143,000,000

Yesterday we received the quarterly newsletter from a local ministry called The Shepherds Crook. This ministry serves waiting children and adoptive families by advocating for the children's adoption, supporting the adoptive families during the adoption processes, helping with fund raising, and also serving the children with much needed medical help. The newsletter started with statistics I was aware of but hadn't thought of recently.

114,00 children in the US are currently living in the foster care system.

2.1 Million children become orphans in Africa each year.

143,000,000 is the current estimate of the number of orphans world-wide.

Honestly, these are numbers I can't even really get my mind around. I know that the number of children in foster care in the U.S. is nearly the same as the population of Dayton, Ohio. It's more than 4x bigger than population of the city in which I grew up, Warren, Ohio. Just the number of children in foster care is more than enough to populate a city!

The population of Chicago is only slightly larger than the number of children that become orphans in Africa in one year's time.

Estimates suggest that there are probably more orphans, world wide, than 100x the population of New York City.

Here are some other statistics that come to mind:


The average cost of an international adoption: $15,000-$30,000 (with a $10,000 tax credit bringing the price down further). The cost for a US foster-to-adopt: in most cases, $0.

The average cost of a new car in the U.S.: $28,000

Over 1 million new cars are purchased, on average in the U.S., each year.

About 20,000 orphans are adopted internationally each year.

People spend thousands of dollars on cruises (even "Christian" ones), boats, new clothes, vacations and that's in addition to the thousands of dollars now often spent to send 1 teenage girl to prom! Christians are buying movies that will only be watched once or twice, spending thousands of dollars annually on Thomas Kincaide kitsch, and who-knows-how-much on Christian Romance Novels. Christians buy bigger houses than they need, have larger wardrobes than necessary (especially compared to Jesus' wardrobe!) and do silly things like pay hundreds of dollars to send their kids to circus camp.

At what point is the church in America going to wake up to the crisis that the world is facing? At what point are we going to stop justifying our materialism and come to grips with the fact that we might be so blessed so that we can bless others (not our daughter who wants the $2000 prom dress).

As Scott Rosenow, director of Shepherd's Crook, wrote in the newsletter, "Christian, will you look at these [sic] numbers, like the man with the mirror, turn away and forget? Or will you look and remember, remember the call of God to minister to the needy; remember that God's expectation for His followers is not that they will seek comfort and the status quo, but that they will seek to serve Him in ways that defy explanation, ways that appear foolish to the perishing (italics mine)... remember that there are roughly one hundred and forty-three million other children out there waiting for their families. You can't help one hundred and forty-three million children any more than I can, but you can help one or two. I urge you, I implore you, to bring this before the Lord and ask Him to lead you as you consider this. I can promise that your life will never be the same, and your walk will be strengthened and challenged and rewarded" -- Scott Rosenow "Reflections" The Shepherds Crook Issue 14, January 2008

The Socialism of Helen Keller

Several days ago I was shocked into reading a book entitled, "Lies My Teachers Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong" by James Loewen. I have to admit, the title did snare me. After all, I am a Home School Mom and I just love it when text books, which are, in my opinion, the archrival to learning, are proven wrong. However, it wasn't just the title that lured me in, it was the first chapter. Right off the bat, Dr. Loewen smacked me with a sentence that just floored me.

"The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist."

What? Helen Keller was a socialist? How incredibly anti-American! How ungodly! How scandalous! How interesting! An image of her sitting in a rocking chair, by a warm cozy fire, reading her braille edition of "The Communist Manifesto" popped into my mind -- an image I'd never thought could even exist, let alone be conjured in my mind. My world had been rocked, and now I was hooked. I had to read the rest of this book.

However, first I had to understand how, and if truly, Helen Keller was a socialist. It was something that wasn't hard to verify, as the woman was not only a member of the communist party in the U. S., but towards the end of her life wrote letters to a friend who was incarcerated for her communist activities. Apparently Keller was outspokenly socialist in her early adult years, but then moved her socialist activities to the back burner for her later years, as being an advocate for the blind was placed in the front. Wow. You learn something new everyday.

Dr. Loewen's reason for including Helen Keller's socialism interested me, because he has a good point. Most people think of Helen Keller as someone who miraculously overcame her incredibly difficult disabilities. Indeed, I have spoken to my children often about Helen Keller, because she is a great role model for not only my girls, but my boys (whose disabilities include an inability to carry multiple items at once, and problem solve such things as "Where did I put my shoes? How can you expect me to find them when I don't know where I put them?").

