HELP! Fancy some "not so light" reading ... anyone?

Hello Friends,

I need to enlist the help of some people who have the time and inclination to do a little research on our behalf.

We are trying to find the answer to 2 important questions and try as we might ... and believe me we have tried, we cannot find the specific answers we are looking for.

Question 1:
We have been told that the document "The Implementation and Operation of the 1193 Hague Intercountry Convention: Guide to Good Practice" explicitly does not allow TLC to have contact with intercountry adopters after placement takes place.

Naturally this would leave us broken hearted and so we have been reading this document over and over again to find where this is stated. I have even emailed the Secretariat at the Hague for an answer. Perhaps we are all blinded by our own personal disbelief in the possibility of such a severing of roots but we cannot find any such stipulation.

If anyone has the time and inclination ... PLEASE read the document and help us look for this.

Question 2:
We have been instructed to not place any identifiable pictures of children with court orders against them on our websites or materials unless we have the express permission of the Presiding Officer of the court.
We are ofcourse willing to comply with this but in the interests of fulfilling legal mandates to the best of our abilities we would like to see the Chapter and Verse of the Children's Act or its Regulations where this is stipulated.

Again, anyone who thinks they can help with this please visit www.acts.co.za (http://www.acts.co.za/children_s_act_2005/index.htm)  or Google around the topic and see if you can find anything because we are battling to get answers around this issue.

AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE :-)

My Geese have taken to having their morning bath in my fountain outside the front door! It's so funny to watch, they get in 2 at a time and swim around and around the Sea Horse Fountain statue, honking like crazy for a few minutes and then they hop out and the next two plop themselves in. It really is very funny.

"The Big 6" ... My boys heading off down the lane to the Mainhouse, on their way to hop on the school bus. They are quite the gang now and all doing well.

My Beloved First Born turned 13 on Tuesday!! We went out for a celebratory dinner as he share a Birthday with my Uncle Berend who turned 74!

This week the Mandela Day Legacy continued. We had 2 Hotdog Parties

My dining room and boy's bedroom painted ...

And Loads of Fun on the Jumping Castles!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO IS REMEMBERING US IN YOUR PRAYERS,

Change is never easy and it's good to know that we are loved.

We Love You All
Pippa

Phew ...

HAPPY MANDELA DAY EVERYBODY!

PHEW! So much has happened in the last 2 weeks! Grab a cup of coffee or tea and come and have a read of what's what!

THE BIGGEST NEWS OF THE LAST 2 WEEKS is something that has been in the offing for a long while now.

Many of you know of how the placements of TLC children have worked up to now. Babies come in and TLC is responsible for their physical care whilst Impilo was responsible for the legal case work, over time some glaring differences in philosophy have become apparent between our two organisations and as of September 1st TLC will be woking with the registered Child Protection Organisation, Wandisa.

We are excited for this new partnership and ask for all your prayers as we work out the details and hopefully get to working smoothly as quickly as possible for the sake of our babies. Ofcourse our hearts are sad that we will now have difficulty placing babies to Denmark and we are hoping a solution for this will become clear in the future.

Besides all this going on in the background we also had 2 HUGELY EMOTIONAL events occur this week.

Our beloved Frank and our darling Martin have been placed into adoption. They are both so in love with their forever families and it is a great comfort to us at TLC to see how all the preparation work we have done with them has paid off. They were able to establish comfortable and affectionate relationships so easily and we are confident there will be minimal trauma for them. We wish them well in their lives going forward and will always hold them dear to our hearts. Thank you to each individual who had a hand in caring for these tow special children - your input made all the difference.

These placements have helped us have a new hope for difficult to place children and we attend therapies, medical appointments and other meetings with new enthusiasm.

This week was also marked by the birthday of two of our special "Tiger" Girls.

We had a lovely joint birthday party and celebrated with cake and presents!



THEN

FOR MANDELA DAY

TLC was inundated with goodwill and lots of practical help this week in honour of the 94th birthday of Nelson Mandela.

Every citizen was challenged to give 67 minutes of their time to help improve the lives of vulnerable South Africans and .... boy did people rise to the challenge!

Some gave time to care for the babies

Some gave time to prepare a meal!

Some cleaned up!

Some brought donations!

And by the end of the week I was left feeling like this!!!!

Completely Pooped!


For those of you who would still like to contribute and honour Mandela for his contributions to the world you will be happy to know that our online donations button is now working on the TLC Website and this makes R67 from a credit card donation very easy.  :-)
 (Hint hint nudge nudge!)

We Love you all

Pippa

Whew, what a week.

Hello Friends

This is a leaf Doninique found the other day.
It made me feel like saying to the leaf "I know the feeling pal."

Some weeks just make your head spin.

This week was all a frenzy: Mom and Zoe were away for 3 days on a conference that will hopefully open some new avenues for funding and the Nursery was a hub of activity as everything got packed up and made ready for the volunteer weekend.

Those of you who have been around at such a time will know how it's like having 2 streams of business going on: The regular work of caring for the babies - where you can't afford to skip a beat AND the work of packing bags for everyone who is going away ~ that means 35 labelled bags of baby stuff all packed for the individual! A massive job and we THANK THE LORD for our beloved ANNE who does such an amazing amount of work in preparation for this!

An added level of the chaos was that we planned a pretty "Major" repaint of the Nursery and Praise God we have a special Group of 7 wonderful young people from the Mennonite Missions community that are here to help with a repaint/ renovation of the Nursery while everyone is away. 

We got the Paint sponsored by TLC UK! Thanks guys!

We moved everything out of the Nursery...whew!

Thanks to the MMC Group who always have smiles on their faces!

The Nest Cribs getting some sun for a change!

So they are all still busy painting as we "speak".
~~~~~~~~~~~
Some other things that have gone on this week ...

We had another birth! This little Bull was born on Monday.

Our Main Cook, Minah, is on 2 weeks leave so I am in the kitchen ~ a place that I love :-)
And God loves too .... just look what he sent me while peeling potatos!

The kids are on school holidays so here are a few "helping" rake the ever falling leaves outside the kitchen. Plenty others were inside peeling and chopping and generally trying to be helpful ~ it was quite pleasant but I didn't have time to take any photos!

And through all of this we are reminded so beautifully how despite cash flow issues, God truly is the supplier of "Our Daily Bread" ... and in this case our daily vegetables (Thank You Fruit Spot Wynberg).

Please remember to check our Main TLC website often for updates of things we could use help with and please encourage friends and family members to Adopt-A-Cot :-)

Keep us all in your prayers, as always the Blessings go hand in hand with the Struggles.

We Love You All
Pippa