"Oh?" you say, "It took you eight months to notice that his age ends in 't-e-e-n'?"
Well, no, it didn't. We were aware before we met Daniel that he is chronologically a teenager. And in some ways, especially his perceptiveness and ability to articulate thoughts and feelings, he is mature even for his chronological age. But in other ways, especially his neediness of my attention and, on some days, his behavior, Daniel has at times left me feeling like I was parenting a particularly tall and mechanically gifted preschooler.
Recently, though, I have felt like I'm really parenting a teenager. Instead of telling me all about his day at school, Daniel now volunteers very little information and answers questions with "I don't know," "Nothing," and "Maybe." He hasn't told me which girl he has a crush on since before Christmas (although I have a guess!). He has gotten a little more independent about self-care--not that he was not capable of doing things independently before, but he has become more willing to do things for himself if I am not available at the time he wants them done. He has started calling me "Mom" instead of "Mama" or "Mommy" (and it has been several months since he gave up trying to call me by my first name). He is demonstrating a little more normal boundaries for his age and gender. And he no longer follows me around all day (although I'm not sure how much of that to attribute to a new developmental phase, and how much to attribute to his discovery that he can watch his favorite local Jinan news programs over the internet).
Like most mamas of kids who are growing up, I'm just a little ambivalent about the change. I'm glad for his sake that he is capable of acting his age, especially outside the family. When we were in DC this past weekend I got to see him interacting with a variety of people in a variety of settings that are outside his norm, and it was so clear how far he's come in the eight months that we've known him. And I must say, my life is more relaxing and my kitchen is more clean now that I don't have two kids jockeying for my attention every minute that they're both home and Tim isn't. But on the other hand, sometimes when Daniel has been buried in his computer for a while and I'm in the kitchen alone, I miss him coming in and bugging me! (He still comes in sometimes, to update me Jinan's weather or the latest sensational local crime. :-) And we still have talks, just not as frequently as we used to.)
Now, if only I could figure out how to get him to be polite to his sister and to do chores and homework...
Monday, February 27, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Vocabulary
Whew, I haven't been keeping up with the blog very well this month! There hasn't been anything really unusual going on, just a lot of little things that aren't usually in our schedule. Things like our monthly foster-adopt support group meeting, a trip to Daniel's school to update his IEP, completing the paperwork and home visit to renew our certification as a state foster family, an actual date! for Tim and me (we went to see a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which was just as funny as I remembered), snow, a power outage, a planned day off school for Daniel followed by a snow day, and now we're getting ready for a trip to DC. Okay, now that I look at it, maybe there has been a lot going on in the last couple weeks!
But Esther has been cracking me up with her use of words lately, so I thought I'd take a little time out to record some of my favorites. She has a great vocabulary, but sometimes her meaning and pronunciation get a little mixed up. Like the other day when we were playing outside and she called to me in an agitated voice, "Mommy, come quick! I see something! It's really scary!! It's a drug!!" Wondering what in the world was going on, I went over to see what had her so anxious...and saw a garden-variety (pun intended) slug. Apparently, the girl who at age two paused in her progress down the sidewalk to pet a spider is no longer a fan of anything faintly creepy-crawly.
Other Esther definitions:
Murder: the stuff you use to stick bricks together
Egg glue: a house built out of snow or ice
Compressed: the way Mommy feels when Esther does something remarkable
But Esther has been cracking me up with her use of words lately, so I thought I'd take a little time out to record some of my favorites. She has a great vocabulary, but sometimes her meaning and pronunciation get a little mixed up. Like the other day when we were playing outside and she called to me in an agitated voice, "Mommy, come quick! I see something! It's really scary!! It's a drug!!" Wondering what in the world was going on, I went over to see what had her so anxious...and saw a garden-variety (pun intended) slug. Apparently, the girl who at age two paused in her progress down the sidewalk to pet a spider is no longer a fan of anything faintly creepy-crawly.
Other Esther definitions:
Murder: the stuff you use to stick bricks together
Egg glue: a house built out of snow or ice
Compressed: the way Mommy feels when Esther does something remarkable
Saturday, February 11, 2012
xiaxue le! (It's snowing!)
