We do celebrate rather frequently in this family. What’s life if you aren’t enjoying a party or two?!
Yesterday marked the 6th anniversary of the day we became a family. In true style, enjoying it how James would wish (and especially because it fell on a Monday, homeschool/cheap day) we went to Legoland. In years past, I felt some wistfulness about wanting to celebrate it with more recognition about the “meaning of the day.” This year, I felt really good about doing something special, something he’s been “longing” to do (coincidentally, but not ironically - look up the difference and try to get it straight, that always makes me nuts – he had asked to go to Legoland on Saturday because “we haven’t gone in forever”), and enjoying our time as a family, which really is what the day is about. Perhaps it’s because he’s at a stage where he is process adoption issues nearly daily, I’m getting the fix of looking at his baby pictures, and can relax and let go of whatever that need was.
In many ways, this hasn’t been the easiest of years. We will all have hose parenting, right (right?, right?!). But, yesterday was a great day for reflecting on how far we’ve come. James feels things deeply, making him unusually empathetic for his age, always had been, easy to anger, easy to sorrow, and haunted by fears, one of his biggest obstacles. Six year ago, he was afraid of the sun and the grass, now,, try to get him inside, 4 years ago, loud noises and swimming, now, I’m the typical mom, “Turn that down!,” and he asks to swim in people’s pools in December, 3 years ago, he wouldn’t stand outside in the rain, now I can’t get him in unless there’s lightening, 2 years ago, roller coasters, yesterday (for the first time), he rode alone, 1 year ago, classes by himself, and we all know how he conquered that.
In an odd sort of reflection, we also realized yesterday that he’s grown 1 1/2″ and gained 4 lbs in the past 6 months, which is pretty significant at 7. I only throw this in there as a reminder that if you’re struggling with your kid and you can’t figure out they’re changes, growth spurts can cause moodiness as well, sometimes ony recognized after the fact.
Finally, proudest mom moment yesterday: At Legoland, they have an area where you can check out wheels, build a car, then race it down a timed track. James spent more than an hour there refining his design. At one point a mom and her little guy, 2-3, raced him and the mom cheered “We won!” James looked at here and said “That’s great! But I wasn’t really racing, I was just testing my hypothesis.”
Last weekend, we flew to the snow. Now planes were involved, just a tram. With all the rain we’ve had recently, and continue to have (grr, send no leaks, no mold vibes please) we were sure that there would be plenty of snow. We had never ridden the Palm Springs Aerial Tram. Strike that, we had never ridden it as a family and never in winter. I have some vague memory of riding it in college, maybe for a field trip. It’s all very vague, fear of heights throws all this into the “let’s not remember” category.
Of course, my camera is broken . . . again. The good news is it broken with 2 days on the warranty left, so it’s being fixed for “free.” The bad news is the gives me no hope the length of life of the lens. And, I brought my phone and Darren his little camera, all of which ran out of batteries (something about the cold and draining batteries and being Southern California devices. Whatever). But, I did get some pictures for you. What I missed was pictures on the way down, full moon, lights of Palm Springs, you’ll have to imagine. It was beautiful even if I was scared to look.
So, the way up:
Waiting
It turned out to be an 1 1/2 wait. Apparently, everyone had the same good idea. And it was a good idea, there was 4′ of snow. But, the waiting was fun, rocks and trees to climb and trails to follow.
Initially, we thought we would buy a sled at the top. But, the first thing we saw was a person being brought down on oxygen. The second thing we saw was people too lazy to walk away from the sidewalk putting their sleds on the hard, icy snow and zooming towards giant trees (the area at the top is a State ark so it is not cleared for “safe” sledding). We changed the plan, moved away from the main group of yahoos, found a smaller group (again, apparently with the same idea) and stuck with snowball fights.
We had such a great time we stayed till dark (which you may have deduced from the full moon description of the ride down). In fact, many people stayed until dark. So many that it took us 2 1/2 hours to get down (so that about 2 hours and 10 minutes in line to get to the tram.
All things considered, it was still worth it. Next time, I might go early and leave early though 
.
Today, we are going to Annie. A new theater has opened in town; I lived near this building for many years and often wished it would be renovated. I’m excited to see how it has been improved.
