November is National Adoption Month in which we remember the over 101,000 children waiting in foster care and hoping for placement with families.

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What are you up to this weekend? It’s rainy and gray in the NW (surprise!) so my girls are plotting and planning playdates, which only means one thing around here – Rainbow Loom! It’s become an obsession.  So if your children, like mine, have caught the loom fever, I have just the thing for you! Sit back and enjoy a special curated list of articles and happenings just for Blended readers. Have a great weekend!

Portrait of an Adoption is currently running its third year of 30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days in honor of National Adoption Month. Essays feature many voices and opinions involved in adoption. Definitely worth your time.

Over at Gazillion Voices, Astrid Dabbeni, Executive Director of local Adoption Mosaic, shares her reunion story.

Earlier this month, in honor of National Adoption Month, The Today Show ran a series on adoption featuring different experiences and insight. You can find all the stories here.

Adoptive Families has a great resource list of essays from adult and teen adoptees – spend some time here and learn from them.

Around these parts you can find me having intense discussions about the new Common Core standards and the decrease in fiction in the classroom. Partner that with a lack of art education and a myriad of other decreasing humanities and I get all hot and bothered. Its why I teach art to 5th graders once a month and I’ll fight to keep the presence of humanities in the public school system for my children and theirs after them. That’s why I fell in love with this video which really gets to The Heart of the Matter.

The Heart of the Matter from americanacad on Vimeo.