nine years

Nine years ago today, Tim and I committed to each other for as long as we both shall live.  Since then we've lived in six apartments/houses in three states and one foreign country, changed jobs on several occasions, traveled together to some spectacularly beautiful places, learned lots of new things, and become parents for the first time.  It's been an adventure, in the best possible way.

So, on this evening of momentous import, we got a babysitter...so that we could attend a required training on how to de-escalate conflict and, if necessary, physically restrain an out-of-control child.  Then we returned home for a dinner of leftovers.  Romantic, huh?  :-)  Lest anyone is inclined to feel sorry for us, I should mention that I don't think we've celebrated our anniversary on the day itself for the majority of the years we've been married.  Last year we celebrated by going to a play...in February.  It still counts, right?

But truly, I am blessed to have spent the last nine years in the company of someone whom I admire, and yet feel as comfortable with as I do in my own skin; someone I can share a vision with, and work together as partners to see it come true; someone who inspires me to grow and become a better person without ever making me feel less than completely loved and accepted for who I am.  When marriage lives up to how God designed it, it is a very, very good thing.

Happy 9th, my partner!

We interrupt this series to bring you Joy to the World!

Last year Esther had a favorite Christmas carol, O Come, O Come Emmanuel.  (I'm not sure  if she "got" that it was about Jesus, however; she seemed to think we were signing about  a neighbor boy named Emmanuel.)  She wanted us to sing it every night during advent, and she would chime in with the "rejoice, rejoice" in the chorus, if she hadn't wandered off by the time we got that far into the song.

This year, Esther can actually sing Christmas carols!  Given how much unfamiliar vocabulary there is (e.g. "ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here"), she can chime in with surprisingly many words on five or six different carols.  And she will go around singing snatches of them to herself, occasionally with alterations ("Joy to the world, the Lord has made!").  Her favorite carol this year is definitely Joy to the World.  All the children were supposed to lead the adults in singing it at the end of their Christmas play, so I worked with Esther on learning the words, and she did a very good job.  Then every time without fail that we sang it as part of our advent family time, she had to stop after the first sentence and announce, "I sang this at Emma's church!"  (Emma is the first friend she made there, and it appears that the church is going to be "Emma's church" indefinitely.)  Hearing her singing carols, reciting our advent verses, and understanding and appreciating a good bit of the Christmas story, I realize how much she's changed in the past year.  I can't wait to see what the next year brings!

Anyway, here are some pictures of our Christmas season.

Esther was an angel in the Christmas play.  You wouldn't guess from this picture that she spent the time between getting dressed and heading into church by running through the Sunday school area and play-fighting with one of the Three Wise Men.  For some reason, she seems to think that ten- and eleven-year-old boys are her peers.

Esther's part in the play was (thankfully!) very small.  After the main angel announced Jesus' birth to the shepherds, Esther and a gaggle of other little angels walked down the aisle hand-in-hand, made a circle around the main angel, and walked clockwise while somebody sang a song.  Then the main angel led them to the manger, where they were followed by the shepherds, and they all remained contemplating the baby for the duration of another song.  Esther had wandered off and had to be forcibly retrieved by the main angel at this point during rehearsals, but did alright during the real thing.  One of the bigger kids said that she tried to take the baby out of the manger, but I didn't see anything, so it must have been discreet.  The picture above is of the angels and shepherds gathered around the manger.  The picture below is of all the kids singing Joy to the World.  I'm not sure what words Esther was singing for the 2nd and 3rd verses, which she doesn't know nearly as well as the 1st, but she was singing something with gusto.





Another fun Christmas activity was making gifts for Grandma and Grandpa.  I thought they came out really cute!  (Another gift isn't pictured because the recipient hasn't gotten it yet...we were late on getting things out this year.)






























And finally, there were presents for Esther herself.  For the past month, she has been asking for two things for Christmas: a belt, and lime juice.  (Sometimes I let her have a few drops of lime juice on her tongue when I'm cooking with it, and she has been wanting her own container so she can have as much as she wants.)  She found both items in her stocking, and she was thrilled.  (She is also now the only person I know who would follow up an Andes mint with a swig of lime juice.)  I hadn't thought about the fact that a belt, of course, requires pants, and that I had had a particular darling Christmas dress in mind for her to wear.  She consented to put the dress on for a photo shoot, but only after I promised that she could change back into pants and a belt as soon as the photos were done.  Then our camera had an unfortunate mishap.  I had balanced it on a rather shaky piece of small furniture so we could use the self-timer function and get a family portrait, and Esther, in rushing to look at the picture on the digital screen, accidentally bumped into the furniture, sending the camera onto the floor and jamming the smaller ring of the lens down into the larger one, from whence it could not be dislodged.  It remains to be seen whether repair is possible, but the remainder of our Christmas pictures were taken with our video camera's still function, and are somewhat dark and grainy.

We (or rather, Esther) opened gifts off and on throughout the day.  We also enjoyed playing in the snow, talking to family on the phone, watching a couple of Esther's new videos, and eating a feast (Tim's and my first time to cook a turkey ourselves; it turned out great!) by the light of all the candles on our advent wreath.  It was a lovely and memorable day.

I'll leave you with one last picture that was too cute to pass up.  This is how Esther felt about opening up a Dragon Tales video.

And now Christmas is over.  I miss our advent traditions, and I will miss our decorations when we put them up.  But I'm glad that Jesus doesn't really come just once a year, but that we can enjoy his presence with us all year long!

The Plan. Revised. Part III.

[Recap from the last entry:  Tim and I had received an e-mail about a an older boy in China who was listed for adoption but was about to become ineligible due to his age.  We sent off a "long shot" inquiry to the U.S. agency that had listed him, and were somewhat unnerved when the response came back that yes, if we worked hard at getting all our paperwork done, we could realistically adopt him.]

The first couple of days after we got that affirmative reply to our e-mail, I was all jumbled up inside.  I had a hard time focusing on anything for thinking of this child, and the decision we had to make.  We were pretty sure that we were the only family that was considering adopting him.  And since the window for him to be adopted was rapidly drawing to a close, it seemed there was a good chance that we were the only family that was going to consider him.  So our decision was going to define the course of his life.  Would he get a forever family, at the expense of moving to another country and culture where he would spend his teen years sticking out like a sore thumb and might never fully fit in?  Or would he stay where he was, where his opportunities--even opportunities for significant relationships--would be limited by his orphan status and his disability, but at least he understands how the system works and knows how to play his role in it?  I HATE being responsible for decisions that mess with other people's lives.  But we had asked the question and now we were stuck.  We had to decide.

We learned that we had the opportunity to pursue this adoption on a Monday afternoon.  On Tuesdays Tim teaches an early morning class, followed by office hours.  He takes Esther in with him and puts her in the daycare there for the morning.  It's good social experience for her, and gives me a chance to get extra stuff done.  So on Tuesday I was praying about this child and hoping desperately for a clear answer.  I had so many questions.  How would bringing this child home affect Esther?  What if he did something that hurt or scared her, potentially leaving permanent scars?  How would taking him away from everything he's ever known affect him?  Was his orphanage director right in pushing so hard to find him a foreign family, or did she have an over-idealized notion of the advantages of being raised by "wealthy Americans" and an incomplete understanding of how traumatic it is to move to a totally different world?  What if we did adopt him, and he grew up to decide that it wasn't worth it, and hated us for doing that to him?  I felt so helpless--how could I even make a responsible decision when so much was unknown, and unknowable?  I remember washing dishes and repeating the Jesus prayer over and over: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."  Me, a sinner.  That can mean a lot of things, but to me that day it meant falling short, incomplete, inadequate.  In and of myself, I simply didn't have what I needed to even make the right decision on this adoption.  Oh, how I longed for the One who did know all the answers to my unanswerable questions to step in and take over.  I knew I couldn't rely on myself, and what I wanted most at that moment was the comfort of being  able to depend on somebody else.  Mind you, one of the areas in which I have been wanting to grow these last few years is to become more dependent on God.  And even though I was confused and anxious and frustrated and racked with anticipatory guilt about all the ways I was going to mess up my child(ren)'s lives, it also felt very right to be throwing myself on God's mercy.  If I could just live in that frame of mind, I thought, then I wouldn't have to be afraid of getting myself into a situation that I couldn't handle.

