Family Fridays ... Without a Family

June 17, 2016 Michelle Cuthrell

In my husband's field of work, weekends together sometimes feel like a luxury.

Once you count trainings and business trips and frequent national and international travels, those few precious weekends per month or per year you do get to spend together off the clock become very special, and early on in our marriage, we realized we needed to make them count.

So from the time we moved to our first duty station as husband and wife, we designated Friday nights as “Family Friday.”

As a newlywed couple living in the frigid temperatures of Fairbanks, Alaska, Family Fridays included Pizza Hut deliveries and late-night Smallville snuggle marathons together on the pull-out couch of our post home. (This was, of course, before children and all their bouncing, bull horn glory entered the life picture at 5 a.m. on Saturday mornings.)

As our family grew, those Fridays evolved into game nights, puzzle nights, neighborhood runs and firepit roasts. (And, for the sake of all early morning critters that rose before the sun, we ended those nights by 7:30 p.m. Keepin’ it real — in those early child-rearing years, the only spit we swapped was that which drooled from our mouths after we fell asleep on each other at 7:45 on the couch.)

Now that our children are all old enough to prepare their OWN breakfasts on Saturday mornings, the late-night Friday movie has returned — and so has the pizza. (So have the make-out sessions — thank God for sleeping children!) Only now, to accommodate the dietary restrictions of Superhero 3, we make our own from naan and veggies each Friday, and we break our own dinner-table-only meal rules to whip out the TV trays and enjoy a family movie at the end of what is sometimes a pretty exhausting week.

Tonight, 2D DJ joined us for the first Friday night that his 3D counterpart was supposed to enjoy. And for awhile, it was all fun and games.

Introducing 2D DJ

June 16, 2016 Michelle Cuthrell

When Super-Spouse departed for a long business trip, the boys and I needed a way to stay connected — to keep this precious man involved in all our family activities and give us a reason to laugh when our time apart didn’t seem very funny.

That’s when we ordered a Flat Daddy.

For nine months, Flat Daddy traveled with us to baseball games and Mexican restaurants and field trips and pumpkin patches. He wore Easter hats to Sunday service and hot pink aprons to summer barbecues. For ¾ of a year, Flat Daddy was never without a stylish outfit, a brood of doting boys, a hilarious photo op or a really great story.

His perfectly plastered smile and incredibly cooperative attitude got us through many difficult days, and he, in all his flat glory, allowed our children to rewrite THEIR separation story — and turn it into one that included JOY.

And that’s why, in the face of DJ’s temporary “extension” in China, the boys and I made THIS:

The Other Superheroes-in-Waiting

June 14, 2016 Michelle Cuthrell

While we hang tight and wait for an update on our summer superhero, the boys and I have fallen in love with all DJ’s friends – other superheroes-in-waiting who are now all over the United States in the care of other host families. Their little smiles just light up my computer screen, and the pictures of hugs and holds and kisses and physical touch they may or may not be experiencing for the first time bring tears to my eyes.

DJ isn’t the only one who’s been waiting on a list for years to be “chosen”; all these superheroes need families, too.

And for the next four weeks, they will be HERE — where interested families can connect with them, Skype with them, Facetime with them, MEET them. This is a rare opportunity in the adoption world, and an incredibly special one.

Family should not be a luxury. And these superheroes have waited too long to find theirs.

Obstacles-Turned-Opportunities: Children on Mission

June 13, 2016 Michelle Cuthrell

There’s no way around it — this weekend was hard.

Although we kept our eyes focused on our miracle-working God (and helped each other when our eyes began drifting instead to those mountain-high circumstances), we all felt the pain of DJ’s absence Saturday night — a night that was supposed to be our first with our little superhero.

As I opened the Facebook page for our orphan hosting group at the arrival time for the Chicago flight, I saw there smiling back at me the photos of families in Great Wall red with posters and banners and balloons and enthusiasm — families waiting just outside the airport gates to meet the superheroes they’d been praying for for weeks and months. And 99 percent of me cheered with them — cheered for them — for these brave families who said “yes” for various reasons to making a superhero-in-waiting part of their world for one month this summer. Their love and passion just emanated from this photo, and I wanted to whisper in all their ears, “Bravo, world changers! YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE!”

And the other 1 percent of me, the selfish part that couldn’t get my mind off a little boy still lying alone in a hospital bed in China, wept for sweet DJ, who was not to be among these families on that day.

When the Welcome Posters Remain at Home ...

June 11, 2016 Michelle Cuthrell

Our family has been here before.

Welcome posters decorated, patriotic shirts neatly pressed, book bags packed for airports and holding areas with snacks and games and goodies. Ready for a run-leap-hug.

Ready to welcome someone special home.

Until we received a phone call.

In 2006, that phone call notified me that my then-soldier, who had already been deployed for 12 months and missed the first eight months of his son’s life, would be extended in combat. Though I’d shaved my legs (with a weedwacker), hung the banners and even stopped calling a pan of brownies deployment dinner in order to welcome home my hero in what I thought was a week, that phone call notified me that he now wouldn’t be returning home … for four additional months.

We received another “extension” phone call late Thursday night.

DJ, the sweet superhero we have been packing and prepping for — the little boy our hearts are already so in love with — got very ill. He was hospitalized, and, in a state of dehydration, this sweet boy missed his flight from China to the United States.

Today, his friends arrive in red shirts to greet their host families at airports across the country.

Today, our sweet superhero sits in a hospital bed in China — feeling better, his staff reports, but not cleared yet to fly.

And how our hearts just break for him.

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