The Dirigible Plum

Respite

2012-03-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

So.

R. and I are going away on a vacation. Just the two of us. The boys are staying here. With sitters. For a week.

Now I know that baby steps would be more appropriate. For a first overnight experience without parents, one or two nights makes sense. But I have a week off from work and sitters who can stay for a week, and so we are having a real holiday and just crossing our fingers that we won't have to come home early because the sitters can't handle our kids.

This upcoming event has triggered some MAJOR behavior for the boys. That's not surprising. We were expecting that.

What has been especially interesting is what has happened with Temesgen. He had several days of wild explosions over very minor things. His stress level was off the charts. Every time, I tried to name his feelings for him, since he was struggling to do that: "You're feeling stressed and scared because mom and dad are going away." For the first few days, he vehemently denied this. "I don't care you're going away," he kept saying.

But finally he broke. And he said HE WAS SCARED. He didn't want us to go away. He needs mom and dad. Even more: he LOVES mom and dad. Whoa. This is a kid who has been fighting this placement since we picked him up in Ethiopia. He has never before told us that he loves us. So this is a major development for him. He is invested in this family. He wants to be part of this family. Who knew that all we needed to do to help him see it was leave?!

My hope is that this will continue to trigger some emotions in him so that we can begin working with him on some of his issues. But I also hope that he can take a break of one week from the triggering so that I can have a real vacation!

How We're Helping Our Kids Become Respectful, Responsible, and Fun to Be Around

2012-03-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to know where to begin writing about the changes we made after we read Nancy Thomas’s book, When Love Is Not Enough: A Guide to Parenting Children with RAD—Reactive Attachment Disorder, because they were so extensive. I’ll try to organize my thoughts around the different areas of the program.

Privileges
All privileges must be earned through consecutive days of respectful and responsible behavior. Thomas argues that RAD kids are really overstimulated by their environments and urges parents, first, to dramatically scale back and, second, to make sure that the children earn their privileges. She creates levels with different goals for her kids to work towards. We have 1-day, 1-week, 1-month, 2-month, 3-month, 6-month, 12-month, and 24-month privileges. There is a set of “free” privileges that don’t have to be earned. In our home, those are reading, putting together puzzles, coloring, playing with Legos or Lincoln Logs, going for walks with mom and dad, and jumping on the mini-trampoline with adult supervision. That’s it. Everything else has to be earned through consecutive days of good behavior. It was a giant change in the boys’—and our—daily routine. We removed everything except books, coloring books and crayons, puzzles, Legos, Lincoln logs, and the mini-tramp. We parked the bicycles in the garage, along with the skateboard. We boxed up all of their toys and put them in my closet. Starting on Day 1 of the New World Order, there was no tv, no movies, no Leapsters, no Wii, no bicycles, no skateboards, no trips to the store, no trips to the library, no trips to the park, no trips anywhere basically, no talking in the car, no gum, and no toys. Even stickers were packed away. All of those things have to be earned back through good behavior choices.

We have several levels of behavior. One-day privileges included a jump rope and a bedtime story. Each boy earned those after just one day. Seven day privileges took considerably more than seven days to earn for both of them. Seven day privileges included stickers and temporary tattoos (a special obsession with both of them), going to Grandma’s house once a week, riding bicycles in town with mom or dad, and playing on the swings and slide that we pass on our morning river walk. After 30 days, they earn the right to ride their bicycles to the park, play at the park, wear a watch, and play board games. With each new level, they earn the ability to have and do the things they enjoy.

I didn't discover Nancy Thomas until August, about three months after we became parents, and that was probably the right time for me to read her book. If I had read it before then, I don't think I would have been open to her approach. I think I would have found it too extreme. The kids can't even have toys? They can't chew gum? They can't go to the store? What in the world are we supposed to do with them if they can't play with toys or watch movies or ride their bicycles?

But it turns out that the extreme scaling back and the requirement to earn all privileges is exactly what they need. We have seen dramatic changes in their ability to focus, to stay calm, to be engaged by what they are doing, and to entertain themselves.

Right now, at the beginning of March, approximately seven months after we first started the program, Daniel is still trying to earn his 2nd 30 days of privileges (he earned 1 day, 1 week, and 1 month; he has gone “back to zero” dozens of times while trying to earn 1 month and 2 month privileges). You have to be pretty disrespectful and irresponsible to lose your day, and then you have to continue being disrespectful and irresponsible to go back to zero. So he has been working hard when it comes to not earning privileges. Temesgen has had more success with the program, which, to be honest, surprised us. He is still working on earning his 3rd 30 days, but he has gotten to 28 and 30 days a couple of times before kind of losing his mind and going back to zero. It turns out that it’s really stressful for him to succeed and make it to the next level of privilege.

But that’s okay. We just say, “You’ll get there when you’re ready. Don’t worry about it. You can start working on it again tomorrow.” And he has internalized that language. Just the other day, he told me that when he almost got to his 3rd 30 day privileges last month (and went back to zero on Day 30), he wasn’t ready yet, but now he felt like he will be able to handle it. He’s on Day 18! Awesome!

The real benefit to this earning of privileges has been watching the boys’ self-concept grow. Temesgen, especially, is redefining himself. No longer is he a “bad kid” (his words). Now he’s a kid who can control himself and made good choices and feel good about those choices. He understands that success in the program is all in his hands. He has really internalized the language of choice and consequence. When he loses a day, he almost always turns his attitude around and starts making good choices because he does not want to go back to zero.

Daniel struggles much more. When he loses a day, he flies into a rage and usually ends up back to zero pretty quickly. He blames everyone and everything except himself for the choices he makes. But eventually he is going to learn self-control and responsibility, and those are really important life lessons.

Rules
The rules are very simple: be respectful, responsible, and fun to be around. That’s how you earn your day.

We made a list of exactly what behaviors showed respect and responsibility and made them fun to be around. Respectful behaviors include saying “yes mom” and “yes dad” (“No,” their favorite word, is not an option), saying please and thank you, making requests with a question instead of giving orders, answering when someone speaks to you, no arguing, no disobeying, following directions the first time. Responsible behaviors are: brushing teeth twice a day, showering, making their beds, doing chores right and fast, putting their clothes and toys away. The fun to be around list was mostly things we didn’t want to see: no tantrums, no complaining, no whining, no tattling. This was the basic set of expectations we started out with, and we continue to work on these basics. They both excel at responsibility, but being respectful and fun to be around (especially the latter) are much harder for them. Many of their least fun to be around behaviors concern their treatment of each other, and that may always be a work in progress for them.

Consequences
Before Thomas, the only consequence we really had was the time-out, and it wasn’t that effective. Thomas does use a version of the time-out: she has out-of-control kids go to their room for 10-30 minutes to cool off. But she has developed a wide variety of creative consequences to nip unwanted behaviors in the bud. When I read about some of them, I had serious doubts that they would work with the boys. For instance, Temesgen’s constant jabbering and strange noises created an unpleasant environment for us—and would have been a disaster in the classroom. Thomas’s solution to nonsense noise is to tell the child to put his hand over his mouth for a minute. When I read that, I almost laughed. There was simply no way that would work with Temesgen. First of all, he probably wouldn’t do it. Second of all, if he did, he’d probably just continue making noises through his hand, all the while looking at you to see just what you planned to do about it. I tried it with trepidation and was shocked to discover that it worked! It took maybe three days to break him of what had been a daily (many times a day) habit for months. Putting his hand over his mouth was just the intervention he needed to get himself under control. And it turns out that he can control himself just fine. (Now we call it a “mouth hug”—as in, “Oh my goodness! Your mouth needs a hug right now!”)

For September through December, we were trying to keep the consequences very predictable. When they were disrespectful, there might be a quick set of push-ups or jumping-jacks to help them get oxygen to their brains. (They actually really like these physical consequences a lot. I guess they function as a stress release.) They might have a time-in or a time-out. If these quick interventions don’t work to turn attitudes and choices around or if the behavior is extreme (hitting someone, for instance), there will be a lost day. That means that the current day doesn’t count towards earning the next level of privileges. They can try again on their day tomorrow. A lost day should be a wake-up call to change their attitude and start making different choices, because the next level of consequence is a back to zero.

The consequences we were using seemed to be working just fine, but we stopped seeing any progress in behavior in January. Now that I’m reading a lot of Love & Logic material, I think we didn’t quite understand what Thomas was getting at with consequences. I think that ours became too punitive and didn’t allow for enough creativity on our part and choice on the boys’ part. Now we’re adding different techniques, which I’ll write about in another post.

Chores
Daniel and Temesgen have three kinds of chores: two are assigned; one is voluntary. Both boys do about 30 minutes of regular daily chores six days per week. Their chores include folding the laundry and putting it away; vacuuming; sweeping; dusting; washing dishes; cleaning the bathroom; cleaning the cat boxes; washing baseboards and molding; washing floors; and cleaning windows and mirrors.

They may be assigned extra chores to compensate us or other caregivers for the time and energy we have to invest in dealing with poor behavior choices. Temesgen put in many, many hours raking the lawn, sweeping the sidewalks, sweeping the basement, and scrubbing floors over the summer, but it’s been over four months since he has earned himself extra chores through poor behavior choices.

Now, extra chores can also be a privilege because they can choose to do extra work on the weekends if they want to earn spending money. Temesgen does extra chores nearly every weekend to earn spending money. At first, he blew his money on the first cheap shiny thing that caught his eye. But after wasting money on things that he then didn’t even look at again or that broke 5 minutes later, he decided on his own to start saving for something bigger and better. He has bought himself a pair of real NFL receivers gloves (in pink!), and just last week, he bought himself an mP3 player. Daniel does not have the privilege to earn money for extra chores because he still cannot complete his regular chores correctly and with a good attitude. Once he gets to the point where he doesn’t have to re-do the basic chores he’s been doing for 7 months now, he too will be able to earn this privilege.

There are many high expectations attached to chores. They have to do them with a good attitude. No whining, complaining, or pouting. They have to do them when they are told to. They have to do them before they play or eat dinner. They have to do them to our standards, which are high (after a training period, we expect the jobs to be done as well as we would do them). If their chore doesn’t meet the standard, they redo it until it’s done right.

It took us four weeks of daily training for Daniel to be able to be able to fold a basket of laundry (the first chore he learned how to do) without throwing a temper tantrum. It was another few weeks before he could do it without whining or complaining. We just use Thomas’s techniques. Children who whine or complain about doing chores must be tired, so they can go to their rooms and take a nap first so that they feel strong enough to complete their chore. Temesgen chose a nap over chores exactly once before he discovered that (1) going to your room to nap when you aren’t actually tired isn’t very much fun and (2) you still have the chore to do when you come back downstairs. Daniel chose naps several times, and he still struggles to have a good attitude during chores. And he also continues to struggle to do his jobs well. He re-does chores at least a couple of times a week because he does a poor job the first time. But he is beginning to take some pride in doing a job well and getting praise for it. He has a lot of trouble with cause and effect, and he is just now beginning to understand that when you do a job poorly, you will have to do it again--despite having had this experience dozens (hundreds?) of times since August.

Here is Nancy Thomas explaining why chores are important: “Teaching A+ floor scrubbing and laundry folding is how a child learns to do A+ science projects in school and A+ work in the job market later in life. You teach him how to put out the extra effort to finish a job he can be proud of, and he learns how to take pride in work and in himself. How a shirt is folded or the laundry is sorted seems unimportant, but it is the basis for every effort he will put out in life!”

Chores are an area where Temesgen really shines. He has a strong work ethic and takes pride in a job done well. These daily successes with chores done well are building his confidence in himself and his belief that he can be a good kid. Thomas cautions against praising kids indiscriminately when they haven’t earned praise. Chores are an easy way to offer Temesgen believable praise each day, because he generally does excellent work. He knows that he is doing a good job, and so he is able to accept the praise. He is building habits and values that transfer to other important areas of life.

Parental Attitude
Thomas writes a lot about staying calm, keeping your cool, delivering statements with empathy and loving eyes, showing a lot of pizzazz and putting a lot of energy into the good behaviors, putting as little energy as possible into bad behaviors. Putting this program into effect has been the best thing we've done for ourselves as well as for the boys. We are able to be much calmer now, and since they are generally behaving much better, we aren't so exhausted all the time.

That said, I will admit that managing myself has been one of the hardest parts of this kind of parenting. The boys have been absolutely relentless in their attempts to create a negative environment. Anger sometimes seems to be literally the only emotion that Temesgen has ever experienced from adults. He is deeply uncomfortable with adults who keep their cool, who can't be manipulated, who don't get angry or frustrated. He will keep pushing and keep pushing to trigger that negative response and to control his environment in ways that make sense to him. It's really very sad. But it's also very annoying. He has seemingly endless stamina for pushing buttons. I have had to work very hard to maintain some kind of equilibrium in the face of nonstop assault, and often, even when I keep my cool and stay calm, I do eventually start feeling depressed and hopeless. Pizzazz is hard to muster when you'd like to crawl under the bed and hide.

Thankfully, I'm discovering more techniques that are working to make parenting somewhat fun for me. That seems to be the area that needs work now: we've gotten it under control, we know what we need to do. But how to make it fun and rewarding? That's a subject for another post.

Stuff I've Been Reading: January 2012

2012-03-04T16:32:00.006-07:00

Ok, it's March. Maybe if I'd written this post when I intended to write it (on February 1), I might have had interesting things to say about the books. But probably not. Writing about books=hard. Please forget the fact that I have a Ph.D. and basically get paid to talk about books.

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block. This was a reread for the Adolescent Lit course I teach. I created a new unit this semester on the History of YA Lit and gave students a list of important titles from the late 60s, 1970s, and 1980s to choose from. I decided to reread Weetzie Bat, which was enormously important to me back in nineteen-eighty-something-or-other. It opened up some kind of world for me. I fantasized about growing up and becoming a hipster and living in a garret and creating things and falling in and out of love a lot and wearing poodle skirts and bustiers.

Cat Getting Out of a Bag by Jeff Brown. Slight but cute collection of cartoons about cats.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K Rowling. This concluded my re-read, or rather re-listen, of the HP series. This book is way WAY too long, but it had its moments. #3 is still my favorite. And Snape is definitely my favorite character.

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger. My mom recommended this graphic novel to me. I'm probably the only person in the world (besides maybe my mom?) who hasn't read The Time Traveler's Wife. This book was strange and kind of creepy but compelling.

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert. Read it too long ago to remember what I thought.

Brain Camp by Susan Kim and Laurence Klaver. Weird and kind of gross graphic novel where there's this giant mystery at brain camp. There are alien chickens incubating in the campers. Seriously.

Then I read a bunch of really good YA and children's lit. Just go read all of it.

How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr. Really liked it.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Really liked it too.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Really REALLY liked it.

To Dance by Siena Cherson Siegel and Mark Siegel.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. Really really REALLY liked it. Maybe my favorite book of the year. Even though it's only January.

Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve.

Amelia Lost by Candace Fleming.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai.

What I Said about Parenting in November and December

2012-03-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

These are things I wrote about Temesgen and Daniel after four months of using Nancy Thomas's techniques:

*They have good manners and never forget to say good morning, ask us and each other if they slept well, say please and thank you, “yes mom” and “yes dad,” and make requests rather than demands.

*They can sit quietly and calmly for hours putting together puzzles, drawing, coloring, or working on Legos.

*They ride in the car without fighting—ever. They sing along to music or chat pleasantly with us and each other.

*They show affection. Even Temesgen! He is really becoming attached to R and hugs him often and with genuine affection. He still gives me stiff hugs most of the time, but he is getting better. He has issues with mothers, and I don’t blame him.

*They enjoy trying new foods. They eat everything I serve them and say thank you and compliment me on my cooking. In one memorable week in December, they tried six new vegetables and pronounced every one of them delicious.

*When they get into a bad mood, they sometimes can choose some techniques for self-regulation (typically exercise, drawing, or spending quiet time in their room). Once they’re feeling better, they apologize sincerely for being cranky.

*They do what they are told the first time they are told, saying “yes mom” or “yes dad” as they go to do it.

*They show appreciation and gratitude for everything—-the meals we serve, time we spend with them, efforts we make to have fun together, things they already have, new things they get.

*They do their chores enthusiastically.

*They smile and laugh every day.

*They spontaneously point out when they are making good choices and actually say aloud frequently that they are happier when they make good choices.

They frequently comment on other children’s behavior. It is stunning, STUNNING, to see Temesgen shake his head at some out-of-control kid and hear him comment, “That boy making poor choices right now.” Um, WHAT? I can only shake mine in wonder at their transformation. Strangers actually compliment them on their manners. They are often pleasant to be around. I might even go so far as to say that they are now USUALLY pleasant to be around. They are still working on some of the more severe behaviors, but they have made great improvements in those areas too. They have a long way to go in their healing process. This is just the beginning. But it really does feel like the beginning of healing for them, and I am now hopeful that they are going to grow up to be functional human beings.

What I try to focus on now is not any kind of "Nature Journal" vision of family life but rather on this one simple goal: it is our job to raise these boys so that they become functional adults. Obviously that's a hugely complicated and challenging task. It's not really "simple" at all. But it gives clarity and focus to what otherwise seems like an overwhelming task. Where do you begin, when there are so many issues to deal with? I spend a lot of time thinking about what qualities, characteristics, behaviors, and values functional adults need and how we can intervene in their dysfunctional behaviors and qualities in order to inculcate new habits, new ways of relating to people, new values, new traits. They came to us with very little in the way of functional behavior—-at least functional behavior for the expectations that the world in which they now live has for them. Their behaviors were extremely functional for living as street children, then in an orphanage for nearly two years. They know how to manipulate, to lie, to cheat, to steal, to fight, to argue, to whine, to complain, to defy, to rebel, to withdraw, to gain pity, to shut down, to hurt others. They do not know how to be kind or generous or thankful. They know how to ingratiate themselves with adults when they choose to (manipulation), but they don't know how to gain real positive regard from others. They have no social skills: no idea how to interact with other children, how to cooperate, how to share, how to be likable, how to be a friend. Those survival behaviors that served them well in Ethiopia are a disaster here and make living with them and parenting them (and teaching them in school and coaching them in sports and sitting next to them in the classroom and playing with them at recess) very difficult and very exhausting. The ways their brains function need to be completely reprogrammed so that they react to every stimulus in a way that right now feels unnatural to them. That is why parenting them is so exhausting: every single second of the day is an opportunity to reprogram. There is no such thing as having an interaction with them that isn’t calculated in some way on our parts to reprogram their wiring and lay down new, functional patterns that will enable them to respond to their environment as moral, ethical human beings.

