At Children’s Hospital yesterday — where my daughter (hooray!) had her cast removed — I met a woman with four kids of her own and four foster children.

While chairing the local elementary school PAC, she befriended a woman with some addiction problems. A year later, the government took that woman’s boys — all four of them — from her home. There were no foster families in Vancouver willing to take all four, so the mother asked the PAC chair if she would take them. And the PAC chair said yes. She thought it would be for a few months.

It’s now three years later and she still has them. Plus, one of her nephews moved in. The three youngest (4-, 6-, and 8-year-old boys) share a room. The two 12 year olds share. The lone girl gets her own room, and the two oldest boys share. I completely lost track of where the nephew sleeps.

This woman cooks dinner for eleven people every night.

I thought about her story all day yesterday, and I came up with two potential morals:

1. There are angels among us.

or

2. Never befriend a woman with four children.