I noticed after our first Christmas with our older kids, that tree trimming was a huge trigger because it emphasized all the years they’d missed with us as our younger kids oohed and ahhed over their ornament collection from years past. Each ornament had a memory or special story. My parents had also had a tradition where they gave an ornament to each child every year. Our older kids were clearly in an ornament deficit.

That’s when I decided to mount the Ornament Project. I sent out a message to all of our friends and family.

It’s a tradition for Melissa’s parents to get an ornament for the kids every year. The missing ornaments from past years for John, Kayla, Grace, and Ty really stir up a lot of grief and sabotage their sense of belonging. We’ve decided to fix it! On Christmas morning, we’d like to present them with a large box of ornaments…one for every year that they weren’t with us. As friends and family who have loved and supported them during their transition into our house, we’re inviting you to participate in this project by sponsoring an ornament. Please do not feel pressured if you are receiving. We just wanted to extend the invitation as wide as possible. The ornaments don’t have to be expensive or fancy. We thought it would be cool if you sent a little note of encouragement with it. Here are some housekeeping notes:

You may sign up for as many ornaments as you want.

Please mark each ornament with the name and year (even if it’s just with a marker).

In lieu of a physical ornament, you may just send $5/ornament, and I’ll shop for you.

Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks again for loving our kids so well!

[bctt tweet=”Check out this cool ornament project if you have kids by foster or adoption. #adoption #fosterlove” username=”corkboardblog”]

In the message, I also included sign up and delivery deadlines and directed them to a SignUpGenius where they could claim an ornament. Within 24 hours all of the ornaments were claimed! With 3 of the kids each having over a decade of missed Christmases with us, that was impressive.

While everyone was out buying ornaments, I got each of the kids an ornament storage box. The actual opening of the ornaments was a bit anti-climatic (especially considering how proud of myself I was for pulling it off), but there was unspoken, deep appreciation in each of their eyes.

Depending on how big your tree is and how many kids you have (and how old they are), you may want to limit how many ornaments each child may display each year.

What are your best holiday survival tips?

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A version of this post was first published here.

Nothing says I’m waiting for the arrival of a Savior like:

• Overspending on more stuff we don’t need.
• Lying to our kids about where all the stuff came from. (We don’t do this, but I hear there are some families who do.)
• Forcing our kids to sit on a stranger’s lap and even smile about it.
• Sending more stuff to children in developing countries to further evangelise that we need stuff to wait for or celebrate our Savior.
• Cutting down a perfectly healthy tree to bring it into our house as a massive fire hazard.
• Stuffing our temples full of more sugar than anybody needs in a year.

If you love anyone of the aforementioned traditions, more power to you. I’ve been in that season, and it was so fun and joyful and enjoyable. And I may cycle back to it again.

But the fact of the matter is that I have felt absolutely zero motivation to do any of the traditional Christmas preparations this year. We have no tree, no lights, no candles. I have wrapped exactly zero presents, addressed zero Christmas cards, and baked zero cookies.

Instead I’ve been slapped in the face repeatedly with the reality that our family is broken. That I’m a sinful human. That I trigger the trauma of my children. That I’m insufficient. And that life doesn’t stop for any “special” season. People still get sick, meltdown (this even MORE than normal), and need surgery. Neither special dietary restrictions nor trauma take a vacation during Advent.

And, I’m not the only one feeling like a Scrooge. Multiple mom’s have confessed their guilt to me this year about skipping a typical family tradition or just deciding to do less than the cultural average.

I wish a had pulled these thoughts together sooner for them because, “out of the whole Christian year one season that is especially fitting for liturgical lament is the season of Advent.”

I’m also pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t even want us feeling guilty about neglecting the traditions that are specifically designed “for him.” The nativities, the Jesse tree, the Advent wreath, etc. Again, I’m not knocking them, but I want you to feel released from the guilt. We can still point our children to Jesus and even instill the importance of his birth in a myriad of other ways and even …gasp… during other times of the year. No one is a failure if their kids don’t hear Luke chapter 2 during December.

