Here are several agencies that can help with the costs involved with adoption.

• Gift of Adoption

  Adoption is the gift of a lifetime. It brings new life to parentless children; new hope to the childless, and joy to families that extends through generations. The Gift of Adoption Fund turns the dream of adoption into reality for those who could not otherwise afford to adopt.

• Shaohannah's Hope

  Steven Curtis Chapman and his wife, Mary Beth, founded Shaohannah’s Hope to reach the church with God’s call to care for orphans and to help more experience the miracle of adoption by reducing the financial barriers, primarily through awarding adoption grants. Theye are not an adoption agency, but they are dedicated to empowering the church to reflect God’s heart for orphans and embrace them with His love.
  

• Kingdom Kids
  

I received a letter today that began with "I'm writing to you with urgent news affecting the Phillipines, the country where your sponsored child lives."

Dinner was almost ready. My wife is an amazing gourmet cook who makes even simple dishes like chicken enchiladas taste like Turkish Delight from The Chronicles of Narnia. She had also whipped up an appetizing chip dip made of shrimp, avocado, cilantro and lime juice.

We eat like kings compared to families in many countries. When my kids whine and complain even with such incredible meals set before them, I try to explain to them that there are children in other places of the world who don't even get 3 meals a day. And that the meals they do get are nowhere near the quality of meals that we eat.

[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]
I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in Marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a Wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day.

Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back Mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. On a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much--except save his life.
This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick Was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him Brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life." Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an Institution."

With 2006 quickly coming to an end, it's a good time to reflect back on the year and evaluate how we've done as dads. Many of you reading this have already started thinking about New Year's Resolutions. I sure have, and largely because I don't want 2007 to be like 2006 - I want to be a better dad in 2007 than I was this year.

I did a Google search on "be a better dad" and Oprah's Ten Way's To Be a Better Dad was one of the first entries. She has some great suggestions that are worth checking out, even if you're not a big Oprah fan. In fact, it turned out that the next several search results had simply copied Oprah's bullet points verbatim!

Without a doubt though, the story of Dick Hoyt and his son Rick is the most inspirational example of an awesome dad that I've ever heard.

You can score big this year with your wife by planning ahead and ordering early while there's still time for shipping before Christmas hits. One way to keep it a surprise is to ship gifts to your work address and then hide them in your desk, car trunk, or garage until the 24th arrives.

Here are some gift ideas (and please feel free to add a suggestion of your own):

• Cell phone with a built-in camera - I just bought new ones for my wife and I yesterday, and here's the link I used to get them both for free through a special deal that Cingular is running right now - Free Motorola RAZR V3. Each phone came with a free BlueTooth headset, and they let us keep our current phone numbers. Pretty sweet deal!
  

• KitchenAid stand mixer for your wife (many women love these!). Here's a link for a free cookbook with your purchase or a $20 cash rebate.
  

We had just arrived at our friend's house for an evening party last night, and our kids went upstairs to play. As we were pulling pizza out of the oven and pouring drinks, we heard a blood-curling scream from upstairs, and then another, and another...

I figured an argument had gotten out of control (nothing out of the ordinary), so I meandered upstairs to break it up.

My daughter came booking down the stairs to meet me with wide tear-filled eyes. I ran up the remaining stairs and turned the corner into the playroom to see a one-inch gash above my screaming son's eyebrow and blood gushing down his face!

My wife had caught up by then, and we scooped him up and rushed him to the emergency room for 7 stitches. My daughter had accidentally pushed him into the corner of a train table, and the cut was about a quarter-inch deep.

Fortunately no nerves were hit and the ER was able to get us in within a few minutes. Our nurse was the father of one of the girls on my daughter's soccer team I had coached over the summer, so we were in good familiar hands.

I was offered a contract extension at work, provided I could start the new project durnig these last 3 weeks of my current project. It's a good client and I like the project manager, so I agreed to put in an extra 10 hours a week during December to make it all work.

The project will take me through to March 2007, which is a lot better than trying to find a new gig during the Holiday season!

But man, between everything else I have going on, the extra 10 hours a week is taking its toll. No more bike rides or YMCA workouts for me anymore, and less time with the family!

I have a 45 minute commute into Portland, so I don't get home until after 6, which gives me about an hour and a half with them. I made the time count tonight though, and felt I was able to connect with each of my children before tucking them in.

(Now if only I could be this focused every night, instead of being so sporadic - especially when life is slamming me a hard one ).

One thing my son likes to do is to put his arm up on mine while I'm brushing his teeth. It used to drive me nuts because I'm usually trying to rush through the process, and it just seemed like an annoyance (he likes to reach over and touch my arm at the dinner table too, even when his hands have spaghetti sauce all over them and I'm wearing a white shirt).

Yesterday I took the kids to the mall to put a dent in Christmas shopping for my wife. We had a great time, and I saw a few other dads doing the same thing with their kids. It's easy to spot them in the crowd - they'll have the wide, darting eyes looking for any tell-tale signs of trouble, with beads of perspiration on their foreheads... or they'll just have the glazed over eyes with the pleading looks on their faces that screams "HELP - Get me out of here already!"

But inevitably the moment of truth came as we passed the Victoria Secret store. I saw a few dads in front of me take the "sideways glance while keeping the head pointed straight ahead" at the mostly-naked mannequins. And as I looked to see what they could possibly be looking at () I noticed that Victoria's Secret sadly was not much of a secret anymore.

How can they get away with displaying soft porn in full public view??! And what affect will that have on my children when they start to notice?

Fortunately, they're still pretty young and at least my two youngest seem fairly oblivious.

Every year about this time the angst about where we go for Christmas and who we spend what time with begins. Everyone grows up with "traditions" and when you marry someone you're trying to weld two different traditions together into a solution that makes everyone happy. The problem with that is everyone can't be happy because traditions often overlap or conflict with each other. The end result -- someone isn't talking to someone else because "they" messed up the 50 years of tradition of doing "X" on the morning of "Y" -- and I walk around with a knot in my stomach because I know that someone is going to be unhappy -- removing the happiness from celebrating the birth of Christ and the gifts that He has bestowed on all of us. So the decision that I am faced with is when is enough -- enough? When do you say "its time for my own little family to have their own traditions, and we'll fit into other peoples schedules as we can?" And the follow-up question -- how do you communicate that decision to everyone else so that you don't become "the bad guy" -- the one that ruined Christmas for everyone else because I'm so selfish and want things my way?

Today I felt like Superman.

I woke up at 5:00 to do some website work, and met up with my riding buddy at 7:00 for a 36 mile ride in near-freezing, windy weather. Forty five minutes after the ride ended, I was on my way to the tree farm to cut not one, but two Christmas trees - one for my family and another for a friend of ours who recently went through a divorce and her ex had made other plans.

My 5-year old son and I cut them together, with his hand on the saw holding on for dear life while I muscled it back and forth until the tree toppled. It was a total father-son moment where he was absolutely determined to be part of the action all the way through.

Then it was setting up one tree at our friends house, and then again at our house, and then of course putting on the lights and ornaments. And that's when I turned into Mr. Hyde!

I hate putting up ornaments and decorating trees. I really do. I mean, I like the end result a lot, and I like to take pictures of the kids putting up their annual ornament gift we give them. But I'm a complete sour-puss when it comes to helping along the way.