It has complicated the process enormously for us to be first-time parents. It has been a steep learning curve. An infant’s needs are pretty straightforward. The needs of our children are incredibly complex. We don’t even know how to be good parents to "normal" children, and being good parents isn’t actually enough for our kids: they need a therapeutic home environment to be able to heal and develop. So we suddenly need all kinds of skills and strategies and abilities and understandings that we simply don’t have and that, frankly, NOTHING in the many hours of training we were required to have to become adoptive parents even hinted at.

I don't particularly want to be doing this kind of parenting. Probably most parents who find themselves parenting kids with RAD don't. Still. There is satisfaction and reward in doing a difficult job well, and of course there is satisfaction and reward in seeing such huge changes, especially in a kid who was described to us by his caregivers in Ethiopia as "unadoptable".

In eight months, I have gone from absolute despair to cautious optimism. And that is a pretty good place to be.

I'll try to do another post about specific strategies we used from Sept-Dec to teach them to start managing themselves.

Last Summer: What It Was Like at First

2012-03-01T11:02:00.006-07:00

We're about 10 months in now, and I've been working on some posts reflecting on where we've been, where we are now, and what we've done to get here. This post describes what our first few months with the boys were like.

Of course we expected there would be challenges. I read all about attachment issues and grief issues. We felt somewhat prepared. But it turns out that a lot of the attachment literature I read downplays to some degree the reality of living with two children as ill as our children are. (I've since found more reality-based parenting books.) Sometimes I wish I had known beforehand what it would really be like. But I am not sure I would have listened. I followed a few blogs written by parents of attachment-challenged children (some of whom had fairly severe behaviors). But somehow I never thought those would be MY children. I never thought that would be MY life.

I am not sure anymore what I thought parenting was going to be like. Certainly I had some fantastical notions. Like Nature journals. Seriously! I was going to homeschool and become Craftsy Mom—-never mind that I’ve never done one craftsy thing in my life--and lead my children on wilderness hikes where we sketched leaves and rocks and stuff.

But while nature journals were obviously ludicrous for many reasons, I don't think that my general notions of what family life would look like were so fantastical or unrealistic. Is it fantastic or unrealistic to believe you will enjoy being around your children, at least part of the time? That you will have fun together? That you will be your basically kind and loving self and have your children respond to that in more or less positive ways? Unfortunately, when you're parenting kids with Reactive Attachment Disorder, the hope of having a normal family life does sometimes seem unrealistic and fantastic. Not. Going. To. Happen. At least not yet. And frankly, it takes some time to get used to that idea, to grieve what you have lost and may never have, to build the stamina you need for this kind of parenting. Every kind of parenting requires stamina, but parenting RAD kids requires extreme mental and emotional (and sometimes physical) stamina. It's not just about letting go of unrealistic notions you might have had: it's about letting go of ANY expectations you might have had and living very much in the moment. We adopted kids who had no idea how to be part of a family, who do not trust adults, who do not dare to attach. It is not easy to parent kids who do not want you to parent them, who do everything in their power, in fact, to prevent you from parenting them.

Here are the symptoms parenting expert Nancy Thomas lists for Reactive Attachment Disorder.

*Superficially engaging & charming, especially with anyone they might manipulate
*Lack of eye contact unless they’re lying
*Indiscriminately affectionate with strangers, especially with anyone they might manipulate
*Not affectionate with parents (stiff or floppy hugs; refusal to give hugs or cuddle)
*Destructive to self, others and material things (accident prone)
*Cruelty to animals
*Lying about the obvious (crazy lying)
*Stealing
*No impulse controls (frequently acts hyperactive)
*Learning lags
*Lack of cause and effect thinking
*Lack of conscience
*Abnormal eating patterns
*Poor peer relationships as other kids don’t want to be friends with them
*Preoccupation with fire
*Preoccupation with blood & gore
*Persistent nonsense questions & chatter
*Inappropriately demanding & clingy
*Abnormal speech patterns (such as asking what? after everything a parent says or refusing to speak clearly)
*Triangulation of adults
*False allegations of abuse
*Presumptive entitlement issues
*Parents appear angry/hostile

Most of these behaviors are about control, which attachment-disordered kids are absolutely obsessed with having. And the final result of all of this is a household in which parents are, in Thomas’s words, “basically abused in their own home.” When I first read this list back in August, it was like seeing my children on the page. Their RAD exhibits differently (Daniel is clingy, while Temesgen is standoffish), but with one very important exception (cruelty to animals--we've never seen that), they exhibit every behavior on this list. We spent our first few months with the boys assaulted by all of these behaviors pretty much constantly from each child. And I do mean all of these of these behaviors, all day long, every moment of the day. Looking back, it is no wonder I was absolutely exhausted and depressed and, yes, angry.

For the first four months or so, we were dealing all day with so many small but naggingly annoying and constant behaviors that wore us out: hyperactivity; persistent nonsense chatter and noise; lack of manners; constant interruption; whining; constant fighting with each other; and a nearly constant and loud demand for our attention. Everything small and large became a power struggle. Temesgen put on the wrong clothes or shoes nearly every time we had to go somewhere. He would come downstairs wearing Daniel’s clothes, then throw a temper tantrum when we would tell him in our mildest tones to please change into his own clothes. He would wear Daniel’s shoes—-much too small for him—-and collapse onto the floor screaming when we told him to put his own shoes on. Sometimes he would refuse to put on shoes at all. The aftermath of these small clothing power struggles was often quite major, as Temesgen would rage and scream for hours or sit on the floor and refuse to budge. It’s one thing to deal with a toddler’s tantrums—-quite another to manage a 65-pound child with flailing limbs who is in full-on refusal mode.

Mealtimes were a nightmare. On Monday they would say they loved spaghetti. I would make spaghetti on Tuesday. On Tuesday, they would throw a fit and refuse to eat, saying they hated spaghetti. A meal that was happily consumed one day would be scorned the next. They would complain about American food, then when I would cook Ethiopian food for them, they would complain about that. On different occasions, I watched both of them stuff their mouths with food until they choked and made themselves vomit onto the dining room floor. The only thing they would eat without throwing a fit was bread and jelly, and so bread and jelly it was for dinner every day—-for about three months.

They had no manners of any kind and no respect for us, for our home, or for each other. They peed all over the bathroom. They spit on the floor. They dropped trash wherever they created it. They screamed at each other. They demanded new things all the time—-new toys, new shoes, new clothes, new games. We were very sparing with new things, but when they did get new things, they threw a tantrum because it wasn’t the new thing that they wanted-—even if it was exactly the item that they themselves had just chosen in the store.

Then there was another level of acting out, more disturbing than the small annoyances and even more wearing and also pretty much daily in occurrence. They lied constantly, about everything, including things that we ourselves had just witnessed and about which we obviously knew the truth. They tried to steal when we went to the store. On several occasions, they ran away. They pretended they were being abused. You could reach out and touch Daniel’s shoulder very lightly, and if he was in a certain kind of mood, he’d fall to the floor screaming that you hit him. We wanted to institute daily chores, but we couldn't get them to comply with the simplest tasks. "No" was by far the word we heard most often.

And then there were the raging tantrums that would last for hours and involve kicking, hitting, screaming, biting, spitting, writhing, drooling, beating their heads against the floor, tearing their rooms apart, throwing things, and even vomiting. I dreaded the three evenings each week when R. worked the 3-11 shift and I was alone with the boys from 2 pm until bedtime. There were always, ALWAYS tantrums. The boys had some respect for R’s authority and none at all for mine—-plus they both have complicated mother issues that always played out when R wasn’t here to support me. Temesgen chose these nights for his worst acting out. He never actually hurt me as he raged and carried on, but his behavior was frightening. Daniel, however, did hurt me many times during tantrums: he kicked, bit, scratched, and pinched.

Their behavior made it very difficult to do anything fun with them. Games ended with cheating or one boy throwing the game board in anger or crying or all of the above. I stopped taking them to the park by myself after one memorable trip when they got mad and threw their bicycles at each other, then Daniel lay on the ground screaming and kicking me while Temesgen ran away. Because their behavior was so erratic, we had to curtail most outings and stay close to home, where we could at least keep them safe.

I read parenting book after parenting book, but we could never get enough control of very basic behaviors to be able to implement techniques effectively. And then we read Nancy Thomas's wonderful book, When Love Is Not Enough. Thomas is an adoptive and foster mom to seriously challenged and challenging kids. She has developed a variety of techniques to address the most typical behaviors seen in RAD kids and to help parents create a home environment where kids are respectful, responsible, and fun to be around. At the end of August, we started implementing her techniques, and we saw a dramatic change in both boys.

That will be the subject of my next post on this topic.

Blog Hiatus

2012-02-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

Well yes. So it's been a couple of months since I blogged. It's been a difficult couple of months. We saw a lot of progress from September to December. To the point where we couldn't believe these were the same children we'd had back in August. And then January happened. We're still not sure what happened in January. But the children from August reappeared with a vengeance. It was as if Sept-Dec hadn't even happened. Behaviors we hadn't seen in months returned. The calendar where we chart behavior tells the tale: nearly every single day, one or both of them "lost the day" (their behavior program has them progressing to different levels of privileges by earning 30 consecutive days of good behavior). If you're on Day 11, say, and you lose the day through poor behavior choices, you have a chance tomorrow to earn Day 11 again. If you lose the day and then continue to make poor choices, however, you can go back to zero and you start all over again to accrue your 30 days. I just checked the calendar for February yesterday, and Daniel has gone back to zero five times this month. That is a lot of disrespectful behavior.

So I've been too tired and too busy to blog (not to mention the new semester started and I have 4 different preps), plus I haven't had anything nice to say. How many times can I really post some version of "WHY? WHY? WHY?"

We've had so much success with the techniques from Nancy Thomas's book, When Love Is Not Enough, which is about parenting children with Reactive Attachment Disorder. I have a couple of blog posts half-written about the different techniques we're using and the success we saw between September and December.

But the boys seem to have leveled out in terms of the progress they're able to make. It was time for new techniques. Last week, I watched some awesome videos by Christine Moers, a mom who parents three kids with Reactive Attachment Disorder. I've linked to the one on "When Kids Get Stuck." Daniel and Temesgen get stuck a lot, and nothing we've tried has helped unstick them. You can see it happening, but I've been helpless to stop it so far. But over the weekend, I started having some success unsticking them using techniques from Christine's videos and embracing her challenge to "out-crazy the crazy."

It turns out that I am good at out-crazying the crazy. But that's a subject for another blog post.

Then I read a Love & Logic parenting book for kids up to age 6. Although my kids are technically 6 and "9" (really more like 12), emotionally, mentally, they are more like 4 and 6. I have been having incredible success with enforceable statements. It's my new favorite thing. Also the subject for another blog post.

Anyway, I'm trying to be back. We'll see how it goes.

Cranky Toast

2012-02-28T09:28:00.003-07:00

The boys' English is really coming along, but we still have amusing moments where they get it almost-but-not-quite right. For instance, when Daniel loses his train of thought, he says, "I just lost my mind!" Given the general content of his [NONSTOP] conversation, this is not hard to believe.

And sometimes, my ears play tricks on me.

The other morning, Daniel asked for cranky toast. Finally, a request I can easily fulfill!

Turns out he wanted crunchy toast.

Best Books of 2011

2012-01-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

YA Lit:
Dash and Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Graphic Novels:
Yummy by G. Neri
Page by Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge
Anya's Ghost by Vera Bogsnal

Children's Lit:
Frindle by Andrew Clements
Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

Fiction:
The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears Dignaw Mengestu
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Passage by Justin Cronin

Nonfiction:
River Town by Peter Hessler
Tattoos on My Heart by Gregory Boyle
When Love Isn't Enough by Nancy Thomas
Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
War by Sebastian Junger
How to Live or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell

Poetry:
Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Gratitude Rounds Two and Three

2012-01-02T14:16:00.005-07:00

In our usual way of doing things, we forgot that we intended to make going around the table and stating something you're grateful for part of the dinner ritual. We did it once, then a week passed.

A couple of nights ago, Temesgen surprised all of us by asking for it. It wasn't exactly easy to figure out what he wanted us to do since he asked for it like this: "you know... where I sat there.... and we eat.... and Dad say Mom."

Here is what they each contributed to the second gratitude go-round.

Daniel said he was grateful for mom and dad who always cook good meals for him and make sure he has a good breakfast and good lunch and good dinner and good snack and good hot chocolate. Then Daniel proceeded to list all the people he's grateful for. Same list as last time: Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandma and Grandpa. Oh yes, and Temesgen.

Temesgen said he was grateful for his bicycle and going out to eat at the Chinese restaurant and eating French fries (which he's had maybe twice--and not at the Chinese restaurant!--but I guess they made a strong impression on him).

It was a little hard to keep a straight face, as I felt their contributions so neatly epitomized where they're both at emotionally.

But the next night, Temesgen actually asked to go first and he shocked me by saying, in a high-pitched tiny voice that indicated to me just how hard it was for him to say the words out loud, that he was thankful for mom and dad who always cook for him and make sure he has everything he needs. Whoa! Who is this kid?

Stuff I've Been Reading in December

2011-12-31T14:51:00.007-07:00

December is always a weird reading month because I go on a binge of trying to finish all the books I started and didn't finish throughout the year--with the questionable goal of padding my reading list for the year or completing book challenges. December is not always about reading for pleasure or serendipity. But somehow, this December ended up being my strongest reading month--not in terms of the number of books read, which was average, but in terms of quality. Every book I finished this month was really good.

Books Read in December
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
Room by Emma Donaghue
War by Sebastian Junger
Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
Where the God of Loves Hangs Out by Amy Bloom
The Eleventh Draft: Craft and Writing Life edited by Frank Conroy
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt
The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer
The Journal Keeper by Phyllis Theroux

I found The Journal Keeper languishing on the shelf as I was prowling the house looking for half-finished books that I might be able to complete in one or two days. I had read about 30 pages back in January, and liked it, and so I am not sure why I didn't finish it then. But I'm glad I didn't, because it was the perfect end-of-the-year read, reflective and wise and generous and writerly. Like all journals, this one made me want to be more committed to my own notebook, and so I spent the morning writing on and off in between reading and admiring half-finished puzzles and herding Abby (who also admires puzzles--with her teeth) and walking Roxy and roasting vegetables and tackling 4 loads of laundry and answering "Yes?" for the five millionth time one of the boys called out "Mom!"

I decided after finishing NaNoWriMo in November that I should experiment with writing short stories which are, you know, short. Maybe a writing project I could actually finish. But I was slightly hampered in this new ambition by the fact that I don't really read short stories. I selected Amy Bloom's collection because it was one of Amazon's Best Books of 2010 and Z.Z. Packer's collection because I've always wanted to read it. And I liked the stories. I did. I liked some better than others. But I'm not sure that's because they were actually better stories. I'm not really sure what makes for a good short story. Only a couple are sticking with me a couple of weeks after finishing the books.

Sebastian Junger's War chronicles his different tours as an embedded journalist with the Army in Afghanistan. I don't generally find war books particularly compelling, but I couldn't put this one down. He captures the mind-numbing boredom of war as well as the horror and trauma. This is a book I'd like to reread at some point because I read through it a little too fast.

I read Nick Hornby's collections of reading essays from The Believer in reverse order of publication, which worked out well, because I saved the best for last.

Okay for Now is one of the better-reviewed children's/YA books of 2011; the author, Gary Schmidt, is an awards favorite, so it's not unreasonable to think that this book might be honored with a Newbery or Printz. It didn't entirely work for me, however. I loved its ambition and especially its use of Audabon's illustrations, but Schmidt took happy ending to an extreme. Doug gets the girl? Sure, okay. Doug makes sure all the pages that have been cut out of the library's edition of Audabon's book get returned? Sure, okay. Doug's disabled brother, a Vietnam vet, finds a job as well as healing? Sure, okay. Doug's juvenile delinquent brother turns out to have a heart of gold? Sure, okay. Doug and his sweetie get cast in a Broadway play? Sure, okay. Doug's evil gym teacher turns out to also have a heart of gold? Sure, okay. Doug's hero, Joe Pepitone, happens to be in the audience for his Broadway debut? Sure, okay. But Doug's abusive ass of a dad suddenly repents on the last page of the novel? Schmidt was already seriously straining the bounds of the credible when I got to that little scene, and that one lost me. Despite the good writing, this is probably not one I will be recommending.

Patti Smith's Just Kids is a strange book. I couldn't quite stop reading it, and yet I was also bored. Smith is surprisingly distant from her material, given how personal it is. The book has an odd tone, which I alternately found amusing (like when she presents some really extreme lifestyle choices in the most matter-of-fact way) and puzzling.

Possibly my favorite book of the year, Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone has everything you want in a fantasy novel: a richly imagined alternative world that the reader can live in. Plus, there's gorgeous prose, compelling characters, and a page-turning plot. Loved it.

Reading Goals Rehash

2011-12-29T10:38:00.001-07:00

Last year around this time, I was compulsively and ambitiously committing to reading challenges for 2011. My friend Martha pointed out that I would be adopting two boys in 2011 and might not have quite as much time for reading as I usually did. And it turns out that Martha, wise and experienced mother, WAS RIGHT. I barely read at all in May, June, and July. But then, I was basically living in a dystopian novel for those months and if you've ever noticed, characters in dystopian novels never read novels.

I always like to compete with myself, and so there was a tiny part of me that wanted to read more than 190 books this year to beat my number from last year. Go 200 books! But I knew that was unrealistic, especially after my months of living in Lord of the Flies. My total number of books read is much smaller this year. Just 101 (as of December 29. I anticipate finishing at least 4 more books by Sunday). (And not including the hundreds of picture books I read each year. I don't keep track of those.)

