Esther's good judgment

I am very proud of how Esther's judgment with money is developing.

Shortly before Christmas, we stopped into a shoe store to look for lace-up sneakers.  We did find any, but the did have red, glittery dress shoes.  Esther loved them, and really wanted to buy a pair.  She didn't need them (at all!), but they were only ten dollars and just the kind of thing any little girl would love, so I was considering them for a Christmas gift.  But I asked her to try walking around in them first.  When I asked her how they felt, she said, "They slip up and down when I walk.  I don't think they're worth it."  Good call for a four-year-old, don't you think?!

And then there is the matter of her savings.  We started giving both kids a modest allowance this fall.  Plus both kids have gotten some monetary gifts from extended family and friends.  Daniel always has something in mind that he would like to buy, and once he saves up enough money he will buy it.  He has made some good choices, but money does not sit around in his wallet.  Esther, however, rarely feels a need for anything she doesn't have.  She will occasionally buy something from the dollar store, and of course she looked forward for months to getting gymnastics shoes and a ribbon for Christmas, but for the most part her money just accumulates.  Recently, however, we were at Walmart and Esther saw a bike.  And she decided that that bike was exactly what she wanted.  We went home and counted her money...and she had enough.  For a bike!  (Okay, so a kiddie bike is not that expensive, but still, I was impressed!)  So Esther and Daddy took a trip back to the store and bought her a pink and white bike with training wheels in just her size.  Due to the really freaky winter weather we've been having (as in, daffodils are trying to come up in January because it's so warm), she has had lots of chances to enjoy the fruits of habitual saving and a wise choice in spending.

We've been taking it out and riding up and down the flat part of our street on warm afternoons.  I tell you, give that girl a set of wheels and she can practically fly!  The first couple times I went out with her, I ended up with sore leg muscles from running to keep up with her.  I think she could probably take off the training wheels now, but we'll wait till summer when we can find a better spot to practice.  Meanwhile, we'll have to think about what we can get her for her birthday, since a bike was going to be her big gift.  I'm glad we let her go ahead and get it though, because she is having so much fun.  Love that go-getting girl!  :-)

Typical

Here is Daniel, taking apart our door chimes to see how they work.  Note how he is standing on the stool.

And this is Esther hanging a picture up on her wall.  I about had a heart attack the first time I came in and saw her perched up on the end of the crib, but she seems quite at home up there.

Just another day in the life of our two monkeys!

Everybody's doing it!

In the year or so after we started the process to adopt Daniel, I started following the blogs of six families who were also adopting an older (10 +) child from China who would become the oldest child living at home (some families had already raised children to college age or beyond).  It was neat to follow their journeys in parallel with ours.  Most of the families traveled before us, one traveled after us, and one we met up with in China.  :-)  One of the kids was from Daniel's orphanage.  Two of them have albinism.  Most of them are boys.  So I feel a certain kinship with these families that I would otherwise never have known.  That made it all the more astonishing to me when a whopping four of the six announced that they were adopting again, within less than a year of the Big Upheaval.  I feel like such an outlier!  ;-)  Of course, I'm thrilled for them and for the children they are going to be adding to their families.  But wow, it is hard to picture us with another one right now!

