FROM STEFANIE WITH LOVE

As you've read in my last post, I am now participating in a brand-new website called "Adoption Voices". This site is for anyone & everyone whose lives have been touched by adoption in some way. Most of you know my adoption story, for those of you who don't, I believe I have a post on my blog about it somewhere, or you can read through it on my Adoption Voices profile too ( :

Through this site, I have met so many beautiful women who have been courageous enough to share their incredible stories with all of us. Some of them were adopted as children, some of them have adopted both internationally & nationally, some have placed babies for adoption. All of them have wonderful stories & powerful things to say about them, as well as encouraging words to say about their peers' stories. I have found the site to be uplifting & supportive. It has become a safe-haven for me where I can openly talk about adoption without having anyone feel sorry for me or pity me for my circumstances. It's been very empowering to share my story with these wonderful women & it gives me the strength & motivation to want to be more open with everyone I meet about my personal experience.

One of the beautiful women I had the pleasure of meeting is Stefanie. She is a very brave & optimistic soul who is planning to place her unborn baby for adoption. She reminds me of myself in some ways, yet she seems much more wise & thoughtful than I was at that point in my life. She is very open & warm, sharing about her experience in such a positive way that you can't help but smile ( : She's been very inspirational to me & I'm sure to everyone around her too. I know that God will bless her choice, her baby, & the rest of her life...the beginning is only yet to come!

Thank you Stefanie for your story & for the award, but I think you deserve it most for your honest & open, lovely blog! ( :

ADOPTION VOICES

I was recently invited to participate in the launch of a new adoption-awareness & support website called "adoptionvoices.com", through a group I joined on Facebook & then forgot about! When I first signed up for Facebook way back when, I joined a group about adoption & maybe entered one or two comments on it from time to time. Well, I eventually forgot I was even part of it. Then the other day I recieved a message inviting me to take a look at this new website & I was totally blown away when I did!

I haven't shared my adoption story with many people. It was something that happened 8 years ago now, which most of the time feels like an entire lifetime ago! It was also somewhat of a "secret". Most of my extended family has no idea I was ever even pregnant, which is shocking considering I spent 9 full months living in an out-of-state maternity home. But I was in high school at the time & most of my friends were just too young to be able to relate to the situation I was in. I lost alot of friends because of that...they simply didn't know what to say to me & I didn't have the self-esteem to handle it. I lived under a cloud of guilt & shame, & still do to an extent, about the whole situation. That makes it very difficult for me to open up & share about it.

This website has changed all of that for me...I can participate in discussions, meet other people who CAN relate to what I went through & offer words of support & encouragement. I think it has also been easier for me to share my story with strangers who I've never met before then explaining to my aunt & cousins, "oh yeah, remember 8 years ago when I was 16 in the 10th grade? Well let me tell you a story..."! I clam up when it comes to sharing face-to-face, but being able to blog about my experience & hear back from people who understand has given me such a surge of confidence. I've always intended to become an "adoption advocate" in some way & I've felt that God allowed me to go through what I did in order for me to be able to share my experience with other people & be able to spread adoption awareness. I truly believe the first step in learning how to branch out & share more openly with friends & family too & that is very exciting!

Please take a look & see what you think: http://adoptionvoices.com/profile/DanielleGinther

MY NAME IS RED

Okay, so this is a follow-up to my last post "Summer Book Club". We finally, FINALLY finished the nearly 1,000-page book by Ken Follett "The Pillars of the Earth" & had our final discussion about it last night. All of us in the book club unanimously agreed that the ending left us very disappointed. The whole focus of our book club is to share about the parts we enjoyed & discuss the events that occur throughout the books we read & also to make predictions for what we think will happen further into our reading. Well sadly, most of our predictions were concerning characters we assumed were going to become more of something further along & 9 times out of 10, this did not happen. It seemed that there were SO many characters & hardly any of them actually fully developed throughout the book. By the end, we were so frustrated with the drawn-out storyline that we all admitted had we not been participating in this book club, we would've put the book down many pages ago!

BUT...moving on, we drew out of a hat the title of the next book we are going to read: "My Name Is Red". It's a Nobel Prize Winning tale of a miniaturist (clay artist) in 16th century Istanbul who disappears shortly after being commissioned by the Sultan to produce figurative art illuminating the European style, which is a dangerous proposition that defies the laws of Islam. It is "part fantasy & part philosophical puzzle that journeys into the intersection of art, religion, love, sex, & power". And it is written from the perspectives of various people, animals & inanimate objects such as: Esther, a coin, a dog, & the color red.

We are all very excited to see how this book goes & hoping that it makes for much better discussion & has a much better ending than the last one!