I think we have literally gone a month since the last snow--in the middle of winter, no less!--but we finally are having enough snow to play in. And play in it we did, for more than two hours this morning. I was surprised when I came in to find out that it was just 19 degrees outside! (I'm pretty sure it was warmer when we first went out--the temperature has been falling throughout the day.) Daniel wore the new sunglasses we got him on Thursday, without me even having to nag. Definitely worth the 45 minutes or so I spent in Walmart going back and forth between him and the sunglass display while he wandered around looking at the watches and the jewelry and anything but sunglasses.
There was some sledding.
Daniel concocted an elaborate plan, involving a garbage can, a shovel, a bungee cord and a wheelbarrow, to move snow from the back yard to the front.
Esther started making a "castle" by molding snow in a bucket, and Daniel supersized the idea by molding snow in a garbage can.
And then there was the car unburying, and the driveway clearing, and the obligatory snow angels. And oh yeah, scooping up snow by the sledfull and throwing it on Mom.
When I finally herded the kids inside, Daniel wanted to know if we could go out again in the afternoon! Knowing that it was supposed to get even colder, with blustery winds, I told him maybe tomorrow. So he took a nap instead. I guess playing in the snow is one way to use up energy!
There was some sledding.
Daniel concocted an elaborate plan, involving a garbage can, a shovel, a bungee cord and a wheelbarrow, to move snow from the back yard to the front.
Esther started making a "castle" by molding snow in a bucket, and Daniel supersized the idea by molding snow in a garbage can.
And then there was the car unburying, and the driveway clearing, and the obligatory snow angels. And oh yeah, scooping up snow by the sledfull and throwing it on Mom.
When I finally herded the kids inside, Daniel wanted to know if we could go out again in the afternoon! Knowing that it was supposed to get even colder, with blustery winds, I told him maybe tomorrow. So he took a nap instead. I guess playing in the snow is one way to use up energy!
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Eyes
We are done with eyedrops, yay!!
Daniel had his third post-op visit with his opthalmologist yesterday--which took most of the day because we had to make an hour and a half drive each way. The doctor was extremely pleased with how Daniel's eye has healed. He wants to see us again in the summer just to make sure that everything still looks good, and then I think we are free for a while! :-) In addition to looking at Daniel's eye and checking his pressure (which was 16, normal), both the doctor and the doctor's assistant spent a long time putting various corrective filters in front of Daniel's eyes and checking how they changed his vision. The filter for astigmatism (which Daniel has) made him exclaim, "I can see clearly with this one!", but none of them allowed him to see the second line on the vision chart. He can see the first line with just his plain eyes. Meanwhile, his near vision (about ten inches, I think) has improved to 20/70 for his left eye (the one that had the cataract removed), 20/80 for his right eye, and a little better than that for both eyes together. His distance vision is 20/200, which roughly means that he can seen from a distance of 20 feet what someone with 20/20 vision could see from a distance of 200 feet. Talking about feet doesn't make much sense when you're looking at near distance, but his doctor said that with 20/70 vision he could read a newspaper without having to get his face right up in it. (Daniel's very best visual discrimination is about 20/40, but he can only do that by holding something an inch or two from his eyes, not a good option when reading for long periods of time! One of my "ah-ha" moments about how Daniel's eyes work was when he was showing me something and shoved it right up into my face so close that I couldn't even focus on it. I realized that he wasn't being annoying or thoughtless, but trying to help me see, because that is the distance at which his eyes focus best!) Given that Daniel is only just beginning phonics in English, it is going to be a long time before he needs the ability to read fine print. So given that and the fact that different lenses don't change his functional distance vision at all, the doctor said Daniel could get along fine without glasses for now. They might make what he sees look a little nicer, but they won't help him accomplish anything that he can't do without them. Given how much Daniel hates glasses, and given what a nuisance and expense it would be to get him fitted for contacts, we're quite fine with the reprieve! However, it does mean we need to get on him about wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes from UV radiation. His attitude right now is that he's gone 14 years without wearing sunglasses and never noticed any ill effect, therefore sunglasses are pointless. He feels the same way about sunscreen. It's just hard, apparently, for a now-thinking child to feel the weight of future eye damage or skin cancer! (And he told me the other day that he used to get sunburns all the time when he was little...AUGGGH!) I personally put sunscreen on him in the mornings and he grudgingly tolerates it, but I had held off on pushing the sunglasses until he had a prescription for them, or better yet, for tinted contacts. Now that he is not getting his vision corrected...I need to get on it! Hopefully if we have him try on a gazillion pairs of sunglasses and find ones that are comfortable, that will help with the compliance. Or if we can find non-corrective contacts with built-in UV protection (is there such a thing? anybody know?), that might be even better. I'll also have to make sure that he not only gets permission to wear sunglasses at school (normally they're not allowed), but that his gym teacher knows to remind him to put them on when the class goes outside. (And boy, am I going to be hearing about that from Daniel! Ha.)
