Backtalk June 30, 2008

Okay, for what it’s worth, since I haven’t said anything here in a while (and also because I’m bored), I’ll offer my responses to the questions in the comments on Lulu’s last post.

TRAVELING WITH THE HOODLUMS

My friend P told me this tip, and I’ve found it works pretty well for air travel: dress your kid cute.  Make his or her hair look sweet.  Give him a cute suitcase stuffed with fun toys.  Basically, do what you can to maximize your child’s ability to charm everyone on the plane before you even get in the plane.  We’ve gotten on flights and sat down and had a nearby passenger enthuse, “Oh, I get to sit by Mavis!” Mavis and Jasper had introduced themselves earlier while tromping around the terminal to burn off some energy.  All of this is wonderful for buying yourself some goodwill when your child is less than perfect on the flight.

For car trips, I’m lucky to have an exceptionally pliant child.  We use one of those car organizers that can hang off the back of your seat and cram various toys in the back of that, within her reach.  We also pull out snacks periodically as a bit of an activity, but try to do this before they are requested–so it seems like a fun surprise.  Carry a portable toilet seat for the kiddo in case she decides she wants to potty train while on the road, like ours did.  Play games like “what color do you think the next car is going to be?” and sing songs and purposely mess up the words, which cracks my girl UP.  Make lists of things, like “who are some of Mavis’ friends?” or “what does Daddy like to do?” or “What are Mama’s favorite foods?”  Mavis usually enjoys this kind of conversation.  Also, of course, make sure your road trip overlaps with nap time.

BOOKS WITH DIVERSITY BUT NOT ABOUT DIVERSITY

Hmm, this is a good question.   I like Umbrella, by Taro Yashima, which stars a Japanese-American girl but has nothing to do with her ethnicity.  I know I have more of these, but nothing is occurring to me off the top of my head.  I guess most of our books nowadays are about animals (Mavis’ favorite), so people ones are less fresh.  If you’re interested in books with diverse animalia, let me know, and I can be of great assistance.

ME TIME

Hm.  I play Scrabble and connect with friends on Facebook, which you can do for just seconds at a time.  I read while she plays (but feel bad sometimes for doing this). I keep an early bedtime for Mavis (though I’m afraid it may be slipping away); she’s in bed each night by 7:00.  During the academic year, I have one morning a week of preschool when I’m not at work, and I meet a friend for coffee every week at that time.  I trade off with Jasper so that sometimes he gets the morning shift and I get the after-nap/before-dinner shift, or vice versa, and we can do things on our own.  Also, we have a house cleaner come every other week. And we have friends who like to play aunt and uncle to Mavis–when they offer, we let her spend a morning or afternoon with them from time to time (she’s been home about 15 months now, and she welcomes it). Honestly, though, most of my free time is work time.  And what “me time” I have is mostly a sacrifice of time with Jasper.  Jasper and I were never a joined-at-the-hip kind of couple anyway (we always had lots of extracurricular activities we did on our own before Mavis came), so that’s maybe easier for us than for some people.

GUILT

Mostly I don’t feel guilty about what time I have to take for my work or myself, because it’s so very obvious to me that I’m a better parent when I do.  I’m just too easily tired by pretending to eat a muffin that Mavis made in her kitchen for the 800th time to be the best I can be.  I feel the difference so strongly that it’s easy to see how the extra time I take really does allow me to give her more.

RECIPES

I recommend having your partner or someone else cook.    But if that doesn’t work out, I like salad in a bag.   We also do our own pizzas somewhat often–nice because Mavis can help.  Okay, I confess: I hardly ever cook.  Jasper is in charge.  I do thrown things into a tortilla with cheese and call it a quesadilla and feed Mavis that.  I also feed her smoothies made from plain yogurt and fruit, and when she doesn’t like the smoothie, I freeze it in a popsicle mold, and voila, she loves it.

ALAS

That is all I have.  What other questions do you have for us?  What else can you share with us about how you keep your kiddos busy?  I’m on summer vacation now and finding myself at a loss most days for clever things to do…please assist!

