A lovely, single friend of ours finalized the adoption of a little boy last week. Another young couple we know filed their application to adopt today. At a party on Saturday, I exchanged adoption stories with a stranger who heard me mention that we had adopted our daughter. Like we, they will have a great […]
Category Archives: Love
On the job
posted by Weeks
I often walk Kip (and our prior foster dogs) through a large park in our village where a handful of homeless people gather outside the public library when it’s warm. We’re training him so I always carry treats and a clicker on walks. Yesterday I saw a couple of people (whom I guessed to be […]
The Cookie Box
posted by Weeks
A group of friends has been very busy this weekend preparing for the arrival of a refugee family. There have been countless Facebook posts within our group. There’s been a group who have spent all weekend cleaning an apartment that the landlord did not prepare sufficiently. Bill and I made quilts for the children in […]
Chapter One
posted by Weeks
Today is a very happy anniversary of sorts for my cousin Marie and I. Marie and I had an emotional first meeting on this day a year ago in a hotel in California while I was teaching at Road to California. Marie is one of many descendants of a long relationship between my great, great […]
Pet Blessings
posted by Weeks
My friend and minister Britt asked me last week to bless pets at our church service today. She knew I was “an animal person” but I warned her that I would cry because I’m always moved by the relationship between people and their pets. She assured me that “tears are holy things” and not to […]
Tribute
posted by Weeks
Stop what you’re doing right now. You need to watch this. You need to watch it to remember the power of music. You need to remember that great music transcends race, class, position in life. And you need to watch this because whatever you think about who’s creative and who isn’t is going to be […]
Seeing Abundance
posted by Weeks
I had a beautiful moment this evening that hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve always thought that happiness isn’t found in winning the lottery or having great achievements as much as it is contentment with how you’ve spent your time and energies. It’s that Sheryl Crow line “It’s not getting what you want. […]
It’s Here
posted by Weeks
It’s here. Today is the day I meet some members of my family I didn’t know existed. I wrote a post last fall sharing that our family discovered a branch of the family tree was missing. It was missing because my grandmother’s uncle had had a long-term relationship with an African-American woman, a descendant of […]
Homemade Pep Rally
posted by Weeks
Our daughter Sophie has always been a science and math kid. I knew this was going to be a big part of her life when she asked me the following question while walking over the Millenium Bridge in London at age 5: “If the supports for the bridge have to be built with concrete, and […]
The Real Family Tree
posted by Weeks
My head has been full this week of information I learned about my family tree. Both sides of my family arrived in the US prior to the Revolutionary War. Both sides of my family lived in the South. I learned that my very well-documented family tree on one side has been missing a branch. The […]
Why I’m in a Hurry
posted by Weeks
I turned 54 today. Truth be told, as a child I didn’t know how long I’d live. There were three separate times before the age of 30 when I thought I was going to die because of complications with my asthma. That leaves a pretty big impression on you when you’re, say, 7 years old. […]
Grown-Up Love
posted by Weeks
Dear Revlon, We won’t even get into the irony of choosing Halle Berry to represent “true love stories [that] never have endings” because that’s pretty insulting to the two guys she divorced and the guy she had a child with before she married her current husband, but I digress. If you’re going to put up […]
13
posted by Weeks
Our family turns 13 today. On May 30, 2002, Bill and I stood in a hotel hallway in Nanchang in Jiangxi province nervously awaiting the first time we would meet out daughter. As I saw the parade of 10 foster mothers carrying 10 orphans into the hotel I worried that I wouldn’t be enough and […]
Girlfriends
posted by Weeks
I realized 24 hrs before we were to host the first of two parties for our daughter’s friends this week that I had a massive respiratory infection and was having a hard time breathing. I began taking steroids and antibiotics per my doctor’s email (my doctor trusts my judgement about my asthma so much that […]
Designing a Pregnancy
posted by Weeks
This morning there’s an outreach activity at our church where we’ll be packing up baby supplies for new mothers who can’t afford or don’t have access to diapers, onesies and such. When I walked into the store with my list of things I needed to get, it all came flooding back to me. I’m sharing […]
Bunny Prints
posted by Weeks
At last. Easter. What must it have been like to discover the body of Jesus had disappeared? Although there are so many wonderful writings about that morning, my memories of Easter morning always remind me, oddly, of my late mother in law, Connie Kerr. The first Easter I spent with her Bill and I were […]
Bob and The Radioactive Guitar
posted by Weeks
I posted last week about our friend Bob who has been undergoing massive amounts of radiation to fight his second round of cancer. He has been in a hospital in San Francisco is a room isolated because he is “hot,” meaning he’s radioactive. His body is so radioactive that everything that he touches and everything […]
An Appreciation of Michael Graves
posted by Weeks
“Design is a tool we use to touch people, engage their senses and enhance their lives.” Michael Graves Art & Design Chances are that before 2000 you had never heard of Michael Graves. And if you shopped in Target at that time you might remember that its products looked very different than they do now; […]
Next to the Kimchi, Words to Live By
posted by Weeks
I happened to be in a massive Korean supermarket this week. Along one wall of the store was a food court so Bill and I decided to eat lunch. Seated at the metal tables with plastic trays holding our food I noticed behind the counter a sign on the refrigerator next to the food inspection […]
Prayers for Bob
posted by Weeks
Four years ago Bob and Rebecca were the happy parents of 3 great girls all at the same school with our daughter. Bob got cancer. Rebecca nursed him through it, managing her job and caring for the girls. Bob got better and soon after Rebecca died suddenly of an aneurysm. Our community sobbed and sobbed […]