I didn't really follow through on any of the many reading challenges I joined, besides the Amazon Challenge, and I cheated a bit on that one. I started and abandoned a lot of books from 2010's list, so for my last few titles, I'm counting the ones I read from 2011's list--even though I didn't know they were going to make it onto 2011's list when I read them.

I had better luck with my reading goals, which were:

Elisabeth's Reading Goals for 2011:
Read more books for grown-ups.
Read to find out about the world.
Read to have fun. (As opposed to reading to prepare for work.)
Read more contemporary fiction.
Read a few books on my YA Shelf of Shame.
Read some classics I skipped in grad school.
Read books by authors of color.
Read poetry. Maybe.

The only goal I absolutely did not meet is reading the classics. I didn't read any of them, though I dutifully carried Trollope's The Way We Live Now around in my TBR stack for awhile and I started Tale of Two Cities three different times. (Actually, I just notice W. Somerset Maugham's novel, The Painted Veil, on my reading list. That counts as a classic! And it was very good.)

I read some poetry this year: Natasha Trethewey and Terrance Hayes and Kay Ryan and Joyce Sidman. I especially loved Natasha Trethewey's book.

I also read plays, for the first time since grad school: The Heidi Chronicles and Jitney and The Piano Lesson. I discovered a new favorite author, August Wilson. I hope to work my way through more of his Century Cycle of plays in 2012. I liked dipping back into drama, which I really loved in grad school, so much that I agreed to guest-lecture in a Shakespeare course next semester. I'll be teaching Twelfth Night and have been reading Marjorie Garber's and Tony Tanner's essays on Shakespeare to prepare.

My YA Shelf of Shame is pretty extensive, and I'm not sure I really addressed it this year, though I did read a couple of very good novels by Melina Marchetta, so I'll count those. In general, I read far less YA than I usually do, which actually worked out well, because what I did read was really strong. 2012 will have to be the year of M.T. Anderson, because 2011 certainly was not.

I did read for fun. I did a surprising amount of rereading this year--J.K. Rowling and Nick Hornby and Susan Patron and Madeline L'Engle and E.L. Konigsberg and Megan Whalen Turner and Jeff Kinney and Alison Pearson and Hilary McKay and Cynthia Lord and Sharon Creech. And I read more what I wanted to and less what I thought I ought to (which partly explains the lack of attention to reading challenges).

I read a lot of books for grownups. I read a lot of new books. I read contemporary fiction, though this turns out to be the genre where I'm most difficult to please. When I like it, I really really like it. When I don't, it makes me really cranky. I started and abandoned dozens (hundreds?) of novels this year because they just weren't right for me. I don't see the point of much contemporary fiction. It's often overwritten and pretentious (excuse me: "luminous." Has any word ever been so overused in book blurbs?), and it's often really bleak. I don't require happy endings, but I also don't want to spend my time absorbed in the lives of deeply unhappy people.

I think for 2012, I'm only going to set one reading goal: Read to enjoy. I won't be able to stick to that entirely because I will have some reading to do for work that isn't purely enjoyable.

That means I won't be doing some of the challenges I had in mind, such as reading the 20 books I haven't read on Betsy Bird's list 100 Best Novels for Children. I may do another Amazon challenge, because the editors really do an excellent job compiling the list and I already have at least 10 of the books on my TBR list anyway. But that's probably about it.

I'll post about my favorite books of the year in a later post--after I finish reading for the year, since just today I finished one book that will make it onto my list: Sarah Bakewell's kind of brilliant biography of Montaigne, who also only read to enjoy.

A New Claim to Fame

2011-12-28T14:33:00.000-07:00

My local librarian just informed me that she recently ran the patron stats for 2011, and I made it into the Top 10. "If you ever need a claim to fame, here it is," she said. Then she said something about not knowing whether it's good or bad that I am one of the top patrons. Like maybe this indicates that I'm just a little bit insane or need to get out more or something. Little does she know that I have active library cards at two other libraries!

I live in a town of 3700 people, and the library is fairly limited. It's the kind of library where if you're looking for something specific, you'll never find it, but if you're open to serendipity, you can always find something interesting to read. The collection shows me that I am not their target patron. There are a lot of hunting magazines and Christian romance novels and serial mysteries. They subscribe to about a dozen magazines that I read each month, and they add maybe a dozen movies I actually want to see each year, and there are always 1-2 new nonfiction or fiction titles that I want to read, even if it's a book that is straining the limits of my interest (like Roger Ebert's new autobiography).

But they set aside new YA and children's books specifically for me; they check my account each week and renew my books for me so that I don't have fines; and they waive the restrictions on the number of items a patron can check out at one time so that I can take as many magazines and picture books home as I can carry.

So I'm just going to say that I am proud to be a Top 10 user.

Things That Boys Find Funny

2011-12-28T11:55:00.002-07:00

Boogers, farts, butts, and poop. Though not necessarily in that order.

Now This Is "Music"

2011-12-27T10:05:00.003-07:00

Among other Christmas presents, each boy got a CD. I had imagined that these would be listened to upstairs in the privacy of their own rooms. But no. The boys believe this is music to be shared. So I have spent my morning listening to an unholy mix of Daniel's children's CD (R. pronounces each song the worst song ever recorded--until the next one comes on, but when Daniel asks how much we love "The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round," we say we love it A LOT) and Temesgen's "dance music" CD that includes Katy Perry, JLo, and Britney Spears, as well as LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," which both boys would like to have on permanent repeat. And let me tell you, after listening to "Five Little Monkeys," "Party Rock Anthem" sounds AWESOME.

Daniel asked if we could listen to Katy Perry on the drive to Grandma's house today. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Their little palates need to be cleansed with some Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Manners Training Gone Slightly Awry

2011-12-24T09:27:00.001-07:00

The boys' English is now good enough for us to be able to give them pre-event behavior pep talks. These have been surprisingly successful. R. is really, really good at pep talks, and we realized last night that we haven't started prepping them for Christmas Day yet. So he got started on that this morning. The boys were in a very good mood today and really got into the whole behavior talk. They kept finishing R's sentences. Often, they were right.

R: "Christmas is about--"
T: "Family!"

And:

R: "We know you'll be excited about opening presents, but your energy level needs to be--"
D: "Calm!"

But sometimes they got it wrong.

R: "If you open a present you don't like--"
T: "You say no thank you and give it back!"

Um, not exactly.

So R. explained that it's the thought that counts and you don't want to hurt someone's feelings when they have tried to select a present you will like. Then he tried again.

R: "If you open a present you don't like--"
T: "You play with it a lot!"

So I guess we'll know which presents he really hates based on how much he plays with them.

A Really Good Post on Parenting Kids with RAD

2011-12-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

I really like it when I can just link to someone else's words instead of going to the trouble of writing my own! This post on parenting a child with reactive attachment disorder explains our situation and our kids really well, though there is a wide spectrum of symptoms and behaviors for RAD and our kids are a little different from hers.

Gratitude

2011-12-22T07:30:00.001-07:00

Last night, after the boys started in on the eternal "I want Santa to give me A, B, C, and X, Y, Z, plus all the letters in between," R. had an idea. At dinner time, we instituted the gratitude go-round, where each person at the table has to say something they're thankful for. We gave them some examples, then got started. R. went first and said he was thankful for me, which is exactly what he should have said. Some days the only thing in the world I'm grateful for is him (and my mom! Hi, Mom!), but I decided to mix it up and I said I was grateful for our dog, Roxy, because she's so patient and kind and sensitive and when I lived by myself I was never scared or lonely because I had her, plus she keeps me from getting fat because I have to take her for walks. Daniel was mesmerized by the notion that I once lived in this house all by myself with Roxy and Wilhemina and no Dad. So we had to talk about that for awhile. He also loved the idea that without Roxy, I'd be really fat. His response: "No Roxy, then you big and fat and then no Dad and no Temesgen and no Daniel. You lonely." Thanks, buddy!

Daniel was practically jumping out of his seat because he was so excited to say what he was thankful for. "My mom and my dad and my grandma and my other grandma and my grandpa and Temesgen." I was starting to think he wasn't going to include Temesgen in that list--or that maybe he'd list all the pets by name before he got to Temesgen or something.

Then it was Temesgen's turn. First he said he wouldn't participate, and R. told him that he would. Then he said he'd just get up and go to bed. So he did ten push-ups to get the oxygen flowing to his brain. The oxygen moved very slowly, though, because he slumped over his plate and made weird faces and scowled and looked like he might go to the bad place for at least ten minutes. R., who is really brilliant with these kids, finally asked him, "Is it scary to have to say something you're thankful for?" He mumbled, "Yes." Amazing! Temesgen admitted to a feeling! First time, I think. And I can see how it would be scary to admit that there are things you like about your life when everything you have ever liked before about your life has been taken away from you--multiple times, in multiple ways. No wonder he doesn't want to commit. So we sat for awhile longer and then he finally volunteered that he likes going for bicycle rides with his dad and his mom and his brother (I'm pretty sure he was making part of that up, because I almost never go for bicycle rides with them and he absolutely hates going for rides with Daniel, who usually complains a lot--that he's tired, he's thirsty, it's hard, his feet hurt, etc.). We were like okay, great job, you came up with a good specific thing to share. But he wasn't done. He is also thankful for story time because "we sit together on the bed and we read and we smile and then we say good night and we go to sleep." Awesome!

Tis the Season

2011-12-21T10:12:00.005-07:00

I hate Christmas.

I never hated Christmas before, but I also wasn't trying to parent kids with serious challenges and issues. Over the past week or so, we have watched Temesgen come unhinged at the seams as holiday mania has reached a fever pitch in his classroom and at the Boys and Girls Club. We are seeing a reversion to behaviors we haven't seen in months. I had read before in different adoption parenting books that the holidays are hard on kids. I thought it was because the holidays triggered memories of their families and their losses. And I'm sure that is part of it. But there is more going on than just that.

It turns out that the whole world conspires to make your kids absolutely crazy during the holidays. The routines they depend on for their sanity are disrupted. Instead of having the structure and discipline of a typical school day, they have parties, watch movies, go on field trips. That's what happened in their classrooms for the last four days. And then the holidays start, and they have two weeks of unstructured time ahead of them. They don't do well with unstructured time.

The disruption in routine is hard, but the changes in their diet are even harder. They are plied with sugar all day long. On Monday, the boys came home and informed me that they had eaten cupcakes, cookies, juice, candy canes, and chocolate at school. Yesterday, candy canes were the snack of choice at the Boys Club. I have a prodigious sweet tooth and wouldn't deny anyone their dessert, but sugar makes my kids INSANE. When Temesgen gets too much sugar, he unravels. He'll be perfectly fine, then he'll have some candy and pretty soon he's nearly crawling out of his skin with hyperactivity which inevitably ends in a crying jag. Sugar is the most dangerous drug we can give them. Aside from caffeine. Which they got yesterday. On a school field trip. Because hey, of COURSE responsible adults should ply six-year-olds with Pepsi at 10 a.m.! The last time Temesgen had a Pepsi (on an outing with his grandparents, who got a rather sharp lecture from R. afterwards), he spent the afternoon writhing on the floor screaming and kicking and drooling and having to be physically restrained by R. so that he didn't hurt himself or someone else. We had a lot of behavior issues with him yesterday. And then we found out he had had a Pepsi. Suddenly it all made sense.

They don't watch tv and they don't go to stores, so you would think they would be immune to the consumerism of the holidays, but they're not. Temesgen snatched a catalog from Target out of the recycling, read it cover to cover, and informed us that he wants everything. All the toys, all the clothes, but also cell phones and MP3 players and computers. At school, Daniel--with much help from some adult since he can't write--wrote a letter to Santa filled with "I want" and "Give me" and not one word of "Please" or "Thank you." They are so fixated on what they're going to get that they can barely function normally. Both boys have a huge sense of entitlement already (a symptom of Reactive Attachment Disorder), which we work very hard all day every day to replace with appreciation, gratitude, and generosity. But strangers on the street stop them to ask what they want for Christmas and they have their list ready to rattle off. And they aren't getting any of that stuff, so what is Christmas Day going to be like when they open their presents and don't find the remote control cars and electric keyboards and MP3 players and Transformers and robots that they seem to think is their right? Major meltdown is what I imagine, followed by a lot of "strong sitting" (a calming self-control technique from Nancy Thomas's marvelous parenting book, When Love Is Not Enough) and cool-off time in their rooms.

I really, really wish I'd read this post on The Christmas Conundrum back when it was originally posted, because Jen has a lot of great ideas for controlling the excess and chaos of the holidays and helping her children focus on what is actually important--which is spending time with family and doing things for other people. Next year, I am absolutely borrowing her idea for presents: something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read, and something to give. I loved the whole Christmas hysteria when I was a kid, and as R. pointed out to me just this morning when I marched into his office (pumped up on Jen's post) and announced that we had made a huge mistake in letting the boys believe in Santa (we weren't planning to do Santa, but they came home from school one day in November, total believers, and we felt like it would be less hassle for us to simply go along with it--BIG mistake! And we KNOW better! We know perfectly well that taking the easy road now usually means paying for it later. But we weren't prepared to start dealing with Santa in November. We hadn't even gotten through Thanksgiving yet, and I didn't know what story we were going to tell to explain Santa, so when the boys came home full of Santa and his flying reindeer and bag of presents, I was just like "mmm-hmmm, that's right."), it didn't damage me. But then, I wasn't a kid with reactive attachment disorder either. Every moment of every day we spend doing therapeutic parenting, so it really sucks when you realize you've made choices that actually feed some of the dysfunctional behaviors you are working so hard to change.

We do have some ideas for scaling back and refocusing the boys' attention this week. And I have a lot of ideas for how Christmas next year is going to be very different. But for now, I kind of can't wait until Monday, when it's all over and we can begin to get back to normal.

Stuff I've Been Reading in November

2011-12-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I was holed up in my office trying to get through my daily NaNoWriMo word count and to ignore the screeches downstairs as Temesgen went to crazyland for the first time in over a month (he refused to wear his gloves while playing in the snow and ended up learning important lessons not only about the temperature of snow, as in it is cold, but also about listening to your parents when they tell you to wear your gloves) and I started reading titles on my bookshelves to distract myself from the sounds below. I spotted Nick Hornby’s Housekeeping vs. The Dirt sharing shelf space with Richard Russo’s Straight Man and decided to reread both of them.

I didn't get that far in Straight Man, even though I was enjoying it, but I read Housekeeping vs The Dirt in a day, then searched my shelves for the other two volumes of Hornby's essays on reading. I find it very challenging to write about books. If I love them, it seems like there isn't much to say. I revert to a sort of caveman speak: Book Good. Me Like. You Read Too. If I don't love them, writing about them is a lot easier and kind of fun, but only in the way that being snarky is fun. Pleasurable, but mean and kind of pointless.

In any case, I felt inspired by Hornby's format--a personal essay about his month's reading that includes lists of the books he buys and the books he actually finishes (often the two lists aren't that similar). I thought I might start a monthly blog series on Stuff I've Been Reading. I've already learned one important lesson: don't wait til the middle of the next month to do it because you'll forget anything you might have wanted to say about the books you read.

Books Bought in November 2011:
John Carey, Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century's Most Enjoyable Books
John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?
Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot
Nancy Tillman, The Spirit of Christmas
Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
Vera Bogsnal, Anya's Ghost
Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Martha Alderson, The Plot Whisperer
Eric Olson, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writer's Workshop
Jaclyn Moriarty, I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes
Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life
Terence Hayes, Wind in a Box

Books Read in November 2011:
Danica Novgorodoff and Benjamin Percy, Refresh Refresh
Terence Hayes, Wind in a Box
Jaclyn Moriarty, The Murder of Bindy McKenzie
Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life
Veronica Roth, Divergent
Julie Salomon, Wendy and the Lost Boys: a Life of Wendy Wasserstein
Vera Bogsnal, Anya's Ghost
Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs the Dirt
Eric Olson and Glenn Schaeffer, We Wanted to Be Writers
Nick Hornby, Shakespeare Wrote for Money

This is actually a pretty interesting exercise, because I always think that I buy a lot of books that I don't read. A non-reader might compare my two lists and think that's exactly what I do. But I'm actually pleased that several of the books I bought were actually read in the same month they were purchased.

I read a lot of good books in November. One of my favorites was the graphic novel, Anya's Ghost, which is YA. I might include it on the YA Lit syllabus in the future. It's got a strong heroine and a storyline that starts off sweet and turns creepy. Refresh Refresh is the other graphic novel I read; I assigned it to my Gender & Lit class, and it has interesting things to say about class and the military and gender roles.

Wendy and the Lost Boys is the first biography I have read in years. I wrote my dissertation on feminist biography, and that project totally burned me out on the genre--for the last 8 years. Unusually, the section that's always my least favorite--the childhood years--turned out to be my favorite in this book: Wasserstein's family was kind of nuts, full of very strong characters, and I found that section of the book to be by far the most engaging. I responded to Wendy the adult rather as I responded to Heidi in The Heidi Chronicles (also read this semester in Gender & Lit): I was bored by her upper-middle-class ennui. It's hard for me to feel a lot of sympathy with the imaginary crises of the privileged. I mean, what do you think is going to happen when you keep falling in love with gay men? You're going to be unhappy, that's what! Snap out of it! But this was a good biography and shed some interesting light on The Heidi Chronicles, which we struggled to appreciate in Gender & Lit.

I really liked Ann Patchett's writing memoir but find I don't remember anything about it--aside from really liking it. I read it on my Kindle (only two books this month were Kindle reads), and one nice feature of the Kindle is the highlighting feature, so if I were a little more motivated, I could reread my highlights and probably remember what I liked so much about it. But I'm not that motivated. I'm sure I'll reread it at some point. Good books about writing always deserve to be reread.

I'm not really sure why I bought or read We Wanted to Be Writers, but I'm glad I did because I liked it. It's a kind of oral history of the Iowa Writers Workshop during the 70s when John Cheever and John Irving were teaching there and T.C. Boyle and Jane Smiley and Amy Tan and a lot of other famous writers were students.

Veronica Roth's Divergent is the first in a trilogy of YA dystopian novels. It reminded me more than a little bit of The Hunger Games, but that's not a bad thing. It was a page-turner: it's a giant novel, but I read it in a morning.

