We ended up having Sissy and Bubby for nearly eight hours longer than we expected. First a planned afternoon activity fell through, and then their family got delayed getting back into town. We found enough activities to fill the afternoon, and mostly had fun, but Daniel periodically came to me to complain that he had nothing to do and didn't feel like he could be himself with the other kids here, and Esther had a meltdown and had to spend some time in her room composing herself. Sissy said again that she wasn't going to want to leave our house...but she also shared that she had cried the night before because she missed her foster parents, and talked about how she was going to hug them when she saw them. Bubby was noticeably anxious as one scheduled departure time after another passed and their family still hadn't returned. When we finally got the phone call that they were almost here, he started openly rejoicing that it was time to leave, then realized how that could sound and hastened to explain that he is rather shy and had been anxious about staying with people he didn't know. We understood that, of course! So both they and we were very happy to return to our respective normals. I asked Esther this morning what percent she missed Sissy and she said, "Zero percent! I didn't like her. She was always getting into my stuff." Mind you, there was plenty of laughing going on (most of the time!) while Sissy was here and they were playing, and for someone who "didn't like" Sissy Esther sure sought out her company every minute of every day, but boy, I can picture the fireworks we would have if Sissy lived here long-term! This weekend really brought home to me what a strong personality Esther has...which is a good thing...but when she channels it into being competitive and territorial, it can set her up for some serious head-butting.
Some of my memories from the weekend:
Esther and Sissy played a wii game involving cute dogs which you can race against each other. They got really into it, and it was so cute to see them jumping up and down trying to get their dogs to win the race. Bubby also enjoyed our wii at times, mostly a racing game, during which he got quite animated and talked to the characters on the screen.
Despite the freezing weather, Esther and Sissy and I went out for walks both days the kids were here; on Sunday we were accompanied by Daniel and Bubby. My quintessential memory of Sissy is her marching along, head back, hood falling off, and eyes sparkling, just enjoying being outside. Such a spunky little girl!
I will also remember Bubby carefully working a twelve-piece wooden puzzle that Esther outgrew a year ago, and being quite pleased with himself when he completed it. After he had done all of her twelve-piece ones he moved on to 24 pieces, which took him a little thought, but also brought a sense of accomplishment when he was finished. I always love seeing a child engrossed in new experiences that stretch their brain, but it was a reality check that an American almost-teenager could have grown up this far without (apparently) ever having worked a puzzle.
Daniel has been talking mournfully about how short his Christmas vacation was and how we didn't do anything fun. (His idea of fun is going out somewhere, and given that the weather has been cold and wet/snowy and that there is nothing much to do indoors around here but shop...we have mostly stuck around home.) So today we tried to send vacation out with a bang and make up some of the stress of the weekend to our kids by doing special things with them. Tim took Esther on a "Daddy date" to see Monsters, Inc. on the big screen. She has watched the video numerous times, but this was her very first time seeing a movie in a theater, unless you count a disastrous trip to IMAX a few years ago with my family where she had to be taken out crying after five minutes because the volume of the soundtrack scared her. This time she had fun! She said that it was loud, but she didn't need to cover her ears. Daniel decided that for his special treat he wanted to ride the bus to the mall. Our local bus system is pretty pitiful, but the walking route to get to the nearest bus stop is safe, if not close (it takes about twenty minutes to get there, if one walks briskly), and the mall is a reasonably interesting destination. I had never ridden the bus before either, so we both enjoyed our little adventure. I don't see any reason why Daniel couldn't make the trip by himself, now that he has done it once and seen how it works. And he is very pleased at the prospect of so much independence, though I doubt he'll actually want to do it often. After we got back, Tim took Daniel out to Dairy Queen (they brought back some for Esther and me to share).
And now we get to gear up for the return to school...
Happy New Year, everyone!
Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Four kids sleeping (I hope!)
As you can probably tell, the previous post is a guest post by Daniel. :-) I was just getting ready to write this post when he wandered in and started inspecting my blog, so I invited him to write in it.
We had a couple of extra kids for the weekend. Since they aren't ours, I'll call them Bubby and Sissy. (For those of you who aren't familiar with this-here part of the country, that's "brother" and "sister." Bubby is a couple years younger than Daniel, and Sissy a couple years older than Esther. It's our second time doing respite since Daniel has been in the family, and the first with "older" kids. It's gone pretty well.
I know Sissy has had a good time. She and Esther did art most of the day today, with breaks to jump on the trampoline, play the wii, and take a walk outside. Esther had not wanted her to come at first, and did have some trouble sharing her stuff and sharing control of their play, but I'm pretty sure she enjoyed having somebody to play with. I was worried at times that Esther would overwhelm Sissy with her attention: she followed her everywhere she went, called her until she came, and generally focused on her with a laserlike intensity. A few times I think Sissy wanted to get away, but on the other hand I think Esther was largely responsible for drawing her out of her initial shell and setting her up to have a good time. Esther pretty much ignored Bubby, but I suspect that if he had come by himself she would have been nearly as fixated on him as she was on Sissy. Thanks at least in part to Esther's persistence, Sissy warmed up to us fairly quickly. At one point on our first evening together she ran into the other room to ask her brother, "Bubby, are you still feeling shy?" He said no, and she announced, "I'm not feeling shy anymore either!" Made me smile. And apparently it was a big deal to her that I let her help in the kitchen and didn't care if the (washable) fingerpaints got messy. At one point she said, "I don't think I'm ever going to want to leave this place!" I'm taking that with a grain of salt, of course, but I do think she felt safe and had fun.
Bubby was interested in talking sooner after arrival than Sissy, and he is good at small talk, but he never came very far out of his shell. He brought some electronic games with him and we let him play them for more time than we would have under less temporary circumstances. When we told him they had to go up for a while he complied, then sat around staring into space. He did join Tim (and Daniel) for a science project and a game of pool, but didn't seem to have any ideas of his own for what to do. He declined art projects and helping me cook dinner. He did play some with Esther and Sissy this evening, although I think it was Sissy who initiated it and decided what to do. Bubby also wasn't as proactive as Sissy about communicating his needs; for example, I only found out that he was too cold the first night he slept here because I asked. (But at least he answered my question honestly!) Daniel had hoped to find in Bubby a kindred, electricity-loving spirit, but wasn't able to make much of a connection. So he was disappointed and bored the whole weekend, feeling like he couldn't be himself with strangers in the house, but didn't have the compensation of enjoying the strangers' company. We were proud of him for figuring out his own way of coping. He made a couple trips downtown (walking) to go shopping, spent some time at a friend's house, and worked on a project. And he showed pretty good sense about what of his normal interactions with us (especially me) were appropriate in front of someone we don't know well, and which were not.
Both kids were well-mannered and compliant, and with Tim being off work right now and us having several days' notice to get ready, we were able to clear our schedules and orient the weekend around keeping them comfortable and (as much as they chose) engaged in positive activities. So it was kind of "honeymoon-y," not at all like it would be if they actually lived with us. Despite their good behavior, it took a lot of energy to be attentive to four children instead of two. I won't be sorry to go back to normal when they leave tomorrow afternoon, but I'm glad we're able to provide a safe, caring place for kids under stress, and a break for caregivers who need to get out of town without worrying about their charges. And I think we learned some things about our kids as well. We just need to figure out how to apply the lessons!
We had a couple of extra kids for the weekend. Since they aren't ours, I'll call them Bubby and Sissy. (For those of you who aren't familiar with this-here part of the country, that's "brother" and "sister." Bubby is a couple years younger than Daniel, and Sissy a couple years older than Esther. It's our second time doing respite since Daniel has been in the family, and the first with "older" kids. It's gone pretty well.
I know Sissy has had a good time. She and Esther did art most of the day today, with breaks to jump on the trampoline, play the wii, and take a walk outside. Esther had not wanted her to come at first, and did have some trouble sharing her stuff and sharing control of their play, but I'm pretty sure she enjoyed having somebody to play with. I was worried at times that Esther would overwhelm Sissy with her attention: she followed her everywhere she went, called her until she came, and generally focused on her with a laserlike intensity. A few times I think Sissy wanted to get away, but on the other hand I think Esther was largely responsible for drawing her out of her initial shell and setting her up to have a good time. Esther pretty much ignored Bubby, but I suspect that if he had come by himself she would have been nearly as fixated on him as she was on Sissy. Thanks at least in part to Esther's persistence, Sissy warmed up to us fairly quickly. At one point on our first evening together she ran into the other room to ask her brother, "Bubby, are you still feeling shy?" He said no, and she announced, "I'm not feeling shy anymore either!" Made me smile. And apparently it was a big deal to her that I let her help in the kitchen and didn't care if the (washable) fingerpaints got messy. At one point she said, "I don't think I'm ever going to want to leave this place!" I'm taking that with a grain of salt, of course, but I do think she felt safe and had fun.
Bubby was interested in talking sooner after arrival than Sissy, and he is good at small talk, but he never came very far out of his shell. He brought some electronic games with him and we let him play them for more time than we would have under less temporary circumstances. When we told him they had to go up for a while he complied, then sat around staring into space. He did join Tim (and Daniel) for a science project and a game of pool, but didn't seem to have any ideas of his own for what to do. He declined art projects and helping me cook dinner. He did play some with Esther and Sissy this evening, although I think it was Sissy who initiated it and decided what to do. Bubby also wasn't as proactive as Sissy about communicating his needs; for example, I only found out that he was too cold the first night he slept here because I asked. (But at least he answered my question honestly!) Daniel had hoped to find in Bubby a kindred, electricity-loving spirit, but wasn't able to make much of a connection. So he was disappointed and bored the whole weekend, feeling like he couldn't be himself with strangers in the house, but didn't have the compensation of enjoying the strangers' company. We were proud of him for figuring out his own way of coping. He made a couple trips downtown (walking) to go shopping, spent some time at a friend's house, and worked on a project. And he showed pretty good sense about what of his normal interactions with us (especially me) were appropriate in front of someone we don't know well, and which were not.
Both kids were well-mannered and compliant, and with Tim being off work right now and us having several days' notice to get ready, we were able to clear our schedules and orient the weekend around keeping them comfortable and (as much as they chose) engaged in positive activities. So it was kind of "honeymoon-y," not at all like it would be if they actually lived with us. Despite their good behavior, it took a lot of energy to be attentive to four children instead of two. I won't be sorry to go back to normal when they leave tomorrow afternoon, but I'm glad we're able to provide a safe, caring place for kids under stress, and a break for caregivers who need to get out of town without worrying about their charges. And I think we learned some things about our kids as well. We just need to figure out how to apply the lessons!
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Starting Our Second Year
I have started this post three times now! Once towards the end of the summer, once right after school started, and once now. Now we are approaching a year and a half with Daniel rather than just starting our second year. And this second year has gone in a totally different direction than what I predicted when I first started this post. It almost seems pointless to finish it...but I want to remember how the summer felt, and this will remind me.
So here is where we were at the end of the summer:
-------------
Life has been quite the ride lately. I started out our second year with Daniel rejoicing in how much progress we've made. There was the visit to the dentist where he had to wait for nearly an hour, but didn't do anything more disruptive that unplugging and replugging the waiting room lamp several times. He even refrained from playing with the elevator chair when I asked him! Then there was the comment from an adult he is close to in China that he is like a whole different person this year compared to last year. Apparently, some of my efforts at teaching him to speak positively and respectfully to others have been successful! And he did so much better with being out of routine on our long summer trip than we had feared. We had some "moments," of course, but on the whole he was cheerful and adaptable, and had a good time. Even the unstructured time of summer has been going reasonably well, with the kids less rowdy and more capable of (occasionally) entertaining themselves or each other.
However, this summer was intense. I don't think it was as stressful as the first summer we were together. Daniel has calmed way down, and only rarely gets into the "lets have a blast being wild and crazy!" moods that left me feeling last summer like I was just hanging on by my teeth and toenails. And he has learned a few more things he can do to entertain himself, so I had a little more breathing room. So the norm this summer was relatively calm, but the outlying incidents! Well, let's just say that this summer featured both the lowest low points and the highest high points of our relationship thus far. And I am ready to get off the roller coaster and enjoy a little monotony!
I won't invade Daniel's privacy by sharing the low points, but I have wondered about the timing. It seems like the trigger is usually if I do something that makes him feel rejected. I don't know if our relationship has become important to him to the point that the stakes are higher than they were before, or if he has now made enough of an adjustment to his new life that he is ready to deal with deeper-level challenges. Or maybe the summer was just too stressful, what with unstructured time to fill and my demands on him to study with me for an hour a day. But whatever is going on, a trip to "that place" is hard on everyone involved. Hard, because when Daniel is in that mode he can't be reasoned with, can't be touched, but often won't let me disengage. Hard, because he only ever goes there when I'm alone with both kids, so I also have to worry about keeping Esther out of the interaction without scaring her or making her feel responsible. (She has a very unhelpful tendency to inflame the situation by adding her two cents about what Daniel should or shouldn't be doing.) Most of all, hard because I know "that place" owes its existence to hurts that I don't want my child to live with, and that I can't fix. Thankfully, he doesn't go to "that place" often and doesn't stay there very long (although it feels very long indeed). We (me and our social worker, me and Tim, and me and Daniel) have talked about counseling, and all feel that it will be a very good thing for him once his English is enough to communicate. He is very articulate and insightful, and willing to do the hard work of healing. But that still leaves us at a loss as to what to do right now. We've considered medication for anxiety (and are still considering it), but whether it was catharsis from the last incident, the start of school, or just a natural cycle, Daniel seems to be in a better place right now.
Meanwhile, we are still rejoicing in this summer's high points. We got to travel for three weeks to the west coast and see both of our extended families. Both kids did great on the trip, and Daniel told me afterwards, "Now I know who everyone in my family is." We planted tomato and pepper seeds, watched them grow into plants, and enjoyed the fruits of our labor. One day after not having been in the garden for a few days, Daniel went out and saw ripe tomatoes on our plants for the first time. I got the biggest kick out of him jumping up and down and yelling, "Mommy, come quickly! Come look!" :-) Daniel was able to use his English well enough to talk to friends on the phone, and he made great strides in learning to read. He is starting to believe that he could be good at learning. Daniel added his birthday money to money that he has been saving in the bank for months, and bought himself an iPod touch. And occasionally I will find him and Esther curled up on the couch together looking at something on the iPod. :-) We figured out a way for everyone to enjoy the Olympics together: Tim and I and Esther sat in the living room and watched the sports, while Daniel (who is not much for TV) sat on the couch and had me rub his feet.
One special highlight for me has been Daniel's growing relationship with God. We had a conversation mid-summer where Daniel explored all the different reasons he had for not wanting to follow God. He came out with a lot of ideas, but basically it boiled down to him not wanting anyone to tell him what to do. I left the conversation feeling a little down, although I firmly believe that thinking through all your alternatives is a necessary part of the process of owning one's own faith. But then, the funniest thing happened. Daniel started to become more enthusiastic about all things God-related. And one day, a few days after the most memorable of our "low points," we were having testimonies in church. Daniel asked why people were standing up and talking, and I explained that they were telling us how God had been good to them. Daniel said, "I want to say something too!" So I helped him get the pastor's attention (having no idea what he had in mind to say!), and Daniel told the whole congregation (in English): "When I tired, angry, Jesus help me. Jesus tell me peace in heart. Everybody peace." Not only was it a very appropriately communicated testimony, but I think it was good for our congregation to hear someone testifying about God working on their character, not just healing an illness or removing a difficult external circumstance. On another Sunday recently, Daniel decided to sit by the pastor in the very front pew. He knew and especially loves one of the songs that morning (I think it was You Are My All In All), so he was singing his heart out. Later in the service our pastor got a little choked up about a story he was telling, and Daniel grabbed a tissue out of the box in the front pew and darted up to give it to him. Later the pastor pulled me aside to tell me how much Daniel ministers to him. And it's true, Daniel has been a blessing to a lot of people.
Adopting (or being adopted) is, I think, a lot like culture shock. The "classic" progression of adjustment includes the honeymoon phase (everything is new and wonderful!), the disillusionment phase (everything is weird and dumb and bad and uncomfortable and you just want to get back to the place that feels right to you), and the realism phase (like any other place/person, this one has its good and bad points; you know how to handle the bad and you can enjoy the good without reservations). But real life rarely follows a classic progression, so the first year with a new child can be suspenseful. ("They" say that an adoption honeymoon typically lasts several months, though some kids cut right to the disillusionment phase and others, especially older ones, can honeymoon for a year.) I don't know about other adoptive families, but I periodically found myself wondering: Is this just a honeymoon? Are things going to get worse, and if so, how soon and how bad and for how long? Does XYZ incident mean that the honeymoon is about to end? At the same time, I have been going back and forth between countries for most of my life, and while I have had culture shock on a couple of occasions, I've also had plenty of transitions that went smoothly, with bits of extra stress (and extra excitement) spread out over a long period of time rather than all bunched together. And to me, it looked like Daniel was transitioning much like that: noticing things that bugged him, that he missed, or that he was no longer competent at, and processing them as they came up rather than stuffing them all in until the wheels fell off the bus.
