Bad Photographs and God's Perfect Timing

I am never in family photographs. I'd love to say it's because I'm always the one taking the pictures. That would be true but not quite the full truth.  I think, like a lot of women, I don't like how I look in pictures. They remind me of how overweight I am. They remind me of how old I'm starting to look. They remind of how perfectly imperfect I actually am.

My youngest child turned seven this week. Naturally, I went digging through baby pictures of him trying to find the perfect pictures to post on Facebook in celebration of his special day. When I came across this one, I chose not to use it because I, in all my imperfection, was in it. But, for the last few days, I keep going back to this picture and looking at it again and again.  This picture perfectly captures a moment in time that completely changed our family forever.

We had only completed the adoption of our younger daughter (also pictured) a few months before this picture was taken. With three kids already, we weren't really planning on having another child. My husband had been hurt at work and had gone through multiple surgeries and was still in constant pain. I had reluctantly gone back to work after he was hurt instead of doing what I loved most - being a stay at home mother. Now, he was the one at home with the kids. Switching places wasn't easy on either of us. Being at home was the last place my husband wanted to be and being at work was the last place I wanted to be. On top of working, we lived in North Dallas and my commute to and from work was at least 45 minutes each way in good traffic. Life was exceptionally difficult during this time. 

But... (doesn't life always seem to have "buts"?)

When we received the call that our adopted daughter's newborn little brother was being taken from the hospital straight into foster care, we suddenly had a big decision to make. It was tempting to take the easy route. Considering our circumstances, we had every reason not to take him. But, God has better plans for us than we have for ourselves. He put it on our hearts to say yes to this little baby boy.

This picture was taken just a few days after he was placed with us. I was completely exhausted from taking care of a newborn while still working a full time job. I look awful in this picture. But, I also look like the beautiful disaster that all mothers of newborns are. 

I can look at this picture today and give myself the mercy I should give myself more often. I don't have time for make-up. I don't have time to go to the gym. It's OK that I'm getting older. It's OK that I seem to have more white hair in pictures than I see in the mirror. It's OK to look exhausted in a picture because I am exhausted from doing what I love, being these children's mother.

And it's OK to bite off more than you think you can chew when God calls on you to do it. I can trust that He has already worked out the details of how to make it work, even when it seems impossible. His timing is perfect even when it appears to us mere humans to be the worst possible time.

Happy Birthday, Little Man! 

X-rays, Loud Kids, and the Idiocy of Modern Health Care

Ebony hurt her elbow Sunday and last night it was swollen and really hurting her. I decided I'd better get it looked at and took her to the walk-in medicenter yesterday evening. We were there for over three hours even though there weren't really that many people waiting.

I really don't understand why you can't just say, "my daughter needs her elbow x-rayed" and just get a damn x-ray. No, we have to sit in the lobby for over an hour, then sit in a tiny examination room for another half-hour​. You finally spend 30 seconds with a nurse. Another half-hour later, you spend another 30 seconds with a doctor. Finally, another half-hour later, she gets the X-ray you told them she needed when you walked in the dang door. Couldn't we have saved a lot of time by just skipping the whole waiting on a nurse/doctor thing? Does the doctor really need to see her BEFORE ordering the x-ray? Either it's broken or it's not and he can't do anything before he knows which it is.

It's the same thing when I have a sinus infection. I should be able to just walk up, tell them I have a sinus infection and need a Zpak and let the doctor sign the prescription. Does the doctor actually need to even see me? A quick glance at my medical records would show that I have frequent sinus infections, so I know what they feel like. The Zpak clearly works because I'm not back in their office a week later still sick. Even better, let me go to a pharmacy and get it straight from them after a short consultation.

Sitting in a doctor's office with kids is a miserable experience.  Kids have a complete inability to be quiet in a doctor's office, even mine. No kid can sit for three hours straight without getting fidgety. Their phones and tablets are loud, even though I keep telling them to turn them down. Five minutes later, when they think I won't notice, they turn them back up. The toys I brought, thinking they would hold off boredom, are now driving me insane because they are loud. What was I thinking bringing that one? Ebony's ADHD medicine has completely worn off by this time of the evening and she's bouncing off the walls and talking incessantly, even with the hurt elbow.

That's another thing we spend countless hours dealing with - her medicine. We know what works. Why the heck do we have to go to hour and a half appointments every 2-3 months to get access to it? It's ridiculous. And I have to go pick up a paper prescription each and every month because it's a "controlled substance". I do understand that people abuse it. But, why punish every single person because a handful of people abuse it?

Can we not be trusted with our own health care? Can we not make our own decisions? Do we really even need a doctor to know that a kid needs something x-rayed? Why can I not go to Walmart, or at least directly to a pharmacist, and buy an antibiotic?

I know that given that freedom to go around a doctor in making health care decisions would be abused. But, isn't that the abusers problem? Why does that problem trickle down to me?

No wonder health care costs so much when my family is sitting in a clinic for three hours for a total of ten minutes worth of actual health care.