Family

Straightforward features with step-up-to-the-mark challenges make this an empowering confidence builder for dads, with focused, doable ideas; uncomplicated ways to be an example; tough, frank advice, like “throw away your porn”; and NO long lists or criticism of dads for acting like men. Great gift or men’s group resource!

Road-tested with over 400 families, BEFORE YOU WERE MINE equips adoptive parents to celebrate and commemorate their adopted children’s birth stories. Parents will benefit from practical worksheets and real-life stories on creating a Lifebook --- a unique tool that offers adopted children the gift of acceptance, peace and security as a part of God’s plan.

Two girls and three boys, all with strikingly different, meet at the Atwood School as young children. Together, they become an inseparable group-known to outsiders as “The Big Five,” but when the group graduates and scatters to different colleges some friends are lost forever, and the ones that remain struggle to understand that even the unbreakable bonds are not proof against tragedy.                                                                                                                                                                                       

Following the invisible thread of connection between people who are seemingly intended to become family, journalist Jennifer Grant shares the deeply personal, often humorous story of adopting a 15-month-old girl from Guatemala when Grant was already the mother of three young children.

Nora Keane’s carefully constructed life falls to pieces when she --- along with the rest of the world --- learns that her husband, a prominent Massachusetts attorney general, has been cheating on her. Heartbroken and humiliated, Nora packs up her daughters and takes refuge with her maternal aunt on Burke’s Island in Main, a place where superstition and magic are carried on the ocean winds.

The story of the Hastings family --- their secrets, their loves and losses, dreams and heartbreaks --- captured in a series of individual moments that follow four generations of the family between the First World War and the present.