I skimmed Terence Hayes's volume of poetry pretty quickly: I sort of spaced out that it was on the syllabus for Gender & Lit and that I'd never read it before. There were a few poems I liked, but I wouldn't include it on the syllabus again next time.

I was really taken by a lot of the things Nick Hornby has to say about reading and taste. Unfortunately, I didn't take any notes or do any annotating, so I don't remember about anything he wrote. Just that he's clever and I wish there were several more volumes of his essays about reading.

Cats Are My Sous-Chefs

2011-12-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

I used to think people who let their cats get on the kitchen counters were really trashy. But then I somehow ended up with 6 cats. It's challenging to keep one cat off the kitchen counter. It's impossible to keep 6 off. But I swear, I really did make them get down after I took these photos.

Christmas Presidents

2011-12-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

The boys' English improves every day, but occasionally they don't quite understand a new word. That has been the case with Christmas presents. They both call them Christmas presidents. I am very much enjoying the image of a pile of presidents piled up under our Christmas tree on December 25th.

Tiny Has Eyes!!

2011-12-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

It is notoriously difficult to get a photo of Wilhemina with her eyes open. She hasn't opened her eyes for a picture since the very first flash photo was taken of her when she was a wee kitten. She sees a camera, and she squints. For 6 years straight. Even when it's not pointed at her.

Abby Vs The Christmas Tree

2011-12-07T09:29:00.004-07:00

Last year, we didn't have a Christmas tree. For several reasons, but mostly because we didn't trust Abby, who is [ahem] special. She is truly a wonderful cat: she is full of joy and happiness; unlike other cats who may be sullen or cranky, she is always in a good mood and everything, simply everything, is so interesting to her; she loves all of the other cats; and she has even tamed the wild Xander beast. Xander's normal impulse is to hunt and attack new animals, but many hours of Abby therapy (where she pursues him, snuggles next to him when he's sleeping, jumps on his head, allows him to bite her neck, etc.) have transformed him into a cuddly bear who just wants to snuggle and bathe his fellow felines. But Abby is also a very busy cat with a very busy mind. We envisioned her launching herself at the Christmas tree and tackling it, and now that we do have a tree, that is basically exactly what she does.

Abby napped all afternoon on Saturday as we were setting up the tree and decorating it. So it came as a marvelous surprise to her to wake up late in the evening and discover that we had put a giant tree hung with cat toys in the living room just for her. She spent the night trying to remove all the ornaments from the tree--and after we locked her out of the living room, she spent the rest of the night yowling at the door to get back in. On Sunday morning, I redecorated the tree--removing all the breakable ornaments, removing all the hooks, and removing all ornaments period from the bottom third of the tree. That has helped, but not completely resolved, the problem. She spends hours every day staring at the tree from different angles, trying to figure out how best to attack the ornament she's after. She knows now that we don't want her in the tree, so when we're in the room, she looks in every direction except the tree. But the second we're out of the room, she attacks. I'll look into the living room from the kitchen and see the whole tree waving from side to side; I'll yell; then I'll see Abby apparate from somewhere mid-tree and go tearing off.

Abby 32, Christmas Tree 0.

Skin Color

2011-12-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Last night, the boys told me that they were very offended by a kid at school who told them they were black.

"Me brown," Daniel said. Temesgen agreed.

And so I tried to explain that even though, technically, they ARE brown, in English we call that skin color black. "Why?" they kept asking, holding out their arms for me to inspect. "Look! Me no black! Me brown! Brown and black not the same."

Um, yes, good point.

"Lots of brown people in Ethiopia," Temesgen said. "Some black people."

Not really knowing where to go with all of this, I explained that I'm called white in English, even though if you put a white piece of paper next to my skin, you'd see that I am not, in fact, white.

Daniel looked at me appraisingly. "You kind of....orangey," he pronounced.

At that moment, a Native American man walked by, and they both whispered to me that he was a Native American. And then they had to dissect his color.

"Not white, not brown," Temesgen suggested.

"Brown," Daniel said.

"Almost brown," Temesgen amended. There are some native kids in his class, and he proceeded to analyze each one's exact shade of brown.

I was just about to launch into some no doubt very moving and memorable pronouncements about diversity and multiculturalism and living in a rainbow world, when I was interrupted by Temesgen yelling and pointing. "White car! White car!" Then a bit of the usual Dr. Seuss talk took place: "White car! Red car! Blue car! Special car!"

SIGH.

Cats in a Basket

2011-12-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

Temesgen and Santa

2011-12-04T15:14:00.000-07:00

So. Temesgen is kind of obsessed with Santa and asks us LOTS of questions. Questions I am not prepared to answer. Like how do his deer fly because regular deer can’t fly. And how does Santa get into our house since we don’t have a chimney. And how does Santa know where he lives. And how can Santa be everywhere at once on Christmas Eve. Ummm...

I resort a lot to magic as an answer. They’re magical deer. Santa is magic so he knows where everyone lives. That crazy magical Santa! Of COURSE he knows how to get into our house even though we don’t have a chimney. (R. told the boys that we’ll just leave the door unlocked on Christmas Eve so that Santa can come in.)

Before we adopted, we had decided that because of the boys’ ages, we wouldn’t do the whole Santa thing. Ryan never believed in Santa, and I stopped believing when I was around Temesgen’s age. We thought he would be too old for it. We also were concerned about trying to convince him one year that there's a Santa Claus and then having to admit, probably the very next year, that we made the whole thing up. We spend a lot of time talking with the boys about the importance of telling the truth--which they do not consider a virtue. And here we are, concocting the most absurd story and assuring them that it's totally true. We worry that Temesgen is going to wonder what else we lied about.

But somehow Christmas snuck up on us and the boys came home from the Boys Club clutching a flyer that announced that Santa Claus—SANTA CLAUS!!—would be arriving in Rapid City on Saturday, November 19, at the Civic Center. Temesgen was so excited. He was full of Santa and his amazing flying reindeer (“Deer can fly? That’s true?!” Ummm…..) and his sleigh and mostly THE PRESENTS. Temesgen is a child who is obsessed with stuff. Stuff is the way to his heart. He began to respect me much more after R. explained that I’m the breadwinner and I buy all the stuff. Stuff is also the best way to discipline him (he destroyed items in his room exactly twice and the consequence—having everything in his room removed besides the furniture—was too devastating; he learned self-control pretty quickly), and it continues to be a way to motivate him. (Doing regular chores well, for example, earns you the right to do extra chores for money, which so far he has used to buy little trinkets, but which he is now saving for larger purchases—pink NFL gloves! He is also OBSESSED with the color pink. He was very sad when he discovered that 3rd-grade boys will make fun of you for wearing pink. But then I showed him photos of Clay Matthews and Larry Fitzgerald in their pink NFL gear, and now he is convinced that pink is cool—at least while you’re playing football. I keep explaining that it’s all about attitude. If pink makes you happy, you wear it, and you don’t care what other people say or think. As the strongest and most athletic kid in the whole elementary school, he can totally carry off as much pink as he wants to wear.)

Anyway, Temesgen, it turns out, is MUCH more into the whole Santa myth than Daniel is. Temesgen talks about Santa every day—several times a day. He spends a lot of time thinking of potential problems and solutions. For instance, at first he wanted to give Santa a present and went through his things, trying to choose the one that Santa would like. I got him convinced that what Santa really wants is a plate of cookies. Yesterday he thought of a real snag in the cookie idea: if we leave a plate of cookies out overnight, the cats will get into them before Santa gets here. He thought for a moment and then jumped up and down: “I have an idea! I have an idea!” His idea was that R. and I would bring all of the pets—including Roxy—into our room and close them in at night so that the cookies can remain unmolested.

“Or what about if we write Santa a note and tell him the cookies are in the microwave?” I suggested.

“Good idea Mom!”

He saw the cover of the last issue of Family Circle last night—a plate of beautiful Christmas cookies—and he wants me to make ALL of them for Santa. I am strictly a drop cookie kind of girl, so the thought of stained glass cookies and candy canes in green and red and frosted snowflakes and so forth is rather daunting. The most I can manage is sticking a Hershey’s Kiss into a thumbprint. But I figure that baking cookies will keep us very busy on Christmas Eve.

This morning, Daniel dictated his letter to Santa Claus (to the air, as it turned out: I’m not taking dictation for Santa): “Dear Santa, I love you, Give me toys, Love Daniel.” Everything—EVERYTHING—becomes an excuse for a lesson in manners at our house, so I asked him to rephrase his letter.

“Dear Santa, I love you, Give me toys please, Love Daniel.”

“We don’t make demands, remember? We ask politely,” I reminded him.

“Dear Santa, I love you, May I have some toys please? Love, Daniel.”

Much better.

Reflections on NaNoWriMo

2011-12-03T15:23:00.001-07:00

On Wednesday, I completed my fifth NaNoWriMo and now have another 50K words on a young adult novel I’ve been working on for several years, off and on but mostly off. I am proud to have finished, especially given my parenting and work schedule. I like the ritual of it—setting aside every November to bust out a fairly brutal writing pace. There is real satisfaction in finishing what you set out to do, in reaching a goal. And I love the social aspect of it. In previous years, my mom and my husband have joined me. This year, they didn’t participate, but a co-worker did, and it was fun to compare word counts and know that while I was shut up in my office writing, he was just down the hall in his doing the same thing. There were several local write-ins every week in my area (which might not seem like a big deal—but I live in a town of 1400 people and all there is for 60 miles in any direction is prairie, prairie, and more prairie, plus a few pine trees). I didn’t participate in any of the write-ins, because they were mostly held when I was teaching or parenting, but I did get out of the house and spend many quality hours writing at my favorite coffee shop (and at the library and at a dinky little bakery with overfried donuts).

The great virtue of NaNoWriMo, for me, is always the routine, the daily habit. After the first week, it stopped being so painful to write. By the end of the second week, I was looking forward to my daily writing time, and by the third week, I was wondering why I don’t write every day of the year. Anything that gets me writing consistently is good. In the past, I’ve always taken a day off here and there and caught up later but because I had such limited time each day to give to writing, I kept to the daily schedule and put in my time every single day for 30 days. I woke up at 5 a.m. two mornings a week so that I would have time to write, and I made sure I was up at least an hour before the boys on other mornings so that I could get at least half the word count in before my day truly started.

This year, NaNo had one additional virtue: it gave me some time to myself to pursue an interest that has nothing to do with being a parent. So much of my time and attention now goes to managing the boys; I feel like I have lost sight, to some degree, of some of my own interests and pursuits. In September, I really began reading seriously again. And in November, I began writing again. I feel more like myself.

However, there are a few drawbacks to NaNoWriMo, especially concerning quality. Given the pace of NaNoWriMo, you end up writing when you just plain don’t feel like it, when you’re too tired or too distracted to actually write good sentences. It’s a good thing to realize that you don’t need to wait for inspiration to write, but sometimes the brain really does need a day off. You pad your writing and multiply words to get to your word count within a reasonable amount of time. You don’t spend any time rereading and revising because that isn’t time that pushes you forward to the word count. You don’t have time to plan or create. I haven’t reread what I wrote yet, but I would guess that of the 50K words, only about half of it is actually decent writing—sound sentences, thoughtful word choices, spritely dialogue, necessary description. And maybe only 10K would actually make it into the draft-in-progress because so much of it just doesn’t push the story forward.

I am beginning to think that it’s a necessary part of my process to write significantly more than I need in order to figure out what the draft is really all about. I am okay with that, but I would feel better if more of the writing I had done this month was actually focused and purposeful. In previous years, the daily 1667 words have taken me about 50 minutes to write. This year, they consistently took more like an hour and 15 minutes. If I have 75 minutes to write and have to spend every second of that time writing, I am not writing very intentionally or thoughtfully. A more reasonable daily word count—750 words or even 1K words—would enable me to write, read, revise, and edit in the amount of time I have available during the school year for writing. I write better if I can reread what I wrote the day before first, make some changes and do a little polishing, and get back into the flow of the writing. But that’s a luxury I can’t afford during NaNoWritMo.

One thing that did happen this November is that I began to enjoy writing. That might sound kind of foolish, because if you don’t like doing something, why would you do it? It’s not like anyone is forcing me to write. But I’ve always found that liking writing is different from wanting to write. I have always wanted to write. But I don’t always like to write. I like having written. It’s rare for me to enjoy actually sitting down and writing. The first week of NaNo was torture. My husband asked every day if I had enjoyed my writing, and every day I looked at him like he had grown a second head. Of COURSE I didn’t enjoy writing! What kind of writer enjoys writing? But after I was back in the habit, by maybe the middle of Week 2, I was beginning not to dread it, and by the beginning of Week 3, I was looking forward to my daily writing time.

My reward for finishing NaNoWriMo wasn’t to take some time off, which is what I usually do. My reward was to start a new project—a short story. Yesterday, I wrote over 2K on it and had fun. Even after I shut the computer down, I kept making up sentences. Usually I am all too happy not to think about the work-in-progress until the next day’s writing time, so it was unusual to feel compelled to turn my computer back on at 11 pm so that I could add a few more lines.

As for post-NaNo plans, I am not sure if I plan to keep pursuing my novel-in-progress. I have trouble committing to very basic plot elements with it. Originally, the main character’s mother was dead, but there’s a reason there’s a popular YA novel called One of Those Hideous Novels Where the Mother Dies. It’s overdone in teen fiction—probably because it’s a Big Problem and teen novels like to focus on Big Problems and because it’s handy to have the parents out of the way. I love the main characters, and I love the title, and I love some of the scenes. But today I wondered what would happen if I took everything I’ve written (probably over 250K words at this point—hundreds of pages of writing!) and reduced it to a short story or two. I might experiment with that.

I do have ideas for some other projects I’d like to work on. Some are creative, some are more professional. I’m up for tenure next year, and although I work at an institution which emphasizes teaching over research, I think I would be a stronger candidate if I had some publications. I’m kind of cutting it short on getting something, especially since I just can’t do literary criticism anymore. The only thing I can write about professionally is teaching, and I do have a few ideas for that. I’m teaching one of my courses in a very experimental fashion next semester (no syllabus, no required texts) in order to write about what happens when students really are at the center of their education. Unfortunately, the answer might be that not very much happens, but hopefully I can get an article out of it.

I do like the daily word count, so I plan to keep that, but scale back to 750 words. I’d rather have 750 good words than 1,667 mediocre or bad ones. I would also like to start rereading what I’ve written the day before. And I think I need a goal specifically about professional writing. My institution is liberal enough that any kind of publication would count—including essays or fiction. But in order to publish, I really have to FINISH something. So that’s my goal my goal for December. FINISH A DRAFT OF SOMETHING, whether it’s a short story or a piece of creative nonfiction or an article.

What happens when you bring an injera basket in the house

2011-12-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

Tiny in a Box

2011-11-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

Roxy and Friends

2011-11-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

This is as close to a snuggle as Roxy has had with her cats in many months. She is very much looking forward to winter, when even Puck, her arch-enemy (only in his eyes; Roxy remains blissfully unaware of their longstanding feud), will deign to cuddle if he gets cold enough.

TGI NaNoWriMo

2011-11-02T15:52:00.002-06:00

Word Count Tally:

Day 1: 1674
Day 2: 3341

Xander and Abby Deux

2011-10-27T14:15:00.000-06:00

A Tutorial in Lola and Abby

2011-10-26T08:12:00.001-06:00

Looking at these pictures, I wouldn't say these two cats look alike, but at least once a week, either R. or I will spot a cat going by and not know if it's Abby or Lola. Abby is larger than Lola, for one, and faster, and crazier, and smarter, and funnier, and quieter. (Except when it's lunchtime.) But the easiest way to tell them apart is to look at the stripes: Lola's are all black, and Abby's are all gray. Lola is a very cute cat, but not particularly photogenic, I find. Abby, on the other hand, has never taken a bad photo. And she has also never met a cat she doesn't want to snuggle with. For a long time, Lola was her first choice for snuggling. We have lots of two-headed cat photos where they're so close, their bodies kind of become one cat with two heads attached. But now, Xander is by far her favorite nap partner. He has never, to my knowledge, sought her company, but she finds him several times a day for a good cuddle. He used to put up a fuss and try to push her away, then he let her snuggle but got a sour look on his face as if he were just barely tolerating her presence, and now he throws a huge arm over her and lets her bury her head in his neck. Pretty good stuff.

What Our Cats Do with a Dog Bed

2011-10-23T14:21:00.000-06:00

The Dreaded Baby Book Assignment

2011-10-21T17:07:00.000-06:00

On Tuesday, Daniel came home with the assignment adoptive parents dread: his class is putting together a collective baby book. Each page features a photo of a different class member as a baby along with a sentence written by their parents: When ________ was a baby, they liked to ____________.

Well.

That poses some problems in an adoptive family. We don't have any baby pictures of Daniel. We don't have any pictures of him from before the age of 5, when he went to an orphanage. And we don't know anything about him as a baby. We don't know what he liked or disliked. When we met their mother in Ethiopia, we dutifully asked what the boys were like as babies so that we could tell them as they got older. But our translator only looked at us, paused, and said this question would make no sense to their mother given the context of their lives. I am not so sure about that. But I didn't press the issue. So we don't have any baby stories to share with the boys.

What we do have is Temesgen, who is 3-4 years older than Daniel, and has a near photographic memory.

Except when he makes up stuff.

For instance. I solved the problem of the photo (we used the earliest photo we have of Daniel and printed an Ethiopian flag and map of the country to paste the photo to; it turned out really great, and Daniel loved it), so R. determined to solve the problem of what did Daniel like to do as a baby. Over dinner (I was at work), the boys began spinning tales..... of a much older brother who went to college, majored in computer science, and got married. It seemed rather unlikely that they would have ended up in an orphanage if they had this well-educated older brother to take care of them. But then they killed off the older brother. Soon after he got married, he died, they said. Then they told of a much older sister, who also got married. But then she died too. Coincidentally (or not), she had the same name as R.'s dead sister.

R. was skeptical, but they were so insistent that these people actually existed that he ended up writing their names in the baby book. At which point Daniel began laughing and said it was all a lie. But then he recanted and said no, it actually was true that they had an older brother and sister who died. It is so difficult to know what's true. Their life stories are so crazy, anything seems possible, and Temesgen has mentioned an older brother before (Daniel never has). But this was the first we've heard of a sister. What is to stop them from rewriting their past? Stories told have a tendency to become memory.