Anyway, the heavens did not open and no voice declared either "This shall be your son" or "Leave that child alone; I have other plans for him."  But I was able to lay down, at least temporarily, my anxieties about myself, and reflect deeply on this child, and grieve for his hurts.  I wondered what important relationships he has now, and what the chances were that they would stay with him into adulthood.  I thought about how he would be considered doubly unlucky in China, both as an orphan, someone with no family pedigree, and as a person with an obvious disability, and how that would make it difficult if not impossible for him to find a wife.  The thought of him never having a family at all, neither by adoption nor by marriage, hurt.  And I thought about God, and how God is in the business of healing internal wounds, even those that seem like they should leave permanent scars.

Later in the day at a  time when Esther wasn't around, I shared some of my thoughts  with Tim.  He had, of course, been thinking as well, and didn't see any compelling reason at this point to say "no" to adopting this child.  So that evening we filled our our pre-application for this child's U.S. agency, and sent it in on Wednesday morning.  In addition to the child we had been praying about, we also requested information on another boy from the waiting child list who had really caught our attention.  We were sent the files for both boys that afternoon, along with more pictures.  We learned that the child who we had received the e-mail about had been initially listed for adoption more than two years earlier, and it sounded like the staff who chose to list him had investigated and seriously considered his feelings about being adopted by a foreign family before making that choice.  It also seemed that he had had a pretty stable life up to this point, living in the same place with the same people from babyhood until now, which is a promising indication that he has the ability to bond with a new family.  There are no guarantees, of course, but the additional information was encouraging to us.  I didn't feel quite as comfortable with the information in the other child's file, although there were some things that really touched me, and I'm waiting for the day when his profile disappears from the waiting child page and I know that he's found his family.

Somewhere around this time we started calling our extended family to let them know we were thinking about adopting this child, and to ask for their prayers.

Towards the end of the week we started looking more specifically at the requirement from China (a certain dollar figure in assets) that we thought we didn't meet.  Our contact at the U.S. agency gave us the worksheet they use for determining the  amount of assets a family has, along with instructions for filling it out.  When we sat down and filled in all the figures we discovered, to our surprise, that we now meet the requirement.  (We didn't last year.)  One more obstacle out of the way.

So we ended the week feeling like we could adopt this child, but still not certain whether we should.  And for more, you'll have to wait for another entry!

The Plan. Revised. Continued.

[Recap from the last post:  I wanted to adopt an older child from the foster care system once we moved to our new house; Tim wasn't so sure it was the right time.  Then we got an e-mail about a waiting child in China, and Tim was the one who said, "I know this is crazy, but do you think we could get our paperwork in on time?"]

Now, while Tim and I are in complete agreement about wanting at least two children from China, he had not been in as much of a hurry as I to disrupt our happy, comfortable family of three by adding a "waiting child" to the mix.  I had figured that when the time was really right, we would be of one mind about adopting again.  I had even, from time to time, prayed something to the effect of, "Lord, when the time is right, please cause us to both feel your leading."  So when Tim started wondering about how long it would take to complete the paperwork for this child, my ears perked up.  If I had gone looking for a child, this is probably not a child that I would have inquired about.  Nothing personal, there just wasn't anything in his profile that really grabbed me, and his special need was not one that I had ever pictured when I dreamed of our next Chinese child.  But at the same time, there was nothing in what we knew about him that made me feel especially reluctant.  I was already on board with older, boy, special need, and Chinese, I just hadn't thought that all of those things could come together for us at this point in time.  But.  His profile mentioned significant fee reductions from both his U.S. agency and his Chinese orphanage that made the prospect of adopting internationally the year after a move, a new mortgage, and a salary cut...if not easily affordable, at least imaginable.  And the description of this boy (written by a representative of his U.S. agency who had met him in person) specifically recalled observing him interacting with small children in very positive ways.  As for our not meeting the one requirement from China, it was one of several mentioned that the agency might be able to get us an exception for.  So, I figured, why not e-mail the agency.  I thought from the way his profile was written that he aged out in January, and I really didn't think it was possible to put together a dossier (collection of documents required for adopting from a foreign country) that fast, but I have heard some amazing stories from the world of older child adoption, and I figured the agency would know better than I what was or wasn't possible.

So, after learning of this child's existence on the afternoon of Friday, October 15, we talked it over after Esther went to bed, decided it couldn't hurt to ask his U.S. agency about him, and sent off an e-mail to them early morning Saturday.  Then we had to wait the weekend for a reply.  We felt alternately a little bit excited at the possibility of adding to our family, a little bit foolish to be wasting the contact person's time with what was undoubtedly a stupid question, and a little bit relieved that we were going to be told it couldn't be done and we would get to have more time enjoying family life as we know it before we threw a wrench in everything by adopting again.

On Monday, October 18, mid-afternoon, we got a reply from the U.S. agency.  The child we had inquired about didn't age out until early summer.  His case worker thought that if we pushed it, we could complete all his paperwork with a month to spare.

Wow.  We kind of looked at each other like, "This is serious.  Now we have to actually decide."

[To be continued...]

The Plan. Revised.

When we were doing our home study to adopt Esther, we initially wanted to adopt an older child.  Neither one of us feels that experiencing infancy is necessary to feeling like a family, and neither one of us thinks it's just that older children who need families get passed over in favor of babies.  However, due to various circumstances, we ended up requesting a healthy infant.  We were referred our dearly beloved Esther, and are so blessed to be her family!

We still felt the urge to adopt an "older" child, though, so we resigned ourselves to waiting a long time for our next adoption so that we could request a child who was "older" but still younger than Esther.  But as we got to know Esther and see how adaptable and social she is, we (or at least I!) began to picture her with an older sibling, and to wonder if that might work after all.  I researched, as best I could, the reasons why out-of-birth-order adoption is sometimes discouraged, and I concluded that if we got a child who was enough older than Esther that they occupied very different ecological niches in the family, maybe she wouldn't feel displaced.  Or at least, no more displaced than any only child feels when a new baby comes along!

I didn't see us adopting that child from China, though.  We definitely wanted another Chinese child, so Esther won't be a minority within her family, but information available on "waiting children" in China is limited and not always accurate.  We feel that our first responsibility at this point is to keeping Esther safe and developing in a healthy way, and we specifically wanted an older child who had a track record--that we could verify!--of interacting appropriately with younger children.  Besides, since we adopted Esther, China has added some new requirements for adoptive parents, and there was one that no matter how many times we did the math, we were well short of meeting.  So, I thought, how about adopting an older child from the U.S. foster care system, where we can actually talk to the foster parents and make sure that the child's past behavior has not posed any danger to younger children in the house.  Then once we met all of China's requirements again, we could revisit our original plan and add an "older" child from China who would be younger than Esther.  Tim and I talked about it, and he agreed in theory to having three children instead of two.  But in our Maryland apartment we really didn't have enough space to put another child and their belongings, we couldn't afford a bigger apartment, and anyway, we kept thinking we might move in the next year, which would not have worked at all if we were in the middle of a foster-adopt placement.  So I waited...and enjoyed Esther... and daydreamed of an older sibling.

