I live in a small town in Clark County, Ohio. When people ask where I'm from, I used to say the biggest city we lived near was Dayton,...

photo: Sarah Thomas Baldwin/Asbury University 2023 The year I turned thirty was what I thought, at the time, the hardest of my life. We...

Online browsing has its place, but nothing compares to the joy of finding a thing that you never knew you needed in a plant shop in a...

Recently I found myself tensing up in a conference room office chair as I listened to an update about a child who had a traumatic, acute...

We recently received the above package from an organization that we support, and while I was excited (who doesn’t love surprise mail?!),...

Christmas is full of remembered trauma for our family. For many kids who come from hard places, not every memory is explicit, but there...

I don’t think it’s accidental that we celebrate Advent and Jesus’ birth at this time of year. It’s a dark season. We’re quickly...

2020 is the year that all of the Slagell girls got combat boots. Yes, it's trendy. Yes, it's completely within our preferred style vibe....

For a person who has based the bulk of her internal value system on this particular word for over a decade, hope and I have had a real...

Do you all know about Advent? It’s my favorite season of the year. The four weeks before Christmas where we spend our time and energy...

This quarantine started with tears for me. Grief over what I sensed instinctively was coming, particularly for my high school senior....

When we began fostering, I thought that every child that entered our home would stay forever. We got into this to expand our family, and...

This past year, in a hard and painful but right-for-right-now decision, we let our license as a foster care home expire. We spent the...

I’ve heard and seen most of the anecdotes and memes the internet has to offer regarding this particular topic. Ones like this: “I...

On a June evening, five years ago, we sat in an ER room with our youngest, just a year old, and we were not certain she was actually...

Advent is my favorite season of the year. Not Christmas. Advent: those four Sundays preceding Christmas. Advent comes from the Latin word...

I’ve always been a words girl - taping index cards of poetry and verses and phrases up all over my house. Most of my wall-hangings have...

Being licensed foster parents for ten years and adoptive parents for eight of those years has taught us a few things. We frequently get...

So you’re like, just a stay-at-home mom? It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten that question, and it won’t be the last, I’m sure. Truth be...

On a winter’s day this year, I logged on to my computer to check my eldest daughter’s recent team roster to see if I remembered any of...