52 Dozen. Week 9. What Does a Plumber and a Newborn Have in Common?

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52 Dozen. Week 9.

Alright, I’ve been talking about giving cookies to people I see naturally so this week was a funny turn-the plumber and several of his workers were able to enjoy Banana Chocolate Chip Cookies as well as a sweet friend who just had her second baby.

Let me start off my saying that the plumber was not on my ‘rough’ list that I started the year with. We actually weren’t sure we would have a plumber in this house this year but here we are so let me explain.

Last year I had a student who came with his high school class to volunteer with my work. He was living in a group home and had been in the care of the state (quite a few foster homes throughout the state) for years; I think he had been in the state’s care since he was about 12. He is delayed in his cognitive development and actually suffered a stroke at the age of 11. That’s all I really understood about his past except that none of his family members were in a place in their lives to have custody of him and they didn’t stay in contact with him once he was put into foster care. Because of his delays he was in the OCS (Occupational Course Studies) program at school (it’s the replacement for what people formerly called E.C. Exceptional Children). This student in particular was probably about 4-5 years behind and there wasn’t any expectation for him to exceed the intellectual abilities of an 8^th grade boy. He had turned 18 years old during his senior year and it was near time for graduation which meant the state had no legal obligation to him anymore which meant he had to find a place to live at graduation time or he would literally be on the streets. I know what you must be thinking: there must be some program for these kids if this really happens every year, teenagers age out and become homeless. Well, there’s ONE in our county and it has 10 beds. It’s also reliant on a young adult’s past, history, and current psychological status and behavior challenges. Due to this student’s past with behavioral issues and current needs the home didn’t feel he would be a good fit and was initially denied which meant he was weeks away from being homeless.

As this unfolded I was coming home and telling my husband about the situation and thinking “there’s got to be something we can do…” and the point I was getting at was that we could house him, if only we had a bathroom in our basement. Our home has three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs with the main living room, dining room, kitchen, and laundry room. You could really live on the top floor without any need for the basement. The basement is the exact same size but has a large playroom for our son, a large living area with a pool table (the room that never quite became ‘the man cave’), an office, a storage hallway, a bedroom, and SPACE for a large bathroom. We’d talked about putting a bathroom down there so that once we had two children in the bedrooms upstairs any guests would have their own room and bathroom downstairs but with only one child thus far we didn’t feel any pressure to get the job done.

To wrap up the story I started with I will tell you that the student did get a place in this home, PRAISE GOD, and is still living there while he takes a few technical classes that will hopefully prepare him for a career. He’s such a bright young man and although his brain ticks a bit differently than others, he’s funny, smart, and clever. He had me laughing whenever he was around and he always showed me respect, he was even very friendly to my son who was only 4-5 months old at that time so had the story ended differently, you may have gotten a Christmas card with a very tall young African American man in our family but I was very pleased for him to get into this program.

So why now for the bathroom?

As soon as I felt the Lord tell me loud and clear that we WOULD have a baby in our home, I started preparing a nursery. I bought furniture from friends when their children outgrew it, I painted the walls with murals of giraffes, and as friends learned of my preparations I got two responses: some friends joined in my faith journey and gave me baby items while others thought I was straight up bananas! Several doctors, even specialists, looked me in the eye and told me we would NOT conceive a child naturally and that IVF may work but may not because of our unique set of challenges. We were still a ways from having enough money to pay adoption fees so we were a few years out from having a baby, at best.Just to be clear, I started and finished our nursery in 2011. I had my son at the end of 2013 which means we had a fully functional baby nursery in our house for 2 years...without a sign of a baby.

I’m sure to some it looked nuts, especially for friends who were pregnant and knew they were having a child, to see me running around preparing for a baby in my home.

But you know who else looked nuts?

Noah.

I’ve always looked at the story of Noah as good inspiration for getting prepared for what God has promised. I know many don’t understand how someone could hear God’s voice as clearly as Noah, I mean check out Genesis 6, the directions the Lord gives Noah are ridiculously detailed.

But the Lord’s timeline was NOT clear, at all. But Noah did it. Noah was faithful in what God asked him to do to prepare for the future without a clue when God would call him to get on board that ark and round up thousands of animals. Some theologians have estimated that it took Noah around 100 years (or more) to build the ark.

