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Today was a special day in the Willis household. We traveled to the Cumberland County Courthouse in Carlisle and Ethan’s adoption was finalized. It was kind of a last minute thing. The lawyer’s office called Monday and said they could squeeze us in at the end of several other adoption finalization hearings if we could … Read more
Ethan is now over 15 months old, and he’s growing. Here are a few photos from the past month …
For the first couple of months in our new home, we used boxes to block the staircases, to keep Ethan from climbing them. It was a bit of a hassle, but it worked, usually. We now have gates installed that work well — at least until Ethan figures out how to open them! 🙂
One final piece to the “life realignment” series is tank-filling activities. Tank-filling activities, as you can probably guess, are activities that “fill your tank.” 🙂 The idea for this comes from a lesson Wayne Cordeiro, senior pastor of New Hope Christian Center in Hawaii, taught at the 2006 Willow Creek Leadership Summit (see this page … Read more
Our day off is a good time to think about rest. This post is part of a series on Life Realignment — a series about finding our new rhythm, which we’re finding necessary since bringing Ethan home and moving to new ministries, all in recent months. (If you missed the previous posts, they’re here: Nutrition … Read more
I am working my way through a series of posts called Life Realignment (see also Routines). It’s a series of thoughts about finding our new rhythm, which is necessary since bringing Ethan home and moving to new ministries in recent months. So far, I’ve written about Nutrition. Now, I want to write about exercise. Joleen … Read more
Without question, Ethan’s most used words are in the phrase, “What’s that?” He asks that question over and over when we first see him each morning (and throughout the day). Earlier this week, I thought I should try to count how many times he says it in the morning. So on Friday, I tried to … Read more
We just added a new page to the navigation menu above called Ethan’s Adoption. It’s an attempt to summarize the story of our adoption journey and to point to some of the key posts written along the way. We hope it will be helpful to those who are getting to know us in Clearfield as … Read more
Ethan is trying out several instruments in his young life. In July, we were impressed when he learned to blow into his recorder and make a tone. I guess we won’t be giving him a straw to drink from anytime too soon. He’ll probably blow bubbles rather than drink from it! (Cheap recorders are only … Read more
I recently started a series of posts called Life Realignment, reflecting on 4 key areas we need to work on as we get settled as new parents in a new home, a new community, and new churches. First on the list is nutrition. I’ve always been interested in nutrition, including the latest information and reports … Read more