Part of what is going on, I feel sure, is that shortly before we started the process to adopt Daniel, China added a new rule that adopting families could re-use their dossier (the set of documents submitted by families to China showing the the family does, in fact, meet China's requirements for adoption and that they are capable of caring for a particular child) within a year of its being logged in by China.  This rule means that if a family applies to adopt a second child within a year of their dossier being received by China, they can bypass a great deal of hassle in producing official documents, and also save a significant amount of money (like, one or two thousand dollars).  When we were doing our paperwork for Daniel's adoption, we asked for immigration approval for two children, just in case we decided to re-use our dossier.  But with an unexpected surgery, an unexpected vehicle purchase (and the attendant rise in car insurance), and higher grocery bills...we don't exactly have the money to adopt again internationally right now!  And while I do know families who have started out with no more money than we did and managed to complete their adoptions in miraculous ways...I also don't think Daniel is ready for another sibling yet.  (Although he did surprise me the other day by asking, if we adopted another child, could it be another 14-year-old?)  We are really pleased with how Daniel is attaching to us, but he does require a lot of attention.  Partly, he wants a lot of nurturing to make up for what he didn't get earlier in life.  That is fine, but it does take up a lot of time.  (As in, his bedtime routine is at least three times as long as Esther's!  And it could easily be longer if I did everything for him every night that he would like.)  And partly, he is still a little...I think "insecure" is a good descriptive word.  We don't have super intense sibling rivalry (thankfully!), and he has gotten pretty good at home about allowing me to finish my sentence or listen to a sentence in a conversation with somebody else before he butts in with his own question or need or request for translation.  He does pretty well at church, too.  But in other environments, he hangs all over me and monopolizes my conversation.  And he does not entertain himself at all, except when he's on the computer or doing a home maintenance project, so most of the time that he is home he requires at least one parent to be giving him attention.  Which means that if we brought home another child who was also very needy (as most children would be during the trauma of transitioning into a new family and culture!), I think that would be really difficult for him.  In a year or two he could be a huge asset in helping a new sibling transition, but right now, barring a voice from heaven that knows better than we do, we can't justify stressing him out that way.  I do think he would survive the stress--he is a pretty resilient kid--but it would be much easier for him (and for the rest of us!!) if he could get really and truly settled first.  So as hard as it is to read about other children in need of families and to know that we could make a difference to them ("X desperately wants a family of his own!  He needs somebody who is paper-ready to step forward and adopt him before he turns 14 and loses his opportunity forever!"), the sad truth is that there will still be children aging out and in need of families when the time comes that we are ready to start this adventure again.  Not to mention children who could be adopted young and not have to grow up with the pain of not belonging to anyone.

I have to make a confession here.  While thinking about this topic, I went into my e-mail to check the date our dossier was received in China.  It was April 19.  So we have about two and a half months to make up our mind if we want to re-use this dossier.  I don't think things are going to change that dramatically in two and a half months, so we are probably going to remain outliers.  :-)  But to those who are adopting again:  I am so excited to see more children coming into families who want them so much, and we will be following your journeys and cheering you on!!

Happy Year of the Dragon!

We had a pretty good Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) this year.  We did not manage to clean the whole house ahead of time, as is the tradition, but Daniel did get his bedroom clean.  We mostly celebrated on Sunday, which is Spring Festival eve.  That is when much celebrating is done in China as well.  Daniel enjoyed his day by watching the Spring Festival TV gala on the internet and making lots and lots of phone calls back to China.  In the evening, we made homemade dumplings.  (Thanks for posting your family's recipes, Jennifer!)  I played fast and loose with the filling and it turned out delicious, if I do say so myself.  The wrappers, though...lets just say this was my first time making them, and I haven't got the hang of rolling them out yet.  So they were waaaay too thick.  (Daniel said they tasted good, though.)  I think part of my mistake is that I'm used to rolling out cookie dough, where you want to use as little flour as possible.  So my little circles were sticky and hard to manage.  But I realized (as I saw Daniel liberally dumping flour over his dough) that when the thing you are rolling out only consists of flour and water, it really doesn't matter how much flour you use.  So maybe next time they will be better.  The dumplings did, at least, stayed together when I boiled them.  I didn't have the energy left to make any "dishes" to go with the dumplings, so it wasn't a real New Year feast, but at least we had the most important part!   (In case anyone wonders what Esther is wearing in the first few pictures...it is her gymnastics leotard.  I made her change clothes when we got to the rolling-out part, so that her leotard didn't get covered in flour.  And yes, she is wearing yet a third outfit in the eating picture because the clothes she wore to roll out dumplings did indeed get covered in flour.)

