apparently when you live in a house with 20 babies you CAN actually begin to grow eyes in the back of your head....

so tonight i am up...there are a lot of reasons i could site...but its probably because there is a baby dying in our house...i am not even there...house sitting of all things...but my heart and my thoughts rest with aron...except they don't exactly rest...about a week ago the face of dying children began to narrow from a dark blurry idea to something more like an actual image...i was in the hospital where we take our children who have aids and tb waiting for an x-ray...i could sense tension among several staff that passed by and later my concerns were confirmed when they escorted two women through our hallway, both clearly weak...wailing and mourning, one calling out "petit mwen, petit mwen"...my baby my baby...now, i am the one who has been ranting for years about the state of affairs for children around the world...i know and am quick to tell people that 30 thousand children die around the world EVERY DAY because they are HUNGRY...not to mention those who are born with or develop other problems...problems that wouldn't have even been a blip on the radar for me as a baby in the states...but this wasn't 30 thousand mysterious invisible children somewhere....this was ONE baby...this was ONE mother...not mourning the global crisis we face...she mourned only one loss...a loss that filled her whole world...i was taken apart by the realization that the loss of this baby was in some ways just as big as the loss of all the ones that will have died that day...it was one baby...but i am certain the void couldn't have felt any larger if all 30 thousand mothers had been wailing in that hallway with her...we each clung to the child in our own lap...sick though they may have been they lived and breathed and felt suddenly heavier now that we were bearing the common guilt of surviors...but at some point we were each called in...got our examinations, picked up medications, had x-rays taken...bought some rice on the street...got on a tap tap...waited for our rides...everyone was different except that for each of us life kept moving while that mother laid in a chair holding her dead babies clothes...and now that reality has come home with me...once again i am facinated with how life and death, beginnings and ends, the sacred and the profane...they all lay so often side by side in our universes...we blow bubbles and dance with children then force food into a baby's sunken belly...comment on a drawing of kites and triangles while we change a diaper filled with blood...count racing heartbeats and shallow gasping respirations as wild healthy children dance and praise god with along with their favorite dvd all around us...pack a bag of food for a woman who you aren't sure can surive the walk home and then pack the bag of a baby now healthy and headed home with a smiling father...put away toys and time seizures...teach a girl with one hand to sew at the same table where you have scrubbed the burnt flesh of a nine year old with nothing but tylenol to numb her pain...cook and console and laugh and inject...cry and clean...teach and bury...somehow it is all part of the same thing...today dorothy and i stood side by side...me holding sterling and she aron...it was the weirdest moment as i looked into the eyes of a child in whom the lights seem to just be coming on and life beginning to emerge from and dorothy into eyes that seem to be drifting farther away slowly, almost carefully letting go...the reason it was weird wasn't how different their situations seems to be...it was how similar...one didn't feel like a success and the other a failure to me...both life and death are welcome to me...one is my companion for a season and the other my slave forever conquered already for eternity...and the same is true for these babies...life is a gift from god but death is merely a reuniting with him...either way they win...but its ridiculous and insulting even to pretend the loss isn't there...ive already seen it...already felt it...so who is losing, what is lost...and why...i haven't got the first clue...but maybe now i can sleep.

mine and yours....

so some people came by to visit keziah before she left to go to the states for the summer and they brought us some lovely mangos...and a baby kitten....yeah. both kervens and cha cha were immediately smitten with the cat but not too surprisingly the cat favored kerven's calling of the cat and petting over cha cha's chasing and grabbing...hmm. anyway, i could feel a battle coming on over whose the cat was gonna BE...regardless of who it played with...i kept hearing each boy looking for "my cat" (or with cha cha "cat mine") but neither had heard the other so i was just waiting...to give you a little background 4 year old cha cha has moved upstairs and now shares a room with 10 year old kervens...so far cha still calls the room "room kervens" but you know how brothers can be :)...so anyway, like i said i was waiting to see just what was gonna happen with the kitty...until the other night...this is the conversation...

cha cha appears at the doorway to the kitchen after being put to bed...

cha cha, what are you doing up buddy

CAT KERVENS toilette (pooped) in MY ROOM!!

and just like that the cat became kervens'...tell me there isn't a sermon there...

p.s. the room still remains "room kervens" when it needs cleaning...tell me there isn't one there too....

my day...



wake up to the sound of children saying "brush brush stop" downstairs

(to those who do not teach pre-ks how to dance that is the sound of a shuffle being practiced)



walk down the hall to hi-fives for not peeing in my bed - whoo-hoo!