Talk to us! June 19, 2008

So, what should we talk about on Octomama?  The Octomamas have tossed around a few ideas, and I have a few thoughts — so weigh in!  Any of these topics appeal to you?  Other Octostuff you’d like to chat about?

• If you are an adoptee or are very close to an adoptee, how did that color your own experience with adoption or your choice to adopt?
• Great parenting books, both adoption and non-adoption related.
• Books your kids adore.
• If you adopted a non-special needs infant (under 2) internationally, do you think you could do so again with a clear conscience?  Or has this topic been beaten to death lately?
• What has been your biggest surprise in becoming a parent?  What has been a bigger deal than you thought (for me, cooking real meals every day), and what hasn’t been as big of a deal as you expected (again, for me, poopy diapers)?
• Favorite online spot or retail establishment for great kids’ stuff.

Clearly, we need a little jolt of energy around here, so let us know what would interest you!

When to worry, and when to let it go. June 1, 2008

Before I became a mother, I knew that parenting was full of worrying.

OK, I knew this in theory. I really didn’t understand the breadth and depth of the constant worrying. Did our parents worry this much? I’m pretty sure our grandparents didn’t. Are we just a generation of worriers, or do we simply have more to worry about as parents these days?

When it comes to Elsie, I have standard mom-fears. She’s pretty shy, especially around new kids and extremely so around new adults. This doesn’t worry me too much, and I can generally keep it in perspective. She’s getting a bit more whiney, and developing an occasional whiney/low voice that sounds like a baby Kathleen Turner. But I can get past that. And today, she cried and wailed for the first 10-15 minutes she was awake (For no apparent reason — this has never happened before. UPDATED: yippee, it was plain and simple constipation, a rarity!). No real mom fear there, and I know it happens all the time.

No, my current fears center on Elsie’s new fears. Lately, she seems to have a lot of them, and oddly, most of them are in our own house. In public, Elsie is pretty inquisitive and likes to explore her surroundings. She will walk around, climb, and poke her nose in anywhere she pleases. At home, she took this same approach, right up until about a week and a half ago. Now, there seem to be fears everywhere, and they tend to drive back to the same source.

Several months ago (really, more than six months ago, easily), we acquired an exercise/fitness ball. It was used a few times, but mostly, it has been parked in a remote corner of our dining room. For a while, Elsie and Max would play with it, rolling it back and forth, or she would sit on his lap and they would bounce on it. There was one, minor unfortunate incident where Max bounced it to her a little too high, and it hit her in the head and knocked her down. But she recovered quickly, and played with it many times afterwards.

For the past couple of months, no one has gone near the ball. And a couple of weeks ago, Elsie decided she was terrified of it. No doubts about her fears — “I scared of ball,” she says. And not just scared — afraid to go near it. She wants us to carry her everywhere in the house, especially in the living room/dining room area.

Well, we are slow, but not idiots, so we did move the ball to a corner of the basement. And made a big production out of moving it. Max does intend to use it again, so we didn’t completely get rid of it (whether he will or not is another matter, but hey, we’ve all been there). He even put our unused baby gate in front of it, and told Ellie that it was in jail, in a cage, and couldn’t hurt her.

So now? She won’t walk down the stairs into the basement, which she’s done many, many times. She will only go down there if we carry her. And she loves to go downstairs since that’s her prime video watching area. When I tried to play hardball (no pun intended) and told her that the only way she could go downstairs to watch Barney was to hold my hand and go down the stairs herself, she lost it. Sobbed and sobbed. “I scared of ball!” I felt horrible.

In general over the past couple of weeks, she wants to be carried in the house (even now that the ball is downstairs), or to simply sit on the couch with her books and her comfort items. Outside, we have no problems.

I suspect she had a bad dream about the ball, but is it more than that? After all, she had a little meltdown a few days ago over fuzz on the couch — “I scared of fuzz!” C’mon. Really? Fuzz?