R. sent an email to Daniel's teacher, just to let her know how difficult this assignment is for adopted kids. Daniel commented several times, sadly, that he didn't have any baby pictures, and I could tell that he really felt this as a loss. In another kid or at another time with these kids, this assignment might cause a real emotional breakdown. We hang on by a thread most days and don't need school assignments creating more emotional turmoil.

I think in the future, I will give their teachers a copy of a list of alternative assignments for adopted kids that I saw online--alternatives to assignments that call for baby pictures or family trees.

Wilhemina's New Arch-Nemesis

2011-10-20T14:21:00.000-06:00

Wilhemina has a new arch-enemy: Batman.

Pre-children, I had visions of myself as a craftsy mom. We'd collage, we'd keep nature journals, we'd sew our own stuffed animals. Ha. Post-children, I am exactly the same person I was before, only more so. And that is definitely not the kind of person who makes her children's Halloween costumes.

So Temesgen and Daniel got to choose from the shelves of Walmart (via the telephone, because trips to the store are most definitely NOT in their current privilege package). Daniel selected The Green Lantern, which comes with a crappy green plastic ring which they both love far beyond its merits, and Temesgen chose Batman (ditto for its crappy gold rubber belt).

A couple of days ago, they were trying on each other's costumes. Daniel came into the kitchen with the Batman mask and cape secured around his head. And Wilhemina freaked the hell out. She was sitting on the kitchen island, which was actually purchased to provide extra counter space in a small kitchen but which she thinks was purchased solely for her convenience, surveying her domain and trying to spy crumbs on the floor, when she caught sight of the intruder. She dropped into a hunting crouch; her pupils exploded and her ears flew backwards. She took one very slow and careful step towards her prey. He moved. And she startled and poofed. First it was just her tail, but slowly her entire body expanded as each piece of fur stood on end. Wilhemina is always a solid cat, but when she poofs, she gets really really big. Suddenly, she was racoon-sized. The poofing seemed to increase her already healthy self-esteem, and she lunged aggressively at Daniel. He screamed. It was all immensely gratifying to Wilhemina. Granted, it doesn't take much of a show from any of the "girlos" to frighten Temesgen or Daniel. They bear hug Puck daily, but they give the girlos a wide berth. The sight of a giant enraged Wilhemina bearing down on him was more than Daniel could stand. As he shrieked, I grabbed the mask and pulled it off his face so that Tiny could see who it was. She stopped short, sniffed, and rapidly de-poofed. Then she ran off to the bedroom to compose herself. A few minutes later, she strolled back into the kitchen with her usual demeanor: entirely bored by life.

I don't believe in teasing animals, not even one so eminently teasable as Wilhemina, but I'm hoping for a repoof on Halloween.

Cats in a Box

2011-10-12T12:55:00.000-06:00

Favorite Pillow

2011-10-10T12:09:00.000-06:00

Xander and Abby

2011-10-06T12:26:00.000-06:00

Xander is our mentally unbalanced cat. We love him, but he's not quite right in the head. Closed doors make him insane, as does the witching hour of 9 pm, at which point he starts patrolling the house yowling at the top of his lungs. (Incidentally, he has the most unpleasant meow I've ever heard.) The worst thing about Xander, though, is that he hates other cats. In fact, one of our cats, Solstice, now lives in an all-girl house with my mom and her three cats because Xander decided his personal mission in life was to hunt her down and kill her. Abby, the cat without borders, decided early on that her mission in life is to tame the savage beast. Xander sent strong signals of displeasure at first when she tried to snuggle with him. But Abby has the cat version of autism, and she couldn't read the signs. She just kept doing her thing. Eventually Xander relented. We would find them snuggling together, though Xander's face was always turned discreetly away, as if pretending that this other cat wasn't snuggling up to his butt. As you can see from these photos, he has now embraced the unique spirit that is Abby. She's the Xander whisperer.

I Still Have a Fat Belleh

2011-10-03T12:18:00.000-06:00

Leafy Greens

2011-10-01T11:59:00.000-06:00

Each of our cats has his or her peculiarities. Fergus's is an obsession with leafy greens. He can hear a package of spinach opening from anywhere in the house, and he comes running. He also likes Romaine lettuce and kale. Lola watched and learned from Fergus, and now she likes her leafy greens too. Abby has also been known to partake. Wilhemina, our resident foodie, remains mystified, however. Yogurt, cheese, tuna, cake, ice cream, bread crumbs... these are all foods she understands. But spinach is beyond her. She always comes to the kitchen when Fergus and Lola tear in to get their spinach--worried that she might miss something truly worth eating. The first few times Fergus tucked in with vigor and relish, Tiny also sampled, but she has learned that health food is really not for her. Now she just hunches in the corner and watches Lola and Fergus. You can practically see her shaking her head in disgust.

Roxy Maudlin

2011-09-29T11:52:00.000-06:00

On Monday, Roxy went to the vet for a dental appointment and spent the afternoon coming out of an anesthetic haze. Her back legs were only working so well, so there was much falling up the stairs, down the stairs, onto the couch, off of the couch. There was even a bit of incontinence, which I like to think she would have found distressing and perhaps embarrassing if she had realized what was happening. But since she didn't, she just lay there in her own pee until we discovered what had happened and got her cleaned up. Mostly, though, there was whimpering. As long as her people were the bread to her Roxy sandwich, she was ok. Wedged in between me and R. on the couch, four hands petting her, she was fine. If even one hand was removed, there was a small cry. If more hands were removed, there was a louder cry. If the people got up and left her alone, there were trills of displeasure. When we made the mistake of putting her in her crate so that we could take a quick walk, she began emitting ulalations of agony. Up and down the scale she went. I really wanted some fresh air but couldn't follow through on what was clearly breaking her will to live. We let her out, helped her back onto the couch, and took up our bookend positions. When the boys came home from school, R. explained that Roxy had gone to the vet and had some medicine that made her feel very bad. Daniel came inside and gave her a big kiss on her snout, while Temesgen shook his head sadly from side to side and said "Poor Roxy" over and over again. She soaked up the pity, feeling it was only her due. We spent the rest of the afternoon taking turns sitting with her. Periodically, she would allow a small moan to escape, then snuggle closer for comfort.

This is why we call him Fangs

2011-09-28T11:56:00.001-06:00

Fergus, like all of our cats, has many nicknames. This is why we call him Fangs.

For Comparison

2011-09-26T11:32:00.001-06:00

The Boys' New Favorite Book

2011-09-26T08:35:00.000-06:00

Roxy, the boys inform me daily, is a good dog, and I can't argue with that. In fact, she has risen extremely in my estimation since the boys arrived because she is so good with them. When they are raging and wild, she doesn't blink an eye or run away. It's astonishing, really, because R. and I have long noted her tender mental state. She is a sensitive dog. Any change in the energy field sends her over the edge. She is especially sensitive to anger and irritation. If someone gets fussed at or scolded (feline or human), she almost loses her mind. She trembles, cowers, tucks her tail between her legs, rolls her eyes wildly in their sockets, and claws frantically to crawl in the person's lap who is doing the scolding--because THAT'S certainly going to make all your irritation go away. It's not pretty. When we realized that the boys have some seriously unstable energy, we thought for sure Roxy would end up on sedatives.

Turns out she's quite the trooper, however. If I so much as raise my voice to get Puck's attention and make him stop eating other cats' hairballs off the carpet (he finds other cats' fur a special delicacy--one that induces almost immediate projectile vomiting. SIGH.), Roxy begins uncontrollably shivering. But the boys can be rolling around screaming on the floor, and she'll be stretched out nearby, keeping an eye on the situation, ready to intervene if needed. Once they settle down a little bit, they get the questionable comfort of her very smelly tongue. Occasionally they turn away or cry out "Roxy, no!" but more typically they throw their arms around her and accept her special brand of sympathy.

The boys also really bonded with Roxy's life story: she was homeless before I adopted her, found wandering the streets of downtown Denver. I don't know more details than that, but Daniel has taken the liberty of creating a detailed back story for Roxy which includes eating garbage and needing a bath.

No surprise, then, that they fell in love with Saving Audie: A Pit Bull Puppy Gets a Second Chance. I had a bit of a hard time explaining dogfighting to them, and I left Michael Vick out of it even though they're both becoming football fans, but they loved the story of this little dog--who happens to look very much like Roxy (thus eliciting cries throughout the story of "Roxy match! Roxy twin!")--who was rescued from Vick's dogfighting operation and found a happy home.

Those Amazon Editors Are Not Wrong

2011-09-23T14:36:00.004-06:00

I have basically put my life on hold for the past two days to read Justin Cronin's 800-page bestseller, The Passage. On the surface, this book doesn't appeal to me at all. I like short books. I hate vampire novels. The cover is ugly. But the beginning was intriguing, and then Cronin slowly reels you in. I don't even want to put it down to eat at this point. And now that it's turning out to be so good, I am very grateful that there's 800 pages of it.

The very bad thing about reading a compulsively readable book is that nothing else seems right afterward. You're wanting another experience where you sink into the world of the novel and get lost, and those kinds of reading experiences are much harder to come by than they should be. Last year, I had it with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and then couldn't replicate the experience with anything else. It seems to be a certain kind of book that hooks me: China Mieville's The City and the City, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines. Apparently I really like sci-fi/fantasy a lot more than I realize.

I just read an interview with Cronin where he shares the story of the novel's inception. His eight-year-old daughter told him his other two novels were boring and that he should write something more interesting. Her suggestion was a book about a girl with red hair who saves the world. On afternoon bike rides, they played "build a novel" together and ended up with an apocalyptic story of humanity wiped out by a military experiment gone wrong.

I'm very pleased to learn that this is the first in a proposed trilogy--though I hope that doesn't mean the book will end on too much of a cliffhanger.

Reading Challenge Check-In: Ha!

2011-09-18T15:39:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, I happened to think about the many reading challenges I joined way back in December, when life was so different and I actually read books. (Some numbers for comparison: In June 2010, I read 13 books. In June 2011, I read 3 books, two of which were rereads and one of which was an audiobook. In July 2010, I read 18 books. In July 2011, I read two books, one of which was an audiobook reread.) It’s not like I’m not reading, but I don’t ever seem to finish anything. Half-read books pile up by the bed, and I slowly lose momentum to finish what I’ve already started even as I am compelled to start something new. Even my reading life is dysfunctional these days!

I am not sure that I’ve really managed to accomplish much of anything toward my challenges, so the annual six-month check-in really isn’t as fun as it usually is. But perhaps it will spur me on somehow.

The Elizabeth A. Contemporary Novel Reading Challenge: 1.5/10
I started The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman and made it halfway through. Then I lost momentum.

I did finish Freedom. Sort of. I skimmed the last 75-100 pages because I just couldn’t bear to read about those small people and their tedious small lives anymore.

Full Steampunk Ahead: 1/10
I have read one book: Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which I had real problems with. Everybody in my book group loved it, however.

Memorable Memoirs Challenge: 3/15.
Doing better than I thought here. I’ve read Neely Tucker’s Love in the Driest Season, about adoption and Africa; Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home; Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. Okay reading, but I wouldn’t describe any of these books as necessary.

GLBT Challenge: 1/1
Since this is a super flexible challenge that you can “win” by reading just one book, my very first read of 2011 qualified: Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares. It’s also one of my favorite books of the year. See? I did like something after all.

Victorian Lit: 0/11
I read the first couple of chapters of A Tale of Two Cities. I carried Trollope’s The Way We Live Now around the house a couple of times. Does that count at all?

Aussie Authors: 2/12
I read two good YA books for this challenge: Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Ghosts of Ashbury High (and also read half of The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie before traveling to Ethiopia to pick up the boys and thereafter losing all will to read) and Melina Marchetta’s Saving Francesca. Started several others. Lost momentum.

Persnickety Snark’s Top 100 YA Novels: 1/10
Melina Marchetta’s Saving Francesca. Started 3 other books on the list. Lost momentum.

Quirky Brown Reading Challenge: 0/4
I did start two of the books on my list. Lost momentum.

Amazon Best Books of 2010 Challenge: 7/20
Doing comparatively well with this one. I’ve read Tana French’s Faithful Place (good but too easy to figure out the killer); Peter Hessler’s Country Driving (excellent travel narrative); Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (meh); Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home (meh); David Wiesner’s Art & Max (gorgeous, like all Wiesner’s picture books); Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table (cookbooks can count, right?). I’ve started perhaps another dozen, only to….yes, lose momentum. Or get distracted. Or need to return the book to the library. Etc.

I also just checked out my reading goals for 2011 to see how I’m doing there. Not too well, as I don’t remember ever writing a single one of those goals. A lot of my reading has been parenting and adoption books—not exactly fun reading, though very necessary. I suppose I have read more stuff for grown-ups than I sometimes do, and I have read some for fun. (Graphic novels! Listening to all the Harry Potters again on audio! Rereading Hilary McKay’s Casson family series, only the best series ever!) I’m not sure that gearing up for a second half of the year push to finish reading challenges is exactly in keeping with my goal of reading for fun, however, though I am still very interested in the Amazon Reading Challenge.

And the second half of the year does include some fun reading events, like mock Newberys and Caldecotts. I saw a list of mock Caldecotts the other day, and I was distressed to discover that I had not heard of a single book on the list. Argh! Makes me seriously miss having access to good libraries. Or a bookstore. In sad news, our local (“local”—it’s 60 miles away) Borders is closing. That means that I now live in a place where the nearest bookstore is a 5-hour drive. I don’t really know what to say about that.

In Which I Forget How to Blog

2011-09-08T14:54:00.007-06:00

Somehow a month has passed since I last posted anything.

Some highlights:

Boys started school. I LOVE school! They seem to like it ok too. Except the HOMEWORK! I cannot understand why 6 and 8 year olds have homework. They are in the school building for 8+ hours every day. Is that really not enough time to complete all their worksheets? They get home at 4:45. Soccer practice is from 5:30-6:30. Bedtime is as close to 7:30 as we can make it. The tiny bit of time that's left is actually not enough for completing the other tasks on the day's agenda: chores, dinner, showers, homework, bedtime story. There is absolutely no time for play. I think Daniel squeezed in 10 minutes of jump-roping one evening. At least Temesgen's homework is just a math worksheet. Daniel doesn't get homework as often, but when he does, it's always a project that's mostly work for the parents. I guess that's what it means to be in kindergarten.

We both read Nancy Thomas's book, When Love Is Not Enough: A Guide to Parenting Children with RAD, and it has changed our lives. There have been plenty of moments over the past few months when R. and I have seriously wondered whether Temesgen is going to have to be institutionalized at some point because his behavior is so erratic. I could write a whole blog post, and may at some point, about how Nancy Thomas Is My Guru. Thomas has parented some seriously challenging kids (as in kids who have killed their siblings!), and she has worked out strategies to address most of the difficult behaviors we see from Temesgen. We still have some parts of the program to implement, but we have been using a lot of her techniques for about three weeks now, and for the first time since May, we usually have something like peace in our home. As always, it's often one step forward, seven steps back. Sunday, for instance, was one of the worst days we've had since we got the boys. But they're both showing more and more capacity to be respectful, responsible, and fun to be around (Thomas's rules). We did have to make drastic changes in order to get that level of calm and compliance: basically take away every privilege the boys have, from television to bicycles, from trips to the park to toys. Reading, coloring, puzzles, Legos, Lincoln logs, and jumping on the mini-trampoline in the house are the only "free" privileges. EVERYTHING else has to be earned through consecutive days of appropriate behavior. It took both of them about 4 days to decide to try to earn their one-day privileges, but then they were both able to earn their 7-day privileges in exactly 7 days. We had to start back at 0 on earning the 30-day privileges (bicycles!) after Sunday, but they've both maintained for the whole week, so we'll see what happens.

Our first sports season began. Soccer. 4 nights a week and 2-3 games every Saturday. It's brutal.

I started reading again. In August, I finished 11 books, more than I read in May, June, and July combined.

Work started for me as well. I'm teaching a course overload this fall, as well as two brand-new courses, and time management is a real problem. I feel perpetually behind, especially in one course. This blog post comes at the expense of my afternoon grading time. Not that I'm not looking for some way to procrastinate a little longer. I most definitely am.

Halloween candy hit the shelf, and assorted packages are now squirreled away in various locations in my kitchen. I wasn't quite fast enough closing a drawer last night, and Temesgen spotted a bag of candy corn (one of those lovely bags with the regular candy corn, the icky brown-tipped candy corn, and the luscious fat pumpkins) and asked what it was. "It's Halloween...." I began. "Medicine?" He interrupted. Yes. That's exactly what it is. Halloween medicine.

It got cold for a couple of days. Cats rediscovered snuggling.

Two Good Graphic Novels

2011-08-11T11:03:00.005-06:00

I read two very good graphic novels this week:

Smile by Raina Telgemeier is perhaps not for the dentally squeamish. Just after she finds out that she needs braces to correct an overbite, twelve-year-old Raina trips and breaks her two front teeth. Over the next few years, she undergoes a series of cringe-inducing surgeries and procedures to correct the problem. Many spreads of this graphic novel take place in the dentist's chair. Her memoir is about much more than just her teeth, however: it's about growing up and transitioning from childhood to adolescence. Telgemeier does a wonderful job portraying the challenges of middle school: mean girls, pimples, braces, unrequited crushes, and all. I really liked this book and might add it to my children's lit course in the future.

Page by Paige is a terrific story about a teenage girl discovering herself as an artist. Paige has just moved from Virginia to New York City and must find a place for herself in this busy new world. At the beginning of the story, she is shy and keeps her art a secret, but over the course of the novel, she learns that her art is her best way of making sense of her world and claiming a place in it. The art is beautiful, and the story inspiring. I'd like to find a place for this book on the Adolescent Lit syllabus next semester.

I Turn 39

2011-08-05T11:57:00.000-06:00

Ok, so it happened a month ago. That's how long it takes now to get photos posted on my blog.

