Picture Books About Adoption That Don't Focus on Parents' Desires

(This is the last post for a while, we're about to become a family of three and that's going to need all of my attention! I'll be back, just not for a few weeks. Be good while I'm gone.)

I wanted to buy our son, who will henceforth be referred to  as Tiger*, some picture books about adoption. He is a little too old for most of the picture books on the market, but he doesn't have the language skills for books aimed at his age group. I want him to have something visual not to "help him understand" (he is old enough to know exactly what is happening) but to show him that families like ours are common enough to feature in multiple books. I want him to know that he isn't the only child who looks different from his parents, and if he brings friends home I hope they will flip open the books and see the same thing.

When I began looking for books, I was surprised and honestly a bit upset to see how many titles of books purportedly for adopted children take the adoptive parents' perspective. I haven't read these books, but the titles alone ensure that I'm not buying them. My son isn't a present, he is a person. God didn't give him to me and his loss of his first family and everything he has suffered subsequently was NOT in response to my wish. My wish is that no child is ever in the situation of needing to be adopted by strangers. I wanted books that focus on the child's feelings and experiences, not the parents' loneliness or wishes for a child. One book, "A Blessing From Above", features a bird who gives her chick to a kangaroo because she "knew her nest was not big enough for all her chicks", perpetuating the deeply vile idea that those irresponsibly fertile poor people really ought to hand their babies over to wealthier families, because money = love. Just no. I'm one of five children who grew up in an intermittently welfare dependent household. Quite glad my parents didn't "choose a better life" for me thank you very much.

So what did I end up getting? Unfortunately I couldn't find any books I liked that featured people not animals (I think there are some issues with the way animal adoption stories are often inter-species,
but as an academic I am prone to over analysis I guess), but I did find some child-focused stories.

Here's what we bought:

My favourite is "All Bears Need Love". In the story a polar bear takes care of a brown bear who arrives at the zoo. The other animals raise objections and the polar bear responds to each:

The anteater sniffed. "No one will believe he's yours."
"He will know," said Mama Polar Bear. "That's what's important."

I love picture books where the illustrations contain additional story elements that aren't in the text. In "All Bears Need Love", the background shows the baby bear happily playing with the other baby animals while their parents are in the foreground talking and worrying about 'difference'.

"Rosie's Family" is actually a close contender for favourite and in terms of content the detail makes it the most age-appropriate for an elementary school aged child. The only reason I'm putting it second is that there isn't any kind of story. It's just Rosie talking about her family and her experiences, so I can't see us reading it for fun more than once. It's the only book I found that uses animals of the same species but different breeds (Rosie is a beagle adopted by schnauzers). It also shows a family with both adopted and biological children. The content is fantastic and obviously intended to prompt conversations between parents and children. Rosie talks about feeling angry with her adoptive parents sometimes, and wondering about her birth parents, and missing the place she was "before". These are important and normal feelings that are denied by gratitude-enforcing meta-narratives like "God gave you to us". 

"A Mother for Choco" is another sweet story that starts with a baby bird trying to find his mother by searching for animals with the same physical characteristics (the giraffe is yellow like him but doesn't have wings, the penguin has wings but doesn't have his cheeks etc) but eventually decides that what Mrs. Bear does makes her his mother, even if she doesn't look the same.

"Zachary's New Home" have my favourite illustrations (line drawings, but beautiful and subtly expressive rather than big bold block colours and cartoonish styling). It details Zachary's removal from his first family by a social worker and time in a foster home before his adoption. It's the only book I found where the protagonist has a clear memory of his biological parents and of losing them. The story is sensitive to Zachary having both happy and unhappy memories about life in his first home and a desire to return there. It also covers testing behaviours that strain the relationship between Zachary and his adoptive parents, and Zachary's feelings of rejection and self-blame about losing his first parents. There's a lot of emotional work tucked into a short story. Although not all the specifics are a good match for us, I like the matter-of-fact approach to difficult feelings and events in the book and the focus on Zachary not the adults in the story.

If you have any books to recommend, do please leave a comment! But I won't be replying to comments for a while.

*大翔 (Taiga, pronounced Tiger) is a commonish name around here and we thought it would be a funny 'bilingual' name so while we were waiting we called our son Tiger~ you can't spend a year (or longer) talking about "the child" and statistically he was probably going to be a boy, so Tiger he was until we got a match and a real name. I think it's pretty common for adoptive parents to have a pre-placement name. My eldest niece was Noodles. Anyway, I'm obviously not going to use my son's real name here so he is going to remain Tiger.

