Ten

Tomorrow is my daughters tenth birthday. This is one of the children we adopted so I wasn't present at her birth. Birthdays like this are bitter sweet for me because it reminds me of all I missed out on in her life.

This particular daughter was born ten weeks early with three types of drugs in her system. She really should have died that day but that wasn't in God's plan. She has grown and matured so much in the past ten years, her problems that were there at birth are now just a memory. That amazes me!

Ten is a big deal in the Hopkins household. All ten year olds in our house get a letter on their birthday from mom and dad. This letter not only tells them how much they are loved by God and their parents but it encourages them to become all they can be. It reminds them that they are an important part of God's plan. We try to point out where they've come from and the potential we see in them.

We started this tradition with our oldest son, a birth child, when we saw how hard it was for him during his 'tween years. It meant so much to him that he immediately wrote his sister a letter to tell her how special she was to him. Seeing that showed us that we were onto something.

Now each child in our family gets excited as their tenth birthday approaches. They eagerly anticipate the letter that mom and dad will write specially for them. Last year when another one of my daughters turned ten we sat at the table and read all the ten year old letters from my oldest son's to our newest ten year old.

So tomorrow we are looking forward to a breakfast of Monkey Bread and bacon as ordered by the birthday girl and some special time around the table reading ten year old letters. Then next week we get to do it all again for our next ten year old. Thanks to adoption we have two girls who will turn ten this month. They are only eight days apart. Our "almost twins" give us twice the fun!!