---------------
So, as we got several months into our second year, I was feeling pretty sure that we weren't going to have a wheels-falling-off-the-bus experience. We had worked through a lot of challenging behaviors and were steadily having "Wow, we could never have done that last year!" moments. But I was wondering if the second year wasn't going to be harder emotionally than the first, finding us periodically falling into a morass of old hurts and having to work our way out. In the event, those fearful expectations didn't materialize. (Not that I fear dealing with old hurts, it's work that needs to be done sometime...but the way they were surfacing this summer was a little scary, for us and I think for Daniel as well.) Instead, we are having a year of realizing how far we've come together. And we are so very grateful we didn't miss out on this journey!
So here is where we were at the end of the summer:
-------------
Life has been quite the ride lately. I started out our second year with Daniel rejoicing in how much progress we've made. There was the visit to the dentist where he had to wait for nearly an hour, but didn't do anything more disruptive that unplugging and replugging the waiting room lamp several times. He even refrained from playing with the elevator chair when I asked him! Then there was the comment from an adult he is close to in China that he is like a whole different person this year compared to last year. Apparently, some of my efforts at teaching him to speak positively and respectfully to others have been successful! And he did so much better with being out of routine on our long summer trip than we had feared. We had some "moments," of course, but on the whole he was cheerful and adaptable, and had a good time. Even the unstructured time of summer has been going reasonably well, with the kids less rowdy and more capable of (occasionally) entertaining themselves or each other.
However, this summer was intense. I don't think it was as stressful as the first summer we were together. Daniel has calmed way down, and only rarely gets into the "lets have a blast being wild and crazy!" moods that left me feeling last summer like I was just hanging on by my teeth and toenails. And he has learned a few more things he can do to entertain himself, so I had a little more breathing room. So the norm this summer was relatively calm, but the outlying incidents! Well, let's just say that this summer featured both the lowest low points and the highest high points of our relationship thus far. And I am ready to get off the roller coaster and enjoy a little monotony!
I won't invade Daniel's privacy by sharing the low points, but I have wondered about the timing. It seems like the trigger is usually if I do something that makes him feel rejected. I don't know if our relationship has become important to him to the point that the stakes are higher than they were before, or if he has now made enough of an adjustment to his new life that he is ready to deal with deeper-level challenges. Or maybe the summer was just too stressful, what with unstructured time to fill and my demands on him to study with me for an hour a day. But whatever is going on, a trip to "that place" is hard on everyone involved. Hard, because when Daniel is in that mode he can't be reasoned with, can't be touched, but often won't let me disengage. Hard, because he only ever goes there when I'm alone with both kids, so I also have to worry about keeping Esther out of the interaction without scaring her or making her feel responsible. (She has a very unhelpful tendency to inflame the situation by adding her two cents about what Daniel should or shouldn't be doing.) Most of all, hard because I know "that place" owes its existence to hurts that I don't want my child to live with, and that I can't fix. Thankfully, he doesn't go to "that place" often and doesn't stay there very long (although it feels very long indeed). We (me and our social worker, me and Tim, and me and Daniel) have talked about counseling, and all feel that it will be a very good thing for him once his English is enough to communicate. He is very articulate and insightful, and willing to do the hard work of healing. But that still leaves us at a loss as to what to do right now. We've considered medication for anxiety (and are still considering it), but whether it was catharsis from the last incident, the start of school, or just a natural cycle, Daniel seems to be in a better place right now.
Meanwhile, we are still rejoicing in this summer's high points. We got to travel for three weeks to the west coast and see both of our extended families. Both kids did great on the trip, and Daniel told me afterwards, "Now I know who everyone in my family is." We planted tomato and pepper seeds, watched them grow into plants, and enjoyed the fruits of our labor. One day after not having been in the garden for a few days, Daniel went out and saw ripe tomatoes on our plants for the first time. I got the biggest kick out of him jumping up and down and yelling, "Mommy, come quickly! Come look!" :-) Daniel was able to use his English well enough to talk to friends on the phone, and he made great strides in learning to read. He is starting to believe that he could be good at learning. Daniel added his birthday money to money that he has been saving in the bank for months, and bought himself an iPod touch. And occasionally I will find him and Esther curled up on the couch together looking at something on the iPod. :-) We figured out a way for everyone to enjoy the Olympics together: Tim and I and Esther sat in the living room and watched the sports, while Daniel (who is not much for TV) sat on the couch and had me rub his feet.
One special highlight for me has been Daniel's growing relationship with God. We had a conversation mid-summer where Daniel explored all the different reasons he had for not wanting to follow God. He came out with a lot of ideas, but basically it boiled down to him not wanting anyone to tell him what to do. I left the conversation feeling a little down, although I firmly believe that thinking through all your alternatives is a necessary part of the process of owning one's own faith. But then, the funniest thing happened. Daniel started to become more enthusiastic about all things God-related. And one day, a few days after the most memorable of our "low points," we were having testimonies in church. Daniel asked why people were standing up and talking, and I explained that they were telling us how God had been good to them. Daniel said, "I want to say something too!" So I helped him get the pastor's attention (having no idea what he had in mind to say!), and Daniel told the whole congregation (in English): "When I tired, angry, Jesus help me. Jesus tell me peace in heart. Everybody peace." Not only was it a very appropriately communicated testimony, but I think it was good for our congregation to hear someone testifying about God working on their character, not just healing an illness or removing a difficult external circumstance. On another Sunday recently, Daniel decided to sit by the pastor in the very front pew. He knew and especially loves one of the songs that morning (I think it was You Are My All In All), so he was singing his heart out. Later in the service our pastor got a little choked up about a story he was telling, and Daniel grabbed a tissue out of the box in the front pew and darted up to give it to him. Later the pastor pulled me aside to tell me how much Daniel ministers to him. And it's true, Daniel has been a blessing to a lot of people.
Adopting (or being adopted) is, I think, a lot like culture shock. The "classic" progression of adjustment includes the honeymoon phase (everything is new and wonderful!), the disillusionment phase (everything is weird and dumb and bad and uncomfortable and you just want to get back to the place that feels right to you), and the realism phase (like any other place/person, this one has its good and bad points; you know how to handle the bad and you can enjoy the good without reservations). But real life rarely follows a classic progression, so the first year with a new child can be suspenseful. ("They" say that an adoption honeymoon typically lasts several months, though some kids cut right to the disillusionment phase and others, especially older ones, can honeymoon for a year.) I don't know about other adoptive families, but I periodically found myself wondering: Is this just a honeymoon? Are things going to get worse, and if so, how soon and how bad and for how long? Does XYZ incident mean that the honeymoon is about to end? At the same time, I have been going back and forth between countries for most of my life, and while I have had culture shock on a couple of occasions, I've also had plenty of transitions that went smoothly, with bits of extra stress (and extra excitement) spread out over a long period of time rather than all bunched together. And to me, it looked like Daniel was transitioning much like that: noticing things that bugged him, that he missed, or that he was no longer competent at, and processing them as they came up rather than stuffing them all in until the wheels fell off the bus.
---------------
So, as we got several months into our second year, I was feeling pretty sure that we weren't going to have a wheels-falling-off-the-bus experience. We had worked through a lot of challenging behaviors and were steadily having "Wow, we could never have done that last year!" moments. But I was wondering if the second year wasn't going to be harder emotionally than the first, finding us periodically falling into a morass of old hurts and having to work our way out. In the event, those fearful expectations didn't materialize. (Not that I fear dealing with old hurts, it's work that needs to be done sometime...but the way they were surfacing this summer was a little scary, for us and I think for Daniel as well.) Instead, we are having a year of realizing how far we've come together. And we are so very grateful we didn't miss out on this journey!
Monday, November 19, 2012
threads of adoption
Most days, being an interracial family formed by adoption doesn't play much into our lives. Parenting, after all, is parenting, no matter who is involved or how you get into it. [Yes, kids with difficult histories can come with extra parenting challenges, but I attribute that to their experience rather than to the plain fact of being adopted.] But it does seem like the last week or so has held more than the usual adoption- and race-related business.
Last weekend, Tim and Esther were playing. She suggested that she be the mommy and he be the daddy and her doll be the baby. He agreed. She announced it was time to go to the store. He asked if they should take the baby and Esther said, "No! We don't have her yet. We have to adopt her!" So they went "shopping" sans baby, and Esther picked out lots of things, commenting on how cute they would look on the baby or how much the baby would like them. (We think the plot of the story owed a lot to a favorite book, Over the Moon by Karen Katz, although we also talk from time to time about our excitement in getting ready for baby Esther.)
Another time over snack, I was talking about how I had gradually come to like a food after trying it multiple times. Esther asked, "And when you first met me you didn't like me, but now you do?" I assured her that we liked her from the very beginning, but then, recollecting that not all loving relationships start out that well and that I don't know what our future may hold with other foster or adopted children, I went on to tell her a story about a college friend who I did not like at all at first, but came to appreciate after we were thrown together on a common project.
A conversation with Daniel started over math, of all things. I was trying to explain the concept of percent. As an example, I said that in our family we have four people, and 50% of us are Chinese. The other 50% are...and here I got stuck, as it's not accurate in our case to contrast American (which is not an ethnicity) with Chinese. My kids proudly identify as Chinese, but I don't want them to feel that that makes them any less fully American. So I hunted up my dictionary and figured out how to say that 50% of us are European (ethnically but not culturally...man, these things are hard to talk about coherently!). Daniel of course asked why, so I explained that my ancestors (or "grandpa's grandpa's grandpa) came from Europe. He wanted to know how I knew, which led into a great long discussion of the relatives who compiled our family genealogy and of the process of hunting down court records of marriages and births in order to trace one's family history back. So then Daniel wanted to know if he could find his own birth family information by looking at court records. I had to tell him that without a specific name to search for, that would be well nigh impossible. I then thought of hospital records, and how there were probably not too many baby boys born with albinism during the same time period as Daniel. He asked how we would know which hospital. I said that we wouldn't; we would have to ask every hospital in the city (which is a lot), and some might let us see their records, but others would refuse and ask why we cared about knowing, anyway. He agreed that that was likely how it would be, adding, "Some people are just that way: annoying to death!" (And then there is the possibility that he wasn't born in a hospital, or was born in a different city, or the hospital is now defunct, or the records were destroyed, or....) So if Daniel ever wants to search for his birth parents, it will be daunting. I don't know if he will choose to or not, but I'm pleased that he feels comfortable discussing the possibility with me. We try to let both our children know that if there comes a point in their life where having more of a connection with their birth parents is important to them, they can search or do whatever they need to without being disloyal or hurting our feelings.
Meanwhile Esther has been telling me lots of stories lately about things that "really happened" when she was a baby in her orphanage. For example, she had her own bottle and another baby chewed it up and it had to be thrown away. All the stories have to do with something the valued being destroyed and taken away from her. I don't think she is really remembering these things (for example, she held up a teething toy that she had as a baby with us and insisted that she had one just like it in the orphanage until another baby chewed it up), but they represent very real losses nonetheless. This past weekend she was saying some hurtful things to Daniel, so I took her into her room to have a private talk. I had intended to talk about how she was treating her brother, but instead we ended up talking about loss. She told me another orphanage story, this time that she had had a blankie that she loved, but a bad guy came and took it away and tore it up, and she cried. She told me that she still misses that blankie. (Given how fast and thoroughly she attached to the green blankie that we brought to her in China, I have often wondered if she was attached to something before we met her. If she was, it didn't come with her.) I asked her if she might be missing the blankie because she was thinking about her birth family and was missing them. She looked at me strangely and said no, then told me again how much she missed the blankie. I stated that babies don't get to take anything with them when they go to a new family. She started crying hard, grabbed me tight, and said, "YES!" Then she added, "When babies have to go to a new family that they don't know, they feel so scared." My poor baby! So she cried about that for a while, and then was ready to move on with life (including the delayed talk about how to treat one's brother). My understanding is that a lot of kids start to understand and grieve the losses of adoption at about age five, so we seem to be right on target.
Then there was the evening that Daniel was hanging out with me in the kitchen and, a propos of nothing, asked, "Mommy, can I go back to China? I mean, I know I can go back to visit, but I still won't be an orphan, right?" I assured him that we will still be family even when he is in China. "Can you send me back to the orphanage?" "We don't want to send you back to the orphanage!...but no, even if we wanted to we couldn't. One a child is adopted in China, their family is responsible for them for the rest of their lives. Occasionally if a child is really not getting on well with their family, their new family might find a different family for them. But it is still that family's responsibility to make sure the child is taken care of." Apparently, that answer was satisfactory, and we moved on to other things.
And finally, Esther's school's open house last week gave me the chance to address an issue that has been nagging at me for a while: the Boy on the Bus. Esther doesn't know his name. But one day near the beginning of school they were sitting near each other on the bus and he informed her that she is Mexican. [As a side note, I wonder how many other people locally have thought that? I have more than once had a stranger tell me that she looks like Dora the Explorer, which she does with her big eyes and her haircut. But it hadn't occurred to me before now that they might actually have thought she is Hispanic.] Esther corrected the boy that she is Chinese, and he (according to her retelling) said, "Chinese?!?" in that over-the-top dramatic way that kindergarteners have. Esther seemed mildly upset, but not to the point where we needed to call the bus driver. Over the next few days I checked in with her to see if anything more had happened, and she said she wasn't sitting near him anymore. But then one day she told me that he had said to her, "Chinese, Japanese, look at these!" And another day she told me, as if it were a good joke, that when they line up for the bus she and her bus buddy say "Chinese" to the boy and he shrieks and runs on the bus and they laugh at him. She seemed to find it entertaining, but I was not thrilled with the ongoing drama. I can't really blame the kid for not knowing the difference between Mexican, Chinese and Japanese; he's only in kindergarten and we live in a very non-diverse community. But it's not fair to Esther to have to spend her life explaining herself to people. So before the open house I spent an hour or two hunting up the names of children's books and websites that might help children learn how to talk about their differences in positive ways rather than teasing and being dramatic about them. I told Esther before we left that I was going to give her teacher and this other child's teacher (Esther was able to tell me what class he was in) some ideas about how to help kids talk respectfully about having different skin and hair. I had a nice chat with Esther's teacher, part of which Esther was present for and part of which she wasn't. Then as we were getting ready to leave Esther reminded me in no uncertain terms that I was going to speak with the other teacher, and took my hand and towed me over to that classroom. The other teacher was very receptive as well. I have no idea if anything has come of my talking with the teachers, but Esther's reaction to my doing so showed me that the situation really did bother her, even though she was treating it as a joke. And I'm glad that I sent the message--to her if to no-one else--that she has the right to be treated respectfully and it's okay to stand up for herself if someone is hurting her feelings in ignorance. I'll also be thinking carefully about what books I pick out when I go read to her class (which I do once a week).
So, lots going on internally in the last nine days or so. Phew!
Last weekend, Tim and Esther were playing. She suggested that she be the mommy and he be the daddy and her doll be the baby. He agreed. She announced it was time to go to the store. He asked if they should take the baby and Esther said, "No! We don't have her yet. We have to adopt her!" So they went "shopping" sans baby, and Esther picked out lots of things, commenting on how cute they would look on the baby or how much the baby would like them. (We think the plot of the story owed a lot to a favorite book, Over the Moon by Karen Katz, although we also talk from time to time about our excitement in getting ready for baby Esther.)
Another time over snack, I was talking about how I had gradually come to like a food after trying it multiple times. Esther asked, "And when you first met me you didn't like me, but now you do?" I assured her that we liked her from the very beginning, but then, recollecting that not all loving relationships start out that well and that I don't know what our future may hold with other foster or adopted children, I went on to tell her a story about a college friend who I did not like at all at first, but came to appreciate after we were thrown together on a common project.