Yet, as Dr. Loewen points out, what did Helen Keller do after she overcame her disability and graduated from Radcliffe?

Good question. I realized that I had no idea. Here, for all these years, I've been touting Helen Keller to my children, and self, as a great person who overcame her disability and I had no idea what exactly she did once she overcame her disability. Well, according to Loewen, it's because after she overcame her disability, she became a socialist -- something text books don't really like about her, so they just happen to leave out the 60+ years of her life after overcoming her disability.

Why didn't this ever occur to me?

According to Loewen and several other sources I read (including her obituary) , Keller's socialism grew out of her righteous anger over the treatment of the working class in America when she learned that a large portion of the blindness in this nation came from work related accidents due to unsafe working conditions.

I would grant that now, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, and seeing, first hand, the fruit of communism, we know that socialism is a baseless idea, chalk full of fallacies and doesn't even begin to factor in the effects of sinful human nature on a society. It seems ridiculous that anyone would believe that socialism would work, although there are professing Christians who believe as strongly in capitalism as Keller did socialism, and capitalism isn't exactly God's economy either. But, I digress.

What is interesting, though, is that no one does mention that Keller was a socialist. According to Loewen, and I have to agree, this is because textbooks, and other teaching aids I might add, want to create "heros". Someone over coming their disability is a hero. Someone doing that and then becoming a socialist is not a hero. However, in creating "heros" some of the truth gets left out, and a myth is created or there is some insight lost because of it. I don't like the creating of heros, because I only want there to be one hero in my life: Jesus.

Is Helen Keller any less amazing because of her political views? I would say no. After the shock wore off, Helen Keller became more human to me. She wasn't a genius, she wasn't an infallible saint. She was an amazing woman who lived a full life and didn't get everything right. It helps me to think, "Perhaps I can do some good, even though I don't get everything right..." After all, I don't want any other heros, but I do want people I can look up to, and take encouragement from, even when I know that they were a bit wacky. And, I would rather my children understand the errant nature of man from the start, so they don't get disappointed in the truth when they're older and hit with it.

In my opinion, Helen Keller did what so many Christians over the centuries have done. She put her faith in changing the system rather than in God. While God can use the "system" to bring change, it's our job to follow his calling to obedience in our own actions. Of course, perhaps Keller would say joining the communist party was God's calling in her life. Ohhhh.... that's wild.

So, it turns out that Keller was an active socialist and writer. She lived off the royalties of her story (along with her teacher) until people lost interest in her book. She almost married once, to a nice socialist man, but her mom hit the roof and kicked the man out her life. Then, when the money ran out, she did a very successful circuit on vaudeville. Although many were offended, she and her teacher did a re-enactment of her story. With interesting people, the scandals just don't cease.

Now, the next question to tackle. How did Keller reconcile her Christianity with her socialism? I would imagine that this very question is why Christians have been more-than-happy to overlook Keller's socialism. It's just so messy, (just like the fact that she was a Swedenborgian, and never committed to a local church -- maybe if she had she would've put her socialist efforts towards a better cause?) but, I agree with Dr. Loewen, it's the controversy, the "mess", that makes it all so interesting.

More Thoughts on the Healings

I was thinking, again, about the miraculous healings found in the New Testament. The Lord has certainly changed my perspective on many things over the years, but my perspective on the healings are going through a most radical change. Perhaps other people have always had this all figured out, but I haven't (I've been too busy figuring out how to solve America's problems, I guess...).

Anyway, the healings have always been presented to me as acts of Jesus kindness and compassion. Teachers would point out that Jesus would choose to give his time to the "the crippled, the sick and those 'tormented by evil spirits' ". "Tormented by evil spirits" could mean almost anything depending upon whatever church I happened to be sitting in. To some it meant demon possession, to some it meant being tormented by illness and to yet others it meant mental illness. To me it shows that the concept of grouping all disabled people into one big "group" rather than seeing them as individuals with very unique needs can be seen even in ancient times.

The teaching tends to focus on the fact that Jesus was always willing to give his time to the "least of these", to the outcast, the people who no one valued. The thought being that if Jesus was willing to love even them, then certainly he would love me. Before my days as a mother of special needs children, that explanation was enough for me. Jesus did seek out the broken, there certainly is truth and insight in that interpretation.

However, once I became a Mom, I realized that there are some concerns with that interpretation. It began when I started reading children's literature about disabilities. I noticed a subtle attitude that would often come through the text: we should have compassion on them.

