Four days remain in 2022 and I have one book left. Then I will have successfully achieved my New Year’s Resolution to read the entire Bible in one year. While there are many one-year bibles on the market, I chose to read my grandmother’s Women’s Devotional Bible circa 1990. Though it has been well-loved, it’s in exceptional shape for being nearly as old as I am. I know my grandmother read it often, but I don’t think she ever read it cover-to-cover. Nearly every day this year I sat down and read a few chapters, if not a whole book. Most days it was a joy, some days it felt like a chore. Some days I was too busy or exhausted to read, so I caught up on quieter nights. Most of my reading happened after Maya & Mateo went to bed, since it’s hard to concentrate on such dense reading with two toddlers constantly vying for my attention. Many nights they fell asleep to me reading it aloud to them, and many times I had to try and translate the Word on the fly, as Mateo requested, “Español,
I recently found a tiny pair of jeans and a pink chambray shirt in a random bag of clothes in the basement. They were size 6x and XS, and I recognized them immediately as the clothes Sofia wore when she arrived at our home in February 2018. It was the day after Valentine's Day, and it was an emergency familial foster placement. We thought she would only be there for the weekend, but she ended up being a member of our immediate family for four and a half years. She joined our household when Maya was nine months old, and now Maya is size 6x. So it is fitting and bittersweet that Sofia finally got to go back to her mom this summer. We welcomed a scrawny, gap-toothed first grader in February 2018, and said goodbye to a beautiful, gangly preteen in July 2022. Being a foster family is not easy, and being a child in the foster system is even harder. We lived in limbo for four and a half years, waiting with bated breath for each case review and court date. Not being able to receive defin