The rain didn't stop him from wanting to lace up his new Nikes for another soccer game against the neighborhood boys!After lunch, Christina (an amazing young woman who spent a year in China caring for and teaching special needs orphans) came over with some of her younger siblings to help teach English to {name}. She covered the alphabet, some letter sounds, colors and body parts. Her energetic spirit combined with her immediate loving/welcoming heart made it easy for him to sit and speak with her. After some lessons she transitioned to a version of "Simon Says" and a neighborhood boy joined our group of already six to see if {name} understood everything that Christina reviewed. Turns out he understood everything very well and knows more English than we realized. It was fun for me to just hear his voice!
Shortly after that, three more neighborhood boys knocked on the door looking to play soccer with {name}. Before the Nikes could be laced up again, it started raining so the boys came into our home. This is especially cool because as a family, we've been trying to reach out to the boys and girls in our community. It's sometimes hard for my son (12) to relate to the other kids because they all go to the same school and do the same things and he is home schooled. Having {name} here has opened a door because all of the kids are drawn to him and want to be around him. When they couldn't play soccer with him, they didn't just walk away. They asked if they could come inside our house!
And they did.
So at this point we had ten school-aged children in our home, with my youngest two napping upstairs!
I truly believe that if {name} wasn't with us, these boys would not have been in our home. Even Stephen was shocked and turned to me and whispered, "Why are all these people in our home?"
Smiling, I said, "Because of {name}."
Children open doors that often seem shut to the rest of us!
So cool!!!!!
ReplyDelete