A conversation with Daniel started over math, of all things. I was trying to explain the concept of percent. As an example, I said that in our family we have four people, and 50% of us are Chinese. The other 50% are...and here I got stuck, as it's not accurate in our case to contrast American (which is not an ethnicity) with Chinese. My kids proudly identify as Chinese, but I don't want them to feel that that makes them any less fully American. So I hunted up my dictionary and figured out how to say that 50% of us are European (ethnically but not culturally...man, these things are hard to talk about coherently!). Daniel of course asked why, so I explained that my ancestors (or "grandpa's grandpa's grandpa) came from Europe. He wanted to know how I knew, which led into a great long discussion of the relatives who compiled our family genealogy and of the process of hunting down court records of marriages and births in order to trace one's family history back. So then Daniel wanted to know if he could find his own birth family information by looking at court records. I had to tell him that without a specific name to search for, that would be well nigh impossible. I then thought of hospital records, and how there were probably not too many baby boys born with albinism during the same time period as Daniel. He asked how we would know which hospital. I said that we wouldn't; we would have to ask every hospital in the city (which is a lot), and some might let us see their records, but others would refuse and ask why we cared about knowing, anyway. He agreed that that was likely how it would be, adding, "Some people are just that way: annoying to death!" (And then there is the possibility that he wasn't born in a hospital, or was born in a different city, or the hospital is now defunct, or the records were destroyed, or....) So if Daniel ever wants to search for his birth parents, it will be daunting. I don't know if he will choose to or not, but I'm pleased that he feels comfortable discussing the possibility with me. We try to let both our children know that if there comes a point in their life where having more of a connection with their birth parents is important to them, they can search or do whatever they need to without being disloyal or hurting our feelings.
Meanwhile Esther has been telling me lots of stories lately about things that "really happened" when she was a baby in her orphanage. For example, she had her own bottle and another baby chewed it up and it had to be thrown away. All the stories have to do with something the valued being destroyed and taken away from her. I don't think she is really remembering these things (for example, she held up a teething toy that she had as a baby with us and insisted that she had one just like it in the orphanage until another baby chewed it up), but they represent very real losses nonetheless. This past weekend she was saying some hurtful things to Daniel, so I took her into her room to have a private talk. I had intended to talk about how she was treating her brother, but instead we ended up talking about loss. She told me another orphanage story, this time that she had had a blankie that she loved, but a bad guy came and took it away and tore it up, and she cried. She told me that she still misses that blankie. (Given how fast and thoroughly she attached to the green blankie that we brought to her in China, I have often wondered if she was attached to something before we met her. If she was, it didn't come with her.) I asked her if she might be missing the blankie because she was thinking about her birth family and was missing them. She looked at me strangely and said no, then told me again how much she missed the blankie. I stated that babies don't get to take anything with them when they go to a new family. She started crying hard, grabbed me tight, and said, "YES!" Then she added, "When babies have to go to a new family that they don't know, they feel so scared." My poor baby! So she cried about that for a while, and then was ready to move on with life (including the delayed talk about how to treat one's brother). My understanding is that a lot of kids start to understand and grieve the losses of adoption at about age five, so we seem to be right on target.
Then there was the evening that Daniel was hanging out with me in the kitchen and, a propos of nothing, asked, "Mommy, can I go back to China? I mean, I know I can go back to visit, but I still won't be an orphan, right?" I assured him that we will still be family even when he is in China. "Can you send me back to the orphanage?" "We don't want to send you back to the orphanage!...but no, even if we wanted to we couldn't. One a child is adopted in China, their family is responsible for them for the rest of their lives. Occasionally if a child is really not getting on well with their family, their new family might find a different family for them. But it is still that family's responsibility to make sure the child is taken care of." Apparently, that answer was satisfactory, and we moved on to other things.
And finally, Esther's school's open house last week gave me the chance to address an issue that has been nagging at me for a while: the Boy on the Bus. Esther doesn't know his name. But one day near the beginning of school they were sitting near each other on the bus and he informed her that she is Mexican. [As a side note, I wonder how many other people locally have thought that? I have more than once had a stranger tell me that she looks like Dora the Explorer, which she does with her big eyes and her haircut. But it hadn't occurred to me before now that they might actually have thought she is Hispanic.] Esther corrected the boy that she is Chinese, and he (according to her retelling) said, "Chinese?!?" in that over-the-top dramatic way that kindergarteners have. Esther seemed mildly upset, but not to the point where we needed to call the bus driver. Over the next few days I checked in with her to see if anything more had happened, and she said she wasn't sitting near him anymore. But then one day she told me that he had said to her, "Chinese, Japanese, look at these!" And another day she told me, as if it were a good joke, that when they line up for the bus she and her bus buddy say "Chinese" to the boy and he shrieks and runs on the bus and they laugh at him. She seemed to find it entertaining, but I was not thrilled with the ongoing drama. I can't really blame the kid for not knowing the difference between Mexican, Chinese and Japanese; he's only in kindergarten and we live in a very non-diverse community. But it's not fair to Esther to have to spend her life explaining herself to people. So before the open house I spent an hour or two hunting up the names of children's books and websites that might help children learn how to talk about their differences in positive ways rather than teasing and being dramatic about them. I told Esther before we left that I was going to give her teacher and this other child's teacher (Esther was able to tell me what class he was in) some ideas about how to help kids talk respectfully about having different skin and hair. I had a nice chat with Esther's teacher, part of which Esther was present for and part of which she wasn't. Then as we were getting ready to leave Esther reminded me in no uncertain terms that I was going to speak with the other teacher, and took my hand and towed me over to that classroom. The other teacher was very receptive as well. I have no idea if anything has come of my talking with the teachers, but Esther's reaction to my doing so showed me that the situation really did bother her, even though she was treating it as a joke. And I'm glad that I sent the message--to her if to no-one else--that she has the right to be treated respectfully and it's okay to stand up for herself if someone is hurting her feelings in ignorance. I'll also be thinking carefully about what books I pick out when I go read to her class (which I do once a week).
So, lots going on internally in the last nine days or so. Phew!
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
His Majesty
Sometimes I tell Daniel he's a drama king. (And then he always asks me what that means. Do you know how hard it is to explain that concept in your second language??) He just cracks me up sometimes with his range of facial expressions and his ability to exaggerate. ("Mommy, I'm STARVING! I haven't eaten in HOURS! WHEN are you going to finish dinner? I'm about to die of hunger!")
Now, he has a new claim to royalty:
In case you can't read his sash, it says Homecoming King! Yes, his eighth grade class (of about 200 students!) decided that, white hair, broken English, vision aids, quirky behavior, and all, Daniel was the classmate they most wanted to represent their school spirit. We are very proud of him! We think he is pleased, too. In good old-fashioned Chinese humility he hasn't said much about it, but he hung his crown up on the wall near his bed and he went off to school the day after homecoming wearing his rosette and his little sparkly pin that says "Court" on it.
It was quite a contrast from the afternoon of the homecoming event, when he insisted that he didn't want to go, and he definitely wasn't going to change his clothes. (At the time, he was wearing a traffic-cone-orange T-shirt...I'm sure that would have made quite a splash on the field!) I'm not sure why he goes through the motions of sabotaging himself before big events. Nerves, maybe? Anyway, when the time came to go he changed into his dress pants and button-down shirt without protest. He even submitted to a belt. We teased him that he ought to wear a tie, which brought out all his drama king talents. He didn't know that Tim doesn't actually own a tie that matches that striped shirt, so he was in no real danger.
Once we got to the football game, Daniel took off with his friends. I got a picture of him at one point completely surrounded by fashionably-dressed girls, apparently all fussing over him (most of his friends are female--and most of the friends he talks about at home were also part of the homecoming court). Unfortunately it was already dusk, so while the photo will help me remember the moment, it wouldn't convey much to any of my Dear Readers if I posted it!
When halftime came, the cheerleaders made a triumphal arch down the middle of the field, and the members of homecoming court passed through it with all due pomp and circumstance while their names and their parents' names were announced to the crowd.
After everyone had come through and taken their places in front of the arch, the Homecoming Queen and King were announced (in that order). Students had voted for the king and queen out of the three boys and three girls previously chosen as eighth grade class representatives. It happened that Daniel's escort was chosen as queen. She stepped forward graciously to accept her tiara, while her mother (at least, I assume it was her mother!) squealed like a teenager, jumped up and down, and ran over to hug her friend. Then Daniel was announced as king. I'm not sure he quite knew what was going on at that point, but he grinned real big and raised his hand to let the master of ceremonies know where he was. Then he figured out what he was supposed to do, and went over by the queen to be sashed and crowned.
(I didn't get as good pictures as I would have liked, partly because I wasn't aggressive enough and partly because the camera's settings weren't right for the lighting conditions, and when I went to adjust them I discovered that the menu had been changed into Chinese! Hmm, I wonder how that might have happened?? So Daniel has asked the teacher in charge of photography to load some of the official pictures onto his (Daniel's) USB, and I think we will get them eventually.)
After the football game had resumed, Daniel received many congratulations and took pictures with all of his friends, which he found already uploaded to his Instagram account when we got home. At one point he had thought he would want to leave right after the ceremony, but in the event he was too busy socializing, and we were very happy we had made Esther take a nap in the afternoon! She did enjoy watching the football game, climbing on the bleachers, and especially watching the cheerleaders.
The day after the homecoming game Daniel attended the homecoming dance at school. I went, too, as chaperone. It was a fascinating sociological experience. :-) Some kids danced, while many just "hung out" with friends (and large clusters of girls followed the time-honored tradition of all going to the bathroom together). Some kids wore jeans, while I saw a few suits and dresses that would not have been out of place at a prom. A couple of kids appeared to have come as dates, but that was the exception (and I know the school doesn't encourage it). There were a few songs that all the kids seemed to know specific moves to. I mentioned it to the vice-principal, and she said they actually teach those dances in gym ahead of time so that every kid can have the option of dancing and not feeling stupid when those songs come on. I thought that was a great idea!
I had expected Daniel to spend the evening hanging out with his BFF (the girl in the sparkly shirt in the top picture below) and her entourage, but he made the rounds of the gym, interacting with anyone he knew. He and another boy made up some wild and crazy dance moves together; he sang along with one of the songs in company with the school custodian (who is awesome, all the kids love him!), and he even slow-danced for a few minutes with a girl that I didn't recognize. (Don't worry, grandmas, middle school slow dances are pretty tame. The girl puts her hands on the boy's shoulders, the boy puts his hands on the girl's waist, and they hold each other at arms length while rocking back and forth to the music. On a couple of occasions I saw several slow-dancing couples line themselves up so that the girls could talk sideways to each other while dancing. And I probably saw more girls slow-dancing with other girls than with boys. (In that case, both girls put their hands on each other's shoulders.) Apparently, at this age, it's still all about the friends!)
I was impressed how well Daniel has learned the unspoken rules of social interaction. Last year I wanted to chaperone Daniel's dance (the one he ended up missing out on when he got strep throat) because we were worried about how he might behave. This year, I just wanted to see what it was like and to be a resource for Daniel if he needed anything. He did ask me a couple of times what time it was and when we were going home (he doesn't tend to like crowded, echo-y places), but he stuck it out to the end and then planted himself in the hall as a self-appointed farewell committee. Funny boy!
A lot of people have said (very complimentary) things to us about Daniel being Homecoming King. Honestly, I have been a little surprised how much meaning some people attached to it. Yes, it's an honor. We're very proud of how well he's adjusted (and how hard he's worked!), and his election is a testament to that. But a kid with a less exuberant personality could have worked equally hard and adjusted equally well, and not gotten picked for homecoming court, yet we would have been equally proud. So while we have gotten lots of admiring comments about Daniel recently, my most favorite one hands down was by another parent chaperone at the dance, who told me that Daniel is "a good kid" and that her three children, at least two of whom are in a younger grade than he is, think very highly of him. If he has won the respect of kids who have nothing to offer him socially, then that suggests not just popularity but character. And that is something that we can be very proud of!
Now, he has a new claim to royalty:
In case you can't read his sash, it says Homecoming King! Yes, his eighth grade class (of about 200 students!) decided that, white hair, broken English, vision aids, quirky behavior, and all, Daniel was the classmate they most wanted to represent their school spirit. We are very proud of him! We think he is pleased, too. In good old-fashioned Chinese humility he hasn't said much about it, but he hung his crown up on the wall near his bed and he went off to school the day after homecoming wearing his rosette and his little sparkly pin that says "Court" on it.
It was quite a contrast from the afternoon of the homecoming event, when he insisted that he didn't want to go, and he definitely wasn't going to change his clothes. (At the time, he was wearing a traffic-cone-orange T-shirt...I'm sure that would have made quite a splash on the field!) I'm not sure why he goes through the motions of sabotaging himself before big events. Nerves, maybe? Anyway, when the time came to go he changed into his dress pants and button-down shirt without protest. He even submitted to a belt. We teased him that he ought to wear a tie, which brought out all his drama king talents. He didn't know that Tim doesn't actually own a tie that matches that striped shirt, so he was in no real danger.
Once we got to the football game, Daniel took off with his friends. I got a picture of him at one point completely surrounded by fashionably-dressed girls, apparently all fussing over him (most of his friends are female--and most of the friends he talks about at home were also part of the homecoming court). Unfortunately it was already dusk, so while the photo will help me remember the moment, it wouldn't convey much to any of my Dear Readers if I posted it!
When halftime came, the cheerleaders made a triumphal arch down the middle of the field, and the members of homecoming court passed through it with all due pomp and circumstance while their names and their parents' names were announced to the crowd.
After everyone had come through and taken their places in front of the arch, the Homecoming Queen and King were announced (in that order). Students had voted for the king and queen out of the three boys and three girls previously chosen as eighth grade class representatives. It happened that Daniel's escort was chosen as queen. She stepped forward graciously to accept her tiara, while her mother (at least, I assume it was her mother!) squealed like a teenager, jumped up and down, and ran over to hug her friend. Then Daniel was announced as king. I'm not sure he quite knew what was going on at that point, but he grinned real big and raised his hand to let the master of ceremonies know where he was. Then he figured out what he was supposed to do, and went over by the queen to be sashed and crowned.
(I didn't get as good pictures as I would have liked, partly because I wasn't aggressive enough and partly because the camera's settings weren't right for the lighting conditions, and when I went to adjust them I discovered that the menu had been changed into Chinese! Hmm, I wonder how that might have happened?? So Daniel has asked the teacher in charge of photography to load some of the official pictures onto his (Daniel's) USB, and I think we will get them eventually.)
After the football game had resumed, Daniel received many congratulations and took pictures with all of his friends, which he found already uploaded to his Instagram account when we got home. At one point he had thought he would want to leave right after the ceremony, but in the event he was too busy socializing, and we were very happy we had made Esther take a nap in the afternoon! She did enjoy watching the football game, climbing on the bleachers, and especially watching the cheerleaders.
The day after the homecoming game Daniel attended the homecoming dance at school. I went, too, as chaperone. It was a fascinating sociological experience. :-) Some kids danced, while many just "hung out" with friends (and large clusters of girls followed the time-honored tradition of all going to the bathroom together). Some kids wore jeans, while I saw a few suits and dresses that would not have been out of place at a prom. A couple of kids appeared to have come as dates, but that was the exception (and I know the school doesn't encourage it). There were a few songs that all the kids seemed to know specific moves to. I mentioned it to the vice-principal, and she said they actually teach those dances in gym ahead of time so that every kid can have the option of dancing and not feeling stupid when those songs come on. I thought that was a great idea!
I had expected Daniel to spend the evening hanging out with his BFF (the girl in the sparkly shirt in the top picture below) and her entourage, but he made the rounds of the gym, interacting with anyone he knew. He and another boy made up some wild and crazy dance moves together; he sang along with one of the songs in company with the school custodian (who is awesome, all the kids love him!), and he even slow-danced for a few minutes with a girl that I didn't recognize. (Don't worry, grandmas, middle school slow dances are pretty tame. The girl puts her hands on the boy's shoulders, the boy puts his hands on the girl's waist, and they hold each other at arms length while rocking back and forth to the music. On a couple of occasions I saw several slow-dancing couples line themselves up so that the girls could talk sideways to each other while dancing. And I probably saw more girls slow-dancing with other girls than with boys. (In that case, both girls put their hands on each other's shoulders.) Apparently, at this age, it's still all about the friends!)
I was impressed how well Daniel has learned the unspoken rules of social interaction. Last year I wanted to chaperone Daniel's dance (the one he ended up missing out on when he got strep throat) because we were worried about how he might behave. This year, I just wanted to see what it was like and to be a resource for Daniel if he needed anything. He did ask me a couple of times what time it was and when we were going home (he doesn't tend to like crowded, echo-y places), but he stuck it out to the end and then planted himself in the hall as a self-appointed farewell committee. Funny boy!