When Tim got the job offer that moved us to our current town, one of the things that I got excited about was that we were finally going to stay put long enough to adopt!  And the housing market is a lot less (a LOT less) expensive, so we could afford a bigger place!  Even before we moved, I researched adoption agencies in our new state and picked out which one we would use.  Once we were settled in our new house, had unpacked enough that I felt like I could function, and had gotten into the rhythm of Tim's new job, I started filling out this agency's application form.  I figured that we could take care most of our home study requirements in the fall, do our required training in the winter, and be approved in the spring, hopefully in time for a summer placement.  I shared my plan with Tim, and he was much less enthused than I.  Was I sure this older child adoption thing could work out well?  It was okay in theory, but work was so busy, and Esther was too young to understand what was going on, and maybe it would be better to wait for another year.

Literally a day or two after this conversation, we got (drumroll, please!) The E-mail.  It was generated by a woman who, two years ago, had adopted a child from the orphanage in the city where we used to live in China.  While she was there meeting her daughter, the director had pulled her into her office to plead for her help in finding a family for an older boy who had the same disability as her new daughter.  Two years later, she had just found his file listed with a U.S. adoption agency, and was following through on her promise to advocate for him if she could locate him.  He was close to aging out (orphans in China are considered unadoptable once they pass their 14th birthday), so time was short.  She had sent the e-mail to (among other places) the yahoo group for that child's orphanage.  It went from there to a woman who has visited that orphanage a number of times as part of her ministry as a globe-trotting Christian clown.  She in turn forwarded the e-mail to all her China connections, including Tim.  (Mind you, we met this person on two occasions, several years ago, and hadn't been in contact since.)  I read the e-mail first, and offered up a prayer for this child.  Tim read it and said, "I know this is crazy, but do you think we could even get our paperwork in on time?"

*To be continued...*

You know winter has begun when...

...the weather forecast calls for a high of 33 (Fahrenheit!) and you rejoice at the prospect of a balmy day.  We have now started on our second snow event in less than two weeks.  The previous one featured snow falling gently but pretty steadily for more than four days.  I think we got about eight inches altogether, and it was COLD!  However, Esther is a snow lover, so we went outside at least once each day (twice most days) that there was enough snow on the ground to play in.  16 degrees (-9 C, for our friends on the metric system) isn't that bad if you're dressed for it, which Esther was, but I was sorely regretting not having gotten around to buying new snow boots.  (I threw my old ones out last winter after they got cracks, and I've been holding out on getting new ones till we can go to a sports store or some other place where I can get really warm, sturdy ones.  With as much time as I spend standing out in the snow these days, I'm willing to pay for quality!  Any recommendations for stores or brands are welcomed.)  So I put plastic bags over my (non-snow, fashionable) winter boots, and we came inside when my toes started to get numb.  It was still fun, though.  :-)  My favorite part was finding cat, rabbit and bird tracks in the snow.  Esther says that was her favorite part too, but she found plenty of things to do.  Here is a sampling of the first snowfall in our new home:

More Esther stories

When Grandma was visiting us, we went out to eat.  Our server introduced himself as Thomas.  Esther's jaw dropped, and in a stunned tone of voice she said something about a train.  Apparently, this was the first time she had met a Thomas other than Thomas the Tank Engine.

At our church's fall dinner, Esther begged to sit next to the director of children's ministries, whom she loves.  At some point during the meal, while this woman was conversing with someone else at the table, Esther decided to be a helper and offer her something else to eat.  I heard her saying, "Hey, woman.  Woman!  WOMAN!!  Do you want this?"  (I told this to a parent of a similar-age child whose son as been known to say things like that and she said, "At least she got the gender right!")

Esther has become quite a backseat driver, taking it upon herself to make sure nobody overlooks a stop sign, or fails to start driving when the light turns green.  But she really demonstrated how much she has been paying attention one day when she first reminded me to bring my driver's license, and then gave me a lecture on how to back out of the driveway (complete with a mimed demonstration of changing gears and looking back over her shoulder).

Shortly after Thanksgiving Esther and Daddy were discussing turkeys.  Daddy asked, "What does a turkey say?"  Esther wasn't sure.  So Daddy told her, "It says, 'gobble, gobble, gobble.'"  "Not anymore!" she pointed out.

Esther was "reading" a folder of information to me.  In her most literary voice, she announced, "By Suzanne Beck.  Pictures by The Cow Jumping Over the Moon."

When Esther and I were putting angel decorations on the Christmas tree, I started singing "Angels We Have Heard on High."  Esther was quite taken with the "Gloria" chorus, and a little while later I overheard her singing, "Gloryluia to the Lord of Jesus!"

We were eating animal crackers when Esther suddenly held one up and exclaimed, "Jesus, Jesus!  Look, Mommy, Jesus!"  It was a mountain goat.  (She was holding it sideways, so maybe it resembled a man in a robe?)

advent

I didn't grow up in a very liturgical church, but have discovered as an adult that celebrating liturgical cycles like Advent and Lent really helps me connect to the true meaning of the celebration that they lead up to.  So a tradition that Tim and I and now Esther have made part of our household is an Advent wreath.  We do it with four candles, and we light a candle or candles each evening and have a reading related to the coming of Christmas.  Tim and I have done rather elaborate readings in the past, but with Esther now old enough to understand (sort of) what we are doing, but not nearly old enough to sit through a lot of words, we decided this year to choose a verse each week and say it every night so that we memorize it as a family.  This past week, the first week of Advent, we lit the candle of Hope each evening and learned the verse "All God's promises are "Yes" in Jesus." (2 Corinthians 1:20, paraphrased).  I also tried to tell Esther Bible stories of God making a promise and then keeping it.  Starting tomorrow (Sunday) we can light two candles each night (for Hope and Peace).  I'll have to start thinking about what verse to learn!  Then the third week we will add the candle of Joy, and the fourth week we will add the candle of Love.  I think Esther's favorite part right now is blowing out the candle when we are done, but it is good to think of this tradition being part of how she experiences Christmas growing up.

It's a small world, after all

This afternoon our family of three, two of European ancestry and one of Chinese ancestry, sat down to enjoy a meal of Thai massaman curry and jasmine rice while watching snowflakes drift down outside the window of our home in North America.  Just an everyday moment (except for the snow), but when I really stop to think about it, it blows my mind!

our family life

We were recently asked to pick out six pictures of us that represent our family life.  Here are the ones we chose.  The last two were actually staged for this project, since we realized in going through our albums that most of our pictures are taken outdoors.  And Esther and I actually spend a lot more time reading that playing board games.  But overall, I thought these pictures give a nice flavor of our family.

Rugga Guggan, RIP

Yesterday Esther and Rugga Guggan got into another spat.  Esther was stomping around the kitchen and the dining room saying, "Stop following me, Rugga Guggan!  STOP IT!!!"  Now, on Friday we had gone to a story hour and one of the girls had been getting after Esther for following her during playtime, and I figured that this argument was Esther's way of processing a social situation that she wasn't sure how to handle.  So when Esther came to me to complain that Rugga Guggan wouldn't stop following her, I told her she should think of what she could say to get her to stop.  She started yelling "No!  NO, NO, NO!!!!"  I asked her if yelling made Rugga Guggan stop.  She paused for a minute to think about that, then stamped hard on the floor several times (remember, Rugga Guggan is very small) and calmly announced, "She's dead."  Not exactly the kind of social skill building I had in mind.

The cutest kitty-cat on the block

Was Halloween this big of a holiday when I was a kid?  If it was, I don't remember it.  I remember, of course, trick-or-treating on Halloween night, and rejoicing in my loot.  But now, in addition to trick-or-treating, you can go trunk-or-treating (which is conveniently on a different night, so they don't interfere with each other).  And then there are all the Halloween- or harvest-themed events that your child can attend around town, all of which seem to have sugar as a key component.  I mean, really.  Does one child really need that much candy?  We skipped the trunk-or-treats, despite being earnestly invited to at least three, but Esther still got a bag full of treats at each of four different events (a church harvest festival, a trick-or-treat on Monday night sponsored by one of the dorms at Tim's university, AWANA, and trick-or-treating in our neighborhood on Saturday night), and I don't think I will need to buy her any more until Easter.

