Brett has been nagging, I mean asking, me to do a follow up post to the one we did on adoption to see what life is like two years after adopting our daughter Rachel. I have been putting it off, mostly due to legitimate reasons. We have became a family of four as I gave birth to our second daughter, Emma, and so life does have that frenetic/blurry/chaotic/kid edge to it that makes it hard [...]
A Tough Miracle Thanks, but I've had mine Every once in a while, when I'm feeling particularly masochistic, I pay a visit to a different church. All usually goes well on arrival. I find an empty spot along the side or at the back, planning a quick escape after the service. Then someone who knows me spots me, and my weakness appears... I love a good chat, and even more, a good cuppa [...]
AN INTRODUCTION It is a silent world, a world devoid of sound. It is an abyss of unknown tunes, of unheard melodies, of nameless songs. The world I belong to is a world where I wake up not to the shrill of an alarm clock, where I walk at the edge of the sea, but cannot hear the waves crashing upon the shore, where I cannot hear dogs barking or the birds flutter above me. [...]
Our eldest daughter Monrovia, who is now six and a half years old, was born profoundly deaf. We first heard the words “profound hearing loss” when she was three weeks old, after failing multiple hearing tests. At the time I felt pretty overwhelmed by first-time parenthood, so the idea of parenting a newborn with special needs felt quite heavy and scary. Here’s an excerpt from an email I wrote to friends after the appointment in [...]
This is a repost that Jess graciously allowed me to share - you can find the original over here and you can, and really should, consider following her blog, 'Jess in Process' - in this piece she talks about losing her four year old son, Henry, 14 months ago, to a brain tumour. FULL DISCLOSURE ***WARNING: GRAPHIC/DISTURBING CONTENT*** How have you been, Jess? I hear this from time to time. It’s been 14 months since my 4-year-old [...]
i don't, as a rule, share anonymous posts... however, this IS my blog and so i make up the rules and figured this one deserved an exception. It is a post from a friend of mine who scribed a very different angled approach to the whole masturbation/pornography struggle that so many of us have or had and i thought it might be helpful, or at the very least, interesting: Three Quick Awkward Memories: 1. In [...]
[Dani is a friend that tbV and i met while working with the Simple Way and she currently lives in San Francisco, which is just across the water from us, this is a piece she wrote a year ago which was published in Sojo.net and which she offered to share with us] When my intoxicated friend leaned in to kiss me, I didn’t think I was just the most readily available girl. No, I convinced [...]
Lex: Being single in a world and a community where relationships are celebrated and held up in high regard can be incredibly difficult…particularly when your single status is not a conscious choice, but rather a default at this point in life! People chuckle (and relate!) when you refer to your self as having a Bridget Jones kind of moment – the moment where you want to eat yourself silly on chocolate, or drink too much [...]
the purpose of Taboo Topics is dealing with some life issues that affect a lot of people but that are rarely if ever spoken about or into... and this topic, ABORTION, must be one of the hugest of those... what to a lot of people might seem like a black and white, right or wrong kind of topic suddenly becomes a lot more tricky and entangled when you talk about decisions that have to be [...]
one of my facebook friends [Catherine Rogers] posted a status about the overabundance of brett FISH anderson articles/blogs/videos on her newsfeed and the struggle to pick which to give her time to [not complaining that there was so much but that there was too much choice] and so somehow five minutes later i found myself looking back through some early pre-Simple Way blog posts i made two or more years ago and finding a bunch [...]