First of all, let me apologize for the drastic DROP in quality and quantity of blog posts since school has started.  Between working on multiple lit reviews, a ton of reading, and perserving my weekends for friends and football, let’s just say I haven’t had a lot of blogging time on my hands.  I have no less than 4 or 5 drafts saved in my WordPress dock, dating back almost a month now, that I absolutely postiively do plan to get up.

Soon, I will be starting work on my TED talk, which is on Nov. 10, as well as numerous other presentations – a presentation for public school students in MCPS on service, two presentations to freshman groups on campus about involvement, as well as a keynote presentation for the Campus Ambassador conference. Needless to say, a ton of work is ahead, and that’s not even including class! But trust I will do m best to keep this updated along the way.

Anyways, to the point of this post – anyone who has been around me this weekend has probably already heard about this story. This semester, I decided to take up writing for the Collegiate Times, the school newspaper, in my spare time. I have been Public Editor for the CT for the past three years, after being a news reporter in my first year, but I realized that being an editor would likely be too big of a time commitment to maintain with graduate studies. So, I decided to be a news reporter and take on stories that were most interesting to me.

One of those stores were a human interest story. I was sitting in the news meeting with all the staff a few weeks ago, and the story came up. The editors actually decided to assign it to me as opposed to me even having the show interest in it. Just goes to show how well they know me. This was the best story that I’ve ever written, in my opinion.

Just to show you some of the reaction, the Mom, Chris, featured in this article with her family e-mailed me this over the weekend:

“Okay missed the picture but the sweetest little 5 year old just walked up to Gobble Goodies with a giant Tupperware full of change. His mom said she read him our newspaper article and he had been saving change to go to Disney but wanted to give it to us. Still bringing me to tears…sweet boy. Oh what we can learn from children.”

Even though I wasn’t able to stop by their stand on Saturday as planned, she had also texted me this:

“Our neighbor just handed us 4 tix to the game. So, we left you a bag of Gobble Goodies in the section under our mailbox for ya! Enjoy!!”

For me, this story means so much more than just writing for my school paper when I really don’t always have time for it. It’s so much more than being interested in improving my writing through practice, or by getting an assignment in on time.  It shows the sheet POWER of the human heart. It shows the power of service. It shows how, even when you least expect it, if you keep your heart open it can always be changed for the better.

The amount of time that I enjoyed spending with this family – like I said in the story, just eating ice cream and sitting around their dinner table for an hour – is second to none. I’ve never experience such a more powerful, moving experience.  No joke, it made me think that adopting a child is so much more of a possible thing at some point in my life, if that’s ever what I wanted to do.

If you have any time free time at all, please check out the story. It’s linked right here:

When Johanna draws a family,
she draws us. The touching story of an international adoption in
Blacksburg, Virginia.

As I listen back to the recording again, it makes me want to just go back and sit in their home some more, and get to know them anymore.  Starting off the ‘interview,’ by talking about Chris’ and I both’s journey through Tech, how much more passionate you tend to be about your graduate studies.

“At least you know more about the school now,” the youngest Chittenden named Jake says, after explaining what my Master’s degree will eventually be in. I didn’t know that younger kids understood higher education so willingly!!

If you want to check out their blog, you can do so right here.

The Chittenden Family:
Room at our Table

“It’s just so interesting to watch who is being moved by our person, and who is stepping up to help out.  [They are more of an] e-mail kind of person, and Facebook & Twitter are great, but we made our blog to keep up with  those who don’t really use social media.” – Chris

“Way to make your place super homey in, like, 2 months by the way!” – Me

“He’s really the only friend I have. Well, I actually have a couple but that’s like my main friend. Well I have more friends…that’s just like my main friend.” – Jake

“It was really different because we didn’t have TV, and we didn’t have websites. And with the language barrier, not knowing a lot of English, so it was hard to become part of the culture at first.” – Adam

“We’ve tried really hard to not get back into that ‘Keeping up with Joneses’ lifestyle, we gave up so much when we were gone. We want to try and keep it that way.” – Chris

“They had the worst commercials ever. But then we got Netflix.”  :)
– And then I promptly recommended the awesome Netflix documentaries to them. :)

I don’t want to put too many things to give away some fun secrets from their journey, but this just begins to scrape the top of how much I loved spending time with this family. As I plan it, I’ll definitely be able to spend more time with them over the coming months as they continue pursuing this adorable little girl that is now their sister. Please help them out in any way you can.