Traumatized Ferg

2011-08-04T13:55:00.000-06:00

I accidentally locked Fergus in my office for about 3 hours. I have no idea where he was hiding, as there aren't really any nooks or crannies in here. He has the tiniest little meow, so there's no way I could have heard him crying, but he certainly had plenty to say when I opened the door. He is now in my lap (never mind that it's 90 degrees) rolling around and rubbing all over me as if we hadn't just seen each other....3 hours ago. Apparently the experience was highly traumatic as it caused him to start losing his fur in big clumps: there are some giant black hair wads on the floor that were not there 3 hours ago.

Fergus is a sensitive guy. He's a lover, not a fighter--unlike all of our other cats. He's the peacemaker. When Puck and Xander mix it up, as they're prone to doing, especially near dinnertime, Fergus undulates into the room at the first sound of trouble, swirling his tail back and forth in its trademark question mark shape, and tiptoes right into the fray, whereupon he flops down heavily between them and shows them his belly. You can practically see Puck and Xander recoil in disgust. But it works: distracted for all of two seconds, they forget what they were doing and slowly wander away in different directions, as if the almost fight never happened.

Fergus, I firmly believe, likes to be babied. I am not normally a person who talks to her pets in a baby talk voice, but I have a special super high-pitched and probably very annoying voice that I reserve just for my Baby Guy, who also answers to the nicknames Little Guy, Baby Ferg, and Fuzzy Bear. Sickening, isn't it? He probably doesn't actually recognize these as different names for himself (unlike Wilhemina who will respond equally to Wilhemina or Tiny)--he's just responding to my baby talk voice. We have quite long interchanges which go something like this:

Me: Baby Guy!
Fergus: (tiny meow and swirl)
Me: Oh, Baby Guy!
Fergus: (tiny meow and flop)
Me: Who's a little Baby Guy?
Fergus (tiny meow and swirl)
Me: Who's my sweet Baby Guy?
Fergus: (tiny meow and flop)

You get the idea.

Fergus is my second favorite cat (after Wilhemina, of course)and unlike the other memorable cats I've had, he is not the least bit feisty or full of spunk. Typically, I like a cat who's a handful. The kind of cat who's just as likely to bite as purr when you pet them. The kind of cat who inspires small children to yell "Be careful! Be careful!" when she appears unexpectedly. The kind of cat who knows her own mind. The kind who keeps herself busy solving problems like how to open the screen door or how to get access to the dog food. The kind who spends her whole day with cranky ears. Just because. The kind like Wilhemina, in other words. Fergus, unlike our other cats, is a wide-eyed innocent who has never had a mean thought in his head for anyone. He has the sweetest and purest soul of any cat I've ever had. He seems genuinely shocked when one cat tries to ambush or attack another, and he does his best to coax them into an entente: the victim gets a swirl of sympathy and the bully a swirl of calming "feel the love" energy.

Fergus has two modes: nap and swirl. When he isn't swirling among the other cats trying to spread the love, he naps, usually on the floor in front of the dresser that houses the amazing Cat Dancer toy. You would not find the cat dancer a particularly prepossessing toy. It's nothing more than a flexible wire with a few pieces of rolled-up cardboard attached to the end. But this toy is The Most Amazing Thing Any Cat Has Ever Seen. All 6 enjoy the cat dancer, but Fergus and Lola are so bonkers over it that they actually scare the other cats away. Lola has a life besides the cat dancer, a life that involves exploring the rest of the house and finding interesting places to nap, but Fergus focuses much of his waking energy, small though that is, and all of his sleeping energy on the dresser that houses the cat dancer. He is eternally optimistic that someone is going to recognize the signals he's sending--camping out in front of the drawer, meowing in his Tiny Voice whenever anyone enters the room, then looking significantly at said drawer--and bring out the toy. Fergus and Lola turn into quite different cats when the cat dancer appears. Normally they are lazy and slothlike. But the cat dancer lights them on fire. They become so insane that the other cats refuse to play, even Abby, who is the most insane cat I've ever met. She hides fearfully under the furniture and peeks out as Lola and Fergus zoom around the room, bouncing off of each other, my legs, the furniture, in their frenzied pursuit of wire and cardboard. You know it's bad when Abby is put off by someone else's behavior.

The cat dancer is a really boring toy for people. You hold it and wave it around while cats bat at it or--Lola and Fergus's preferred style of play--you drag it along the floor in circles until you feel like throwing up. So we don't play with it every day. Still, Fergus never gives up hope. I like to imagine what he's thinking as he meows and swirls in front of the drawer and looks at it and then looks at me and then looks at it and then looks at me--and I just keep walking. He must think I'm really, really stupid.

Oddly enough, Fergus is also Wilhemina's favorite cat. For the most part Wilhemina behaves as if she belongs to a different species than the other cats. But there was something about Lola and Fergus that really rubbed her the wrong way. After we got them as kittens, Wilhemina held the longest grudge in the history of cats: she had nothing to do with me and basically slept for an entire year in protest. But one day, almost a year after we got them, fully armed with her cranky ears, she jumped Fergus, who gave up his belly and let her rabbit kick him into submission. She found it very satisfying. And ever since, she has spent far more time hanging out with him than with any of the other cats. For awhile, they wrestled quite a bit. Tiny, despite being the smaller of the two, always absolutely dominates him, of course. But she will also allow him to hang out on the same piece of furniture with her. On cold days, she has even been known to snuggle with him.

Children's Literature Reading List Fall 2011

2011-08-03T09:17:00.000-06:00

Because I can't ever leave my classes alone and make life easy by teaching the same class twice, I made lots of changes to the Children's Lit syllabus for the upcoming semester. My goal, every semester, is to assign less. But somehow it never works out that way. There's just too much good stuff that I want to force my students to read! In general, I don't find coverage or exposure good motivations for teaching texts, but in a survey course of Children's Literature designed for future elementary school teachers, exposure to a variety of texts and coverage of as many books as possible are my goals.

Harry Potter is making his first ever appearance on my syllabus. Too many of my students--future elementary school teachers--have never read the series, and some of them also object on religious grounds without ever having read one of the books. That's not an appropriate mindset for a future teacher. If they want to object, that's fine, but they need to do it from a position of experience and knowledge rather than ignorance. I'm really excited about the addition of G. Neri's graphic novel, Yummy, the true story of an 11-year-old gang member who accidentally kills a 14-yr-old girl in his neighborhood during a gang fight.

Two new genres are making their first appearance on the syllabus as well: mystery and poetry. I'm incorporating an element of student choice for some units: for instance, with the mystery unit, students can select Joseph Bruchac's Skeleton Man or Victoria Bond and T. R. Simon's Zora and Me.

I am hoping to have time to add lectures on the different genres as well as reading quizzes. Last semester, I had some problems with a handful of students who just weren't reading the books, and while in theory, I believe it's a student's choice to do the work or not do the work, I also don't believe that students who don't do the work should earn the same grades as students who do. If all of the papers and projects were completed, a student who didn't read the books could still, in theory, earn an A. Interestingly, it was the students themselves who protested: those who were doing the reading were having to carry group members who weren't during class discussions. I had several students show up during my office hours to "tattle" on group members who weren't contributing to discussion and in-class projects. So even though reading quizzes go against my teaching principles, I thought I might experiment with them this semester IF I can find time to reread all the books and prepare the quizzes.

At the end of spring semester, I had all of these wonderful ideas for how I was going to arrange and organize the class, and now when I look at the list of books I selected to teach, I don't remember a single one of those ideas. It's going to be a lot of work to pull it together before the semester begins.

Doing new things keeps it fresh for me, however, and even though it's a lot more work, it makes me continue to love my job.

Here are the books that are on the syllabus:

Sharon Creech. Love That Dog.
Patron, Susan. The Higher Power of Lucky.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Draper, Sharon. Out of My Mind.
Bang, Molly. Picture This: How Pictures Work
Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are.
Pinkney, Jerry. The Lion and the Mouse.
Selznick, Brian. The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Clement, Andrew. Frindle.
Kennedy, X.J. Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to Poetry.
James and Joseph Bruchac. The Girl Who Helped Thunder and Other Native American Folktales.
Shannon Hale. Rapunzel’s Revenge.
G. Neri. Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty.
Tony O’Brien and Mike Sullivan. Afghan Dreams: Young Voices of Afghanistan.
Nelson, Kadir. We Are the Ship.
Bruchac, Joseph. Skeleton Man.
Bond, Victoria and T.R. Simon. Zora and Me

In addition, there will be two or three Newbery weeks where students can choose which book to read from different categories. There will definitely be a multicultural week and a historical fiction week. If I can find room in the syllabus, I'd also like to have an animal fantasy week, as that's a big gap in the syllabus. But ultimately, books about talking animals just don't seem as important to me as Christopher Paul Curtis's Bud Not Buddy or Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Leave Me Alone

2011-07-31T11:34:00.001-06:00

Cats in a Basket

2011-07-30T11:11:00.001-06:00

I bought a beautiful large basket in Ethiopia that I intended to use for fruit or maybe mail. The cats have other ideas. The basket is literally never empty. In any given 24-hour period, every cat naps in it at least once. Sometimes Puck will stay in it for 6 hours straight. Sometimes cats line up patiently on the table waiting their turn in the magic circle of goodness. Abby, as you can see, does not wait patiently.

My Son, Timmy or Tommy

2011-07-28T16:11:00.005-06:00

Today our therapist decided to "plant the seed" in Temesgen's mind that maybe he would like to have a nickname because his given name is "so difficult to remember." Um, what? I'm sure there are some Ethiopian names that are hard to say in English, but Temesgen isn't one of them. Tim + miss + gun, more or less. Are any of those hard words for the native English speaker? I don't think so. Are those three syllables harder to remember than any other three-syllable name? I don't see why they should be. Given how many kids have kr8tif names these days, I don't think that Temesgen should present too many problems.

This isn't the first time we've heard that we should change his name or at least give him a nickname. One cranky adoptive mom we met on our first trip to Ethiopia said sourly that she hoped we were prepared for all the teasing he is going to get on the playground. (Given that he's bigger and stronger and far more athletic than any other kids his age--not to mention streetwise and aggressive!--I'm guessing any teasing will be short-lived and possibly much regretted by the would-be bully.)Several moms in town have asked if we are going to call him Timmy or Tommy. Um, no.

Certainly many people get his name wrong the first time. We've heard Thomaston, Temesten, Temessen, etc. But you write it down, you help the person say it right, they learn the name. This is just something we do as part of the social contract: we learn each other's names, even when they're different. His friends at summer rec, his coaches, his teachers and friends at daycare....they have no problem saying his name. Probably his friends and teachers at school won't either.

Our therapist assured me that "kids love having a nickname." As a kid who LOATHED having a nickname, I don't think that's true for all kids.

The therapist did share a great name story with me. A little girl named La-a, pronounced Ladasha. Because hey, why not? I never considered the possibilities of punctuation when it comes to names. Adelaide could become +laide. Nat could become N@. Just get rid of Colin altogether and simply write :.

Jesus Is Looking

2011-07-24T15:20:00.002-06:00

Daniel informed me a couple of days ago that he intends to be good even when Mom and Dad aren't there to award him behavior tokens. That's because Jesus is always looking. His exact words: "Mom and Dad no look? Jesus look!" Then he re-enacted the crucifixion, which he does periodically and which kind of weirds me out, and said, "Jesus very sad." Was it wrong that I seized that opportunity to ask him what makes Jesus happy? "Jesus happy me good." Oh yeah! Jesus IS happy when you're good! And don't forget it!

Jesus may be happy when Daniel is good, but R. learned from Temesgen that Jesus does NOT like dancing. It makes him very unhappy.

Also, in a conversation about farting that I was, thankfully, not privy to, Temesgen informed R. that everyone farts--except for Jesus.

I have no idea where they got their religious training, but they definitely have some curious ideas.

Edited to add: I learned yesterday why Daniel acts out the crucifixion in gory detail every so often. THEY WATCHED THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST AT THE ORPHANAGE. In addition to the Scream movies and Season 1 of Prison Break and all of Jason Statham's movies. In what kind of universe is that appropriate kids' entertainment? Good grief!

Transforming the Difficult Child

2011-07-18T09:56:00.000-06:00

Over the past few weeks, I've been reading a parenting book called Transforming the Difficult Child, which presents a full program for managing your intense child's behavior. I've implemented many of the book's techniques with Temesgen over the past few weeks and have been having some success when I can be fully committed to the techniques, which are energy-intensive but not difficult to follow.

The authors present their system through two metaphors: video games and sports. The video game metaphor works like this: when you're playing a video game, you gets lots of intense energy coming at you when you do right things but very little energy when you do the wrong thing. Good moves equal points, moving to the next level, colorful stuff, good noises, etc. Bad moves have very clear consequences: you might lose your video game life. But the consequence doesn't keep going on and going on: it's quick, brief, and very clear. And then you get right back to the game, even if you have to start over.

Sports work in a similar way: as long as you're playing by the rules, you're in the game having fun. When you break the rule, you forfeit the ball or your turn. The consequence is clear and quick. The referree blows the whistle, you take your consequence, the game continues. The referree does not lead you to the corner and lecture you about your choices for 5 minutes, make you sit on a special chair to think about your actions, take away privileges that you enjoy that have nothing to do with the game, or make you apologize and hug them. (Now that I'm writing this, however, I realize that your COACH might do any and all of these things! So as a parent, are you supposed to be the referree or a coach?)

The authors suggest that behavior management for intense children needs to work the same way. Lots of energy should be invested in the child during all the moments when he or she is not breaking the rules. When a rule is broken, there is a swift and brief consequence to reset the behavior before the child can re-enter the game and start getting the positive attention again.

Their description of the intense child certainly matches Temesgen. The intense child is one who feeds off of extreme energy and will often misbehave in order to get a greater reaction from the parent than they typically get through compliance with the rules. Even if we praise a child for complying with the rules, it tends to be very mild-mannered, calm praise--nothing like the level of energy we bring to a situation where an important rule has been broken and a child needs discipline.

Transforming the difficult child has three components.

First, you try to satisfy your child's core emotional needs by intensifying the energy of your positive interactions; being very specific with praise (no more vague "Good jobs"; instead, the book urges parents to notice and say exactly what the child is doing right); teaching rules when they are not being broken; and verbally "noticing" your child by neutrally describing what you see them doing at least 20 times throughout the day. This is the energy-intensive part of the program for parents. The book is very specific: for every hour you're with your child, you should be doing 10-20 of the four types of recognition (active, experiential, proactive, and creative). This is your positive energy investment into the child.

Second, you impose a consequence every time a rule is broken, but you remove all energy from the consequence. The intense child can no longer feed on the extreme energy you bring to discipline because you are the calm referree rather than the personally affronted and outraged parent. The program uses time-outs, but not in a way I've seen them used in other programs. This time-out is basically a pause, a behavior reset. You don't have to time it, you don't have to lead the child to a specific "think-it-over" place, you don't have to explain in detail what they did wrong, they don't have to apologize at the end. It's almost like a pause in the game so that they can collect themselves, and then you push play.

Third, you use a system of credits to reward the child when they follow the rules and show the positive behaviors you're looking for. This part took a couple of weeks for us to develop because it's a bit complicated: you have to develop a list of rules, positive behaviors, daily responsibilities, and chores, as well as a list of ways to spend credits. We have 8 rules (No hitting, No disobeying, No whining, No tattling, No name-calling, etc.) We have 10 positive behaviors (Listen, Take turns, Share, Follow directions the first time, Use words to express feelings, Good manners, etc.) we want to see in the boys. They have 8 daily responsibilities (Make bed, Dirty dishes in sink, Dirty clothes in laundry basket, Brush teeth,etc.) And they each have 4 chores (Fold laundry, Take out garbage, etc.) that we are slowly teaching them how to do. They earn credits for all of this. The book uses a points system, but we decided we needed something more tangible for the boys, so we found glass balls at the crafts store to use as tokens and each boy gets to physically put his points in his own jar at the end of each day.

At the end of each day, you do a credit review, giving partial credit where you can. The partial credit idea is a good one, I think. If there was whining in the morning, but then the child pulled it together and didn't whine for the rest of the day, they have the chance to earn half their points. So there's incentive throughout the day to start behaving.

The credits can be cashed in for privileges. Stuff that used to be free in our house--ice cream, other food treats like fruit soda or cookies, tv, computer games, trips to the park, trips to the pool--now cost tokens. The system is designed to make sure kids who behave adequately will get enough tokens for daily privileges and still have some left to save each day for more special expensive privileges. I like that their behavior is now clearly tied to the fun things they get to do. But even more, I like that they are now more in charge of choosing how to spend their time.

I think R. and I were both a little skeptical of the credit system before we implemented it this past week. It seemed awfully complicated, and we didn't relish the extra time we'd have to put into the evening behavior review. But the system is working. Their behavior has improved. The rules and positive behaviors are now more tangible to the boys. We've been harping on taking turns and using good manners ever since we got them home, but it's only in the last week that they are applying those words to their own behaviors. Perhaps most surprisingly, Temesgen has started trying to use words to express his feelings each day. He only has a few feelings words, so no matter how he feels, he tends to express it as "sad" or "tired." But this is an important development.

Not surprisingly, the difficult child has put up some resistance to the program. Temesgen was outraged that he should have to purchase something he wants and which he believes should be freely given. He was excited when he first saw the shiny red balls but decided to opt out of the system once he realized they wouldn't simply accrue to be shiny and pretty in a jar but would have to be returned to mom and dad every time he watches tv, eats a piece of cake, or goes bowling. "Me no points. That's okay. Me, no. Danny yes. But me no." After he was reminded yet again that parents, not children, choose, he has been complying with the system, but he still struggles. Unlike Daniel, who carefully weighs each "purchase" and has a long-term savings plan in mind for whatever special outing or treat he wants, Temesgen is extreme even with this system. Yesterday, not even a full week into the system, he decided to spend every token he'd earned (270 of them!) and left himself with just 1 token for today--not even enough to earn the cheapest privilege on the list, 30 minutes of educational TV. I had to advance him another token this morning so that he could join Daniel in watching "The Electric Company" with breakfast. When we got in the car to drive to daycare, he was outraged that he couldn't listen to music or play the Leap Frog because he didn't have the tokens. It was clear that in his mind, the credit system was in full effect as long as he had tokens, but once he was out, we should scrap it. It wasn't the most fun commute we've ever had to daycare.