I freely admit that I am a curmudgeon, and that I often read through things looking for unspoken attitudes and cheap imitations of the truth. However, take, for instance, one children's book I read where a child and grandpa go to the zoo for the day. While out, they don't just look at the animals, they also look at a myriad of people with disabilities. "Look a monkey! Hey, Look at deaf girl!"

Albeit that was a wee bit of hyperbole, the feel of the book was simply that. The perspective it was written from was a "us looking at them". Even at the end of the book the kid writes a letter to a disabled kid saying, "I know your just like everybody else." Of course, if that's so true, then why did he have to write and tell her in the first place?

It's all so pedantic.

I started to think, "How would I feel to be the subject of a book like that?" "How would I like it to be labeled 'the person we're supposed to have compassion on.' "

Maybe it's just pride... but maybe something is there. As a child, how would I feel if someone wrote me a letter saying, "Really, I believe you're just like everybody else?" Well, I would be pretty concerned as to why a person would feel the need to say that to me.

So, does this apply to the miracles? I think so, because maybe, just maybe, the only point wasn't that Jesus was just compassionate, but that Jesus understood the value of people with disabilities, and that those who have a disability don't have to be on the margins of society. With Jesus there wasn't a "we" and "them." He didn't need to tell disabled people "you're just like everybody else." He knows it and He knows they know it.


Think, again, to the story of the man by the pool of Bethesda. Jesus asked him if he wanted to be healed. Our presumption is, of course, that he would want to be healed. The most common explanation I've heard for that question is that Jesus is asking him because maybe "he wants to be disabled, he wants to have an excuse for not working." But, perhaps Jesus knew that not every disabled person desires healing.

"Do you want healed?"

There's an option. Jesus understood that abundant life was available to the man whether or not his body was healed. Perhaps one of the points is that either way it's okay. It's okay for a person with a disability to want healing, and it's okay for a person with a disability to not want healing. It's a message of reassurance to disabled people. At the same time, it's a message of perspective for those of us who don't have a disability: don't presume just because someone has a disability that they wish they didn't have it.

Give compassion where compassion is due. Give respect where respect is due.

Life With a Nearly-4-Year-Old

Today my youngest daughter decided to do everything in the world that she could to drive me crazy. She almost succeeded.

It all started when she woke up. I was finishing the paper route with my son, and my husband was in the shower, getting ready for work. No one heard her scream.

Now, she wasn't screaming because she was hurt. She was screaming because she wanted someone to remove the protective railing from her bed so she could climb down. She called for me once, and when I didn't come, she screamed. Then she screamed louder. Really, I'm surprised that I didn't hear her screaming while I was out driving my son around. Grant it, all her siblings, minus her paper boy brother, were still asleep in bed and no one else was getting up. She wanted up -- now.

By the time I arrived at the scene of the tragedy (that would be her description), she informed me that she had been yelling for me. What a start to the day!

Then, she got down, got dressed and came down for breakfast. All was fine. In fact it was all fine until she, her older sister and I needed to leave for a doctor's appointment. As I was setting her in the car, I realized that her tights, dress, shirt -- everything-- was drenched with pee.

Then I wanted to scream.

I didn't have time to change her clothes,so I said, "Well, honey, you're going to the doctor wet."

Since it wasn't her appointment, she was going to just have to sit in her wheelchair. Once in the car, I asked her why she didn't tell me she needed to go potty. She gave me her standard response:

"'cuz."

So I went over with her, again, what she should say when she needed to go potty.

"You need to say, 'MOM, I NEED to go POTTY!'"

She scowled at me, her bottom lip hanging low enough to touch her chin.

"Now, you say it...."

Nope, she wasn't going to do it. The line had been drawn and she wasn't going to cross it. She knew she was supposed to tell me she needed to go potty. The whole point was that she didn't want to bother with it, so there was no way she was going to say it now.

"Fine." I said, "You're in time out in your wheelchair until you say those words." I can be every bit as feisty as her.

So, she remained, pouting, in time-out in her wheelchair (which actually worked well since her clothes were wet so she couldn't get down anyway, but she didn't' know that) for the next 45 minutes. Then, as we were in the drive through line for the pharmacy, she decided to proclaim her intent.

"MOM, I NEED to go POTTY!"

Of course, there was no potty anywhere near us. I swear this was all planned. This kid is smart. She plans. She strategizes. And, as a result, she often wins...

Accident number 2.

Then we arrived home. I put her on the pot and made her take her clothes off and put them in the laundry room. She was in time-out on her bed until lunch.

