And how can I get my three-months-without-an-accident, fully pee-potty-trained kid to POOP on the potty!?!?!?

Areas where I am doing well:

1. Finding other families like ours for Elsie to relate to. OK, I have hit a pretty solid homerun here. Between our travel group, people I met online who have become friends IRL, and others I have encountered along the way, nearly all of Elsie’s non-school friends are internationally adopted children. But this was easy, and it isn’t really central to culture now, is it? 
2. Reading a great deal on race, culture and identity.  And we have solid diversity in our toys, books and videos.
3. Talking about China and the area where she is from with Elsie.

That’s it. A pretty short list of areas that get a B or above.  I gave myself too much of a free pass when Elsie was so little, but it has kept me from developing good habits in this area. 

OK, here are the areas where I am doing very, very poorly.

1. Building relationships or at least frequently interacting with Chinese-American/Asian-American families. With our current circle of friends (see above), Elsie must think all Asian children have white parents. The only in-road we’ve made here is with our former neighbors, who have become friends (they are from the Philippines, they have two children, the youngest is a 5-year-old girl Elsie adores). The mom is a stay-at-home “super mom” type that I struggle to relate to, but she is very kind, so I am trying. 
2. Making a solid plan for incorporating Elsie’s language into her education. According to USNWR, we live in one of the best 100 school districts in the country, and it was a driver in our house purchase 8+ years ago. That’s the good news.  The bad news (to me) is that the elementary school in our neighborhood is French immersion. Sigh.  My husband leans toward having Elsie attend that school so she can have a more typical community school experience (bus stop is nearby, her school friends would live nearby, she would be in school with some of the same kids through high school, etc.). I lean toward the relatively close Chinese immersion school where Elsie can get the exposure to Chinese language and culture that we can only offer second hand at home. (FYI, Elsie is from a Cantonese speaking province, so Mandarin will not be a language she has heard before, but it would obviously benefit her in our return trips to China as a family, as well as any travel to the area she would undertake on her own, not to mention provide another bridge to her heritage.) Since Max and I lean in different directions on this, we keep putting off our decision, which we can only do for roughly another year when Elsie turns four and we need to get her on the list for the Chinese school.
3. Truly incorporating aspects of Chinese culture into our daily lives. Spring Festival made this crystal clear. My lame excuse is that we were all terribly sick at different points of CNY this year. But even if we had been well, I did not have much of a plan. As I read other AP blogs about making noodles and jiaozi, cleaning the house to prepare, attending festivals, and of course distributing hongbao, my heart sank. It’s not as if I turned around in surprise one day to see that Elsie is Chinese. And it shames me that I have fallen into lazy patterns I swore I would resist. This particular issue came to a head for me at our local FCC chapter’s CNY celebration. I have never had a good experience at their events, and yet, I registered for it thinking it was better than nothing. It wasn’t. First, it was held from 1-5 p.m. on the last day of CNY. So, horribly inconvenient for kids who still nap (like mine), and not exactly a rousing kick off to Spring Festival. Second, it was just awful, save for the CAAM dance troupe performances. Now, we did get there late, so perhaps we missed something profound, but looking at the agenda, I think not. Table after table of vendors hawking nasty cliche’ Chinese trinkets (didn’t keep me from buying a cute umbrella and chopstick cheaters), a carnival consisting of dumb games and cheesy prizes, and a dragon dance that started 20 minutes early (so no one was in the right place) with two gawky white teenagers under the dragon who were done long before the music stopped (the kid under the head finally took it off and yelled, “ok, enough with the music, we’re done!”).  And for this, I paid a little over $40. Never again.
4. This last one pains me to write because I have vowed to remedy it for a year, but I still haven’t finished Elsie’s lifebook. I have it about 2/3 finished, and I just can’t seem to commit to finishing it. I know part of it is a fear of getting it wrong, but not doing it at all is certainly no solution.

So, enough hand wringing.  What am I going to DO about all of this?  One immediate (within the next 30-60 days) thing I am going to do is join CAAM and start attending their events rather than FCC events. Maybe even enroll Elsie in their dance classes. Second, I am going to make a calendar of activities we are going to do around Chinese cultural events (other cultures too), some of which will be focused on our immediate family, and some of which will involve outside/sponsored events. Third, Max and I are going to attend a very premature tour of said Chinese school (and talk to a few parents I know who send their kids there) to make a more informed decision. And finally, I will finish the lifebook.  Really.  I will.  Hold me to it, ok?

So, now that I’ve nattered on as usual, what about the rest of you? Where are you doing well in terms of cultural connections for your kids?  Where could you do better?  What resources are out there to provide real help/support?

And is everyone’s FCC chapter as lame as mine?

Anyway, she is not one of us.

1. Spend more time alone with Jasper.
2. Be more diligent about Mavis’ dental care.
3. Work really hard to make January and February, which I normally find very depressing, interesting months.
4. Take a real vacation at some point, one that doesn’t involve visiting family (she writes, as she is on “vacation” visiting family…)

Any for you guys?

