St. Joseph’s Vanguard And Our Lady’s Train

I don’t know what it is about baby stuff, but I–I hope other young mothers understand–am a sucker for cuteness. Check out some of the things that I’ve found so far:

Baby Dress–have to wait to buy any of these dresses until we actually get a baby and know her age. The baby boy clothes are a little less sweet but still cute:

Christening Gown–I can’t buy one of these until we are actually able to adopt.

Crib Bedding

Okay, apparently I like Battenburg merchandise.

For diapers, I think I’m going to go with BumGenius because they are one-size-fits-all; this is important for us, since we won’t know the age of our infants until the day they arrive at our home. Special thanks to Mrs. Fruit for introducing me to BumGenius.

I have my eye on some furniture but am not ready to buy it quite yet. And, finally, who can resist Montessori baby stuff?

At first, we were under the impression that we would foster a baby for a year. Then, we learned that a year is the longest time possible to foster, and actually, 6 months is usually more common.

Most recently, however, we talked with two foster moms who care for babies and both said that their usual amount of time with a baby is 2 weeks; 4 months was the longest a baby had ever stayed with one of the mothers. Yikes! I’m not sure if I can handle a 2-week stay. That doesn’t seem like quite long enough–no time to establish a routine or catch my breath or normalize a sleep schedule.

There’s so much uncertainty with this process. Devin and I know of two different couples who both were able to foster two babies a piece and adopt all of them. On the other hand, we’ve met one family who fostered babies for a year with the hope of adopting and was unable. I’m not really comfortable with the not-knowing but that may just be what Our Lord wants for me. Dear Hannah and Elizabeth, please pray for me.

Alpha 1 version is up for brave souls to try.

You can scroll down that page and read my alpha introduction to the game.  It uses Silverlight 2 Beta 2, so just follow the directions to install it (it’s fairly fast), and email me if there are problems.  Have fun!

What a lovely place. I experienced the perfect moment yesterday evening, sitting on a bench in a grove of oak trees, looking west over the vineyard at the sunset, enjoying the sweet breeze, eating artichoke-parmesan fritters and listening to the plunkings of the guitarist seated nearby.

The wine is great, especially the Verentino. It’s only 30 minutes from South Austin and a lovely drive through Texas hills. Enjoy!

Yesterday, I was reminded that people are good. We had a little break during our 6-hour Behavior and Crisis Management class and were chatting with our fellow participants. I asked the woman next to me the reason for her interest in foster care; she explained that she and her husband have already chosen the profile of a 7-year old boy on the TARE gallery whom they were interested in adopting. “But,” she said, “I’d really like to adopt enough boys for a whole baseball team” Her husband grinned and rolled his eyes. The woman to my left, Jennifer, who is currently adopting a sibling group, 3 and 5 years old, agreed; “I want to adopt, like, 15 children, and sometimes I make my husband nervous.” We met her husband on Thursday at our Psychotropic Meds class, and I don’t think he’s that nervous–he’s clearly smitten with their adoptive children. Many of our other classmates shared their sentiments, and we all laughed.

It was refreshing to see such goodness. We were talking about children as a source of joy, not as burdens or bothers. And, the gusto was contagious, making us all a little breathless as we contemplated opening our homes to many many children. Just as negativity and fear can spread, so does love, igniting nearby hearts and wreathing faces in smiles. Laughter seemed to bubble up inside of us at the audacity of generosity. Absolutely lovely.

Psychotropic Medications. If you have any questions about such chemicals, just ask me tomorrow; I promise to answer all your questions.

Devin and I are beginning to compile lullabies that we’ll sing to our babies–don’t laugh, Devin has a good voice, and I think men can sing lullabies, too. We especially like: Raglan Road, an Irish ballad–melancholy but beautiful; Kindle My Heart, from the sweet movie, “A Little Princess”; and Suo Gan, a lovely Welsh lullaby featured in “Empire of the Sun”–I’ll sing the English translation.

From the Family Research Council, more of what most pro-lifers already know about Sen. Obama but worth making clear as he continues to deny that he voted to let babies born alive be tossed aside and left to die–whether in 5 minutes or hours, as it sometimes took.

