Colombian Brewed: Camping Adventures

God has been gracious to teach me about the effect my expectations have on myself and on others. At times expectations are a good thing and other times my expectations are a trap. For example, our big kiddos came home to us not knowing anything about how to behave in a civilized or safe manner. Teaching these behaviors along with having the expectation that the kids would employ what we taught them made for quick learning and changes in behavior in some of these areas. Conversely, my expectations for my newest children to accept our love and trust our family as safe, and in turn stop their anxious and hurtful behaviors, was a huge set up for disappointment and failure - both for myself and for them. This is a balance I am still working out in parenting. It is my desire to set a standard for our children that they can strive to meet with God's help, to feel encouraged by us and not crushed by an unrealistic expectation I have for them to be what they cannot yet be. God is good to bring about tools of refining in my own life to shape me into the person He created me to be. In this same way, I think that it is good for parents to challenge their children toward God's right standards, holding them accountable and training them in God's Word. This is the kind of expectation, seasoned in love and grace, that brings life.

I write all of this about expectations because two years ago as we ventured into older child, sibling group adoption we had an expectation for how long it would take our newest children to adjust to being part of our family, and never did we imagine it would take this long. We were very well educated about parenting children with traumatic pasts, and we thought our expectation for their adjustment period was very compassionate. We were wrong. We have been disappointed, exhausted and discouraged. It is also likely that we have exasperated our children a time or two on any given day with some of these expectations. It's not that we weren't compassionate, it's just that it has taken so much longer than we ever imagined and our expectation in this area caused our disappointment. Of course, there were other hurts involved and they are ongoing, but God is good to cover those with His love and a burden to love these precious children.

As summer winds down we have found ourselves concluding that we are finally at the point we thought we would have been at last summer - a whole year ago. It would take several blog posts to describe all of what that looks like in detail and I'm certain I will not get around to that. We are thankful that God continues to work mightily in our hearts to love our children and in their hearts to work at being part of our family. He has kept our hearts tender to one another, to adoption, and most importantly, to Him. We are plodding along in this journey, amazed at where we've been, open to where He's taking us, and thankful to be in His grip.

This past weekend we enjoyed a therapeutic camping adventure with the kids and it was wonderful all the way around! Nic and I are so thankful to our parents, and specifically our dads, for raising us in families that appreciated God's creation and enjoyed camping together. I learned about camping from having to sit in on my brother's boy scout meetings where my parents were leaders and help him get all his gear ready for so many boy scout camping trips. As the younger sister, I wanted to do everything he did and so when I got to be "old enough" my dad started taking me on their special father/son camping and fishing trip to the Northwest Angle of Minnesota and Lake of the Woods. I suppose I never have apologized for crashing those special trips and complicating things by being a girl in the midst of their "guy time". (As an aside, I did do most of the cooking during those trips.) Nic and his dad have shared many camping/canoeing trips throughout his growing up years. These are precious memories of camping with family for us. When we got married we continued to go camping and inherited camping gear from both sets of our parents. We would take our dog with us to state parks all over Minnesota before we had kids. We flew to Massechusettes and camped on Cape Cod. We drove to Colorado and camped in Rocky Mountain National Park during a forrest fire. There is always some great adventure to camping. Then when the first little ones came along we even took them as babies, though it got sufficiently harder to keep them out of the poison ivy when there were two toddlers. One of our camping trips with the two littlest included a non-life threatening trip to the Fergus Falls Emergency Room which ended well. Very nice staff there. Nic has also maintained some close friends for the past 14+ years who dream up a daring and adventurous camping trip every year with very little prior planning. I am pleasantly surprised that none of their trips have involved the emergency room, at least not to my knowledge.

We didn't get around to camping last summer because it was just too hard. For everyone. For many reasons. We were so excited to try it out this summer and so were the kids. Our nature-loving selves were eager to get back to camping after two years away from it. We decided to just go for one night at a state forest close by and we had things well planned out. The kids did a fabulous job learning all about "how" to go camping. We were doubly blessed by all the hand-me-down camping equipment we have received in years past because we put it ALL to use this weekend. The entire weekend was a success from loading up the vehicles, to setting up the tent, to cooking, cleaning up, hiking, swimming, playing, tearing down, and putting everything away when we got home. The kids were so tired they were all in bed and asleep by 7 p.m. on Saturday night - a bonus for us! We were also that tired, but it was a sweet and pleasant exhaustion after a wonderful night away camping. We are thankful for God's provision of this time away together and for His sustaining grace to bring us to this point of healing and growing together as a family.