Of course when I was able to conceive, NATURALLY, through God’s grace and plan several people asked why we would continue with this call to adopt and some even suggested we may have heard God wrong. Hmm yea, I don’t think so. I know it took this situation with our natural bodies being broken to get our minds wrapped around the idea that we just wanted to know God as a parent and therefore parent. Having a child biologically or in a different fashion didn’t matter.In fact, now being a parent and feeling such a deep connection God as my father and knowing what it feels like to parent, I can't imagine not welcoming any child into my home and sharing that love with them the way God has ADOPTED me and shared His love with me.

The story of our son is indeed a miracle and God crossed a lot of raging seas to reach us in that way, defeating so many circumstances of this broken world to give us such a gift but I can tell you for sure that that miracle does not change that call to prepare ourselves (and our home) to accommodate the one(s) God is calling to our family through adoption. Our son is one piece of this huge puzzle in our life leading to adoption.

 "By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith." (Hebrews 11:7)

We are at a crossroad in our journey to adopt. The Lord has definitely awoken us to an array of possibilities for our family and we COULD go with any of them and do it in efforts to serve the Lord, love one of His children, and be obedient to that call but we want God to have His way, not our own eagerness to welcome a new little one to our home. In effort to respect the fact that God has not told us finitely which path to take we wanted to make some effort to show our faith and to make an active step in our adoption even though we are not fully prepared to file our paperwork and restart the adventure we were in when we found out we were pregnant.

Thus, the bathroom. The bathroom in the basement is a physical act we can take to show this rooted belief that our family will be growing and we will need space for what God is calling us to do and for us to be prepared for that means we won’t have to turn down any such opportunity to grow simply because we haven’t completed projects around the house or made accommodations for this new addition.

The bathroom is ALMOST done and has been quite a project for us DIYers. The plumber ran the pipes and set up fixtures and an electrician ran some wires but my husband has done most the rest of the work and I’m so proud of how much he’s put into getting this done. I’ll post pictures when it’s all done! The plumbers have put in the most work to the job and even worked around our son’s naptime over the past two weeks so they definitely deserved the cookies!

As far as the rest of the cookies I delivered them to a sweet friend who just had her second baby in two years, I’ve always been impressed with her sweet spirit toward her son and it’s great to see her loving on a new one. It’s pretty amazing how God surrounded us with several friends whose children are the same age as my son so he has some sweet friends to grow up with so I enjoyed our visit watching the boys play and me picking her brain for wisdom about having two in the house since I know it’s in the cards for us too.

I wish I could share more about the different aspects of this journey that have come more into light over the past few weeks but we are still praying through many of them and patiently waiting upon the Lord who offers all we need to guide us, in HIS time.

We appreciate your continued prayers for our growing family and the deep love that’s growing in my heart for the future child(ren) God has for us.

BAKER’S REVIEW

These cookies were ridiculously easy. My son was really into bananas for a while so we bought a ton of them each week at the store and now it’s more like ½ of one a day which meant TOO MANY BANANAS and since my job is in the fight to end hunger we fight hard not to waste food in this house which mean using the bananas. I’m not a big banana fan but my husband is and my son still enjoys them. I found a recipe online for Banana Chocolate Chip but changed it…a lot. Which means I basically made up a new recipe. They turned out yummy and chewy, not mushy, like I was expecting from using bananas so I even liked them! My son found them really easy to eat and I could rationalize that they had a healthy element to them and gave him two, which he enjoyed!

Banana Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients:

3/4 cup melted coconut oil
3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

2 large bananas
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 small box instant vanilla pudding mix

1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of kosher salt
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
Directions:

1.      Beat oil, sugars, egg and vanilla medium until combined.

2.     Add the flour, pudding mix, baking soda and  salt.  Beat just till combined.

3.     Stir in chocolate chips.

4.    Use your hands to form about 12 balls of dough.  It’s a little tricky to work the dough so just press tightly together and stick in any resistant chips.

5.     Chill this dough for 30 mins in freezer, covered or place in fridge to chill for a few hours.

6.     Preheat oven to 350F and line a cookie sheet with parchment.  Bake for about 10-12 minutes.  Do not overbake-they will finish baking as they cool on sheet.