For all of his stirring speeches, even Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) can’t talk himself out of the controversy that’s emerged over his position on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA). The legislation, which protects newborns who survive an abortion from infanticide, became a federal law in 2002. In Illinois, Obama actively opposed an identical piece of legislation as a committee chairman, stating later that he would have endorsed it had the bill contained the same language as the federal version. When it surfaced that he voted against the BAIPA, Obama lied in several interviews, including this one with Chicago Tribune in 2004 in which he told reporters that “had he been in the U.S. Senate two years ago, he would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.” This week, the National Right to Life Committee uncovered new documents proving that the Illinois version of the Act was taken verbatim from the congressional bill, which means that the man running for president has been lying about his position on the issue for six years. The deception continues on his website, where a June 30 “fact check” claims that the Illinois and federal bills “did not contain . . . exactly the same language.” Is it any surprise that a man who referred to babies as a “punishment” would vote for the killing of innocent children who survive abortions? As David Limbaugh writes in yesterday’s column, “Are pro-life Obama supporters so selfishly hooked on a feeling… that they’ll back Obama and his party in the most immoral crusade since slavery? It appears so.”

Additional Resources
David Limbaugh: The ‘Making Abortion Rare’ Hoax
Jill Stanek: New documents show Obama cover-up on born-alive survivors bill

Here are our pictures from the Texas Alliance for Life Safari day:

It’s looks like the Serengeti but it’s actually just south of Austin around the landfill run by Waste Management.

Totally awesome–I’m full of American pride.

From a farmer of the Madonna House community:

Why wait?  Give of yourselves.  Why are you saving your personal energy resources?  Unless you learn to live beyond your energy resources, you will miss something essential.  Unless you learn to give of yourself–here, now, today–you may go all through life and never experience the daily joy and happiness of giving full measure of your heart’s blood.

Happily, a local gardener has begun setting up a farmstand in our neighborhood on Saturday mornings. His stand is located right next to the Shell station on Amherst and Adelphi, in the Millwood neighborhood between Parmer and Duval. This morning, we purchased 8 lovely medium-sized tomatoes (everyone knows that garden tomatoes are the best) for $4, 3 large zucchini for $2, and 2 green/red bell peppers for $.75 each. He also had lots of peaches and plums, garlic and tomatoes, okra and fresh eggs and broilers for sale. Let’s keep him in business, Milwood residents.

Devin has kept you all posted about our ongoing foster-adoption training. We’re having a wonderful time and experiencing growing excitement about welcoming a child/children into our home. We learned Thursday evening that Arrow Project, the agency with which we’re working, receives many newborns. Apparently, these babies are born with addictions or born in the jail, and their mothers lose temporary custody, meaning that they need an immediate home. That’s when we get the call.

Can you imagine? We wake up one morning, having no idea that we’ll become foster parents that afternoon when baby is ready to leave the hospital. I keep trying to think this through, hoping that I can mentally prepare myself for such a drastic and wonderful event. I fail, however. I don’t know what can prepare me more than I already am and am praying that the Holy Spirit helps me if I’m forgetting anything.

Devin has generously given me approval to begin preparing baby’s room, so I’ve already chosen curtain and a few other things. Because we don’t know whether we’ll get a boy or girl, I’m decorating the room in neutrals, with khaki walls, white eyelet curtains, and then I’ll add pink or blue touches when we know for sure. I, also, need to buy glass bottles for feeding and the ingredients for homemade organic formula, as well as diapers and so on. I’ll keep you posted. And, please pray for us that we are able to handle this transition as gently as possible.

There’s those little bits of sunshine that brighten your life, and one of them for me and Katie is an elderly man who we pass by in our car while driving to our parish.

The parish is in a neighborhood, and about once or twice a month, when we drive through the neighborhood he is walking, oftentimes with one of his grandchildren; he has a coffee mug in his hand, and his favorite shirt has in big letters on the front: “GRANDPA”.

How wonderful that this extended family is so close that the grandchildren take walks with their grandfather every week!  All seems right with the world when we see him, and he knows our car well enough now to wave at us when we pass by.

I hope one day I will have a shirt like that and grandchildren who will want to take walks with me.

I’ve spent less time at our computer the past few weeks, and the time I have been on it, I have been using to work on completing the Tower Defense game, hence the sporadic posting.