I’m going out on a limb and claiming that Jesus will understand if you lament this year and just lay in the fetal position in a bedroom (next to a bathroom without Christmas hand towels, down the hall from a treeless living room, in a house without a single exterior light) and wish he would come sooner rather than later.

I’m betting that He’ll meet you in that space with a quiet reminder that He did come and gift us with Hope and the Holy Spirit, and He will back.

However you are waiting for Jesus this year, I wish you a Merry and Guilt-free Christmas!

We have a tradition of visiting two local train gardens sometime during the Christmas season. It’s a tradition that my grandparents started with my mom decades ago.

When I was a photography student in high school, the train garden (especially the one at the fire house where the lights cycle on and off) was one of my favorite places to shoot. The lighting was challenging and the subject matter changed each year. Except Waldo. He’s almost always there to find.

It’s fun when the content chosen reflects other favorite traditions. #GrinchReading.

Over a decade later, some things never change. It’s still a great venue to practice technical photography.

The photos in this post are from December 2013.

Notables since the last update:

• Cafe Tesfa is officially Cafe Tesfa complete with window decals and a new sign. We’ll be rolling in the new year with the addition of soups and paninis and fun happenings.
• Some unforeseen transitions sent one of the kids into a downward spiral that put us through a refiner’s fire we’d rather not experience again. The good news is that God is faithful, and we were humbled by the community that rallied around us. Thankfully that season happened while we still routinely had extra adults in the house. Unfortunately, Melissa’s sanity-keeper is moving on to better and more stable opportunities. While we’re miss her, the timing is right.
• Our experience reaching out to the State for resources for the kids did not go well and re-kindled our passion for waking the Church to the needs of post-placement families. In that vein, the Grafted launched the 2015 Small Group Tour and Praying Partners.
• Speaking of church, check out our thoughts on re-thinking church here. If you’re local, we’d love to have you join the conversation in the new year.

We hope this un-Christmas card finds you well and anxiously anticipating the celebration of the birth of our Savior.

P.S. We have enjoyed those of you who have it together enough to send the beautiful cards that hang in our kitchen gallery.

We tried something different this year.

We opened presents (except stockings) on Christmas Eve after church and after dinner.

I was a little worried it was going to be too late of a night and that we would have to deal with multiple breakdowns.

However, everyone was on their best behavior (despite what the attitude above may suggest).

There turned out to be multiple advantages to this schedule of events.

For one, everyone looks fab in the Christmas photos rather than in their pajamas with bedhead and sleep in their eyes.

More importantly, it takes away the need to get up at crack of dawn on Christmas morning.

We were all still asleep at 9AM. Now that is a Merry Christmas!

Christmas Eve and Christmas morning brought to you by Pops and Nana!

As you can see, it’s a photo-worthy experience for all. Just kindly ignore that evil look from my Hubby. Sometimes he’s Grinchy about photo opportunities.

Ty and Mia are the only ones small enough to fit on Pops’ lap during the reading. Mia started a tradition a couple years ago where she does a dramatic interpretation as the reading progresses. That girls cracks me up.

The cousins (we use that term loosely in our family) from my generation who attend the Grinch event pick names to get gifts for our kids. One day I hope our kids fully comprehend how loved they are.

 Photo credit: Nicole Renee

While you’re invited to poke around the archives to see what 2012 has been like for our family, I’ll hit some highlights for you with our adoption as the backdrop.

By January, we were hitting our groove in homeschooling and knee-deep in adoption paperwork.  PJ also started playing ice hockey and all 5 of us started Tae Kwon Do.

On February 24th, our dossier (stack of paperwork that represented our family to the Ethiopian government) was on its way to Ethiopia.  Meanwhile we were earning our first Tae Kwon Do belts and hiring a friend to help us start a coffee shop that would make our orphan care non-profit self-sustainable.  We also celebrated with friends who welcomed home one of the girls from last spring’s Ethoipian host program who is now Mia’s BFF.

