptive placement (at least initially), as the father has worked his case plan and reunified with them once before, and his sister, their Aunt whom we met last night, is hopeful that he can do it again. I don’t know whether the county places any weight to the fact that he tried once and lost custody again or not. I think it all depends on the social worker because the time frame should be winding down with the 18 month hearing coming in a few weeks, but we know from experience that the social worker is really the one who decides whether to keep delaying things until reunification can happen (in this case, for the second try). We would be a concurrent planning family just like we were with Midge…willing to adopt if things work out with them in our home and if reunification doesn’t happen. Again, it all depends on the social worker and if she sees the goal as reunification or as permanency for the kids. (For perspective, Midge’s first social worker viewed the goal as permanency for the child once parental services are terminated, which they already have been in this case. Midge’s second social worker sees the goal as reunification with both parents at all costs, and worked to extend things and still is working towards that goal.)

We had hoped to get a sibling pair who had no visitations and whose parents were out of the picture. We’re realizing that wish is pretty unrealistic. Still, we would have liked to have a little more certainty about the kids’ future than we do in this case.

Secondly, the little girl has a major medical condition related to her heart that is not in her file or was not communicated to our agency. We know the diagnosis but not the complete medical details, and she has no restrictions other than taking several medications three times daily. But it is definitely something that took us by surprise because it should have been in her file. Her brother also has been diagnosed with a heart murmur, which would be something to keep an eye on, especially with the family history of this particular heart disease.

You remember those “check boxes” on the agency’s placement forms? We would never have checked the box for this medical condition! But isn’t that how God works? Sneaking a kid under our radar just because He wants to?

As I was standing with Tia, talking to her about all these things, I thought for sure that Greg would halt the whole process when I told him either one of these huge curveballs, never mind both of them! But I am amazed at how we are both on the same page and ready to move forward with placement despite both of these things that we had hoped to avoid. That is yet another sign that God is working in us to move us toward His plan for our family’s next step of faith in this journey.

So there you go…we need to decide in the next few days if we’re willing to go ahead with the placement. Greg and I both still feel right now that this is the match God wants for us, so unless we suddenly feel otherwise in the next few days, we will go ahead with it. We don’t know the timeframe but will keep you posted.

Please pray for us. Specifically that if this is not the plan God has for our family, that He will make it clear to us in the coming days. And we are thanking Him that at the very least, He is allowing us complete unity in this decision so far. What a blessing, and it’s not one I take for granted!

On the other hand, the county doesn’t usually terminate rights unless the kids have a family willing to adopt them, or if the case involves such severe abuse or neglect that there is no question of them returning to their parents. So the odds of us getting kids with absolutely no parent involvement are pretty slim, especially in the age range we’re looking at. The two kids we’ve been matched with have been lucky enough to be living with an aunt for their whole time away from their parents. What a blessing…there’s still the trauma of being removed from your parents, but at least you know the people you’re moving in with. And there is none of the emotional damage of hopping from foster placement to foster placement.

Tia sounded really nice on the phone, but overwhelmed and feeling guilty for putting the kids into foster care. She works full time and is a single mom to her teenager, grade schooler, and toddler, as well as these two kiddos for much of the past year and a half. She hasn’t told the kids or their parents yet that she plans on giving them up. What heart breaking conversations those will be…poor Tia. My heart goes out to her. Trying to be everything to everyone while working to keep your kids and your brother’s kids cared for…what a tough life. I assured her that if they are placed with us, we would keep the kids in touch with her and her children.

And what about the two who may come to us? They are removed from their parents and move in with Tia, then move back in with their dad then get removed again. Go back to live with Tia and then out of the blue she’s going to have them move in with strangers? I wish we had a longer time frame to get to know them and let them get to know us before springing this all on them. Poor little ones.

I am crazy with anticipation…I don’t know how I’m going to focus on anything else for the next two days! I have to admit, I’ve been searching the internet hoping to catch a glimpse of this family whose lives we are going to be entering this week in one way or another. Maybe the match won’t work out, but even if it doesn’t, there’s something strange and wonderful about how just getting a peek into these lives brings about more compassion than I’ve ever known for strangers.

Will you pray with us for Tia and the kiddos? This is going to be a heart-breaking week for all three of them. If only there were no such thing as broken families, abuse, neglect, and foster care.