Meanwhile, Daniel has an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) to address his vision issues at school. His vision issues are hardly the major factor affecting his education, but there is no formal process for addressing academic delays due to lack of education in one's home country, and we'll take any extra help we can get in any area! And it is certainly a problem for learning that Daniel can't see the board at the front of the classroom even when he's sitting in the front row. Right now he can't do most of what the other kids in class are doing anyway, but if he can at least see what they're doing it will help him absorb some of the language and concepts. So his IEP is mostly geared towards getting him to use adaptive devices: a magnifier so he can read small things up close, a monocular (kind of like a miniature telescope) so he can make out words and images on the walls and whiteboard of the classroom, and a flipper (basically a closed circuit TV system) that will let him use a screen and camera to see whatever he points the video camera at, usually either a worksheet on his desk or the board at the front of the classroom. The flipper is especially nice because he can "look" back and forth from something far to something near without having to change his focus. Unfortunately, Daniel is about as fond of his adaptive devices as he is of sunglasses and sunscreen. The magnifier and monocular go to school with him, but I think they mostly stay in his locker. So getting him to realize that they are useful and to use them in class is the main goal for this school year. Daniel's vision teacher recently instituted a requirement that he needs to bring his magnifier when she works with him, and he can get a detention if he doesn't. So that will make sure it comes to his afternoon classes at least three times a week. Then there is the flipper, which he is just using (or supposed to be using) in math class for now. The first day he had it, he turned it on, and had lots of classmates asking him about it or craning their necks to see what he was doing. That made him uncomfortable, so he didn't turn it on after that (but didn't bother to tell his vision teacher or me that he wasn't using it). So today his vision teacher is coming into class with him to explain to his classmates what the flipper is and isn't, and to have Daniel show them how it works. Hopefully that will satisfy enough curiosity that he can use it in peace. And I am going to give him some assignments that require him to use it, to hopefully get him in the habit. Part of the problem with him using his adaptive devices right now is that he's not doing much in his regular classrooms--certainly not doing what the other kids are doing--so he doesn't have assignments that can only be completed with help from his adaptive devices. And under the circumstances, really, I can see why he doesn't want to bother with toting around a bunch of tools that have to be kept track of and make him look different. Hopefully that will change, in time.
We have another IEP meeting on Tuesday (Valentine's Day!). This was sparked by Daniel's decision to walk home from school by himself one warm afternoon. He did walk by himself some in China, and he is aware of cars. But in order to get from school to home he has to cross a busy street twice, and later walk down several blocks with no sidewalk (although at least that part is a quiet residential area). So any time he has broached the idea of walking alone, I've told him no, it's not safe. But one day last week he showed up a little before the bus would have dropped him off, mighty pleased with himself for walking. He was shocked--shocked!--that I was displeased with him for doing something I had specifically and repeatedly forbidden him to do. He insisted that he was safe, he knew the way, he had watched how the other kids crossed the street and copied them, and didn't I know that he was just like everyone else? (Poor Daniel! It is hard to have your choices more limited than other people's.) To make a long story short, I called his vision teacher to get her opinion on the safety or lack thereof of him walking independently, which resulted in him getting a terrific scolding from her (and getting very annoyed with me for having told on him!), but also resulted in her recommending that he receive services from an orientation and mobility specialist who will pull him out of class to walk him through his route home and teach him how to safely approach each type of situation he may encounter. I knew that orientation and mobility specialists existed, but I had no idea that they could do something like this, and I am thrilled! The way Daniel's bus schedule works now, he spends about half an hour before school and half an hour after school sitting in the bus waiting room with a bunch of bored peers who are also waiting for buses. He liked the novelty of being with new friends for the first few weeks, but he's had some encounters with mean or thoughtless behavior since then, and he does not like it there anymore. And I would so much rather have him out getting exercise by walking home than sitting in a room dealing with boredom and middle school social dynamics. We have already made one improvement in Daniel's bus experience, which I wish I had thought of a long time ago. His designated stop is across a fairly major road from the end of our street, and I was not comfortable with him crossing that road by himself, so I walked him down to the bus stop every day for months. However, the bus actually turns around a couple of blocks down from his stop and comes back on the other side of the street. So it is just as easy for the driver to pick Daniel up on our side of the street, especially since he is the only student who gets on at his stop. And all it took was a quick call to the bus coordinator to get permission to move the stop from one side of the street to the other. So now I can send Daniel out by himself in the mornings without worrying about him getting run over on his way to the bus stop. He rather likes the independence, and I rather like not having to get myself and Esther all bundled up on cold winter mornings.