We forgot to give the kids their red envelopes (of "lucky money") until the day after Spring Festival.  Oops!  I am also, I believe, supposed to be wearing red socks and underwear this year in honor of my zodiac year (I'm a dragon), but I don't own any red underwear and I keep forgetting to dig out my Christmas socks.  :-)

The whole thing made Daniel kind of homesick.  Being a Chinese kid celebrating Spring Festival in an American family for the first time is kind of like if an American teenager moved to China and discovered that Christmas there, instead of having lights everywhere, special music, special food, visits to relatives, school vacation, and loads of presents, consisted of a couple of gifts at home and one batch of misshapen cookies (because although his new mama really wanted to give him a taste of home, she didn't know how to make them right).  Daniel knows that Christmas is our big holiday here, but he missed the fireworks and excitement of the New Year, he missed the special food and music, he missed the family he has spent Spring Festival with every year since he was six, and he especially missed the long school vacation.  So while he did enjoy the things that we did, he also said several times that he wished he could go back to China for Spring Festival.  And he was pretty grumpy about getting up and going to school on Monday.  I do hope we will all get to celebrate Spring Festival in China together someday (Tim has a sabbatical coming up in four and a half years...), but in the meantime, we are happy to be starting out a new year with Daniel in our family.  Go year of the dragon!!

and a little philosophizing

I didn't mean to leave the blog hanging after such drama...but life goes on, and I haven't had much time on the computer lately.  Anyway, we are all back to normal.  This actually was Daniel's second big outburst since he has been in our family, but I didn't blog about the first one because the evidences of hurts past were a little too obvious for comfort, and it just felt like an invasion of his privacy to describe it.  The last time, he had had a rotten day at school, came home feeling horrible, and pretty much forced the conflict as a way of dumping all his bad feelings and getting some relief.  (He told me this later.)  This time, he just thought I was being unfair to take his computer privileges away, and reacted in righteous indignation.  And, you know what?  If I had just told him that he wouldn't get to use his computer if he didn't go in his room, he probably would have gone in his room and the whole blow-up would never have happened.  And that makes me sad.  Because I don't want him to listen to me just because I have bigger artillery than he does.  I want him to listen to me because I'm his mama.  Not just another female caregiver who can't control him when he loses his temper (and boy, does he have some stories about that!).  His mama, who wants what is best for him, who keeps him safe, and teaches him, and would fight for him.  And how is he supposed to believe I can do all that if I can't even get one skinny teenage boy to take a time-out when I ask?

So, that's how I feel.  What I know is, that's a lot to ask of a seven month relationship.  I wish it weren't so, but one of the hard parts of adopting an older child is that everything is long-term, even while your time until your child grows up is limited.  So much as I hate calling in Dad for reinforcement, or answering questions about what I would do if Daniel does X (e.g. "What would you do if I hit you?"), it's going to take some time to get to where I know we can be.  (And yes, I know he's a teenager and they're wired to become independent...but if this teenager is young enough emotionally that he still needs me to help him pick out his clothes in the morning and to tuck him in at night, he is still young enough to need me to be in charge.)  I do think we're going in the right direction.  I have seen Daniel make progress in handling frustration, anxiety and anger.  He has made some progress in respecting my boundaries, and even a little in talking to me respectfully.  He even told me once, "I like you because you don't let me do anything."  I thought at first I must have mis-heard, so I asked him what in the world he meant and he said that he knows I care about him because I teach him to do good things and don't let him do bad things.  And a couple days after this last outburst, when he was talking to a former orphanage "teacher" on the phone, I overheard him say something along the lines of, "In the orphanage, it didn't really matter whether I listened to you or not," and a little later, "I think I'm much more good now than in the past."  So maybe he is assimilating this whole family expectations thing better than it felt like on Friday.