We are STILL WAITING to hear from social services regarding the two foster kids we’ve been matched with. I’m not sure what to make of it…maybe it’s because they’re with a relative and not a foster family, so things are moving slower? Or maybe they’ve placed them with someone else and didn’t tell our agency? For whatever reason, it’s taking longer than our first two placements did, but I’m trying to patient!

In the meantime, I’m finishing up some ‘around the house’ stuff that I need to get done before the new kids arrive. After we lost Midge, I knew I wouldn’t be able to be alone in a quiet house all day while the kids were at school without going crazy. I also knew that we weren’t going to accept any long term placements before Easter because of our Hawaii trip. So I made a list of all the BIG jobs around the house that never get done with little ones underfoot. Cleaning closets out completely, reorganizing storage, that kind of thing. I’d been wanting to make a canvas for my mantle for a while and finally did it!

BIBLE VERSE CANVAS TUTORIAL

Supplies:

• canvas (blank, or with a saying/image that you want to paint over)
• acrylic paint the color you want the words to be
• spray paint the same color as the background of the canvas (or if your canvas is blank, the spray paint will be the main background color you want your finished product to be.)
• letter cutouts and/or letter stickers in lots of fonts and sizes (you want a variety of these to give it some interest!)
• small tape runner (like you’d use for scrapbooking) or double sided tape
• small paintbrush for touch ups

I bought a few canvases on sale, knowing that I would be painting over them. I picked them based on their size and background colors, and I liked that the sides of the black ones were burlap! First step: Paint over the image/words/blank canvas. You want to use the paint color that you want your WORDS to be. Cheap acrylic paint is great for this. It took a few coats of paint to cover the words that were already there.

Here are all three canvases (not sure what I’m doing with the other two yet, but I wanted to paint them all at once.) The words on the cream colored one that used to be the dog sign will be in that mossy green. The words on the other two will be cream.

Now it’s time to use your leftover letter stickers/cardstock letter punchouts from your scrapbook stash. If you don’t have any, head to the craft store with your coupons and find some different font sizes that you like. I bought some and used some I already had. This is the most time consuming part of the process. Once the paint is completely dry, lay out your letters carefully on the canvas. I had to use a tape runner (double sided tape) to get most of the letters (even the stickers!) to stick to the acrylic paint I just applied. They don’t have to be stuck down super tight if you like a fuzzier look to the finished product. If you want the words to be crisp in the finished product, spend more time sticking the letters down now. Be sure to vary the fonts and the sizes and be creative with the placement as you go. But make sure it’s still readable! When I did this, I liked the way the colors look so much that I almost decided to stop here!

Now spray paint over these letters, using the color of the background (in this case, black.) Your letter stickers that you just applied will function as a mask, so that in the end they will be the color you just painted (in this case, cream) and the background will be the color that you’re spray painting. Be sure to spray evenly in several light coats, from straight above the canvas. I did it on my garage floor. If you spray from the sides at all, your spray paint is more likely to get under your letters. Here’s what it looked like after that.

See how some of the letters were peeling up a bit in the picture above? That’s why the edges of my letters aren’t crisp. Some are fuzzier than others. Once the spray paint dries, carefully peel up the letters.

The larger letters looked fine with the fuzzy edges, but as you can see, the smaller letters needed a lot of work in order to be legible. I took a small paintbrush and the same cream color of acrylic paint, and touched up all the edges that made it too difficult to read. I like the weathered/aged look, so I left a lot of it fuzzy, but just painted where really necessary for reading. You can see below that the “d” in guide and the smaller letters needed some touching up, or they really drew your eye to them.

After the touchups…here’s the finished product on our mantle! I handpainted the verse reference (Isaiah 58:11) when I was all done. Now I have two more blank canvases to play with when the mood strikes!

If these new kiddos don’t come soon, my house may be covered with these canvases!

sunrise from in front of our vacation house in kapa’a, kauai

We’re back from a beautiful week in Kauai and as soon as I can get my pictures edited, I will post some more here. I’m a little distracted, though, because after a month of waiting, we finally got a placement call!

Some of you know how strange it is to get THE CALL (or THE EMAIL if you’re in an international adoption!) You’re on the list and waiting for your next kiddos and caller ID says it’s your foster family agency calling. Your mind races and you wonder if they’re just tying up loose ends from your last case, asking questions about something totally unrelated, or if this is the placement call you’ve been waiting for. It is. They are calling about a sibling pair. A boy, age 4, and a girl, age 5.