(i had given hi-fives to all the kids who woke up with dry beds...they were returning the favor)



sit in the rocker with isna just whispering in her ear all the beautiful things i believe await her in life...and how precious she is to us, to her adoptive family, and to god



teach cha cha how you hold a baby cat



nap on the floor with a four month old wearing two full leg casts (to correct clubbed feet)



employ some of the child rearing skills i learned at the MP and we decide as a family that



-baseball bats are for outside



-pulling up our pants happens inside the bathroom



-and we do not put lids on containers with kitties inside them



thank you ashley...i have benefited so much from your family's journey...



spend the afternoon dressed in a sparkly top, pink scrub pants, red high heels and a paper tiara...you guessed it...playing sharpay evans for my roomate's high school musical party...fabulous

instruct kervens on how to properly wear said red high heels without breaking them, or his leg

take the gran ti moun yo outside for a little tap dancin...hokey pokey, ring around the rosey, and i see the moon....

snuggle with my ti zwazo a little before bed

remind cha cha of family decision number two...underpants up THEN exit the bathroom

bon nwit tout moun...it was a good day

blog monster returns: rise of the tail end

okay...i did all i could yesterday or the day before...whenever it was that i started this monster blog to bring you up to date and i have a couple of things to say before i bring this beast to a close...

the first is that i realized after writing that first section that writing about this life that way is terribly ineffective b/c it isn't the general info about what i do in a day that deserves recording, it is those little moments that turn the world upside down, the crizazy things that one of the kids (or my mama) says at the breakfast table...it is the flashes and seconds of my day that deserve their own pages of remembering...not the boring overview...so i am sorry and i really am going to try to do better...

the second is it really annoys me that what i put into this little box never ends up looking right when i post my blog...and when i come back to this little box everything still looks right here so i don't even know how to edit it to fix it...so forgive the ridiculous annoyance of the extra spaces, misplaces pictures, and words spelled out with one letter on each line...just take comfort in knowing that instead of wasting my life figuring out this mystery i just trust you to be smart enough to get the gist and i do something worthwhile with that time...like take a nap with a baby...

now where were we...ahhh yes...back in haiti....



well i came back to a ti zwazo that weighed a whopping 14 pounds and has turned into an eating machine...we laugh a lot now about the conversations we had when we first got her and were force feeding her 10cc of formula an hour through an NG tube...we would ponder over whether it was right to force a baby in her condition to stay alive after a certain point...yeah we aren't pondering that about her anymore...she even has one of the other children stealing from other kids and putting it on her plate...and her body is now an alarm clock for the kids' meal and snack times...she will be hanging out and playing and then suddenly go into super crank muffin mode...and without fail you can check the clock and you will find it is time for food...our prayers were also answered when she went to AIDS clinic...the docs are going to put her on the ARV's without treating her first for tb (we were concerned she didn't have the time or immune system left to wait that long)...they want her to be stronger first so she still won't start for another month but it is still a good thing...so keep eating bird!

once i got back into the swing of things it was back to homeschooling now amid a group of toddlers...funny thing is i think kervens was actually way less distracted than i was...:)

i also started dancing with the kids again with the addition of roseline who is a 6 year old staying with us while she gets better from some sores and gets her nutrition back on track...it was so great because all the kids were listening better than ever and jetline has even been coming up with her own choreography...and apparently they have been teaching roseline while i was gone b/c this child who has never danced with us and doesn't speak any english knew all the steps and even what they are called...and she gets crizazy excited every time i pull out our dancebag...i have to say i was pretty proud of my little dancers!

with malnutrition you get all kinds of side effects developmentally and so we have a lot of kids who are behind in language or motor skills that we have been encouraging to catch up...johnny j...one of our aids babies...keziah's aid's baby to be more specific....is one of those...recently he finally started responding to our constant urging and on a recent trip to clinic he randomly said my name in answer to kez's question "keyes sa?" (who is that?) and then on his 2 birthday he came over to me and climbed up just like normal but then proceeded to show me that he could stand up all by himself...because we have been BEGGING this child to show any interest in walking and talking before he was 30 we showed him LOTS of positive attention for his efforts...the result has been that in various forms "casey" is the new "it word" downstairs and walking is the new cool thing to do...so at the same time we have children of several different ages and different developmental levels all learning to walk at the same time and calling "casey, casey" non stop from the basement as they try out their new skill...its really quite facinating...remember this when you pay a kid a lot of attention for something... you WILL see it again!























i got to visit healing hands for haiti for the first and second time...we got poutchino fitted for a wheelchair and took our new baby in to have her clubbed feet cast...and so keziah went to a beach retreat for three days with a youth group and got barely any sun and i spent the day in a clinic and had a sunburn when i got home...ohhhh haiti...






















i made two trips to ti frer for tb clinic with poutchino and miltha and had three people offer me their chilren...

i realized that your whole perception of a luxury changes after you watch a child eat the candy coating off of an m&m and then eat the chocolate...


i had a few of those moments when you think there is something wrong with the computer screen...then you think you are about to pass out...then you realize that you have just been rocking a baby so long that you have forgotten that YOU are moving...not the images before you on the screen...but everyone has those moments, right?


i witnessed a baby leaving our house to go back to their family...my first one other than emily (who went to an orphanage) to actually be here for...it is a good thing but it was really hard to watch them walk into the ravine with her...bye bye bethsaica...





















and for any of you who think i am in anyway tough or hardcore you should know i am being bullied into a daily afternoon nap by a 14lb 2 year old...so yeah.

okay, this is not nearly everything...barely anything really...but its some of the highlights and honestly...this blog has been a shadow hanging over me and i need to move on with my life...:)



so if you are still reading...consider the monster blog slain...

blog monster...or monster blog...whatever..a blog that almost scares me

so in the www. i have discovered something that there is nothing quite like the thought of almost a month of life so very full of things to say and share and tell....and a blog where you haven't said or shared or told any of it....where in the world do you start...and how in the world will you convince haitian internet to load all those hotos...and who without weeks of intense training would be able to hang in for such a blog if you could in fact create it...anyway, bear with me...i am going to try to make this happen...but don't blame me if this thing gets out and eats manhattan or something....

backing up to when my family came to visit...quick re-cap...

mama came to haiti...enough said really.

laura lynn and taniuska did surgery in a clinic.

we threw a birthday party that should go down in some kind of history of parties...20 babies all dressed up in costumes with no tears, no major injuries, and no mental breakdowns...see additional blogging and photos.

mama was amazing in haiti.

we went to the basket shop and saw the inner shopper emerge in my mother...i also almost got stuck in the bathroom.

we stole the big boys from dee dee's boy's home and took them to the park to dorothy's for a movie and out for pizza...yep, domino's in haiti...as i said on facebook...sometimes the boycotts aren't as important as the boys. p.s. mama was amazing.

we walked the ravine...tata scrubbed some heads...me and laura lynn tried to help with the scribing...thank you keziah and mary.

we discovered laura lynn needs an easier name for the sake of all the children in foreign countries who are going to love her.

there was lots of hugging and loving of babies...same as usual but this time with 6 extra arms.

mama was was in haiti...and did i mention she was amazing...i love that woman. and the two other chicks she came with did pretty good too :)

okay...update on my visit to supersickytonville...turns out that the 6 days i spent on the floor in our room was care of klebsiella pneumonia...some kind of non-strep throat infection...and we discussed when i got back just how ridiculous my behavior was during that week...mesi jezi for good roomates who kept me hydrated and got me well :)

so just about the time i was starting to feel like i might could start functioning again it was time for my trip home to the states...i had felt very strongly that i was supposed to go back to GA for my brother's play at college (he was willard hewett in footloose...and was so so great) so even though it seemed kind of silly i planned my trip that way....by the time i was supposed to go there were so many reasons that i knew i was supposed to be going home at that time and i was very thankful i had trusted the leanings of my spirit...and then the day before i left i heard that some dear friends of mine had lost their 15 year old nephew/grandson/son/cousin/brother under some extra heartbreaking circumstances...even with delays and my 13 hour layover (it took me 26 hours to make two 2 hour plane rides...you figure it out) i was able to get home just in time for the funeral. what a blessing to get to put my arms around those people that day...again mesi jezi for telling me what to do back in january. i wouldn't trade anything for being able to hug those beautiful people that day...and to say goodbye to blake for now with the many many people who loved him so much - well worth an extra plane ticket.

also while i was home i got to spend some lovely time with my parents, with my dog - who is terribly fat btw, i got to put my underwear in the dryer so now i don't have to roll them up to keep them on (one of the great things about handwashing your clothes is how skinny you get to feel...more and more with each washing!)

it also turns out that bank of america is taking such good care of me and my money that they decided to take action in response to some strange spending behavior...mind you, they didn't have any trouble with all the money being spent in haiti on my card...it wasn't until i got back to the states and was spending money in the country they thought i was in all along that i suddenly couldn't use my card...ahhh the BOA...

on thursday natasha rae and i had a lovely spend the night at the farm...where we spent the night talking! nothing like going to bed at five and getting up at seven...so worth it though...i love that girl.

friday night i spent at the MP (sunny brooks market place) hostessing when i wasn't distracted by people i wanted to visit with and listening to gitlo jam with sam and the occasional customer who felt like gettin up there with him...spent some qt with beaver out by the grill and if we had had like maybe 7 more minutes i think he could have had my whole life figured out...oh well...next time :)

after we closed down we headed to the brookses to get ready for RESCUE ME...a peaceful demonstration to raise awareness about the abduction of children by the LRA in uganda and surrounding countries in africa...i have to say the perfect way to spend my weekend at home...we painted and worshipped and made shirts and plans...then saturday we headed down to tallahassee to spend the night on the steps of the capital...the event was good and so was the fellowship...even if i was kind of out of it...for some reason part of my heart and mind were still on a certain crowd of short people hanging out in the basement of this house in haiti....

so yeah, good visit...i think it was a good "practice round" for my actual going home in june...otherwise i think it would have been a million times harder when i realized how naked i feel without a baby constantly in my lap, laying on my chest, hanging on my skirt, crawling on and under and over me all the time...is that weird?

wow...moving right along aren't we...back to haiti...

after a very exhausted drive in a sticky sweet smelling rental car (apparently they don't make car air fresheners in "dogs and dance feet" variety...ahh the blaze) i made my way back to this place...back to haiti...back to the kids...back to homeschooling...back to the roof...back to the crank muffin...back to tap dancing in the back yard...back to "AGAIN" with poutchino...back to thinking of white people as foreigners...back to the roof...back to driving like you are in a video game...back to changing money in the back room at one stop...back to this life i love so much it hurts...and with that we will start again tomorrow...

so ends the monster blog part one....rrraaaaaarrrr!