For Daniel's part, he has had plenty to say about how unreasonable it is to take away a kid's most favorite thing for discipline.  He agreed that it wasn't any worse than hitting a kid, but it wasn't clear that he thought it was much better!  He said that when he has kids, if they do something wrong he won't hit them or take things away from them, he will just tell them that what they did was wrong and leave it at that.  Like many parents of teenagers, I'm looking forward to reminding him of that someday!

a good bad afternoon

Yesterday afternoon...was not so pretty.  Tim had a lab to teach until up in the afternoon, so I had both kids to myself for a couple of hours after Daniel came home from school.  During this time, I had to put Daniel's eyedrops in.  He hates Esther watching him do something that he doesn't want to do.  Esther hates not being involved in what we are doing when there is no-one else in the house to interact with.  So, 30 seconds into the first drop out of three, I was trying to count out the one minute Daniel was supposed to keep his eyes closed; Esther, disobeying my express orders to entertain herself elsewhere, was staring around the door; and Daniel was opening his eyes and repeatedly and stridently telling me, "Esther's here!  Esther's here!" (like I couldn't see for myself?).  I had already had it with the two of them disrupting the eyedrop routine, and had no interest in spending the next five minutes scolding them and being ignored.  So I told them both to go to their rooms for one minute, hoping that when they came out they would take my instructions more seriously.  Esther went, with much unhappiness.  Daniel looked me in the eye and said, "No."  I repeated the order.  He said no again.  So I told him no more computer for the afternoon.  He smiled and said, "That's great!"  Ignoring the bravado, I asked if he was ready to cooperate with the rest of his eyedrops.  He told me that I had already taken away his computer, so he was not going to listen to me any more.  At this point Esther decided to come out of her room and refuse to go back in.  So I told her she could not watch her Curious George movie that afternoon.  Then I had a brief discussion with Daniel about how I was doing the eyedrops for him, to help him, and it didn't make sense for him to be fighting me doing something that was for his good.  Apparently some of that sank in, because I found out later that he did the rest of his eyedrops himself when I wasn't looking.  But he was mad, and determined to show me that I couldn't be his boss.  So he set about proving that he could do things I didn't want him to do, and I couldn't stop him.  I will spare the details, but I have to say that some things he didn't do were to hurt anybody, damage anything, or use harsh words.  So I was rather proud of him for that.  The two most egregious things he did were to sneak a phone outside to make a call after I had told him not to use it (he only wanted to call Tim, which would have been fine if he had just told me what he was doing, but I was not happy about the sneaking), and to turn on Esther's forbidden movie very loudly and refuse to turn it off, thus making her much more miserable than I had foreseen or intended.  So it was not a fun afternoon, for anybody.  The good part of the bad afternoon?  When Tim came home, Daniel met him at the door and told him (accurately, and in surprisingly understandable English!) what had been going on, and later, when he talked himself down from being so angry and began to feel sad instead, he turned to Tim for comfort.  We have never seen him do that before.  Between the language barrier and a wariness of men, Daniel normally turns to me rather than to Tim to meet his emotional needs.  But this time, he wanted his daddy.  So, as unpleasant as Daniel's defiance was, in another way we feel like we reached a milestone.

After Daniel's meltdown was over he told me he was sorry and we found some pleasant, non-computer activities to do together for the rest of the evening.  We did have a bit (or maybe a lot?) more drama this morning over the consequences for yesterday's behavior, but we seem to have worked through it successfully.  And I'm hoping we don't have another incident for a while!

Daniel's big gift

We decided back when we were in China that we didn't want Daniel taking over our main computer.  He had installed some of his own frequently-used programs (starting within about an hour of meeting us!) on our laptop, and Tim was nervous that he would alter it in some way that would make it less usable for the rest of us.  Plus the main computer is in the study, where the person who is using it can be out of sight of the rest of the household, and we wanted to keep tabs on what Daniel was looking at.  So when we first got home we let him use the laptop in the living room, but we felt kind of bad about that since the laptop (a netbook, really) has a very small screen while our main computer has a huge screen, and of course with Daniel's vision issues, a small screen makes it harder to use.  Then Tim gave Daniel an older computer that a colleague of his had salvaged and given to him.  That had a much larger monitor, but it is a little slow.  Worst of all [and I'm skipping over a good bit of narrative here], it did not have Windows, and Daniel was not able to properly use some of his favorite programs.  So, Daniel begged for Windows.