Neither Max nor I have fearful personalities, and we’ve certainly encouraged her to be adventurous in general. I hate to sound like a broken record, but it is so difficult when to determine if something is just a normal stage, and when it might be an adoption-related issue.

Since I started writing this post a few days ago, things have improved. We’ve had a delightful weekend, and the ball has hardly been mentioned. Max has given up on it, and he let Elsie help him push all the air out of it, and we’ve stored it in a box in the back room of the basement. We haven’t seen if she will actually walk downstairs again, but she is roaming the upstairs again.

Now I get to worry about the letter my daycare provider dropped off yesterday. I let her know last week that we’re thinking of moving Elsie into a new daycare in the fall. It is a center, but not a traditional one. It’s very small, run by fabulous, childhood-development degreed women who have all been there for many years, the ratios are small, and the waiting list is enormous (as is the playground). We’ve been waiting for a slot since before we brought Elsie home 15 months ago. We finally have our spot in the fall.

The letter (and the fact that she sent a letter rather than sitting down and talking to me feels very junior high) talks about how she doesn’t think this is a good time for Elsie to make a transition since she is so nicely settled into her current situation. She talks about adopted children and their challenges with permanence. It felt very scolding in a backhanded way. We were incredibly gradual in our transition to Elsie’s current in-home daycare. In fact, our daycare provider thought we were being a little overprotective. And now she’s reminding me of how hard we “all worked together” on the transition?!

Anyway, it played into some of my fears, but I’m still standing my ground (and we really have already decided to make the change, we’re just telling our daycare provider in two stages). There are two one-year-olds in Elsie’s current daycare – they are not playmates, and are unlikely to be playmates for quite a while. There is an older girl who will start 1/2 day kindergarten in the fall and her older sister who, other than summers, is only there two afternoons a week.

Elsie’s main playmate at daycare is Alex, a 3-year-old box (Elsie is 28 months old). Alex is very bright, loves words, letters, and numbers and has helped Elsie’s development in that area a great deal. He is friendly and adventurous, and his determination to bring Elsie out of her shell is generally welcome. Here’s the challenge. He is also incredibly outgoing, to the point where he overshadows Elsie almost completely. He is clearly in charge, and he sucks up a lot of the energy at daycare. He is also quite whiney, and frankly, a little out of hand and aggressive at times. Honestly, my husband calls him the little brute (not in front of Elsie), and while it can sometimes be true, some of it is typical boy behavior.

Our daycare provider does a pretty good job managing Alex’s aggressive behaviors, but while Elsie is doing incredibly well with language comprehension, speech and letters/numbers, as I mentioned above, she is not doing as well socially. She doesn’t really know how to play with other kids her age, or even close to her age, and she is very fearful of other kids. She hangs back until someone tells her what to do. Yes, she is shy, but I simply don’t think she will have a chance to express herself or stand up for herself as long as she is hanging out with Alex all day. Our daycare provider said in the letter that Elsie has plenty of time to play with kids her own age (that was one of the reasons behind the move that I expressed to her), but in her current environment, the only thing even close to a kid her own age is Alex.

I’m not sure how to handle this with her daycare provider. I don’t feel comfortable telling her that we’re making a change for a variety of reasons, but a primary motivator is to distance her from Alex. I know there will always be aggressive kids in a class, and especially outgoing kids that require a lot of attention from caregivers. But in her current situation, that kid is her only peer.

I know it has been forever since I’ve posted, but I really would like to hear from people about this. How important are the other kids at daycare in forming your child’s early social behaviors? How important is it for other kids at daycare to be your child’s age, or at least close to it?

And perhaps most importantly, how do you manage another transition for a child that likely struggles with permanence issues? We have an opportunity to start Elsie early in the new setting in August, but it would mean Mon/Wed at the new location, and Tues/Thurs at her current in-home daycare (she’s home with us on Fridays). Would doing that half-and-half routine make it easier or harder to make the transition? We will definitely manage her transition slowly again, bring her in the first time with us for short time, having her first days there by herself be just a few hours, etc.

My, what a long/rambling post. For anyone who hung with me, any advice?!