Tuesday, January 4, 2011

kids say the darnedest things


i'm feeling a little blue today and really missing our boy, so i thought that i share something that has made me smile recently. but first, if you think of it, please say a prayer for our family to be together soon! right now a lot of paperwork needs to be coming together for us to receive our appointment with the US embassy in a timely fashion. i cannot travel very late into march because of my pregnancy so we're asking God to bring our son home sometime in mid-february. thanks y'all!

we all know that kids see the world differently. i love watching my nieces experience the world as they grow, and i love hearing their interpretations of what they are experiencing. particularly, with our adoption of greer, it's been funny to see my 2 nieces' reaction. mikayla, who is 8, and mikenna, who is 6, are very close to ryan and i so they've known about our adoption and pregnancy all along. when we first tried to explain that we were adopting a little boy or a little girl from another country, they were pretty confused. to add to the confusion, they were some of our earliest family members to know that we were also pregnant. at the time that we told them that we were going to adopt a baby and have a baby, the confusion escalated. they didn't really understand the difference, which i think is pretty neat.

in their short little lives, they've experienced the ups and downs of fostering through our experience with R and P, and they've also experienced their parents raising 2 little boys through kinship care. now, they're living through and experiencing us adding a family member through adoption. to them, fostering, adopting, whatever all equals the creation of family and i think that is such an awesome perspective to have at such a young age!!

the night we told the girls that we were pregnant, we asked our youngest niece, mikenna, what she thought about having 2 new cousins. she said that she was of course very excited and began making predictions for what we would have. {now keep in mind, at the time we still didn't have a referral for greer yet so we didn't know if we'd be adopting a boy or a girl or birthing a boy or a girl.} without batting an eye, mikenna blurted out her predictions..."i think we'll have one boy black and one gwurl white". just like that she was hedging her bets for our future. funny thing is, she was right all along!!

since getting our referral for greer, both girls see his picture plastered all over our house and at their nana's house, so he is a pretty frequent topic of conversation. while we were traveling to ethiopia though, it seems the conversations about greer really began to become more frequent. on christmas day, after our LONG trip home from ethiopia, my sister told me about a conversation that she had recently had with mikenna about greer. it went something like this...

mikenna: "it's really good that we're finally going to have a black person in our family."
my sister: "you're right, mikenna. i think so too."
mikenna: "i can't bewieve that we don't already have any black people. we just keep having white people in our family. it's kinda weirwd that we didn't have any before but it makes me really happy."

:) that makes me happy too! i love the innocence that comes with children. mikenna and mikayla obviously recognize that greer has a different color skin than them but they have no idea why and it's really not any big deal to them. i love that they recognize his differences but don't have any of the negative connotations related to their differences.

today, while we wait for our little boy to come home, i am thankful for my little nieces and the joy they bring to our lives.

2 comments:

Bethany said...

Thanks for sharing these cute little things your nieces said! That had me laughing out loud! So cute!!! We are praying that God would bring Greer home VERY SOON! Can't wait to have play dates. =)

jody said...

I am laughing out loud! I love it. I'm going to share it with my sister who has 3 "black" kids!!! Praying for you in your wait!