Empowered to Connect Conference Recap

The last two weeks have been two of the busiest we've had all year so I am late on posting this.  There are so many updates to share! I'll start with the Empowered to Connect conference. It was held at Brentwood Baptist on September 14 and 15 and was eye-opening, informative and as the name promised, empowering.  It was a tremendous amount of information to try and take in over a short amount of time, but we both felt like it gave us a huge head start (coupled with our Parents in Process class we completed at Miriam's Promise).  We learned there are six primary risk factors that are predictors of  children from "hard places."  These include prenatal stress, difficult or traumatic labor or birth, medical trauma early in life, abuse, neglect and trauma.  One of our biggest takeaways was the realization that even if we get our baby at a very young age, there are still issues that we need to be prepared for due to the biological mom's prenatal history and birth.  Also, the importance of communication can't be stressed enough--and not just routine parent/child communication, but rather a very specific style of parenting communication.  The featured speaker for most of the event was Dr. Karen Purvis (who I swear must be the Baby Whisperer).  She and Dr. David Cross, both at the TCU Institute of Child Development,  developed the Trust-Based Relational Intervention model,  an emerging intervention for a wide range of childhood behavioral problems.  In addition to several lectures by Dr. Purvis, we watched lots of DVD clips of children who were at her summer camp.  It was amazing to watch the skills actually in action and how they worked so effectively.  Austin and I agreed that we want to attend more training and plan to do so annually (similar to how we do our marriage conferences) as this will be a lifelong learning process for us. We even discussed wanting our families to read the book, The Connected Child, to get a better understanding of how our parenting style will look different. 

Other important things over the last few weeks--Austin started his new job!  He is officially a firefighter with the city of Franklin.  He will spend the next ten weeks in the fire academy.  I am beyond proud of him and my heart swells with pride every time I think about how hard he worked, how he never gave up and most importantly, how he is giving God all the glory.  I am confident he has been placed in this role for a very special reason.  I just returned on Sunday from Utah after spending five days in Sundance for my Green Smoothie Girl coach certification.  It was an amazing trip and I have so many ideas swirling in my head on how it will play out moving forward.  First and foremost, I want to be able to bring in some extra income to help fund our adoption.  I am so excited about the opportunity and can't wait to get started!  

Finally, we received news this week that there are moms at the missionary home in Taiwan that are ready to select families.  We were asked to send in a photo of us with a brief description (max of seven sentences) describing us as a family.  In one short paragraph, we tried to summarize our sincere desire to be parents and how we have an amazing group of friends and family just waiting to welcome our little one to his or her forever home.  Our prayer is that God will move the heart of one of these moms and she will give us the honor of raising her precious baby.  Even more importantly, our prayer is that the mom will see the love of Christ lived out through adoption process.   We aren't sure what this means in terms of how quickly we might receive a referral, however, we continue to rest in God's perfect timing and realize that it will all happen according to His schedule. 

Love and hugs!