This fall I am facilitating a men’s book study group called Men at Work at my parish, and by God’s grace, a great group of guys have joined it, so I am looking forward to that.  Also, I am going to be coaching a boy’s soccer team with my Dad starting in about two weeks, which I am looking forward to but also will consume a lot of free time.

Finally, and most important of all, we are taking the foster-adoption classes; next week we have three during the week lasting for 2 - 3 hours and then a 7 - 8 hour one on Saturday; meanwhile we are filling out the reams (literally) of paper work for the application process.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way, but we have had a full schedule–how much fuller will it be if God blesses us with a baby or two?! 

And a last thought: I’ve gotten a bit burned out about the presidential election–it’s something that can really bother me as a person with a melancholic temperament, so I have to step away from it for a while and leave it on the back burner.

The big news this week about John Edwards’ infidelity is sad; I feel the worst for his children who have had to see their father’s shameful behavior trumpeted on the headlines; may God bless his wife and children and lead him and the other woman to repentance, forgiveness, and deep conversion of heart.  How vital is the virtue of chastity!  And how much is every man tempted to lust and infidelity, which knows no political parties?

Oh yeah, happy memorial of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)!

A great success!

Katie and I plan to work with Arrow Child and Family Ministries, a Christian, non-profit organization founded by a man who grew up with an abusive family and then in the foster-care system. They seem like a really dedicated, loving group of persons.

We learned a lot more about the foster/adoption process, and also learned how organizations like Arrow help prospective foster-adopt parents like us: Basically, the State is primarily concerned with reuniting the children with the birth parents, if possible, while these organizations are advocates for the children and for us, who hope to adopt them.

The State relies heavily on these organizations to help them; Arrow alone is currently helping over 100 children in foster care and has 75 families who are fostering or foster-adopting or adopting. The State caseworkers apparently have really tough jobs with overwhelming numbers of cases, so these groups are the ones who meet regularly with the foster parents and children to assess how things are going; they also do the home screenings of prospective families, teach these mandatory pre-service classes, etc.

Arrow is unabashedly Christian, which is also really refreshing. This month we have a fairly intense regimen of classes to take, including an 8-hour one on a Saturday, but Katie and I both continue to feel that God is leading us in this direction, so we are very excited about the prospect of adopting children!

Father Alberto Borruel!

Fr. Alberto celebrated Mass at St. William’s this past Sunday and demonstrated himself to be a very faith-filled priest right away, thanks be to God.

He spoke of his delay in transitioning to St. William’s from Brenham, Texas, which was caused by him going to World Youth Day with 14 young people from his parish there.  The masses of young people were chanting “Benedictus, Benedictus” and “Jesucristo, Jesucristo!” he said.

It is such a blessing and so exciting to have another holy priest assigned to our parish, especially after Fr. Juan Carlos, who served God and us so faithfully, moved on to a new parish.

It seems to be back up now.

Hopefully it will stay that way, though I need to do some things to make sure that no more trouble happens.

The blog was down from Friday sometime through yesterday, and what I think happened was that hackers used some kind of program to exploit a security vulnerability in Wordpress, the blog software I use, since I had not upgraded to the very latest version (2.6 currently).

As a result, my server company shutdown the devinrose subdomain of my site, which is where the blog lives, and I had to spend several hours upgrading Wordpress using only FTP and not the nice clean web interface, talking with their technical support, emailing their admins, et cetera, before finally they said things were back online, but even then they didn’t work because the subdomain had quit propagating through the internet’s DNS servers blah blah blah now things seem to be working, but I need to install some plugins and ban people who are probably spammers blah blah.

Your patience is appreciated. 

Just been thinking about all of the poor children who have no parents nor family to love them:

And you ask me what I want this year
and I try to make this good and clear
just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days

cause I don’t need boxes wrapped in strings
and designer love and empty things,
just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days

Better days…waiting to be adopted by a family who will promise to love them forever.

The big and little chickens:

The coral vine beginning to blossom (with pink flowers), which the bees are gonna love.  My apologies for the bad photo:

Katie and I learned during our adoption information meeting that the way in which babies (0 - 1 year old) are usually adopted is through foster-adopt.

Babies are taken from their birth family when they have been abandoned, neglected, or abused; oftentimes the family, very sadly, has a history of harmful behavior toward their children, and so the State takes the babies away.