A lot of people have said (very complimentary) things to us about Daniel being Homecoming King. Honestly, I have been a little surprised how much meaning some people attached to it. Yes, it's an honor. We're very proud of how well he's adjusted (and how hard he's worked!), and his election is a testament to that. But a kid with a less exuberant personality could have worked equally hard and adjusted equally well, and not gotten picked for homecoming court, yet we would have been equally proud. So while we have gotten lots of admiring comments about Daniel recently, my most favorite one hands down was by another parent chaperone at the dance, who told me that Daniel is "a good kid" and that her three children, at least two of whom are in a younger grade than he is, think very highly of him. If he has won the respect of kids who have nothing to offer him socially, then that suggests not just popularity but character. And that is something that we can be very proud of!
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Processing
A couple nights ago at dinner, I reprimanded Esther for eating with her fingers (which she tends to do when she's tired). She asked why babies eat with their fingers and I explained that babies don't have the fine motor coordination to use utensils, so they have to use their fingers, but big girls are capable of using forks and spoons. That apparently got her thinking about what babies are and aren't able to do for themselves, because a few minutes later she was asking, "How come mommies and daddies and grandmas and grandpas and great-grandmas and great-grandpas and...birth mothers and fathers, can't take care of their babies?" (Just the kind of conversation I like to start two minutes before bedtime. Not.) I said something about some parents having situations in their life that don't let them take good care of a baby. Leaning forward, eyes wide and serious, Esther suggested, "What if a birth mother was deaf? She wouldn't be able to hear her baby cry! She wouldn't know when it needed to eat, and the baby would get so hungry! And she wouldn't know when it was tired, and it would just fall asleep crawling on the floor!" I agreed that babies need parents who know what they need so they can take care of them. Esther thought of more examples: "What if a tornado came? The mother wouldn't know about the tornado because she couldn't listen to the news, and the baby might get blown around!" [Here the conversation took a detour into the topic of tornado safety.] I will confess that I had to bite my tongue in a couple of places to keep from smiling as the story got wilder and more elaborate. But she was intensely earnest, and I couldn't do that to her. Eventually (I'm just reporting the gist of the conversation here), Esther wound up with, "If parents can't take care of their baby, they need to find a family that can, quick!" I agreed with her that if parents aren't able to meet a baby's needs or protect it, then it is a very responsible choice to let the baby have a family that can. I suggested a couple more likely circumstances that might prevent parents from taking care of a baby, and then the conversation turned to other topics and we headed for bed. (I decided this was not the time to educate Esther on the abilities of people with disabilities. I have no idea where the thought of birth parents being deaf came from!)
Much as I'm bemused by some of the details of the scenario Esther came up with, I'm relieved by the broad strokes. In her story, there is nothing wrong or bad about the baby. It's an ordinary baby, that has the same needs as any other baby and deserves to be cared for and protected. And there's nothing bad or mean about the parents. They are ordinary adults who care about the baby even though circumstances prevent them from caring for it. Is the real story more complicated? Probably, and Esther will no doubt process those complications as she gets older. But for now, this is a healthy foundation to build on.
Much as I'm bemused by some of the details of the scenario Esther came up with, I'm relieved by the broad strokes. In her story, there is nothing wrong or bad about the baby. It's an ordinary baby, that has the same needs as any other baby and deserves to be cared for and protected. And there's nothing bad or mean about the parents. They are ordinary adults who care about the baby even though circumstances prevent them from caring for it. Is the real story more complicated? Probably, and Esther will no doubt process those complications as she gets older. But for now, this is a healthy foundation to build on.
Friday, September 28, 2012
The shape of contentment
I promise I'll get back into blogging one of these days, hopefully soon! But right now I'm sneaking a quick moment with the computer (while Tim and Daniel hunt up galvanized nails for a science project) to write about...pretty much nothing.
Our evening activities were not newsworthy. We had a late supper. Esther busily went back and forth charging her new glow-in-the-dark monster teeth and dragging me into her dark room with her to try them out. Daniel deconstructed a battery to see what was inside, which led to him and Tim watching educational videos about batteries on the internet and, now, trying to make their own "battery" out of...a potato? spare change? I'm not sure which version they decided to try, but anyway they are bonding over science. And Esther, after exhausting the possibilities of her glowing teeth, lay on top of me and "read" a book while I chatted with a friend on the phone. Now she's peacefully asleep. So, no calls to the newspaper, but I am loving how we spent the evening being very much ourselves while enjoying each other. I do believe I love these times better than the lows and highs (yes, even better than the highs!) that feel like they've characterized our life lately. These non-newsworthy times quickly fade into hazy half-recollection, but they leave a flavor in our lives that I will remember. It's the flavor of contentment.
Our evening activities were not newsworthy. We had a late supper. Esther busily went back and forth charging her new glow-in-the-dark monster teeth and dragging me into her dark room with her to try them out. Daniel deconstructed a battery to see what was inside, which led to him and Tim watching educational videos about batteries on the internet and, now, trying to make their own "battery" out of...a potato? spare change? I'm not sure which version they decided to try, but anyway they are bonding over science. And Esther, after exhausting the possibilities of her glowing teeth, lay on top of me and "read" a book while I chatted with a friend on the phone. Now she's peacefully asleep. So, no calls to the newspaper, but I am loving how we spent the evening being very much ourselves while enjoying each other. I do believe I love these times better than the lows and highs (yes, even better than the highs!) that feel like they've characterized our life lately. These non-newsworthy times quickly fade into hazy half-recollection, but they leave a flavor in our lives that I will remember. It's the flavor of contentment.
Monday, July 16, 2012
School
It's been ages since I last posted about school on here! But that's not to say that nothing of note happened in school. On the whole, it was a very good year for Daniel. Not so much in terms of academic learning, although more of that happened than I would have predicted. But Daniel learned lots of English, began to internalize some American social mores (that one is still a work in progress!), made some real friends (all girls), and developed a more positive self-image.
Some things that I loved about school (besides that I didn't have Daniel attached to my person 24-7!):
Although Daniel couldn't begin to do what the other kids were doing academically, his teachers let him develop a classroom niche as a helper. He was the one who turned lights on and off for class videos, passed things out, and helped the teachers troubleshoot their technology when it didn't work as expected. So Daniel felt useful and competent, and got a great boost in self-esteem from peers thinking he was really smart to figure out the tech stuff.
In choir and gym, by the last half of the year, Daniel was just a regular student. He did what the other kids did (and was good at it!), was held to the same expectations as the other kids, and got actual letter grades.
Teachers, peers and administrators genuinely enjoyed Daniel. (Well, most of his peers--he would come home from time to time talking about "bad kids" or "annoying kids" who would trip or push other kids (apparently not just him) or try to get them in trouble. I offered to call the school about it but he would have none of it.) Teacher reports about Daniel frequently contained sentiments like "a joy to have in class." And whenever I was with Daniel in school there would be kids calling out, "Hi Daniel!" every little bit. One day I had to get him for a dentist appointment, and as he walked by the gym on his way to meet me at the front office I could hear girls from inside the gym class screaming his name. It sounded like a whole contingent of fans, but he told me later it was just two. :-) Daniel can be charming and exuberant at home and apparently is charming and exuberant almost all of the time at school, which may help to account for his popularity. Tim commented at one point, "That probably explains why he comes home so tired every day, if he's 'on' all the time at school." I know Daniel's teachers also appreciated his curiosity, his genuine interest in understanding things, and his helpfulness. And I suspect his classmates responded to his great sense of humor and his "realness."
Some things that happened the second half of the school year:
After the incident in which Daniel walked home from school by himself despite explicit and repeated instructions not to, I asked his vision teacher for advice. She promptly got him an evaluation for orientation and mobility services, and he now has a special teacher who meets with him once a month and teaches him skills for walking safely within the community. He does not yet have the green light to walk home alone, but that is the goal. Have I mentioned how much I love his vision teacher???
During the winter, Daniel's geography class studied China. His teacher asked me if he would be interested in doing a class presentation about China, maybe with some pictures of his city. At first he didn't want to do it, but I insisted, and he ended up getting really invested in the presentation. We looked through pictures together (some that he has gathered of his social welfare institute and school; others that Tim and I have from our two years in Jinan) and picked out some that we thought would give Daniel's classmates the flavor of Jinan, then practiced what to say about them. I accompanied Daniel to his class for moral support. He did a super job! His classmates didn't have any trouble understanding his English, even if it was a little creative, and they were riveted. Afterwards they asked lots of questions. Daniel's teacher was so pleased that she asked him if he could come to her other five periods of 7th-grade geography and do his presentation for the other students! So pretty much the entire grade got to hear Daniel present, plus a couple of administrators made time to come in for those few minutes. He got great feedback on how interesting his life story is and how good his English has gotten. (He told me afterwards, "Mama, I'm the kind of person who doesn't have to prepare to speak in public; I just get up there and talk!" And truly, he has great public presence, although the extemporaneous thing will only take him so far.) Daniel's teacher asked him a little bit more about his social welfare institute privately after his last presentation, and according to his account, he brought her to tears with the following definition of a fuliyuan (social welfare institute): "Mommy Daddy no want baby, uh, put-it-back baby in-a street, uh, police hug baby, uh, put-it-back baby in-a fuliyuan." The students in at least one class also caught on that many of the children who end up in social welfare institutes have disabilities, and apparently there was a pretty passionate discussion about how unfair that is to judge somebody like Daniel based on their disabilities.
A couple of months before school finished, I asked for a meeting with Daniel's teachers. I wanted to know what Daniel was actually doing in classes, given that his standard answer to "What did you do today?" was "I played on the computer." I know Daniel well enough to take such answers with a grain of salt, so I really wanted to hear from his teachers. I was delighted with the results. Daniel's teachers reported that he participated in group activities to the best of his ability (his science teacher reported that he tried to tell the other members of his lab group what to do!), and that even when he did not seem to be paying attention, he would be the first to notice that they were getting ready to show a video and he would jump up to turn off the lights and go up to the board and watch. (He cannot see well enough to see a video from his seat.) His math teacher also said that he was attempting the same problems the other kids were working on in class, including some stuff that is way more advanced than anything I had done with him. They all agreed that Daniel is very bright and wants to learn. I think that myself, but it was nice to hear that he had made the same impression on his teachers!
School behavior, on the other hand, was not always angelic. Daniel spent the last 23 days of school trying very hard not to get a detention, because he was only one lunch detention away from a day of in-school detention. Mind you, it is not all that difficult to get a detention at his school; two of Daniel's detentions were for "disrupting the educational process" (by disassembling a classmate's mechanical pencil when he had nothing else to do) and for "failing to exit in an appropriate manner" (because he was running loudly through the hall in sandals after a previous reminder that running and loudness are not permitted). Not that the above are desired school behaviors, but I was glad he escaped in-school for this year!
At the teacher meeting, I met Daniel's new long-term substitute math teacher for the first time. She was very sentimental about Daniel and what a great kid he is and how inspirational he is, to the point that I was mildly irritated. I was more than mildly irritated when Daniel came home saying that she said he could call her his "school mama" and he wished she could be his mama. Obviously Ms. Starry-Eyed Math Teacher has never heard of attachment theory! (I found out later that he took to addressing her as "chocolate mama" and the other kids picked up on it, so by the end of the year she was everybody's "chocolate mama.") Since it was almost the end of the school year and I doubted she would be encountering recently adopted kids on a regular basis in the future, I elected not to say anything. I was not disappointed, however, to hear that she will be at a different school next year. (I should clarify that I don't bear her personal ill-will--I'm confident her intentions were good--but it wasn't helpful for our family at the place we are at.)
There were a couple of tragedies at school this year too. One involved a student in Daniel's grade, and it hit some of his classmates pretty hard. The day they learned about this situation, it was the main topic of conversation in choir class. According to Daniel's account of events, somebody decided that they should pray for the girl involved, but then was too nervous to do the actual praying. So they asked Daniel to pray. And he did. Out loud and in English. As best he could remember it to tell me, his prayer went something like: "Dear God, please give [the girl's name] peace at your side and tell her that students love her and [our family] loves her." I thought it was very appropriate for the situation. And it did make me wonder what Daniel has been doing or talking about in school that his classmates thought to ask him to offer a public prayer. We are proud of him being able and willing to step up and offer that kind of leadership.
The end of the school year finished with a bang. Two days before school ended, I got to go see the 7th-grade awards ceremony. I hadn't been sure what to expect, but it turned out to involve presenting certificates to any student who had accomplished pretty much anything. The students were pretty good about clapping for all of their classmates, and from time to time a cluster of them would stand up to cheer for a particular friend. Daniel got a certificate for "faithful attendance"--and more than half the student body gave him a standing ovation. I just about started crying in the middle of the auditorium. Then on the last day of school Tim and Esther and I all went to the final assembly. Part of the assembly was a talent show, for which Daniel had auditioned and was one of ten students chosen to perform. (Like with his geography presentation, he was very diffident at first, and would probably not have gone through with the audition if I had not insisted. I'm thinking that next year I will insist more often!) The performances were all good: a gymnastics routine (done by somebody Esther recognized from her gym); an original rap on the topic of bullying; an original song performed on the piano; a drum solo; an a cappella duet; and several more traditional musical numbers (mostly current love songs). Daniel sang one of the songs that had been written for him when he was his orphanage's chief P.R. kid. It is called "Mama," and ironically is addressed to the orphanage caregivers, describing how the orphanage is the "family" that the speaker needs in order to grow up well. But since it is all in Chinese, nobody but Daniel's one Chinese-speaking classmate was any the wiser. Daniel spent the several days before the performance insisting that he didn't want us to come, and that he would be embarrassed if we showed up. We told him that was tough, we are family and family come to each other's special events. Then he called us shortly before his performance to make sure we had gotten the video camera ready! :-) When Daniel was called to the front, his music teacher got ready to introduce him, but he grabbed the microphone away from her. Then he told the students that he wanted to sing this song for his mommy because June 13th is his family day and last June 13th I came to China to get him. He went on to nail the performance. I think his voice was still changing when we met him, but now he is much more confident in his new tenor, and performing that very familiar song, he sounded amazing! He got a standing ovation that time, too. Later, as we were getting ready to leave, several of his teachers pulled us aside to say how much they had enjoyed getting to know him this year, and to give him a group gift: a motion activated soap dispenser! He had been greatly admiring the soap dispenser in his science teacher's classroom, and I don't think they could have gotten anything that pleased him more.
And then we brought him home and began summer vacation. :-)
Some things that I loved about school (besides that I didn't have Daniel attached to my person 24-7!):
Although Daniel couldn't begin to do what the other kids were doing academically, his teachers let him develop a classroom niche as a helper. He was the one who turned lights on and off for class videos, passed things out, and helped the teachers troubleshoot their technology when it didn't work as expected. So Daniel felt useful and competent, and got a great boost in self-esteem from peers thinking he was really smart to figure out the tech stuff.
In choir and gym, by the last half of the year, Daniel was just a regular student. He did what the other kids did (and was good at it!), was held to the same expectations as the other kids, and got actual letter grades.
Teachers, peers and administrators genuinely enjoyed Daniel. (Well, most of his peers--he would come home from time to time talking about "bad kids" or "annoying kids" who would trip or push other kids (apparently not just him) or try to get them in trouble. I offered to call the school about it but he would have none of it.) Teacher reports about Daniel frequently contained sentiments like "a joy to have in class." And whenever I was with Daniel in school there would be kids calling out, "Hi Daniel!" every little bit. One day I had to get him for a dentist appointment, and as he walked by the gym on his way to meet me at the front office I could hear girls from inside the gym class screaming his name. It sounded like a whole contingent of fans, but he told me later it was just two. :-) Daniel can be charming and exuberant at home and apparently is charming and exuberant almost all of the time at school, which may help to account for his popularity. Tim commented at one point, "That probably explains why he comes home so tired every day, if he's 'on' all the time at school." I know Daniel's teachers also appreciated his curiosity, his genuine interest in understanding things, and his helpfulness. And I suspect his classmates responded to his great sense of humor and his "realness."
Some things that happened the second half of the school year:
After the incident in which Daniel walked home from school by himself despite explicit and repeated instructions not to, I asked his vision teacher for advice. She promptly got him an evaluation for orientation and mobility services, and he now has a special teacher who meets with him once a month and teaches him skills for walking safely within the community. He does not yet have the green light to walk home alone, but that is the goal. Have I mentioned how much I love his vision teacher???