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Budget Vegetarian in Japan: August Edition

Previous Editions of Budget Vegetarian in Japan:
June

Summer is here for real now, with scorching sun, temperatures in the mid-30s and cicadas trying to send you deaf everywhere you go. I'm craving cold, fresh, crispy food that doesn't require much stove time. I apologize as always for the photos. I am not cut out for food photography...

In season this month we have: Capsicum (bell-peppers in American), cucumber, okra, bok choy and other leafy vegetables, and 新しょうが new ginger (no need to peel because the skin is so thin and mild enough to eat raw~ I munched on some like a carrot while cooking today).

Tofu and Herb Cream Cheese

Adapted slightly from Recipes of Japanese Cooking, replacing the gelatin with agar*.
Wrap 1/2 a block of silken tofu in kitchen paper, microwave for 1 minute then wring dry either in robust kitchen paper or a cloth.

Microwave 100g of cream cheese for 30 seconds. Mix with 1/4 of a red onion, finely diced, chives to taste and green herbs to taste.

The agar needs to be dissolved in boiling water, this is just to show you the ingredients

The recipe says three sprigs of Italian parsley but I used about 1/2 cup of basil and Italian parsley combined (what I happened to have in the garden). Stir through a little salt, sugar and the agar, and chill for two hours in molds.

These quantities made four muffin-liner sized cheeses

Savoury Tofu Jelly

Also adapted from Recipes of Japanese Cooking.
I used the remaining half of my silken tofu, cubed, with a small quantity of diced mixed-colour capsicum as the filling. Coloured capsicums are often quite expensive but I got a good deal on these, 30% off!

For the jelly itself , bring 1 2/3 C of stock to the boil, remove from heat and add soy sauce, mirin and cooking sake to taste (I used 2 Tbsp soy sauce and 1 each of the others). Mix through the agar and pour over the fillings. Set in the fridge for at least two hours and garnish with the chives left over from your cream cheese.

Cucumber Three Ways

1. Spicy Yuzu and Daikon Cucumber Salad

Cut new ginger into sticks and flash-fry in very hot olive oil until crisp. If you cook it too long it will become chewing not crispy. Very finely slice a your cucumber and daikon and add the ginger and frying oil when cool.

Use any tangy dressing and toss through with an equal quantity of lemon or other citrus juice. I used this spicy green-pepper yuzu dressing and it matched wonderfully with the sharpness of the daikon.

2. Fresh, Simple Cucumber Salad

On the left, the one on the right is #3

Shred cucumber and mix through some garlic, lemon juice, black pepper and a tiny whisper of olive oil. That's it. 

3. Chili-Fried Cucumber

Growing up I ate cucumber in salads and sandwiches. It was never cooked and never eaten hot. Not so in Japan. This tasty dish is just cucumber fried with salt, sesame oil, garlic and some dried chili~ simple but tasty.

Take care when frying because the high water content of the cucumber makes for lots of spattering. You can eat it hot or let it cool.

Noodle-Stuffed Grilled ピーマン

Cellophane noodles are super cheap, easy and perfect for summer.

Just soak for a few minutes in hot water and it is ready to use

How massive is this eggplant? It's as long as my arm!!

Cost about a dollar

I fried some eggplant with  油揚げ tofu skins that came cheaply in a big bag and added some really good texture contrast with a bit of left-over red capsicum and grated ginger and garlic in sesame oil.

After browning the eggplant I added some kombu dashi, soy sauce and the noodles. Once the stock had been absorbed/evaporated I stuffed the mixture into some crispy Japanese green capsicums

and grilled them until the skin burned. I chilled them in the fridge for a few hours and the flavours matured as they cooled (be careful not to over-season because it will taste much saltier cold than hot).

Mint Ice-Tea

I have an abundance of mint in the garden so I thought I'd have a bash at a minty spin on iced tea.

I ran a cup of fresh mint through the food processor with 3/4 C coarse brown sugar and dissolved the resulting mix into 3/4 C of boiling water.