So much has gone into making this moment a reality. You’ve gone through the agency checklist and identified the issues and behaviors you are willing to accept and those you are not. Of course, there are no guarantees, just like with our biological children. The agency cannot know every situation in the child’s history, nor can they predict how they will react in your family or what will happen in their future. But we go through the checklist (fire-starting, harming animals, NO. diabetes, delayed developmental milestones, YES) and tell them the ages, races, and genders we’re open to. For us it is any racial makeup or gender combination (boy-boy, boy-girl, girl-girl) for two kids under 7 or 8 years old. I know it sounds strange to those outside of the foster/adoption community to bring a child into your home without knowing much about them, but isn’t that what we all do when we get pregnant and have biological kids, too?

We are so hoping that we will be able to adopt our next kiddos and not have to go through the loss that we did with Midge. But in foster care, you just never know. On one hand, you should be rooting for parents to get their lives back together and for them to be able to take care of their children. On the other, what the county says is adequate parenting doesn’t always mesh with what we think is adequate parenting. In the end, in foster care, you just have to pray and trust that God will bring you the children He has planned for your family for whatever amount of time He sees fit. We will look at this next placement as a foster placement. The case has not closed and the parental rights have not yet been terminated. The county can make their predictions, but in the end, only God knows what will happen. Luckily, He loves us and these kids even more than we do. They are all His children after all, aren’t they? Even the ones we claim as our own.

So this week we are hoping to meet the kids and the Aunt with whom they’ve been living off and on over the past two years. We need a little bit more information about their visitations and where they are in the court proceedings before moving forward. Once we get a chance to talk to the Aunt and meet the kids (a rarity before taking a foster placement!) things could move forward very quickly! It’s such a strange thing, thinking that you have other kids out there and you wouldn’t even recognize them if you met them in the aisles of Target. Foster Care and Adoption are so strange and emotional…feeling such a strong tie of love to people whom you’ve never even met.

It’s scary and exciting. And hopefully it’s soon! That is, if they haven’t already been placed with someone else since our phone call on Wednesday, which is a distinct possibility. Wouldn’t that be something, to finally get the call, go through the stages of apprehension and fear and make your way towards excitement, only to have the kids placed somewhere else? I wouldn’t be surprised, really.

This is foster care.

Here’s hoping for a beautiful ending.

To all who mourn, he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the LORD has planted for his own glory.   -Isaiah 61:3

just the four of us…in front of our vacation home in kauai! i didn’t really think about the fact that two chairs are left for the forever kiddos God will bring to us…whether this week, this month, this year, or just sometime during this lifetime! who knows when our family will truly be complete!

After so many weeks of silence, we heard from Midge’s dad on Monday! Praise God…I am so thankful that He continues to allow us to stay in contact with our girl. I pretty much begged her dad to let us take her for a few hours on Monday night and it was just the calming thing we needed…a family evening together. Playing in the backyard, dinner together, and riding scooters around the lake nearby made this week the best week in a while.

In different terrifying news, I was the speaker at our church’s women’s bible study this morning…eek!! So I’ve been letting everything else go to prepare for that message. Now that the lesson is taught, it’s time to turn to the other tasks before me…catching up with housework and packing for our Easter trip, as well as getting our tax stuff together so we don’t wait until the last minute (I know! I know! It already is the last minute!)

I’m just so thankful that we got to see our girl before we left for our weeklong trip. I tried to look forward to the vacation, but it’s hard when every day that passes is one day further away from the last time you saw your baby. Now I can sigh a deep breath of relief and look forward to the week we have in store. I just had to pop in here and let you all know about our chance to see Midge, as I know so many of you are in similar situations and share our prayers for her.

Time to go pack. Is it strange that my packing list includes three cameras?!

We are in the school choice window for our district, which means that if you want your kids to go to a different school from the assigned elementary school for your neighborhood, you have to decide now. Our lives are so up in the air right now that I have no idea where we will all be for the next school year.