Lunch was fine, and she was happy in her dry, clean clothes. After lunch she and her sister got out the "bean and aquarium rock box" and played with it for a while. Then it was time to clean of the enormous mess. It was not long before the "sweep" controvery arose. We have a small hand broom and dust pan they use to clean up their bean box mess. The older one had it first, and so, of course, she wanted it. Instead of helping with the dust pan she laid down and cried.

I had enough.

"Okay, if you're not going to help your sister, then you'll clean the mess up yourself." I said.

As the realization sunk in, her lip went out.

"Wha... well.... uh.... " some serious pouting, "Well, JESUS STILL LOVES ME!!!"

The implication being, of course, that I didn't since I was making her clean up the mess.

"Well, I still do to, but you're picking up that mess."


The day rounded out with 1 royal tantrum, 2 more potty accidents and an early bedtime.

So, now I will reflect on why I love this kid. Everyday isn't like this. Really. It isn't. I keep reminding myself of that.

For instance, she always talks about Jesus and how much she loves him. It's very sweet, especially when she says, "Someday Jesus will come get me, and then I'll take His picture."

She has also, recently, told me about her "people." I know it's common for a preschool age child to have a pretend friend, but how many have a pretend entourage?

"I do all my stuff with all these people," she told me the other day, waving her arms around and pointing at nothing. "All these lots of lots of people and friends."

It's always creepy when your kid gets pretend friends, but this was the creepiest, a group!

"What stuff?" I asked.

"My singin' and readin' and playin' , " she replied.

"What friends?"

"I have Big Brown bear, 2 little white bears, 2 froggies, 2 elephants and Mr. Helen." she replied.

So, apparently, everything she does, she does for her pretend audience of 7 animals and some unfortunate man named Helen. She, of all people, would want an audience! This is almost as bizarre as the time that my oldest son took an old broken laundry basket, put a pair of jeans in it and called it his "pet kitten". He took it everywhere with him and showed many shocked people the pet kitten. Thankfully, he out grew that phase.


She's also really cute when she pretends that under our dining room table is her choo-choo train. She sits on one of the pedestals and drives the train to her friend's houses. She often takes her baby -- baby John, who, today was wearing bloomers, a bow and a pink shirt. She had to drive him to the doctor for an appointment for his "streps and white spots on his throat."

And, she was really sweet when I tucked her in bed tonight. She hugged me and kissed me and said, "Mom, I flove you." It was really sweet.

So, I just have to remind myself of all the good things. Which is so much easier to do when she's asleep in bed.

Cooking with Deb

Last week, after a full day of homeschooling, I made a very profound statement to my husband.

"It's a lot of work to home school and care for 5 children."

He looked at me like he wondered if I had the mental capacity to home school children in upper elementary school.

"You're just now realizing this?"

The problem is that the schoolwork is not the problem. It's that life goes on at the same time. So, while I enjoy studying Latin, history, music, logic, bible, math (sometimes), science, grammar and literature with my older three, I still have to devote a big part of my day to feeding them all. This starts at the grocery store.

I hate the grocery store. Talk about boring. I mean all that's there is food. And, darn it, the food isn't even cooked, at least not the food I can afford to buy. Since I'm feeding 7 people, I have to be very careful with how I spend our alloted grocery money. I have a complex formula that I follow. It's something like this:

nutritional value + ease + environmental impact / price = must be cheap

In other words, precooked microwavable bacon is never on the list. Fresh apples, Kroger brand vanilla yogurt and canisters of oatmeal are.

I'm trying, very diligently, to go grocery shopping only once a month. This would work better if we had a big freezer, but since we don't have space for a freezer, it isn't an option right now. I do, however, have it down to one huge trip per month, with a second trip halfway through to reload on fresh produce and milk. This past month, I decided to take my oldest son to help, especially as we really need two carts when shopping for the month.

Things went pretty well. To save time, I sent him down the cereal isle while I picked out the meat. I should have sensed trouble at his little cheer upon the news that he was picking out the cereal. Instead, I naively pushed forward. I laid down the guidelines, presuming he'd stick to the cereals that I normally purchase.

"Get 10 boxes of cereal, and they have to under $2.50 each. A couple of them can go as high as $3.00"

When I returned to his cart, he was beaming with pride. All 10 boxes were under $2.50, and all 10 boxes listed sugar as the first or second ingredient! There was no way I could burst his bubble by putting them all back. Needless to say, my other 4 were thrilled when we got home, and I added some new factoids to my education. I hadn't even realized that there were chocolate Lucky Charms.

