Oh My Goodness Gracious!

 Things are sure heating up around here. You know how they say when it rains, it pours? Yep. I think there is something to that.

Since the book Ezra and Hadassah: A Portrait of American Royalty was released mid-January, it has been getting nice, steady attention. Good pacing and all that jazz. I have been able to keep up with the work required around the book on top of my regular job and life responsibilities because I have an extremely understanding family and clients who I have trained to nicely wait their turn.

Things are starting to change, folks. I am going to be speaking at two colleges in the near future and I have invitations to several book clubs who are featuring it. Yay! Yay! Yay! It's all good, I hope the word continues to spread and I get many more opportunities to speak about the topics discussed in the book.

In related news, if you  have a group that would love to have a discussion on the real life topics of :

Foster Care
Adopting Older Children
Mental Illness
Child Abuse
 Strategies for Healing from Abuse
Caregiving for Special Need Children or Adults
Laws/ Advocacy for Children in Court

shoot me an email at ezraandhadassah@email.com and we'll plan a party. I'll bring my dancing shoes if you provide the chocolate.

George Washington's Hair Disaster

 Everyone should have a teacher they adore. Mrs. Gustina was my first favorite teacher. She taught my third grade class and she helped me feel comfortable in my new post-adoptive school, with my new first and last names, new clothes and new family at home. Mrs. Gustina had short, shaggy blonde hair and she wore fashionable clothes with long, draping necklaces. She reminded me of Mrs. Brady from the Brady Bunch Show on tv.  

 When I showed up at school with my brand new perm, (thanks to my adoptive mom who thought it would help my thin, stick straight hair) Mrs. Gustina was the first person to notice my new hairdo. She complimented me and told me my half curly, half straight hair looked wonderful. I wasn't so sure.

 My hair smelled chemically from the home perm and it was a lot harder to comb with curls that only took on the underside. My adoptive mom let me know the perm didn't work right and somehow my hair failed the test. It was supposed to curl up like Shirley Temple's fro. Instead, my new adoptive brother told me I looked like George Washington. He would know because like many people with autism, he was passionately learning about one topic and at the moment it was US history. He wasn't criticizing or complimenting my hair, he was stating a fact. I was sporting a 3rd grade girls version of George Washington. 

To make me feel better, Mrs. Gustina gave me the job of cleaning the classroom chalkboard erasers. I stood outside on the playground blacktop, clapping two erasers together. The resulting poofs of flying chalk dust were strangely satisfying. I clapped all four erasers for a good long while, until there was no more chalk dust and my teary-eyed anxiety about my new look drifted away with the white clouds of dusty education. 

By the end of noon time lunch period, my fears about my hair were over.  It turned out no one in my class even noticed it. None of my classmates knew that I looked like George Washington and I was free to get back to the business of being the best dodge-ball player on the playground.

"Last Mom" Gives Her Opinion

It is nice to get an impartial review from someone who hasn't had lunch at my house, don't you think?
(I am doing my best Sally Field "You like me! You really like me!" imitation at this very moment. You should see it, I'm not nearly as classy as Sally, but I have the feeling down.)
 Click here to see what Last Mom has to say:
 http://lastmom.com/adoption-book-review-ezra-hadassah-portrait-american-royalty/

Keeping Lunch Boxes Alive

This picture is from the first day of school in our new adopted family. I was in 3rd grade. The best thing about it was my lunch box. I got a metal Peanuts comic strip lunch box with a matching thermos. I read the comic strips on each side everyday while I ate my self-made peanut butter and jelly sandwich, apple, orange or banana and occasional bag of pretzels or potato chips. I filled my thermos with Kool-aid everyday.

Before we were adopted I'd never had a real lunch box. In the foster home, Dorothy made brown sack lunches and we bought a milk or we ate hot lunch. The glamour of the lunch box wore off pretty quick. Unlike brown sacks, I had to keep track of my lunch box. I had to remember to bring it home, clean it out and repack it myself. If I ignored it over the weekend or spring break, the thermos grew mold and the 1/2 eaten fruit went slimy in the bottom. Our adoptive mom Virginia refused to buy brown lunch sacks because we needed to learn responsibility. Brown paper sacks were for undisciplined, lazy children.

By the end of the school year, my beloved lunch box was dented, hanging on by one hinge and reeked of food smells that permeated the metal insides. Virginia inspected our boxes, hoping they were in good enough shape she wouldn't have to buy new ones for the following school year. She was sorely disappointed. At least I still had mine. Rex's lunch box disappeared early in the school year and Emelia's was looking pretty rough, too. With Matthew's precise, mechanical ways, his was the only lunch box worth saving. Virginia kept his box for reusing the next fall.