Anyway, Esther got to wear her costume for the two trick-or-treating events, and she enjoyed it as much as I remember enjoying costumes when I was a kid.  I don't think I ever had a "bought" costume, but I have fond childhood memories of envisioning what I wanted and pulling it together from what we had, and I wanted to recreate that for her.  So for this Halloween, Esther was a kitty-cat.  It was appropriate for several reasons.  First, it's an easy costume to make, and I had some idea of how to make it because I was a kitty-cat myself the year I was four.  Second, one of Esther's favorite pretends lately has been to be a kitty-cat.  She will meow and crawl around and rub her head against our legs and instruct us to say, "Nice kitty-cat!"  Then when we have acted appropriately besotted with her, she will suddenly turn around and roar at us and we will pretend to be afraid.  This, apparently, is hilarious.  I probably spent as much on the costume as I would have on buying one, but most of the components (like black fleece pants and a black turtleneck) are things she can wear for everyday as well.  For a tail we used one of Tim's black socks, stuffed with plastic bags and safety-pinned to the hem of her shirt.  For ears, I bought some black twill iron-on patches, cut them into the shape of kitty-cat ears, and clipped them on with black hairclips.  Black face-paint for whiskers and nose completed the look.  Soooo cute!  I expected her to meow at people and be really social, but she went shy on me and would say neither "meow" nor "trick-or-treat" but only (while hiding behind my pant leg) "You say it, Mommy!"  (I did not meow, but I did say thank-you on her behalf!)

Unfortunately, our camera battery died on us Halloween week, and we did not have a replacement yet by Halloween night.  So we only have a couple of grainy pictures of her from the Monday-night trick-or-treat.  But they do give an idea of how cute she looked!  In the second picture she is eating a hot-dog.  I think the hot-dogs (she ate two, despite having recently had supper!) were her most favorite part of the trick-or-treat experience, although she was also quite taken with a glow bracelet that she got in her bucket.

For Halloween night (which was officially Saturday the 30th in our town), I decided to just go up and down our street.  She really didn't need more candy, and several of our neighbors were clearly ready to roll out the red carpet for any trick-or-treaters who strayed into the neighborhood, so I thought they would enjoy seeing Esther.  After two stops we had to ferry stuff back to our house--both those neighbors not only gave her candy but had gotten her gifts!!  The rest of the street was a little less eventful, but fun.  We got to officially meet one set of neighbors that we've been wanting to.  Then we came back home and gave out our own candy.  I think there were a grand total of nine trick-or-treaters on our street, counting Esther.  So now Mommy has some Halloween treats in the cupboard, too!  :-)

Later I pulled out my old photo albums and let Esther see my kitty-cat costume.  It was really fun looking at pictures together.  Her favorite two were baby pictures: one of me with my security blanket, and one of me apparently whining after getting water poured over my head in the bath.  She thinks it's funny that Mommy used to do some of the things she does.

daylight savings

Tim reminded me today that tonight is daylight savings, and I rejoiced.  Esther asked me what it meant, and I explained that we get an extra hour of sleep!!  At first her face mirrored my excitement, but as she processed what I had said it fell ludicrously.  An extra hour of sleep?!  What's good about that?  Well, Esther...it's hard to explain, but you'll understand when you're a grown-up!  :-)

The evolution of Rugga Guggan

Sometime in the spring, Esther started randomly chattering about Beebee Bobbi, or occasionally Robbi Bobbi.  I couldn't make much out of it, but it sounded occasionally like she was talking about a person.  Over our Memorial Day trip to my grandmother's house, it became clear: Beebee Bobbi was her imaginary friend!  I learned that Beebee Bobbi was small (small enough to climb on the curtains, and be carried in Esther's cupped hands) and was a girl.

Esther continued to talk about Beebee Bobbi a lot all summer, occasionally changing her name.  Sometimes she was Robbi Bobbi, then Robba Bobba, then Rugga Gugga, and now for the last few months she has been Rugga Guggan.  The name hasn't changed in a while, so maybe this one will stick.

Esther plays with Rugga Guggan a lot on some days, usually days which she has spent with only me for company, but pretty much ignores her on days when she gets a lot of socialization elsewhere.  I don't think she has yet asked for extra treats to give Rugga Guggan, but has been known to share food with her.  She has also blamed her for messes ("Rugga Guggan did that!"), for disobedience ("But Rugga Guggan doesn't want me to do it!") and for slowness ("I'm waiting for Rugga Guggan!")  Esther takes great delight in scolding Rugga Guggan when she breaks house rules.  Sometimes she carries her around in her hands.  Once she had a fight with her and came complaining to me about it.  I must say, I anticipate having to deal with sibling rivalry someday, but I never expected to find myself arbitrating a quarrel with an imaginary friend!  Then again, this is the same child who the other day dropped her imaginary ticket out of her imaginary pocket and lost it.  We are not lacking for imagination around here!

vignettes

If Esther doesn't decide to become a scientist or a physician, she might have a great career ahead of her as an electrician.  Seriously!  She's fascinated with all things mechanical, and seems to have a real knack for learning from observation.  We have to be careful how much access she has to tools!  Before we moved, Tim was putting the lock back on our bathroom door (we had removed it for fear of her locking herself in), and found when he finished that she was well on her way to removing the doorknob from another door.  He asked her how she managed to get the screw loose and she blithely replied, "lefty loosey, righty tighty!"

We've finally figured out why Esther thinks that Tim's classes involve soda pop.  It's because of the "fizz" in "physics."

The last time we visited my grandma, her church was having a child baptized, and so all the children in children's church were brought in to watch.  Afterwards, Esther announced to me, "I went to a Baptist church today."

As we were leaving my grandma's hometown, Esther asked, out of the blue, "Is that an evil one?"  Startled (I didn't even know she knew the word evil!), I asked, "an evil what?"  "An evil church," Esther replied, pointing to a church logo of a cross with a flame (representing the Holy Spirit) curved around it.  I asked why she thought it might be evil and she explained, "Because it has fire."  There are times I really wish I knew what was going on in that little head!

On Tuesday when Esther came home from daycare, she reported to me that one of the little boys had asked her if she was his buddy and she had told him, "I'm not your buddy, I'm my Mama's buddy!"  A little while later she asked me, "Are you my buddy, Mama?"  I told her that I sure was, and she added, "You keep me safe from cars in the street."

For Esther's first week of AWANA, she was supposed to learn a motto and three Bible verses.  She has a great memory, but wasn't really keen on memorizing something that was initiated by me.  One of her verses was "God loved us and sent his son, 1John 4:10."  I would periodically ask her to say her verses, giving her the first word of each.  At one point she evidently got tired of that, because she recited, in a tone of long-suffering, "God loved us, and so on."

anthropomorphism

Last week Esther went on a jag of waking up waaaaay too early.  On one such morning I was up with her, letting Tim get some more sleep.  We heard a flock of geese fly low overhead, honking as they went.  Esther yelled at the top of her lungs, "Geese!  Be twiet!  My Daddy's still sweeping!"  (He had managed to sleep through the geese, but was not so successful sleeping through his daughter's admonition.)

Shortly before dinner tonight, Esther was dispatched, much against her will, to pick up some potato chips that she had spilled on the floor.  I overheard her asking them solicitously, "Chips?  You want to stay on the floor?"

Sunday School, revisited

I seem to have confused several people with my previous post on this topic, and on re-reading it, I can see why! What can I say: I wrote it late at night!

