Today I watered the kids as well as the veggie and flower gardens. This was Scarlett’s first exposure to the hose and so we took it slow. She loved it and shrieked and laughed her way through the hose spray.

Priceless.

Towards the end of it, she ran onto the driveway and fell down. Because she falls all the time and gets right back up, I didn’t think anything of it. I went over to her, but she just got back up and ran off to continue the pursuit of the hose. It was only after we came back into the house that I noticed the back of her arm. She had a huge, open, bloody scrape on the back of her elbow.

Now, if this had been one of my bio kids, they would have been going on and on about it. They would have been “this close” to death, the agony, and so on. This child never uttered a single word about it. In fact, when I took her into the bathroom to clean it, again, she didn’t utter a word. My bio kids would have been SCREAMING bloody murder.

She never said a thing. It’s as though she was immune to the pain.

How is that possible? How can she not have felt that and wanted comfort for the pain?

She received kisses and tickles and everything else in between regardless because that’s what I do. But, I was a little freaked out. The two older kids were freaking out.

Why wasn’t she crying?

My heart is still crying for her. For her lack of acknowledgement of the pain she must have been in…
For her thought that no one was going to comfort her anyway so why bother…
For her heart that must be crying, even though her face isn’t…
For every time she has fallen down and picked herself back up without someone there to help her up…
My heart aches…

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Kenlyn started advocating for the children of Shepherd’s Field about 3 years ago through sponsorship and fundraising. Adoption was not on their radar. God called them to help the children, and it took them a little while to realize it would be through adoption as well. Kenlyn aims to blog the “real story”– “the good, the bad, the ugly” — in hopes of better preparing adoptive families for their children’s homecoming. Go check out their blog and see their newest addition recently home from China.