During the winter, Daniel's geography class studied China. His teacher asked me if he would be interested in doing a class presentation about China, maybe with some pictures of his city. At first he didn't want to do it, but I insisted, and he ended up getting really invested in the presentation. We looked through pictures together (some that he has gathered of his social welfare institute and school; others that Tim and I have from our two years in Jinan) and picked out some that we thought would give Daniel's classmates the flavor of Jinan, then practiced what to say about them. I accompanied Daniel to his class for moral support. He did a super job! His classmates didn't have any trouble understanding his English, even if it was a little creative, and they were riveted. Afterwards they asked lots of questions. Daniel's teacher was so pleased that she asked him if he could come to her other five periods of 7th-grade geography and do his presentation for the other students! So pretty much the entire grade got to hear Daniel present, plus a couple of administrators made time to come in for those few minutes. He got great feedback on how interesting his life story is and how good his English has gotten. (He told me afterwards, "Mama, I'm the kind of person who doesn't have to prepare to speak in public; I just get up there and talk!" And truly, he has great public presence, although the extemporaneous thing will only take him so far.) Daniel's teacher asked him a little bit more about his social welfare institute privately after his last presentation, and according to his account, he brought her to tears with the following definition of a fuliyuan (social welfare institute): "Mommy Daddy no want baby, uh, put-it-back baby in-a street, uh, police hug baby, uh, put-it-back baby in-a fuliyuan." The students in at least one class also caught on that many of the children who end up in social welfare institutes have disabilities, and apparently there was a pretty passionate discussion about how unfair that is to judge somebody like Daniel based on their disabilities.
A couple of months before school finished, I asked for a meeting with Daniel's teachers. I wanted to know what Daniel was actually doing in classes, given that his standard answer to "What did you do today?" was "I played on the computer." I know Daniel well enough to take such answers with a grain of salt, so I really wanted to hear from his teachers. I was delighted with the results. Daniel's teachers reported that he participated in group activities to the best of his ability (his science teacher reported that he tried to tell the other members of his lab group what to do!), and that even when he did not seem to be paying attention, he would be the first to notice that they were getting ready to show a video and he would jump up to turn off the lights and go up to the board and watch. (He cannot see well enough to see a video from his seat.) His math teacher also said that he was attempting the same problems the other kids were working on in class, including some stuff that is way more advanced than anything I had done with him. They all agreed that Daniel is very bright and wants to learn. I think that myself, but it was nice to hear that he had made the same impression on his teachers!
School behavior, on the other hand, was not always angelic. Daniel spent the last 23 days of school trying very hard not to get a detention, because he was only one lunch detention away from a day of in-school detention. Mind you, it is not all that difficult to get a detention at his school; two of Daniel's detentions were for "disrupting the educational process" (by disassembling a classmate's mechanical pencil when he had nothing else to do) and for "failing to exit in an appropriate manner" (because he was running loudly through the hall in sandals after a previous reminder that running and loudness are not permitted). Not that the above are desired school behaviors, but I was glad he escaped in-school for this year!
At the teacher meeting, I met Daniel's new long-term substitute math teacher for the first time. She was very sentimental about Daniel and what a great kid he is and how inspirational he is, to the point that I was mildly irritated. I was more than mildly irritated when Daniel came home saying that she said he could call her his "school mama" and he wished she could be his mama. Obviously Ms. Starry-Eyed Math Teacher has never heard of attachment theory! (I found out later that he took to addressing her as "chocolate mama" and the other kids picked up on it, so by the end of the year she was everybody's "chocolate mama.") Since it was almost the end of the school year and I doubted she would be encountering recently adopted kids on a regular basis in the future, I elected not to say anything. I was not disappointed, however, to hear that she will be at a different school next year. (I should clarify that I don't bear her personal ill-will--I'm confident her intentions were good--but it wasn't helpful for our family at the place we are at.)
There were a couple of tragedies at school this year too. One involved a student in Daniel's grade, and it hit some of his classmates pretty hard. The day they learned about this situation, it was the main topic of conversation in choir class. According to Daniel's account of events, somebody decided that they should pray for the girl involved, but then was too nervous to do the actual praying. So they asked Daniel to pray. And he did. Out loud and in English. As best he could remember it to tell me, his prayer went something like: "Dear God, please give [the girl's name] peace at your side and tell her that students love her and [our family] loves her." I thought it was very appropriate for the situation. And it did make me wonder what Daniel has been doing or talking about in school that his classmates thought to ask him to offer a public prayer. We are proud of him being able and willing to step up and offer that kind of leadership.
The end of the school year finished with a bang. Two days before school ended, I got to go see the 7th-grade awards ceremony. I hadn't been sure what to expect, but it turned out to involve presenting certificates to any student who had accomplished pretty much anything. The students were pretty good about clapping for all of their classmates, and from time to time a cluster of them would stand up to cheer for a particular friend. Daniel got a certificate for "faithful attendance"--and more than half the student body gave him a standing ovation. I just about started crying in the middle of the auditorium. Then on the last day of school Tim and Esther and I all went to the final assembly. Part of the assembly was a talent show, for which Daniel had auditioned and was one of ten students chosen to perform. (Like with his geography presentation, he was very diffident at first, and would probably not have gone through with the audition if I had not insisted. I'm thinking that next year I will insist more often!) The performances were all good: a gymnastics routine (done by somebody Esther recognized from her gym); an original rap on the topic of bullying; an original song performed on the piano; a drum solo; an a cappella duet; and several more traditional musical numbers (mostly current love songs). Daniel sang one of the songs that had been written for him when he was his orphanage's chief P.R. kid. It is called "Mama," and ironically is addressed to the orphanage caregivers, describing how the orphanage is the "family" that the speaker needs in order to grow up well. But since it is all in Chinese, nobody but Daniel's one Chinese-speaking classmate was any the wiser. Daniel spent the several days before the performance insisting that he didn't want us to come, and that he would be embarrassed if we showed up. We told him that was tough, we are family and family come to each other's special events. Then he called us shortly before his performance to make sure we had gotten the video camera ready! :-) When Daniel was called to the front, his music teacher got ready to introduce him, but he grabbed the microphone away from her. Then he told the students that he wanted to sing this song for his mommy because June 13th is his family day and last June 13th I came to China to get him. He went on to nail the performance. I think his voice was still changing when we met him, but now he is much more confident in his new tenor, and performing that very familiar song, he sounded amazing! He got a standing ovation that time, too. Later, as we were getting ready to leave, several of his teachers pulled us aside to say how much they had enjoyed getting to know him this year, and to give him a group gift: a motion activated soap dispenser! He had been greatly admiring the soap dispenser in his science teacher's classroom, and I don't think they could have gotten anything that pleased him more.
And then we brought him home and began summer vacation. :-)
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Finally!
Remember that loose tooth that Esther discovered at three in the morning during a visit to Grandma's house? You know, about six weeks ago? Well, it's finally (finally!) out. I don't know if loose teeth normally take this long, or if this one went slowly because Esther didn't want to yank on it (although she did enjoy wiggling it from time to time), or if it had to do with how the permanent teeth were coming in. Both of her permanent lower front incisors have already erupted, behind the loose baby teeth. So the missing tooth actually doesn't change her smile much, since there's already another tooth there. It's amazing to me how tiny the baby tooth is. The permanent teeth aren't huge either, which is a good thing if she's going to get them this early. Her little mouth doesn't have space for big teeth yet! I still can't believe she's getting her permanent teeth this early, but I guess it's within the range of normal.
Esther is, of course, excited about her tooth coming out. Daniel suggested that she throw it up on the roof, like he did when his lower baby teeth came out. (I've heard of this Chinese tradition; lower teeth are thrown up to make the new permanent ones grow upwards; upper teeth are buried in the ground to make the new permanent teeth grow downwards.) Daddy mentioned that if she put her tooth under her pillow it would be changed into quarters. But, although the quarters held some mystery and allure, she decided that the very best thing to do with her tooth would be to keep it. So we now have a large plastic baggie containing a tiny tooth, labeled with Esther's name and the date and the precise original location of the tooth in her mouth. Her other lower front incisor should follow soon, but I've told her that she's not going to keep every tooth. So the next tooth will likely go to the tooth fairy.
Esther is, of course, excited about her tooth coming out. Daniel suggested that she throw it up on the roof, like he did when his lower baby teeth came out. (I've heard of this Chinese tradition; lower teeth are thrown up to make the new permanent ones grow upwards; upper teeth are buried in the ground to make the new permanent teeth grow downwards.) Daddy mentioned that if she put her tooth under her pillow it would be changed into quarters. But, although the quarters held some mystery and allure, she decided that the very best thing to do with her tooth would be to keep it. So we now have a large plastic baggie containing a tiny tooth, labeled with Esther's name and the date and the precise original location of the tooth in her mouth. Her other lower front incisor should follow soon, but I've told her that she's not going to keep every tooth. So the next tooth will likely go to the tooth fairy.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Happy Birthday, Esther!
In our family, we now have three birthdays within two weeks. First Daniel, then me, then Esther. (Poor Tim has to wait until September for his. I tell him that our next child needs to have a September birthday; he tells me that two is plenty!)
Esther celebrated her 5th birthday this past week, while we were still in Phoenix visiting Tim's family. We started out by all swimming in the hotel pool. Esther could stay in the water for hours and not get bored. Then we went over to Tim's mom's house and Esther spent the afternoon playing with Grandma and Daddy and the dogs and kitten while Daniel and I helped Tim's sister with a bookcase replacement project. In the evening, all of Tim's siblings and their families came over for dinner and an ice cream cake, and both the kids got their birthday presents from that side of the family. Esther liked everything she got, but the funniest thing was her reaction to her gift card from Amazon.com. She was beyond thrilled with it! I don't know if she had any clear idea what she could use it for, but Daniel is crazy about Amazon and also had gotten an Amazon card, so Esther thought she was big stuff to have one of her own. She thinks she is going to use it to buy a pillow pet. She has been asking for one for months, and I have been refusing to buy it for her because I think they're a pointless fad. But I remember how fun it was to have a grandparent buy me something that my parents had declined to spend their money on, so I will admit I was the one who suggested a pillow pet as a use for the gift card. I suggested some other possibilities too, but the pillow pet was the idea that she loved. (She also wants an iPie--aka iPod--but there is no way we are letting a five-year-old have a personal $175 electronic device!)
Esther is very proud of being five. She is working on a mental timeline of her life, and will frequently ask me things like, "How old was I when we did X? Could I talk then?" Since X is often an event within the last year, her questions can come out sounding pretty funny. She loves to talk about what she did when she was a baby, but is a little less invested in being a baby than she was even a few months ago. She does, however, still love her green blankie and still love to be picked "uppy." But even green blankie is fading slightly in importance; one day we went to look for it at bedtime and were shocked to find it still in her bed where she had left it when she got up in the morning! That was just a one-time occurrence, however, and blankie frequently keeps her company while playing or snuggling, and comes along in the car with us when we go to church or on outings.
The world is blessed that there is an Esther in it, and we are especially blessed to have been entrusted with parenting her. Happy birthday to our sweet, almost-grown-up-but-not-too-big-to-snuggle five-year-old!
Esther celebrated her 5th birthday this past week, while we were still in Phoenix visiting Tim's family. We started out by all swimming in the hotel pool. Esther could stay in the water for hours and not get bored. Then we went over to Tim's mom's house and Esther spent the afternoon playing with Grandma and Daddy and the dogs and kitten while Daniel and I helped Tim's sister with a bookcase replacement project. In the evening, all of Tim's siblings and their families came over for dinner and an ice cream cake, and both the kids got their birthday presents from that side of the family. Esther liked everything she got, but the funniest thing was her reaction to her gift card from Amazon.com. She was beyond thrilled with it! I don't know if she had any clear idea what she could use it for, but Daniel is crazy about Amazon and also had gotten an Amazon card, so Esther thought she was big stuff to have one of her own. She thinks she is going to use it to buy a pillow pet. She has been asking for one for months, and I have been refusing to buy it for her because I think they're a pointless fad. But I remember how fun it was to have a grandparent buy me something that my parents had declined to spend their money on, so I will admit I was the one who suggested a pillow pet as a use for the gift card. I suggested some other possibilities too, but the pillow pet was the idea that she loved. (She also wants an iPie--aka iPod--but there is no way we are letting a five-year-old have a personal $175 electronic device!)
Esther is very proud of being five. She is working on a mental timeline of her life, and will frequently ask me things like, "How old was I when we did X? Could I talk then?" Since X is often an event within the last year, her questions can come out sounding pretty funny. She loves to talk about what she did when she was a baby, but is a little less invested in being a baby than she was even a few months ago. She does, however, still love her green blankie and still love to be picked "uppy." But even green blankie is fading slightly in importance; one day we went to look for it at bedtime and were shocked to find it still in her bed where she had left it when she got up in the morning! That was just a one-time occurrence, however, and blankie frequently keeps her company while playing or snuggling, and comes along in the car with us when we go to church or on outings.
The world is blessed that there is an Esther in it, and we are especially blessed to have been entrusted with parenting her. Happy birthday to our sweet, almost-grown-up-but-not-too-big-to-snuggle five-year-old!
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Happy Birthday Daniel!
Today, I'm the mother of a fifteen-year-old. Where did the last fifteen years go?!? (Just kidding!) Seriously, though...for whatever reason, it didn't feel too odd to me to be the mother of a young teenager, but fifteen feels old. However, he is still our own dear Daniel, growing up on his own timetable, and it is a good feeling to be marking all our family's important occasions together with him for the second time. Last year at this time we celebrated in China by going out to Karaoke, eating at Pizza Hut (Daniel's first time eating pizza; he was a fan from the start), and eating a not-too-sweet Chinese bakery cake in our hotel room.
This year, Daniel's activity of choice was (drum-roll, please)...going to IKEA! He had been asking recently about home-decorating stores, and I had told him about IKEA, and he really wanted to check it out. We don't have one anywhere near us, but there is one near my parents, so it was the perfect opportunity. My dad, brother, Tim, Daniel and I all went. Daniel skipped a few sections entirely, but examined every bedroom display that they had. He also liked the comforter section downstairs.
We also managed to find him an Asian-style cake. When we picked it up, he told me, "I want to have my birthday here every year!" (Our small city does not sell anything remotely resembling an Asian cake.) So for dessert tonight, we had non-sweet (but actually pretty good) cake, watermelon, and Neapolitan ice cream (another Daniel favorite). Daniel was a happy boy. :-) He didn't get much in the way of presents, since he has already gotten his present from us (a new mattress) and his presents from Tim's side of the family are waiting for when we visit them. But he was quite pleased with cash from great-grandma and a projection clock (complete with white noise maker and radio) from my parents.
We have some pictures, but I'm too tired to post them right now. Maybe tomorrow.
This year, Daniel's activity of choice was (drum-roll, please)...going to IKEA! He had been asking recently about home-decorating stores, and I had told him about IKEA, and he really wanted to check it out. We don't have one anywhere near us, but there is one near my parents, so it was the perfect opportunity. My dad, brother, Tim, Daniel and I all went. Daniel skipped a few sections entirely, but examined every bedroom display that they had. He also liked the comforter section downstairs.
We also managed to find him an Asian-style cake. When we picked it up, he told me, "I want to have my birthday here every year!" (Our small city does not sell anything remotely resembling an Asian cake.) So for dessert tonight, we had non-sweet (but actually pretty good) cake, watermelon, and Neapolitan ice cream (another Daniel favorite). Daniel was a happy boy. :-) He didn't get much in the way of presents, since he has already gotten his present from us (a new mattress) and his presents from Tim's side of the family are waiting for when we visit them. But he was quite pleased with cash from great-grandma and a projection clock (complete with white noise maker and radio) from my parents.
We have some pictures, but I'm too tired to post them right now. Maybe tomorrow.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Happy Family Day, Daniel Huang!
A year ago today, we entered our hotel lobby with some trepidation, wondering what Daniel would really be like and what he would think of us. I do believe the process of adoption is harder on the kids than on the parents, but in any case, becoming instant family with a stranger is not for the faint of heart!
A year later, we have real relationships, a foundation of shared experiences, and some understanding of how each other tick. Can I just say how good that feels?