To set the record straight, I think children's programming in churches is valuable.  Kids are not mini adults; they are more active, more impulsive, concrete thinkers, and hands-on learners.  So if kids are going to get much out of a religious experience, whether it's designed just for children or for all ages, it needs to be designed to take advantage of the characteristics they have.  My grandma also made an excellent point that children whose families don't go to church are more likely to come to (and benefit from) a Sunday School or a children's church rather than an adult-oriented service.

What I intended to object to were the following:

1.  Children and youth being completely segregated from adults, so that they never see people of other ages, developmental stages and lengths of spiritual experience interacting with God.  I cannot tell you how much I've learned about God and faith through interacting with others who were at different stages than I was.  This was true of me as a child and teen watching adults, but it's still true of me as an adult being with children and young people.  We of different ages need each other to be the whole body of Christ.

2.  Sunday School curricula that focus on information but neglect engagement.  It's great for kids to know what's inside the Bible, but knowledge alone doesn't lead to transformation.  (This is an issue for adults, too!) In addition to learning the stories, we need to learn how to wrestle with and listen to the God who stars in the stories, and we need to learn how to let the stories shed light on our daily lives.  A good teacher will make space for this regardless of how the curriculum is written, but it would be better to have curriculum written in such a way that the target outcome is not to have kids able to tell you facts about what they learned today (as if it were a math or spelling lesson) but to have them come out having engaged with God in some way, and able to continue to engage during the rest of the week.  (I am not saying Sunday schools should trade Bible stories for something else--that would be a terrible loss!--but that children should be led to interact with stories in such a way that they don't just learn the information contained in them, but develop a way of relating to the Bible, and to God, that will follow them into adulthood.)

The church we visited on Sunday was opposite in many ways from the previous week--large, lots of children and children's programming completely separate from "big church" (although I was pleased to see that children seemed to be welcome in the service if their parents chose to bring them in), good expository sermon which made a rather difficult passage in Romans clearer to me than it has been in the past, and a keen awareness of God's work in the rest of the world.  I liked it, but I don't know that we're going to settle there.  However, I'm thinking about putting Esther in their AWANA program (Bible memorization program for little ones) for this semester.  I think she would love it, and it will give her some continuity in the people she sees each week until we find a church home.

Went hiking today

Life according to Esther

As you may have noticed, I like to write down Esther's latest funny sayings from time to time, so I won't forget them.  And why not share them while I'm at it?  So here is the latest installment.

In addition to "wacket jellos," Esther sometimes gets other beginning consonants switched.  My favorite is "runny babbit" (bunny rabbit).

Esther is turning out to be not much of a milk drinker, like her mommy.  :-(  One day recently I gave her a cup of milk at both breakfast and lunch, only to throw it away several hours later when I discovered it still untouched at her place.  However, she will usually drink chocolate milk.  (I also push other sources of dairy and calcium.)  So the other day I asked her whether she wanted chocolate milk or plain milk, and she said she wanted plain milk.  I was a little dubious, so I asked her again and got the same answer.  When I brought her the milk, she looked into her cup, looked up with an injured expression, and said, "But I thought you were going to give me chocolate milk!"

Esther for a while was begging us every few hours for a "jumpoline."  I thought at first that it was a cute neologism, but apparently there is such a product, and she enjoyed the use of one at her gymastics class.  We would like to buy her some jumping apparatus, but want to make sure it is safe, durable (reviews of the jumpoline have left me with some concerns in this category), and doesn't violate the terms of our homeowners insurance.  Meanwhile, she has mostly given up bugging us about it, but yesterday she jumped up in the middle of her Donut Hole video for the express purpose of coming and telling me, "I'm waiting so patiently for my jumpoline."  So I guess the idea has not died!

Today we opened our new bank account.  The woman who walked us through this process was lovely with Esther, getting her a coloring book, finding official-looking pieces of paper for her to write on, and being very patient with her wiggles.  Towards the end of the process, this woman printed out some information about our account and highlighted key facts as she went over it with us.  So then Esther wanted to use her highlighter to write on the "account number" (a packet of general bank information, I think) that this woman had given her.  The woman said it was just fine with her if it was okay with us, and I said that Esther sometimes uses our highlighters at home.  At which point Esther piped up, "I usually do things that my mommy and daddy don't let me do."

We made it!

Backing up a bit (by nearly three weeks, to be precise), we are in our new house!  We are renting right now, but some of the repairs required by the mortgage appraiser have been already taken care of, and the rest should take place next week, so we are hoping to close in early September.  Meanwhile, it is good to feel a little settled.  Mind you, there are still stacks of unpacked boxes in nearly every room of the house, including the living room and kitchen.  But we can eat, sleep, clothe ourselves and attend to personal hygiene without having to spend 15 minutes of every thirty hunting for that one crucial item that we distinctly remember seeing within the last few hours but can't for the life of us remember where.  Tim has begun classes, and thinks it is going to be a fun semester.  I am loving watching him have a job that he is excited about!  Esther has started to daycare two mornings a week.  The first time she was pretty clingy when I dropped her off, and apparently kept her blankie with her all morning.  Today (her second day) she seems to feel more at ease.  I've stayed on campus this week so I can be immediately available if she needs me, but eventually I will stay home on her daycare days and have four glorious hours all to myself!  Don't worry, I won't have any trouble filling them.  I've also started volunteering in the International student office, although I'm not sure what form that will take over time.  Right now I'm tutoring a Bulgarian student on the TOEFL.

Anyway, here are some highlights from our move.

Some "oops" moments:
--We packed the DVD player up with a library CD still inside it.
--When we drove down the first time, using a van borrowed from a friend, we tied Esther's (disassembled) crib up on top to give us extra space.  Our first evening in the house, in the process of unpacking the van, we untied it.  Tim started, and then I finished while he carried some things inside.  When I finished, Esther was sitting on the tailgate of the van.  I wasn't sure how heavy the crib sides were and didn't want to risk dropping them on her, so I left them for later.  A little while after that, while driving to the grocery store, we heard scraping sounds.  We asked each other, "What was that noise?"  We couldn't see anything moving in the back of the van, but figured that the noise must come from some of our stuff shifting around.  A little while later we heard even louder scraping noises...and looked behind us to see one of her crib sides go sailing into the road!  Thankfully it did not land on another car or cause an accident.  Tim pulled the van over onto the shoulder and went running back to retrieve it before it got run over.  We pulled all the parts of the crib off the roof, found a place to shove them in the van, and went on to the store, feeling sheepish.  I've heard of people forgetting things on the roof of their car before, but not an entire crib!
--In our first week in the house we managed to break not one but two of the knick-knacks the owner had left behind!  (And neither incident was Esther's fault!)  We were relieved to find out that the owner didn't want them and had had no intention of taking them.  He left a number of things in the house for us, some more useful than others, but we will enjoy the useful and beautiful ones and take the rest to the Salvation Army.  Our first couple of days there we particularly appreciated that he had left hand soap and dish soap!

Things we like about the house:
--We love our back deck!  It is a lovely place to eat a snack or meal, and we can see stars!  On one of the nights of the Perseid meteor shower Tim and I stood out there for a while craning our neck at the sky and saw a blazing shooting star, by far the biggest and brightest I've ever seen!
--We love not having any neighbor under us to complain about Esther making noise during the day (our previous neighbor worked night shift).  Esther has run and jumped and bounced loud balls to her hearts content.  Every once in a while she'll comment, "There's nobody downstairs."  (We haven't quite escaped the issue of neighbor noise, however--some kids a few houses down have this thing for setting off firecrackers right around Esther's bedtime.  At least they're not too loud.)
--We love how it cools down at nights.  Most nights we sleep with the windows open and the fan going, and we can hear cicadas!
--We love all the space.  And multiple bathrooms!  No more taking a shower with the door unlocked in case a family member needs to get in to use the toilet.
--Our long, flat driveway is perfect for sidewalk chalk and scooter riding.