Once we get home, of course, the marathon continues as we have to put all the groceries away. We actually have an assembly line that we form, passing the food from person to person to either the refrigerator or down the stairs to our ill-placed pantry. Then I spend the next few days trying to convey to my 9-year-old son that this food has to last for a month, not just several days. Yesterday, I caught him about to open a ham for a snack. He carries about 1/4 of our total food bill.

Then, of course, there is the cooking. I actually enjoy cooking. It's baking that I hate. I hate getting flour on my hands and clothes, and I especially hate it when I'm trying to frost something and it rips apart. But, cooking isn't so bad. It's just cooking everyday, day after day. My kids are very polite, and always say, "Thank you for cooking dinner Mommy." but I can tell the popular meals from the unpopular. Usually, the first clue is that they start asking questions about the next day's breakfast.

I've only had one real cooking disaster. It was several years ago, and I purchased a Chinese marinating sauce to give dinner a unique flavor. Unfortunately, unique is the polite way to describe the sauce.

"UGGGHH!" screeched my oldest, "What's that smell???"

"It's dinner" I replied with a smile. He looked unsure and ran upstairs. When the meal was finally cooked, we called him down. He didn't come, so we went looking for him. I found him in our upstairs bathroom with the door closed and the fan on.

"UGH!" he yelped, "Close the door... oh no it's too late, you let the smell in!"

I told him he was being unreasonable. However, after trying a bite of dinner, I realized he wasn't. At that point I filled a bowl with plain rice and took it to him. He was sitting on our side porch because that was the only place he couldn't smell dinner. I handed him the rice through a crack in the door (he was worried dinner would pollute the outside as well.), and pondered what our neighbors were thinking as they watched a small boy, huddled in his coat, eating a bowl of plain rice on our side porch. He wouldn't come in until my husband offered to bake some oatmeal scotchie cookies to cover the smell. He entered the house after the first batch went through the oven.

Our oldest son is gifted in many ways, but especially nasally. This is really hard to live with. One time, my husband was making homemade barbecue sauce. Our oldest walked into the kitchen.

"Ohh." His nose wrinkled. "That smells awful."

Sniff.

"It smells like...."

Sniff.

"Vinegar."

Sniff.

"With ketchup and brown sugar."

Sniff. Sniff.

"And a touch of mustard, red pepper and salt."

Yes, it's really that bad. I honestly think that the kid has some kind of onion/mushroom detecting radar in him. He can even taste onion powder in spaghetti sauce.

The main problem with all this cooking is keeping things varied while catering to 7 people with very different tastes. I always thought those wives who run their homes on a 2 or 4 week menu cycle were a little, well, stifled. However, I'm now on a month -to -month.

My husband, wanting to help out, forwarded me a link, recently, for a new cookbook. At first blush, I thought that he was hoping for not only some more variety to our dinner fare, but was looking at cheaper options for the main course. Then I saw the cover and it made a bit more sense. The book is appropriately titled "Cooking with Pooh."

I do believe that this must be the absolute worst cookbook title in the history of the world.

Of course, there's nothing for me to do but to continue cooking for my family. My husband does cook on the weekend, and we do have a cereal night once a week. So, I think we'll all be able to survive the next 15 years. At least I hope.

A Little More Bragging

This artwork was done by my 9-year-old.

Update on the Wheelchair Saga (Also Known as "The Young and the Unmotorized")

Well, I thought I would update on the entire wheelchair controversy. We're still in wait mode on the funding, and so everything is on hold until that's settled. The good news is that our original therapist is back from maternity leave. Since she has actually met us a few times, she has more of a context for our family. I talked with her last week and she ended the conversation by saying, "I just don't want you to feel like I'm pushing this wheelchair on you."

AMEN! This I can work with! But, the push is still, really, to get the chair.

One big thing I'm noticing is that people are assuming that our daughter's "spark" will carry her through and make her able to do anything. To a degree, I believe that's true. But, in the course of the past year of mothering her, I've learned that that spark is also very able to help her dig in her heels are refuse to do even things she knows she can do! Her greatest disability is not arthrogryposis, it's "victim syndrome". The world owes her, and we should just pity her and do for her. At the risk of using the oldest parenting cliche in the history of parenthood, "When we give her an inch, she takes a mile."

For instance, we know that she can dress herself. She knows she can dress herself. Yet, many mornings she chooses to lay in bed and cry about having to dress herself because "it's just so too hard." After she finally realizes that her pity partying isn't going to move anybody, she puts her clothes on and crawls downstairs.

So, we're still really hesitant to do anything that's going to give her an easy way out before she's mastered other ways first. And, I still think this wheelchair is going to sit in our garage for the next 3 or 4 years.