The Lord did not bless us with any children of our own, so we gathered up little waifs whom we thought would be neglected and would not be cared for unless we brought them into our family.
I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.
Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.
I give God all the glory. And try to move on. Come home and hug my wife and my children. And thank God for every day that I have with my family.
An increasing number of Canadians must juggle the demands of work with the need to care for children, or for family members who are ill or too frail to care for themselves. Our programs have simply not kept pace with these societal changes.
I do feel guilty. I do. Especially about my family, my children. I write about them, and I know that this will haunt them as well through their lives. Why did I do that to them?
So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.
We have dinner every single night, Monday through Friday, with our children. We sit down around 6 or 6:30 and it's a family dinner - it's time to check in, just to be around each other.
That case with my two sisters? That was a disaster. It was. They're really fine people. When my family and my two sisters' families - their children - grew up and so on, it just wasn't the same. But we took care of them very nicely.
I am blessed to have married the man that God sent me. He's loving, compassionate, strong and supportive of my children, family and career. I look forward to our lives together.
I'd like my children to learn that anything is possible if you put your mind to it, and that when you make a decision to do something like pursuing the Olympics, like I have, it needs to be a family affair.
There are many times when I think I would have rather died with my husband. It would have been pleasanter, simpler. But it would have been worse for the children and the family in general.
And to play as long as I did and to have a family you have to be very blessed and I was with my wife Ruth. Ruth, I appreciate the job you did, and my three fine children, Reid, Reese, and Wendy.
I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.
Luckily because I had a family and children, my priorities changed. I mean, I'm very passionate about my work but I have other interests and other things that balance my life.
What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable - and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.
I'm not asking that people accept homosexuality. I'm not asking that they believe like I do that it's inborn. I'm not asking that. All I'm saying is don't let these children suffer without a family because of your bias.
No child should be raised in a system. A system isn't a parent. Even the system knows this, which is why the Children and Family Services Division puts so much effort into finding permanent homes for the kids who are never going to be reunited with t...
In the second part of my life, away from cycling, I hope I will be able to benefit fully from my family and children in the same way that cycling gave me such joy.
My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.
The beauty of 'spacing' children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones - which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.
