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

We never talked about race at the dinner table when I was growing up. I lived in an affluent town in Southern California that was 85% white and 15% Hispanic, and as a little blond-haired blue-eyed girl, I was blissfully unaware that racism was still prevalent in the US.  Until I went to college in Boston. My roommates freshman year--two black young women from New York City--became my best friends, and the first black people I had ever known. As I got to know them deeper and my friendship circles began to expand, my eyes were opened to blatant racism and microaggressions my black and brown friends experienced. I had my first conversations about race when I was 18-years-old, a stark contrast I learned from my new friends’ experiences, in which they were taught early on in childhood to “speak correct English,” always keep their hands visible when shopping, and to be wary of law enforcement. It was heartbreaking to hear their unfair life experiences and it was then that I began my journey