So, after a year of living life with Daniel, this is the boy we know and love:
Personality/character: curious, kind, intelligent, extroverted, diligent (at least on projects of his own choosing!), helpful, skeptical, authentic, insightful, exuberant, loyal, open, funny, affectionate, outside-the-box thinker, tease
Likes: anything that runs on electricity, mashed potatoes, physical contact, scented stuff (like candles and soaps), friends, music, noodles, sledding, his new mattress, feet (especially Mom's), swimming, ice cream, attention
Dislikes: anything that started life as a dried legume (with the exception of soybean products), wearing glasses, messes (poor kid, our house is always messy!), people being upset (especially if he doesn't know why), waiting to see the doctor/dentist, being stared at, most candy, not knowing what to do next, being ignored
Hobbies: fixing things, taking things apart to see how they work, lovingly arranging the many layers of sheets and mattress pads on his new mattress, helping people, watching the news in Chinese, getting the mail before anybody else does, "getting a rise" out of people, shopping, hanging around Mom, chatting, finding electronics and bed accessories on Amazon.com
Wants: an iPod, wireless headphones, remote switches (so he can turn off his light from in bed), a motion-activated light (he already has the motion-activated soap dispenser), twine and beads for the sort of handicrafts he used to make in China
Talents: fixing things, math, photography, singing
Possible future careers: maintenance technician, contractor, interior designer, plumber, electrician, electrical engineer, architect
Daniel is quite pleased to have a day that is all about him. :-) His first idea for how to spend his family day was to eat lots of mashed potatoes. Then we thought about swimming. But his final choice? Shopping!! We are making a trek to Home Depot (an hour away) and stopping at our favorite Chinese buffet in that city. We may hit some other stores as well (like Lowes, his local favorite!). No promises that we're going to buy any of his beloved gadgets for him, but he will have fun window shopping. And, he wants to go sign up for a library card. It will be a full day, but fun, and very Danielish. :-)
A year later, we have real relationships, a foundation of shared experiences, and some understanding of how each other tick. Can I just say how good that feels?
So, after a year of living life with Daniel, this is the boy we know and love:
Personality/character: curious, kind, intelligent, extroverted, diligent (at least on projects of his own choosing!), helpful, skeptical, authentic, insightful, exuberant, loyal, open, funny, affectionate, outside-the-box thinker, tease
Likes: anything that runs on electricity, mashed potatoes, physical contact, scented stuff (like candles and soaps), friends, music, noodles, sledding, his new mattress, feet (especially Mom's), swimming, ice cream, attention
Dislikes: anything that started life as a dried legume (with the exception of soybean products), wearing glasses, messes (poor kid, our house is always messy!), people being upset (especially if he doesn't know why), waiting to see the doctor/dentist, being stared at, most candy, not knowing what to do next, being ignored
Hobbies: fixing things, taking things apart to see how they work, lovingly arranging the many layers of sheets and mattress pads on his new mattress, helping people, watching the news in Chinese, getting the mail before anybody else does, "getting a rise" out of people, shopping, hanging around Mom, chatting, finding electronics and bed accessories on Amazon.com
Wants: an iPod, wireless headphones, remote switches (so he can turn off his light from in bed), a motion-activated light (he already has the motion-activated soap dispenser), twine and beads for the sort of handicrafts he used to make in China
Talents: fixing things, math, photography, singing
Possible future careers: maintenance technician, contractor, interior designer, plumber, electrician, electrical engineer, architect
Daniel is quite pleased to have a day that is all about him. :-) His first idea for how to spend his family day was to eat lots of mashed potatoes. Then we thought about swimming. But his final choice? Shopping!! We are making a trek to Home Depot (an hour away) and stopping at our favorite Chinese buffet in that city. We may hit some other stores as well (like Lowes, his local favorite!). No promises that we're going to buy any of his beloved gadgets for him, but he will have fun window shopping. And, he wants to go sign up for a library card. It will be a full day, but fun, and very Danielish. :-)
Thursday, May 31, 2012
busy few weeks
After Tim got back from his conference and (mostly) recovered from his stomach virus (or whatever it was), he had a work-related day trip and an evening foster care training, plus we got to spend a couple of hours taking Daniel to the doctor for a follow-up visit for his strep. (The strep ended up being pretty much a non-event by the way; after 12 hours on the antibiotics, Daniel felt fine.)
Then there was our 12-hour power outage. Tim about gave me a heart attack one night by bolting up in bed saying, "What was that noise??" I vaguely recalled there being an ongoing crackling noise at the tail end of my disappearing dream, which was the same noise that had woken Tim up in real life. Now the noise was gone. It had sounded like it came from outside the house, but Tim took a flashlight and went to check. As he reached the end of the hall I saw a bright flash of light, heard a loud bang, and the power was off. So at three in the morning I hauled myself out of bed, groggily hunted down an old electricity bill and called their 1-800-number to report an outage. We thought the couple houses across the street that usually go out with us were affected as well, but it was hard to tell in the middle of the night. Other houses clearly had lights still. Neither child had woken up, although I did hear Daniel talking in his sleep about a clock.
The next morning when I went to wake Daniel up, I looked out his window across the street and solved the mystery of the crackling noise. Our neighbors across the street have an enormous (and I do mean enormous) oak tree that overhangs their living room. Sometimes on windy days I worry about it blowing down on top of their house. At least the tree itself was still standing, but, although it had not been storming the night before, two giant limbs had fallen on the power line and snapped it. Daniel of course rushed through his morning preparations and was out the door fifteen minutes early so that he could survey the damage. I went out with him, being as I didn't know whether or not there might be a live wire on the ground (it turned out later that there was, though thankfully not in the street), and I didn't trust Daniel's vision or curiosity enough to be sure he wouldn't step on it. Our neighbor who owns the house was out too, so we chit-chatted a bit and traded stories, and then I saw Daniel off to the school bus. He was disappointed that he didn't get to stick around and watch the crew come fix the wire. (Our neighbor commented, "He's going to be an electrical engineer; you can see that one coming!" It's interesting how many people say that, or some variation of it, to us. Yes, Daniel has great aptitude and interest in technical things, and I think he will very likely go into a technical career, but why engineer and not electrician? Maybe people assume that with two college-educated parents we will necessarily produce college-educated children, but actually we'll be happy with any career that suits a child's abilities, contributes to the world, and makes a decent living.) Esther did get to watch the electrician and the tree-trimming crew at work, and later she played electrician with Daddy. He was impressed with how well she remembered everything they had done. That one may well choose to become an engineer, although right now she's trying to decide between biology and physics. :-)
We finally got our power back about 3:00, and a few hours later Tim's dear friend from Arizona arrived for a visit. He and Tim have been friends since seventh grade, and he was actually the one who officiated at our wedding. He had a meeting in a city five hours away from us, so he came a couple of days early, rented a car, and made the five-hour trip down just to spend time with us. Now, that's a good friend! We had a wonderful time together. Tim and Mark played lots of pool and table tennis, and Esther hung on his every movement. One morning I overheard her asking him if he would like her to feed him his cereal! (He politely declined.) Daniel was away at school for most of the visit, but he got in on some of the pool action.
Mark left on Friday morning. On Saturday morning, not quite as early as we wanted to, we loaded up the SUV and headed out to my grandmother's house to spend the long weekend with her and celebrate her 88th birthday. We had a great time there as well, even though the air conditioner wasn't working and the temperatures were above ninety degrees. Some of us spent a lot of time in the cool basement! :-) But we wouldn't have traded the visit for anything. Grandma is very special to us, and we love being close enough to go for a weekend. Esther, true to her usual form when traveling, woke up at four in the morning our first night there and insisted it was time to get up. And somewhere during those pre-dawn hours she discovered her first wiggly tooth. Daniel slept fine, but the visit was an interesting preview of what our summer travels may look like. He was calm and pleasant as long as he was in physical contact with me or engaged in conversation with me. And of course he was fine when doing projects, of which he found many: adjusting the drapes, cutting an unused cord off of a recliner, fixing the screen on a door, fixing the back doorbell. But if he wasn't with me or doing a project, he had no idea what to do with himself. We are going to be away from home for three weeks this summer. It could be...interesting!
This week has been a little less busy so far...just dental appointments for two of us, an audition for Daniel to perform in his school's end-of-year talent show, the arrival of Daniel's new mattress (his long-anticipated birthday present), our one-year post-placement visit with our social worker, and an inspection by pest control people to get rid of a possible carpenter ant nest. We're hoping that the actual nest is outside somewhere and the twelve ants Tim killed in our bathroom after we got back from Grandma's house were just scouts, but we've been putting the inspection off long enough!
Then this weekend is the 30 Hour Famine at church. I will be involved the whole time, and Tim and kids may come for some of the Saturday activities. We decided that Daniel isn't ready to do it yet, though I'm hoping he can next year.
Next weekend we have friends from DC taking a detour from a long road trip to come spend the night with us, and the following week we have two medical appointments (one in another city) and Daniel's Family Day, plus packing to go out of town for three weeks. I'm super excited for the trip: we're going to see my family in Oregon, drive down the coast together to northern California to be at a cousin's wedding and see extended family, then fly on to Arizona with my sister and return her to her supported living community before spending almost a week with Tim's family and friends in Phoenix. I suspect the trip will feel long at times, especially with our kids, but I am so looking forward to seeing loved ones I haven't seen in a few years and introducing everyone to Daniel! In particular, Tim's mom is no longer able to fly easily, so this will be her first time meeting her newest grandson. Very special. And for a long time we weren't sure if we were going to be able to do it financially. I was praying hard for us to have the money by the time we needed to decide, and I'm so grateful that we do!
So that's our lives right now. (And I thought things were going to get relaxing once Tim was done with the semester! Ha!)
Then there was our 12-hour power outage. Tim about gave me a heart attack one night by bolting up in bed saying, "What was that noise??" I vaguely recalled there being an ongoing crackling noise at the tail end of my disappearing dream, which was the same noise that had woken Tim up in real life. Now the noise was gone. It had sounded like it came from outside the house, but Tim took a flashlight and went to check. As he reached the end of the hall I saw a bright flash of light, heard a loud bang, and the power was off. So at three in the morning I hauled myself out of bed, groggily hunted down an old electricity bill and called their 1-800-number to report an outage. We thought the couple houses across the street that usually go out with us were affected as well, but it was hard to tell in the middle of the night. Other houses clearly had lights still. Neither child had woken up, although I did hear Daniel talking in his sleep about a clock.
The next morning when I went to wake Daniel up, I looked out his window across the street and solved the mystery of the crackling noise. Our neighbors across the street have an enormous (and I do mean enormous) oak tree that overhangs their living room. Sometimes on windy days I worry about it blowing down on top of their house. At least the tree itself was still standing, but, although it had not been storming the night before, two giant limbs had fallen on the power line and snapped it. Daniel of course rushed through his morning preparations and was out the door fifteen minutes early so that he could survey the damage. I went out with him, being as I didn't know whether or not there might be a live wire on the ground (it turned out later that there was, though thankfully not in the street), and I didn't trust Daniel's vision or curiosity enough to be sure he wouldn't step on it. Our neighbor who owns the house was out too, so we chit-chatted a bit and traded stories, and then I saw Daniel off to the school bus. He was disappointed that he didn't get to stick around and watch the crew come fix the wire. (Our neighbor commented, "He's going to be an electrical engineer; you can see that one coming!" It's interesting how many people say that, or some variation of it, to us. Yes, Daniel has great aptitude and interest in technical things, and I think he will very likely go into a technical career, but why engineer and not electrician? Maybe people assume that with two college-educated parents we will necessarily produce college-educated children, but actually we'll be happy with any career that suits a child's abilities, contributes to the world, and makes a decent living.) Esther did get to watch the electrician and the tree-trimming crew at work, and later she played electrician with Daddy. He was impressed with how well she remembered everything they had done. That one may well choose to become an engineer, although right now she's trying to decide between biology and physics. :-)
We finally got our power back about 3:00, and a few hours later Tim's dear friend from Arizona arrived for a visit. He and Tim have been friends since seventh grade, and he was actually the one who officiated at our wedding. He had a meeting in a city five hours away from us, so he came a couple of days early, rented a car, and made the five-hour trip down just to spend time with us. Now, that's a good friend! We had a wonderful time together. Tim and Mark played lots of pool and table tennis, and Esther hung on his every movement. One morning I overheard her asking him if he would like her to feed him his cereal! (He politely declined.) Daniel was away at school for most of the visit, but he got in on some of the pool action.
Mark left on Friday morning. On Saturday morning, not quite as early as we wanted to, we loaded up the SUV and headed out to my grandmother's house to spend the long weekend with her and celebrate her 88th birthday. We had a great time there as well, even though the air conditioner wasn't working and the temperatures were above ninety degrees. Some of us spent a lot of time in the cool basement! :-) But we wouldn't have traded the visit for anything. Grandma is very special to us, and we love being close enough to go for a weekend. Esther, true to her usual form when traveling, woke up at four in the morning our first night there and insisted it was time to get up. And somewhere during those pre-dawn hours she discovered her first wiggly tooth. Daniel slept fine, but the visit was an interesting preview of what our summer travels may look like. He was calm and pleasant as long as he was in physical contact with me or engaged in conversation with me. And of course he was fine when doing projects, of which he found many: adjusting the drapes, cutting an unused cord off of a recliner, fixing the screen on a door, fixing the back doorbell. But if he wasn't with me or doing a project, he had no idea what to do with himself. We are going to be away from home for three weeks this summer. It could be...interesting!
This week has been a little less busy so far...just dental appointments for two of us, an audition for Daniel to perform in his school's end-of-year talent show, the arrival of Daniel's new mattress (his long-anticipated birthday present), our one-year post-placement visit with our social worker, and an inspection by pest control people to get rid of a possible carpenter ant nest. We're hoping that the actual nest is outside somewhere and the twelve ants Tim killed in our bathroom after we got back from Grandma's house were just scouts, but we've been putting the inspection off long enough!
Then this weekend is the 30 Hour Famine at church. I will be involved the whole time, and Tim and kids may come for some of the Saturday activities. We decided that Daniel isn't ready to do it yet, though I'm hoping he can next year.
Next weekend we have friends from DC taking a detour from a long road trip to come spend the night with us, and the following week we have two medical appointments (one in another city) and Daniel's Family Day, plus packing to go out of town for three weeks. I'm super excited for the trip: we're going to see my family in Oregon, drive down the coast together to northern California to be at a cousin's wedding and see extended family, then fly on to Arizona with my sister and return her to her supported living community before spending almost a week with Tim's family and friends in Phoenix. I suspect the trip will feel long at times, especially with our kids, but I am so looking forward to seeing loved ones I haven't seen in a few years and introducing everyone to Daniel! In particular, Tim's mom is no longer able to fly easily, so this will be her first time meeting her newest grandson. Very special. And for a long time we weren't sure if we were going to be able to do it financially. I was praying hard for us to have the money by the time we needed to decide, and I'm so grateful that we do!
So that's our lives right now. (And I thought things were going to get relaxing once Tim was done with the semester! Ha!)
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
What a week!
The week of which I speak is not last week but the week before--I'm just a little bit behind, here!
Tim "celebrated" Mother's Day by going off to a conference and leaving me alone with the kids for a week. The timing was not his choice, of course, but I still gave him a hard time about it! He gave up going to his usual professional conference this year because he didn't want to leave me on my own, but this one was a particularly good opportunity for him, and we decided it was time to give it a try.
The reviews...were mixed.
On Sunday after Tim left, both kids were positively angelic. We had a really nice time outside, then Daniel occupied himself on the computer and let me read and play with Esther until bedtime, and afterwards I had some good one-on-one with Daniel. It was great! It was also the highlight of the whole week, which means: things went downhill from there!
On Monday, Daniel's school started standardized testing. He is excused from the testing this year only, but all his teachers and classmates were involved, so he was put in with the special education class. That worked well the rest of the week, but on Monday he hadn't known it was coming and I think he was a little upset by it, plus just stressed by being off his normal routine. On Monday night I had a support group meeting. Daniel has always had a hard time with going to the kids' group associated with this meeting; something about all the kids and the adult caretakers that he doesn't know well just doesn't work well for him. So I had told him that he could try coming to the adult group the next time, but that was before I knew that Tim wasn't going to be there. Daniel coming with just me would, I'm pretty confident, be a disaster. So I made him go to the kids' group. He was mad, and made sure I knew it. And even Esther, uncharacteristically, cried when I left. So, Monday afternoon and evening, not so good, although I was pleased that Monday evening ended with Daniel asking to call Tim, and pouring out to him the whole story of his day, in English. Tuesday morning, also not so good. Tuesday afternoon we slowly climbed back out of our hole, and we did fine again until Thursday.
I'm sure Daniel would prefer that I not share the details of Thursday. But it ended with him being as rowdy and uncooperative as he knows how to be, and egging Esther on to do the same, right at bedtime! And right at that moment, there was nothing I could do about it. Daniel is just too big for me to pick up and hold in my lap until he calms down, like I can do with Esther. And while I can talk either child down out of the trees when it's just me and him/her, this time neither one was listening to me. Daniel finally realized that keeping Esther up was not in his own best interest and tried to help me get her to bed, but by that point she was so riled up that it was quite a job. I was soooo happy when both kids were asleep and I could pour out my evening into Tim's sympathetic ear!