My topic/question is:  who are your freaky crushes?

Brad Pitt is a normal crush (not one I really have, but it is normal).  Harrison Ford used to be my normal crush, but he’s gotten a bit long in the tooth for me (still think I’d give him a second look though…).  Celebrity chef Tyler Florence is my current normal crush (cute, at least pretends to be relatively normal, AND cooks, gotta love that).

What I find more interesting are people’s freaky crushes.  The ones that make no sense. The ones where if people knew you had them, they would tilt their head and look at you with a mixture of confusion, worry and a bit of pity.

Here are mine:

1.  Duff from Ace of Cakes:  Me thinks Duff is not someone you’d pick out of a crowd for me.  But the combination of biker ‘tude and baking prowess just grabs me.  Add in the great sense of humor and his delightful silliness with his kid brother (who is maybe 5 or 6), and my crush is complete.

2.  Rabbi Jay Holstein.  Jay Holstein was one of my first professors at the University of Iowa 20+ years ago, co-teaching the monster (400+ students) liberal arts elective, Judeo-Christian Tradition.  He is barely 5 feet tall, bald and quite skinny. But he made me laugh harder than almost anyone I’ve ever met, and made me think too.  I ended up with a religion minor due to taking every class he taught.  A highlight was a course called “Quest for Human Destiny.”  I still have the notebook from that class — it was amazing.  I don’t think I’m the only one who had a freaky crush on him since one day there was a wrapped package waiting on the podium that he unfortunately chose to open in front of the class.  Um, there were black mesh undies inside.  I swear, I did not do it.  Really.  Wish I would have thought of it though…

3.  Bill Clinton:  OK, again, not the only woman who has (might be had at this point for me) this crush, but really, it is freaky, no?  He’s not hot, and c’mon, he’s a pretty shady character when it comes to the ladies, right? But when the whole Lewinsky situation was happening, I talked to my college roommate one night, and we both freely admitted, “yep, I’d do Bill.” 

Now Barack Obama is far superior in the hawtness category, but I have no freaky crush on him. I think it is the lack of naughtiness factor.  I suspect he saves all his naughtiness for Michelle, which keeps him out of any freaky categories for me.

4.  Daniel Radcliffe:  Why is it freaky, you ask? Well, I am 43, and he is 19.  If I were a man and he were a 19-year-old girl, you’d definitely call it freaky, right?  Creepy might be a better term.  And if anyone uses the word Cou*ar in relation to this might get flamed.  (That whole term and concept makes me gag.)  But still, that young Daniel makes me have all sorts of illicit Mrs. Robinson-like thoughts.

I have a longer list, but I’ll stop at 4 and ask others to submit their own.  And I believe my freaky crush issues started before I was 10 when I had a crush on Roy Clark from Hee Haw…

OK, share.  Who are your freaky crushes?

I just send the URL to a friend today, and I was re-reading some of the November posts, and then some of our early posts, and it made me think. We still have plenty to talk about on the site. So, no, I’m not ready to let go just yet.

Maybe we do need to reconsider format, topics, promotion/readership and a few other things. But I hope we can figure it out and stick around for a bit.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I still need a little help figuring things out…

One of my aunts in particular is using drugs and is nasty to everyone. She has a son who is 25 and barely wants to be associated with her, and she’s very self-conscious about how everyone knows that she has been a pretty bad mother. Anyway, she was at our Thanksgiving dinner tonight and observing Mavis, who was behaving well but squirmily, as a two year will do. She wasn’t noisy or bothering anyone, but my aunt needed to take the opportunity to cut us down to make herself feel better (it’s so obvious that this is what she’s doing, even though it’s really a cliche to say so). So she leaned over to my cousin, who is a nurse, and said, “Do you think she’s so hyper because they don’t let her have any sugar?”

I love the logic on this one. First, we do let her have sugar, but not candy on demand. Secondly, wouldn’t she be hyper if she had sugar? My cousin said, “Well, she doesn’t seem hyper to me–she seems two.” My aunt then baked up some story about how sometimes Ritalin has a reverse affect on children, riling them up more than it focuses them. How this analogy works, even in theory, was so baffling that my cousin and I got a good laugh out of it.

Later, laughing over this story as I retold it to my mom, my mom informed me that my aunt had also criticized me and Jasper for encouraging Mavis to say “please” and “thank you” when gifts were given to her last night. Later she also reacted to Mavis’ good vocabulary by saying, “well, living with two teachers, you know everything is letters and numbers for her,” in a snarky voice that suggested we just drill our toddler endlessly. It couldn’t be, you know, that Mavis is just a smart cookie.

My aunt is a crack addict who was also drinking tonight and has no real authority on anything, so I’m not hurt by these comments, especially based on the approximately two hours that she saw Mavis. But they do remind me of how quick we sometimes are to judgment from minimal facts, how soon we want to draw conclusions about other people’s parenting skills when we’re unsure of our own. I think my aunt is just an extreme example.

