The boys have a sponsor sister

Before I start this post, I need to give a disclaimer that I stole this idea from my good friend Jaime.  Her first baby, Faith, was born still.  Their family has been sponsoring a child with the same birthday as their Faith for several years now.  When I heard that they did this, I decided that I wanted to do this too.  We lost a baby three years ago.  Our due date was September 15, 2009.  I liked how sponsoring a child would change that date from just being a sad milestone into something more. It would bring more hope to the day.  Hope that the child we support would have a chance at a better life.  I also love the idea of having our boys learn through this experience.  You can send emails, letters and even small packages.  We'll have  to get to work on that soon too.

For those of you that don't sponsor a child but might be interested, you can pick one by country, gender, birthdate.  It can be a bit overwhelming at first.   We narrowed down our search by using our due date (9/15/09). 

We don't know if our baby was a boy or a girl.  So, we decided to pick a child with that exact birthdate and sponsor him/her through World Vision.  There were several choices.  After hearing Nicholas Kristoff (the author of Half the Sky) speak at church recently, Jon and I knew that we wanted to sponsor a girl rather than a boy.  I could get into a lengthy explanation here but I think one quote sums it up.  "When you educate a boy, you educate a boy.  When you educate a girl, you educate a village."    Also, we thought that since we are a family of boys that it would be fun to have a surrogate sister.  We signed up and our packet came last week before I headed out of town to meet my nephew in Delaware.

I've been super excited about sharing the big news with the boys.  Tonight we had a family meeting with the 3 big boys after Caleb went to bed.  We had an inflatable globe (I'm on the search for a real one, so this had to do in a pinch) and our packet from World Vision.  Before we started, the twins were guessing about our family meeting.  There were speculations that we were going on a trip or moving.  James said he had so many thoughts in his head about the family meeting, he didn't want to bother sharing them.  Ha!  I love that boy.  He has theories for everything so its no surprise to me that his mind went into overtime when he heard we were having a family meeting (we don't do these too often), there were papers and there was a globe. 

Checking out the picture of Mily

 

We started out by telling them about the baby we lost early in our pregnancy (they were 2 years old and 6 months) at the time of miscarriage so way too young to remember anything.  Then we filled them in on deciding to sponsor Mily Juliet in Ecuador.  We marked on our inflatable globe where we live with an X and marked where Mily lives with a heart (Andrew's idea). 

Marking the globe--who wants to guess how long until it gets popped after all, it is a $1 inflatable globe.

 James and Andrew had tons of questions.  How many choices of kids were there with this birthdate?  What other countries did they live in?  Which country is the furthest? Why did we pick the girl in Ecuador instead of the ones in India and Africa?  And so on.  For the record, we picked Ecuador because it was the closest and the most likely that we would ever be able to visit (aka buy 6 airplane tickets to) in the future.

Since the boys started school, they now consistently raise their hands to ask questions at home.  Kinda funny

We read a lot of information to them about Ecuador and how our sponsor money is going to be used.  Jon explained what he knows about Ecuador and where it is in relation to us.

At the end, we prayed for Mily and her family. 

Happy 3rd Birthday to Mily Juliet (our new sponsor sister)!  We look forward to watching you grow (from afar) over the coming years and hopefully to someday meeting you.