The parents have one year to change their behavior and show that they can be good parents; during this time, the baby is placed with a foster family. It is so important that the baby learn to bond (or “attach”) to a family at this age; even if the baby is later removed from the foster family to be reunited with her birth one, much good has been done because if the baby learned to bond, they can learn to bond again.

Children who fail to learn to attach can develop reactive attachment disorder, a frightening disorder that negatively affects the child her entire life.

The “risk” taken by such a foster family is that, after many months or even the year has passed, the baby could be given back to the birth parents if their behavior has improved sufficiently. It must be very difficult then for the foster family who had hoped to adopt the baby.

Nonetheless, Katie and I are seriously considering first being open to foster-adopting a baby. The caseworkers we have spoken with told us that there are many babies in the 0 - 1 age range who come up for fostering, and thus there is great need for foster parents for these babies.

How soon could it be before we were given a baby to foster-adopt? Amazingly, it could be in as little as three months! When we learned this, it took me aback. I could be a father in three months? Wow.

To finish this post, I want to give you just a few of the sobering statistics that we were given about child abuse here in Texas and last year alone:

• Child Protective Services (CPS) received 240,688 reports of child abuse or neglect
• Of these, 71,344 Texas children were known to be confirmed victims of abuse and neglect.

That was only in 2007 in Texas. It is hard to imagine the horror that so many children suffer.

They also apprised us of what they call “disproportionality”, which for Texas means that African-American children are represented at a higher rate in the system than in the general population:

• !2% of the Texas’ children population is African-American, but 29% of the children in state conservatorship are African-American
• African-American children spend more time in the system, wait longer for adoption than other children, and age out of foster care without an adoptive family at a high percentage.

How vital is the family for the upbringing of children! And children deserve a true family, a good family, a family who will foster a civilization of love where all members are treated with respect and given the care they need to grow and fulfill their God-given vocations.

So that is what Katie and I are thinking about currently. We are prayerfully considering which foster/adoption foundation to work with (who in turn works directly with the State but who also provides many services and much wisdom), and the next step will probably be to take our PRIDE classes, which will teach us more about what it means to foster or adopt these children.

Please say a prayer for us if you think about us.

Here’s the latest screenshot of my Silverlight Tower Defense game:

There are currently five distinct tower types and images to go along with them; the cloud-looking things are the first enemy type that has been created, with the life meter directly over it.  The clouds animate as they move, getting bigger and smaller (because the enemy is supposed to be a ferocious “blob” creature).

I was struck recently by the difference between the world leader of 1.1 billion Catholics, Pope Benedict, and the next world leader of the United States of America, either Sen. McCain or Sen. Obama, specifically with regard to their motivations for wanting to be elected to these high positions.

My observation is this: Pope Benedict was reluctant to become the Pope; he didn’t want the position, but McCain and Obama both eagerly desire to become the President.

Cardinal Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict before he became Pope) submitted his request for retirement multiple times to John Paul II–requests denied. He was over 75 years old, the normal retirement age, and he wanted to spend his retirement in his beautiful homeland with his brother, Monsignor Georg.

However, when the College of Cardinals chose him to be the Pope, he humbly accepted their decision as the will of God, and in the past three years has shown himself to be a man after God’s own heart, reaching out to the Orthodox Church for reconciliation, reaching out to those persons abused by priests and others in the Church, proving the silly accusations from the media elite of being “Der Panzer Pope” or “God’s rottweiler” or “the Vatican enforcer” to be completely spurious and ridiculous.

In short, he is the just the man you would want to lead your Church.

How does this differ from our American presidential race today? Well, what have we watched on the news everyday for the past year? Hillary, Barack, McCain, and the other candidates jockeying for position, pushing themselves forward, promoting themselves and all the great things that they will do for the country if elected.

They all desire to be the President, probably for mixed motives, some good and some bad, and they all have realized that in our country’s culture today, you have to promote yourself to make it to the top. You have to have all the answers to every single issue and can never appear to–gasp!–not know the answer on the spot to how to solve world hunger and the energy crisis and radical Islam and the sub-prime housing collapse.

I wish that our political candidates were more like the Pope, reluctant to take up a post with such tremendous responsibility to the 6 billion people in the world and especially to the 300 million Americans.

Toqueville warned of this type of problem happening with a democratic system where people were elected. And we see in the lives of the founders of our country that it used to not be so; there were great men who served the country as leaders reluctantly, out of love of the country and duty, but not selfishly eager.

