Meet the Family

Welcome to our Blog.

I wanted to start out by saying I am so happy you are here.

This space is so I can connect with you all and a place to be honest and real. As I said in our welcome I am a mom of 5 but actually I am a mom of 6. How is that possible you may ask well, I became a mom at 16 with my oldest. Then at 18 I became pregnant again, but I was not ready or capable of raising 2 children on my own so I decided to give my second child up for adoption.

I struggled with parenting at a young age and to make things a little more difficult my son was diagnosed at 13 with Autism…but that is a story for later.

A month after I had given my 2nd son up for adoption I met my husband, of who I just celebrated 25 years of Marriage. My husband …who you will meet later on a blog post….and I decided not to have children together because raising a child with special needs was a full-time job (hats off to all you moms and dads with kids with special needs). Well fast forward a few years and my husband and I found ourselves in the Arctic where we met our forever Inuit Princess Daughter Maddy. She came into our lives and stole our hearts and we moved back to Vancouver and brought her with us. A year later we became the forever family for Maddy’s full older sister Naina…again you will meet them later. We were now a family of 5 with the 2 girls and my son who had now grown up and was living on his own.

In 2013, our lives changed forever when our Youngest Michael was born and due to circumstances, Richard and I had to step in and become his parents. Michael is my grandson. Michael was 8 weeks premature and was delicate. When he was born, he was not breathing, and did not become resuscitated for 45 minutes. By the grace of God, he did not suffer any brain damage, or organ damage as he was shocked into hypothermia when he was born. Knowing he was early and did not have the ideal beginnings, and knowing that his biological father lives with high functioning Autism I wanted to give the most natural products without chemicals to him and the other members of my family. I became hyper aware of toxins, in products and knew I wanted to offer natural solutions to my family, this is when doTERRA entered our lives.

You see I liked the smell of essential oils, but to use them every day for medication, cleaning, emotional support I was not easily convinced. But they worked, like they really worked. They worked for his diaper rash, they worked for his colic, they worked for his teething, and they worked cleaning our house without me worrying about chemicals that my baby might come into contact with through crawling, sticking things in his mouth all those glorious baby things you need to think of.

We are now a family 6 but then a social worker called me and told me that my Niece needed a forever home as she was in care and there were no other options for her. Well needless to say we then became a family of 7.

We are more than a blended family. You see we are foster parents, adoptive parents, and really, we are just parents to 5 truly amazing kids that I am thankful for every day. My husband and I chose not to have kids naturally together but when the universe has a different plan you end up with 6!

Through blogging I will talk about what it is like to have children through fostering, through adoption as well as parenting special needs. How we navigate being parents to our grandson while we are still in regular contact with my son his bio parent. I will discuss how we maintain a relationship with my daughter’s community and their parents while also navigating my husbands and my knowledge on being adopted ourselves. I will also talk about how I work full time as a social worker, deal with stress, and my real struggle with weight, which I am starting on a health journey of my own. And sometimes you will hear from my daughters, and my amazing husband who really takes care of our house and us as he is a super star stay at home dad which in my option is the coolest most amazing man and I am so lucky to have him as my partner. So until next time feel free to peruse all the amazing sections of this website and feel free to message me if you have questions.

Michelle, Richard and the kids