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My friend Erin at Life with the Loraines gave me the Liebster blog award! This was such a wonderful surprise and I really thank Erin for thinking of my blog when she passed on this award. I have to answer some questions that she asked — which will be hard for me — and then pass this award on to two other bloggers. So, I will try to answer all the questions — here goes.

1. What is your favorite post on your blog? I think that my favorite post is “More Alike Than Not” because it describes how I feel about my girls with Down syndrome. They are just kids — just like all my other kids and I think that is important to remember.

2. Why do you blog? Well, I started blogging when we committed to Sophia (then called Allysen) and someone at Reece’s Rainbow suggested we start a blog to help with fundraising. I continued blogging after both of our girls came home as a kind of journal of their first weeks and months here and just never stopped.

3. What is your favorite book and why? Ok, so this may sound strange but my favorite book is The Pink Maple House by Christine Noble Govan. This is a children’s book, but I have always loved the book. I read it to my children usually once a year in the fall and so far they have all loved it, too.

4. What is your favorite thing about each of your children? Well, since I have 20 children I am not even going to try to answer this question. I don’t think anyone would want to read about that many different children and my favorite thing about each so I will just let this one go.

5. You have three wishes. What are they?

· I would wish that Bethanydidn’t have cystic fibrosis.

· I wish I loved to home school — I do it because Bill and I know it is the right thing for our family, but I definitely don’t love doing it. I want to be one of those women that loves the planning and teaching and all the projects.

· I wish I was more outgoing and that I was a more confident person.

6. What do you think is the best and the most challenging thing about adoption? One of the best things is seeing a child that had little hope for a future blossom, grow and learn what love and being part of a family really means. The challenge is that you never really know to what extent the child has been physically and emotionally damaged and you must be prepared for this. Sometimes this can be very difficult.

7. What do you like to do to relax? Read a book or read a few of my favorite blogs.

8. Something you are proud of… I am proud of the way our older children have been loving and accepting and even excited over the adoptions of our special needs children. There is no hint of resentment among them. In fact, they express only love and acceptance. They take them swimming, out to lunch, to the movies, to the store with them and sometimes will just come over to watch a movie with them and have a snack — the snack is really important to Sarah. Adopting so many children does take up a lot of our time, energy and money, but our older kids have never complained or been resentful — quite the contrary. When we were adopting Caroline, our daughter Megan was 16 years old, and she insisted on getting a job to help with the adoption expenses. When we were adopting Sophia and Bella our daughters Katie and Abigail had the opportunity to travel to New York and play at Carnegie Hall with the American Youth Harp Ensemble. They had auditioned for this trip and were accepted. But, the cost of the trip was not really in our budget since we were saving everything we could to go get our girls. Both Katie and Abigail willing gave up the trip without a single complaint. Then our son, Michael, gave a Benefit Concert to help raise money for our adoption of Bella and Sophia. Meredith came over to our house daily to check on the kids while I was in Bulgaria (even with terrible morning sickness) and Emily went with me to meet her new sisters. They are all supportive of what we do and that means the world to me.

9. What is your family’s favorite meal? With so many kids this is a very hard question. I guess one meal that quite a few of my younger kids like is barbecue chicken, peas and mashed potatoes — simple but most of the kids like it and it is hard to find something they all like.

10. What is your favorite room in your house? Some people may not consider this a room, but I am still going to choose it — our front porch. I love my porch. Bill and I have coffee on it early in the morning before any kids are up and then when he goes to work the kids will sometimes eat breakfast out there. We read on the porch, sit and talk, visit with neighbors, the kids play games, we sit and watch the deer and we even have our little squirrel that comes up every single day and will sit at my feet until I feed him. When we built this house the one thing I knew we had to have was a porch and I think everyone in the family loves it.

I now need to pass this award on to two more bloggers. I choose two that I started reading while in the process of adopting Bella and Sophia. Both were adopting from the same country and pretty much in the same time frame. They are Blessings Eternal and I Will Go Before You .