Tonight Jasper and I went out to a movie with my cousin and siblings while my mom watched over a sleeping Mavis. After the movie, Jasper and I stopped at a grocery store that is open 24 hours to get some snacks for our return trip tomorrow. On the way out, in 27-degree air and at midnight, was a young mom bringing her sleeping toddler into the store. I felt myself rush to judgment–why isn’t that baby in bed?!–and then stopped myself and felt, instead, some sympathy for whatever it was that made that mother have to haul her child into a grocery store at midnight, by herself.  Whatever the reason was, it had nothing to do with me.

Jasper doesn’t complain about our arrangement; in fact, he thinks I do in fact give 50%.  It’s been hard for me to feel like that because it just seems like the maternal default position is something like 80% or even higher.  But I was thinking this morning, as I was choosing what toys and clothes to bring with us on her trip and getting a bit frazzled, about the other things I do for Mavis that don’t always get recognized.  I do a lot more of the behind-the-scenes parenting for her.  Sure, we both clean up after her after bedtime.  Jasper makes sure her preschool bill is paid and sometimes collects advice about things like good preschools or pediatricians from his colleagues at school.  But I do a lot more:  buying all her clothes, choosing them each day (she just knows that he puts them on her), buying all her gifts (for herself and for her friends and teachers), planning and throwing her birthday parties, keeping photographs organized, keeping her history through a blog (though you could argue that’s not solely for Mavis, of course) that helps her stay close with her grandparents, who all live far away.  I always pack for her for all of our travels.  I build the traditions. I write Christmas cards with her pictures in them. I pack her lunches and plan for snack when it’s our week at school.  I spearhead research on everything: adoption issues, parenting issues, where to send her to school, whether X weird potential health thing is to worry over, what classes I could enroll her in.  I weed out clothing and other stuff she doesn’t need anymore and tend to her keepsakes.  I wrote and published her lifebook.

Some of this stuff is day-to-day operations that she just doesn’t see.  It happens mostly when she’s asleep or I’m at work or whatever.  But a lot of it is about tending to her past and to her future.  Jasper’s maybe more of our go-to man on the day-to-day, but I’m doing a lot more of shaping the bigger picture (not, of course, that those are really separable).  And really, I’m not complaining at all: I like doing almost everything I listed above.  But I think they sort of don’t get noticed or counted in the scheme of “parenting” sometimes–by me, especially.  Maybe I’m just rationalizing here, but it strikes me that these things I do for Mavis behind the scenes–things she doesn’t necessarily know about–oughta count too, in the constant accounting I do to make sure I convince myself I do enough.

Most importantly, we have each other, and as Max, Elsie and I enjoyed a pre-Thanksgiving treat at Starbuck’s this morning, I thought about how huge that is in my life. We waited so long to be a family of three, and I really worried about how high my expectations were becoming of what family life would be for us.

Not everything has been expected. Not everything has been rosy or blissful (by any stretch).  But I cannot even describe how fulfilling it has been for me personally, and for us as a couple.  I am so thankful we took this leap of faith, and I am eager to see what the days, months and years ahead bring to our lives.

We really do live in abundance at our house, and I mean that in all the ways that truly matter.

• my husband, who shares this parenting business with me 50/50
• the election of a clear-headed president whose values and actions seem to align
• the fact that I only have one more semester after this one of PhD coursework–I’ve been at this since 2003, and it is pretty old
• one friend in particular who, though he is not a mushy type, has really been a huge support to me in work/school this year and whom I think I failed until recently to recognize as being as good a friend as he is
• a group of cool women at work, even though I don’t get to spend a lot of time with them
• most of my students, most of the time–I spend more time with them some days than with my friends, so it’s nice to have good ones
• my family’s seeming embrace of a simpler Christmas this year, including their agreeing to come here instead of us having to go to my sister’s, which never goes off without an argument
• the exciting stuff that’s happening at work, even if it also freaks me out equally if not more
• a trip to Mexico planned for March and funded by Jasper’s aunt–this should help me get through the misery of January and February
• the births of my friend’s twin daughters, who came after a long time trying
• Facebook’s reuniting me with a ton of people I haven’t talked to in ages–I’m a ridiculously nostalgic person, so this has been really lovely for me
• for Mavis, who daily this fall has picked up the biggest leaf she can find, remarked how pretty it was, and decided who she wanted to share it with.  She’s exhausting, but she’s a good little egg and she’s mine.

Jasper, Mavis, and I will be packing up the car in the morning and driving 8 hours to see my grandmother, who doesn’t know we’re coming.  My siblings and mother are all coming too–all of us from out of town.  We’ll stay about 48 hours and turn around and drive home.  It’ll be exhausting, but that is how it goes.  I’ll try to keep up with the November posts while we’re away, but forgive me in advance if I miss a day!

Happy Thanksgiving!  I’m thankful to you readers and especially to you, Lulu–you’re a great friend, especially for someone I’ve only ever spent a few days with.