PS

It's hard to have our life in public sometimes.  There are people that look for ways to criticize.  People who look for avenues to hurt you.  People who are jealous that we DO have support.  People that feel we've in some way wronged them.  There are people who are critical of our parenting.  People that are critical of our children.  There are people that, no matter how positive a blog it is, will find the negative in everything.  There are people who see our family and since they wouldn't choose it they think we're crazy.  There are people that struggle with their family with "different needs" than ours and who are critical because they don't feel they could "handle" our crew.  There are people who, for whatever reason they may have, are reading along on our family's journey not for encouragement or because they care about us or our children.  Instead they have selfish desires, ill intent, or who knows what... but they certainly aren't here in a positive way and make that known.

Those people are the ones that make it even more difficult to ever share any of the struggles of parenting special needs children.  They make it hard to be completely honest about difficulties because of their attitudes, notes, and other attacks that they give when anything negative is written about.

They make it hard to write about our own areas of struggle as parents.  They see a little issue as a big one and the idea that no one's perfect as a reason to criticize.

Being real comes at a cost.  It comes at a cost to us, because the times we share anything that can be seen as negative are misconstrued and often thrown back at us.

I won't stop being real, admitting our difficulties, seeking help, or sharing our lives just because someone else takes it into their own hands to make life difficult for us in doing so.  We have nothing to hide, and as you can see from the previous post, we are well connected with services and specialists and people who are in our lives weekly and daily that know we are doing the best we can and, yes, we are thriving.

Sometimes we have to meet challenges by backing away slowly.  Sometimes we meet them head on.  Today, I continue to blog because I hope and pray that my being REAL here will help others to see the realities of raising a large family made up of birth and adopted children with and without special needs.  I hope someone's life will be touched to then touch another's life.  I hope that if nothing else, I can look back and see this record of our days, our good stuff, our struggles, and our time with a family of young kids and have it to remember these days by.  After all, that was the original purpose of this blog... to record the journey of Aleksa's adoption.

If you happen to be one of those people that's here just to criticize or find something wrong with our parenting, I invite you to find a more constructive way to spend your time.  My posts are often long and drawn out, detailing our lives and really of no interest to you if your intent is only to raise a fuss over the way we parent.

If you're here to share in our parenting family, the lives of our children, and the special blessings they are to us, then I invite you to stay, share with us, enjoy, and read along.  You are the reason we've continued to keep this blog public and to share our journey here rather than in a private setting.