Can we get back to candidates who have humility and don’t promote themselves like prize fighters? I don’t know, but I hope so.

Our associate pastor, Father Juan Carlos, left our parish this past week to take a new assignment as pastor of a parish in Cameron, Texas.

Near the end of his farewell talk at the end of Mass, after he had thanked our Lord and also us for our love and kindness to himself, he said something to the effect of: “If I have failed to be a good Christian witness to you in any way, I ask for your forgiveness.”

Katie and I were both touched by this act of humility; it is so totally in line with our Christian faith of course–you ask for forgiveness from others–but it is not something you see done publicly very often, and coming from a priest who has only shown us great love and service (e.g. daily Confession), it is that much more moving.

May Christ bless Father Juan Carlos!

We have been asking this question since attending the adoption information meeting put on by the State of Texas’ Child Protective Services (CPS).

We have friends who adopted 5 girls, all sisters, through CPS some years ago, and I believe they ranged in age from 1 or 2 years old to maybe 10 years old; we hope to meet with them sometime soon to learn about their experience adopting their 5 daughters.

Another friend of ours who is well-versed in Montessori wisdom said that she thought that “old” is 4 years old!  That took us aback, since we had been thinking that maybe 12 years old is “old”.

I guess our concern, as you can imagine, is that the older the child is, the more harm has been done to them and therefore their wounds are deeper, their personality, including faults and learned bad behavior, is more ingrained and therefore harder to change for the better.

Yet another friend, however, encouraged me that these children need love, and if they are ever to have a good chance at becoming the persons God created them to be, they are much better off being adopted and loved rather than bounced around from one foster family to another until they finally turn 18 and are on their own, without a family to come home to.

Katie and I are very grateful to all our friends and family who have given us advice or shared their experiences with us about adoption; we are actively discerning whether our Lord desires us to adopt or not, and if so, what age of children, and the wisdom of our loved ones is an important factor in this discernment.

Meanwhile, we did a search recently on the CPS site and found this sibling group had been newly added:

“and its someplace simple where we could live
and something only you can give
and that’s faith and trust and peace while we’re alive

and the one poor child who saved this world
and there’s 10 million more who probably could
if we all just stopped and said a prayer for them

so take these words
and sing out loud
cause everyone is forgiven now
cause tonight’s the night the world begins again”

– The Goo Goo Dolls, “Better Days”

…with the lowest approval rating in the history of our country, refuses to hold hearings to either confirm or reject qualified, nominated judges, whose only misfortune in life is that they have the gall to be Republicans.

This has been happening for a long time now; Chief Judge Robert Conrad has been waiting for over a year to even get a hearing.

Sen. Obama is the most prominent member of the Democratic Senate, and he talks frequently about uniting our country, ending divisiveness and partisan politics, bringing people together with compromise. But the proof is in the pudding: He has not acted to give these judges hearings and so the divisiveness and partisan politics continues, depriving our country of needed judges.

A new book!

I haven’t read it, but I love it already.

Just check out the subtitle: “The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate”

From our recent visit to Katie’s extended family in New Mexico:

With our niece, Ava (or perhaps Addi):

With nephew Adam:

…unscrupulous persons will commit evil actions.

In Guatemala, which has thankfully begun investigations to overhaul their adoption system, people have been abducting babies to put them up for adoption.

Why?  From the article:

Before the reform, foreign couples, mostly from the U.S., paid up to $30,000 to adopt children.

The previous system was so quick and hassle-free it became the second-largest source of foreign babies to U.S. couples after China.

$30,000 for a baby, while 4,000 are aborted everyday here in our country, and it leads to kidnapping in poor countries like Guatemala.  I don’t have a magic solution, but surely we can see that something is wrong with this situation.

It’s tough to find clothing that is feminine, fashionable, and modest, and I was delighted yesterday to stumble upon the website for Shabby Apple clothing. It’s featured in the newly published Eliza magazine, which, from what I understand is an initiative of young women who are members of LDS. They did a great job with the magazine; it’s hip, chic, and features really cute clothing.

Check it out and consider subscribing. And, thanks, Mormon sisters, for helping to promote good fashion sense in such a spectacular Audrey Hepburn way.