Tyler is currently attending a Title I (at-risk, low income) school which has a Spanish Immersion Charter School program. I LOVE it. So much. The kids are diverse in every way. The families value different cultures and languages. I love hearing music and conversation in different languages at school events and in the hallways. Right now the whole day is in Spanish, with the kids changing teachers (so their own students don’t ever hear them speak English!) and teaching English for 30 minutes a day. Next year, it will increase to 60 minutes of English with the rest being Spanish. We are lucky that the program can even extend into Jr. High and High School if we’re interested. At that level, the kids take Science in Spanish instead of English, and they take a Spanish elective class for immersion kids. I have several really good mom friends now at Tyler’s school and I love the teachers, staff, and program.

Tyler, on the other hand, has complained to me about once a week that he wants to go to an “English” school. He’s not that convincing, really. He only says it before school when I think he’d just rather stay home and continue playing legos. After school, it’s all smiles and chatter about his great day. Still, I wonder if the idea of an “English” school will always interest him. At his teacher conference, his wonderful teacher told me he is soaking up the program so well. I wasn’t sure what he was really capable of producing in Spanish until she showed me a recent writing assignment he did. Oh my. His Spanish vocabulary is WAY beyond what he admits to at home! His sentences were perfectly composed with reflexive verbs and proper tenses and even correct adjective endings. Seriously? I don’t know that I could have done that in High School Spanish class. I was so thrilled and relieved to see that, and to know that his teacher feels he is thriving in the immersion program. When I told Tyler that his teacher hopes he’ll continue on in the program next year, he said, “Okay. I’ll do it,” and ran off to play. See, I told you his complaints about “Spanish school” weren’t all that serious!

So we’re all set for Tyler for next year. But Jake is totally up in the air. Luckily, we don’t have to decide for him until the last minute because of the program he is in. We decided last year to move him from our wonderful assigned school to a nearby school with a special challenge program for 3rd-6th grades. The idea of the program is that they group the kids who need extra challenges into one class for each grade, so that the whole class is aimed at a higher level. Greg was in this type of program as an elementary schooler, and I taught this type of program and LOVED the cool stuff I could do with those kids that I couldn’t do in my regular classes.

The problem is, there just aren’t enough kids who have tested into this program at his grade level. Jake’s teacher thinks that the decline in the number of kids who test into this program is related to the rising class sizes in the lower grades over the past few years. So for third grade, his class has been a regular class with just a cluster of kids from the program, like any school would have. We knew this ahead of time and moved him anyway so that it would be an easier transition than moving him after third or fourth grade. I’m glad we did…he’s had a great teacher and made the school move so easily without any complaints about missing his friends or his old school. But NOW they’re telling us there might not be enough kids to have a full class again next year for fourth grade!

I’m frustrated because I’m not sure I would have moved him if we had known this last year. But what’s done is done. I can’t complain about this year’s experience and am happy with our choice with the information we had. But I AM wondering about next year. If they don’t have a full class for the program, I’m not really interested in messing with carpools and the longer drive and all that taking him to that school entails.

So then I’m left with three options. I could homeschool him for fourth grade and see if they get enough kids to have the full class challenge program in fifth grade and send him back that year. I could send him back to his previous school, although in my mind, I would probably want him to stay there for 4th-6th rather than moving him back to the new school YET AGAIN even if they have a full class program in 5th and 6th grades. Or I could send him back to the tiny little canyon school where he started in kindergarten before I pulled him out to homeschool him. I loved that little school and he has only positive memories about it.

What I choose to do with Jake next year fully depends on the new little people who will be joining our family hopefully before the next school year starts. If they are school aged and native Spanish speakers, I can send them to Tyler’s program so I’ll be able to make Jake’s school decisions based only on what’s best for him. If they are school aged and English speakers, I will want to factor in what might be best for the new kids as well as Jake (I have already vowed not to have kids in THREE different elementary schools!) If they aren’t school aged, I will have only Jake’s school needs to think about, but I have to admit I’m intimidated about trying to homeschool a fourth grader with needy little ones underfoot!

We won’t find out until April or May about next year’s program for Jake’s school, and even then, if we don’t have our new kids yet, I don’t plan on making a decision about Jake until we know who’s in our family, or until August when I’d have to start homeschooling if that’s my choice!

Phew. I’m thankful for so many options, and intimidated by them all at the same time. Once again, I’m grateful that we have the LORD guiding us through these decisions each year. Even when we don’t feel sure about the future, He knows what the future holds!