Things we don't like about the house:
--All that space?  There are more places to lose things.  Esther tends to take off her sandals and put down her blankie in the most random places, and then get upset when she can't find them.  And there are a lot of times I've been in a bathroom and wanted some bathroom item only to realize that it's in a different bathroom.

--We've found a few pests--a trio of large ants exploring the bedroom, a carpenter bee boring a hole in one of the supports for the railing on our deck, and most importantly, two nests of yellow jackets (Esther referred to them last night as yacket jellos) in the back yard!  The guy that we are currently paying to mow our lawn discovered one nest "the hard way" (multiple stings on his face,  ouch!) when he was mowing on behalf of the house's owner earlier this summer.  He discovered the second one (though without getting stung this time) while mowing for us on Saturday.  I read up on exterminating them, but the consensus of the articles seemed to be that  if you discover them this late in the season you run a higher risk of getting stung while removing them (because the nests are largest and most active in late summer and early fall) and have less time to wait before the first frost will do the dirty work for you, so you might as well leave them alone.  So that is what we're going to do, but in the meantime, we're staying out of the back yard!  Sometimes in the late morning I can see yellow jackets shooting up into the sky just beyond our porch.  Pretty, but I would enjoy the sight more if I didn't know what they were!  (Once the wasps are dead, we're going to fill in the holes with dirt and rocks so we don't get them again next summer.)

--Utility bills--they were included in our rent in our old apartment, so having to pay them ourselves is giving us sticker shock!  That's another good reason not to run our air conditioning.

--While Esther can get way more active inside the house than formerly, I miss having  a playground or park within walking distance.  There aren't even sidewalks  for a few blocks around us, although there is so little traffic that it's safe enough to walk, even with Esther.  We walked to the library a couple of weeks ago and that was fine.

Serendipity

--The best thing about our new house is our new neighbors!  Within a few days of us being there, no less than four people came over to introduce themselves and tell us to be sure to knock on their door if we needed any help with anything.  One of them even brought a chocolate cake!  We are also really enjoying our Lebanese neighbors next-door, whom we had met earlier.  Their little girl is about a year and a half younger than Esther, so it will be a while before they can really play together, but they are fascinated with each other and we have visited back and forth several times.

--The first Sunday we were at our new home, as I was standing outside directing movers, I heard church bells chime the time, followed by a lovely rendition of several hymns!  It was a  moment of oasis in a hectic day.  I have since discovered that the chimes are played every day (or nearly every day) a little after 9 and a little after 5.  I usually can't hear them at all from inside, and can't always hear them well even outside, but I love it when I do!

--I love keeping up on the weather, and two of the things the owner left behind were an indoor/outdoor temperature gauge (sometime I have long been ambitious to own!), and in the front yard, a darling little bunny sculpture clasping a rain gauge in his arms!  I have been enjoying checking the rain gauge, and Esther likes to water the plants with it (never mind that if there's been enough rain to put water in it, the plants are already sopping wet).

Sunday school, the emerging church, and the Donut Man

I've been thinking.  (Whenever I tell Tim that, he says, "Again?!")

We missed church two Sundays in a row (once because our movers were moving our stuff in and once because we were on our way back from a weekend trip to Maryland), but we finally got to start our church hunt this past Saturday.  There is an Episcopal church not too far from us that I was interested in trying, and a couple of churches that Tim had found and liked the sound of, so we decided to start with the closest one and go to the Episcopal church.  We were a little unnerved to pull into the parking lot ten minutes before the service was due to start and see only two cars.  I suggested hopefully that maybe a lot of the congregation walked.  At about that moment a woman dressed in church clothes (this is definitely a dress-up-for-church kind of community!) did come walking into the parking lot, and when asked, assured us that there would be a church service happening at the appointed time, and walked us into the building and introduced us to the people who would be leading the service.  The pastor--excuse me, priest--was on vacation, so it was to be a "service of prayer" rather than a "eucharistic service."  We sat in the second pew, only to find when the rest of the congregation trickled in that nobody sits further up than the middle.  The congregation that day consisted of us, a woman who (I think) used to attend there but now lives in Florida, a family with two high-school-age children who were also there for the first time, and something on the order of seven church members, whose average age I suspect was over 70.  There was (obviously) no children's program.  I had brought Esther a puzzle book, but had not remembered her notepad and not thought to bring food, usually the most reliable method for keeping her quiet in a formal setting.  The service itself was lovely, lots of responsive readings and scripture passages punctuated with hymns.  The "homily" was short, but I got as much out of it as I have many longer ones.  Esther got really into the readings, earnestly studying her bulletin and "reading" along with us in nonsense syllables.  She also enthusiastically "sang" the hymns.  For one of them, the music stopped and she kept going for a few beats, then suddenly realized that no-one else was singing and ceased abruptly.  It was very cute!  At the end, though, there was a long series of "collects" (short prayers) which were read one after the other by a reader and did not involve congregational moving or vocalizing.  I missed most of these because Esther was squirming (as in, opening and closing the kneeler, wandering from one end of the pew to the other, and dropping down on her tummy and heading for the aisle), and then whining audibly when I sat her in my lap.  I have mixed feelings about having Esther in a church service with me.  On the one hand, I want her to experience church.  Whenever I'm in a church I feel a sense of being home, and I want that for her.  On the other hand, I worry that I run the risk of introducing church as a place where she gets in trouble for being who God made her to be.  But I can't simply let her behave as she normally would, because others would be distracted.  No-one complained on Sunday (in fact, one person complimented me afterwards on her good behavior!), but Tim and I talked later about how we really want to be part of a church that is in some way geared for children.  (It would also be really nice to be part of a church where some people aren't of European descent.)  We asked Esther over dinner what she had thought about church and she said she liked it.  We asked what she liked about it and she promptly answered, "I liked the God."  If we only knew what experience was described with that statement!

So after going to church, I was already thinking about children's church vs. children being in the adult service.  Our former church a couple of years ago went through a whole visioning process about the role of children and youth within the body, and one of the key values that came out of that was wanting children to feel, especially at important times in the church calendar like Christmas and Easter, that spirituality was not just a grown-up thing, but something that everybody does.  And segregating ages, while it does allow for more targeted teaching content and styles, can also lead to children viewing adult worship as a) incomprehensible and weird, b) boring and irrelevant, or c) an elite club that you have to earn membership into.  From my own experience, I've attended all-ages worship services since about Esther's age.  Many of those times most of the service went over my head, particularly since it was often in a language I didn't understand.  But I did witness people of all ages valuing God and honoring God in different ways.  And these ways went deeper than the platitudes (God wants us to be helpers.  God wants us to obey our parents.) that are "the point" of many a Sunday-school lesson.  Not that the above statements aren't true and important, but being able to recite "the point" and give an example of it from a Bible story never went as deep for me as watching adults I respected actually helping others, or actually wrestling with what it means to submit to authority.  I'm sure most of my spiritual formation happened through spending time with my parents, and most of the rest through watching and being with other adults who had deep relationships with God.  Very little if any came from Sunday school.  (And honestly, in cases where children are deeply influenced by Sunday school, I suspect it has more to do with their relationship with the teacher than it does with the curriculum.)  The curricula that I've taught in the past have more to do with being able to repeat dos and don'ts and Bible story plots than they do with learning to wrestle with God, and God's word, and our complex lives, without the guarantee of coming up with a pat answer over the course of an hour.

Meanwhile, a friend forwarded me an article co-written by the former pastor (now a full-time writer and speaker) of my former church.  He and several other scholars and church leaders wrestled with the question of spiritual formation for children in the emerging church movement.  The article talked at length about the role of community in spiritual formation, and argued that however children's participation in church is structured, children need to spend extensive time with adults (not necessarily being taught by them, but experiencing how they live and relate to God) and need to feel like full citizens of their community.