He had also, for months, been begging for a new bed.  The one in his room when he arrived is elevated, with a ladder going up to it and storage space underneath it, and he does not like sleeping high up.  Plus he wants a spring mattress rather than a latex mattress...and a full bed rather than a twin bed...and, well, you get the picture!  Ordinarily we would not buy a new bed for a child whose bed is already perfectly adequate, but we are going to need another bed soon anyway when Esther moves into a twin bed, so we had been going to get Daniel a bed for his big Christmas gift.  Then he shared with me that he wanted Windows even more than he wanted a bed.  So we decided to do Windows for Christmas and a bed for his birthday.

But then it seemed not very economical in the long run to spend $100 or more on software for a computer that we expect to be upgrading in the next couple of years.  And then Tim found a really good deal on a whole computer--with Windows already installed--and we decided to get that for Daniel for Christmas.  Only the deal that seemed too good to be true...apparently was just that.  Despite the website's promise that they only advertise goods they have in stock, and despite their cheery automatically-generated e-mail telling us to expect it the week before Christmas, it didn't come.  We waited a few days after Christmas, and it still didn't come.  Nor was there any evidence that it had ever been sent.  Nor was the company returning phone calls or e-mails.  So Tim went through our credit card company to dispute the purchase (being as we didn't want to pay for something we were beginning to think we would never get).  That generated a communication from the company that they were shipping our product...except that as the days went by and we kept checking the UPS site for progress, it became clear that the company had generated the shipping label but had not actually shipped anything.  Meanwhile the credit card had investigated our case and found no problems, so informed us that if we were responsible for the bill and they would report us to the credit reporting agencies if we did not pay on time.  More phone calls, both to the computer-selling company (which did not answer, of course) and to the credit card company.  Upon further contact from the credit card company, the computer company finally mailed the computer, only about four weeks late.

Meanwhile, we had not told Daniel about the computer.  At first we wanted it to be a big Christmas surprise, and then we didn't want it to be a bitter disappointment if we had to cancel the order and go back to just buying Windows.  We did have fun teasing him about his Windows.  Tim told him at one point, with a straight face, that we should go to Lowe's to look at windows since they sell very good ones there.  Daniel thought that was hilarious, and brought it up for days.  On Christmas we printed out a picture of a window and put it in an envelope to tell him that his Windows really was coming...we just didn't know when.  Then when we were finally expecting it to arrive, Tim teased him again by telling him he had better start taking his bedroom window out to get ready for installing the new one when it arrived.  Daniel was pretty sure Tim was not serious, but he did double-check it with me.  For my part, when the computer box arrived and Daniel noticed how big it was, I managed to keep a straight face while telling him that I hoped after all the problems this company had caused us, they hadn't sent us the wrong product in the end!  So Daniel had no idea what was going on, but he was one happy boy when he found out!

Meanwhile, just as Daniel was oohing and aahing over his computer, Esther came over and got all excited...about the packing peanuts!  I still have bad memories of trying to clean up statically-clinging packing peanuts after Esther dumped a box of them out in the kitchen one time, but I was in the middle of making dinner and I thought that since this was such a big occasion for Daniel, Esther ought to have something fun to do to.  So I let her get in the box.

At least the mess stayed somewhat contained, although I think Tim had to vacuum her off when he took her out.  If you have ever tried to clean up packing peanuts that are broken into the bits--they are the most effective demonstration of static electricity I have ever seen, and the more you try to brush them off the harder they stick.  But at least she had fun, Tim and Daniel got to set up the computer in peace, and I got dinner done.

And now Daniel has his own computer, in the living room, that he can install his own programs on and turn all the commands into Chinese so that he knows which buttons to push to do what he wants to do.  So he has been happily spending every afternoon setting it up just the way he wants it.  And hopefully, it will last us for a few years!