Sunday, March 2, 2008

Welcome to the Johnson Chronicles

We're reluctantly being pulled into the 21st Century with all the other Bloggers. I'm sure that many families out there that consider themselves and their lives unusual and are using the Blogging media as a therapeutic release. What can it hurt, right? This first post will be a bit lengthy, but how else does one start a story, but to begin with the beginning and that takes a bit.

So what makes us think that we are so "unusual" that others would be interested in reading about our lives and our thoughts? Our family is made of an African-American husband/father (Juan), a Caucasian wife/mother(Pam), one Chinese son(DJ), and a set of one son and two daughters from Ethiopia. Those are just the children at home. Our other five children are from previous marriages for both of us. Pam's daughters are Heather and Laurie, both of whom are adults with their own children. Juan's son ( Corey) and daughter(Ebony) are all adults; none of which have children, yet. So that's eight children between us.

Juan was born and raised an Army brat, had his own Air Force career and is now an accountant. Pam was born and raised in Upstate New York and is now an accountant. We know, the epitome of excitement, huh? We're actually not your run of the mill shy and reserved accountant types, we sort of just fell into these roles over a course of adventure or misadventure.

As mentioned before, we've both been previously married but we technically didn't bring kids into the mix because they were either already adults or living with the ex. We met at work 11 years ago. Actually Pam interviewed me for a job and the rest is history in the making. When our relationship developed to the point of talking marriage I told Pam that I wanted children to be part of our lives. Hers were adults and mine lived half a nation a way, so that left a few options to explore. Giving birth to them was already out for both of us; so that left adoption and or foster parenting. We prayed about it and felt that adoption would be the best for our lives and for the children who would come into it. To be continued...