And, in closing, can I just mention how much I love Daniel's vision teacher? She has been involved in his education since about the second day of school, unofficially at first when we didn't yet have an IEP. When the IEP was written she was initially going to pull Daniel out once a week for instruction in using his adaptive devices. But when she found out about his academic delay, and how much he needs one-on-one instruction that he really isn't getting now, she figured out a way to change that to three times a week. So while she is ostensibly working with him on vision issues, they are using those specialized vision devices and techniques to get in some much-needed tutoring in academic areas! Oh, I love that woman! Besides that, she is extremely skilled at her job. She knows how to teach visually-impaired students in ways that fit with how they process information, and she knows how the academic system works and how to leverage it for her students' benefit. We are so, so blessed to have her on Daniel's team!
Daniel had his third post-op visit with his opthalmologist yesterday--which took most of the day because we had to make an hour and a half drive each way. The doctor was extremely pleased with how Daniel's eye has healed. He wants to see us again in the summer just to make sure that everything still looks good, and then I think we are free for a while! :-) In addition to looking at Daniel's eye and checking his pressure (which was 16, normal), both the doctor and the doctor's assistant spent a long time putting various corrective filters in front of Daniel's eyes and checking how they changed his vision. The filter for astigmatism (which Daniel has) made him exclaim, "I can see clearly with this one!", but none of them allowed him to see the second line on the vision chart. He can see the first line with just his plain eyes. Meanwhile, his near vision (about ten inches, I think) has improved to 20/70 for his left eye (the one that had the cataract removed), 20/80 for his right eye, and a little better than that for both eyes together. His distance vision is 20/200, which roughly means that he can seen from a distance of 20 feet what someone with 20/20 vision could see from a distance of 200 feet. Talking about feet doesn't make much sense when you're looking at near distance, but his doctor said that with 20/70 vision he could read a newspaper without having to get his face right up in it. (Daniel's very best visual discrimination is about 20/40, but he can only do that by holding something an inch or two from his eyes, not a good option when reading for long periods of time! One of my "ah-ha" moments about how Daniel's eyes work was when he was showing me something and shoved it right up into my face so close that I couldn't even focus on it. I realized that he wasn't being annoying or thoughtless, but trying to help me see, because that is the distance at which his eyes focus best!) Given that Daniel is only just beginning phonics in English, it is going to be a long time before he needs the ability to read fine print. So given that and the fact that different lenses don't change his functional distance vision at all, the doctor said Daniel could get along fine without glasses for now. They might make what he sees look a little nicer, but they won't help him accomplish anything that he can't do without them. Given how much Daniel hates glasses, and given what a nuisance and expense it would be to get him fitted for contacts, we're quite fine with the reprieve! However, it does mean we need to get on him about wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes from UV radiation. His attitude right now is that he's gone 14 years without wearing sunglasses and never noticed any ill effect, therefore sunglasses are pointless. He feels the same way about sunscreen. It's just hard, apparently, for a now-thinking child to feel the weight of future eye damage or skin cancer! (And he told me the other day that he used to get sunburns all the time when he was little...AUGGGH!) I personally put sunscreen on him in the mornings and he grudgingly tolerates it, but I had held off on pushing the sunglasses until he had a prescription for them, or better yet, for tinted contacts. Now that he is not getting his vision corrected...I need to get on it! Hopefully if we have him try on a gazillion pairs of sunglasses and find ones that are comfortable, that will help with the compliance. Or if we can find non-corrective contacts with built-in UV protection (is there such a thing? anybody know?), that might be even better. I'll also have to make sure that he not only gets permission to wear sunglasses at school (normally they're not allowed), but that his gym teacher knows to remind him to put them on when the class goes outside. (And boy, am I going to be hearing about that from Daniel! Ha.)