School wise, I’ve had no more (interesting) updates about James’ school; they do keep us informed. I have been working on following James’ lead. I’m a planner; I have to be, James is, I think typical, in the inability, yet to form his own plans. However, somehow this year, when he did want to stray, I fell into the trap of “later, when we’re done with these things.” This week I’ve been better of putting aside my own plans and letting him follow his interests. In art, does it really matter if he does a project he’s conceived with the materials I set out, or what I planned? The important thing is, if I don’t plan and bring out the materials, it won’t get done at all. Similarly with science, this week, he wanted to grow bacteria. It wasn’t really on my radar at all. We have been studying the brain (at his request). If he wants to take a bay to set up some bacteria studies, why do I care, except that I planned something else? As long as he’s studying, reading, doing his math, progressing, interested, excited, I can follow his lead something.
Just not on sledding down the mountain into trees. The line does have to be drawn.
Hopefully, I’ll be back tomorrow with another post. But no promises. If not, have a great weekend.
James’ school is still on hiatus. Mold. They don’t want to expose anyone to anything toxic. Tests to be done. Results are needed, possible abatement.
How could I have come to rely on two days so quickly? Now I have more to do, with less time to do it in. With that 16 hours of thinking time, I made plans, big plans, great fun for us to have. And the time to implement it. Well it turns out that that is now. While the mold testing is going on.
P.S. I’m actually having a lot of fun in my own grumpy way. Crafts, creativity, snuggling galore. But, tonight, I have to clean, fold laundry and cook. No Fair! Stinkin’ mold.
James’ class was cancelled because of the rain. Completely the responsible thing to do, what, with the instructor’s husband unable to drive his car down their street and all, but James and I are a wee bit disappointed. I am not letting on to James that I am disappointed, because that is insulting.
But, I have discovered I’m a better me with the time by myself. With just the two days, I’ve remembered my goals for this whole homeschooling thing and started to reconnect with them. It’s not as though I spent that time planning or even thinking about planning. It’s like when you go to sleep or take a shower and suddenly have a wonderful idea. With just two days, I’ve been able to listen better, I’ve been even asking the right questions.
Imagine how perfect I’ll be if the rain ever stops .
James is an extrovert, constantly pulling energy. Me, the introvert. Perhaps this is the balance we need to work together.
On the other hand, although he loves the class (so far, please let it continue to work), I’ve noticed he is much more clingy when he is home now. To the point of freaking out, twice, when he thought he lost me in the grocery store today. Now, I should explain it’s not like I left him and went around to a new aisle. We were in the produce aisle both times. I was 10 feet away. He began screaming and it took me two seconds to reach him and calm him down. He’s sitting on my lap to do school work, not that I mind, except that it’s a sign of his greater insecurity. This could be considered a regression for him.
The good news is that he begs to go to school still, so while he may feel torn in some ways, he’s not so torn he doesn’t want to go.
As he ages, and he understand more about how his Chinese parents had to leave him, how a child, him, could be separated from their parents, it affects him. He is, to some degree, helped by knowing that my mom is not my birth mother, but that there she is, loving me, loving him, spoiling him. But, just as the adoption itself, the move, the changes, traumatized and disrupted his world when he was a toddler, as he grows older his understanding and cares differ. The separation, the lose, the fear of that, he grapples with it all. And, the loss of the memories. He has grown to an age where he can’t remember where he was born, his orphanage, his first language (although we are working on learning it). He wants to visit China, and I want it for him. So now, I am washing dishes by hand, as my first contribution to our savings for the trip. In the money will go to an account. Maybe more things will break.
You cannot heal your children’s hurts. No one could fix my past for me. The best you can try to do is give them the strength to face the hurts themselves. I hope we’re doing that.
I’ve gotten three e-mails in the past few days (one forwarded from Cal State Fullerton, one from an airport, and one from a neighbor, whose a retired meteorologist) all declaring, my paraphrase, that in the next 5-10 days we can expect a year’s worth of rain, high winds, and the flooding that would accompany that (in the desert, if it rains much, it floods). According to the news, “there might be some rain next week.”
Usually, the news overplays things (and that is phrasing it mildly) and I’ve never gotten weather warnings in my e-mail from, well, anyone.
Choosing to take the better safe than sorry approach, we did some sandbagging yesterday. The last time we waited until the rain started for sandbags we found out that: 1) local stores sell out quickly and 2) you can only get them from the fire station if water is already in your house (which, truly, seems a bit too late to me).
I’ll let you know if the e-mails were technology taken to far or a use of computing for good.
To begin with, James loves his new school, hasn’t wanted to leave each day, so that’s all good.
Thursday morning, he was certainly unsure but once he was there, he handled himself well. Apparently, he missed me about 2 (he’s there from 9ish to 3ish), but once I arrived, he didn’t want to leave.
The scene at home was less . . . pretty. He was obviously emotionally overloaded from the day and let loose once we got home. On the up side, he slept really well.
Interestingly, today, he was completely confident and I was less sure. The night before I had had no time with him, between cooking dinner, making his lunch for the next day, cleaning up and tonight, I’m watching a movie with a friend, so again, no time with him (or was it just that instead of having the day to myself, I knew I would be spending the day cleaning the house?), whatever it was, the first day, I felt anxious about leaving him because I wanted him to succeed, the second, it was all about missing him.
As it turned out, cleaning this pig sty lovely home took much more effort than I imagined, and instead of being done at lunch as I thought (and getting more time to myself), I was frantically trying to finish before I needed to leave to get him. No need to worry about missing him.
And, he came home much more centered (thankfully ), even willing to talk about “what he learned at school” (Martin Luther King Jr, Nobel Peace Prize, dodgeball – quick, relate the three, in essay form). Yesterday, all I could find out was that he “didn’t like quiet time” (no surprise there!) and played “basketball – tricked you – it was dodgeball!” He’s also already asking to have kids over (“maybe for Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday? Like a birthday party?”).
I’m interested to see how our own schooling, our own week integrates in, how our new flow will look.
I feel refreshed.
I hope I’m wise enough to follow James’ growth.
James is going to school.
Well, are you shocked?
Delighted?
Horrified?
On the floor?
Perhaps I should clarify. James is going to school two days a week. We went today to visit a learning center, very hands on, literature based, waldorf-y, a maximum of 8 students, and signed James up. It also meets my sister’s criteria of haing chickens 
. James was very enthusiastic, and is now having cold feet. I’m nervous, hoping he’ll do well, and think it’s necessary. More than anything, he needs the interaction with kids more, more, more than I can give him. More than classes or park days can give him. What either school or siblings can give him.
Also, he has begun to express fear of school, which is not something I want to foster. So, before the fear sinks in, I’m kicking him out of the nest. Well, kicking him to the edge at least.
He starts Thursday. Be thinking of us.
My library is a little thin on reading for James’ level, or perhaps his taste, I’m not quite sure which. But, I came across this 
a couple weeks back, there’s a whole series, almost all available (by order) from my library, very Survivorman-esque. James actually thanks me every time one comes in. I thought I would mention it because I am constantly looking for book ideas on-line, and don’t think I have ever come across this series mentioned.
One which I see constantly mentioned, but which James just “discovered” this week (thanks to my organization binge) is 
Horrible Science (and History and Maths).
He actually had to be told he could only read them on weekends and vacation. Yesterday he spent most of the day reading the one to your left (I didn’t have the heart to tear him away for his schoolwork). I will be collecting used ones for his birthday and I know what someone will be doing this summer .
Oh, I paid for everything mentioned myself. Or got it for free from the library. If someone wants to give me any of the series of books, I’ll happily take them and thank you.
Dudes. It’s that, I need a break from my break kind of feeling.
There was the painting (let’s be honest, mostly done by Darren, by I did my bit, and mostly gave my opinion ):
James bath, blue and yellow, mostly blue, although you
can’t tell from this picture, and the guest bath, sort of terra cotta and the “we pick it every time from every store no matter how much we think it’s a different color” tan. All paint stores out to just break down and call it “Holly’s family” tan that way I’ll know and stop looking so hard at paint chips. “We” also added the backslash, which was the primary reason for the guest bath redo (turns out that sink is just the right size and shape for making whirlpools. Who’da thunk? And added suction cups to James’ shower curtain and switched out hooks for a towel bar. We may have had a bit of a love of water splashing problem. But, I’ve heard this new rubber paint is great.
Then, there was the organizing. This was all me and I think both of the males may have thought I slipped a little past “organized” and into OCD, but luckily, no one was asking. There was a lot of laminating and velcroing going on.
There’s the daily schedule, which is kind of sort of for James, but is even more for me (and Darren). 10 million times a week, “Did you give James his vitamins?” 6 million times, “James, did you makes your bed?,” I forget to buy some supply we need to do a project. Long term organization, check. Daily organization. Yikes! So far, we’re good. Day 1, check. I’ll let you know if I throw it in the trash by the end of the week. But, the real mastermind has been the shoe organizer. If you remember, I got them in August, and vaguely knew I wanted art supplies in them, but couldn’t quite figure it out. Well, this week, I sorted, I labeled, I used cups (both kiddie and disposable) and got both art supplies, daily supplies (pens, pencils, rulers) and writing supplies (address labels, premade, stamps, cards, stationary) into the shoe hangers. And the supplies are being used and put back again. I could do a little happy dance. A big happy dance. A jig.
I reorganized the rest of the school room. You can see the pictures on flickr if you want. To you, most likely, it won’t look much different from August. It’s functionally different. The big change, which almost physically hurt at first, was the “Great Book Organization of 2009.” If you are particular about books, you might want to look away.
O.k., so here it is. I put labels on all my James’ books (except for my childhood books and ones I bought him “special”), . . . with tape . . . so they won’t come off.
This is the point where my family began to question my sanity. You can see the organization point. Now that James is a true reader and I used somewhere around 25 of these bins (from the Dollar store) that held between 15-35 books (depending on chapter or reader), I’m having a book problem. What I’m having is a book clean up problem. And I finally decided that decsicrating having one small label on the book would be better than James having an enormous pile of books on the floor of his room that he walks over to find “the book.” So, labels on the books match with the labels on the bins and now at most, only one bin of books should be out. Although since I have apparently lost my mind, James has put the books back. I think he might be worried about being labeled and put in a bin or pocket when not in use.
I may at the end of the week have other big news. Or, then again, I may not. Cliffhanger.
10 years ago today:
I was in Tiananmen Square celebrating the New Year and Mikhael Gorbachev was resigning. The two are not really related (unless you thought I had some connections ), except that I will remember the date if it ever comes up in a Trivial Pursuit game because as we were getting ready to go out, we had CNN on, mostly as background noise because it was the first time we had English t.v. in our hotel and the t.v. suddenly went blank. In Tiananmen Square that night was mostly foreigners (Dec. 31st/Jan. 1st not being the Chinese New Year), directly after the strock of midnight army troops emptied the square. And I got a large lesson that night in totalitarian governments.
We didn’t own a digital camera, so no pictures to show you (Darren has to take things to work to scan and I didn’t plan this out that well. One day, you know, in that someday kind of way, I’ll get all my old pictures turned digital). I did take pictures of the troops though, because I was young. And had no children. And therefore, no fear.
I was teaching, would start my Master’s in the fall, and James was not yet a glimmer of a glimmer.
In the next decade, I would:
- finish my Master’s, get a substantial pay increase, and promptly decide to adopt and stop working.
- Adopt James, go back to China, avoid any international incidents (aren’t we all proud? Although, on this trip, I was actually told not to take pictures, of, this time, of all things, a hospital – where James was left. Ultimately, approval was obtained).
- Have three dogs die, take in one more, and now a cat (?!).
- Sell a house, build a house, move.
- Figure our parenting. Find out everything I figured out doesn’t work. Repeat.
- Have 2 nieces and 2 nephews who I don’t see often enough (along with their parents and the rest of my family)
- Discovered a whole new world around me I didn’t even know was there
Ten years from today:
- James will be 17! Good God. We’ll be thinking about college. Seriously. Unlike the “when you go to college” talks we have now.
- Maybe we’ll have finally move from Southern California. But if we haven’t, we’ll be getting close, what with James being ready to go to college and all. Please. After he goes to college. Please.
- I’ll be facing the “what now?” time of my life.
