Positive Adoption Story: It often seems as if the media equates adoptive parents with abusive parents, especially when the adoptive parents happen to be fundamentalist Christians. See, for instance, this book. So, it's refreshing to read the story of the Rice brothers in the New York Times:

They met with a lot of adversity themselves, but luck, ambition and potent senses of humor helped them rise above it. The brothers were born with dwarfism - a condition marked by curved spines, small limbs and oversized heads - and were abandoned by their mother at St. Mary's Hospital. But eight months later, social workers found a foster family for them - Pentecostal Christians who raised them with abundant love and gave them confidence, joie de vivre and the urge to give back.

"Our mom sat us down and told us, 'Yes, you guys are different, but think of yourselves as a couple of dimes in a handful of nickels,' " Greg Rice said in an interview this week. "She said, 'It's up to you to decide what you are worth.'

This could be the first time the words "Pentecostal Christians" and "joie de vivre" have appeared in the same sentence in an American newspaper.