I made about 8 C of tea using four regular tea bags and 4 Earl Grey. Once it was cool I mixed through the sugar syrup and 1/4 C of lemon juice. It was delicious but I want to try it again with orange juice to compliment the Early Grey. I didn't strain the mint leave out because I'm happy to, as my husband puts it, "eat twigs and leaves", but if I were making it for guests I would strain the syrup before adding it to the tea.

*Agar is called かんてん （寒天） and is available from most supermarkets quite cheaply. Read about how to prepare it at here.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. That means if you click then buy the item I get a small commission. It does not mean that I am being paid to promote a particular product or opinion. I will only include affiliate links that are directly related to the subject of a post. If you want to know why I have begun including affiliate links you can read about it here.

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A Flamin' Good Time

Kids throwing fire. Because, Japan.

Remember the ice festival I posted about? Turns out we do fire festivals well around here too. It's all very Game of Thrones .

I am happy to report that no children were injured this year, although there was "an incident" last year no one wants to talk about. One firework did shoot downwards instead of up, but it missed the kids.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. That means if you click then buy the item I get a small commission. It does not mean that I am being paid to promote a particular product or opinion. I will only include affiliate links that are directly related to the subject of a post. If you want to know why I have begun including affiliate links you can read about it here.

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Japanese Drama... Gray's Anatomy Inspired?

  Recognize who is who? (Image Source Here)

OK, Resident: Story of Five Interns is very heavily Grey's Anatomy inspired. One would almost be tempted to say that it is a Japanised version. Resident has been out for a while now and it has been gradually moving further away from Gray's, but the first few episodes had some very familiar elements. I'm not bagging the show out by noting the similarities to Gray's by the way, I find inter-cultural re-makes fascinating.

Resident tells the story of five young doctors starting their surgical internship. The main character is trying to prove that she can make it as a doctor to her overbearing father, who is a successful doctor. She works with a tall and model-looking female resident (who uses a pink stethoscope), a severe but talented female resident, a fluffy-haired and accident prone male intern whose adoration she is oblivious to, and another male intern who is an abrasive and seemingly self-absorbed womanizer with hidden depths. The romantic interest is a divorced senior doctor with awe-inspiring hair. Early cases in the hospital include a patient who is swallowing magnets due to family problems and a teen-aged girl making herself ill trying to please her perfectionist and never satisfied mother. There's even an emergency in a stalled elevator.

Despite these similarities, there are some huge differences necessitated by the dissimilarity of the Japanese medical system and Japanese television's much more conservative attitude towards sex. One of the pleasures of watching inter-cultural interpretations is seeing what has been changed and what hasn't (Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, based on Macbeth, is fascinating in this regard). Although it has developed into much more soap-opera and less medical-drama, Grey's still places medicine and ethical conundrums pretty firmly in the center of each episode, while Resident is all about the emotional connections between the interns and the patients. There's little discussion of medicine and not many scenes featuring surgeries. The biggest thing that jumped out at me is the simplistic attitude to metal illness and emotional problems in the show. In one episode a man who has been allowing his wife to gradually kill him rather than confront her illness has his situation resolved by the residents handing him a pamphlet on mental illness. After being willing to die rather than confront his wife's situation, it seemed less than probable that he would come around so easily. I guess it was a good pamphlet. Then there was the teenaged girl who was repeatedly attempting suicide. All it took to "fix" her was a trip to the OR to see a dead car-crash victim's family crying. Problem solved. And the girl with the overbearing mother? The residents just told her mother to be nicer to her, and she felt bad for being mean and all was well.

Here are the opening sequences to Gray's and Resident in one video, for your enjoyment.

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In Which I Discover that I am an Imperialist Monkey

Researching for this post, it seems like this experiment never actually happened, FYI (Image Source Here)

 Have you ever heard about the experiment with the monkeys, ladder and bananas? Click the image to enlarge and read if you haven't. Although the specific details seem to be untrue, the story is based on published research about learned fearfulness (see Psychology Today). When I first read about the "experiment" I thought immediately about an exchange I had with my father when I was fifteen and had just started working as a kitchen hand. My dad went to use a wet dish cloth as a pot holder when taking a roasting tray out of the oven, and I told him not to. "Why not?" he asked. "I don't know" I said, "they told me at work never to do that." "I wonder why..." dad said, went ahead and did it, and got burned quite painfully. The dampness in the cloth turns into steam, apparently. My dad is like that, he wants to know how everything works. He'd be the monkey getting beaten up by everyone else. Actually, when he talks about his childhood, I think that's exactly what it was like. I remembered this story a while ago when reading This Japanese Life:

