Janet's Blog

Thanksgiving is over.  Now the countdown to Christmas can begin!  Yes, I know that the stores all began their countdowns weeks ago.  The holiday merchandise has been out since Halloween (or even earlier) and the stores have been playing Christmas carols for just as long.   (It's a little ironic that so many retail chains insist that their customers be greeted with "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas," but that traditional Christmas carols, both secular and Christian, are the predominant background music this time of year.)  As far as the retailers are concerned, Black Friday was bigger than Christmas itself, effectively kicking off a whole frenzied season of buying and selling. We've had Christmas parades already, too, on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, and Santa Claus has officially arrived to greet excited children who are ready to recite laundry lists of longed-for Christmas presents.  The neighbors have put up their outside lights

So, I've been thinking all week about what to write for Thanksgiving.  I could write about everything I'm thankful for--family and friends, our home and pets, a job I love, our secure lives here in Gering, Nebraska, or, most of all, for God's loving care and His Son's great sacrifice for me and everyone.  But so much of it seems like a cliche.  Of course, we're thankful for all of these things, and we express our thankfulness this Thanksgiving, as we do every year, to God and the people we love.  There's nothing wrong with that.  But, somehow, it just doesn't seem to be enough. Every Thanksgiving, someone always expresses the feeling that our thankfulness should not be reserved for one day of the year, but should continue all year long.  I believe this, too.  But, this week, I've been thinking about all of those things that we take for granted, that we forget to thank God for because we just accept life the way it is most of the time.  So, why don'

When we lived on the farm in the 1950s, our telephone was a large wooden box, attached up high on the wall, with a horn-shaped mouthpiece you spoke into and a handheld receiver that you placed on your ear.  I doubt that this model of phone had changed much in the half century or so that phones had been common communication devices for rural households in Nebraska.  Children did not often answer the phone, let alone use it.  On the rare times I talked to one of my grandmas on the phone, Mom or Dad held me up so I could reach the mouthpiece, or I stood on a chair.  The telephone had no push buttons, and no dial, but it did have a crank on the side, which was used to summon the telephone operator or call a neighbor on the same party line.  Most calls were operator-assisted; to make a call, you turned the crank, waited for the operator to answer "number please," and gave her the number for the person you wanted to contact.  Most phones were on a party line, which meant that sev

People talk about "getting your foot in the door" as a way of being in the right place at the right time, so something good will happen as a result.  For me, though, getting my foot in the door was the beginning of a rather painful chain of events that would never happen in the twenty-first century. It happened the summer before Laura was born, when I was six.  Mom and Dad had taken a rare fishing vacation to Minnesota, leaving Dan and me with Grandma and Grandpa Wegner, who came to stay with us at the Oxnard so they could run the hotel while Mom and Dad were gone.  It had been a traumatic morning, to begin with, because our beloved yellow canary had choked on a seed and died.  Perhaps Grandma was trying to make us feel better about our poor pet, because she decided to make pancakes for breakfast.  However, we were missing some necessary ingredient, so Grandma, Dan, and I walked the half block, across the alley, to the nearest grocery store to buy what we needed. Nowadays

It's November--National Adoption Month.  Bill and I first talked about adoption years ago, soon after we were married.  We wanted as many as six children and, even then, we planned to adopt and provide foster care, as well as raise our biological children.  The time frame has been a little different than we expected, but the results have been worth the wait. It was just eleven years ago this week that Victoria joined our family permanently through adoption.  We saw her picture on the internet in June, filled out reams of paperwork, and attended one training after another.  We first saw little Victoria, across the room at her daycare center, in August, and we met her for the first time in September, when we joined her foster family for a picnic lunch and a trip to Riverside Zoo.  Victoria was almost five years old, very tiny, and very cute.  A proposed six month transition period was shortened into six weeks of back and forth travel between our house and her foster home, an