A few short weeks later, in March, we accepted referrals for two unrelated teens. This was the month we travelled to Texas to be trained as trainers for Empowered to Connect’s PREPARE and CONNECT courses and hosted our good friends the Polks (who are now living in Ethiopia).

Life went into high gear in early April when we found out we needed to be in Ethiopia by April 30th for our court date.  Thanks to all your support, we raised over $4000 toward our adoption and hundreds of pounds of donations.  On April 28th, all five of us plus Patrick’s father left for a rather eventful trip to Ethiopia.

After spending the first half of May in Ethiopia, we settled in to wait for John to pass court.  Meanwhile, we caught up on gardening, and Ty finished his preschool year ending our 6-year RCCS era.

By the end of June, Kayla was almost cleared for travel but John still hadn’t passed court.  Stateside, Mia turned 7, Patrick and I celebrated being married for 10 years.  I also spent a lot of time pre-planning our school year.  We spent the entire summer making “tentative” plans since we never knew when we could get a call to travel.

July finally showed some movement as Kayla was cleared for travel and John finally passed court.  I went into nesting mode, organizing and rearranging everything in sight.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you nesting is due to pregnancy hormones.

August was another whirlwind month as John was cleared for travel, and we completed paperwork to accept at THIRD REFERRAL (John’s cousin). This started a race to get a court date before seasonal closures (and to avoid an additional trip to Ethiopia).  At first we planned to travel on Saturday 8/18.  Instead we received a phone call Monday 8/13 that we needed to appear in court on Friday 8/17 so we (just Patrick and I this time) jumped on a plane 48 hours later on Wednesday 8/15.  We took custody of John and Kayla when we arrived in Ethiopia Thursday.  This started my quest to take one photo a day for the next 365 days to visually chronicle our adjustment from a family of 5 to a family of 8.

I’m not quite sure how to describe September. It’s a unique situation when you are celebrating and adjusting adding 2 new family members but life is still on hold as you wait for yet another travel call.  We jumped into school with both feet and managed to sneak in a trip to Connecticut to see Patrick’s family.  God was gracious enough to grant us a honeymoon period, and well fell into a comfortable routine that included school, soccer, and Tae Kwon Do.

We made our third trip to Ethiopia on October 16. By this trip, we had spent so much time in country, the locals were calling us “Half-besha” (Habesha means “Ethiopian” in Amharic).  Just before we left, Ty reached a huge milestone when he was released from speech therapy after almost 3 1/2 years.

Just when we thought all the paperwork was finished, we filed our first post-placement report (totalling more than 14 pages) in November. November also marked the end of our honeymoon period so let the sibling spats begin! There are 15 different relationships just between the kids. We’ve had to be creative in helping the everyone focus on the positives of each other.

December has been abuzz with advent activities and Christmas preparations.  To make gift giving more manageable, the kids are doing a secret santa exchange.  The biggest news is that Patrick finishes his Masters in Theology Program this month after 5 1/2 long years!

We’d love to hear from you so please leave a comment or drop us an email. There’s also a chance to win a great “year-in-review” calendar until tomorrow. Just click here to see it.

Click here to see all the photos and captions from the {365} The First Year Home project or just enjoy the slideshow (sorry, no captions) below.

How does you handle holiday family juggling?

Time in CT usually means time with the cousins (or at least two of them)!

There aren’t any cousins on my side but there are 9 all together on Patrick’s side.  My in laws welcomed 9 grandkids over just 5 years! 

Besides hanging out with cousins, we took advantage of the wide selection of hockey equipment found in New England over B-more, visited Kringle and Yankee Candle factories, and ate lots of food.  Can you say monkey bread?

It should also be noted here that we’re thankful for the wonderful guy who got PJ all geared up for hockey.  He was even able to find a helmet to fit his head…even if we did have to pay twice as much. 

Note to shoulder pad manufacturers:  Please make the head opening a little bigger or provide snap openings or something.

Oh, we also took in a CT Whale game.  It’s the most attuned the kids have every been.  The Whale even won!  See Ty’s victory violin? 

He’s been taking his air violin everywhere these days