"Monkeys Eat Corn
Perhaps it’s a bad sign that after reading about monkeys, my mind wandered to my life as an expat. But a recent study, published in April in the journal Science (and a NY Times story here) made me think about social adaptation.
In the experiment, researchers dyed two batches of corn – one pink, one blue. For two groups of monkeys, the blue corn was soaked in a disgusting liquid, and the pink stuff was standard monkey corn. For the other groups of monkeys, they switched it.
So, two groups of monkeys grew accustomed to pink being inedible, two grew accustomed to blue being inedible. Soon enough, the monkeys only ate one color of corn (the delicious one).
Then the scientists stopped making the other color taste so bad. Once the monkeys got used to which color was good, they both ended up being the same. What happened was interesting: High-status monkeys never bothered eating the gross-colored corn, but low-status monkeys occasionally had to. And even though these low-status monkeys knew that the corn was identical to the good stuff (identical, now, aside from the color), they still favored the “good” color when they could get it. Meanwhile, babies who grew up watching mom eat one color of corn barely even registered that the other color of corn was even food. They’d shit in it.
Monkeys shitting in food have a lot in common with me, as an expat. I’m not always down on my life, of course, but anyone in one culture can get accustomed to interacting with certain things in certain ways. It’s a given: The institutions shape how we interact with them, and then that shapes how we interact with each other. Sometimes this institution is a school or job hunt, and sometimes it’s the people giving us corn.
But then the researchers did something really cool.  They took some monkeys and introduced them to the monkeys in other areas – areas where the opposite color of corn was “the good stuff.”

Wild Vervet monkeys, trained to eat only pink-dyed or blue-dyed corn and shun the other color, quickly began eating the disliked-color corn when they moved from a pink-preferred setting to a blue-is-best place, and vice versa.

These guys went in, looked around, and lost their old cultural identities. This is, at a literally primal level, a version of culture shock. Humans, lucky us, have a much more complicated set of adaptations to deal with. We don’t just want to eat some corn, we want our identities validated."

For anyone who lives in a culture not their own for any length of time, life becomes a balancing act between experiencing and respecting the host culture on the one hand while retaining a situated sense of self (and depending on your approach to ethics, trying to be culturally aware without succumbing to subjective morality). I've mentioned before the way cultural differences are often discussed in Japan on the one hand in completely trivial ways while on the other as completely uncrossable divide. People ask me if it's hard not wearing shoes in the house. They don't believe me when I say that many Australians have shoe-free houses and that I never wore shoes inside growing up. But even if I had... why would it be difficult to take off my shoes? (Slipper culture is another issue of course!) No-one ever asks if it's hard being casually insulted on a daily basis, because it doesn't occur to them that it's a cultural thing. But if I brought it up I imagine the response would be that I just didn't understand The Japanese Way ™. In fact, my supervisor at city hall asked me a while ago if I had any experiences of racism. He was very eager about it so I tried to think of an example that had been unpleasant for me but not so serious that it would turn into a 'thing'. So I told him about a function I had just attended for sports people who had represented our city at the prefectural tournament. I was there representing our naginata team and shared a table with representatives from various other sports. A man sitting opposite talked loudly about me all evening, despite the fact that I was speaking Japanese with everyone else and could clearly understand him. He didn't say anything bad, but it was a non-stop stream of: "I have to text my wife that I'm sitting opposite a 外人! She'll never believe it! Someone take a picture as proof. Oh look, the 外人 is eating some melon. Wow! It's eating melon with a fork! Gotta get a photo..." And yes, he literally took photographs of me eating while sitting opposite me at the table, without ever once speaking TO me. "Oh, but you have to understand that it's very exciting for Japanese people to see foreigners" my irrepressibly optimistic boss responded. "It's not discrimination or any bad thing!" And that is how it always is. You have to be understanding. You don't get to feel uncomfortable. You have to see the funny side of things when the fifth kid in a row asks your cup size during class and the teacher is obviously hoping that you'll answer. Anyway, back to the monkeys. Or rather, to me being a cultural imperialist.