And of course now he is swinging to the opposite extreme: now he vows never again to buy another privilege. But our hope is that eventually he will find a middle ground with the system and maybe it will help him regulate himself. That is what we struggle with most with him--finding that middle ground where he can regulate himself.

There is one more point to be made about the system. What do you do when the child refuses to complete the time-out or behaves so egregiously that a time-out really isn't the appropriate consequence? He can continue to earn credits but the privileges go on hold until the time-out is completed. Since the time-out is no longer burdensome or a power struggle, we aren't having any trouble with getting the kids to comply, so that hasn't been an issue. We have, however, had to ramp up the consequences after Temesgen threw a five-hour temper tantrum when R. was at work. Funny, isn't it, how he never throws temper tantrums when Dad is home but always manages at least one every time Dad is at work! The consequence for Mom's headache was extra chores: he had to vacuum the house and clip the grass growing along the front fence. Privileges were on hold until the chores were completed.

Of course we implemented this program to manage Temesgen's behavior, but it's having positive benefits with Daniel too, as the book promised it would. Daniel's behavior is already good, but now it's even better. And he loves the whole credit system. He spent a surprising amount of time on Saturday--given the large amount of tokens he has--deciding between a brownie (10 tokens) and ice cream (16 tokens) and 30 minutes of tv (5) vs. a movie (15). He wanted to be frugal, yet also enjoy himself, and so he selected the brownie and the movie. On Friday he decided that Dad should take him bowling on Monday and he diligently counted and saved tokens over the weekend to be sure he'd have plenty for bowling with enough left over to have privileges on Tuesday.

Hearing What You're Really Saying

2011-07-17T09:26:00.000-06:00

Based on how often these particular phrases are spoken by our sons, these are the things I say most:

"Wow!"
"That is not an option."
"Good job."
"Understand?"
"Enough!"

Just in the last day, Temesgen has picked up "That's right," which, granted, I say ALL THE TIME. But that's because the boys talk ALL THE TIME and there is a limited number of possible responses to their constant observations of "Blue car! Small dog! Hot today! Time for swimming! Red car!" Etc.

Temesgen is doing a variation, however. Instead of using "That's right" to confirm what the other person is saying, he adds it as a tag to every statement that he makes. So today's running commentary on our walk went something like, "Blue car, that's right! Small dog, that's right! Hot today, that's right! Red car, that's right!"

I was reduced to "Mmmmmm" as my response.

Mom Is Very, Very Old

2011-07-16T09:21:00.002-06:00

Yesterday Temesgen discovered that Melody, his favorite teacher at the childcare program they attend at the college where I work, was once my student. Most of the teachers at the childcare program were my students, because I teach one course that's required for all Elementary Ed majors: Children's Literature. Melody is a non-trad, probably in her early 30s. But Temesgen doesn't understand that grown-ups also go to school. In his mind, I must have taught Melody when she was a child. Which makes me old. Much older than he imagined.

When he told me that Melody had explained to him that she used to be my student, he shook his head sadly and clucked his tongue. "Mom very, very old. Very old."

Lunchables Redux

2011-07-09T15:45:00.003-06:00

The boys (mistakenly) believe that what makes me and R. happiest in the world is for them to clean their plates. And since sometimes they like to please, they draw as much attention as possible to food completion. As each portion of a meal is eaten, they cry out, "Mom! Finish! Me good job!" If, for example, they eat a lunch consisting of fish, rice, corn, and a glass of water, I will hear "Mom! Finish! Me good job!" at least four times per child, once for each item that is eaten or drunk, and probably more because they also do variations on "Mom! Finish! Me good job!" such as "Mom! Almost finish! Me good job!"

At the end of the day at daycare, the lunch report is usually the first thing they share with me. I hear about what they ate, how it tasted (usually good—unlike the food that Mom cooks, just so you know), and how much of it they finished.

I was curious about how the Lunchables would go over.

When I picked them up, the first thing Daniel said to me was “Oh Mom, lunch, WOW! Water good! Me finish! Me good job! Yum yum yum, delicioso.” (The final bit there comes from Dora the Explorer, one of their favorite TV shows.)

Temesgen was not quite so enthusiastic about the Lunchable, though he did inform me that he finished the whole meal. Mostly he wanted to argue that the chicken nuggets were, in fact, fish. The two of them went back and forth for quite some time over this. My authority as the one who purchased the chicken nugget Lunchable as well as the only one in the car who could read English and thus decipher food labels counted for nothing.

A Brief Meditation on Lunchables

2011-07-08T11:07:00.002-06:00

Some of my readers may not know this about me, but I am very serious about food. And that's what we eat. Not the chemistry experiments that fill most American pantries and freezers. Real food made with ingredients that your great-grandmother would recognize. I buy local and organic always. I don't eat junk food or fast food or processed food. I don't eat foods that have ingredients I can't pronounce. There are no products with high-fructose corn syrup (aka EVIL) in my house.

Pre-children, it wasn't enough for me to make decisions for myself about what I would and wouldn't eat. No, I had to have massive amounts of sanctimony and judgment for those parents who fed their kids the kind of crap that fills the middle aisles of the grocery store. My kids, I told anyone who would listen, would only eat organic, nutritious, homemade REAL FOOD. They would never eat at McDonalds or drink a soda. They would never eat a school lunch. They would grow up never consuming a fruit or vegetable covered with pesticides, drinking a glass of milk filled with antibiotics and hormones, or letting a single drop of HFCS pass their lips.

You see where all this is going, right?

Today the boys needed to bring a sack lunch to daycare, and I sent them off with Lunchables.

LUNCHABLES.

My only excuse is that the thought of preparing a sack lunch for them made me want to cry. And so I went to Walmart and bought LUNCHABLES.

The one I selected has "chicken nuggets" in it, Ranch Dressing AND Barbecue sauce (both filled with HFCS) for the child who just can't make up his mind, a chocolate chip cookie, a bottle of water, AND a packet of Kool-Aid powder to add to the bottle of water because heaven forbid any part of that meal isn't packed with sugars and chemicals. The reason I chose it was because it was the only meal that had fruit: a cup of mandarin oranges (sweetened, no doubt, with HFCS).

I added a banana in the hopes that that would make it somehow okay.

I Am Reading a Book

2011-07-07T13:30:00.003-06:00

Normally this would not be the noteworthy news of the week. But these days, reading is about as rare as cooking a good meal. I scoffed pre-children when my friends who were already parents said things like, "Read as much as you can now because when you have kids, you won't have time for reading." It was impossible for me to imagine a world in which I didn't have time for reading. And now I live in that world.

I'm not even sure it's an issue of time. It's more about energy. I never thought of reading as an activity that required energy, as it's usually something I do stretched out on the couch or sprawled on the bed, but it does. It requires mental energy. And now,I use up all and more of each day's store of mental energy trying to:
1. Remain calm.
2. Be patient.
3. Sound really, really enthusiastic

Mustering enthusiasm for the various things my kids want me to be enthusiastic about is far more draining than I ever would have imagined it could be. The boys talk nonstop, but their limited English means that they only have a few topics they can talk about, and what they have to say gets repeated a lot. For instance. Yesterday, they went through all of the characters from Masters of the Universe and labeled them "good guy" or "bad guy." This might not sound so draining, but the conversation went something like this:

Daniel or Temesgen: "Mom! Mom! Mom!"
Me: "Mmm-hmm?"
D/T: "Skeletor! Bad guy!"
Me: "That's right. Skeletor is a bad guy."
D/T: "Skeletor Mom bad guy?"
Me: "Yes, Mom thinks Skeletor is a bad guy."
D/T: "Me Skeletor bad guy."
Me: "Mmm-hmm."
D/T: "Mom!"
Me: "Yes?"
D/T: Skeletor Mom bad guy?"
Me: "Yes, Mom thinks Skeletor is a bad guy."
D/T: "Me Skeletor bad guy."
Me (losing my will to live): "Mmm-hmmm."

And so on. For 10 different characters. At which point we moved on to superheroes.

One of my many misapprehensions about parenting was that it was going to be mentally stimulating. Reading about it was mentally stimulating. Preparing for it was mentally stimulating. Talking about it was mentally stimulating. So surely actually doing it would also be mentally stimulating! Um, not so much.

When I was little, I could never understand why my mom didn't want to play board games. Mom, I am sorry I judged you for not playing Candyland and Chutes & Ladders with me. Once again, you were right and I was wrong. Candyland and Chutes & Ladders were obviously designed to break the spirits of parents everywhere. I almost cry every time the boys pull one of these games out. Except that it would take effort and energy to cry, and I don't have any to spare.

But somewhere, I have found a little reserve for reading, and it feels wonderful to be reading something that isn't a parenting book. I just finished rereading Nick Hornby's About a Boy, which I put on the syllabus for the Gender & Lit class I'll be teaching in the fall (to discuss whether there's a male version of chick lit: more about that in a future post), and now I'm reading Tana French's Faithful Place, which, so far, is a very good mystery novel.

It's 100 Degrees & I Have a Fat Belleh

2011-07-04T14:42:00.007-06:00

To Kerfuffle

2011-06-29T14:20:00.009-06:00

In my house, there's a lot of kerfuffling. This is the word the kids have chosen to mean "throw a fit." They do a great deal of behavior self-check and finger-pointing throughout the day, so I hear repeatedly about who's kerfuffling and who isn't. As if I weren't there to experience every wonderful second of it myself! There is much boasting by one child after we successfully complete our morning walk: "Me no kerfuffle!" And then much finger-pointing at the other brother, who surely did kerfuffle. Because someone ALWAYS kerfuffles. Sometimes I wonder if they have some kind of elaborate schedule worked out that they just haven't shared with me. "From 8-9:30, you'll kerfuffle, then at 9:42 sharp, just when they think the trouble has passed, I'll take over."

They learned the word "kerfuffle" when we were in Ethiopia. There was a big traffic jam, and I called it a kerfuffle, and Ryan repeated the word, and then another adoptive mom's child picked it up. Yishak seemed to use it in a positive sense, however: "I love you, kerfuffle" became one of his favorite phrases. My kids love to remember Yishak and his "kon jo" mama, and they continue on occasion to shout out a boisterous "I love you, kerfuffle" followed by "kon jo mama!" and "I love you mama!"--three things that Yishak said A LOT over the week we spent with him and his mama, who is, in fact, extremely beautiful! (Which is what "kon jo" means.)

Kerfuffle was clearly too good of a word to limit to "I love you kerfuffle." And so they have claimed it for their own. And we get to hear it a lot because there is a lot of kerfuffling.

Yesterday, they started daycare at the Child Development Center at the college where I teach. They'll be going two days a week, as a way to help them with their language development and social skills, but mostly to provide some desperately-needed respite for us (not to mention work time!). They were uncomfortable and shy at first, but soon became the stars of the center when they appropriated the "Writing Center" as the "Paper Folding Center" and dazzled the mostly younger children with their skills at making not just paper airplanes and boats but noise-makers and swords. Because the CDC has a policy of "the child's interest leads instruction," many noise-makers and swords were made before the children's interests turned elsewhere. I myself was dazzled by the patience of the teachers, who did a much better job than I've ever managed to do of pretending sincere interest in the construction of paper noise-makers. I am guessing they were cringing on the inside.

In any case, they ended up having a wonderful time and completely ignored me when I showed up to get them 7 hours later. The only thing they wanted to know was "me come tomorrow?"

Once we got in the car, Temesgen proudly informed me: "Me no hit here, no kick here, me no kerfuffle today!" Awesome, dude!

But since he hadn't kerfuffled in over 8 hours, he had a lot of kerfuffle built up inside. He did an assortment of minor annoying things after we got home: pretended to hit the dog; ruined a coloring book; spilled tea after trying to drink from a china mug without using his hands; spit toothpaste in his own eye while trying to brush his teeth while in a backbend over the sink. Etc. We can't decide if we should (1) come down on him like a load of bricks at the first minor annoyance since he has a tendency to escalate until he gets a response; (2) ignore everything that isn't physical violence; (3) ooze sympathy and unconditional love. I have parenting books that say each one of those approaches is the right one. And there are probably different approaches described in the parenting books I haven't gotten around to reading yet.

In any case, last night we decided to ignore the minor annoyances, but after bedtime, he escalated to behavior that had to be dealt with: kicking his brother violently and repeatedly in the bed.

After being reprimanded for that, he decided that he would sleep on the floor, and so he gathered his pillow and blanket and the rug and crawled into their closet to sleep. Um, okay.

And the kerfuffle just kept going this morning. He has now had his bicycle indefinitely confiscated after breaking the bell on it (no big deal), then intentionally trying to break other parts of the bicycle (more of a big deal), then picking up a large stick and beating his little brother on the head (luckily Daniel was wearing his helmet) until Daniel fell off his own bicycle (a very big deal indeed). At which point, Temesgen stole Daniel's much smaller bicycle and joy-cycled it around the park. I am just not sure what to do with a child who beats his little brother in the head with a stick until he surrenders his bicycle. What I ended up doing was calling my husband to come to the park and pick up Temesgen and his bicycle. While we waited for R. to arrive in the car, I guarded the bicycles and watched Temesgen eat handfuls of the bark that covers the playground surface. Daniel was scandalized by this behavior and has not been able to stop talking about how "dirty" it was for Temesgen to eat that stuff.

We haven't decided how Temesgen is going to earn the bicycle back, but earn it he needs to do. Most of the techniques from Parenting with Love & Logic don't seem appropriate for my children, much as they sound appealing to me, but I do love the concept of the "energy drain" and its consequences. When kids' behavior is bad, the parent experiences an "energy drain," which leads to the parent later being "too tired" to do nice things that the kids have come to expect--such as take them to the park. Kids may need to replenish the parents' drained energy through extra chores. The constant kerfuffling over the past couple of weeks has most definitely drained my energy!

The last time I took the boys to the park by myself was a couple of weeks ago. My energy was too drained by that experience to repeat it for awhile. On that fun day, the boys intentionally crashed their bicycles into each other within 5 minutes of being at the park and got off their bikes in a huff. Temesgen picked Daniel's bike up and threw it while Daniel had to content himself with pushing Temesgen's bike over. Some hitting and kicking followed, then Daniel started up a full-blown shrieking, sobbing temper tantrum that included hitting and kicking ME while Temesgen left the park and ran away. And they were totally mystified when the next Saturday rolled around, Dad left for work, and I said absolutely no way am I taking you guys to the park.

Temesgen's kerfuffles now generally include much loud denouncing of America and our family. "No America! No family! Family no good! No mom! No dad! Me Ethiopia! Me no America!" Etc, etc. I just pull out my broken record: "Mom is so sad to hear that. That is so sad for you. It must be so hard to feel that way. Mom can tell you're frustrated. Mom is so sad that you're frustrated." Etc. But what's interesting to me about "no America! no family!" is Daniel's response. He wants no part of it! As soon as Temesgen starts the "Mom no I love," Daniel starts loudly proclaiming his love for everything about America: mom, dad, grandma, grandma & grandpa, Roxy, each cat named in turn (as many as he can remember, anyway), always concluding with "Everybody! Everybody I love!" and "Temesgen no America but me YES America! America I Love!"

Real Food

2011-06-22T15:09:00.003-06:00

Last night, I cooked. Normally, this wouldn't be worth a blog post, but it's become pretty unusual around here. By the time we get the kids in bed at 7 pm or so, I'm too exhausted to care what I eat and too demoralized to want things like vegetables. By 7 pm, I need chocolate and comfort food. So I've been relying on breakfast for dinner every night: a bowl of oatmeal with chocolate chips and sliced bananas. (Which is also my morning comfort meal).

But last night, I decided to cook, and I made the most wonderful meal. A spinach salad with roasted beets, mandarin oranges, and glazed maple pecans. And pasta with asparagus and prosciutto, crisped in butter, in an herb goat cheese sauce. It was AMAZING. Dessert was raspberries and my very favorite store-bought cookies, LU's Le Petit Ecolier.

And there are leftovers for tonight!

You Won't Know If You Like It Til You Try It

2011-06-11T11:17:00.011-06:00

Even though I haven't lived in the south since I was 18, I am still very Southern. This means that I wear make-up every single day, believe that food equals love, and find little sayings that my mother and grandmother drummed into me still popping up in my head and determining my behavior. Such as, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Hence, my blog silence. I just don't have anything nice to say.

Often, the boys' behavior is pretty good. We had four days in a row with no temper tantrums and in fact virtually no crying at all. Before this, there was crying at least 15 times a day and massive temper tantrums once every day or two. And when I say massive, I mean tantrums involving kicking, screaming, hitting, spitting, scratching, AND vomiting. I did not know it was possible to have a temper tantrum so violent that you actually gagged yourself on your own spit and threw up, but I have now seen it with my own eyes.

But despite the fact that I have less to complain about today than I have at any time in the past month, I am just not enjoying this very much. Or at all. I keep thinking every day is going to be better, but it's not. My attitude is not improving: in fact, it seems to be getting worse.

I don't like parenting very much.

This is not a popular thing to say. It's not something I ever heard before I had kids. B.A. (Before Adoption), R. and I often noted that the parents we observed with their kids didn't seem to be enjoying themselves or their kids very much. But we always assumed we were catching the family at a bad moment or maybe they just weren't a very nice family. We knew for a fact that we would enjoy our own kids.

And the parents we talked to always assured us that having kids was wonderful, gave your life such meaning, so rewarding, wouldn't change it for the world, etc.

But now that I am a mom, I feel like I have been let into the club and am finding out the dirty little secret of parenting, which is that actually a lot of parents don't like it a lot of the time. "It's kind of horrible," I keep telling other parents. "Yeah," they agree, "it is." WHAT?!

Last night, I asked a friend who has two daughters, ages 9 and 11, if this is ever going to start feeling rewarding. "Well," she began, "I'm probably not the best person to ask."

And that seems to be the response from everyone I talk to!

I used to observe parents who behave exactly as I behave now, and I always thought to myself, why did they even bother having kids? But now I think I know: they didn't know any better! They thought for sure that THEY would NEVER become that cranky, sour, irritated mom who was short-tempered with her kids ALL DAY LONG. No, they would LOVE their kids and love BEING with their kids, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, forever. And then they had kids.