Meanwhile, Daniel has an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) to address his vision issues at school. His vision issues are hardly the major factor affecting his education, but there is no formal process for addressing academic delays due to lack of education in one's home country, and we'll take any extra help we can get in any area! And it is certainly a problem for learning that Daniel can't see the board at the front of the classroom even when he's sitting in the front row. Right now he can't do most of what the other kids in class are doing anyway, but if he can at least see what they're doing it will help him absorb some of the language and concepts. So his IEP is mostly geared towards getting him to use adaptive devices: a magnifier so he can read small things up close, a monocular (kind of like a miniature telescope) so he can make out words and images on the walls and whiteboard of the classroom, and a flipper (basically a closed circuit TV system) that will let him use a screen and camera to see whatever he points the video camera at, usually either a worksheet on his desk or the board at the front of the classroom. The flipper is especially nice because he can "look" back and forth from something far to something near without having to change his focus. Unfortunately, Daniel is about as fond of his adaptive devices as he is of sunglasses and sunscreen. The magnifier and monocular go to school with him, but I think they mostly stay in his locker. So getting him to realize that they are useful and to use them in class is the main goal for this school year. Daniel's vision teacher recently instituted a requirement that he needs to bring his magnifier when she works with him, and he can get a detention if he doesn't. So that will make sure it comes to his afternoon classes at least three times a week. Then there is the flipper, which he is just using (or supposed to be using) in math class for now. The first day he had it, he turned it on, and had lots of classmates asking him about it or craning their necks to see what he was doing. That made him uncomfortable, so he didn't turn it on after that (but didn't bother to tell his vision teacher or me that he wasn't using it). So today his vision teacher is coming into class with him to explain to his classmates what the flipper is and isn't, and to have Daniel show them how it works. Hopefully that will satisfy enough curiosity that he can use it in peace. And I am going to give him some assignments that require him to use it, to hopefully get him in the habit. Part of the problem with him using his adaptive devices right now is that he's not doing much in his regular classrooms--certainly not doing what the other kids are doing--so he doesn't have assignments that can only be completed with help from his adaptive devices. And under the circumstances, really, I can see why he doesn't want to bother with toting around a bunch of tools that have to be kept track of and make him look different. Hopefully that will change, in time.
We have another IEP meeting on Tuesday (Valentine's Day!). This was sparked by Daniel's decision to walk home from school by himself one warm afternoon. He did walk by himself some in China, and he is aware of cars. But in order to get from school to home he has to cross a busy street twice, and later walk down several blocks with no sidewalk (although at least that part is a quiet residential area). So any time he has broached the idea of walking alone, I've told him no, it's not safe. But one day last week he showed up a little before the bus would have dropped him off, mighty pleased with himself for walking. He was shocked--shocked!--that I was displeased with him for doing something I had specifically and repeatedly forbidden him to do. He insisted that he was safe, he knew the way, he had watched how the other kids crossed the street and copied them, and didn't I know that he was just like everyone else? (Poor Daniel! It is hard to have your choices more limited than other people's.) To make a long story short, I called his vision teacher to get her opinion on the safety or lack thereof of him walking independently, which resulted in him getting a terrific scolding from her (and getting very annoyed with me for having told on him!), but also resulted in her recommending that he receive services from an orientation and mobility specialist who will pull him out of class to walk him through his route home and teach him how to safely approach each type of situation he may encounter. I knew that orientation and mobility specialists existed, but I had no idea that they could do something like this, and I am thrilled! The way Daniel's bus schedule works now, he spends about half an hour before school and half an hour after school sitting in the bus waiting room with a bunch of bored peers who are also waiting for buses. He liked the novelty of being with new friends for the first few weeks, but he's had some encounters with mean or thoughtless behavior since then, and he does not like it there anymore. And I would so much rather have him out getting exercise by walking home than sitting in a room dealing with boredom and middle school social dynamics. We have already made one improvement in Daniel's bus experience, which I wish I had thought of a long time ago. His designated stop is across a fairly major road from the end of our street, and I was not comfortable with him crossing that road by himself, so I walked him down to the bus stop every day for months. However, the bus actually turns around a couple of blocks down from his stop and comes back on the other side of the street. So it is just as easy for the driver to pick Daniel up on our side of the street, especially since he is the only student who gets on at his stop. And all it took was a quick call to the bus coordinator to get permission to move the stop from one side of the street to the other. So now I can send Daniel out by himself in the mornings without worrying about him getting run over on his way to the bus stop. He rather likes the independence, and I rather like not having to get myself and Esther all bundled up on cold winter mornings.