The same afternoon that I read that portion of the article, I sat down with Esther to watch an old "Donut Hole Repair Club" video.  I first ran across this series of Christian children's musicals in high school, and despite some hokey acting (think "Barney"), and the fact that they were geared for younger children, I really enjoyed them.  The music is fabulous, and the Easter episode routinely moves me to tears as it makes Jesus' triumph over death feel so real.  Watching this one as a parent, I was moved to tears again to see spiritual formation in action.  The plot was that the Donut Hole Repair Club (a group of kids), led by the Donut Man, were trying to refurbish the Celebration House, a place for anyone to come and find a place to sleep, someone to talk to, or a great meal.  When they despair at the size of the job, the Donut Man is reminded of the story of Joshua, and leads them in a rousing rendition of it, followed by a prayer asking God's help for this overwhelming task.  When one boy confesses that sometimes he doesn't feel like helping, the Donut Man shares that sometimes he doesn't feel like it either, but when that happens, he prays for God to change his heart, and God always does.  And so it goes: insights from the Bible, personal experience from a fellow traveler on the spiritual journey, and lots of opportunities for prayer and praise, all beautifully intertwined with the details of what would otherwise have been just a noble chore.  I so want to teach Esther that way!  And as a necessary foundation, I so want to be the kind of person who lives that way myself!  I do some...but I want to do it more!

None of this, of course, answers the question of where we'll go to church, or even exactly what we're looking for.  But I'll keep thinking.

a new mommy

Today at dinner, out of the blue, Esther looked up at me and declared, "If I had a new mommy I would cry and cry, because I want you."  I don't think this is the kind of thing that most three-year-olds think about.  Then again, one of her favorite books right now is an adoption story where a baby is described meeting her new mommy and daddy.  She didn't sound worried, but just in case, I assured her that she won't have any more new mommies, that when we adopted her it was forever.  And I was reminded again of the enormity of this transition that we expect children to make easily because they're little and adaptable.  And they are...but I don't think we often appreciate just how much.

A little later on in the evening Esther was out of sorts because she wasn't allowed to eat dinner while holding her blankie in her chair.  She pouted dramatically, explained, "I have a mad face," laid her head down on her blankie, and then asked me to pray for her head so it would feel better.  I'm not sure in what way her head was bothering her, but was encouraged that she herself thought of praying as a way of helping her situation.  She did seem to feel better afterwards, although she was obviously very, very tired.  It appears we are still in recovery mode!

It's over!

One extended power outage (think packing with no air conditioning or lights, while cooking with no oven and piling dirty dishes in a stopped-up sink with a non-functional garbage disposal), two weeks of gymnastics classes for Esther and "vacation" days for Tim, three nasty colds (one for each of us), four professional movers, and countless hours later...we're moved!  Moved out, that is.  We're now staying at the home of generous friends while we wait for our new house to become available and deal with the stuff that the movers didn't take.  Some of it is slated to be given away, some is food items that we are still trying to use up, some consists of items that we deliberately saved out so that we could have the use of them as soon as we move in (the moving company we used gives themselves a rather large window of time to make the drop-off), and a rather larger amount than we would have liked consists of items we could have sent with the movers but didn't get sorted and boxed in time.  It took us two and a half days after the movers left to organize our remaining stuff and get the apartment cleaned.  We finally locked our door for the last time and dropped our keys off on Sunday night.  Yesterday was all about recovery--and trying to manage the tasks of daily living when we couldn't find anything!  Today I am doing loads of laundry and trying to reorganize our belongings.  Tomorrow we'll drop off our giveaway stuff at the various locations that it's slated for, and have a farewell lunch with Tim's colleagues.  Saturday will most likely be the day we make our drive down to our new house.  Our mortgage has been delayed yet again--there are some things about the house that the mortgage appraiser is requiring to be fixed before we can be approved--but the owner is allowing us to rent in the interim, and we can move in on Saturday.

Anyway, the biggest hurdle of our move has been accomplished.  Unpacking will be a lot of work, but I can take my time about it, and most of the boxes are pretty well organized.

Esther has done remarkably well with this move.  She went through a period right before we found out we were moving where she was having significant issues with what looked like separation anxiety--she couldn't fall asleep at night unless one of us was sitting where she could see us, would wake up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep at all for several hours, and had a couple of meltdowns over being apart from us (something she did only very briefly at the age where that's usual).  So I was expecting her to have the same issues and then some the whole time we were packing and moving, but she has been fine.  Just in the last few days she has been a little extra clingy and wanting to be carried everywhere, but after all the disruption and transitions I think she's entitled to that!  (I am SO glad I went ahead and ordered a new mei tai carrier for her, as there were several times I really had to get something done and she really wanted to be carried, but willingly accepted being up on my back in the carrier while I packed.)

Esther is awake now.  I asked her what she wanted me to write about moving and she said, "Esther and Daddy.  And you!"

She also wanted to type herself.  Here is her contribution:

  v f'flhki,bvialhbihnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn".
eSxz'sswkswot6[--                   nn  mmm    frk>o6     epZS'DF;KOPKKI

conversations

Here are some conversations I have had with Esther recently:

Esther and I make a weekly visit to an assisted living center near us, which is named Sunrise.  On our last trip back from our new hometown, we stayed in a motel midway.  Esther woke up very early in the morning (not unusual for her when she's off her routine), so in order to let Tim get his sleep out I took her on over to breakfast.  The TV in the breakfast room was on, and as the program moved towards a commercial break, the news anchor announced something like, "This is 9 News at Sunrise."  Esther looked around and protested, "We're not at Sunrise!  We're at a motel!"

Esther is getting as much enjoyment from plans for the new house as we are.  One day she asked if we could have a play structure in our back yard.  I answered that we would have to figure out whether we had enough space and how much money one would cost.  She volunteered, "I could help!  I have a piggy bank!"  (Actually she called it a monkey pig, but I figured out what she meant--there is a Curious George episode about a piggy bank, hence the monkey.)

She sat down on my bare leg one day when I hadn't shaved recently and complained, "Your spines are prickling me."

We were watching a downpour out the window one day, and Esther asked where all the water was coming from.  I explained that the clouds got full of water and then it had to fall down.  She giggled, "Yeah, the clouds are wetting!"  (Wetting is our family term for urinating--she thought clouds wetting was pretty funny.)

Sadly, I don't remember the context for this one anymore.  I think we might have been watching someone interacting with their dog.  Esther said seriously, "I don't have a dog.  Or a baby."  (Sometimes I wonder if she understands the distinction between babies and pets--any time she sees a baby she eagerly asks, "May I pet it?")

One day on our way home from the library, there was a woman standing on the sidewalk outside of our apartment complex talking loudly and with great feeling to the air around her.  As we passed, I heard her say, "My daughter is dead and [something I didn't catch] killed her...".  I didn't know how to respond, so I ignored her, but I didn't feel good about that either, and Esther either caught my discomfort or felt some of her own, because she clearly was unnerved by the woman.  As we got farther away from her, Esther asked, "Why was that woman so angry?"  I didn't want to introduce the concept of family members dying, so I told Esther just that something really sad had happened to the woman, and sometimes when people have really sad feelings they use angry words because they think it makes them feel better.  Esther answered, "When I feel sad I cry, and then I feel better."  I thought that was quite an insight for a three-year-old, especially since I distinctly remember realizing that myself in my late teens!  Or maybe I did know it when I was Esther's age and had forgotten in the interim.

Back when we first knew we were going to move I got Esther some "moving day treats" (chocolate candies) that she could eat one of every day to count down the days until our move.  She has mostly lost interest in them recently, so I had to remove several to maintain the correct number in the container.  Having just watched me fill a bag with stuff to give away, Esther fixed me with a stern eye and said, "Don't even think about getting rid of those!"