At one of our many summer seminars for elementary school teachers we were broken into groups and told to play a card game with simple rules. That catch was that we weren't allowed to speak, and we were told that is was an exercise in non-verbal communication. After a minute some members were told to switch groups and keep playing. We did it a few times, and then the game ended and we were told the real purpose of the activity. If you're familiar with Barnga you'll have recognised it by now: each group is given slightly different rules, so when the players are shuffled around the group has to cope with players who have different expectations of how the game works. Some players will dominate their new group and enforce their original group's rules, some will go with the flow and assimilate into their new group's rules, and some will get confused or angry. It shouldn't come as a surprise if you know me or have been reading this blog for a while that I completely dominated every group I entered, ruthlessly enforcing "my" rules and quashing all opposition while all the while thinking what a great job I was doing of communicating non-verbally. Hearing the real purpose of the activity was an eye-opener. It wasn't news to me to discover that I am bossy and domineering, but it was a big shock to discover that I had gone through the whole exercise without ever once contemplating that perhaps the other players who were "doing it wrong" were actually playing with a different set of expectations. When it comes down to it, despite my desire not to be, I'm still one of the monkeys at the bottom of the ladder beating up the new guy without stopping to wonder why.

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Sparkling into the High School Baseball Nationals

It's so much more exciting than pro-games; the kids hold nothing back and literally go for broke(n fingers)
(photo source)

It’s high school baseball season. Unless you have been in Japan at this time of year it is a little hard to describe how important high school baseball is. A friend commented last night that the first time he came to Japan it was during 甲子園 (koshien), the nationals, and he thought a natural disaster had occurred because everyone in the airport was crowded around the televisions watching in rapt silence. Did I forget to mention that it’s televised on the national broadcaster? Restaurants bring out TVs so no one misses the score during lunch. I’ve been asked to cut a teaching seminar short because teachers couldn’t be expected to miss a game. There are magazines dedicated to profiling the players (yes, we are still talking about high school kids here) and team strategies. Some kids are recruited directly into pro teams from the tournament, making it something like college sports in the US I guess. Basically, every boy who plays baseball dreams of making it to koshien. Boys who make it take back sand from the field and treasure it forever. In the TV drama I wrote about in relation to non-biological families, the protagonists’ motivation to foster his dead friend’s children comes not from their (apparently distant) adult relationship but from memories of going to koshien together in high school. It’s that important. In fact, it seems a little sad that for the kids who make it, that’s probably the peak of their lives at the grand old age of around 17. What else is going to compare with that?

Accepting the responsibility of representing the prefecture (photo source)

So this brings me to the reason for today’s post. Yesterday, in a thrilling match (I saw this as someone with no interest in sports and the very Australian habit of referring to the pitcher as the bowler), my husband’s school won the right to play at koshien this year. The school hasn’t made it there since 1997. I hope my introductory paragraph has sufficiently backgrounded you on what a big f-ing deal this is. Obviously I am happy that his kids did well, but there’s more to it than that; some of his kids used to be my kids. I teach K-9, meaning that I have the privilege of teaching kids across their transitions between kindergarten and elementary, and elementary to junior high. Then, some kids graduate and head off to the school my husband teaches at. He has students now that I taught in elementary. It’s beyond words how lucky I am to be able to see them grow up across such a broad time period. So the baseball team’s win yesterday was pretty emotional for me, too. One boy in particular I had in JHS has always had as his dream going to koshien. I never took it that seriously, because like I said, all baseball boys dream of that. But yesterday I got to see him, now more of a man than the boy I taught, making his dream come true. That is pure magic. I’ve done my fair share of bitching and moaning about my job, but there is nothing in the world that could replace the joy I have been able to experience working with these kids. 

This kid is going to be a pro sooner rather than later (photo source)

I’m sorry for the horrible quality (filming my projector with one hand while furiously texting all the other ALTs with the other) but here’s a taste of the final moments. One of the boys on the winning team has a younger brother on the losing team, I think you can probably spot them in this video.

Not only parents but the entire school comes out to watch and cheer for these matches. The kids have synchronised cheers they do non-stop for hours in the sun, as do the parents. The school band plays a different theme-song for each player, and during the “chorus” all the kids chant the player’s name. This isn’t just for home-games; the ENTIRE SCHOOL will travel to Hyogo prefecture for the finals. It’s phenomenal. Personally everything I know about baseball comes from the drama Rookies (excerpt below). Every episode the teacher/coach tells the kids to キラキラ into tomorrow. The translation used in the except I uploaded is “shine”, which is probably more natural in this situation, but when we watched the show the man and I enjoyed translating it as “sparkle”, which is the more common meaning. Hence the title of this blog post. Rookies is well worth a watch for the high melodrama, but also for Hayato Ichihara, who I find strangely attractive.