And, in closing, can I just mention how much I love Daniel's vision teacher? She has been involved in his education since about the second day of school, unofficially at first when we didn't yet have an IEP. When the IEP was written she was initially going to pull Daniel out once a week for instruction in using his adaptive devices. But when she found out about his academic delay, and how much he needs one-on-one instruction that he really isn't getting now, she figured out a way to change that to three times a week. So while she is ostensibly working with him on vision issues, they are using those specialized vision devices and techniques to get in some much-needed tutoring in academic areas! Oh, I love that woman! Besides that, she is extremely skilled at her job. She knows how to teach visually-impaired students in ways that fit with how they process information, and she knows how the academic system works and how to leverage it for her students' benefit. We are so, so blessed to have her on Daniel's team!
Sunday, February 5, 2012
on persistence, ingenuity, and an avimorphic girl
I try to get the kids outside when the weather is nice. Esther needs no persuading. She has loved going outside since she was tiny, and would happily spend far more time playing outside than I can afford to take away from my indoor chores to watch her. Daniel is another story. I think that outside, especially on sunny days, is just too bright for his light-sensitive eyes, and he does not "do" sunglasses. But as with Esther (and myself, for that matter!) I have observed that when he spends time outside he seems calmer, more positive, and better regulated. So when we had a really nice afternoon last week, I arranged for Esther and me to be already outside when Daniel came home, and greeted him with the announcement that he was going to do an outside chore instead of an inside chore today. (My goal is to have him do some chore every day, although it doesn't always work out that way.)
Mind you, my day with Daniel had not started out well. Daniel had woken up, apparently, on the wrong side of bed, and I could do nothing right in his eyes. He wanted to talk with me over breakfast, but all he had to say were complaints and criticisms. Our discipline methods were unfair and excessive, we expected too much studying of him, we loved Esther more than him, and so on. The final straw was when he first got mad at me for looking at him while he was eating, and then a few seconds later got mad at me again for not looking at him while he was blowing his nose! His mood the evening before had been similar. I managed to send him off to school with a sincere "I love you!", but I have to admit I was wondering if we had entered a new phase and, if so, how long it was going to last! So I had no idea how he would take to the news that we were going to spend some time outside. He did gripe and grumble a bit at first, and went inside by himself, but he was out again a little later and ready to make the best of things. The chore I had in mind for him turned out to be impractical, so while I was looking around for something else to do, he started monkeying around in a tree. Then Esther wanted in on the fun, so I lifted her up in the tree and let her climb around a bit. Then I got her down and got ready to do some work.
Esther asked me to put her back in the tree again, but I was intent on getting something accomplished. Rather than give her a direct "no," I told her that if she wanted to get up in the tree again she would have to figure out how to do it for herself, as I was busy. I imagined that she would try for a few seconds to shimmy up the trunk and then give up and find another activity. But I reckoned without my girl.
I should stop here and try to describe the layout of our back yard. There is a flat part just behind the house, and then a steep hill running down to another small flat pocket in the bottom of the yard. In the very corner of that bottom flat place, where there is a gap in our hedge, we keep four tires as bumpers for when we go sledding down the hill. This picture doesn't quite capture the steepness of the hill, but you can see where the tires started on the far right, and the branches of the kids' climbing tree on the far left.
The next time I consciously noticed what Esther was doing, she was rolling a tire along the bottom flat portion of the yard. I thought she was putting away one that Daniel had gotten out, and commended her on her hard work. That was when I saw that Daniel's tire was still sitting at the top of the hill and Esther was getting a second one out. Well, I figured, it's a harmless activity and it will keep her busy for a while. So I went back to my work. Meanwhile, Esther was getting a workout from that tire. She would roll it partway up the hill, and then it would get away from her and roll back down into the hedge. She would patiently chase it down, drag it out from under the hedge, and start again. After several repetitions of this Sisyphean project, she finally laid the tire down flat and started turning it end over end up the steep hill. This method turned out to be successful, and she finally got the tire up to the top of the hill and over to the trunk of the tree that she wanted to climb, where she heaved it up on top of Daniel's tire to make a tower that she could climb on to reach the lower branches by herself. She then repeated the process with the remaining two tires. At one point she convinced Daniel to help her for a while, and at one point she experimented with tying a rope around the tire and pulling it, but basically she just kept end-over-ending the heavy tires up our hill, getting her sleeves soaked and dirty and no doubt giving her muscles a good workout in the process. I did help her lift the last tire up onto the tower, and then lifted her up onto the tower, as it had gotten just too tall for her. But the solution to my challenge and almost all of the work of carrying it out were all hers.