Friday afternoon Tim came home, and we were all very glad to see him. The kids settled, and I felt better for having reinforcement in the house!
Saturday evening, Tim came down with a 24-hour stomach bug, and was pretty miserable. But the kids were positively angelic again. At one point Daniel had Esther in his lap, showing her how to play his favorite game on his computer, and at another point he actually invited her to play the Wii with him! I thought, "You've got to be kidding me, you fight over me all week, and now that Dad's home you can suddenly play together?? That's not fair!" But I was happy to be able to do what I needed to do and leave Tim to do what he needed to do at that point, which was sleep!
So that was my Mother's Week. I am, as always, glad I get to be a mother...but also glad that I mostly don't have to do it on my own!
Tim "celebrated" Mother's Day by going off to a conference and leaving me alone with the kids for a week. The timing was not his choice, of course, but I still gave him a hard time about it! He gave up going to his usual professional conference this year because he didn't want to leave me on my own, but this one was a particularly good opportunity for him, and we decided it was time to give it a try.
The reviews...were mixed.
On Sunday after Tim left, both kids were positively angelic. We had a really nice time outside, then Daniel occupied himself on the computer and let me read and play with Esther until bedtime, and afterwards I had some good one-on-one with Daniel. It was great! It was also the highlight of the whole week, which means: things went downhill from there!
On Monday, Daniel's school started standardized testing. He is excused from the testing this year only, but all his teachers and classmates were involved, so he was put in with the special education class. That worked well the rest of the week, but on Monday he hadn't known it was coming and I think he was a little upset by it, plus just stressed by being off his normal routine. On Monday night I had a support group meeting. Daniel has always had a hard time with going to the kids' group associated with this meeting; something about all the kids and the adult caretakers that he doesn't know well just doesn't work well for him. So I had told him that he could try coming to the adult group the next time, but that was before I knew that Tim wasn't going to be there. Daniel coming with just me would, I'm pretty confident, be a disaster. So I made him go to the kids' group. He was mad, and made sure I knew it. And even Esther, uncharacteristically, cried when I left. So, Monday afternoon and evening, not so good, although I was pleased that Monday evening ended with Daniel asking to call Tim, and pouring out to him the whole story of his day, in English. Tuesday morning, also not so good. Tuesday afternoon we slowly climbed back out of our hole, and we did fine again until Thursday.
I'm sure Daniel would prefer that I not share the details of Thursday. But it ended with him being as rowdy and uncooperative as he knows how to be, and egging Esther on to do the same, right at bedtime! And right at that moment, there was nothing I could do about it. Daniel is just too big for me to pick up and hold in my lap until he calms down, like I can do with Esther. And while I can talk either child down out of the trees when it's just me and him/her, this time neither one was listening to me. Daniel finally realized that keeping Esther up was not in his own best interest and tried to help me get her to bed, but by that point she was so riled up that it was quite a job. I was soooo happy when both kids were asleep and I could pour out my evening into Tim's sympathetic ear!
Friday afternoon Tim came home, and we were all very glad to see him. The kids settled, and I felt better for having reinforcement in the house!
Saturday evening, Tim came down with a 24-hour stomach bug, and was pretty miserable. But the kids were positively angelic again. At one point Daniel had Esther in his lap, showing her how to play his favorite game on his computer, and at another point he actually invited her to play the Wii with him! I thought, "You've got to be kidding me, you fight over me all week, and now that Dad's home you can suddenly play together?? That's not fair!" But I was happy to be able to do what I needed to do and leave Tim to do what he needed to do at that point, which was sleep!
So that was my Mother's Week. I am, as always, glad I get to be a mother...but also glad that I mostly don't have to do it on my own!
Friday, May 11, 2012
and then there were germs
Last night, we were anticipating, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, Daniel going to his first middle school dance tonight. Tim had just finished grading all of his students' finals, and was looking forward to getting some other things done and to playing with Esther. I was pleased that Esther is over whatever bug she has had, and seems to have returned to spending the night in her own room after a string of nights coming in and waking me up at least once.
When I put Daniel to bed, he couldn't breathe well and asked me to put some normal saline drops in his nose to help clear it out. It worked, but he told me that some of the drops had gone into his ear and made it hurt.
At 12:30, Esther came in and woke me up. I'm not even sure what inspired her to get out of bed in the first place, but she wanted to be tucked back in. Less than an hour later (but at first I didn't even realize I had been asleep, and thought it was just a few minutes later), I heard the medicine cabinet in the bathroom creaking and got up to see who was doing what. It was Daniel, looking for something to scrape out his ear with because it was really hurting. Remembering how miserable earaches were for me when I was his age, I stayed up with him for an hour, giving him an antihistamine, pain medicine (650 mg of acetominophen designed for arthritis relief, which was all I could find at that hour of the morning), a heating pad, and a little entertainment. When it got to the point where I thought the pain meds might kick in soon, I put him back in bed with instructions to wake me up if I was still hurting in half an hour. My cold feet had not yet let me fall back to sleep when I heard Esther mumbling, so I went to check on her to find her sitting on the side of her bed saying something about having lost her blankie. I retrieved the blankie, put her back in bed, and checked on Daniel. He was asleep, thankfully. So after lying awake with cold feet a while longer, I finally got back to sleep. I only had to get up one more time, at 5:30 to put Esther in her sleeping bag after she wet her bed. (Which reminds me, I need to do laundry...)
At 7:00 I got up again, made Daniel's breakfast, and woke him up to ask how he was feeling. His ear was only hurting a little bit, so I had him get up and get ready for school and was all set to send him out the door with a note asking his teacher to let him call us if the pain came back. Then he started grumbling about how much he hates asking to use the school telephone, and I was reminded of the time in the fall when I sent him with a low-grade fever and instructions to call me if he got sicker, and he spent the afternoon with his head on his desk and a fever of 102, not bothering to call me despite feeling lousy. So we decided that he was going to the doctor. Oh my word, I am SO glad we did that! Even though it took most of the morning, we now have a diagnosis...of strep throat! And I am so glad we didn't send him to school and spread the germs around his classmates...so glad we are already started on the course of medication before he got to feeling really lousy...so glad we aren't stuck with a Saturday or Sunday decision of whether to take him to an urgent care center or tough it out over the weekend...so glad I don't have to figure out how to get him to his doctor in a neighboring town (a drive I'm not comfortable with) while Tim is out of town next week...so glad that Tim had already finished his urgent work for the week and has been able to have Esther with him all afternoon so I could nap and catch up from last night. Of course, I'm not glad that Daniel has strep in the first place, but it could have been a whole lot more unpleasant! I'm also glad Daniel's doctor thought to test for strep, since he doesn't have any of the classic symptoms except an irritated throat, and even that I don't think has the tell-tale white patches. But for whatever reason he decided to swab, and it came back positive.
So our expectations for today did not come to pass. But the sun is shining, Daniel is not too uncomfortable (I think; he's been zonked out in his bed for a while now!), and we all get to spend the evening together. And that just might be good too.
When I put Daniel to bed, he couldn't breathe well and asked me to put some normal saline drops in his nose to help clear it out. It worked, but he told me that some of the drops had gone into his ear and made it hurt.
At 12:30, Esther came in and woke me up. I'm not even sure what inspired her to get out of bed in the first place, but she wanted to be tucked back in. Less than an hour later (but at first I didn't even realize I had been asleep, and thought it was just a few minutes later), I heard the medicine cabinet in the bathroom creaking and got up to see who was doing what. It was Daniel, looking for something to scrape out his ear with because it was really hurting. Remembering how miserable earaches were for me when I was his age, I stayed up with him for an hour, giving him an antihistamine, pain medicine (650 mg of acetominophen designed for arthritis relief, which was all I could find at that hour of the morning), a heating pad, and a little entertainment. When it got to the point where I thought the pain meds might kick in soon, I put him back in bed with instructions to wake me up if I was still hurting in half an hour. My cold feet had not yet let me fall back to sleep when I heard Esther mumbling, so I went to check on her to find her sitting on the side of her bed saying something about having lost her blankie. I retrieved the blankie, put her back in bed, and checked on Daniel. He was asleep, thankfully. So after lying awake with cold feet a while longer, I finally got back to sleep. I only had to get up one more time, at 5:30 to put Esther in her sleeping bag after she wet her bed. (Which reminds me, I need to do laundry...)
At 7:00 I got up again, made Daniel's breakfast, and woke him up to ask how he was feeling. His ear was only hurting a little bit, so I had him get up and get ready for school and was all set to send him out the door with a note asking his teacher to let him call us if the pain came back. Then he started grumbling about how much he hates asking to use the school telephone, and I was reminded of the time in the fall when I sent him with a low-grade fever and instructions to call me if he got sicker, and he spent the afternoon with his head on his desk and a fever of 102, not bothering to call me despite feeling lousy. So we decided that he was going to the doctor. Oh my word, I am SO glad we did that! Even though it took most of the morning, we now have a diagnosis...of strep throat! And I am so glad we didn't send him to school and spread the germs around his classmates...so glad we are already started on the course of medication before he got to feeling really lousy...so glad we aren't stuck with a Saturday or Sunday decision of whether to take him to an urgent care center or tough it out over the weekend...so glad I don't have to figure out how to get him to his doctor in a neighboring town (a drive I'm not comfortable with) while Tim is out of town next week...so glad that Tim had already finished his urgent work for the week and has been able to have Esther with him all afternoon so I could nap and catch up from last night. Of course, I'm not glad that Daniel has strep in the first place, but it could have been a whole lot more unpleasant! I'm also glad Daniel's doctor thought to test for strep, since he doesn't have any of the classic symptoms except an irritated throat, and even that I don't think has the tell-tale white patches. But for whatever reason he decided to swab, and it came back positive.
So our expectations for today did not come to pass. But the sun is shining, Daniel is not too uncomfortable (I think; he's been zonked out in his bed for a while now!), and we all get to spend the evening together. And that just might be good too.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Some Daniel vignettes
Recently Daniel had a choir concert at school. He's lucky that we made it, since he didn't tell us till the night before! Apparently he had brought the announcement home with him previously, but because I was involved in a serious phone conversation and didn't immediately look at the stack of papers he shoved in my face upon his entry from school, he got annoyed at me and hid the announcement about the choir show. Stinker! The night before the show he asked us something about "that music activity" and when we responded with confusion, he first debated with himself out loud about whether to tell us, and then went and got the piece of paper. So we had him to the concert on time and we were all able to attend. One of the songs he has been singing around the house for weeks...but not with recognizable English words...so I was happy to finally know what song it is. On the chorus for that one, I swear I could pick out his individual voice from where I was sitting in the back of the auditorium! He does so love to sing. And we love to hear him. He also sang a solo (in Chinese) in church again a couple weeks ago and did a good job.
I got a bit of a reality check about older child adoption the other day. I was applying sunscreen to Daniel when he did something mildly irritating. I scolded him, then noticed a white streak showing on his cheek and reached over to rub it in. He kind of laughed and said, "Oh, I thought you were going to hit me across the face." Ouch. That reaction doesn't reflect our relationship at all, but it does reflect his history, and nothing about his life from here on out is going to change his history. Some of that history is good, some of it not so much, but all of it is beyond our control. And that's just the way it is.
Daniel had a couple of days off of school recently, and devoted some of his time to fixing his translator, which had not been working. Since the translator was bought in China, this involved a call to tech support in China. The person who was helping Daniel asked him why he was calling from America, to which he explained that the translator was from China. Then she wanted to know why an American living in American needed a Chinese-English translator, to which he explained that he is Chinese and his English isn't very good yet.
Then she saw his QQ (internet chat) profile picture...
which is...
wait for it...
this:
(I'm not sure I would have posed so obligingly if I'd known he'd post it on the internet!)
So then Daniel explained that he was recently adopted from China and that his QQ picture is of his American adoptive mama. I can only wonder what the tech support person now thinks of American adoptive mamas.
I have started reading Dick and Jane books with Daniel as part of he reading instruction. This past Saturday I wrote an extra story Dick-and-Jane-esque story for him:
"Look, Mother look! Come see funny Daniel and funny Esther! Daniel and Esther can run and jump. Little Esther can jump a little jump. Big Daniel can jump a big jump. Can Father jump? No, Father must do something. Father must work. Father must make a test to give his students."
True story! :-)
I got a bit of a reality check about older child adoption the other day. I was applying sunscreen to Daniel when he did something mildly irritating. I scolded him, then noticed a white streak showing on his cheek and reached over to rub it in. He kind of laughed and said, "Oh, I thought you were going to hit me across the face." Ouch. That reaction doesn't reflect our relationship at all, but it does reflect his history, and nothing about his life from here on out is going to change his history. Some of that history is good, some of it not so much, but all of it is beyond our control. And that's just the way it is.
Daniel had a couple of days off of school recently, and devoted some of his time to fixing his translator, which had not been working. Since the translator was bought in China, this involved a call to tech support in China. The person who was helping Daniel asked him why he was calling from America, to which he explained that the translator was from China. Then she wanted to know why an American living in American needed a Chinese-English translator, to which he explained that he is Chinese and his English isn't very good yet.
Then she saw his QQ (internet chat) profile picture...
which is...
wait for it...
this:
(I'm not sure I would have posed so obligingly if I'd known he'd post it on the internet!)
So then Daniel explained that he was recently adopted from China and that his QQ picture is of his American adoptive mama. I can only wonder what the tech support person now thinks of American adoptive mamas.
I have started reading Dick and Jane books with Daniel as part of he reading instruction. This past Saturday I wrote an extra story Dick-and-Jane-esque story for him:
"Look, Mother look! Come see funny Daniel and funny Esther! Daniel and Esther can run and jump. Little Esther can jump a little jump. Big Daniel can jump a big jump. Can Father jump? No, Father must do something. Father must work. Father must make a test to give his students."
True story! :-)
Some Esther vignettes
Yesterday Esther was wearing my robe, which she decided made her look like an angel (it's white and shiny). She asked me to play Mary to her angel Gabriel. Some of the conversation went like this:
Mary: [acts startled]
angel [holding a box wrapped in her blankie]: Don't be afraid; I brought you a present! This is your Son of God. You can call him Jesus.
...later...
Mary: But how can this happen? I don't have a husband.
angel: Yes you do!
Esther's two favorite TV shows these days are Word Girl and Wild Kratts, both on PBS Kids. Word Girl, in between saving her city from various villains, is notorious for defining words. So now, Esther has begun to define words too. The other day I was discussing with Tim where to display something, and Esther remarked, "Display means to hang it up where people can admire it." Another day Esther's daycare teacher told Tim that Esther is a leader of the pack, and Esther said, "Do you know what a pack is? It's a group of animals that live together." (I'm not sure what she thought about her teacher saying that she was the leader of a group of animals! Ha.) Meanwhile, Esther's favorite thing to do with me is for the two of us to pretend that we are the Kratt brothers going on "creature adventures." One afternoon we spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes luring an imaginary Spotswat the Cheetah Cub across our backyard with imaginary meat tied on to the end of a (real) stick, and then taking care of him in the Tortuga HQ (the underside of our weeping cherry tree). And that was only part of the play! Tim and I have both recently noticed an explosion in the complexity of her imaginative play.
I read in some parenting book that four is the age at which young children have the most violent imaginations. I can believe it! Earlier this year, Esther killed her imaginary friend on more than one occasion, and talked with great relish about her imaginary babies having cancer. [She hasn't talked about Robba Bobba or Rugga Guggan at all in months, though, so the imaginary friendship phase may be over.] More recently, when I didn't get out of her way fast enough to suit her, my dear little girl inquired sweetly, "Would you like me to run over your toes with a lawn mower?"
Esther still likes to play that she's a baby All The Time. I'm rather looking forward to her growing out of this phase. Of course, when she's not being a baby she wants to be everybody's boss and caretaker. In particular, she wants to serve everybody food at the table, whether or not they've expressed a desire to have the food in question, and whether or not she's actually capable of dipping it up neatly.
Esther continues to rack up new achievements. She has started skipping--I didn't teach her, I just noticed her doing it one day--and Tim recently taught her how to dribble a basketball under her leg. It is the funniest thing to see such a little girl doing that trick! She also continues to be fascinated with printed words and numbers. She is finally starting to "get" phonics, not so much the part of knowing what sound each letter makes, but the part of hearing a word and being able to isolate the first sound. Before this she would say things like "Blueberries starts with /k/! /k/ /k/ blueberries!"
