Wonder why you came

Today was almost perfect, because it involved a trip to Jordan's Furniture. As I said to Hilla, "I always have a smile on my face when I'm at Jordan's Furniture." First we ate at their Fuddrucker's (shout-out to Carrie, who moved out just this morning and loves Fuddrucker's). Then we visited the bedrooms, dining rooms, beds, youth rooms and best of all, the massage chairs upstairs. I've sat in their remote-control armchairs before, but these were something else. These chairs gave full-body massages with different settings for "kneading," "rolling" and "percussion." Plus, foot and calf massagers! It was intense.

"I would come here for regular massages. It would be like, 'I'm going to get a massage.' 'Oh really, where?' 'Jordan's Furniture.'" --Hilla

Then at long last, we tackled the Jelly Belly store and got Richardson's ice cream, and then I gave Hilla a tour of the Tufts campus.

But what really prompted me to update about Jordan's Furniture was this photo exhibit in the lobby called the Heart Gallery. It's professional photographs of children in the Massachusetts foster care system who are seeking to be adopted permanently. Look at this gallery, it'll break your heart. "If I could have my own special wish...I want to be in a family that loves me." I was reading an article in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago about single women who are trying to conceive, spending thousands of dollars on in vitro and trying to find the perfect sperm donor, and then you find out that in Massachusetts alone there are 3,000 children in the foster care system waiting to be adopted. Of course, that's not to say they should necessarily consider adoption instead, because a lot of the kids have medical or emotional conditions that require a lot of parental effort and support, but the disconnect there seems so sad; there are thousands of parents out there who are desperately trying to have children and thousands of children who desperately want families. Some of these kids in the gallery are teenagers, and in a few years they'll be 18 and out of the system. Some of them are sibling groups of seven children trying to find a home together. I think it must takes an incredible amount of love and courage to choose to adopt an older child and build a family that way.