I just want to say Thank You MLK...

Just so you know, this will be a reflective post. We are having a great relaxing family day today. And last night, at dinner, I looked around the table at my family and started thinking about the man we were honoring today, and the man we are inaugurating tomorrow. And my eyes welled up with tears that these things are actually happening...in my lifetime.

It is not lost on me that my family would have been impossible 20 - 30 years ago. The idea that I, a single unmarried woman, would be able to adopt a child at all was completely out of the question. The idea of adopting Black children, another impossibility. And let's not even go into my baby, a child of both Black and Hispanic descent, again, probably never would have been born at all.

I watch my daughters, and I see that they are true sisters. They don't pay attention to the color of their skin or mine. Oh they see the color, and they love the differences, Katy is a deep dark chocolate brown. (I am a foodie by nature, so you'll have to excuse my use of food to describe my daughters, but this is my post, so get over it!) Madyson is a my latte coffee girl, she is almost as dark as Katy but with a little bit of cream in the mix. Mackenzie is my strawberry vanilla girl, her skin is so pale it is almost blue. Ava Marie is a coffee with cream, maybe a hazelnut? But my girls love this about each other, they love all of the colors, and their teachers love to watch all of the crayon colors they use to create a drawing of our family. How boring it would be to draw a family of 6 and only have to use a couple of crayons!

I am thankful to all who have made this possible. The men and women who had to suffer to make the world and our country in particular look at itself and right the wrongs we have made.

I am no PollyAnny, I know that we are still fighting racism and sexism and intolerance for those that are different in many ways. But like a journey that begins in darkness and ends in the bright sunlight...we are going the right direction.

So I say today...Thank you Martin Luther King, Jr. Thank you for all you did. Happy Birthday to you. From a house of love and laughter, where beautiful children with brown and white and coffee colored skin live together and call themselves sisters. And they believe that they can do or be anything...anything!!