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: