raising dc

happy endings and new beginings

2007-10-29T13:37:00.000-04:00

after many fits and starts the final punctuation can be added to the raisingdc story.

last friday, sheila and paul (paulette and jennifer's biological parents) signed papers to allow dave and debbie and bobbie and mark to adopt the girls (paulette and jennifer, respectively). this is a miracle of the first magnitude; both sets of new parents have wanted to make their custody of the girls permanent for quite some time, and the biological parents have been resistant even though they know they are not in a position to take care of the girls, and in fact, haven't been for quite some time. after much legal consultation both d/d and m/b decided that the best approach would for them to come out together, meet the biologicals in a united front, and show them their willingness to provide permanence and stability for the girls.

neither kimberly nor i were with the parents when they visited sheila and paul, but we got a readout from dave, who was, as you can imagine, ecstatic. the conversation with sheila lasted about two hours, with her sisters (both high functioning women) and social worker present to be sure sheila understood what she was doing. she was adamantly opposed at the start, refusing even to look at the families when they arrived. however, in time, her heart softened as she realized that she was unable to care for the girls in the way that they needed. when she agreed to sign the papers, she told both families she felt like it was the right thing to do.

after one stressful visit (and dealing with sheila is always stressful) the families drove over to paul's nursing home. there, they met him for the first time and spoke with him about their intentions and what they were offering the girls. again, he was resistant initially. the families brought in a social worker, who could help to ensure that paul understood what he would be signing. within 45 minutes, he had agreed to sign the paper. once signed, he burst in to tears and hugged both families. he wheeled himself out with them to say good-bye, waving and blowing them kisses until they had left the parking lot.

we are amazed at the transformation of paul and sheila. kimberly and i have both felt for some time that what the girls have needed--and what every child deserves--is permanence, safety, and stability. it is a miracle that the way has been cleared for both girls to finally get what they have long deserved.

so, from here, d/d and m/b will go back to arizona and proceed with adoption proceedings. this process will take several months. in the meantime, paulette remains at westridge where she participates in weekly family and individual therapy and, among other things, plays on the volleyball team. (word on the street is that she has a mean serve). jennifer continues to thrive in az. she started junior high this fall (6th grade is part of the middle school there) and, fortunately, finally changed her gmail status message to "i love chris brown" instead of "i love christ brown" which i suspect raised more than a few eyebrows.

as for kimberly and i, this essentially means the end of all our legal responsibilities for the girls (which continued until last week). it has been an unbelievable year and a half. life-changing, as cliche as it sounds, would not be an inappropriate way to describe it. we are both eager to begin a new chapter of our lives--a feeling we have a sneaking suspicion that the rest of the raising dc's cast: dave, debbie, bobbie, mark, and most of all paulette and jennifer may just share.

collecting trash for KIPP

2007-09-24T12:09:00.000-04:00

as you know raisingdc loves KIPP!!! so we have signed up, and hope you will to, to collect yogurt containers and soda bottles and ship them to terracycle. terracycle will give $.o5/soda bottle and $.05 or $.02 for yogurt containers depending on the size of the containers. when you sign up, just choose KIPP DC. just think if the colonial ward decided to do this, how much waste would be saved and how much cash could start flowing into this awesome school.

Program Statistics:

269 spots available

31 total participating locations

This program is only available in CT, DC, DE, MA, MD, ME, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VA, VT and WV

the bottle brigade is hurting:

The Bottle Brigade Needs Your Help to Survive!

The Bottle Brigade™ needs a sponsor and we need your help in finding one! The Bottle Brigade has been hugely successful. So successful, in fact, that our small start up company can barely support the costs and labor needs associated with running the program. Recently the Bottle Brigade reached an amazing 4,000 locations in a little less than a year and a half! We never imagined it would become so popular, so fast. We were doing really well until a change in shipping policies caused by rising gas prices and shipping companies switching to dimensional weight this year. The shipping of our boxes has tripled in cost and because of this we are forced to scale back.

The Bottle Brigade is designed to help teach children about the importance of saving the environment and conserving resources. More then half of our locations are primary schools and teaching these young kids to "reduce, reuse and rethink" is a vital mission of our program. However we simply cannot continue to grow this great program without financial support. With a sponsor we can continue to sign up locations. Sponsorship would help us clear out our waiting list of hundreds of locations. It could also help us to develop an entire recycling and reusing curriculum to send to participating schools!

So we need your help to save this program and allow it to reach its full potential! Here are just a few of the benefits of a sponsorship. The sponsor's name and logo will be on every one of the 10,000 plus boxes we send. The boxes are usually located in high traffic areas. In addition, the sponsor would be credited in every press release that it single-handedly helped save the Bottle Brigade program. This year to date TerraCycle has been mentioned in hundreds of articles (Audited Bureau of Circulation of over 66 million impressions). Most importantly a sponsor will know it's helping America's children save their future. If you are interested in the sponsorship or know someone who would be interested, please review our proposal and press release in the following links.

Word document detailing the sponsorship opportunity
(please be patient, this is a large file)

Sponsorship Press Release

a plea from bobbie

2007-09-17T22:53:00.000-04:00

Dear friends,
We are having to take another trip to Washington,DC in October to convince the birth parents of our soon-to-be daughter to voluntarily sign papers.YIKES!! The great thing is that her birth sisters adoptive parents are going with us for the same thing. Some of you might remember Jason that used to be in our ward--he will be Jenn's birth sister's new big brother. Which will be awesome that both girls get to grow up in LDS homes 20 minutes from each other when they came from across the country! Anyway,what I am asking for is HUGE!! I need prayers that it will be as simple as us going to DC and them signing the papers. Pray that they will see that this is the best way to show love for their daughters. Some of you don't know the back story,but for those of you that do,you know this is what needs to happen. So please,pray with us.
Also,if anybody knows the cheapest way to fly across the country on 3 weeks notice---I'm open for suggestions! We have to get 4 people over there. Both of our families have already put out SO much money trying to make this happen. Especially for Jenn's sister's new family because they have had to travel back and forth several times between here and Utah (where she has been staying for complicated reasons) for the past year to bond with her. Not to mention adoption costs. So,if there's any brilliant ideas that could help us out,please let me know. I've already tried cheap tickets,etc but I'm looking for some deep airline secret that only few people know about,if such a thing is possible.Or if anybody is friends with somebody that owns their own plane,that would be cool too !! :)
But,of course,the prayers are the most important thing!
Thank you so much,Bobbie

more pics from the trip to Disneyland

2007-03-26T22:22:00.000-04:00

Alaina and Jenn on the water rapids ride

Trying to wake Jennifer on the last day, they were all this easy to wake up !!

Disneyland

2007-03-26T22:20:00.000-04:00

For a moment,we were tempted to leave them in there!

sweet children :)

Isn't she a cutie?!

We spent 5 days at Disneyland with 8 children! Yes,we were as tired as you can imagine. But we had a blast.I will let Jen give her comments with a few of mine added in.....My favorite ride is space mountain it is really dark and super fast. My least favorite ride is the hollywood tower of terror it was really scary(so she chickened out) My favorite food was the chicken fingers they were fantastic and good. I met this guy on a bus and when we got off and went on some rides he was going on the rides we were going on. There were twelve people in our group and boy was it a lot. It was hard for my mom and dad to keep track of eight kids(including our friends daughter) in a big place like Disneyland. My foster sister named Anna got lost (for about 30 seconds) luckily my dad found her and my mom was freaked out, she was so worried i would be too if i was her.

That's the end of Jen's comments so I'll fill you in on the rest of the trip.The drive there was uneventful.It took 7 hours and at our lunch stop,we were told that our children were very well behaved and had sweet manners.Which of course we took pride in and prayed it would continue! We did the normal rides,shopping,eating,blah,blah,blah...on the few hot days we left a little early to go swimming at the hotel.

Our hotel was very cool.It was a 2 bedroom family suite.In the 2nd room were bunkbeds,a sofa bed and a seperate TV with video games.And of course 2 bathrooms which really helped with showers! One day at the hotel,our 3 year old was getting impatient and turned to my husband and said "You're goin' down,tubby",which everybody thought was hilarious.Jen had to do her hysterical witch laugh.

One thing that really helped save time and avoid grouchy children was the wheelchair.I have bad hips so we got a wheelchair each day to save on all the walking. The best part of that was that the wheelchair got us straight to the front of all the ride lines! The kids thought that was pretty awesome.

On our last day we went to the character breakfast at the Disneyland Grand Hotel.The whole time we were eating, lots of different characters would come by,play with the kids,sign autographs and take pics.The kids had a blast and the food was wonderful. Of course,one of our great sons tried to pick the nose of one of the characters,stuck his finger right up the nostril! Sad to say,it was the oldest son who will be 10 on Monday.

The kids had fun shopping too. They each had their own money and got to buy whatever they wanted.They all used up their money pretty quickly--except for Jennifer.She was trying to be practical.Everything she picked out,she said"what can I use this for,is it worth the money,can I get it cheaper in another store?"I had to force her to spend her money.I would have just left her alone but it was a Disney gift card and she HAD to spend it there.

The ride home was a little more exciting. One of the kids got carsick (yeah!!) and they were all SO tired,they were either sleeping or fighting. And because of our poor planning we got back into town during evening rush hour and had to sit through the fun traffic.
It took a week for the adults to recover from the trip,but the kids were awesome and everybody had fun.

Now they are wanting to go back this summer and spend time at the beach(we didn't have time while we were there) and visit family that Jen hasn't met yet.They can't wait to meet her!! There's grandparents,an aunt,an uncle and some cousins.We'll post stuff from that trip (if we have the guts to make it so soon after this one!)

a letter from paulette from westridge

2007-03-26T19:53:00.000-04:00

this really made my day. i think it made lindsay's too. it came out of the blue. which made an extra delight. we got home to a fun letter from paulette. she wrote one to us, one to our ward (congregation), and one to amanda (her new sister). so we thought we would post the letter to the ward here.

if anyone would like to write her, please do. i know she would love to hear from you. you can send it to us at raisingdc@gmail.com and we will make sure she gets your letters.

and now, without further ado, from paulette (grammatical errors included, for effect):

Dear Capitol Hill Ward,

Hello! and how are you? I really miss being in Washington D.C. going to church. Everything at Westrdige is ok. I guess I'm talking to Jacob (my clinician) just a little bit more than any of my other clinicians. Two weeks ago I went on my first weekend with my new dad. It was fun. We went out to eat for every meal, talked aboutour pool and our new jacuzzi. We went driving and by that I mean I drove! That's right I drove. It was way fun. here at Westridge I've made some friends. Well how are things back in D.C.? Do you miss me? I really can't wait to come back to D.C. with my parents so you guys can meet them. there really, really nice. my dad just adores me every time i call home he always wants to talk to me even if I can sometimes only say hi. Well how are the young women deanna, olivia, karis, and the rest of the young women? I really want to be able to talk to you guys on the phone or see you guys.

Katie and Scott. I heard you guys know one of the women who worked at Anasazi. her name is gina, ring a bell? She told me that she grew up with Katie and her cousin. that's pretty cool. She says that our cousin is getting married in a couple of weeks. I think she said that the wedding is going to be in Utah. I'm not quite sure but if it is in Utah you should come visit me and even if it isn't you should visist me anyway that would be way cool.

Well, I hope everything is OK there. Please write back.

Write, or maybe even see and talk to you later.

Sincerely,
Paulette (with hearts on either side of her name)

quick blurb about fRamily member

2007-03-22T23:55:00.000-04:00

we owe yall an update. i even talked to jen today about posting some photos from her spring break vacation to disneyland. so hopefully soon we will all get back to our frequent blogging.

the brief story is this:
jennifer continues to flourish. she is the cutest young woman i can remember knowing. she is funny, bright, and kind. she is enjoying school and really loving being a big sister. she had her 12th birthday recently which was a smashing success.

paulette is kinda struggling at westridge. she has never been one for talk therapy and the school is kinda eh. so she is not loving it. though she has, of course, made lots of friends and seems to have fun. dave went up to visit recently and they had a wonderful time. we got the cutest call from her. it is an adjustment for sure. she seems to really be bonding with her new family so that is great.

but more later on all that....

as you will remember the girls went to stay with our friend dianna's family in august. below is a recent trailer to a documentary about becky, dianna's mom. surrogate mom to jen and paulette for a month. wonderful advocate and voice of reason and love to lindsay and i. it is a minute long. it will give you a glimpse into the amazing people that our in this fRamily.

reunited and it feels so good...plus admission to westridge

2007-02-17T11:23:00.000-05:00

the first few moments of the reunion were awkward

but then really really fun

jennifer was so funny and cute. she looks really really great and is just oozing happiness. she asked us to listen to her play the piano (so awesome). she is often found snuck away reading books (chapter books) and scriptures. she has lost weight, her acne is all gone. she is like a new beautiful little young woman. she loves being a big sister. she is always on hand to take care of the little kids. she and alaina stay up late giggling. they don't fight. she is getting straight A's in school. she is amazing and we are very proud of her.

a final fRamily photo. my guess is this is the last time we will all be together while lindsay and i are legal their guardians.

paulette spent the night with jenn and her family. i was trying to give her a hug good-bye, she loved that. they had an awesome time. road quads, played games, giggled. i think they were relieved to get to hang out again.

paulette spent friday with jen. saturday morning paulette's new brother picked he up to go see meet the rest of her new family. they seemed to really have fun. paulette loves the idea of being an aunt (she will have 3 nieces). she is also really loving her new brother mike. he is in his mid-twenties and recently started dating one of paulette's favorite counselor from anasazi. she is super interested in this relationship, as evidenced by her calling them a few times on their first date.

we met dave, debbie, and paulette at the airport and flew to SLC. we went immediately to temple square. paulette was having a hard time being open. but then we watched the new joseph smith movie and she really opened up.

we met dave and debbie and their daughter-in-law and granddaughters at the roof restaurant.

waiting for dave and debbie. do we look hammered or what?

part of paulette's new clan
she is missing a bunch of brothers and a sister and another niece

grandpa dave. we love this picture

hoodlum redefined

we got up early sunday morning and heard the mormon tabernacle choir. this is us with mac wilberg, the choirs director.

paulette spent all of sunday with dave and debbie, while lindsay and i took SERIOUS naps. they feel even more in love with paulette, which made the next day even harder

this is lindsay getting pancakes made for us the morning paulette entered westridge. paulette really really really didn't want to go.

we had a very beautiful and sacred conversation with paulette. dave, debbie, lindsay and i all shared our hopes for paulette. we talked about the parable of the ten virgins and how for all of us, at some point, the course of our lives is ours to determine. for paulette that time is now. she can choose to use her time at westridge to get the help she so desperately needs or she can try and beat time again and end up right in the same place she started (which is what we feel happened at anasazi)

here we are getting ready to go to westridge

my camera ran out of battery, this is my only shot from westridge. we are not convinced that westridge will give her the help she needs but at least we are all a step closer. she really really wants to be back at dave and debbie's house, so at least there is a heck of a carrot.

this is shawn bradley who is the new vice principal of westridge's school taking us all on a tour of the campus. he recently retired from playing basketball in the NBA.

leaving her at westridge was pretty tough. we know she needs the help, and that this step is necessary. and dave and debbie feel the same way.

snowy, stinky reunions

2007-02-02T11:25:00.000-05:00

sorry. we accidentally posted these pictures early. now, you can see what they all mean....

Here we are packing for the trip. You can tell we have no idea what's coming. We're smiling.

As you can see from the sign, this is the beginning of our "Making of a Walking."
(Anasazi lingo for moving forward, in a positive way, in life.)
We actually got quite a bit of mileage out of this one.

Stopping for a lunch break on our way to the trail,
Kimberly picked up some bananas and yogurt, Lindsay bought carrots and a ham sandwich. This mom picked up a hot dog, a slice of pizza and a cup o joe. You guessed it, she is from NYC.
We must have been nervous; this had us in stitches at the time.

Final D*: Bloody Basin, Tonto National Forest.
*Anasazi for the "final destination"

On the way to "final d", Kimberly asked our driver to pull over if we saw a bush or something so she could use le toilet. We looked up right then, and saw this glorious little number.
Keep in mind, we're on a dirt road, with no sign of civilization in sight.
We took this for a sign of good things to come.

Kimberly with Gina, of Anasazi Alumni Services. From the Army poncho you can see it's already raining, as it would do for three straight days.

the crew of parents and guardians
the baton started to pass
the hat ensembles are a bonus.

our hike to paulette.

it is safe to say that she smelled worse than she looks.

this is where paulette slept. she never figured out how to make shelters work, so she just did this

the making of a fire
anasazi doesn't believe in matches or lighters
all fire is made from "busting a coal" or "busting"

busting

tandem busting.

everything was wet so we would bust a coal but then
we couldn't blow it into flames because the tinder was too wet.

here, i'll do it

finally, a coal and some tinder. these are the hands of paulette and new dad dave.

almost there.
just so you know: this is an hour into being at paulette's camp

our tinder was too wet.
ezekial, co founder of anasazi,
came by and gave me some really good avice about body positioning
and all sorts of good stuff
we had busted out the bottom piece
so when he came we had 2 pieces of wood tied together
he gave us props for resourcefulness

Ezekiel left. we eventually used toilet paper to get the fire started.
then paulette made us dinner.
pizza
we had to "loveup" our sundried tomatoes and garlic
to "loveup" means to chew and then spit back into your food.
raw garlic BURNS

you can't see it, but there are ash cakes (aka pizza crust) in the ash.

the stuff in the cups is toppings.
onion, garlic, sundried tomatoes, water, powdered cheese

dale, the therapist. the making of a hero

i got too cold and went to my sleeping bag. this is lindsay and paulette by the fire late the first night. i think it was probably 9, but in the wild, 9 is late.

for some dumb reason we forgot to take a picture of where we slept. tate built us a shelter of a tarp. it was about 1-1.5feet off the ground. we had sleeping bags and army ponchos. we made a HUGE leaf bed that looked as though it would be nicer than my simmons beautyrest. unfortunately, leaves smash down to nothing. we were in a sandy creek bed, so it was really cold. the heated rock i placed in my sleeping bag got cold in the night.

my worst fear was that the fire would go out. it rained and snowed all night long. i kept waking up wigging out that the fire had gone out. it almost did but we resuscitated it.

the making of dirty clothes

the making of awesome hair and coolness

this is what our shadow calls "the making of a pissing me off"

things got a little rocky with the fRamily. reuniting was difficult and the transition from being with peers to being with guardians was hard on paulette. so lindsay and i went on a hike to get bit of a break.

the making of a pooping

the making of a feral paulette

vogue

kimberly and debbie
please, enjoy coka-cola in moderation
i learned the hard way

tate: our trail walker

sayonara tonto

cleaned but not shorn
goodbye firesmoke dreads

we aren't supposed to tell you

2007-01-30T09:09:00.000-05:00

we woke up early this morning to get out on the trail. i have been dreading this because it is supposed to be really cold. but then i learned that it is supposed to rain today and tomorrow. cold, rainy camping. sleeping on the cold hard ground. i think there may be some divine justice in this... paulette at least is going to get us back...

paulette's response to us

2007-01-25T12:34:00.000-05:00

Dear Kimberly and lindsay.

How are you? What are you doing?

I just got through talking to [my shadow] and reading my letter. I was really shocked when I read that I'm going to get adopted by the Anasazi nurse (Nurse Debbie). I really do think that she is the perfect mother for me. After reading the letters that her and her husband dave sent i decided that i am going to pray to see if she and dave really are the perfect family for me to live with.

[My shadow] told me to read the letter in front of him. I couldn't even finish your letter. i cried so so hard. After reading your letter i immediately went back up to the group to tell the other girls I had to have another young walker read the letter aloud to everyone who was there. i was really blown away. one of my trail walkers started to cry. i really now do believe in the power of fasting. Two days before i found out I fasted that I would find a family and then BAM it happened. I really do appreciate fasting.

It brought great joy to my heart to know that you guys were working hard to find a family for me and that hard work paid off.

you don't know how much crying I'm going to do at family camp next week.

i have tons of questions to ask about the school I'm going to and whats going to happen when I'm done with the school.

please write down all the information about the school and then give it to me at family camp.

love always,

paulette mason

(there are lots of hearts all over this letter)

Get a box of tissues.

2007-01-25T12:28:00.000-05:00

Our only communication with Paulette comes through the weekly exchange of letters and, as you know if you've been following the blog, ours have been a little less than stellar.

This week, however, was different because we had big news to share. We asked Dave and Debbie to write letters to Paulette, to introduce themselves to her, and to share with her some of their feelings about inviting her into their home and family. They wrote beautiful letters—letters that made Kimberly and I tear up—and included some pictures that we will, hopefully, post on the blog soon. We also wrote Paulette a letter to tell her about the life-changing news.

The following account from Dave, who heard it from Nurse Debbie, who was up on the trail for her weekly check-ups when the mail arrived.

Before the letters were delivered, Paulette met with Nurse Debbie for her weekly physical exam. Afterward, Debbie asked Paulette some questions about herself, like what Paulette likes to do for fun. Paulette looked at her sideways. Debbie prompted her: "Do you like camping, outdoor things?" Paulette said she did, but that she was "kinda tired of it now." Debbie asked whether Paulette like music, and playing instruments, like the violin. (Before Anasazi, Paulette was first-chair violinist in her 6th grade orchestra). Paulette looked suspicious. She said "Yeah, but why are you asking?" Debbie said she was "just curious". A few more questions passed, including about piano lessons, and Debbie said good-bye to help the other kids.

At that point, Paulette received her first letter: the one from Kimberly and me. She sat down, opened it up, and started reading. A stunned look crossed her face, but there were no words. Then, as the letters from Dave and Debbie were delivered, she stood up and walked over to join the rest of her group. "I can't read them," she said. "I'm shaking. Can you read this letter for me?" The other girls, who are much older and have really taken a liking to Paulette, read her the letter aloud. All the girls were squealing and crying, telling Paulette "Congratulations!" Paulette just listened, taking it all in, and said she felt "so happy." When the girls said, "this is everything you said you wanted: you get to live with a Mormon family, and you get to be close to your sister!" She added, "I get to go to school in Utah!" (A lifelong dream of hers, and a reference to the time that she will spend at the Westridge Academy before moving in with Dave, Debbie, & co.).

After receiving the letters, Paulette visited with Debbie again, this time both of them knowing the big news. Paulette was fairly quiet, but asked questions. They talked about Dave and Debbie's family, their grandchildren, their home, what the family likes to do. They talked about the time Paulette would be in Utah (Dave and Debbie had been worried about how Paulette would respond to knowing she had a family, but not being able to live with them straight away. Fortunately, Paulette actually sounds excited about it for reasons noted above.) At good-bye, they hugged, and Paulette rejoined her group, where she spent the rest of the afternoon talking with the other youngwalkers, and trailwalkers, about how happy she was.

Of course, the talk of Paulette's big news dominated the day. At one point, all the girls were saying to Paulette: You get to be a sister! And have another sister! And have brothers! And you get to be an Aunt! (Paulette was pretty excited about that last one.) Someone asked Paulette what else she would be. She was quiet for a time, and then said "Well, I guess I'll be the baby of the family. I guess that will be okay." For Paulette—a little girl who took care of herself, her sister, and her mother from the time she was four years old—we think it will be precisely what she needs.

in answer to your questions

2007-01-23T12:34:00.000-05:00

i keep getting emails with all these questions...hopefully this will help.

here is what follows:

lindsay and i leave on friday to go to AZ. we will have family camp starting monday. please note the weather: the nights will be brutal. i hate the cold! if paulette decides to become part of the nurse's family, mom and dad will join us on the trail for family camp. part of family camp will just be the fRamily, the nurse mom and dad will come and we will all camp together, then we will leave and paulette will have some time alone with her new parents. the whole thing is like 3-4 days.

then we will all go to dinner, hang out with jen, etc. on sunday we will go to Salt Lake City.

you may wonder why Salt Lake City? paulette is going to go to the westridge academy for about 18 months. it will piggy-back on the progress she has made at anasazi. it will provide time for paulette to get some help and a bridge for the new family. we don't know how long she will be there, but as soon as she is ready she will move back home to arizona and live with her new family.

the westridge academy has a school that is well regarded and a program that appears to have great success. she will wear a uniform all the time, which she won't love. but we all feel like this is an answer to prayer.

can you even beleive this? i wanted so desperately for a nice pretty bow to go around this experience, and it did! i am astounded and thankful!!!!!!!!! the truth is, there aren't the right words for these emotions.

arizona: the new dc

2007-01-22T08:30:00.000-05:00

God has parted the red sea once again. this experience has been one heck of a spiritual experience; so much is difficult to record in this forum. we will do our best to keep sacred, sacred and private, private.

as the nurse at anasazi admitted paulette and gave the weight okay, she also felt compelled that there was more she could give paulette. paulette is a compelling personality, a joy to be around, and her story is tragic. these factors have led many to be interested in rescuing and helping this little girl. she kinda tried to brush it off, but that evening she shared paulette's story with her husband. he too felt like they had something to offer her; they could help. they both felt like paulette needed a family. one like theirs.

this is their story. i am going to leave it for them to tell, if they so desire. suffice it to say that last night they called to tell us that "paulette has a family." lindsay and i burst into tears of joy, that frankly haven't stopped. we can't believe it. but it is true.

a weight has been lifted. as our friend michelle told us: "you're done". there are not words in my language to describe how i feel or how i have felt. joy that does not begin to be able to be measured. i keep thinking about something c.s. lewis wrote in surprised by joy: "the pain then is part of the joy now, and the joy now is part of the pain then."

we so desperately wanted a happy ending to this story. and though the story is far from over, this crucial, pivotal chapter is and it feels wonderful. i try not to be overtly spiritual on this blog, but i just want to say, that this is nothing short of a miracle. that His hand made all of this happen. 4 years + ago lindsay and i were asked to be their mother's "visiting teachers" (a responsibility to ensure for her spiritual and temporal welfare). at that first encounter we both, without telling each other, felt like the girls were the real reason we had the calling. mom just didn't have much hope. but the girls were both so bright and promising. we had to do something.

it is like getting the star of david to shine the night Jesus is born. this stuff was set in motion so so long ago. and through much trial, error, longsuffering, patience, impatience, hand wringing, air punching, kneeling, begging, and an enormous increase in faith and knowledge about the nature of God, He made this miracle. probably so we could all know that He loves each one of us, and knows us as individuals. and that He has a plan for us. a precise, accurate, thorough plan that, in the end, if we trust will bring us joy.

lindsay woke up singing this song: fairytales can come true, they can happen to you. its true.

a quick letter to paulette

2007-01-19T21:54:00.001-05:00

this is the last letter we will send to paulette before we tell her what her future will hold. we are both super stressed out. so much about this just is really really crazy. we feel bad putting this much pressure on paulette, we feel bad that there is this much pressure on the prospective family. and we are so afraid of what might happen. both lindsay and i have been sick the last couple of days and i am pretty sure it is stress and anxiety (or maybe the norwalk virus. so, hopefully something wonderful will happen. we went from baited breathe to not breathing.

you usually can only get one letter out to a young walker per week. they are making a special exception so that we can get this message to her.

Dear Paulette,
We just heard a great report from Stephanie. Sounds like you are doing well, and growing closer to your creator. People are making decisions about you right now that will affect the course of your life. Please fast and pray, and explain to Heavenly Father what you want. We know Heavenly Father loves you. In the time you have lived with us, we have seen His hand do miracles. He wants you to be happy, and He will answer your prayer. We love you.
Kimberly & Lindsay

i am pinging with jennifer. she is about as cute as they get. she gives me hope and so much joy. i hope that the same thing happens with paulette.

jennifer just wrote this to me. we were saying goodbye and her sister alaina asked me what bisous was, so i explained...this is seriously a tearjerker night.

yeah i knew that because you will always say that when i was living with you and that was a lot of fun living with you and limbo i loved that a lot and thanks 4 taking me in when my real mom coudent take care of me the right way that she was suppose to i wish that this never happened to my mom and my dad to because i really miss them both the next time you and limbo see her tell her that i love her and that i will always be her little baby girl and i miss how me you limbo and paulette would play rummiekub that was so much fun but some of the kids dont understand it very well

in respect to raisingdc

2007-01-17T10:23:00.000-05:00

kimberly is beginning her solo blog to record l'année de l'amusement for generations to come. if you are interested in visiting her please stop by lannedeamusement.blogspot.com/
you will probably catch must of the raisingdc cast there. only we will be sillier and less stressed. please bless.

week 7 -- letter 3

2007-01-11T23:06:00.000-05:00

Dear kimberly and lyndsay,

How are you? I am really sorry I didn't write to you last week, it is just that I was really upset about getting extended, But a couple of days ago I realized that you only wanted me to stay out here for acouple more weeks because you care about me and want me to learn all that I can out here. since I've been out here I have learned alot. I've learned to let people help me even more. I have also learned how to respoect and apreciate the things that you do for me. I have really learned that ther are better things that I could do with my life.

Thanks again for sending me out here.

anticipation

2007-01-11T16:52:00.000-05:00

so we are still waiting for final words from everyone. we think a million good things are going to happen, but none of them are confirmed. we vacillate from being amazed at how all this good could happen and preparing ourselves for the tremendous let down that will follow bad news. bad news also means we have to figure out how to get her into a good foster care system (read: not dc) and that is horrible too.

the major cliff hanger is will this family, who is very interested in caring for paulette, decide it is the right thing to do. i could, and have, pointed out many reasons it will be hard. they seem to feel strongly, so all arrows point to yes, but still ... we are waiting.

then there is the "will the church pay for westridge" question. westridge is vital to what making any tranistion for paulette into a family successful. without it we would really be setting the family and paulette up for failure. paulette needs some help and getting it for her now will minimize tough teen years. also, it will provide the family with the opportunity to get to know paulette better via family therapy. therapy will also give them some skills to help paulette. but it is a sizable amount of money and the Church has already invested heavily in this kid. will they keep doing it? our stake president is convinced enough that it is a good idea, but ... we are waiting.

anticipation! part of me doesn't want the anticipation to end because if it does and it the news is bad i have to deal with bad reality. and good make believe is sometimes better than bad reality. but then it also feels like i am just prolonging the pain and i like to rip band-aids off fast.

then again, if the news is good, i want to CELEBRATE good times come on! and i think i will feel like a hero if this really works out. because if the best case scenario happens it is really really really really miraculous and crazy and just thinking about it gives me chills all over.

so fingers and toes and legs are crossed. prayers are more meaningful. and anticipation is keeping me waiting.

Update on Jen and a back story

2007-01-04T20:13:00.000-05:00

Last night Bobbie and Jen called. They had a great holiday, minus one cornea surgery (on Jen's sister, Natalie--OUCH!) and one fairly upsetting conversation with Jennifer's biological family.

Two days before Christmas, Jen was feeling a bit homesick for DC, so she asked her mom (Bobbie) if she could call some of her friends here. She tried several friends from school and, unfortunately, no one was home. So Jen decided to call her older sister. For those of you who aren't aware, Jen and Paulette have a half sister who is in her early 30s. She's got a pretty remarkable story of her own that includes being abandoned by her mother (yes, that's Jen and Paulette's mom, too) at the tender age of 12. At the time, she was taken in by Sheila's sister and raised to adulthood. Today she holds down a good job and--a remarkable testament to the resilience of children--is a pretty impressive woman, someone Kimberly and I think we could be friends with. Although she did not have a relationship with either Paulette or Jennifer until very recently, she thought seriously about taking the girls when their mother became ill. Ultimately, she decided that she was in no position to take care of them, given that she was a single woman with a job that required her to travel a large portion of her time.

That was in May. Once the girls moved in with us, they tried for weeks to contact several of their extended family members--the sister among them--to no avail. No one returned their phone calls then and, to date, not one member of the girls' extended family has tried to make contact with either of them, or with us. It's tragic and, though we don't dwell on it, both girls know they have essentially been abandoned by their family.

Well, in August, Kimberly and I had reason to contact this older sister. Surprisingly, she returned our phone call. We had a long conversation with her, in which she described her own life story and the feelings of guilt she experienced because she was unable to take care of her half-sisters. That same day, she was able to even spend some time with Jennifer. They went to a movie, ate dinner in a restaurant, and bought a teddy bear for Jen. (At the time, Paulette was with her mother in the nursing home).

After that day, the sister essentially disappeared. We made no efforts to contact her, and she made none to contact us--or the girls. A month later, before Jennifer moved to Arizona, she was invited to come say goodbye. She professed wanting to come and told us she was planning on it. But when the time came, she didn't show. No one from the extended family showed. Jennifer had no word from her sister until, she (Jennifer) decided to call her sister on Christmas Eve's eve.

Again, surprisingly, her sister answered the phone. She explained to Jen that she saw their mother over Thanksgiving, and reported that her health was improving. She even said she thought that Sheila would be getting out of the nursing home sometime soon. Jen was floored--all previous reports, including from us--had indicated that her mother's health was, in fact, getting worse. (We later learned from Sheila's sister that her health was not getting better--just the opposite. She had been so ill, in fact, that she had been unable to feed herself, or even walk. ) Of course, Jen had no way of knowing the state of her mother's health while on the phone with her sister, since she had tried calling her mother faithfully every Sunday for weeks and had not been able to reach her. If that wasn't enough news for one phone call, Jen's sister then told her that if she (Jennifer) wanted to, she could come and live with her (the sister).

Of course this was upsetting to Jen. She got off the phone and told Bobbie about the conversation.

Of course this was upsetting to Bobbie. She immediately called Kimberly, hoping to find out the real state of Sheila's health, and to get some advice about how to the handle the situation. Wisely, Kimberly told her that she shouldn't get in the way of Jen and her sister. Jen would have a decision to make. Kimberly was confident that Jen would see that her life in Arizona would be more secure and healthy than the one promised to her with her sister. And, frankly, Kimberly had the sneaking suspicion--borne out by 8 months of experience taking care of the girls--that the older sister would probably never try to contact Jen again, for, in fact, she had never once tried to contact her in the first place. Kimberly was convinced that the sister felt massive guilt pangs that she was not in a position to take care of her sisters, and that this guilt is what had motivated to make the offer to Jen. However, she had her doubts about whether the offer was genuine, because she had made the same offer in August, and then had not followed through. Bobbie was somewhat comforted, and followed Kimberly's sound advice.

Bobbie gave Jen time and space to think about her sister's offer. After a couple of days, as Bobbie was tucking in Jen and her sister for bed, she asked Jennifer whether she had given any more thought to her sister's offer. Jennifer told Bobbie that she had thought a lot about it, and that she had even prayed about it. And that she had decided to stay put. She told Bobbie that she had the distinct feeling she was supposed to be a part of their family.

Although I can't imagine the emotions that Jennifer must have felt during this experience, I'm extremely proud of her for making a very difficult decision. And, while I was outraged by her sister's conversation, I feel for the sister, too. I am sure she feels a lot of guilt that she isn't in a position to take care of her sister. However, as someone who cares very deeply for Jennifer, I am confident that Jen couldn't be in a better place than where she is right now: with a loving family that wants her and takes excellent care of her. She is flourishing in Arizona--making friends and good grades, helping her family around the house, laughing and sometimes fighting with her siblings. We talk to her frequently, and she really sounds great. She reported to us in October that she reads her scriptures every day on her own, and when I talked to Bobbie last night, she said she can still find Jen in her room at bedtime, reading her Book of Mormon.

Jen loves checking email and loves instant messaging people, even more. Last night, when we were talking with her on speaker phone, she asked us to go get on our computers so we could "talk" to her. I know sometimes she's homesick, and appreciates contact with her old life. Any of you out there who know Jen, and who'd like to drop Jen a line, please let us know. We'd be happy to put you in touch.

week 6 no letter

2006-12-29T14:05:00.000-05:00

no letter again. we have decided to extend paulette for a bit. she seems to be opening up a bit and we hope that by extending her she will start to take advantage of the therapy availible to her at anasazi.

we also have to figure out where she is going to go. we know that she cannot come back to our house. even at anasazi, she requires intense supervision: something we cannot provide. there is a family who is thinking, fasting, and praying about taking paulette. some members feel really good. others are, and rightly so, worried that it will really change the family. undoubtedly, it will. so we are waiting and hoping that they will feel inclined to take her. if they do, we will work at figuring out a way to have her admitted to the westridge academy. this would provide paulette the extensive help that she needs to over come her reactive attachment disorder. it would also provide the family and paulette time to bond and start a relationship. just moving from anasazi to essentially a strangers house seems like it could be setting people up for failure. so we are hoping. we will be talking with the stake president soon to see if the Church can again pay for this expensive theraputic intervention. we are also talking to westridge to see if there are any discounts for people who are destitute. we may have to have a bake sale. but i am pretty sure that if there is real potential for paulette to be healed, there will be a path paved for us to get her what she needs.

unfortunately, if such a path is not paved, we will have to place her in foster care. we are working with lawyers in arizona to figure out if there is a way for her to become part of the arizona foster care system...i have a bike ride to get on. more later

our christmas letter to paulette

2006-12-21T09:02:00.000-05:00

i thought this might be appropriate to share. it is hard to know how much to share here because these things are so highly personal and sacred. yet, so many of you reading pray for and love paulette, it becomes quite a balancing act.

merry christmas paulette!!!
we hope you have a wonderful time and the oranges have made it to you safely. if they have, you are more lucky than we are. those are the best oranges in all of the world. they come from the tree in the allred's back yard. whenever i go home, i bring some back with me. we hope you love them.

we have attached a special christmas story for you. we want you to know that we love you. we are working hard to figure out a place you can call home. we really hope that this year you are able to find yourself living in a permanent place, with people that love you and will love you forever. we pray daily for this. if we could give you anything, that is what we would give you. no matter what, we want you to know that we will always love you. we will be your fRamily forever.

with loads of love,
kimberly and lindsay

The Three Levels of Christmas

Isn't Christmas a wonderful time of the year? We love the excitement, the giving spirit, the special awareness of and appreciation for family and friends, and the universal feelings of love and brotherhood that bless our gatherings at Christmastime.

In all the joyfulness, it is well to reflect that Christmas comes at threes levels. Let us call the first the Santa Claus Level. It's the packages, candle-lights, rich food and warm open houses. It's carolers in the shopping malls, excited children, and weary but loving parents. It's a lovely time of special warmth and caring and giving. It's the level at which we eat too much, spend too much and do too much – and we love and enjoy every minute of it.

But there's a higher, more beautiful level. Let's call it the Silent Night Level. It's the level of our glorious Christmas carols and of that beloved, familiar story: "Now in those days there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus…." It is the level of the crowed inn and the silent, holy moment in a dark stable when the Son of God came to earth. Its shepherds on steep, bare hills near Bethlehem, angels with their glad tidings a new star in the East, wise men traveling far in search of the Holy One. How beautiful and meaningful it is; how infinitely poorer we would be without this sacred second level of Christmas.

The trouble is, these two levels don't last. They can't. Twelve days of Christmas, at the first level, is about all most of us can stand. It's too intense, too extravagant. The tree dries out and the needles fall. The candles burn down. The beautiful wrappings go out with the trash, the carolers are up on the ski slopes, the toys break, and the biggest day in the stores the entire year is exchange day, December 26. The feast is over and the dieting begins. But the lonely and the hungry are with us still, perhaps lonelier and hungrier than before.

Even the second level of the Baby Jesus, can't last. How many times can you sing "Silent Night"? The angels and the star and the shepherd, even the silent, sacred mystery of that Holy Night itself, can't only satisfy humanity's basic need. The man who keeps Christ in the manager will, in the end, be disappointed and empty.

No, for Christmas to last all year long, for it to grow in beauty and meaning and purpose, for it to have the power to change lives, we must celebrate it at a third level. That of the adult Christ. It is at this level – not as an infant – that our Savior brings His gifts of lasting joy, lasting peace, lasting hope. It was the adult Christ who reached out and touched the untouchable, who loved the unlovable, who so loves us all that even in His agony on the cross He prayed forgiveness for His enemies.

This is the Christ who created worlds without numbers, who wept because so many of us lack affection and hate each other -- and then who willingly gave His life for all of us, including those for whom He wept. This the Christ, the adult Christ, who gave us the perfect example and asked us to follow Him.

Accepting that invitation is the way – the only way – to celebrate Christmas all year and all life long.

week 4 -- letter 2

2006-12-14T15:24:00.000-05:00

here is our latest letter from paulette...

Dear kimberly and lyndsay

How are you? What are you guys up to? Sorry I didn't write to you last week. I just didn't know how to respond to what you guys said the whole myspace thing really made me mad because I don't even know what there talking about as far as the people you saw go. please Write to me about what you guys are doing for christmas.

well talk to you guys later
Paulette

A new look for Jennifer

2006-12-10T22:06:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's been awhile. But Jen is doing great in Arizona! She is getting straight A's in school,making lots of friends,getting along great with the new siblings and has changed the way she dresses and speaks (so I'm told by people from DC). On Saturday she got her new glasses and looks really cute. One of the items on her Christmas list was extentions,so she got them. I thought it would be fun to share this new look with y'all...

wonderful advice for the fRamily

2006-12-10T17:08:00.000-05:00

this was shared in church last week and it has stuck with me. i think it is good for everyone in this fRamily to hear. it will be included in my letter to paulette.

The universe is friendly. Life is on your side. Joy is your birthright. In fact, all of creation wants you to succeed. Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Retrain your senses and intellect so you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.

food and photos

2006-12-09T06:03:00.000-05:00

q: what is paulette eating out there?
a: once a week she is given a ration of the following:

Bacon Bits
Baking Soda
Brown Sugar
Bouillon
Butter - dehydrated
Cheese - dehydrated
Cornmeal - mix
Flour
Fruit Drink
Lentils
Macaroni
Milk -- dehydrated
Oats
Raisin
Rice
Salt
Seeds
Tomatoes - sun dried

in our conversation with her therapist this week it sounded to us like paulette is being her true self on the trail. after previous conversations, lindsay and i worried that anasazi would never even know the paulette we know. from dale's description this week, it sounds like they are getting the same kid we get. it took a 2.5 weeks. we kinda expected that. hopefully in the next 6 weeks paulette will be able to experience some awakenings and be able to get better.

we also go the results from her psychologist. it was humbling. she is going to need so much help. it is weighty because it seems like if we can just find her a family she will be able to over come all this muck. she just needs love and stability. she will test that love completely. she has never be in a relationship where love was unconditional and she was safe. it will take a lot of love to help her trust that the love is not going anywhere. she will push you away as hard and as desperately as she needs you. any family willing to do this will have to be a very unique family. they would need amazing amounts of love, time for just her, and a sticktoitness that most just don't have. if we can find this, i honestly believe she can overcome most of this muck.

it weighs heavily because if we don't find this, the outcome is pretty sure. she will never learn to trust people. she won't learn empathy. her ability to objectify people will become more profound. she will tear through people begging them to come near her and pushing them away with full force. she won't be happy. she will live a life of a unlovable being. not that she is unlovable, but she will force her own belief that she is unlovable on the word in a self-fulfilling prophesy.

we honestly pray daily that we can find a family or that they can find us. we are also looking into other options for permanent placement, in case we don't find her a home. we like the idea of the westridge academy. our ideal situation is that we find a family that is willing to invest in paulette for the next 6 years. they come with us to anasazi to meet her and to learn about the anasazi way. when paulette completes anasazi, we place her in westridge. paulette and this new family have weekly family therapy sessions. lindsay and i are still involved to help paulete through her therapy, but the family is there to prepare for the future. then when paulette is well enough to live with a family she enters this family's home. they all will have had a year + of therapy to prep them. they would need to continue paulette in therapy, but would probably be able to have a pretty good time. that is our pipe dream right now.

there are so many problems with this pipe dream. primarily there is no family. then, westridge is expensive and i think we have drained our sources.

so we are looking at other options. boarding schools? foster care with lots of intervention from the psychologist and therapists?

if anyone should have any ideas, please contact us! we need some help. we feel like we have 6 weeks to get this figured out. with jennifer it felt like we watch God part the red sea. i really hope He will do that again here. i really hope that we can make decisions with surety.

here are some photos from paulette on the trail...

NYTimes on KIPP

2006-12-08T10:50:00.000-05:00

this is an amazing article from the NYTimes about "no child left behind" and the achievment gap. there is much talk about KIPP the girls school here in DC. it is a long, but worthy read!

November 26, 2006

What It Takes To Make a Student

By PAUL TOUGH

On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. ''See, that's a good sign,'' the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. ''Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.'' He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading ''well below grade level.'' But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. ''Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,'' he said. ''Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.''

Bush's Woodridge trip came in the middle of a tough midterm election campaign, and there was certainly some short-term political calculation in being photographed among smiling black faces. But this was more than a photo opportunity. The president had come to Woodridge to talk about the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation his administration had enacted after almost six years in office: No Child Left Behind. The controversial education law, which established a series of standards for schools and states to meet and a variety of penalties for falling short, is up for reauthorization next year in front of a potentially hostile Congress, and for the law to win approval again, the White House will have to convince Americans that it is working -- and also convince them of exactly what, in this case, ''working'' really means.

When the law took effect, at the beginning of 2002, official Washington was preoccupied with foreign affairs, and many people in government, and many outside it too, including the educators most affected by the legislation, seemed slow to take notice of its most revolutionary provision: a pledge to eliminate, in just 12 years, the achievement gap between black and white students, and the one between poor and middle-class students. By 2014, the president vowed, African-American, Hispanic and poor children, all of whom were at the time scoring well below their white counterparts and those in the middle class on standardized tests, would not only catch up with the rest of the nation; they would also reach 100 percent proficiency in both math and reading. It was a startling commitment, and it made the promise in the law's title a literal one: the federal government would not allow a single American child to be educated to less than that high standard.

It was this element of the law that the president had come to Woodridge to talk about. ''There's an achievement gap in America that's not good for the future of this country,'' he told the crowd. ''Some kids can read at grade level, and some can't. And that's unsatisfactory.''

But there was good news, the president concluded: ''I'm proud to report the achievement gap between white kids and minority students is closing, for the good of the United States.''

This contention -- that the achievement gap is on its way to the dustbin of history -- is one that Bush and Spellings have expressed frequently in the past year. And the gap better be closing: the law is coming up on its fifth anniversary. In just seven more years, if the promise of No Child Left Behind is going to be kept, the performances of white and black students have to be indistinguishable.

But despite the glowing reports from the White House and the Education Department, the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test of fourth- and eighth-grade students commonly referred to as the nation's report card, is not reassuring. In 2002, when No Child Left Behind went into effect, 13 percent of the nation's black eighth-grade students were ''proficient'' in reading, the assessment's standard measure of grade-level competence. By 2005 (the latest data), that number had dropped to 12 percent. (Reading proficiency among white eighth-grade students dropped to 39 percent, from 41 percent.) The gap between economic classes isn't disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches) were proficient in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent.

The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.

In the first few years of this decade, two parallel debates about the achievement gap have emerged. The first is about causes; the second is about cures. The first has been taking place in academia, among economists and anthropologists and sociologists who are trying to figure out exactly where the gap comes from, why it exists and why it persists. The second is happening among and around a loose coalition of schools, all of them quite new, all established with the goal of wiping out the achievement gap altogether.

The two debates seem barely to overlap -- the principals don't pay much attention to the research papers being published in scholarly journals, and the academics have yet to study closely what is going on in these schools. Examined together, though, they provide a complete and nuanced picture, sometimes disheartening, sometimes hopeful, of what the president and his education officials are up against as they strive to keep the promise they have made. The academics have demonstrated just how deeply pervasive and ingrained are the intellectual and academic disadvantages that poor and minority students must overcome to compete with their white and middle-class peers. The divisions between black and white and rich and poor begin almost at birth, and they are reinforced every day of a child's life. And yet the schools provide evidence that the president is, in his most basic understanding of the problem, entirely right: the achievement gap can be overcome, in a convincing way, for large numbers of poor and minority students, not in generations but in years. What he and others seem not to have apprehended quite yet is the magnitude of the effort that will be required for that change to take place.

But the evidence is becoming difficult to ignore: when educators do succeed at educating poor minority students up to national standards of proficiency, they invariably use methods that are radically different and more intensive than those employed in most American public schools. So as the No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization next year, Americans are facing an increasingly stark choice: is the nation really committed to guaranteeing that all of the country's students will succeed to the same high level? And if so, how hard are we willing to work, and what resources are we willing to commit, to achieve that goal?

In the years after World War II, and especially after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, black Americans' standardized-test scores improved steadily and significantly, compared with those of whites. But at some point in the late 1980s, after decades of progress, the narrowing of the gap stalled, and between 1988 and 1994 black reading scores actually fell by a sizable amount on the national assessment. What had appeared to be an inexorable advance toward equality had run out of steam, and African-American schoolchildren seemed to be stuck well behind their white peers.

The issue was complicated by the fact that there are really two overlapping test-score gaps: the one between black children and white children, and the one between poor children and better-off children. Given that those categories tend to overlap -- black children are three times as likely to grow up in poverty as white children -- many people wondered whether focusing on race was in fact a useful approach. Why not just concentrate on correcting the academic disadvantages of poor people? Solve those, and the black-white gap will solve itself.

There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child's language development and each parent's communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children's I.Q.'s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child's home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child's vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 ''utterances'' -- anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy -- to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.

What's more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of ''discouragements'' a child heard -- prohibitions and words of disapproval -- compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another -- all of which stimulated intellectual development.

Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child's life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.

In the years since Hart and Risley published their findings, social scientists have examined other elements of the parent-child relationship, and while their methods have varied, their conclusions all point to big class differences in children's intellectual growth. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Teachers College, has overseen hundreds of interviews of parents and collected thousands of hours of videotape of parents and children, and she and her research team have graded each one on a variety of scales. Their conclusion: Children from more well-off homes tend to experience parental attitudes that are more sensitive, more encouraging, less intrusive and less detached -- all of which, they found, serves to increase I.Q. and school-readiness. They analyzed the data to see if there was something else going on in middle-class homes that could account for the advantage but found that while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more.

Martha Farah, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has built on Brooks-Gunn's work, using the tools of neuroscience to calculate exactly which skills poorer children lack and which parental behaviors affect the development of those skills. She has found, for instance, that the ''parental nurturance'' that middle-class parents, on average, are more likely to provide stimulates the brain's medial temporal lobe, which in turn aids the development of memory skills.

Another researcher, an anthropologist named Annette Lareau, has investigated the same question from a cultural perspective. Over the course of several years, Lareau and her research assistants observed a variety of families from different class backgrounds, basically moving in to each home for three weeks of intensive scrutiny. Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied all followed a similar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversations as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children's development -- piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum.

The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose -- playing outside with cousins, inventing games, riding bikes with friends -- but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.

In her book ''Unequal Childhoods,'' published in 2003, Lareau described the costs and benefits of each approach and concluded that the natural-growth method had many advantages. Concerted cultivation, she wrote, ''places intense labor demands on busy parents. ... Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents' incompetence and disparage parents' decisions.'' Working-class and poor children, by contrast, ''learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize.'' But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of ''natural growth'' disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.

Taken together, the conclusions of these researchers can be a little unsettling. Their work seems to reduce a child's upbringing, which to a parent can feel something like magic, to a simple algorithm: give a child X, and you get Y. Their work also suggests that the disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren't primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents -- and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite -- but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.

What would it take to overcome these disadvantages? Does poverty itself need to be eradicated, or can its effects on children somehow be counteracted? Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on? Is it enough simply to educate poor children in the same way that middle-class children are educated? And can any school, on its own, really provide an education to poor minority students that would allow them to achieve the same results as middle-class students?

There is, in fact, evidence emerging that some schools are succeeding at the difficult task of educating poor minority students to high levels of achievement. But there is still great disagreement about just how many schools are pulling this off and what those successful schools mean for the rest of the American education system. One well-publicized evaluation of those questions has come from the Education Trust, a policy group in Washington that has issued a series of reports making the case that there are plenty of what they call ''high flying'' schools, which they define as high-poverty or high-minority schools whose students score in the top third of all schools in their state. The group's landmark report, published in December 2001, identified 1,320 ''high flying'' schools nationwide that were both high-poverty and high minority. This was a big number, and it had a powerful effect on the debate over the achievement gap. The pessimists -- those who believed that the disadvantages of poverty were all but impossible to overcome in public schools -- were dealt a serious blow. If the report's figures held up, it meant that high achievement for poor minority kids was not some one-in-a-million occurrence; it was happening all the time, all around us.

But in the years since the report's release, its conclusions have been challenged by scholars and analysts who have argued that the Education Trust made it too easy to be included on their list. To be counted as a high-flier, a school needed to receive a high score in only one subject in one grade in one year. If your school had a good fourth-grade reading score, it was on the list, even if all its other scores were mediocre. To many researchers, that was an unconvincing standard of academic success. Douglas Harris, a professor of education and economics at Florida State University, pored over Education Trust's data, trying to ascertain how many of the high-flying schools were able to register consistently good numbers. When he tightened the definition of success to include only schools that had high scores in two subjects in two different grades over two different years, Harris could find only 23 high-poverty, high-minority schools in the Education Trust's database, a long way down from 1,320.

That number isn't exhaustive; Harris says he has no doubt that there are some great schools that slipped through his data sieve. But his results still point to a very different story than the one the original report told. Education Trust officials intended their data to refute the idea that family background is the leading cause of student performance. But on closer examination, their data largely confirm that idea, demonstrating clearly that the best predictors of a school's achievement scores are the race and wealth of its student body. A public school that enrolls mostly well-off white kids has a 1 in 4 chance of earning consistently high test scores, Harris found; a school with mostly poor minority kids has a 1 in 300 chance.

Despite those long odds, the last decade -- and especially the last few years -- have seen the creation of dozens, even hundreds, of schools across the country dedicated to precisely that mission: delivering consistently high results with a population that generally achieves consistently low results. The schools that have taken on this mission most aggressively tend to be charter schools -- the publicly financed, privately run institutions that make up one of the most controversial educational experiments of our time. Because charters exist outside the control of public-school boards and are generally not required to adhere to union contracts with their teachers, they have attracted significant opposition, and their opponents are able to point to plenty of evidence that the charter project has failed. Early charter advocates claimed the schools would raise test scores across the board, and that hasn't happened; nationally, scores for charter-school students are the same as or lower than scores for public-school students. But by another measure, charter schools have succeeded: by allowing educators to experiment in ways that they generally can't inside public-school systems, they have led to the creation of a small but growing corps of schools with new and ambitious methods for educating students facing real academic challenges.

In the early years of the charter-school movement, every school was an island, trying out its own mad or brilliant educational theory. But as charter-school proponents have studied the successes and learned from the mistakes of their predecessors, patterns, even a consensus, have begun to emerge. The schools that are achieving the most impressive results with poor and minority students tend to follow three practices. First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. The school day starts early, at 8 a.m. or before, and often continues until after 4 p.m. These schools offer additional tutoring after school as well as classes on Saturday mornings, and summer vacation usually lasts only about a month. The schools try to leaven those long hours with music classes, foreign languages, trips and sports, but they spend a whole lot of time going over the basics: reading and math.

Second, they treat classroom instruction and lesson planning as much as a science as an art. Explicit goals are set for each year, month and day of each class, and principals have considerable authority to redirect and even remove teachers who aren't meeting those goals. The schools' leaders believe in frequent testing, which, they say, lets them measure what is working and what isn't, and they use test results to make adjustments to the curriculum as they go. Teachers are trained and retrained, frequently observed and assessed by their principals and superintendents. There is an emphasis on results but also on ''team building'' and cooperation and creativity, and the schools seem, to an outsider at least, like genuinely rewarding places to work, despite the long hours. They tend to attract young, enthusiastic teachers, including many alumni of Teach for America, the program that recruits graduates from top universities to work for two years in inner-city public schools.

Third, they make a conscious effort to guide the behavior, and even the values, of their students by teaching what they call character. Using slogans, motivational posters, incentives, encouragements and punishments, the schools direct students in everything from the principles of teamwork and the importance of an optimistic outlook to the nuts and bolts of how to sit in class, where to direct their eyes when a teacher is talking and even how to nod appropriately.

The schools are, in the end, a counterintuitive combination of touchy-feely idealism and intense discipline. Their guiding philosophy is in many ways a reflection of the findings of scholars like Lareau and Hart and Risley -- like those academics, these school leaders see childhood as a series of inputs and outputs. When students enroll in one of these schools (usually in fifth or sixth grade), they are often two or more grade levels behind. Usually they have missed out on many of the millions of everyday intellectual and emotional stimuli that their better-off peers have been exposed to since birth. They are, educationally speaking, in deep trouble. The schools reject the notion that all that these struggling students need are high expectations; they do need those, of course, but they also need specific types and amounts of instruction, both in academics and attitude, to compensate for everything they did not receive in their first decade of life.

It is still too early in the history of this nascent movement to say which schools are going to turn out to be the most successful with this new approach to the education of poor children. But so far, the most influential schools are the ones run by KIPP, or the Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP's founders, David Levin and Michael Feinberg, met in 1992, when they were young college graduates enrolled in Teach for America, working in inner-city public schools in Houston. They struggled at first as teachers but were determined to figure out how to motivate and educate their students. Each night they would compare notes on what worked in the classroom -- songs, games, chants, rewards -- and, before long, both of them became expert classroom instructors.

In the fall of 1994, Levin and Feinberg started a middle school in Houston, teaching just 50 students, and they named it KIPP. A year later, Levin moved to New York and started the second KIPP school, in the South Bronx. As the KIPP schools grew, Levin and Feinberg adhered to a few basic principles: their mission was to educate low-income and minority students. They would emphasize measurable results. And they would promise to do whatever it took to help their students succeed. They offered an extended day and an extended year that provided KIPP students with about 60 percent more time in school than most public-school students. They set clear and strict rules of conduct: their two principles of behavior were ''Work Hard'' and ''Be Nice,'' and all the other rules flowed out of those. At the beginning of each year, parents and students signed a pledge -- unenforceable but generally taken seriously -- committing to certain standards of hard work and behavior. Teachers gave students their cellphone numbers so students could call them at night for homework help.

The methods raised students' test scores, and the schools began to attract the attention of the media and of philanthropists. A ''60 Minutes'' report on the schools in 1999 led to a $15 million grant from Doris and Donald Fisher, the founders of the Gap, and Feinberg and Levin began gradually to expand KIPP into a national network. Two years ago, they received $8 million from the Gates Foundation to create up to eight KIPP high schools. There are now 52 KIPP schools across the country, almost all middle schools, and together they are educating 12,000 children. The network is run on a franchise model; each school's principal has considerable autonomy, while quality control is exercised from the home office in San Francisco. Feinberg is the superintendent of KIPP's eight schools in Houston, and Levin is the superintendent of the four New York City schools.

KIPP is part of a loose coalition with two other networks of charter schools based in and around New York City. One is Achievement First, which grew out of the success of Amistad Academy, a charter school in New Haven that was founded in 1999. Achievement First now runs six schools in New Haven and Brooklyn. The other network is Uncommon Schools, which was started by a founder of North Star Academy in Newark along with principals from three acclaimed charter schools in Massachusetts; it now includes seven schools in Rochester, Newark and Brooklyn. The connections among the three networks are mostly informal, based on the friendships that bind Levin to Norman Atkins, the former journalist who founded North Star, and to Dacia Toll, the Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate who started Amistad with Doug McCurry, a former teacher. Toll and Atkins visited Levin at the Bronx KIPP Academy when they were setting up their original schools and studied the methods he was using; they later sent their principals to the leadership academy that Levin and Feinberg opened in 2000, and they have continued to model many of their practices on KIPP's. Now the schools are beginning to formalize their ties. As they each expand their charters to include high schools, Levin, Toll and Atkins are working on a plan to bring students from all three networks together under one roof.

Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes. When I visited KIPP Academy last month, I was standing with Levin at the front of a music class of about 60 students, listening to him talk, when he suddenly interrupted himself and pointed at me. ''Do you notice what he's doing right now?'' he asked the class.

They all called out at once, ''Nodding!''

Levin's contention is that Americans of a certain background learn these methods for taking in information early on and employ them instinctively. KIPP students, he says, need to be taught the methods explicitly. And so it is a little unnerving to stand at the front of a KIPP class; every eye is on you. When a student speaks, every head swivels to watch her. To anyone raised in the principles of progressive education, the uniformity and discipline in KIPP classrooms can be off-putting. But the kids I spoke to said they use the Slant method not because they fear they will be punished otherwise but because it works: it helps them to learn. (They may also like the feeling of having their classmates' undivided attention when they ask or answer a question.) When Levin asked the music class to demonstrate the opposite of Slanting -- ''Give us the normal school look,'' he said -- the students, in unison, all started goofing off, staring into space and slouching. Middle-class Americans know intuitively that ''good behavior'' is mostly a game with established rules; the KIPP students seemed to be experiencing the pleasure of being let in on a joke.

Still, Levin says that the innovations a visitor to a KIPP school might notice first -- the Slanting and the walls festooned with slogans and mottos (''Team Always Beats Individual,'' ''All of Us Will Learn'') and the orderly rows of students walking in the hallways -- are not the only things contributing to the schools' success. Equally important, he says, are less visible practices: clear and coherent goals for each class; teachers who work 15 to 16 hours a day; careful lesson planning; and a decade's worth of techniques, tricks, games and chants designed to help vast amounts of information penetrate poorly educated brains very quickly.

Toll and Levin are influenced by the writings of a psychology professor from the University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman, the author of a series of books about positive psychology. Seligman, one of the first modern psychologists to study happiness, promotes a technique he calls learned optimism, and Toll and Levin consider it an essential part of the attitude they are trying to instill in their students. Last year, a graduate student of Seligman's named Angela Duckworth published with Seligman a research paper that demonstrated a guiding principle of these charter schools: in many situations, attitude is just as important as ability. Duckworth studied 164 eighth-grade students in Philadelphia, tracking each child's I.Q. as well as his or her score on a test that measured self-discipline and then correlating those two numbers with the student's G.P.A. Surprisingly, she found that the self-discipline scores were a more accurate predictor of G.P.A. than the I.Q. scores by a factor of two. Duckworth's paper connects with a new wave of research being done around the country showing that ''noncognitive'' abilities like self-control, adaptability, patience and openness -- the kinds of qualities that middle-class parents pass on to their children every day, in all kinds of subtle and indirect ways -- have a huge and measurable impact on a child's future success.

Levin considers Duckworth's work an indication of the practical side of the ''character'' education he and Toll and Atkins are engaged in: they want their students to be well behaved and hard-working and respectful because it's a good way to live but also because the evidence is clear that people who act that way get higher marks in school and better jobs after school. To Toll, a solid character is a basic building block of her students' education. ''I think we have to teach work ethic in the same way we have to teach adding fractions with unlike denominators,'' she told me. ''But once children have got the work ethic and the commitment to others and to education down, it's actually pretty easy to teach them. ''

The schools that Toll, Atkins, Levin and Feinberg run are not racially integrated. Most of the 70 or so schools that make up their three networks have only one or two white children enrolled, or none at all. Although as charter schools, their admission is open through a lottery to any student in the cities they serve, their clear purpose is to educate poor black and Hispanic children. The guiding principle for the four school leaders, all of whom are white, is an unexpected twist on the ''separate but equal'' standard: they assert that for these students, an ''equal'' education is not good enough. Students who enter middle school significantly behind grade level don't need the same good education that most American middle-class students receive; they need a better education, because they need to catch up. Toll, especially, is preoccupied with the achievement gap: her schools' stated mission is to close the gap entirely. ''The promise in America is that if you work hard, if you make good decisions, that you'll be able to be successful,'' Toll explained to me. ''And given the current state of public education in a lot of our communities, that promise is just not true. There's not a level playing field.'' In Toll's own career, in fact, the goal of achieving equality came first, and the tool of education came later. When she was at Yale Law School, her plan was to become a civil rights lawyer, but she concluded that she could have more of an impact on the nation's inequities by founding a charter school.

The methods these educators use seem to work: students at their schools consistently score well on statewide standardized tests. At North Star this year, 93 percent of eighth-grade students were proficient in language arts, compared with 83 percent of students in New Jersey as a whole; in math, 77 percent were proficient, compared with 71 percent of students in the state as a whole. At Amistad, proficiency scores for the sixth grade over the last few years range between the mid-30s and mid-40s, only a bit better than the averages for New Haven; by the eighth grade, they are in the 60s, 70s and 80s -- in every case exceeding Connecticut's average (itself one of the highest in the country). At KIPP's Bronx academy, the sixth, seventh and eighth grades had proficiency rates at least 12 percentage points above the state average on this year's statewide tests. And when the scores are compared with the scores of the specific high-poverty cities or neighborhoods where the schools are located -- in Newark, New Haven or the Bronx -- it isn't even close: 86 percent of eighth-grade students at KIPP Academy scored at grade level in math this year, compared with 16 percent of students in the South Bronx.

The leaders of this informal network are now wrestling with an unintended consequence of their schools' positive results and high profiles: their incoming students are sometimes too good. At some schools, students arrive scoring better than typical children in their neighborhoods, presumably because the school's reputation is attracting more-engaged parents with better-prepared kids to its admission lottery. Even though almost every student at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, for example, is from a low-income family, and all but a few are either black or Hispanic, and most enter below grade level, they are still a step above other kids in the neighborhood; on their math tests in the fourth grade (the year before they arrived at KIPP), KIPP students in the Bronx scored well above the average for the district, and on their fourth-grade reading tests they often scored above the average for the entire city.

At most schools, well-prepared incoming students would be seen as good news. But at these charter schools, they can be a mixed blessing. Although the schools have demonstrated an impressive and consistent ability to turn below-average poor minority students into above-average students, another part of their mission is to show that even the most academically challenged students can succeed using their methods. But if not enough of those students are attending their schools, it's hard to make that point. North Star's leaders say this problem doesn't apply to them: the school's fifth-grade students come in with scores that are no higher than the Newark average. At KIPP, Levin and other officials I talked to say that their schools do what they can to recruit applicants who are representative of the neighborhoods they serve, but they also say that once a class is chosen (and at all the charter schools, it is chosen by random lottery), their job is to educate those children to the best of their ability. Dacia Toll is more focused on the issue; she says that she and her principals make a special effort to recruit students from particularly blighted neighborhoods and housing projects in New Haven and Brooklyn and told me that it would ''absolutely be a cause for concern'' if Amistad seemed to be attracting students who were better-prepared than average.

The most persistent critic of KIPP's record has been Richard Rothstein, a former education columnist for The New York Times who is now a lecturer at Teachers College. He has asserted that KIPP's model cannot be replicated on a wide scale and argues that the elevated incoming scores at the Bronx school make it mostly irrelevant to the national debate over the achievement gap. Although Rothstein acknowledges that KIPP's students are chosen by lottery, he contends in his book ''Class and Schools'' that they are ''not typical lower-class students.'' The very fact that their parents would bother to enroll them in the lottery sets them apart from other inner-city children, he says, adding that there is ''no evidence'' that KIPP's strategy ''would be as successful for students whose parents are not motivated to choose such a school.''

In some ways, the debate seems a trivial one -- KIPP is clearly doing a great job of educating its students; do the incoming scores at a single school really matter? But in fact, KIPP, along with Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, is now at the center of a heated political debate over just how much schools can accomplish, and that has brought with it a new level of public scrutiny. Beginning in the late 1990s, KIPP, Amistad and North Star were embraced by advocates from the right who believed in the whole menu of conservative positions on education: school choice, vouchers, merit pay for teachers. In 2001, the Heritage Foundation profiled the KIPP schools in a book called ''No Excuses: Lessons From 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools,'' which set out to disprove ''the perennial claims of the education establishment that poor children are uneducable.'' Two years later, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, the well-known conservative writers about race, borrowed the Heritage Foundation's title (which was itself borrowed from a slogan popular at KIPP and other schools) for their own book on education, ''No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning''; the book used the success of Amistad, North Star and, especially, KIPP to highlight the failings of the public-school system in serving poor children. If KIPP can successfully educate these kids, the Thernstroms asked, why can't every school?

The Thernstroms argue that if we can just fix the schools where poor children are educated, it will become much easier to solve all the other problems of poverty. The opposing argument, which Rothstein and others have made, is that the problems of poor minority kids are simply too great to be overcome by any school, no matter how effective. He points to the work of Hart and Risley and Lareau and argues that the achievement gap can be significantly diminished only by correcting, or at least addressing, the deep inequities that divide the races and the classes.

Levin and Toll sometimes seem surprised by the political company they are now keeping -- and by the opponents they have attracted. ''I'm a total liberal!'' Toll said, a little defensively, when I asked her recently about this political divide. Many charter advocates claim that the views of Democratic politicians on charter schools are clouded by the fact that they depend for both money and votes on the nation's teachers' unions, which are skeptical of charter schools and in some states have taken steps to block them from expanding. In Connecticut, the state teachers' union this year lobbied against a legislative change to allow for the expansion of Amistad Academy (it later passed), and the union's lawyers filed a Freedom of Information Act request that required Amistad to turn over all of its employment and pay records. The union's chief lobbyist told reporters in April that the state's charter law was intended only ''to create incubators of innovation. It was never to create a charter-school system.'' Amistad was acceptable as a small experiment, in other words, but there was no reason to let it grow.

Even if schools like KIPP are allowed to expand to meet the demand in the educational marketplace -- all of them have long waiting lists -- it is hard to imagine that, alone, they will be able to make much of a dent in the problem of the achievement gap; there are, after all, millions of poor and minority public-school students who aren't getting the education they need either at home or in the classroom. What these charter schools demonstrate, though, is the effort that would be required to provide those students with that education.

Toll put it this way: ''We want to change the conversation from 'You can't educate these kids' to 'You can only educate these kids if. ...' '' And to a great extent, she and the other principals have done so. The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.

Right now, of course, they are not getting more than middle-class students; they are getting less. For instance, nationwide, the best and most experienced teachers are allowed to choose where they teach. And since most state contracts offer teachers no bonus or incentive for teaching in a school with a high population of needy children, the best teachers tend to go where they are needed the least. A study that the Education Trust issued in June used data from Illinois to demonstrate the point. Illinois measures the quality of its teachers and divides their scores into four quartiles, and those numbers show glaring racial inequities. In majority-white schools, bad teachers are rare: just 11 percent of the teachers are in the lowest quartile. But in schools with practically no white students, 88 percent of the teachers are in the worst quartile. The same disturbing pattern holds true in terms of poverty. At schools where more than 90 percent of the students are poor -- where excellent teachers are needed the most -- just 1 percent of teachers are in the highest quartile.

Government spending on education does not tend to compensate for these inequities; in fact, it often makes them worse. Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has compiled persuasive evidence for what he calls the country's ''education apartheid.'' In states with more poor children, spending per pupil is lower. In Mississippi, for instance, it is $5,391 a year; in Connecticut, it is $9,588. Most education financing comes from state and local governments, but the federal supplement for poor children, Title 1, is ''regressive,'' Liu points out, because it is tied to the amount each state spends. So the federal government gives Arkansas $964 to help educate each poor child in the state, and it gives Massachusetts $2,048 for each poor child there.

Without making a much more serious commitment to the education of poor and minority students, it is hard to see how the federal government will be able to deliver on the promise contained in No Child Left Behind. The law made states responsible for turning their poorest children into accomplished scholars in a little more than a decade -- a national undertaking on the order of a moon landing -- but provided them with little assistance or even direction as to how they might accomplish that goal. And recently, many advocates have begun to argue that the Education Department has quietly given up on No Child Left Behind.

The most malignant element of the original law was that it required all states to achieve proficiency but then allowed each state to define proficiency for itself. It took state governments a couple of years to realize just what that meant, but now they have caught on -- and many of them are engaged in an ignoble competition to see which state can demand the least of its students. At the head of this pack right now is Mississippi, which has declared 89 percent of its fourth-grade students to be proficient readers, the highest percentage in the nation, while in fact, the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that only 18 percent of Mississippi fourth graders know how to read at an appropriate level -- the second-lowest score of any state. In the past year, Arizona, Maryland, Ohio, North Dakota and Idaho all followed Mississippi's lead and slashed their standards in order to allow themselves to label uneducated students educated. The federal government has permitted these maneuvers, and after several years of tough talk about enforcing the law's standards, the Education Department has in the past year begun cutting one deal after another with states that want to redefine ''success'' for their schools. (When I spoke to Spellings this month, she said she would ''appeal to the better angels of governors and state policy makers'' to keep their standards in line with national benchmarks.)

The absence of any robust federal effort to improve high-poverty schools undercuts and distorts the debate over the responsibility for their problems. It is true, as the Thernstroms write in their book, that ''dysfunctional families and poverty are no excuse for widespread, chronic educational failure.'' But while those factors are not an excuse, they're certainly an explanation; as researchers like Lareau and Brooks-Gunn have made clear, poverty and dysfunction are enormous disadvantages for any child to overcome. When Levin and Feinberg began using the slogan ''No Excuses'' in the mid-1990s, they intended it to motivate their students and teachers, to remind them that within the context of a KIPP school, there would always be a way to achieve success. But when the conservative education movement adopted ''No Excuses'' as a slogan, the phrase was used much more broadly: if that rural Arkansas public school isn't achieving the success of a KIPP school, those responsible for its underachievement must simply be making excuses. The slogan came to suggest that what is going wrong in the schools is simply some sort of failure of will -- that teachers don't want to work hard, or don't believe in their students, or are succumbing to what the president calls ''the soft bigotry of low expectations'' -- while the reality is that even the best, most motivated educator, given just six hours a day and 10 months a year and nothing more than the typical resources provided to a public-school teacher, would find it near impossible to educate an average classroom of poor minority students up to the level of their middle-class peers.

The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement. It is not yet entirely clear what that system might look like -- it might include not only KIPP-like structures and practices but also high-quality early-childhood education, as well as incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools -- but what is clear is that it is within reach.

Although the failure of No Child Left Behind now seems more likely than not, it is not too late for it to succeed. We know now, in a way that we did not when the law was passed, what it would take to make it work. And if the law does, in the end, fail -- if in 2014 only 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the country's poor and minority students are proficient, then we will need to accept that its failure was not an accident and was not inevitable, but was the outcome we chose.

Paul Tough is an editor at the magazine. He is writing a book about the Harlem Children's Zone, a community organization.

week 3 -- no letter

2006-12-07T12:13:00.000-05:00

we didn't get a letter from paulette this week. we were asked by her therapist to be direct about why paulette was in anasazi and why she would be there for 8 weeks rather than 6, which is the norm. so we were. she apparently didn't respond too well.

this is an email from her therapist:

Hello Kimberly & Lindsay,

I had pretty decent visit with Paulette. She was slow to warm up to say the least, but by having other female staff with me seemed to loosen her tongue at least to surface details. While I was sitting by the fire talking to Paulette and another YoungWalker, the other stated that "if you don't talk you can get extended." I think Paulette may have already known that, but her eyes got big and she asked if that were true. It was interesting how her demeanor seemed to change and she was not so bubbly. I do not believe she wrote a letter this week, despite my encouragement.
She said maybe "tomorrow," and she had stated that yesterday. It is possible to send out a letter with the families coming off the trail, but who knows if she knew that or not. If a letter appears I will let you know.

I will call you both tomorrow at Noon EST.

Take care,

Dale

weekly letter from paulette #1 -- week 2

2006-12-04T14:41:00.000-05:00

this came last friday, but i was lazy. i am not editing at all, but i get it as a pdf and you can't read it if i just upload....sorry for the delay:

Dear Kimberly and Lyndsay
everything at Anasazi has been a blast! the hiking the food (everything has been great except for the lentils.) i think lentils are the most nastiest thing i have ever yet to taste. i am sorry i haven't been writting you i have been really busy lately. in the last letter you asked what wet dog was. Wet dog is simply a combo of Powedered milk, water, tang, baking soda and creamer. (creamer is powered butter and tang is sucgar but flavored.) Thats what wet dog is and the funny thing is it smells like a wet dog. there is also maple dog its the same thing you Just add brown sugar.

we can also make something called ashcakes there really good. yesterdcay i made biscuts and gravy it was really good. you make it by one haveing all the right things. you need flour. water. tang. brosn sugar [there are arrows from the tang and brown sugar pointing to -->] (optional)
chicken bullion bull-yon an an onion fist you mix 1/3 of a cup of flour and like two splashes of water. shril it up so it makes dough. you can add the tang or brown sugar if you want

then you form little circle patties adn put them in the ashes of you fire they don't bubble but, when they look brown you flip them. while those are cooking you make the crazy. you make gravey by putting 1/3 of a cup of water then you add like 4 pimches of flour mix it w/ bullion and let it boil then you take the askcakes or biscuts samething and dunk them well i think thats enough about food i'll tell you the rest next week. well like i said earlier everthing is great. i've realized that i loce being outdoors and i love hiking. i really miss you guys (incl being home in my bed. As soon as i get out of Anasazi I want you to take me to olive garden i hope you know you are supposed to take me out to dinner that thursday i really am enjoying Anasazi bit i can't wait to get out! i have one question how many week am i going to be at anasazi

well that all talk to you later

love
paulette

more thanksgiving photos

2006-11-28T18:38:00.000-05:00

if you are interested in more photos, please visit the qualter's blog (jen this is especially for you.)

thanksgiving

2006-11-26T14:51:00.000-05:00

paulette celebrated thanksgiving with a personalized cornish game hen, a sweet potato, and a personalized size pie. she had to prepare it. but she was able to have some meat. we are sure she didn't relish it the way the kids who had been out for 5 weeks did, but we hear she was pretty happy.

we had a gathering a friends who happen to be foodies. we had an AMAZING thanksgiving with mindblowing food.

fresh organic brined turkey
mushroom stuffing
spectacular gravy
home made rolls
pineapple souffle
mashed potatoes
yams
green bean in tarragon
salad greens from the garden
cranberry sauce

it was yummy...
berry pie
apple pie
pumpkin pie

the chefs

the food

the hedonists

the thankfulness

week one of anasazi

2006-11-25T23:18:00.000-05:00

paulette has been "on the trail" now for 1 week. when she left the headquarters she was given her first weeks ration of foods which included:

lg ziplock 3/4 full of lentils
lg ziplock 3/4 full of macaroni
lg ziplock 3/4 full of oats
lg ziplock 3/4 full of brown rice
small ziplock with 2 fingers worth of salt
small ziplock with 2 fingers worth of baking soda (for brushing teeth or cooking
powdered milk

she makes all of her meals over an open fire in a tin cooking cup. she has to start all of her fires without matches using sticks and wood she finds.

over time she may earn the opportunity to have a knife, but right now she is not allowed to.

i talked to her "shadow" today. (shadow = therapist in the language of anasazi) she decided not to write us letters this week. we are totally disappointed. we learned that she did a good job rationing her food and even had a little left over. apparently this last week was not very physically demanding and so "she has no idea what is in store for her."

she has made friends with a 17-year-old who is near the end of her walk (means that she is nearly done with the program). this other young walker is teaching her how to cook her own food, ration, find water, make a nice bed, etc. she is apparently getting along with everyone. we are a bit worried that the experience will only hit her surface and won't sink all the way in. i hope we are wrong.

we have weekly conference calls with her shadow. each call is about an hour or so. this is a good time for us to work through our own issues and try to figure out how we can help her too. the stuff we are learning from anasazi digs really deep and makes you really think about how you react and why. the main premise of the concept is that as humans we find it often easier to live in self-betrayal than in honesty. we betray ourselves when we think or feel to behave kindly or selflessly but then decide not to. in order to justify our not behaving well be find ways to blame the other person for our bad behaviour.

the example they use is:
the baby wakes up in the middle of the night screaming and you are woken up. you notice your spouse is fast asleep. you feel like you should go get the baby and comfort her but instead you decide to fake sleep and wait for your spouse. as you wait you start to feel guilty. instead of letting that guilt motivate you to get out of bed and help the baby, you start thinking ill thoughts of your spouse. "oh he is probably just feigning sleep. he never gets up with her and i always have to. and plus i am always the one that feeds her and does he even understand how many loads of laundry i do in a day. he never even says anything..." and then we betray ourselves. you are not really made at our husband for not getting up and all these other things, you are mad at yourself.

there are a number of really good books written about this. and if you feel inclined i HIGHLY recommend them.
leadership and self-deception
bonds that make us free
the anatomy of peace

lindsay and i both wrote paulette letters this week that are delivered to her on tuesday, every tuesday. we are supposed to write explaining what we are learning and what we want to change in our relationship with her. it is tricky. we also wrote a letter to her shadow all about the best things about paulette and what we hope she will become etc. it was pretty cool to do. but man, this self-exploration is exhausting.

i think we are in a real catharsis moment. lindsay and i spent the weekend cleaning. my room has never been cleaner or more organized. lindsay is a master organizer and we have just buzzed through the house cleaning and getting rid of junk. i think it is a way for us to take control back. we have thrown a ton of stuff out. catharsis is good. it is always really messy when you start but then it is SO much better than it was. i know it is the same emotionally. you just have to trust the processes and you have to let your self get messy and all messed up before you can get it all back together.

untitled post

2006-11-25T17:38:00.000-05:00

will it rain on paulette?

2006-11-20T00:13:00.000-05:00

this is a question that has been on my mind alot! i have this picture in my head of a rainstorm rolling in and paulette refusing to make her shelter because she is tired. she ends up getting soaked and not sleeping. she curses the rain, and God for sending the rain. all of her stuff is wet and she wants to blame someone but there is no one to blame. maybe she could blame God. she has to hike is wet yucky clothes the next day and carry a heavier pack because it is wet. she gets thirsty and drinks water from a creek that is flowing a bit more robustly. she is grateful for the water. and nature teaches her a leason about the power of her agency. if she would have just done what she knew needed to be done she would be dry. it is her responsibility and she is the only one to blame.

because this has been going through my mind i am perceverating about it raining while paulette is out there. i just spent some time combing the web for some predictions and found out that dec. and jan are the 2nd wettest months of the year (summer monsoon - some of july, all of aug, some sept are the wettest).

she is hiking in the light green part of arizona

the making of a young walker

2006-11-17T22:01:00.000-05:00

on our way to the airport...before the torrential rain

saying goodbye to our bestest fRauntie D!

waiting anxiously to get on our plane
you can tell it is raining. but the ground stop hadn't gone into effect yet.
the real rain was yet to come.

after about 1.5 hours we had to run out on the tarmack
to catch our flight. we shared a huge umbrella
the wind and rain were too much. they soaked us all the way through.

after we arrived in cinncinati and realized we had made our flight
we remembered that we needed to fatten her up.

the flight was pretty uneventful. lindsay slept. i cleaned up my wallet.
i am not sure what paulette did. we weren't sitting by each other

jennifer, bobbi, and mark thankfully came late to the airport for a reunion.
i wish i could report a happy reunion but it was actually kinda ackward.
the moment jen saw paulette she ran and skipped to her as fast as she could
paulette just stood there with her arms folded and hip out.
jen hugged lindsay first, then me, then paulette.
it was hard to watch. their relationship will definately need some healing time

it was tough to get a photo of the 2 of them at first.

eventually they started warming up

speak no evil

our luggage didn't come so we had some running around to do
the girls left with bobbi and mark to find ice cream
then they all came back to bekki and tyler's (where we are staying)
and we got to hang out for a bit.
lindsay and i were exhausted. i am sure we were not the best company.

as we drove to anasazi in rush hour traffic paulette kept saying: it is so peaceful here.
we had been filling her full of water to make her be able to weigh-in. we were mistaken because she didn't see the nurse for a couple of hours. poor thing. at least she started the trail hydrated.

we pulled up and a woman, natalie about 23 yrs-old, was standing there.
she said "are you kimberly or lindsay"
i am kimberly
"hi, kimberly. and you must be lindsay: hello"
opening the car door: "you must be paulette"
we step out of the car and natalie says
"take as much time here as you need. say your good-byes and any final words.
as soon as you are done, paulette will go up these stairs and get ready for the trail.
you will go in that door and finialize her admission."

last minute hydration
the last licorice mint tea she will have for a long long time

saying good-bye

we had a pretty ackward, lecturey type good-bye.

our last view of her.
at least you can tell she is in good hands!

Weighing in

2006-11-17T09:35:00.000-05:00

Kimberly just posted about all the near misses we've had on our trip to Arizona. Though we finally made it, we're not entirely out of the woods. The last requirement: weight.

In order to participate in Anasazi's program, Paulette needs to be at least 5 feet tall (check--she's 5'1''), and weigh at least 100 pounds. (She's going to carry a 35-pound pack on her back for 8 weeks). Over the last two weeks, we've weighed her at least three times, and found her weight fluctuating between 90 and 95. We rounded up on the application.

In a desperate effort to get her to gain the needed pounds, Kimberly and I have been on a mission to force-feed this girl as many empty calories as we can. It's been a little tricky since she hasn't been staying at our house over the last week, and, therefore, we can't control her diet. We have, however, given it the old Cougar try:

Monday. Haagen Dazs (sp?) ice cream + hazelnut white chocolate bar + Five Guys hamburger (two patties) and fries + two scoops Ben & Jerry's Cookies and Cream ice cream in a sugar cone. That was all after lunch, and before dinner. We sent her home with Chubby Hubby Ben and Jerry's with the command to eat it all so we could give her another pint.
Tuesday. Clif Bar + Protein Builder's Bar + Luna Bar. In addition to three full meals, of course.
Wednesday. Clif Bar + Protein Builder's Bar. Meals counted separate.
Thursday. Tuna Sandwich loaded with Mayo + Cream Cheese and Crackers + Pasta dripping in Olive Oil sauce + salad drenched in dressing + Whole Milk Steamer with Toffee flavor + Soda (3) + McFlurry. I regret that we never gave her a Cinnabon, the obvious choice. Too stressful.
Friday (today). We have only one meal to work with, since we take her at 8:30 am. Oatmeal + Water. And lots of it.

We report to Anasazi in about 45 minutes. I hope this works....

near misses

2006-11-17T02:11:00.000-05:00

this entire process has been one near miss after another. i have no idea what the meaning behind it all is, but the forces seem to be simultaneously for and against us.

yesterday at 5:30pm we are asked to postpone our trip due to some administrative issues concerning the church paying for anasazi. lindsay and i both flipped out. at 9:30 last night we found that the following appeal worked to allow us to come now:

Where is she going to stay. Her stay at the temporary group home ends tomorrow. Tonight is the last night she can stay there. It is not safe for her to be in our house as she has run away, been truant, (edited for paulette's privacy), while in our care. We are not able to provide for her the supervision that she needs.
School. Paulette is on a 1-week school break beginning Monday through Friday (20-24 Novemeber) because of Thanksgiving. This means that she will have no place to go where she is supervised during the day.
Thanksgiving. Kimberly and I have made plans for the holiday. We are emotionally drained, and need some time to recuperate and to spend time with family and friends to recharge our batteries. Delaying one week, would actually mean that we would need to travel on Thanskgiving day to enroll her the following day (they take admissions only on Fridays).
Work/Jobs. This has been a huge drain on our jobs. We have missed over 80 hours of work in the past month. Since we have already alerted our employers about the necessary time off tomorrow and Friday, we fear that changing things now will only irk them further and may jeopordize Kimberly's employment.

then, today we arrived at the airport with plenty of time. we were in good shape. lindsay and i were both upgraded on the long flight. paulette seemed okay. then, 10 minutes before we were to board our plane there was a total and indefinite ground stop due to torrential storms. our layover in cincinnati was to be 50 minutes long. it didn't take long, about 50 minutes, for us to realize that we had missed our connection. we were conflicted: do we fly through cincinnati or atlanta? as we were wrestling with the decision they boarded our plane. the connection we new we were missing was the last flight out of cincinnati. as the flow of travelers moved towards the plane we were swept up. once seated we realized we never really considered what we should do, but the doors were shut. i ask God to make the plane we were connecting on in cincinnati have a mechanical problem so it would still be there when we arrived and we could catch that plane to phoenix.

40 minutes after our connection was due to depart we arrived. we walked out of terminal c onto the bus to terminal b, which left the moment we got on. once at terminal b, i ran like a bat out of somewhere to check on the status of our connection; the tv screen said it was boarding. the sign above the gate said that the flight to phoenix was leaving at 7:20 (it was supposed to have left at 4:40).

"does this mean i didn't miss my connection to phoenix?"
placidly, "sure does."
"WOW! that is awesome. can i ask why?"
"massive mechanical problems. the other plane was in no condition to fly. we are getting a plane from seattle to take yall to phoenix"

needless to say, i was kinda freaked out.

i had been really worried that paulette wouldn't see jen. that i wouldn't get to eat costa vida. and that i would not be able to keep my upgrade into first class. it all worked out, but not without some serious stress.

our bags didn't make it though.

the good thing is, we are here and anasazi starts tomorrow. i really really hope this works!

i will add pictures later, but all of my cords to get the photos off my camera are in my checked baggage which i should get tomorrow afternoon.

inching closer to resolution

2006-11-15T23:17:00.000-05:00

tomorrow we leave for arizona. paulette is, miraculously, being admitted to anasazi. she had nearly worn out her welcome at the group home -- we were called monday night telling us that they were about to kick her out for bad and disrespectful behaviour. her therapist was convinced that she was picking up some really bad behaviour from the other residents. in reality it is the same stuff that happens here: disrespect, defiance, entitlement, anger, etc. we are very excited about this opportunity for her. we were really at our wits end wondering what we could do with her. our home was far too unstructured. police officers, therapists, psychologist, psychiatrists, all indicate that what paulette needs is intensive, theraputic, around-the-clock intervention. there is no family enviroment that can provide the amount of structure and type of intervention needed to save her from her poor judgement.

paulette will be at anasazi for eight weeks. she takes absolutely nothing with her. they outfit her with basics. she will make her own backpack. live off the land. make fire without matches. have therapy regularly. and be out of DC and in nature. we are hopeful that this will allow her to deal with her baggage and start the process of recovery.

she is excited to go. i think she really does want help. she wants to be better. she wants to be happy. she really just can't figure out how to do it right now. and she is inundated with so many horrible influences that it is really difficult.

from the anasazi website :

The Young Walkers learn by themselves to trust, to grow and to challenge old thoughts and behavior. This is done in the most supportive, safe and unrelenting environment -- nature. Nature demands the best -- it cannot be manipulated, it continues in its scheduled course regardless of the behaviors of the youth. Nature simply requires compliance and wise decisions. The adolescent has no one to blame or challenge but her self.

we feel like this is exactly what the doctor ordered.

she will write us one letter once a week and we reciprocate. she will have no other outside communication. we will post the letters on this blog. (we may edit out some information.) you are welcome to respond to her in the comments part of this blog. we plan to have her read all of the comments once she returns.

this saturday, lindsay and i will enjoy a 12 hour seminar on the philosophy of the program. much of the philosophy is captured in terry warner's bonds that make us free. lindsay and i have both read the book and found it really helpful. we recommend it! frankly, i think this seminar comes at a good time for us. we are both spent and in need of some perspective.

while she is at anasazi, lindsay and i will try to pick up the pieces of neglected work and a dissolved social life and get our bodies back in shape. we will also continue the search for paulette's family. hopefully the healing she will experience at anasazi will make her less intimidating to families and make us more comfortable allowing her to be added to a family.

this is not without its fall backs. one, it is really expensive. our Church has offered to pay for it out of the fast offering. in the mormon church, members are encouraged to fast whenever their faith needs special fortification and to fast regularly once each month on the first sunday of the month usually. when we fast we go without eating or drinking for two consecutive meals, pray more, and contribute a fast offering to help the poor. the offering is at least equal to the value of the food that would have been eaten. anasazi is a LOT of lunch time hotdogs. (think $20k)

if you are inclined to help paulette out financially, this might be a good time to do it. you can make a donation to our congregation and include a note that it is for paulette and it will go towards this treatment program. if you are so inclined, please feel free to email us at raisingdc@gmail.com and we will give you the mailing address and instructions. the good news is this will be tax deductible.

our plan for now is, in january, when she is done, lindsay and i will go back to arizona and spend 3 days with paulette "on the trail". if we all survive, we will spend a few more days in arizona. paulette will hang out with jennifer and we will do something for lindsay's 30th b-day. then paulette will return to our house. she will live with us for a few months while we observe her behaviour to ensure that sustainable change has occurred. hopefully by this time a family will present itself. if not, we will probably turn her over to the district foster care system. we have learned more about the system and learned that there are some really good placements for kids with issues like paulette's.

we are excited and a bit nervous. so much hinges on the next few weeks. it is all in paulette's control. the outcome of all of this will be based on paulette's decision making. it is a bit scary, i really hope this works!

election day

2006-11-07T08:33:00.000-05:00

today is election day and many of you will be able to cast votes that really matter. we here in the district of columbia get to vote for a figurehead mayor and a city council that aren't able to control our taxes or really the distribution of our district budget; that is done by a special committee of the house made up of NO ONE that lives in this city. even still, raisingdc is endorsing will cobb for ward 6 council member. he is not establishment or beholden to the democrats. he also hasn't been "reforming dc government for 20 years". seriously, we have no idea why that guy would put that in the electoral briefing book. dc is not doing too well under your care mr. wells. plus, cobb supports community oriented policing (a regular soap box of mine), improvement of the dc school system and expansion of charter schools. he seems to have more of a concrete plan than wells. anyway...

today matters for all of us.

for raisingdc, it really matters. it will affect our jobs. but more importantly, it will directly affect the lives of jennifer and paulette...or at least the rest of the kids that still live at hopkins. so much of what jennifer and paulette have suffered is due to the dysfunction within our society. their fragment of OUR society is so marginalized that our worlds seem completely different. But we live in the same city. they are americans. i can't help but feel like we, the wonks and the voters, failed them. we owe it to these kids to TRY to make this different. and i can't help but think that this population is marginalized because it is hard to fix, and it is much easier to just believe they are bad, rather than that they are sick and abandoned. psychically it is much easier to absolve ourselves of our responsibility and believe that poverty happens because people are bad rather than we failed them. frankly, i believe that paulette is a representative of this entire population. in her, we can see how many ways we've failed. for years this part of all of us was told they were subhuman, unworthy, bad, lazy, dumb. too many really believe this. and it will take a TON of holding therapy to get this portion of society back to where it can function.

the raisingdc homestead is 5 blocks from where paulette and jennifer grew up. their household lived on $678/mo. blocks away we live extremely comfortably on well over $100k (our combined incomes). fear, transactional sex, drugs, violence, rodents, filth, disrespect, defiance are the norm at the housing project they grew up in. fire alarms would go off in the middle of the night for hours, for no reason. men would bust into the girls home and chase them (supposedly never touching them...) they had environmental induced asthma, which cured itself within 10 days of their staying here.

i am not sure what government could do to help these kids, but drastic reforms are needed. it is ridiculous to me that we spend on average $23,542 per year per inmate in prison (according to the federal bureau of prisons) and this family of three was living on just over $8k a year. with poverty being the most powerful predictor of juvenile delinquency and victimization, why not place that investment in preventative measures? fix the schools in the inner cities. provide housing that did not become the petrie dish to the most base of sociology.

after spending 2 hours in a family therapy session, and yet another workless day trying to figure out how to help paulette over come this muck, there is part of me that just hopes that freedom can run though all americans. that we can ALL somehow become freer to enjoy safety and security; have access to health care and education; and that all of us can be viewed as american and as equals and brothers and sisters in a human family. my socioeconomic status was not created by my righteousness/wickedness, or even the righteousness/wickedness of my fathers.

the number of poor people in america is on the rise. but even more dramatic, is that the demographic is changing: they're kids. approximately one-fourth of all children in america are living in poverty. and if he preset trends continue, the figure will reach and appalling one-third within 10 years. and we are the wealthiest of all nations?

a professor at byu that i have grown to love (and lindsay loved as a student) postulated that "perhaps the central moral problem of our time is primarily economic or materialistic, involving behaviour that is more often than not perfectly legal and socially acceptable." he went on to say that " a major point from the parable of the widow’s mite seems to be that moral judgment over the use of money is based not on how much we give, but on how much we keep for ourselves...it is no longer possible to think or even pretend that material acquisitiveness can be morally neutral. never before has it been so clear that the earth's capacity to sustain life is limited. never before did humankind realize that a high standard of living must be purchased at the cost of depletion of finite resources and pollution of a fragile environment."

please vote. we did. look how happy it made us.

when push comes to shove

2006-11-03T15:44:00.000-05:00

so, we are at our wits end. we are not sure what to do with paulette. it is clear that our house is not as structured as she needs. she will be getting more extensive therapy the next few weeks and possibly entering one of these anasazi-type programs.

it is amazing how many families have seriously considered making paulette a part of their family, but when they hear the extent of he behaviour problems they feel like it might not be the best thing. we hold out hope that there is a family out there that is right for her (and where she is right for them) but that hope fades.

because we are at such a loss for a long-term option for her. and dealing with fading hope, we are fasting this sunday on paulette's behalf. we will offer prayers focused on finding paulette a place to live long-term, find a solution for her troubling behaviour, and that she may know we all love her. i really really really hope this helps.

lindsay told paulette about the fast this morning as she took paulette to school. apparently sasha bruce (the place she is staying) is having a horrible impact on her language. she sounds super ghetto these days. she apparently was "talking smack" for quite a bit, then lindsay explained the special congregation-wide fast to her and she fell silent. i am sure that it really struck her that this is happening.

so we invite all of you who read this board and feel inclined to please join us in fasting this sunday. us mormons do this fasting thing regularly: once a month for 24 hours. but you don't have to do that...unless of course you want.

Long time, no write.

2006-11-02T20:53:00.000-05:00

As most of you probably know by now, silence on raising dc's website does not necessarily mean silence in raising dc. I wish that were the case. The last three weeks have witnessed some pretty serious and sensitive developments. We always struggle with striking the right balance between what information to share online—in this quasi-public forum—and what to keep to word of mouth, or to ourselves.

Since Jennifer moved to Arizona, you've read and seen pictures of her progress. We are amazed and thrilled to see what is happening there. Her new family reports how helpful she is, and that she has embraced the role of big sister. We talk to her several times a week and she really does sound like she is blossoming. From her new look (see link to eyebrows post) and her new language (I've heard the word "heck" out of her at least twice), she has enthusiastically thrown herself into this new world. It's not that she's not sad, or that she doesn't miss her family—most of all her sister—and her friends. She does. But when she gets sad, she's turning to her new parents and siblings to comfort her, and that seems to be just as it should be. Even when we tell her that we miss her and ask her if she wants to come back, she says 'no.' Arizona is where she wants to be.

Back in DC, we are struggling with a different problem. Since Jennifer left, Paulette has experienced at least two of the stages of grief we expected: sadness, and anger. For the first three weeks after Jen left, Paulette was unusually clingy and tender, and visibly sad. She would sleep in Jen's bed, for example, or listen to Jen's favorite cd of primary songs as she was falling asleep. This seemed, at the time, to be a pretty important breakthrough. (Usually, when she feels sad, or vulnerable, or lonely, she expresses it as anger instead.)

Unfortunately, the anger is back with a vengence. And so is the disrespect, dishonesty, and occasional explosive violence that marked her behavior during the first few months she lived with us (and, as we have come to learn, that has marked her behavior for years). Three Fridays ago, she took two extra hours to come home from her piano lesson, with some cockamamie story about where she had been in the meantime. Two Fridays ago, she bit me. Last Friday, she didn't come home at all.

Worried and frantic, Kimberly called the police to file a missing person's report—the second time we've had to do this in two and a half months. Paulette eventually showed up at her piano teacher's house while the police were at ours, and the police officer brought her back to the house. It would be an understatement to say she wasn't exactly repentant. Fortunately, the police officer remembered her from when she responded to a call at their old house. She says that she remembered Paulette being the "mom" of the family. The officer said that she was going to be a constant presence in Paulette's life. YEAH!!!!!

Since then, Kimberly and I have spent countless hours trying to figure out how to get Paulette the help that she needs. It's clear that the current situation isn't helping her—something we'd come to realize days before. What we know is that Paulette needs a major therapeutic intervention—a combination of medication, therapy, residential treatment, and an environment that is structured and contained enough to keep her safe. She also needs a change of heart, something all the doctors, therapy, and medications in the world can't provide.

Unfortunately, we are realizing how few options are available. Preventive mental health care in this city is atrocious. Unless a kid is suicidal, homicidal, or in the juvenile justice system, there aren't a lot of options for care.

Yesterday, we admitted her into a two-week therapeutic group home (called "respite care"). It will be a needed break for us, and hopefully a wake-up call for her. During that time, we'll amp up her therapy, and start her on some meds (something the doctor suggested months ago, but we had been reluctant to do for the obvious reasons).

Our hope (pipe dream?) is that somehow, we'll be able to find a way for Paulette to participate in an Anasazi-type program that would serve as a bridge between where she is now and where we hope she will eventually end up—with a loving family. We vacillate between being hopeful that this will work out, and certain that it won't.

Wax on--Wax off !!

2006-10-22T20:56:00.000-04:00

I was waxing my oldest daughter (just older than Jen) and Jennifer thought it would be fun to try.And since she had some crazy weird eyebrows that were going in every direction,I agreed.Of course the first thing out of her mouth when I pulled off the first strip was "you tryin' to kill me girl?" And since she was already dying, we did her upper lip too.When we were done,she looked better and realized that just because somebody is doing something that looks fun,it might not be a good choice :) But since Alaina pulled out the camera and took pictures of the torture,I had to share it with the world....enjoy!!

family fun day

2006-10-14T22:56:00.000-04:00

There was a family safety day at Home Depot. The kids got to climb in a fire truck and ambulance and wear a neck brace.They also got to spray out a "fire" with a hose.We took some fun pics and thought we would share...

trunkie

2006-10-13T15:43:00.000-04:00

our dear little paulette is super trunkie. trunkie is that feeling you get when you are almost done with a place. you pack your bags and you are supposed to be closing stuff out and doing last horrahs, but all you can think about is what you are doing next. that is our little paulette.

she is totally checked out of school. she loves her school and thinks it is the best in the world (which it may well be) but she does NOT want to be going to school there any more. her sister goes to a school that is enjoying a 2 week hiatus (due to year round school) and she doesn't have to wear uniforms. and all the other awesomeness of starting a new life. she is definitely ready to start a new life.

she is as cute as can be at home. she still is not a big fan of chores, but who is? she is charming and funny. and she has found her first true love: violin. she is clearly musically inclined.

any words of advise for paulette or us around how to keep focused when the length of your lame-duck status is not really defined is appreciated.

cool stuff from our fRauntie D

2006-10-11T19:47:00.000-04:00

our auntie dianna is on assignment in baghdad for NPR news. if you want to hear her, you can on NPR throughout the day in their hourly newscasts or you can get it here and then click on "hourly newscast". she has been there for 5 weeks and it is high time that she come home. she sends out a weekly news letter to let us know she is alive and kicking. this week she sent this little ditty about all the wars that have been waged to "own" iraq.

sorry this has nothing to do with raising children, but this is the kind of stuff that facinates us here in the raisingdc house.

Zestfully Clean!

2006-10-08T21:07:00.000-04:00

Well this weekend has been full of lemon zest! Our theme as a framily for this weekend is zestfully clean. We are basically redoing the whole house. Yesterday we went to a million stores to go shopping for things that the house needs. We went to The Container Store, Home Depot, IKEA, and I have to say at that store I had lots of fun scanning the prices of things that is were I decided that when I turned 16 my job was going to be to work in a store scanning items i know that i might change my mind but hey cant a girl dream.

we had soo much fun shopping yesterday we shopped for at least 5 hours i know that many hours shopping for household items: see the results

So far we have cleaned out two rooms my room and the upstairs closet my room looks fab well at least my bed does!

see

my favorite store was IKEA b/c i got to scan items to find the prices i thought that was really fun. i think that i have broken my own record of shopping in more than three stores in one day. when we got home we had to cram all of the things onto the doorstep and we didnt have any room to get through the door. i think that we not only spent a crazy amount of time shopping. thats just if you ask me.

well i think thats all for our little shopping trip but that is not all for our cleaning fiesta or zestfully cleaning.

-paulette

this is what i look like when i talk to jennifer and eat dinner.

The LONG break

2006-10-05T23:58:00.000-04:00

Jen was happy to discover that after 4 days of her new school that there was break for 2 1/2 weeks! But that left 2 1/2 weeks of entertaining 7 kids! We have (so far) gone to the movies(to see open season),baked cupcakes,made jewelry,played made-up games,jumped on the trampoline,played video games,done art projects,gone shopping,e-mailed people,wrestled...and that covered the first 4 days :) But with this many great minds,somebody is always coming up with something interesting,so I've only heard "I'm bored" about 5 times. And the last week of break will be used to care for one of Jen's new little brothers who is having surgery.Jennifer is SO awesome with the younger kids and loves to help especially when they get hurt,so she will be a big help .After all,she is the 2nd oldest out of 7,so she is handed alot of responsibilty and she does very well at accepting it (for the most part,she IS 11) But along with this she is enjoying learning how to do new chores (I think her fave was mopping,I've never heard so much on one subject:)
I do have to say that she is missing alot of people and that's where some e-mails and phone calls have helped.So if anyone would like to have e-mails from her,let one of us know your e-mail address.This seems to be her new passion when she gets bored,she likes to read old e-mails since she doesn't have many new ones to look at.
But when asked by new people if she likes it here,she says she loves it and never wants to leave! Even though every e-mail that she sends she has to include how very weird her new family is,she keeps reassuring us that is a good thing.
To help with some pleading we have received,I will try to post more pics and be more regular on the blogs,things have just been a little crazier than usual around here.But now that I've put it in print,I have to follow through!

The "new family" party

2006-10-05T22:29:00.000-04:00

We had a party on Sunday so Jennifer could meet (most of ) the family/friends.We only had about 30 people here 'cuz about 1/2 couldn't come.She had a ball with the cousins and the sweet babies,wish I had taken more pictures,sorry.She fit right in and,of course,everybody thought she was awesome!! And,like usual,she wanted everybody to watch the video of her and Paulette.I don't think she'll ever watch it too many times.
And a side note to respond to the last blog...no matter how much sleep or experience you have,the kids will always find a way to get more sugar,stay up a few minutes later and trick you into letting things slide.And if all else fails,they use "the face"!

-- bobbie

Mathematics of parenthood

2006-10-04T07:47:00.000-04:00

i want to be up front and say: i don't know what i am talking about.

it turns out that there is all this math required to raise children. no one ever tells you and you have to come up with all the theorems yourself.

it is a blend: calculus and algebra maybe even trigonometry required to perform in order to parent.

there are simple equations:
(s!/S) G = # of fights it takes to get someone to bed

where:
s=amount of sleep last night
S= average amount of sleep for a night over one week
AND
G= sugar intake levels within the last 3 hours

there are tougher ones like:
(a + S) (-+ @)= the right approach to discipline + knowledge about when it is time to just let some things slide.

where:
a=attitude
S= average amount of sleep for a night over one week
-= experience of past
@= amount of contact with family members

it gets even crazier, but i can't figure out the square root thing or how to do superscript for the exponential equations or i would share more equations. suffice it to say, it takes a heck of alot of math. and sometimes even though you get all the calculus right...this happens:

Jennifer is so cute!!!!!!!!!!

2006-10-02T20:32:00.000-04:00

I checked out the blog just now and jennifer's pictures from Arizona are soooo cute. Her little brother ty is also cute. I really like the outfit Jennifer is wearing. That makes me whish even more that I could wear regular clothing to school I mean not uniforms. I love jennifers new life especially the whole thing about having other siblings. I think that Jennifer is very lucky to find a family like the bumms. I really hope that my teachers read this so that they will feel sorry for me and change the rule of our clothing.

_Paulette

Jen on Jen...

2006-09-27T23:21:00.000-04:00

Hi my first day of school was Ok :) My new friends are Bobbi,Emilia,Jessica and TJ. On my first day of school they invited me to sit by them. I really liked it.I really like it in ARIZONA :). I really miss my friends in DC. I miss my mom and Paulette alotttttttttttttt.I think that my new parents are wierd and crazy but I like them a lottttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt.I really like Alaina,my new big sister.
Love,Jennifer Rene Bumm (Kristina) get it bumm like a bumm on your butt but that is so COOL DUDES ROCK ON

Different...in a good way

2006-09-27T00:02:00.000-04:00

Ty sending her off to school

Today was Jen's first day at her new school.She was scared but survived.She was in a really great mood when she got home and said she made friends. I asked her how it compared to her old school and she said it was VERY different but in a good way.Tonight we went shopping for new clothes which was semi-successful. Her and Alaina tried on about 50 things and walked away with about 6.But they assured me that it was fine because we have 2 weeks of break coming up which gives us plenty of time to shop!

WE MATCH

2006-09-26T23:46:00.000-04:00

We had a last minute family home evening which consisted of a short story that I opened up to in the Friend magazine. As I began reading the story,going along with the tradition of crazy,divine coincidences,the story was about our family! It was about a little black girl who was told by a boy at school that she didn't have a real family because she didn't look like them (they were white and had adopted her).The family went on to talk about how a family "matches" because they love each other not because of how they look.All of our kids identified with this story since we have 4 different races of children living here.We went on to play games and watch the video of Jen and Paulette on the blog.It was one of the best FHE's we've had in a long time!

half time

2006-09-26T07:19:00.000-04:00

our friend tomicah (a fRuncle) said that jen's leaving was kinda like halftime in a really really important game and that we were winning. it makes really good sense.

paulette has been so sweet and fun the last 24 hours, and that has made all of this a million times easier. i have been weepy and lindsay has been grumpy. so thank goodness paulette is holding the fRamily together.

yesterday was a disaster. i got really stressful news at work, a couple of times. bobbie called in a full panic because the az attorney we were about to retain called her and hassled her point of tears. they indicated that she had jen illegally and that she could be charged with kidnapping. That bobbie and mark needed to get in the office straightaway.

I am miffed for a number of reasons. Nonetheleast of which is that bobbie and mark are not their clients we are and they only even know their contact info because they asked us to send all of that info to them so that they could get a form prepared, only to send a template of a form. I was steaming mad! they were fired.

i talked bobbie down from that panic and indicated that all the forms we had were totally right and that those lawyers were fired and that we would be finding a new lawyer to help etc.

then i got an email from blair (the girls therapist) tell us that paulette was "not at school today". lindsay had taken her to school and watched her go into the building. there was a flurry of activity only to learn that she was out getting her eyes checked...arg.

it was seriously so up and down and stressful.

we had decided that we were all going to change paulette's room around, but screwed that up and just did it in a hurray without paulette (which i regret). but her new room is much nicer and seems about 100x's bigger.

introduction to the new room

sweet pose

we did talk a lot about jen. telling funny jennifer stories and laughing at jennifer antics. she is really missed.

she's gone

2006-09-24T21:41:00.000-04:00

jennifer left today.

it was an emotional day. selfishly it was sad. it also felt like we were watching the Lord part the red sea. such an incredible miracle. and then there is this anticipation about who jennifer is going to become. she is really so in love with mark and bobbie (though it is clear she will be a daddy's girl).

lindsay and i woke up early to get jen packed while the girls slept. i was making too much noise sneaking stuff out of their room that eventally jen woke up.

my bags are packed...i am leaving on a jetplane, don't know when i'll be back again

jen wrote very sweet notes to us saying thanks for all that we had done for her and for letting her stay with us. and telling us she loved us. they were really sweet and i think i cried about 5 times before i even left for church. she was not really letting herself cry, but once when i was crying she asked me why and i told her because she was leaving and i was going to miss her. she teared up then, but really didn't let herself cry the whole day.

getting ready for church
how cute are these girls
please note paulette's nails...

i am lucky because i will get to see jen over the holidays and any other time i go home. which is super awesome for me. m&b are going to post photos and little stories on the blog. so i think raisingdc will be a way for the 4 of us to keep in touch with each other. and probably not all that interesting for everyone else.

at church mark was asked to give a short talk. it was so touching to hear this big tough looking guy explain his love for his kids and his gratitude for jen. he talked about how he never imagined that he would have 7 kids, that he didn't think he could do something like that. "but the more kids i have, the happier i am".

cuddles and kisses on the sofa

the fRamily on the way to airport

jen as a blowfish at the airport

one the way to the gate

jen leading the pack

the happy family

fighting back tears

really fighting them back.
they are so dang cute

her last farwell

there is no such place as far away. we will miss jen, but she is part of us and we are part of her. we are excited to see what these girls become.

we love you jennifer! we miss you lots. (paulette is sleeping in your bed tonight.)
love,
your fRamily

whirling dervish of emotions

2006-09-23T23:42:00.000-04:00

wow! what an incredible day.

we had blair the girls therapist over for breakfast to meet bobbie and mark. i regret not taking a photo of jen and blair. it was an awesome morning and wonderful way to start the day. which was planned to be a really big day.

then we talked to kviti, our awesome lawyer, to make sure we were doing all the right things. and then headed over to shelia's to introduce her to mark and bobbie and get her to sign custody of jennifer over to them. NERVE RACKING. and i know her

on the way to the nursing home

shelia wouldn't talk to m & b at first and then repeatedly said (probably 10 times), in a very forceful tone: "you are NOT going to adopt my daughter". lindsay and i expected this, but i could see that it was really unsettling to m & b.

we went outside and had a longer conversation.

shelia explained that she was the mother and was really concerned that m&b had sent jennifer a letter and not her. "i am the mother and the letter should come to me. i make the decisions" she then asked them why in the world would they want to have so many kids, and why jennifer. m&b handled this with poise and grace, explaining that they feel like this is what they can do for the world and they have a lot of love to give. they also talked about how much they wanted to meet shelia because they love jennifer and knew that whoever was her mom must be an awesome person. i could tell shelia was starting to develop a little crush on mark. she said some really crazy stuff. and then asked them if they minded if jennifer called them mom and dad. when she learned that it was her and jennifer's decision she gave her permission. she then pointed to bobbie and asked jennifer "who is that?" jen would not answer and looked so on the spot.
she finally said "i am afraid to say it."
"don't be afraid baby, who is that"
"mom?"
"that's right" pointing to mark "and who is that?"
"dad"
"you have my permission to move to arizona"

then it was one big happy family

i am pretty sure the burger king made the trip easier

momma and baby
(who incidentally is much taller than her mom now)

we were all pretty exhausted after than, so we went and ate potbelly's. then m&b and jennifer and linZ went to arlington cemetery and paulette and i went to my ultimate frisbee game (we won). then to the going away party at sarah and tomicah (who get the gold medal of friendship bar none for this weekend and saving us from every other crisis or bind)

it looks more riotous than it was

mike, scott and chuck

sarah, eli, and lashaun

jen started crying. the friends that she wanted to come
weren't able to come. but i think all the goodbyes really started getting to her
our congregation is really like a family
especially for these girls.
it must have been really really hard to say goodbye.
it was nice to see her go to her dad for comfort.
paulette was super sister once again and got mimi and brought her over.

kimber and liz

linds and ginny

once the party was over the girls went over to liz and mike's and we went shopping for souvenirs. score! then to five guys (best hamburgers in dc) and then for a tour of the monuments.

i love ny...whatev

i don't think it is ironic that we ended up at this guys feet.

then we learned some conspiracy theories from mark. taught lindsay about area 51. and got home exhausted.

the girls were super exhausted, so they of course got into a fight about pencils. it ended in paulette punching jen in the back and lindsay jumping out of bed to contain the situation. no matter what sisters are sisters.

it has been a real emotional day. i am amazed that God put us all together. from linday and i being called to be shelia's visiting teachers. and lindsay and i feeling after our first visit that our primary duty was to the girls. to mikki desiring to hear the quite promptings of the holy ghost and be more willing to do something about what she hears and her feeling so compelled to talk to bobbie. i mean there are a million pieces to this puzzle that would be hard to fit together if you weren't omniscient and omnipotent.

it is miraculous. i am really excited for jen. i am really sad for me, because i really do love spending time with jen and it is going to feel really really weird not to have jennifer here with us. she often kicks off the silliness that i love so much about our fRamily. i dread tomorrow, but i am also really excited for jen.

i do feel like this separation is actually going to strengthen the girls relationship. i am too tired. i hope to come back and be more detailed and a more intersting writer, but for now, i just want to get all this stuff out.

what a day

2006-09-23T07:30:00.000-04:00

i have been up for way too long. so much has happened in the last 18 hours it is uncanny. i feel like the baton has been passed to mark and bobbie. it is really amazing. i have to say that i am really really impressed by the way paulette is handling all of this. she is polite and outwardly focused. she is fulfilling the role of a big sister in a really heartfelt and tender way. tonight was her turn to pray. she rendered the sweetest, thoughtful, selfless prayer i have ever heard. i tear up just thinking about it. mostly that jen would know that mark and bobbie love her and that we all love her, and that she is never alone and that we are always here for her. she was grateful to get to know them better and hopeful that someday soon she could have her day like this. i give a hearty amen to all that she said, it was incredibly beautiful.

today has been a rollercoaster of nerves, tears, and happiness. the more i get to know mark and bobbie the more perfect they become. i just can't believe that we all found each other.

mark and bobbie arrived at 7:am. we ate at eastern market and went through "the binder". later in the day we went to the school for songfest (which was awesome, and became the third thing of the day that made me cry). it was so clear that all of her classmates and teachers will miss jen! which made me miss jen too.

jen saying goodbye to her principal and teacher

saying goodbye to friends

sisters and a principal

leaving sarah's on our way to hopkins (the old homestead)

saying good-bye to hopkins and louis
louis has always been an awesome friend to this family

then we all went to dinner and toured around dc
my "say i love bush" caused quite a guffaw from bobbie
schwew

by the time we got home everyone was exhausted
i took a bath and missed the "slumber party in lindsay's bed" memo
they slept like this all night

going out with a yippee kai yay

2006-09-22T04:43:00.000-04:00

last night we had our last unencumbered fRamily pizza party. actually, it is not our last, but just our last where we all live together. i hope that for years we will get together and make pizza and play the way we did last night. bobbie and mark arrive in just a couple of hours. the house is dead quite, and i am awake anxious so i figured i should post something from last night.

we have been wanting to have some real 2 on 2 time with the girls but i think paulette was nervous and wanting to avoid it. on tuesday we were all going to go to sushi (something both girls have wanted to do for over a year). paulette kinda sketched out so we gave her a choice. she choose to hang out with her friends. she missed this:

we love you sakana
and jen of course

spicy tuna

so last night we forced her. lindsay and jen got paulette from the church and went directly to safeway to buy some pizza stuff.

pre-pizza planning with the crazys

we made a couple of signature pizzas and then planned on playing rummikub but then this happened:

i like to call this: follow the prophet dancefest. but i really think we should have a contest to see who can come up with the best name.

on a completely different note, jen has decided to change her name in light of all the other transitions. she kinda likes the idea of kristina, but will probably settle on jenny.

ARIZONA!!!!!!!!!!!!:):):)

2006-09-20T19:47:00.000-04:00

I went to arizona and I had the most fun time of my life. We rode quads and we were suppose to go swimming but it got cancled. I was so sad that they said that it got cancled,but we went quad riding again that was my weekend at arizona.

peace out dudes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-- jen (if you couldn't tell)

sometimes dreams do come true

2006-09-19T00:51:00.000-04:00

Dreams do come true. In this case, this is so out there that I don't think Jen's wildest dreams looked like this. But it does seem like an answered prayer (most probably the answer to many many prayers.)

jen's clothes laid out the night before meeting mark and bobbie.

please note the readiness of those rykas

driving to mark and bobbie's
she was talking 100 miles a minute
giggling the whole way

The trip went exceedingly well. This family is so perfect for Jen it is crazy. It is really unbelievable. (I am starting to wonder if this type of desperation is needed to find a husband.) They are perfect in ways that we would have never even considered as necessary. Their manner, priorities, attitude fit her needs and wants so perfectly. Jen was shy at first, but even in her shiest moments it was clear that she had decided that this was what she wanted. Before we left Jen with Mark and Bobbie the four of us explained to Jen that this was her decision to make. She had choice and voice to decide if she wanted to live in Arizona, with Mark and Bobbie and the rest of their clan. That if she didn’t want to do this she could tell us and we would call it quits. Her response: “i would never do that!” My guess is that she decided to live there when she read the letter they wrote to her.

checking out the toys in the back yard

bonding with bobbie

She spent the weekend with them. She rode bikes, feed horses and goats, road quads (4-wheeled motorcycles), stayed up late with Alena (the 12 year old sister talking about silly stuff), played x-box, had sodas and hamburgers. She was loving her life.

We went over for a BBQ with all the kids and the grandparents. It was so fun and amazing. This family is so full of love and support, but so normal all the same. The grandparents are incredibly kind and welcoming (and clearly proud of the children they raised). There is a keen focus on family and a real value in spending time with each other.

jen and brother ty

the happy family

Jen took us on harrowing quad rides (I thought I might die…she told me it was only far because she has had to drive with me for years – true). I think she really enjoyed introducing us into this new world. Stay tuned for those photos.

We saw Jen again at church on Sunday. I think that was much trickier for her. She was straddling two worlds and not sure where her allegiance was. Who was “mom”, who was friend? It was understandably confusing. It was also the Primary Program Sunday when all of the children from the congregation sing and present little speeches for the worship service. There were about 100 children (where is in our congregation there are typically about 6). Most of the 100 had memorized their talks and knew the songs. Which is quit different from our congregation on capital hill. I think she might have been intimidated and the situation was confusing.

But all that cleared up when she came to where we were staying to get dropped off to come to the airport. She was kinda disheveled and resistant to going, and clearly excited to know that she would be coming back “home” so soon.

The plan is now that Mark and Bobbie will come to DC on Friday. They will stay for the weekend and then return to Arizona with Jennifer on Sunday. This is all contingent on us getting the legal stuff worked out. Our lovely lawyer is working to expedite all of the document signing and making sure that we comply with AZ law.

So please keep your fingers crossed or your prayers coming (or both) whatever suits you best. We need all the divine help and luck we can get.

bobbie and jen riding off into the sunset
(actually to go feed some goats and horses and then a minor crash
jen's not a strong cyclist . . . yet)

arrival in the arid-zone

2006-09-15T05:05:00.001-04:00

we miraculously made it to arizona. every step of the way felt like we wouldn't make it. the 30 minute trip to the airport took 1.5hours (weird traffic and some weather). we were able to check the bags curbside, park the car, get our boarding passes, get through security and a turkey sandwich for jen all within 15 minutes.

making it to the gate, sandwich in hand

(we forgot to get food for me and lindsay which meant a little bit of grumpiness until the delta snacks came around). then the ground crew was having some significant understaffing issues and we were delayed for about 40 minutes. then they announced the time we would arrive in atlanta we realized we had 15 minutes to get to our next flight (and don't forget we are hungry). that flight was delayed (i have never been more pleased to have a flight delayed). and we made it. a bit travel worn and exhausted.

tomorrrow is the big day. jen is excited. i don't think that she had much of an idea of what arizona was until we showed her some photos in the in-flight magazine. we talked about how hot and dry arizona was, which precipitated the "i am hot", "my lips are so chapped", "it is so dry", "there is no water here" mantra as we arrived into sky harbor and all the way to gilbert. hopefully she will aclimate.

jen on the phone with bobbie as we land in atlanta

she is super excited about tomorrow. a friend at school asked her if she was coming back today. jen told her she didn't know, but she didn't want to return. i think jen was pleased that her friend told her she had to come back.

i keep thinking about what a gianormous change this is/will be for her. i really can't even imagine what she is going through. it seems not to really be affecting her. she is clearly ready for a big change. she wants a fresh new start. and she wants to be in a place where it is more "normal" to be mormon. she really wants brothers and sisters who she can take care of. and she really wants to be able to call her female caretaker mommy and to have a daddy in the house too. i really really really hope this is the answer that it seems like it might be.

so here is to tomorrow.

Ode in D

2006-09-14T13:50:00.000-04:00

yesterday was our dear fRauntie (fRaunt is to a aunt what a fRamily is to a family) dianna's birthday. we intended to get the ode out then, but had too many mishaps and breakdowns to get to our computers. but better late than never. here is a quick tribute to fRaunt D!

not long ago our brave, dependible (though not always timely), beloved D left the fRamily for this man.

now at face value anyone would say...NOT WORTH IT. but this man is d's translator while she is on assignment in baghdad for NPR.

d is the source of most of the sanity that remains in this humble abode of ours. and when the sanity seems lost forever, d always knows where to find it (bike rides, hair cuts, rummikube, lightheartedness, perspective, grace).

we are very proud of the work she is doing. blessed to have such a wonderful, compassionate, sunshinny friend. we love you heaps and miss you too much.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY-- webdings for

HAPPY BIRTHDAY --(this is the georgia font)

girls were found

2006-09-13T00:15:00.000-04:00

and not long after i posted...

i had a pretty intense conversation with the girl's principal this afternoon. she called to tell me that she (and others at the school) were VERY concerned that we were splitting the girls up. she said it just seemed really sad that the girls would have to be split us just because a proper family willing to take them both hadn't been found on our time frame. i explained the reasons for the girls being split and she wouldn't really listen. she made me feel like a colonial oppressor. she explained that the office manager at the school is willing to take the girls and adopt them. i was surprised and grateful for the amazing level of kindness and openness but explained there is one non-negotiable criteria -- that the family be mormon. this is not a criterion made up by Kimberly and lindsay but by all 5 of the people most intimately involved (mom, girls, guardians)

i then explained again how it is clear that the girls being separated is the best thing. it is heartbreaking in some regards, but i am over that. both girls are excited (though rightfully sad at times) and it is clear that they want a fresh start. they are viewing this like they are going to different boarding schools. they will remain, of course, sisters. and the family in AZ taking jen is completely supportive of the girls maintaining a relationship. but this is about them getting over the years of abuse and neglect they have suffered. she would have none of it. it was frustrating to say the least.

then i needed to talked to her about the afterschool program that the girls were in last year. this year they are not allowing paulette to be there because she is not struggling academically. so paulette is done with school at 5 and jen is done at 6. it makes afterschool and having a full time job impossible. we need them done at the same time. so the principal explained that they would both NOT be able to participate. so...i rushed home to great them at 5:20...they didn't get home until about 6:45 because jen stayed in the after school program and paulette waited. then they made their daily stop at "the sev" for fire hot cheetos, which is horrible, but i always soften because they share them with me and they are totally delicious. so...they hadn't run away or gotten into too much mischief. but i was fuming mad at that principal.

i am sure she just forgot the conversation was not a smooth one. but it was just kinda frustrating (to say the least)

oops we spoke too soon

2006-09-12T18:24:00.000-04:00

this maybe should be called "hell no they can't go"or even "so much for jesus"

earlier today lindsay posted our amazing experience with the girls mom. well, that has all been changed. after thinking about it and confering with her husband (who lives in a seperate nursing home across town with severe mental and emotional handicaps) they decided that the girls were not allowed to go on vacation to utah (where did they get this idea??!!!).

the girls are missing. i left work in a rush to get home so that someone would be here when they got home. they have been out of school for 1hour and 25 minutes now. i guess i won't make it to frisbee practice afterall.

we have had a feeling that this was going to get ugly at some point. i keep waiting for it to strike. maybe it is right now? who knows. i am nervous and tired.

Surprised

2006-09-12T15:44:00.000-04:00

Our conversation with Sheila went better than any of us expected. We approached her with a reminder that we have been happy to help take care of the girls while she is unable to do so and telling her again that we cannot keep the girls permanently. We explained that we have been looking for other families in our church who would be able and willing to take care of the girls, and that we have found a family who wants to take care of Jennifer. We used the "g" word (guardianship), and she, several times, repeated her resistance to the "a" word. ("I'm not giving my girls up for adoption" she said, with us assuring her that we were talking about guardianship at this point and that our desire was to find a way to ensure that someone would be able to take care of the girls while she could not.)

Initially resistant to the idea of separating the girls and of sending Jennifer far away, she at first focused on the question of how Jen would be able to continue to attend KIPP School while living with this family. At one point she answered her own question by guessing that Jen would have to "commute." We tried to impress upon her that Arizona was too far away for Jen to commute to school, and that there would be very good schools there for Jen to attend. (A fact that Jen has already discussed in great detail with the family). In Arizona, we emphasized, Jen would be cared for by friends of Kimberly's and members of our church who loved children and had already warmed to Jennifer. We told Sheila that we would be taking Jennifer to meet the family this weekend.

We explained that we had prayed and felt really good about the decision. That so many people had also prayed with us, that we are pretty convinced that this is God's will. We told her that we understand why she may not feel great right off, but asked her to pray about it and that we could continue to talk. She apparently decided that prayer was expedient. Hushed us. Bowed her head and began a mumbled, personal prayer. After about a minute, she lifted her head and made a modified version of the sign of the cross (more in a circle with a kiss of her fingers and a flick of the wrist) and said that she wasn't "getting anything". (it is remarkable that she expects such answers. I wonder if I expected direct communication what would happen?? I am WAY too cynical) So we talked about spending more time in meditation and prayer when she was alone and their weren't T.V.s blaring in the background.

Sheila asked how Jen was feeling about all of this. Jennifer came into her mother's room at that point and told her mom that she was feeling "ok" and "good" about the idea. She showed her mother the letter she had received from the family inviting her to come and live with them, and shared the pictures of the family. Sheila read the letter with great interest and looked very closely at the pictures. She said repeatedly, "they sound like nice people." And then added, "but I want to meet them so I can know for sure." We assured her that this would be the case. Paulette, bravely, also chimed in support of the plan; telling her mother how much she wanted her own new home (for some reason, she is fixated on going to Salt Lake City, Utah) and how important this was to Jen.

Ultimately, Sheila did agree to sign a document consenting to giving guardianship for Jennifer to Mark and Bobbie. At one moment in the middle of someone's sentence Shelia hushed the group again. Bowed her head and listened intently. Then looked at us all and said that Jesus had spoken and it was okay for Jennifer to go. After her mother said this would be okay, Jennifer burst into tears--I think in part because she had been so worried that her mother might say no. Sheila wants to meet them to make sure they are as nice as they look, but she said several times that it would be okay for the family to take care of Jen. We explained that we had hired an attorney who could prepare the paperwork, and help us to make sure that everything was done in a legal, right way, and she seemed to understand that as well.

Frankly, all of us (Kimberly and I, as well as both of the girls) were a bit surprised at the ease and outcome of this conversation. Now the questions are about how--and how quickly--to proceed?

tonight

2006-09-11T12:04:00.000-04:00

tonight the grown ups and the girls are going to shelia's (mom) to tell her that the girls are going to live in different places with different family. and that they will be moving very far away. we hope that she will understand!

solutions coming into view

2006-09-07T15:45:00.000-04:00

as mentioned earlier, things are moving at mach speed. in fact so many amazing things have happened in the last couple of weeks, that it is really hard to capture it in a small blog posting. i am sure at some point lindsay and i will discipline ourselves and write a book about this experience.

two weeks ago (25 Aug) i sent an email to my close friends and family outside of DC. the situation felt desperate and lindsay and i both knew that we needed to quickly get the girls a home. they needed stability and incredible amounts of attention. a very close friend (practically a sister) mikki responded by calling a friend from her congregation. to make a long, beautiful and incredibly spiritual story short, this family believes that they are the family for jennifer.

it is a bittersweet discovery. we had decided that the girls would stay together at all costs. but after four intense months it has become clear that the girls need different things. we were looking for a place that could provide both girls what they need, but i think we could look for years and still not really help them. and though fRamilies are wonderful. they are temporary and only a backfill for families. the truth is, splitting the girls is what is really best for them and we have felt that deep down for awhile.

we told the girls in separate conversations, we think we found the home for jennifer and that we (lindsay, kimberly, and jennifer) are going to visit the family next weekend. the story of finding this family is miraculous and worth sharing. stay tuned hopefully we will get it all out here at some point. suffice it to say that we couldn't feel better and believe that this is exactly what Heavenly Father has in store for jen.

we are still looking for paulette's home. we trust that when the time is right the Lord will provide that home for her. we also feel strongly that the home for paulette is somewhere in the first few degrees of separation from us. so please pray for paulette and pray that we will be able to find her a family. if as you read and/or pray about this that you will share the paulette's story with families who may be missing a beautiful, intelligent, and injured little girl.

paulette needs a family where she will be able to get a heap of one-on-one attention. where she will learn that she is a wonderful, good person and undo some of the false messaging her abusive aunt and dysfunctional mother communicated to her. she has been severely abused has a really hard time bonding with people. when she gets close she pushes them away. she has all of the potential in the world. we know that with the love of a happy and caring family, she will become an amazing powerful force for good. she is a natural advocate and passionate. she will bring to the world a wonderful perspective on society and truth. given the right opportunities we have no doubt that she will make the world a better place. so, if you know any particularly special families who would like a beautiful, but troubled young woman, please let us know.

though we are loathe to ask this next favor, we feel like we need to. we have been admonished not to let this hurt us financially. and the ward has been incredibly generous in paying all of the girls' food, clothes, medical care, etc. we know that this has been a sacrifice and we do not want to make light of all that has already been given. the legal issues surrounding this situation are sticky at best and very complicated. we have retained a lawyer to make the interstate
adoption possible, to figure out the relinquishment or termination of parental rights, etc. the ward/Church is not at liberty to participate in financing such action, which completely makes sense. but it means that we are going to have to ask people to help the girls in a non--tax deductible way. so, if you know any people of means who might be willing to help us pay for legal fees, that would also be awesome. we have a paypal account for the girls listed posted on this blog, which we hope will make any donation easier. (though they take 2.5% of anything given. if you want to use paypal click the "make a donation button" on the right of the screen). if you would like to avoid paypal, please email us at raisingdc@gmail.com and we will send you an address where you can reach us. we feel really ridiculous asking, but feel like we must.

what we need most though are prayers. all four of us need the help of the Lord. and we appreciate all of the prayers that have been offered on our behalf. and we appreciate all of the spontaneous service you have rendered our "fRamily".

what happens after the water boils?

2006-09-06T07:48:00.000-04:00

after reaching a boiling point with paulette, i think we have safely come up with a pretty good solution. as mentioned earlier, the girls came home from atlanta begrudgingly. they wanted to stay desperately. of course! DC represented school, chores, and lots of bad memories. we expected a difficult reentry. they both we cranky for the first few days. but paulette just never snapped out of it. she made it clear that she didn't like living with us or even like us. she felt she had "no childhood" here. we were beside ourselves trying to figure out what to do.

our friends mcaurthur and cheryl came to the rescue. they both invited paulette to stay with them for a couple of weeks. we talked to paulette and let her know that we love her and hope that she willat some point (soon) choose to stay with us, but that she could choose what she thought was best for her. so for now she is staying with mcaurthur. she will be there until next monday. if she still doesn't want to come back then, she will go to cheryl's. if she still doesn't want to come back, i don't know what we will do. hopefully a solution will present itself.

it feels really good to let her make and live her decisions. i think we were trying to hard to fix all that was broken, and paulette really didn't want some of it fixed and probably doesn't see it as broken. it feels good for the onus to be on paulette to make the changes she wants. to not try and help her more than she wants help. and to set her free. i hope that this is what she needs and that it will help her to feel better.

meeting with school

2006-09-01T10:45:00.000-04:00

this morning lindsay and i had a 7:am meeting with the school regarding paulette. 7:am in the midst of ernesto was a bit rough, but the meeting was helpful. it was clear that the teachers did not understand the situation and the reason the girls were with us. it was also nice to be validated that many of the concerns we have for paulette are shared by the school.

we are excited because the school is going to make some changes in seating and such to facilitate paulette making some positive friends. additionally she is going to be added to the soccer teams roster. i can think of nothing better for these girls than a team sport. so i am excited for paulette.

later today we have a meeting with a lawyer that we think we may be retaining. we clearly need a lawyer. we are nervous about the financial ramifications of retaining a lawyer, but see no way to negotiate all these complicated legal questions without one.

the girls will be with our friend McArthur for the weekend, which will be a wonderful break for us. we are all super exhausted. none of us have been sleeping. due to either behaviour that requires a late night intervention, late night conversations, or just the sleeplessness that comes from stress and worry. i am hoping that this labor day and i can do no labor and recuperate.

the girls are finding real solace in their spirituality lately and it is really a beautiful thing to watch develop. they know big changes are ahead. i am sure that they are being prepared. we, the grown ups, are not really sure how this is going to end. it does seem like we are beginning to get a better picture of what might be needed. i am sure this will be difficult and heartrending. but i am also sure that in the end it will be worth it.

mach speed

2006-08-31T05:59:00.000-04:00

it has always been our feeling that we are a temporary home for the girls--that our main priorities are to keep them out of foster care (aka. "the system") and to find them a permanent loving place to live.

their exposure to a real family in atlanta, instead of our fRamily, created in the girls an intense desire to have that kind of love permanently. they really hated coming back. who wouldn't? they were living the dream of any 11 or 12 year old, or any 30 something. swimming, biking, movie watching, game playing. no school, no schedule, no structure. they loved it. and in part, they hated us for having to come back.

as their discontent levels continued to rise, lindsay realized that we needed to involve shelia (the girls' mother) more in their care. and the next time someone was upset enough that they needed to go somewhere else, that somewhere would be their mother's. so around midnight saturday night, paulette, lindsay, and i made a trip to shelia's nursing home with the hope that shelia could help paulette be less angry. it worked, but only after the drama of a missing person's report, some serious lecturing from the police, and a number of trips to take paulette back to the nursing home. the good thing is that we learned that paulette can figure out how to get home from almost anywhere and is really skilled at riding the dc metro buses.

all of this made clear the necessity of finding them a good home. through a number of clear miracles, it seems that we are on our way. we have been praying intensely that God will help us, and that He will pave the way for these children. they are His, after all. and it seems that He has moved this process into mach speed. questions we have been struggling with for months have been answered, a lawyer is in the process of being retained (something we have worked on for about 3.5 months), people are contacting us, from the most random of sources, because they heard about the girls and are interested in taking them. i am astounded by how many people have considered this. most of these people don't know them, they simply hear the story and think "huh, maybe i should take them." there are people out there who are so full of love that their homes are created to help kids in these situations.

we have talked a family that's had over 20 foster care kids in their home over the last 10 years. this family has permanently adopted 2 of those kids. and they feel like they are missing one. and what is even crazier, is this is not unique. we have talked to many many people who are in similar situations.

i am astounded by the love these people have. it really is inspiring. we hear so much of how horrible people can be to each other, and we rarely get to hear how loving and wonderful we sometimes are to each other. these people are amazing. and i am convinced that we will find the place, which God has prepared, for these girls.

it is tricky to write about all of this stuff--it is sensitive.

they're ba-ack

2006-08-25T00:11:00.000-04:00

for all of you who might be wondering whether we still have a framily to speak of, have no fear....paulette and jennifer have returned. after a glorious month of freedom for all of us, the girls returned home kicking and screaming this afternoon. literally. when i (lindsay) met them at the gate, a us airways personnel was kind enough to warn me, as the rest of the passengers deplaned, that the girls were still on the plane and that one of them was "kicking and hitting" the other one. excellent.

the girls raved in the car--and will hopefully post on this blog--about their spectacular visit to atlanta. i don't want to give away the best parts (think go-carts, six flags, and an end-over-end bike crash) but i do want to say that atlanta has truly converted these two. "atlanta is way better than washington," says one of them. "are there even any malls here?" evidently, they've been introduced to the wonders of the perfume counter at dillards, smoothie king, and--my personal favorite--chick-fil-a and are skeptical that washington holds any such treasures.

for their first night back, we ate at our favorite vietnamese restaurant, played rummikub, and negotiated a new system of incentives for housework, personal hygiene, and general good behavior. the girls visited cute daniel and isaac. they called their mother (who, as expected, forbade them from taking any more vacations). jennifer cooked herself an egg and, in the first of what i hope will be many victories for the incentive-based system, cleaned the kitchen after herself.

i wish i had some pictures to post, so you could see how good a month of that fresh atlanta air was for them, and how much their hair has grown. hopefully, though, we'll have something to put up soon. stay tuned.

francophile

2006-08-15T03:56:00.000-04:00

the last day in cote d'ivoire i realized that if i was ever going to get married it would probably have to be to a french man. there is a mutual attraction between me and the frogs that just doesn't exist with other men. i have no photos of this particular french man, which is a bummer.

corina eating agutae (sp?)
it is an oversized rat that they eat as a delicacy in cote d'ivoire
she said it was really good and quite tender.

typical roadside scene

i don't think i will ever really understand the utility of selling cds, chewing gum, jeans, windshield wipers, and razors at busy intersections. i am sure i am missing out on some serious convenience, but if i need jeans i am sure i will want to shop around...

monica asked annie to help us shop
the prices started out a full 8x's more than the actual sale price.
this market is the best in all of africa

mangosteen and friends at the market
i love tropical fruit

they sell tons of ivory in the ivory coast (ironic?)
it is a beautiful material, but it is definitely not worth the life of an elephant.

i left cote d'ivoire and had 2 days and a night in paris with alena

ahhh paris. why did it have to rain all weekend?

we stayed at les etangs de corot
it was delightful. the link to the website does it some justice.
if you need to relax and unwind this place is perfect

the courtyard

nerdy of me, but check out that courtyard

despite the rain we went to the rodin museum

this was my favorite sculpture

the gardens with the sculpture make this one of the most
beautiful museums i have ever visited

nerdy

alena was away from ian (who is 8 months old) so she eventually had to pump.
i made a huge mistake. i confused la defense with la republic and instead of going to the cool, trendy shopping area of paris we ended up in this sterile financial district. it really messed up our mission to shop.

this woman was quite interested in what she was doing
we had a hard time communicating
(she spoke arabic and french)
but is was a cool exchange between women.
she had 4 children with her and it was apparent that the idea of leaving an infant home with his father was unthinkable to her. i don't like burkahs they seem oppressive to me and i felt like this woman was really missing something that we had. and then i wondered if she felt the same way about us...

i left beautiful paris for the wretched charles de gaulle airport
with the new security measures in place the lines were ridiculously long. i was yelled at by a french security guy because i asked him where i was supposed to go. i realized that the guys running this shoe were morons and power hungry. so i just cut in line and was through security in about 45 minutes which was a welcome relief. i have no doubt that i could have been in line for over 3 hours.

okay girls, your turn to post photos.

nigeria and cote d'ivoire

2006-08-11T05:32:00.000-04:00

i am sitting in my hotel "lobby" eating a plate of fruit (papaya [not eating blak], mango [super yummy], and pineapple) and pan au chocolat...lovin' this. it is the first morning in a really long time that i wasn't up before 6:am and the first time in the whole week that i have been able to actually have a breakfast.

but let me back up and give you some taste of nigeria and cote d'ivoire

this is me having lunch with some colleagues at the hotel

orange was the theme of the abuja sheraton
mirrors on the ceilings and orange everywhere

room with this view

abuja is africa's geneva. it is sterile and not much like africa. there is not much to recommend it, but there is not much to hate about it either. it is a peaceful mellow town. most of the town is about 5 years old, as that was when the capitol moved from lagos to abuja.

one of the ladies at the embassy that was helping with travel was really upset. she explained that someone in her family was having their house demolished in the next couple of days. they have just finished building it 2 months previous and then the city decided that the title they held for th property was not accurate. that they had not purchased the land from someone who actually owned the land. Hence, demolish the house. such an insane rational, and there is no way to prove who is right or who it wrong. but they have no recourse. there is nothing that can be done. they are trying to get their belongings out in time. apparently many people who are living on the streets these days are people who once had homes and stable lives, but who the government has treated in a similar way. house demolition???!!!!

travel companions dr. samuel adenyi-jones (the king of nigeria) and corina

happy, confused, and seriously we checked out of our hotel

the large mosque from the road

on the road to the airport

the airport in lagos

our security detail. they follow us where ere we go

we stayed at the sheraton in lagos, which is famous for it's parties. all of the people working for the oil companies, flight attendants and pilots all layover there. they stay up all hours drinking at the bar. there is a long line of prostitutes outside of the hotel. it is a nice but seedy hotel. i was glad to get out. but i was not glad to wake up at 4:am to get on a 7:am flight (armour toured of lagos in the interim) only to have my expediter slow down the process and the plane be delayed (long story that i will explain later). once on the plane i thought i would asphyxiate from the smell of gas, i got in a HUGE fight with a flight attendant, and corina's luggage was lost. my lovely travel agent booked me on the same flight that crashed with embassy staff a few months ago. anyway it was a disaster, i am glad i got my luggage and kept my life. i feel bad for corina who doesn't have her luggage. two days later the luggage is still missing.

but then i arrived in cote d'ivoire:

sunset from the hotel lobby

this is the pincane and the hotel lobby

corina's new fiance

this is the hotel. my room is in the building in the back. the Wafau

there is a weird relationship brewing between iran and cote d'ivoire. it troubles me. is it like china and sudan? or is this islamic fundamentalist recruiting in a vulnerable, tense country? it is really concerning to me.

email from the atl

2006-08-02T22:58:00.000-04:00

this is a recent email from paulette. my guess (hope) is that is summerizes their first few days in atlanta. i think i publish this with permission. i asked and she didn't say yes or no. she instead told me about a crush she has developed. i have asked them to take photos. my guess is jennifer, will be our girl for that.

kimberly yesterday i learned how to float. it took me about 10minutes to learn how to float.well today i'm going back to the pool to hang out with everyone and by everyone i mean tohmas, yo, esther, michel,chipand the rest of the crazy gang they really are crazy mostly tom. two days ago we meaning yo,jen and myself were hanging out in thomas's rom playing video games and just chilling oh yeah every night we stay up yill 3am talking giggling and just being kids lol (laugh out loud thats what lol means)
well thats all for right now i'll continue to keep in touch oh yeah everyone says hi.
love, paulette

off to atlanta

2006-07-30T00:37:00.000-04:00

yesterday the girls left for atlanta to stay with the douglas's. they are saints for taking them and we are INCREDIBLY thankful. i have to go to west africa next week and lindsay is out of town for family reunions and stuff. the girls are out of school for the month and it was just going to be impossible for us to care for them. so thank-you douglas's. we will love you forever for this kindest of jestures.

the night before they left was horrible. it is quite personal for the girls, but suffice it to say the magnitude, intensity, and power of the abuse they experienced was revealed (at least in part) and it was troubling. i believe that we have some good help for them and i believe that this time at the douglas's will be awesome.

the girls were super duper excited to go to atlanta and fly on the plane by themselves. their plane was delayed by 2 hours which gave me just enough time to show them all of my magic tricks, help them understand that i couldn't reveal my tricks or i would be kicked out of the alliance, and eat some really nasty chicken (well the girls did) at ranch1. we had a ton of fun at the airport running the opposite way on the moving sidewalk, watching planes and all the fun people watching.

i learned that i had to wait until the dang plane was "airborne" before i could leave. in an effort to insure that i would stick around, the gate guy didn't let the girls board until the very end. i was so frustrated because i was really looking forward to sushi with my friend caroline adn i was already 2 hours late. as they left, i was so glad to be able to get out of the airport that i kinda forgot that they were leaving for so long. i just waved goodbye and turned around. then i remembered and made them come back off the runway (as the door was closing) and give me hugs. i got a little teary. they noticed and kinda laughed. then they left and i got really sad and cried. i was just standing there when the door opened again because the gate guy forgot something. they came out and gave me another hug. jennifer asked why i was crying. and the truth was i didn't really know. paulette guess that it was because i would miss them? i said yes.

i cried all the way home, incredible trouble by the fact that this situation is so sticky and tricky. i love them and want them to be happy. it is clearer and clearer that this current situation -- them living with 2 roommates -- is not sustainable. lindsay and i just can't do this until they are at college. for all the obvious reason and also because they have also been severely traumatized. i guess i got a glimps of what it will feel like when they move away for good.

i came home to a number of messages on my home phone from their mother shelia. she had decided earlier in the afternoon that they were not going to be able to go to atlanta. fortunately sarah was able to convience her to let them go. she apparently changed her mind while i was at the airport and was livid that they were leaving. "i am the mother and though i appreciate what you are doing, they cannot go to atlanta". they had gone already. so i didn't return the call.

i am sure this is going to be awesome.

--kimberly

some days are diamonds, some days are stone

2006-07-24T20:58:00.000-04:00

the title of this post is so true. the problem is when you wake up, you don't know what you are going to get. or in this case sometimes, you don't know what you are going to get when you come home.

we have wonderful days where there is love and fun and peace. in fact recently i had to go to atlanta for work and i took the latest flight out possible because the girls were just so dang cute and fun. it was their first day back at school and they both were just glowing. everyone loved their hair and their new shoes. they looked better and each one of their teachers commented that they seems like new people. more confident, happier, etc.

then their are days like today, where everything is a struggle. i had to go to school today because paulette had been benched (kipp's form of in-house suspension). the rules at their school are really really strict and they expected to behave with respect and poise. it is a struggle at times. it has never been required of them except at church and now it is required everywhere.

they love the boundaries, i think it makes them feel safe, but then they resent them. so then they resent us.

also, they are feeling so much anger because of their situation. feeling abandoned, mistreated, abused, etc. and we are easy targets for all that negative stuff too. which in the end makes a day a stone.

stones are more common than diamonds. and such is life i suppose. but i hope that someday we are able to be in a space that is more like Oz with yellowbricks and diamond days.

--kimberly

penultimate installment of framily vacation frotos.

2006-07-16T08:03:00.000-04:00

We may have missed the statute of limitations for posting framily vacation pics, but, if not...here's the final installment of Maine pics:

Jen and Paulette are relative newcomers to the wonderful world of bikes. But that didn't stop them from cruising around Acadia's Carriage Roads. We rented bikes out of a little shop in Southwest Harbor and toodled around for the day. The girls loved it, despite the hills. Riding bikes was--by all accounts--the highlight of the trip.

We rode to a waterfall to refill our water bottles and
ask other cyclists to take too-far-away pictures of us.

Kimberly and Paulette couldn't resist going in.

Paulette, the butterfly whisperer.

About the time that Jen's gears and my brakes went out, we made it to Jordan Pond House, where we talked the wait staff into serving us dinner despite the fact that our wallets were three miles away in our car. (Surprisingly, the "Just charge it to our campsite...." line actually worked.) We went hog wild, ordering lobster rolls, crab cakes, shrimp salads, Jordan Pond House's famous popovers, blueberry crisp and blueberry ice cream. The damages: $100. Pretty much the same as all our other meals (think hot dogs over an open flame) put together.

I'm not sure what the girls enjoyed most: the view, the food, or the "tall and handsome" waiters. (I realize in this picture Jen looks like she's not really enjoying anything. )

That's better. One big happy framily.

Unfortunately, we had such a fun time at dinner that we lost track of time and missed the last bus to our car. Fortunately, a helpful Acadia National Park Volunteer named Thor (truly) gave Kimberly a ride to the Uplander and she came back to pick us up. The girls used the last 30 minutes to ride around the Jordan Pond House parking lot--which they enjoyed as much as the carriage roads, and maybe even more (no hills).

On the way home, we stopped to get our feet wet in the harbor.

Well, Paulette and Jennifer got their feet wet.

Kimberly and I watched from the shore.

Later, we stopped to watch the sun set.

I'm not really sure what the girls are doing in this picture, but they sure look cute doing it.

Back at camp, the lovefest continued with the four of us giggling and girltalking in Paulette and Jennifer's tent until someone who will remain nameless stunk it up so bad we had to call it a night.

The Rocky Mountain Climb x2

2006-07-11T21:38:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday around noon Kimberly, Jennifer, Lindsay, and myself went on the most amazing hike I had ever been on. We climbed two of the most mammoth and hardest mountains in all of Acadia Park. We climbed Door Mountain, and Cadilac Mountain (Hello!! Can you say major hurting legs and booty’s!!)

"Major hurting legs! And bootys!"

The first mountain we climbed was door mountain. The first mountain was pretty good, there was a lot of climbing stairs. After climbing about 500 stairs we started to climb down for about 3 minutes. (THAT WAS HEAVEN!!!!) then back to the uphill we stopped a few times to get something to eat or drink.

We stopped one time because we saw a rock stream. we decided to get water because we were pretty low. Jennifer was scared because in order to get over to the rock stream you had to get over a big gap. Kimberly decided to go first to show Jennifer that it wasn’t hard. It was pretty funny because her words didn’t back her up. kimberly jumped over the gap and made it, took a sip of water and tried to come back without falling. she almost made it, but not quite. the minute she hopped off of the ledge she landed and slipped(OUCH!!!!) we wanted to ask if she was ok, but we couldn’t beat our laughs.

After that happened we continued on our quest to victory. After about one hour and thirty minutes of climbing and stopping and whining we finally reached the top.

I was so realived that we had reached the top of one mountain, when I heard that we had another mountain to climb that was taller than the one we had just finished I wanted to cry and scream like a two year old.

I told kimberly that I was tired and that I was hungry and that my legs were hurting. Well she didn’t care. she said that the only way to get back down was to go the same way that we came. of course she won the battle because I didn’t want to go back down by myself, so we ended up climbing the 2nd mountain.

to climb the second mountain, we actually had to scale down the first.
these pictures don't really do the incline justice.

The 2nd mountain was taller but didn’t take as long it only took about 60 minutes (THANK GOODNESS!!!!!) after about 60 minutes of hiking we finally made it to the top of the 2nd mountain.

(note from lindsay: i can't find any pictures of us at the summit of cadillac mountain, but it was kind of a let down anyway, since the summit was swarming with people who had driven to the top. )

we were so tired that we didn’t want to go back down the hiking way--we wanted to catch the bus. We went to a rangers station and found out that we had to hike halfway back down the mountain but on a different trail than what we came up on. The ranger said it would take about an hour--just when I thought that the hiking was over something went BAM!!!!! another hike (by that time I was like HUH!?) we walked forever. I could see and hear the cars on the road a few times but after that nothing, nothing but god’s beautiful creations.

God's Beautiful Creations

After about an hour and 30 MINUTES we made it to the bus stop, met a nice family and drove home, and by "home" I mean the mosquitoes' home.

-- paulette

fRamily vacation (installment 3)

2006-07-10T23:38:00.000-04:00

after all the fun in bar harbor we drove nervously to to seawall campground...we had heard that they would be full, but decided that we should just try it out...and too our luck there was room.

we knew that we were getting in when we saw this luna moth...

I had never seen one, but the young women of our church had decided that it would be their “bug” during girls camp. I will let paulette explain the miracle of the luna moth…but we saw this moth as an act of God telling us we had come to the right place…

this is the view up from our tent

we stopped to see the seawall

we found sea snails

and kelp.

I nerded out and gave a pretty detailed lesson on marine ecology
and biology (which I actually know little about)

we felt pride in the enormity of our vehicle
(it actually got pretty good gas mileage all things considered)

we got lobster rolls

and hotdogs

we went to experience the rising tide
(it was the first time for the girls)

they kinda freaked out

we went back to our happy A8 campsite (which we determined was the best in all of seawall) and ate a delicious dinner of fried fish and tinfoiled veggies (which we had purchased from the farm that the college of the atlantic runs…delish…

we slept well!

though for some very disappointing reason we never took pictures of our awesome campsite.

so off to bed again, but hopefully i can get day 3 up tomorrow....

the fRamily vacation (#2)

2006-07-09T21:29:00.000-04:00

we just returned from our maine adventure. where we had no access to cell phones, blackberries, or the worldwide web. it was a welcome break and returning is a bit depressing, but i believe we will all survive.

maine is an amazing state. we all want to go back. thank-you teddy roosevelt for having the foresight to create the national parks system. acadia national park is one of the most beautiful places on earth and i am sure if it were not for the parks system it would be overrun with vacation homes. i am in love.

because it would be very difficult to record the entire trip in a blog...i will be really brief and give a quick narrative with lots of photos.

it was magnificent. we had a couple of major discipline problems, but those were overcome and i think we all returned with more love in our hearts.

in the minivan on the way to the airport
(we had so much stuff we had to get a taxi, none of our friends had enough room to take us)

enthusiastically experiencing an airport for the first time
(it made airport time 1000x's more fun!)

the girls were very excited to fly, but also a bit worried
we had to wait on the runway for awhile and i think the anxiety started getting to jen
once aloft she asked if we were going to be above the clouds, and was so thrilled to see the tops of clouds.
once above the clouds she postulated:
"maybe if we get high enough we can see Jesus"

we arrived in boston starving
we rented a white chevy uplander and drove straight to the north end for some delicious sandwiches at milo's

we wanted to make haste so we drove and ate...
i ended up wearing a good portion of my sandwiches
but it was amazing

before we knew it we were in maine
(jen got camera shy and we were in no mood to wait)

we drove to freeport, me and stopped at the original ll bean store
we had forgotten a number of pieces of vital camping equipotent
(and we would realize all week more and more of the things we forgot)
we bought me a headlamp, lindsay a pillow, and a couple of bookmarks for friends

jen was wigglin' her bum....
and then we had to get ice-cream too (thanks to amanda & todd!)

our friend mimi (who lives in NYC) made us an amazing cd which brought tears to all of our eyes as we drove through the beautiful countryside of maine listening to handel's "ombra mai fu" by aria

we all wanted lobster so we stopped and tried it out...

we later realized that we prefer scallops...but when in maine...

we stayed in a totally random hotel near ellsworth maine the first night.
woke up andlearned that there was a blueberry pancake breakfast in
celebration of the 4th of July

just before breakfast the girls heard their first bagpipes...

one of these guys aksed if the girls were from africa
the girls wanted to know why he would ask such a crazy thing
we did too...

pancake assembly line

please note all the festive attire
i wish these bites could be bigger

this is soooooooo yummy

after breakfast we walked around the town fair where you could watch karate guys split wood in half with bare hands or dunk a lobster in a tub of water (a human lobster that is)

clowns
(are they scary or funny, we never decided)

then we watched the parade
paulette was a little too cool for the parade, but once the candy started flowin' we were in business
there were lots of these kind of guys

but only one of these

oh and a elvis impersonating postman

i am too tired to finish up the 4th...there shall be more soon.

questions about how to help

2006-07-02T21:57:00.000-04:00

the past month has been a testimony to me (us) of the goodness of the human family. an incredible amount of people have offered to help. and not just offered, but really delivered. from the wonderful douglas family lovingly taking the girls for a month during their summer break (affording lindsay and i the opportunity to work) to the qualters endless charity of taking the girls to theater camp (which deserves its own post) and digging dead squirrels out of gutters, the degns rescuing us from paulette's worst blow out, sonja's thoughtful service, missy's memorial day, sarah and tomicah's ALWAYS being there for all of us, michelle and marc's laid back love that allows the girls to walk across the park and play with the boys whenever they want (or we want them to) and seriously, this list could, and should go on. it has been incredible and so many people have lovingly stepped up to the plate and demanded the opportunity to serve. it is truly awe inspiring.

many, though, who read this blog are not able to perform this type of acts of service and have asked if it was possible to make charitable contribution to the care and well-being of the girls. we have resisted this idea hoping that our work with government agencies, and the generosity of our congregation would carry us through. government entitlements for these girls, though helpful, are meager. and our poor congregation is stretched then as there are many in our ward who suffer from poverty and need. we are always giving out more than is being donated. frankly, i think we are glad that we are helping so many people. but this extra burden may just wear out the coffers.

that said... we trepidatiously explain the following for those interested. the last thing we want is for people to feel obligated, but with as many requests and offers as we have received we have been advised to suggest the following.

if you are interested in donating to the basic needs of the girls (essentially this means food, clothing, medical/dental care, etc.), you can send a check to the Capitol Hill Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is a tax-deductible contribution. Please write the check to "Capitol Hill Ward" and indicate on the check that the funds are to be used for Paulette and Jennifer. Please send the check to:

LDS Capitol Hill Ward
27 16th st. se
washington, dc 20003

If you would like a receipt for tax purposes, please include your return address. Once the check has been received and processed you will receive a receipt in the mail.

there are some things that are beyond basic needs. our camping trip to maine, for example, the girls haircuts, and random trips to maggie moo's. we do not use contributions from the church toward these ends. if you would like to contribute to these extracurriculars, you can do so through the link on the side bar. this will link you to a paypal account. please note that this is not a tax deductible donation.

again, we thank you all for being interested and sharing your comments with us.

enter love interest

2006-06-30T18:39:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty convinced that if our lives were a movie, we would have now reached the point in the storyline where either Kimberly or I (preferably both) would meet someone and fall in love. He would be someone with some responsibility for the girls--a teacher, doctor, social worker, detective/prosecuting attorney (long story)--and he would be slightly nerdy and marginally attractive. On the upside, he'd be solid, stable, and good with children. Isn't that how it worked in "Raising Helen"?

is this too much to ask?

the fRamily vacation (installment 1)

2006-06-29T11:33:00.000-04:00

so we are preparing for our first fRamily (when friends become family = fRamily) vacation. we are flying to boston (sweet deal on airfare) renting a minivan and then driving up to maine to do some fun outdoor activities in acadia national park ... or somewhere near there. we hope to sea kayak, bike, whale watch, and play uno. we will then return to boston to hang out with some fRamily friends at harvard, and hopefully instill a powerful desire in the girls to seek after learning. while we are there we will swim in walden pond, see the alcott house, check out some of the revolutionary sites, and eat really great sandwiches.

this trip is as on the cheap as we can muster...so we are camping (hence the minivan) at acadia national park.

paulette is at our church girls' camp right now. she gets back on saturday. we pack and then leave on monday afternoon.

if you have any suggestions for places to stay, things to do, or ways to make this trip cheaper (e.g., discounts on rental cars etc) please let us know. we have been searching the web for good deals, and not really finding the hook-ups that we need...though we did get an amazing deal on our plane tickets.

speaking of which, this is the first time the girls have ever flown on a plane, and i kinda think they are more excited about flying than actually having the holiday.

suka patch update --

2006-06-27T13:04:00.000-04:00

i lifted this from elaine's blog... but i wanted to give a garden update, and i know (hope) she won't mind...

The Suka Patch has grown lush and green since my last garden posting. Below is a view of the sweet peppers box - they aren't ripe yet, but there is fruit on the vine!
The tomato plants are enormous and need to be pinched and tied. We harvest greens almost every day - and they are delish. The arugula is super-spicy.

One of my main reasons for having a garden is being able to grow my own cucumbers. After growing up on fresh Japanese cukes from mom's garden, it is so hard to eat store-bought American ones . My cuke plants are doing very well and I'm hoping they continue to do so. They are a bit overshadowed by the zucchini plants, but they are growing fine along the fence.

All that in this delightful garden grows
should happy be and have immortal bliss
~ Edmund Spencer

compliments of elaine....
thanks elaine

all of this rain is going to make the garden crazy fruitful. i am so excited for bruchetta

cuttin' hair down

2006-06-24T23:10:00.000-04:00

due to unfortunate "over perms", hair twisiting and fungus, the girls had to have their hair cut down. it took over a month for them to get "comfortable" with the idea. jennifer went first, because i knew the turmoil of watching paulette go through it would completely unnerve her. she came unhinged anyway, but at least it was done quicker...

paulette wanted to do it, but was worried that it might be too short...

before the torture began

horray, haircut!!!!

it seems like he is cutting ALOT of hair...

wait....what are you doing????!!!

i don't like this anymore

okay, i can handle it...my hair has been breaking off...it will be better...
i think i can, i think i can

why does he keep cutting?

BUZZERS??????!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

i will never forgive you for this...

HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME???!!!

at this point you have to wonder if you deserve a call to
child protective services.

NEVER!

why does torture last sooooooooo long?

kimberly and jennifer leave to go buy some maintnance products for her hair. she is completely unhinged. we missed a big chunk of paulette's cut and i had the camera in my pocket...

brian has lots going on...

did someone say grace jones?

"i mean, i am tough and all but...i am not real sure about getting all this hair cut
did you see that huge piece that just dropped?"

jennifer: "its like you have three hands"
brian: "that's the best compliment i have ever recieved"

change of heart...there is hope that there is a cute style lurking on that head

paulette lovin her new d00

results...
i personally think it was worth it

--kimberly

single motherhood

2006-06-23T10:42:00.000-04:00

I want to respond to one reader's astute question: "What in the world did you do while K was in Durban??!"

This is a very good question. Kimberly was in Durban (or en route) for ten days. The girls spent four of those days in Florida (or en route.) I think Kimberly was super jealous that I was going to get the house to myself for four days. And she had good reason to be. Those four days were wonderful. I visited friends, stayed out past 9, napped, re-read Bridget Jones' Edge of Reason (again laughing at loud at the Colin Firth interview), and ate cold cereal for dinner.

But those days did not come cheaply. I paid for them by having the girls by myself for six days, learning for myself how exhausting single motherhood can be.

Listing all the things we did during Kimberly's trip would be boring (think laundry, chores, and trips to the grocery store). But, some of the highlights include:

Introducing the girls to their new favorite movie, My Fair Lady. Subsequently singing "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" twenty-three times.

Packing--and upacking--for the trip (which included trips to Target, H&M, etc. to pick up needed items, including: sunglasses, beach towels, hairbands, shorts, etc.). Packing with these two takes an unbelievably long time.

Visiting mom (twice) and dad (once) in respective nursing homes. This was the first time I had met the girls' dad, actually, and it's a story worth telling, though not, unfortunately, one I can tell on the blog. Please call for details.

Playing "spring spa day" with face masks (thanks Dianna), hair treatments, nail polish (3 sessions, including one unfortunate bout with French Manicure press-on nails purchased at CVS with leftover money from Florida trip with said nails prompting mom to call five times this week to tell Paulette that she was not allowed to get her navel pierced).