From authors and speakers, Steven and Courtney Cohen, this companion Guide for Loved As You Are is designed for parents, teachers, counselors, family, and friends of children who have been adopted from hard places. This guide is designed to help give common language, empathy, compassion, and understanding for adopted or adoptive children, while equipping the reader with questions, background information of the illustrations, a scavenger hunt on every page, as well as ways to challenge the readers own precepts, beliefs, and understandings.

Join Gif, the giraffe, on his perilous and providential journey to find his forever home - to discover what it means to be loved as you are.

Family comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Adoption through foster care is one wonderful path a family can walk to come together. Even the storms and steep mountains of life your child has faced are part of the larger, colorful portrait God is painting of their life. Though God may not have brought the challenges their way, He can always make use of them for your child's good.

Gif the giraffe, pronounced Jif, was first painted on our nursery room wall as we prepared for our first adopted daughter. He gained his name almost three years later when she would say goodnight to the animals and she called him peanut butter. Like that creamy substance on the roof of your mouth, the name just stuck.

In Loved As You Are we are invited into Gif's journey of adoption through foster care. For kiddos who experience these unimaginable challenges and hardships it can become hard to see God's love for them or His bigger picture, sometimes making them feel hopeless or unloveable.

But as we travel through this journey we find that not only is God with us in the most difficult of times, but He redeems them to be a part of His beautiful portrait and our testimony.

Loved As You Are is also available on BookBaby.com