At John M Simmons .com it’s all about home and family. Of course the foundation of ours is a successful marriage and most of that can be attributed to my wife, Amy. Parenting, in our home, involves nine children, in all, and we have just entered the mode for grandchildren with our first grandchild. After three biological sons, Amy and I turned to adoption. The first was Jack, who joined our family through domestic adoption here in the U.S. Jack has Down syndrome and he was our first special needs adoption. As we moved to add daughters to our family of brothers, we turned to international adoption. Five of our children came to our home from Russia in two separate intercountry adoption forays. All four of our daughters were sisters before sibling adoption brought them back together in our home. Our time in Russian orphanages taught us about social orphans around the world and how important older child adoption is. We hope that time you spend on our family web site makes you smile, shed a few tears and then laugh out loud. We hope you find our pictures and stories to be inspiring and encouraging. We hope that by the time you leave, your faith in humanity will have been boosted and that you feel like you can go out and better your own life, as well as the lives of all those you touch.

Please note that under the “Blogs>>” tab there are several worthwhile categories by different members of our family.

In our blog articles, we won’t ignore the “natural fertilizer” that no one finds pleasant. I hope you laugh when you read about me falling in it. I know you will cry when you see it heaped on the innocent. But we will also witness flowers that bloom in its midst and we will remember that—in time—exquisite beauty can rise above filth, mountains burst forth from the abyss and mighty civilizations grow out of rubble.

You can also follow my writing for the Huffington Post.