After a couple of years of buying lunch boxes, Virginia finally gave up on us and bought a case of brown lunch bags. If the ability to maintain a lunch box really is a measurement of future caretaking skills, I think we should acknowledge it is a minor miracle that my three children made it to adulthood in one piece. My lunch boxes didn't fair so well.

Hey! Look Here! It's a Book Giveaway!

So...you haven't gotten around to ordering your copy of Ezra and Hadassah. Or you got it as an e-book and really, really wish you had an autographed hard copy to keep forever. Or you hadn't really thought about my book at all because your life has more than enough drama in it and you don't need to go looking for more. No matter what the reason, today is your lucky day to change your fate. Just click on the link below and enter yourself in the book giveaway sponsored by Goodreads, a fabulous site for everyone to read, review and share their favorite books. Now don't be shy, demand your fair share of the best life has to offer:

Your very own, in real paper (squeal!) copy of Ezra and Hadassah: A Portrait of American Royalty.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/85394-ezra-and-hadassah-a-portrait-of-american-royalty?utm_medium=email&utm_source=giveaway_approved

Family Photos, Kidnapping and My Eternity is Set

Someone pointed out an interesting thing he noticed about these pictures. In the book, I describe Virginia as being very overweight and not in good health, yet in these photos, she and Harley look really nice. Why is that?

It is a point I considered when picking photos for this site. First, the only family photo we ever took is above. That picture is one of the rejects from the photo shoot. Virginia gave each of us kids a discarded  photo to keep for ourselves. The second photo was taken years later for Harley and Virginia's anniversary. I don't remember which one. What I do remember is that Virginia had the earliest version of stomach-stapling surgery to lose weight and this was her After photo. In both pictures she is wearing wigs. She and Grandma Quigley kept an assortment of wigs for public occasions.

The only other photos I have of Harley and Virginia Spencer were taken a year after Rex and I were adopted. We drove from Eugene, Oregon to Oakland, California to be sealed for eternity to our adopted parents in the LDS Temple in Oakland. This is how they looked on a regular day.

What I remember about our family sealing trip to the Oakland, CA temple was that my new adoptive mother, Virginia was super crabby in the car. She complained about how our new adoptive father Harley was driving, how hot and cold the air was, that my brother and I were making too much noise in the back seat, etc., etc.

At one point while barreling down the freeway, wishing for a bathroom (Harley wasn’t a fan of stopping for potty breaks), I carefully printed on a sheet of notebook paper in my best block-printed handwriting, “Help Me! I’m Being Kidnapped!” I held it up in the back window so the cars behind us could see it. After a couple of cars sped by us, the occupants slowing down to stare at Harley and Virginia in the front seat as they passed by, Virginia told me to take down whatever picture I was holding in the window, it was blocking Harley’s view out the back. I wasn’t looking for trouble, I just wanted to see what would happen. Turns out in 1975, not much.

Nothing else exciting happened for the long 10 hour trip from our home in Eugene, Oregon to the temple in California. It is a long, boring drive in a car without a radio. The radio cost extra when my new parents bought the Oldsmobile and they weren’t about to waste money on a silly radio.

The Oakland temple was very pretty with plush carpets. It had a children’s room with a tv hooked up to a new-fangled VCR, which played cartoon scripture stories that my brother Rex found interesting. I got busy eating cookies and being my adorable 8 year-old self with the ladies that ran the playroom. Soon enough Rex and I were handed white jumpsuits and white socks to put on by the nice powder-smelling temple ladies. I don’t remember anything else about getting sealed to our new parents.

After it was all over with and we were on the road going home, I had a conversation with God in my mind.

“Heavenly Father, I know I just got prayed over in the temple and that means I am sealed to the Spencer’s for eternity so when I die, I will be with them in heaven. But I didn’t mean it. When I get to heaven, I only want to be with my brother, not them, ok?”
I figured God could handle fixing the paperwork to make it happen. After that, I never paid attention to any church lesson about how families are eternal. I already had an agreement with God about my future and it was settled.

An Important Paper

Due to a technical glitch that I was unaware of until it was long past too late to correct, my brother's will does not appear in the ebook formats of the book. It is in the hard copy versions of the book, which I guess makes the paper book all the more valuable. Well, that and I can't sign your ebook with a fabulously special note personalized just to you.

Since I am grateful to everyone who is reading Ezra and Hadassah: A Portrait of American Royalty in whatever format you have it, here is your very own copy of Rex's will to have forever. I keep my copy in our family fireproof lock box along with our marriage license, birth certificates, vaccine records and car registration certificates. We believe in keeping important papers safe.