She is excited about going off to kindergarten next year. She really can be a big help around the house when she chooses to, but she has informed me, "Mommy, when I go to kindergarten you'll have to wash the dishes and fold the clothes all by yourself, because I won't be here to help you. You'll say, 'waaaaaaah!'"
Having Esther around makes us smile often. :-)
Mary: [acts startled]
angel [holding a box wrapped in her blankie]: Don't be afraid; I brought you a present! This is your Son of God. You can call him Jesus.
...later...
Mary: But how can this happen? I don't have a husband.
angel: Yes you do!
Esther's two favorite TV shows these days are Word Girl and Wild Kratts, both on PBS Kids. Word Girl, in between saving her city from various villains, is notorious for defining words. So now, Esther has begun to define words too. The other day I was discussing with Tim where to display something, and Esther remarked, "Display means to hang it up where people can admire it." Another day Esther's daycare teacher told Tim that Esther is a leader of the pack, and Esther said, "Do you know what a pack is? It's a group of animals that live together." (I'm not sure what she thought about her teacher saying that she was the leader of a group of animals! Ha.) Meanwhile, Esther's favorite thing to do with me is for the two of us to pretend that we are the Kratt brothers going on "creature adventures." One afternoon we spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes luring an imaginary Spotswat the Cheetah Cub across our backyard with imaginary meat tied on to the end of a (real) stick, and then taking care of him in the Tortuga HQ (the underside of our weeping cherry tree). And that was only part of the play! Tim and I have both recently noticed an explosion in the complexity of her imaginative play.
I read in some parenting book that four is the age at which young children have the most violent imaginations. I can believe it! Earlier this year, Esther killed her imaginary friend on more than one occasion, and talked with great relish about her imaginary babies having cancer. [She hasn't talked about Robba Bobba or Rugga Guggan at all in months, though, so the imaginary friendship phase may be over.] More recently, when I didn't get out of her way fast enough to suit her, my dear little girl inquired sweetly, "Would you like me to run over your toes with a lawn mower?"
Esther still likes to play that she's a baby All The Time. I'm rather looking forward to her growing out of this phase. Of course, when she's not being a baby she wants to be everybody's boss and caretaker. In particular, she wants to serve everybody food at the table, whether or not they've expressed a desire to have the food in question, and whether or not she's actually capable of dipping it up neatly.
Esther continues to rack up new achievements. She has started skipping--I didn't teach her, I just noticed her doing it one day--and Tim recently taught her how to dribble a basketball under her leg. It is the funniest thing to see such a little girl doing that trick! She also continues to be fascinated with printed words and numbers. She is finally starting to "get" phonics, not so much the part of knowing what sound each letter makes, but the part of hearing a word and being able to isolate the first sound. Before this she would say things like "Blueberries starts with /k/! /k/ /k/ blueberries!"
She is excited about going off to kindergarten next year. She really can be a big help around the house when she chooses to, but she has informed me, "Mommy, when I go to kindergarten you'll have to wash the dishes and fold the clothes all by yourself, because I won't be here to help you. You'll say, 'waaaaaaah!'"
Having Esther around makes us smile often. :-)
Thursday, April 26, 2012
tooth surprise
Esther complained periodically yesterday that her gum was hurting on her lower left side in the very back. I looked at it and felt it and couldn't find any evidence of anything wrong, but it reminded me somewhat of when she was teething on her two-year molars. So I looked up tooth development this morning and found out that six-year molars can come in at five years, and are normally the first permanent teeth to erupt. I had suspected with her two-year molars that she felt some discomfort several months before they actually appeared, so I thought it was just possible that her six-year molar was moving deep within her gum and that was what was bothering her.
Well, apparently the molar wasn't all that deep, because tonight when I was brushing Esther's teeth--viola, there it was! It hasn't quite broken skin yet, but it's clearly visible under the gum. For cryin' out loud, not only is the child not six yet, she isn't even five! What does she think she's doing, growing up so fast??
For Esther's part, she has been envying friends' loose teeth and new permanent teeth for some months already, so she is pleased as punch to be starting the process. I'm just hoping we still have a while before we have to decide what to do about the tooth fairy!
Well, apparently the molar wasn't all that deep, because tonight when I was brushing Esther's teeth--viola, there it was! It hasn't quite broken skin yet, but it's clearly visible under the gum. For cryin' out loud, not only is the child not six yet, she isn't even five! What does she think she's doing, growing up so fast??
For Esther's part, she has been envying friends' loose teeth and new permanent teeth for some months already, so she is pleased as punch to be starting the process. I'm just hoping we still have a while before we have to decide what to do about the tooth fairy!
Monday, April 23, 2012
The picture says it all
On the plumbing front, a friend who does contracting came over (on a Sunday night!), removed the irreparable piece of pipe and capped off the pipes leading to it so that we could turn on our house water again. This is the husband of the woman who rescued us when we were stranded by the side of the road after our car accident in the fall--I think we need to start referring to them as our knights in shining armor! The tub itself is going to be out of commission for a while. Our friend discovered that there had been a long-term leak back behind the wall (a different leak from the one we created), and parts of the wall and tile are going to have to be replaced. We may just be getting a vinyl tub insert; it's easier to take care of! But those decisions can wait until Tim's work quiets down a little; thankfully, our downstairs bathroom has a shower, so this bathtub isn't critical to our well-being. And we are reminded how much we appreciate clean, convenient, indoor, hot-and-cold running water!
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Projects
Daniel is a project guy. He is not good at entertaining himself, but give him a project and he will work hard at it until it is completed. So in order to keep from going crazy when Daniel is off of school, we look for projects for him to do. This can sometimes end up being more work for us than we had anticipated. For instance, one afternoon I asked Daniel to vacuum out the lint hose leading away from our dryer. Three hours, a trip to Lowes, and considerable involvement from both Tim and me later, we had a whole new hose in place. We needed that hose (and it made our dryer much more efficient!), so I'm not complaining, but it wasn't quite what I had in mind when I suggested what I thought was a five-minute chore!
Over Christmas break, Daniel cleaned the washing machine, cleaned the microwave, defrosted and cleaned two refrigerators, helped Tim replace a leaking faucet in the bathroom, installed a light on our living room ceiling fan, and probably a few other projects that I'm forgetting right now. He didn't have a working computer at that point, so if he wasn't doing projects he was following me around. One day he followed me all.day.long...upstairs, downstairs, flipping light switches on and off in our wake. (He has this habit of reaching out to passing light switches and flipping them on and off several times...drives me nuts!) Since Tim was also on break, he was able to "spell" me by having Daniel do projects with him while I played with Esther or got some of my own work done.
But Tim was working during Daniel's spring break, so we knew we were going to need a good project if I was going to survive a week by myself with both kids home! Daniel has been bugging me for literally months about renting a carpet-cleaning machine to clean our carpets (yes, these are the things that float his boat!), so that was the project we chose. It required sorting through boxes and piles of stuff on the floors of two rooms, moving all of said "stuff" and all of the furniture out of three rooms, of course the actual cleaning of the carpets, and then moving everything back in. It was definitely a week's worth of work! In fact, I told Daniel that if I was going to be giving my attention to cleaning the carpet rather than my normal "maintenance" chores (laundry, dishes, etc.), he was going to have to help with the other chores. And with only minimal grousing, he agreed! (This is huge, because normally when I ask him to help with a maintenance chore he complains that that's my job.) I asked him to choose whether to be my laundry helper, my dishes helper, or my cooking helper. He chose laundry, and was quite independent with running the loads, switching clothes to the dryer, and even some of the folding and putting away!! (I still sorted the clothes and told him which temperature each pile should be washed at.) It really was a huge help, which freed me up to do sorting and putting away of piles without letting the rest of the house go to pot. He also helped me some in the kitchen. AND, on Monday, he willingly entertained Esther (in my earshot) for several longish stretches so I could sort in peace. Like I was saying a few weeks ago, that sibling bond is making progress! (Okay, so after attending the kids program of our foster-adopt support group that evening, they got into an altercation and both got in big trouble on the way home for spitting on each other. But at least the first part of the day went well!)
By Friday evening, we had three rooms and a hallway of clean carpet (the rest of the upstairs is wood or tile), one clean dining room rug, and clean(er) upholstery on our dining room chairs. (Seriously, who designs white upholstery for something that's supposed to be sat upon??) I also had red callouses at the bases of all my fingers on my right hand from pushing the heavy carpet-cleaning machine, plus a bonus blister on my palm from trying to dig a hole in rocks to plant a new blueberry plant, and a small cut on my index finger on the same hand courtesy of Friday night's dinner preparations. Needless to say, I was avoiding the use of that hand for a while! But it was nice to have all of that work done and to be able to move stuff back into our rooms. Tim put Daniel in charge of rinsing out the machine before he returned it to Lowes, and the people at Lowes said they had never seen one come back so clean. That's my boy! :-)
Meanwhile, since all the stuff was out of the bedrooms, we decided to go ahead and switch up our sleeping arrangements rather than waiting for the summer. So we moved the desk and computer stuff out of the study into our bedroom, moved Esther out of our bedroom and into Daniel's room next door, and moved Daniel down the hall to what used to be the study. The bed we put Daniel in when he arrived in our family is an elevated bed a little lower than a top bunkbed would be, with drawers and a cupboard that fit under it, and a ladder going up to it. I think it's a cool bed, but Daniel doesn't like being up that high. At all. And while he has come up with various solutions (re-engineered the bed to make it lower; put his mattress on the floor under the bed; etc.), he has been begging for a new bed almost since he got here. Ordinarily I wouldn't put a new bed high on the list of priorities, but since we needed one anyway as soon as Esther outgrew her crib, we agreed that we can have a new (to him, anyway) bed for his main 15th birthday present from us. Since Daniel's birthday is still several months away, he is currently sleeping on his mattress on the floor in his new room. Esther is sleeping on her crib mattress under the bed in her new room (she uses the top of the bed as a place to read books and do art). And we are really, really enjoying having our bedroom all to ourselves for the first time in four years! We did love having Esther so close to us all that time, but...sometimes it's just nice to be able to sit in your own room with the lights on and have a normal-voiced conversation while kids are sleeping!
We hadn't been sure how Esther would take to the transition, being as how she nixed the idea of moving to her own room in no uncertain terms when we last proposed it a year ago, but she is loving having her own space. (It probably helps that she got to take over Daniel's room! Nothing like sibling ownership to make something look attractive.) She was pretty cute hunting through the house for her stuff so she could squirrel it away in her room. At one point she pulled some pieces of packing foam out of our closet (I'm not even sure why we were keeping them in there in the first place, but sometimes she uses them for padding when she practices gymnastics). She asked if she could put them in her room. We asked her why, and she said earnestly, "Just in case!" So we let her. :-)
And right now, as I type, Daniel (and Time) are at it again! Yep, another project. This one started out with a clogged pipe (due to the yucky stuff we dumped from our dirty water tank after cleaning the carpet)...that led to a newly discovered leak...which turned out to not be coming from where we first thought it was...and then in the process of fixing that, Daniel bent something and now it looks like we have to replace a piece of pipe before we turn the main house water back on, or we will have a flood. You know how I wrote at the beginning of this entry that projects seem to expand on us? I hadn't intended for those words to be prophetic! Sigh. Never a dull moment!
Over Christmas break, Daniel cleaned the washing machine, cleaned the microwave, defrosted and cleaned two refrigerators, helped Tim replace a leaking faucet in the bathroom, installed a light on our living room ceiling fan, and probably a few other projects that I'm forgetting right now. He didn't have a working computer at that point, so if he wasn't doing projects he was following me around. One day he followed me all.day.long...upstairs, downstairs, flipping light switches on and off in our wake. (He has this habit of reaching out to passing light switches and flipping them on and off several times...drives me nuts!) Since Tim was also on break, he was able to "spell" me by having Daniel do projects with him while I played with Esther or got some of my own work done.
But Tim was working during Daniel's spring break, so we knew we were going to need a good project if I was going to survive a week by myself with both kids home! Daniel has been bugging me for literally months about renting a carpet-cleaning machine to clean our carpets (yes, these are the things that float his boat!), so that was the project we chose. It required sorting through boxes and piles of stuff on the floors of two rooms, moving all of said "stuff" and all of the furniture out of three rooms, of course the actual cleaning of the carpets, and then moving everything back in. It was definitely a week's worth of work! In fact, I told Daniel that if I was going to be giving my attention to cleaning the carpet rather than my normal "maintenance" chores (laundry, dishes, etc.), he was going to have to help with the other chores. And with only minimal grousing, he agreed! (This is huge, because normally when I ask him to help with a maintenance chore he complains that that's my job.) I asked him to choose whether to be my laundry helper, my dishes helper, or my cooking helper. He chose laundry, and was quite independent with running the loads, switching clothes to the dryer, and even some of the folding and putting away!! (I still sorted the clothes and told him which temperature each pile should be washed at.) It really was a huge help, which freed me up to do sorting and putting away of piles without letting the rest of the house go to pot. He also helped me some in the kitchen. AND, on Monday, he willingly entertained Esther (in my earshot) for several longish stretches so I could sort in peace. Like I was saying a few weeks ago, that sibling bond is making progress! (Okay, so after attending the kids program of our foster-adopt support group that evening, they got into an altercation and both got in big trouble on the way home for spitting on each other. But at least the first part of the day went well!)
By Friday evening, we had three rooms and a hallway of clean carpet (the rest of the upstairs is wood or tile), one clean dining room rug, and clean(er) upholstery on our dining room chairs. (Seriously, who designs white upholstery for something that's supposed to be sat upon??) I also had red callouses at the bases of all my fingers on my right hand from pushing the heavy carpet-cleaning machine, plus a bonus blister on my palm from trying to dig a hole in rocks to plant a new blueberry plant, and a small cut on my index finger on the same hand courtesy of Friday night's dinner preparations. Needless to say, I was avoiding the use of that hand for a while! But it was nice to have all of that work done and to be able to move stuff back into our rooms. Tim put Daniel in charge of rinsing out the machine before he returned it to Lowes, and the people at Lowes said they had never seen one come back so clean. That's my boy! :-)
Meanwhile, since all the stuff was out of the bedrooms, we decided to go ahead and switch up our sleeping arrangements rather than waiting for the summer. So we moved the desk and computer stuff out of the study into our bedroom, moved Esther out of our bedroom and into Daniel's room next door, and moved Daniel down the hall to what used to be the study. The bed we put Daniel in when he arrived in our family is an elevated bed a little lower than a top bunkbed would be, with drawers and a cupboard that fit under it, and a ladder going up to it. I think it's a cool bed, but Daniel doesn't like being up that high. At all. And while he has come up with various solutions (re-engineered the bed to make it lower; put his mattress on the floor under the bed; etc.), he has been begging for a new bed almost since he got here. Ordinarily I wouldn't put a new bed high on the list of priorities, but since we needed one anyway as soon as Esther outgrew her crib, we agreed that we can have a new (to him, anyway) bed for his main 15th birthday present from us. Since Daniel's birthday is still several months away, he is currently sleeping on his mattress on the floor in his new room. Esther is sleeping on her crib mattress under the bed in her new room (she uses the top of the bed as a place to read books and do art). And we are really, really enjoying having our bedroom all to ourselves for the first time in four years! We did love having Esther so close to us all that time, but...sometimes it's just nice to be able to sit in your own room with the lights on and have a normal-voiced conversation while kids are sleeping!
We hadn't been sure how Esther would take to the transition, being as how she nixed the idea of moving to her own room in no uncertain terms when we last proposed it a year ago, but she is loving having her own space. (It probably helps that she got to take over Daniel's room! Nothing like sibling ownership to make something look attractive.) She was pretty cute hunting through the house for her stuff so she could squirrel it away in her room. At one point she pulled some pieces of packing foam out of our closet (I'm not even sure why we were keeping them in there in the first place, but sometimes she uses them for padding when she practices gymnastics). She asked if she could put them in her room. We asked her why, and she said earnestly, "Just in case!" So we let her. :-)
And right now, as I type, Daniel (and Time) are at it again! Yep, another project. This one started out with a clogged pipe (due to the yucky stuff we dumped from our dirty water tank after cleaning the carpet)...that led to a newly discovered leak...which turned out to not be coming from where we first thought it was...and then in the process of fixing that, Daniel bent something and now it looks like we have to replace a piece of pipe before we turn the main house water back on, or we will have a flood. You know how I wrote at the beginning of this entry that projects seem to expand on us? I hadn't intended for those words to be prophetic! Sigh. Never a dull moment!