In looking back at what the previous blogger on this topic, Aleida, wrote about, I ran across this blog about the Best in Life.


I look forward to having a sibling co-blogger on this topic, as I would love to hear some of his or her perspectives. I think Aleida hit the nail on the head with her “best in the life” topic.


We moved back to Overland Park from Illinois about 9 months ago. We are in a predominantly white collar community now. We love it here, for many reasons. The streets are clean, the roads are great, the people are very Midwestern, and we love our church (which is now about 16,000 people and was 400 people when we started attending in 1994!) The school district gives you more bang for your buck than we got in Illinois, but is not without some problems. Ah, the problems… There are some of those, too.


While we enjoy the Midwestern lifestyle a great deal, there is a lot of money in this community. That is not in and of itself a bad thing. With that affluence comes some wealthy kids, with incredibly easy lifestyles, some with a “princess mentality”. We saw that in Illinois, too, in some areas, but the school district was so huge there were kids of all walks of life and all ethnicities in each school. Here, it is predominantly Caucasian. All the adoption books tell you that you should live in multi-ethnic communities if you are parenting transracially adopted kids. I agree. But sometimes you weigh all the factors, and this is a good place for us to be. (Adding our foreign exchange student was one of our solutions!) We are building in an area where there is as much financial diversity as can be found around here. The farther north you go, the more that narrows.


My husband has a great job, and we truly are very fortunate. But I have tried very hard to raise kids who appreciate what they have, and who work for what they get. I dress like a farm girl and prefer braids over beauty salons. I have learned some hard lessons in life about what is important and what isn’t. I don’t have a lot of time for dwelling on fluff! I'm much more into real relationships than superficial stuff. Relationships are what life is all about.

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