"I'll take 'hippocampus' for $500, Trebek"

y'all.  my brain is full.

i'm talking the end of a college career full.

this weekend josh and i went to a 2 day conference called 'empowered to connect'.  this equally empowering and exhausting conference was designed to help both adoptive and foster parents better understand their children's history and how it impacts their development.  led by the brilliant dr. karyn purvis, director of the tcu institute of child development, these 2 days were crammed full of 150 hours of graduate student course work.  

trust based relational intervention, spontaneous infantile regression, sensory processing deficits, attachment cycles, sympathetic nervous system, amygdala, hippocampus, regulating, weighted blankets, time in's, strategies for behavioral change ...  and lions and tigers and bears oh my.

the short version is that any adopted child, any foster child comes to their family with varied amounts of trauma.  some more than others, some less than others, but all needing the same things.  we learned gobs and gobs (medical measurement term... but don't look it up, just trust me ok?) of information about how our kiddos' brains function and how we can help them to, overall, trust and adjust.  

so that was my friday and saturday.  my how the time's-are-a-changin', huh?

sunday night the brave and beautiful founder of the raining season, who also happens to be my good friend, Erica, spoke at a church here in nashville about the organization.  i love hearing her story.  that girl is making me dang proud.  she is responsible for getting 120 children off of the streets and giving them the lives that they deserve.  modern day mother teresa?  i think so.

these kids will have the opportunity to change the world, because she changed theirs.

the cherry on top of my adoption filled weekend?  our in country director of the covering (the orphan care center run by trs), Quami, and his wife, Madonna, were in town with their beautiful baby girl, Karen, and joined us for dinner later on in the evening.  look at this sweet little baby girl!!!!!!  good golly miss molly i love her.

how was your weekend??

xo,

m