Skin Color

I hope you caught the relation between my site name and our family. Sometimes I refer to our family as the United Nations. This is merely due to our different skin colors, not our stance on world politics! We have 6 different shades of skin in our family. My husband has an olive complexion-it's like having a perfect tan year round! I am white with a lot of pink-not tan like unless I am consistently in the sun. (At this point I have decided that I am not going to refer to the kids as DD and DS, I am going to use their names!) Ashley is Cinnamon-also perfect year round tan. Abigail is Caramel-yep, another year round tan girl. John is Special Dark (chocolate)-not tanned! Daniel is white, olive and a little yellow, but we call him Vanilla Bean. All four of our children became ours through adoption. We have a heart for the foster care system and adoption. Before we were married we wanted to adopt. This morning Abigail told Daniel that he looked exactly like Daddy! Peter and I laugh at this because the darker our children become, the more people assume Daniel is our biological child. If it's just us with Daniel then he looks totally Mexican! So, even our sweet Caramel daughter sees all the "white" people as looking alike. For us as parents, our eyes have been opened and we see color through our children eyes. John and I were in the grocery store before Christmas and he spotted a gingerbread man hanging on the wall. He pointed at it and said, "That's me Mom, he's brown like me!" John likes to color with the brown crayon, he likes to point out all things that are brown and he picks the brown fake tattoos to put on his brown skin. Our kids know that we are all different. They also know that God made each one of us unique. They know that God made the little children of the world and that they are precious in His sight!

PS Did you catch that this posting is in different shades?