When Esther finally got up into the tree, she enjoyed the fruits of her labor with the zest that only comes from having succeeded on a project after persistence and effort. She announced to me, "Mommy, I'm a bird! I'm going to stay up here all night!" And she did stay up for quite a while. Daniel, meanwhile, took photos from up on our deck. And everyone had a satisfying and peaceful afternoon.
Mind you, my day with Daniel had not started out well. Daniel had woken up, apparently, on the wrong side of bed, and I could do nothing right in his eyes. He wanted to talk with me over breakfast, but all he had to say were complaints and criticisms. Our discipline methods were unfair and excessive, we expected too much studying of him, we loved Esther more than him, and so on. The final straw was when he first got mad at me for looking at him while he was eating, and then a few seconds later got mad at me again for not looking at him while he was blowing his nose! His mood the evening before had been similar. I managed to send him off to school with a sincere "I love you!", but I have to admit I was wondering if we had entered a new phase and, if so, how long it was going to last! So I had no idea how he would take to the news that we were going to spend some time outside. He did gripe and grumble a bit at first, and went inside by himself, but he was out again a little later and ready to make the best of things. The chore I had in mind for him turned out to be impractical, so while I was looking around for something else to do, he started monkeying around in a tree. Then Esther wanted in on the fun, so I lifted her up in the tree and let her climb around a bit. Then I got her down and got ready to do some work.
Esther asked me to put her back in the tree again, but I was intent on getting something accomplished. Rather than give her a direct "no," I told her that if she wanted to get up in the tree again she would have to figure out how to do it for herself, as I was busy. I imagined that she would try for a few seconds to shimmy up the trunk and then give up and find another activity. But I reckoned without my girl.
I should stop here and try to describe the layout of our back yard. There is a flat part just behind the house, and then a steep hill running down to another small flat pocket in the bottom of the yard. In the very corner of that bottom flat place, where there is a gap in our hedge, we keep four tires as bumpers for when we go sledding down the hill. This picture doesn't quite capture the steepness of the hill, but you can see where the tires started on the far right, and the branches of the kids' climbing tree on the far left.
The next time I consciously noticed what Esther was doing, she was rolling a tire along the bottom flat portion of the yard. I thought she was putting away one that Daniel had gotten out, and commended her on her hard work. That was when I saw that Daniel's tire was still sitting at the top of the hill and Esther was getting a second one out. Well, I figured, it's a harmless activity and it will keep her busy for a while. So I went back to my work. Meanwhile, Esther was getting a workout from that tire. She would roll it partway up the hill, and then it would get away from her and roll back down into the hedge. She would patiently chase it down, drag it out from under the hedge, and start again. After several repetitions of this Sisyphean project, she finally laid the tire down flat and started turning it end over end up the steep hill. This method turned out to be successful, and she finally got the tire up to the top of the hill and over to the trunk of the tree that she wanted to climb, where she heaved it up on top of Daniel's tire to make a tower that she could climb on to reach the lower branches by herself. She then repeated the process with the remaining two tires. At one point she convinced Daniel to help her for a while, and at one point she experimented with tying a rope around the tire and pulling it, but basically she just kept end-over-ending the heavy tires up our hill, getting her sleeves soaked and dirty and no doubt giving her muscles a good workout in the process. I did help her lift the last tire up onto the tower, and then lifted her up onto the tower, as it had gotten just too tall for her. But the solution to my challenge and almost all of the work of carrying it out were all hers.
When Esther finally got up into the tree, she enjoyed the fruits of her labor with the zest that only comes from having succeeded on a project after persistence and effort. She announced to me, "Mommy, I'm a bird! I'm going to stay up here all night!" And she did stay up for quite a while. Daniel, meanwhile, took photos from up on our deck. And everyone had a satisfying and peaceful afternoon.