Sparkle into tomorrow kids!  Make it count!

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Graduation Day: The Boy Who Lived

April, 2010. It was the first day of school. The boy was about the start grade eight. It was his little sister’s first day at Junior High; her first time wearing a uniform and having a different teacher for each subject and a million other firsts. The sakura were blooming and pale pink petals fluttered through the air. As he had nearly every day for a year, he walked with his friends. They joked and laughed, faces turned to one another and eyes crinkled against the chilly spring sun. They didn’t see the car, coming around the corner too fast. The car couldn’t see them past a hedge on the corner, and didn’t bother to slow down. The impact crushed his ribcage, bone stabbing his lungs and tearing his diaphragm. His skull shattered, his brain swelling and escaping its suddenly fragile casing. For a time, he died.

For a week afterwards, a teacher was at his bedside twenty-four hours a day. He was not expected to survive more than a few days. His tanned, wiry body looked half the size it had now that it was surrounded by machines. A machine breathed for him. Another fed him. The school councillor prepared the other students for the inevitable. But the boy did not die. He remained comatose for more than a month. His family were warned not to expect too much, even if he woke up. He had been so terribly broken. When he did, one day, open his eyes and struggle to draw breath into his scarred lungs by his own power, I felt worse for his family than if he had died. His eyes were vacant. His face was expressionless. He didn’t respond to sounds. I imagined his mother spending the rest of her life caring for the shell of her child and silently cursed the paramedics who had brought him back from that first, small death.

I was so wrong.

He came back to us, more and more every day. He learned to smile. He sat up. He managed to swallow by himself. Finally, almost year after the accident, the hospital asked if he could come back to school as part of his rehabilitation. His mother, who had long ago quit her job, came with him. At first he could only join one class a day. He didn’t have the balance to sit on a school chair. He couldn’t climb the stairs to get to the science labs. He couldn’t speak. But he fought every day to get back what he had lost. He fought and he smiled every time he dropped his book or had to go to the toilet with his mother’s help while his friends looked awkwardly the other way. After a morning of struggling at school, he went back to the hospital and did more rehabilitation. At the start of this year he was walking by himself without a stick. He could speak, but it was very slow and difficult to understand. His mother moved to the side of the classroom instead of sitting beside him. He began trying to get his old life back, trying to reconnect with his friends.

It was hard for them, too. They missed him. They wanted to support him. But they were fifteen, bursting with energy. All they wanted to do was strip down to their undershirts and play soccer, pushing their growing bodies to their limits. They wanted to run, jump, even somersault across the sports field. He could only watch. They felt guilty when he watched them. They began running out of the classroom as soon as the bell rang, escaping before he could struggle from his chair to ask where they were going. He tried to engage them in the jokes they’d enjoyed before, but he had missed a year of television and didn’t get the current gags. His thoughts moved too slowly to understand their conversations, newly turned to topics more ‘adult’. Every time he was left out, he smiled. Every time I saw him smile, I wanted to cry for him.

In November the school festival included a number of speeches by students who had won essay writing awards during the year. I was surprised to see the boy’s name on the program. It was difficult for him to climb the stairs to the stage, but he did it alone. He spoke slowly. He words were still a little indistinct, a little difficult to understand, but his voice was loud and strong. “I wanted to come back to school” he said. “I never have a break; rehabilitation never stops. But I wanted to come back to school. I wanted to graduate with everyone. That’s why I can get through every day.” It was the first school festival since the tsunami and great earth quake. The student council had chosen the theme “生きているから” (because we live). For the boy, this meant something so much more. He did not die. He came back to us. He reclaimed his body, muscle by muscle. He was able to tell us in his own words how he felt.

Today is graduation day. Today he will walk across the stage on his own feet. Today he will stand with his friends to thank the teachers and parents who have supported them, with his voice loud and steady. Today he will graduate, together with everyone. Because he lives.

This was originally posted March 1st, 2012. I'm re-sharing it for Elleroy's Monday Blog hop. I hope it makes your Monday better.

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