One week to go!

Now there is only one week to go until we move out!  I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel, but there is still a lot of packing to do.  Esther LOVED her gymnastics class this week, and I think we will invest in sending her again next week.  It just makes it so much less stressful to pack when I have chunks of uninterrupted time to do it in.  And I'm glad that she's having fun!  She was a little disappointed to learn that tomorrow is Saturday and there won't be any gymnastics class.  But I'm sure she'll have fun with Daddy.  Last week they went scooting in a park and played in the river there for a long time; tomorrow is going to be too hot for outdoor activity to be comfortable, but they will find something to do that is fun and that doesn't involve being in the house.  I went with Tim to pick Esther up today, and her teacher was commenting at how well she does on the parallel bars, and how she can almost do it by herself.  I'm not exactly sure what "it" is that she can almost do by herself, but I know she has a lot of upper body strength.  She can almost do a pull-up already, which is something I don't think I've been able to do my entire life!  Or maybe I did it once, sort of.  I remember trying, but I was pretty pathetic!

Unfortunately, although our move-out date is fixed, it looks like it will be a while before we can move IN.  Mortgage paperwork is starting to feel like adoption paperwork: there's always something that takes longer than you project, or just plain goes wrong!  Not being local, we've been mailing stuff back and forth with our lender.  So first UPS didn't have our apartment number, which cost us a couple of days receiving the papers we needed to sign.  We finally got them on Monday, signed everything that night, and returned it by express mail on Tuesday morning.  Our lender (or someone in his office) received the paperwork Thursday morning, and this morning he contacted us to say that he didn't see the personal check that he needed to pay for the appraisal.  Tim remembered that the clerk at the post office had switched the papers into a new envelope when he mailed them on Tuesday, and sure enough, we found the check still sitting in the old envelope along with his receipt.  So we conferred over the phone, and ended the conversation with Tim thinking I had agreed to go to the post office with Esther and mail it this afternoon, and me thinking that he didn't want me to.  It will get mailed tomorrow morning.  Sigh.  So the appraisal won't even be ordered until next week.  We had already figured we wouldn't make our target closing date of August 2nd, but as Tim put it, this latest development pretty much put the nails in the coffin.  The moving company can store our stuff for up to a month at no cost, and we have had multiple offers of places to stay in the meantime, so we're not in dire straits, but it would be nice to know when we will get to actually start living in our new hometown!

missing piece

This doesn't have anything to do with Esther.  No, that's not quite right.  It doesn't describe Esther, or any of her activities.  But it does affect her.  And while the experience I'm about to relate is so particular to me as to sound bizarre, in another way it is nearly universal. 

To give a bit of background, Tim and I have spent the last year participating in a prayer training at church.  Specifically, this kind of prayer is called theophostic prayer (theophostic means God-light).  I like to picture theophostic prayer as resting on two theoretical pillars.  Once is the psychological theory, I think a fairly standard one, that the cause of our emotional distress in a current situation often has less to do about the details of the situation (my husband asked me what I'd been doing all day) than it does with our belief about the situation (he thinks I'm failing to accomplish what I should), which in turn may have its roots in a conclusion we drew about ourselves in some earlier, formative experience (my mother "fixed" a picture that I had worked hard to draw and been proud of, and I felt like I couldn't do anything right).  (The above example, by the way, is not personal!)  The other theoretical pillar is the idea that, if we can identify and confess to God the false belief that is causing us pain, God is in some mysterious way able to replace that belief experientially with God's truth.  In some cases we may know very well that the false belief is false, and know what the truth is, but there is something different about experiencing that truth as it is communicated by God.

We are being trained to facilitate theophostic prayer for other people, but as an important part of our training (and also, now that we have learned how to do it, an important part of our own spiritual development), we have also been receiving as much theophostic prayer as we can for ourselves.  On Monday night I got the chance to have one of the other trainees facilitate for me.  I chose to focus on the anxiety I feel about driving, and found myself revisiting a memory from when I was in elementary school and my family used to take family bike rides.  Between our village and the next village over (Yakadee, for those with enough geographic background to picture it) there is a particularly long and steep hill, with a one-lane bridge at the bottom.  On one ride, my dad was ahead somewhere (I think already across the bridge), my mom had reached the bottom of the hill and was standing just before the bridge, and I was just starting down the hill.  The bike I rode at the time had pedal brakes, so that you pedaled backwards in order to brake.  I got up a little more speed than I could confidently control, so I pedaled backwards.  Nothing happened.  I looked at my mom standing between me and the bridge with her back turned.  I wanted to scream to warn her that I was coming, but nothing came out of my throat.  And for a split second I really believed I was going to kill her.  I wouldn't be able to stop, I would come careening down the hill with nowhere to go but the bridge, she would still be standing with her back turned, oblivious to the danger, and I would kill her.  And it would all be my fault because I didn't know how to brake, or scream, or do anything to protect her.  A second after that I turned my bike into the ditch by the side of the road and averted the catastrophe, and a few minutes after that my dad checked my bike out and showed me how to push backwards harder and more than once if the brake didn't catch the first time.  But the panic and shame of that first split second lived on in my subconscious.  Working my way back into the memory on Monday night, I felt like I was defective, missing some crucial piece that I should have had.  As I confessed that out loud, and as the person who was facilitating for me invited the Holy Spirit to bring truth into my memory, I gradually began to see myself as the bicycle I had been riding in that event.  At first, the bicycle was definitely missing a piece.  But as the picture continued to emerge, I saw that Jesus was riding the bicycle/me, and it/I was working just fine for him.  I looked for the missing piece to see if he had fixed it, but I couldn't tell anymore if there was a piece missing or not.  Amazingly, it had ceased to matter.  Either Jesus had fixed the missing piece or he was working around it, but the outcome was the same: he was riding the bike, and it was responding perfectly.

As that truth sunk in, I thought of how much it would mean for it to feel true in every part of my life.  Because there are places where I really am missing something--where, for that matter, all of us are missing something (I told you it was a universal experience!).  I come up short, as a parent, as a teacher, as a friend, as whatever.  And even knowing that shortcomings are part of the human condition, I anxiously measure the size of each shortcoming, trying to judge whether or not I should be condemned for it.  But what a relief if I could leave off judging and measuring, trusting that the outcome of a situation doesn't depend on my capacities, but on Jesus.

Normally I don't talk much about my theophostic prayer experiences, even to Tim.  They're very precious, but so personal that afterwards it seems hard to put them into proper language.  But I left on Monday night feeling strongly that this particular one was meant to be shared.  So I'm not sure who I'm writing this for, but if it blesses you, and honors God, I'm glad!

Just two weeks

I have just two weeks to get everything packed up before movers come to load it all.  AAAAAUGH!  Don't worry, I have already started--but the amount already packed seems inconsequential compared to the amount yet to go.  Yesterday I was feeling really discouraged because despite my best efforts I made no headway on packing and didn't even get to interact with Esther as much as she needed to feel attended to.  Then today I got a lot done, and took Esther outside for over an hour, and took her swimming.  I guess I have more time in my day when I don't have to wash my hair, go grocery shopping, do laundry, or fix a big dinner.  It's unfortunate for packing progress that on most days I have to do at least one of those things!  Tomorrow I'm hoping Tim and Esther can have a fun Daddy-daughter outing and I can get another gulp of packing out of the way.  Next week we have her enrolled in gymnastics camp in the morning, which should help a lot.  But boy, I'll be happy when this move is over with!

Tonight was our last night to attend our Chinese fellowship.  We were prayed for, and took a group photo, and said lots of goodbyes, and didn't get home until nearly 11.  It still doesn't seem real that we're actually leaving.  In just two weeks!