I am trying to understand what it is that I am disliking about it. As I've said, the boys' behavior--compared to what I was prepared for after reading the attachment disorder books--really hasn't been that bad.

Maybe it's the never-endingness of it. I knew I wasn't a baby or toddler person, which is why we decided to adopt older kids. But in some ways, they're like having toddlers--really big ones who are too heavy to pick up and remove from the area when they start misbehaving. There are not 5 minutes of down time during the day because the boys cannot be left unsupervised together in a room for even 5 minutes. Just taking a short break to run to the bathroom can mean that someone ends up in tears, something gets broken, or a pet gets provoked.

Maybe it's the mind-numbingness of so many of the activities that they can or want to do. The adoption books tell you to find things to do with your kids that you enjoy. So far, I've found one thing: coloring. And they don't even want to do that every day.

Maybe it's the lack of effective communication. In some ways, we are able to understand each other better than I imagined. But in other ways, communication is one of the most frustrating parts of this. I am sure that things will improve more once we have more language in common. The boys are so eager to communicate but have such limited English that they keep up a nonstop patter (seriously, if they are awake, they are talking) that goes something like this: "MOM!MOM!MOM!MOM! Bicycle! Me! Park! Later! Mom! Look! Me! Good job! Mom! Bicycle? Bicycle later? Park? Park soon? Later? Soon? Mom!" Both of them. At the same time. For 12 hours a day.

I was always so judgmental of that mom whose kid demanded her attention over and over again and she just ignored them, but now I understand. She had no attention left to give. Her kids had used it up.

Maybe it's the incessant complaining. Every activity, every meal, every snack, every moment of the day, it sometimes seems, is accompanied by a litany of complaint. I remember complaining, whining, and pouting a lot when I was a child, too. I'M SORRY, MOM. I DIDN'T REALIZE HOW ANNOYING IT IS. I SHOULD HAVE EATEN THE FOOD YOU MADE AND BEEN GRATEFUL FOR IT. EVEN THE ASPARAGUS CASSEROLE WITH SALTINES.

I assume--and hope--that in a few months or even a year, my feelings will have changed and I will have discovered all kinds of wonderful and rewarding things about being a mom. Then I'll be one of those mothers with selective memory who runs around assuring all of her childless friends that they should definitely have kids because it's the most wonderful and rewarding thing in the world.

I can't think of any way to conclude this blog post, so I'll just end with a few quotations from others.

"It sucked, and then I cried."--Heather Armstrong

"I'll give you something to cry about."--My mom

"Be sweet."--my very Southern Aunt Elsie

And now I'm going to go be quiet, since I don't have anything nice to say.

Summer Rec

2011-06-03T20:50:00.003-06:00

It turns out that Hot Springs, South Dakota, offers the bargain of the century: summer rec programs for the astonishingly low price of $6 per program.

"I'll sign them up for everything," I told the nice lady who runs the program. She had taken pity on me when I called her the day after the absolute final late registration date and begged to be allowed to register my kids for summer rec. "We have special circumstances!" And she apparently thought so too because she told me to come on down to City Hall and bring my checkbook.

When I told her I wanted to sign them up for everything, she gave me that look that's reserved for bad mothers who want someone else to raise their kids. But I was immune to it. After all, my kids had already watched 4 hours of television that day! Summer rec would be a big improvement over that!

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of options for 6 year olds, so we have had daily meltdowns (and when I say meltdown, what I really mean is blood-curdling shrieks that sound like limbs are being amputated without anaesthesia) when eight-year-old Temesgen gets to leave each afternoon for baseball practice and six-year-old Daniel gets to stay home or stand outside the fence watching.

They could both take gymnastics, however, so on Wednesday, my mom (SUPERHERO!) and I shuttled the boys off to the high school auditorium for "gymnastics." My gentle readers who are parents probably understand why I put gymnastics in quotation marks right there. I am sure that it's not nice to sit and laugh at other people's children--or for that matter, your own--but there were kids there who seemed to be discovering their arms and legs for the first time. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Neither of my boys wanted to go to gymnastics at first, but once they were there and doing it, they loved it. Since Wednesday, they have asked at least 6 trillion times, "Gymnastics tomorrow?" Unfortunately it's only on Mondays and Wednesdays. But at least they're learning the days of the week in English because I have to repeat 6 trillion times a day that it's Thursday, so no gymnastics til Monday, or it's Friday, so no gymnastics til Monday.

Next week, we add bowling on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In July, Temesgen gets basketball (cue wailing from Daniel) and they both have swimming lessons.

The key to raising boys, I'm discovering, is KEEP THEM BUSY.

I haven't updated the blog much since we've been back, since most days have been really hard and I have been too exhausted and demoralized to remember to eat, much less update my blog. The last two days have been much better, however. I am hoping we have turned one small corner and can start getting along better.

And in the meantime, at least there's summer rec, 4 days a week for the next 2 months.

Boys and Pets

2011-05-31T21:10:00.003-06:00

The pets have been a huge concern to us since we brought the boys home. They have never been around pets before and don't know how to treat them. They resort to teasing several times a day and have to be corrected. The energy in our house has also changed. No one is balanced right now! Roxy is doing surprisingly well. She has been so patient and tolerant. In general, she is super sensitive to the mood of the house and gets very upset when anyone's energy is out of balance. We assumed she would go into hiding or suffer a breakdown. But she's been great, and I think it all comes down to crumbs. Boys bring emotional chaos, pulled tails, and a confusing mix of "Come! Go! Come! Go! No! Sit!" (until they're reminded that only Mom and Dad give commands to the dog). But they also bring crumbs. Lots and lots of crumbs. And that makes up for a lot.

The cats have gone into hiding with two exceptions. Wilhemina has no intention of letting anyone interrupt her routine. She is too mean to worry about the boys. She draws blood regularly from the people she loves most, so she will have no qualms about setting limits with the boys. She gets cranky ears if they get too close and she finds higher ground. Puck, unlike the other pets, has welcomed the boys with open arms. I have really appreciated his mellow good nature this week. He loves strangers and house guests, so he immediately took to the new family members. He is a giant of a cat, and the boys were scared of him at first. But he lets them stroke his fur the wrong way, kiss him, swish his tail around, and even pet him with puppets. He is seemingly deaf to the multiple meltdowns we have each day that send the other cats racing for cover. He can't even be bothered to move from his favorite dining room chair when the boys play a rousing game of table tennis on the dining room table. The ping pong zings off his head, and he doesn't even blink. He is the only cat who has tried sleeping with the boys. That didn't go over so well. There were many cries of "Mom! Mom!" when I tried to leave the room with Puck on the bed. His presence was fine during storytime, but once the lights went out, he apparently turned into a scary tiger.

What this means for the other 4 cats is that they are starved for attention. The second the boys are in bed--literally the second--the cats emerge from their hiding places and swarm us.

Picky Eaters

2011-05-28T07:44:00.004-06:00

The only thing my boys really like to eat is soft white rolls smothered with jelly. Smother is the best word I can think of, but maybe drowned will give you a better visual. Let's just put it this way: the two of them alone managed to consume an entire jar of strawberry jam in a day and a half. That was before we realized that parents need to be the ones in charge of the knife and jam jar. If they had their way, they would eat soft white rolls with jelly for three meals a day. Meals that I was certain would be surefire hits--roasted chicken, pizza, burgers--were disasters. Not a single bite of chicken was consumed. The burgers were removed from the soft white buns, which were then eaten by themselves. (The burgers made an appearance the next day in spaghetti sauce, which one child loves and the other detests.) Toppings were peeled off the pizza, and then the dough was consumed. You get the idea.

So I'm struggling to find things for them to eat. It has not been the healthiest week. They do love fruit, so they're eating a lot of that, but otherwise, their diet is high on the refined carbs and sugar. They are often too tired at the end of the day to want much dinner, so I am trying to shift their main meal to lunch--and serve the beloved bread and jam before bed with a little hot tea, which was their evening meal at the orphanage. Maybe it will be comforting to them. Today for lunch, we're trying fish sticks from the health food store, rice, and carrot puree. Tomorrow, we're trying lentil soup.

What makes feeding even more difficult is that what they like one day, they don't like the next. In Ethiopia, they had banana bread and strawberry smoothies for breakfast several mornings and loved it. Yesterday, I baked banana bread and made smoothies. Temesgen, normally the pickier of the two, ate well and even asked for seconds. Daniel threw a fit and acted like I was trying to poison him. He refused to eat. But this morning, served the same breakfast, he ate happily. Who can figure it out?

I myself have eaten things this week that I never imagined I would eat: Arby's roast beef sandwiches, bologna sandwiches (they hated bologna, which I thought would be a surefire kid favorite; sure it's gross, but at least it's got some protein in it), and peanut butter on the ubiquitous soft white roll. I miss fiber. I miss vegetables. I miss cooking for an appreciative audience of myself and my husband. By the time we get them in bed, all my good intentions of making a special meal for us have gone out the window.

But at least my house is clean! Temesgen is kind of a neat freak and doesn't like for his room to be messy, so the bed is always made (much better than I can make it in fact), clothes are folded and put away, toys are put in the bin. And I am trying to stick to my 15 minutes a day of straightening, which is enough to keep things tidy. This weekend, we're going to start experimenting with chores. I am not sure what Daniel can do. He can't be trusted not to drop things, plus he's very easily distracted. My mom suggested having him dust the baseboards, which is maybe a once a year job for me, but why not have clean baseboards every week? The goal really is just to keep him occupied. I am hoping that Temesgen will love the vacuum cleaner.

It's Just Two Kids: How Hard Can It Be Anyway?

2011-05-26T14:51:00.007-06:00

I have been trying to find time to update my blog all week.

But when you have children, time, it turns out, no longer exists in the same way. For instance. On Monday, our first day home, when I ended up in hysterics about three times wondering WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!, I sat down at 7 pm only to realize that I had not gone to the bathroom since 6 am. I apologize to my gentle readers for too much information, but seriously. WHEN YOU HAVE CHILDREN, YOU DO NOT EVEN HAVE TIME TO PEE. I didn't shower. I didn't put on make-up. I didn't eat. I didn't have a single thought for 12 hours straight that wasn't related to my children. And then when they finally went to bed, my husband and I collapsed (after taking a bathroom break) only to talk about our children for two hours before falling asleep on the couch.

Things have improved steadily since Monday. Everyone is sleeping better. I've got my schedule in place. R. and I are doing a better job handing off parenting tasks so that each of us can get some work done each day and even have time for a shower. We are also doing a better job of making sure they get enough exercise.

But it is a HUGE adjustment to go from zero kids to two kids. Of course it's a huge adjustment for them too.

Their behavior has been excellent this week, all things considered. Some food issues, a daily tantrum or two from Daniel, but that's about it. We had one nightmare bedtime, but then Temesgen agreed to sleep in the bottom bunk with Daniel, and since then, bedtime takes about 1 minute.

Their behavior during Embassy Week while we were in Ethiopia was quite a different story. Temesgen has been a different child since we arrived home. In Ethiopia, he was withdrawn, defiant, moody, aggressive. He picked on his brother many times every day to the point of tears; in fact, just about every conversation they had ended in tears, and we got to the point where we distracted them from talking if the conversation lasted more than a minute or two because we knew what was coming. The wonderful manager of the guest house where we stayed told me that she'd never met a child so disrespectful and difficult. I cried every day, worried that we had ruined our lives. I spent the flight home reading a parenting book specifically about working with difficult children and formulating a plan.

But since we arrived home, he has swung to the opposite extreme: he is trying to be the perfect child. He gets very upset with Daniel when it's time for the afternoon temper tantrum. You can see the refrain circling in his mind: "Don't do anything to rock the boat. Don't do anything to make these people send us back." This isn't the real Temesgen either, but it's much easier to deal with than the child we met in Ethiopia. It's unclear right now who he really is, what his personality will reveal itself to be when he begins to feel secure here and begins to let himself be known. He has had many moments this week, though, of what looks like real joy and play. He loves their new toys, says thank you for everything, and hasn't made his brother cry in three days!

As for parenting, I am still a little shell-shocked at how hard it is. It's one of those things that no amount of reading can really prepare you for. People said it was hard, but I didn't really understand just what that meant. And it's probably a good thing you don't understand what it entails before you're doing it, because if you knew what you were in for, you probably wouldn't do it and the species would die out.

Becoming a parent also means eating a lot of crow, I have discovered. I would like to extend a personal apology to every parent I have ever judged--and that includes most of you. I was pretty sure I knew how to do it better, but it took only about 5 hours of being a parent before I realized that I know nothing.

I have broken so many of my most cherished parenting principles already, and I've only been a mom for a week and a half! I let the tv babysit my children every day (including right now! The boys are absorbed in Monsters Inc while I write this blog post. I'm calling it "Language Work."). I have bought a dozen or more snacks filled with high fructose corn syrup, that root of all evil. And worst of all, I have fed my children fast food not once, not twice, BUT THREE TIMES this week. We are NOT a fast food family! WE AREN'T. And yet somehow, it happened.

The hardest thing this week has actually been my work schedule. I am teaching a 4-week online summer school course this month and I couldn't log on while I was in Ethiopia. Students write two papers a week, and I came home to 4 sets of papers to grade, with more on the way. I have gotten through 3 sets and just have one left, at least until Sunday. But it's taking up A LOT of my time this week, when I should be interacting with my kids. Mom guilt! And wife guilt, because my husband has had the kids for many more hours each day than he should so that I can work.

The good things? I've kept my house clean and tidy all week. I haven't lost my temper. I've been consistent with discipline. I haven't gotten into a power struggle about food even though I have wanted to at least once a day.

I can sort of imagine by next week that I might even be enjoying this a little bit. I'll try to get some photos posted in the next day or two.

Leaving tomorrow!

2011-05-13T14:22:00.003-06:00

I'm a little frustrated with my blog right now because two posts I wrote yesterday--one of which already had comments!--are now missing. Who knows what happened? I saw them on the blog at one point, checked back later for comments, and both were gone. Technology! Bah!

Almost packed and ready to go, though right now, the boys' suitcase contains a cat rather than clothes. Wilhemina has always liked a trip.

In Which I Am Moved to Quote the Immortal Words of T.O.

2011-05-12T11:40:00.000-06:00

This morning, something new and fun was sprung on us: the I-864. I know I've seen those little numbers before, but somehow I didn't think they would apply to us. After all, we already checked off the I-600 and the I-171 from our list, so how could we possibly also need an I-864? But it turns out we do. And it requires information that I simply do not have handy at my fingertips. Like tax returns. Like copies of our W-2s.

The I-864 is an immigration document that must be filled out to satisfy our friends at the Department of Homeland Security. It's an "Affidavit of Support." As near as I can tell, by filling it out you're promising that you have enough income to support the "immigrant" you're petitioning on behalf of. Our children are described on this form as "principal immigrants." It took me awhile to figure that out. Adoption is basically nine months of paperwork, so I'm not sure why this form, more than any of the others, threw me. Today is just not a good day for filling out US government documents, I think.

To give you a sense of what filling it out was like, I will simply tell you that the form itself is 8 pages long. The instructions on how to fill out the form are 11 pages long. SIGH.

Once I got going, though, it sped along. Until I got to the part about copies of tax returns. That necessitated some digging through papers and much cursing and resolving to be more organized in the future. (Yeah, right.)

An hour and a half after I started, I was finally wrapping everything up.

Only to spot some fine print on page 11 of the instructions. "The following items must be submitted with Form I-864: A copy of your individual Federal income tax return, including W-2s."

It is a miracle that I didn't break down in tears. W-2s?! W-2s??!! WHO CAN PUT THEIR HANDS ON THEIR OLD W-2S?!?! I am quite sure at least ONE of my devoted readers cannot. (Mom, that's you.)

I could vaguely remember stuffing everything related to 2010 taxes into an envelope last month, helpfully labeling it "TAXES 2010," and shoving it.... somewhere. I looked around my office. Where to start? My office, for me, is pretty neat right now, but there are still stacks and stacks of papers crammed every which way. The 2010 taxes could be anywhere.

I headed downstairs for a flashlight to assist the search (you know it's bad when you need a flashlight during the day to find something in your house), took a deep breath, prepared myself for at least an hour of searching, opened a file drawer, and found the envelope labeled TAXES 2010. It took all of 10 seconds. Dreading the search took longer than the actual search.

A DOCUMENT THAT I NEEDED WAS EXACTLY WHERE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AND I DID NOT HAVE TO SORT THROUGH TWO TONS OF PAPERS TO FIND IT.

Hence, T.O.'s immortal words: "I love me some me." At that moment, I really did.

Traveling Back to Ethiopia on SATURDAY!

2011-05-12T05:09:00.000-06:00

Yes, Saturday. As in two days from today Saturday.

Just got the email yesterday morning from the US Embassy in Addis, letting us know we are cleared for travel. We were able to set up our Embassy interview for next Wednesday. I don't really know what the Embassy interview entails. All I know is: don't bring cameras to the Embassy, because they really freak out about that. No battery-operated devices of any kind, in fact. I read a story once on someone's blog about how they inadvertently brought miners' headlamps to the Embassy: they had been using them during blackouts at night to see and get around. (Lovely jet lag to Africa means that most Americans seem to be awake between the hours of 2 and 5. You can always find company in the lobby of your guest house at those hours.) She had forgotten she had the lamps in her bags. I am guessing Embassy staff was not amused.

But I don't know if the Embassy interview is more in-depth than the court appointment, where you are asked 5 questions, and the answer is always yes. The whole court interview takes about 120 seconds.

I kicked into high gear yesterday, organizing flights, dogsitting (thanks, Mom!), housesitting, accommodations. Now that all the arrangements appear to be made, I have to finish my to-do list, which may be even more distinguished than my infamous pre-Court to-do list. The difference is that most things on the Court to-do list were inessential; I was trying to get a lot of house projects done with my sudden and unexpected burst of nesting energy. The things on the Embassy pre-travel list aren't things that can really be put off for another time.

To make things a little crazier, I am also teaching an online class this month, and my computer access in Ethiopia is going to be sketchy to nonexistent. I won't be able to grade any of the papers coming in while I'm there, so I'm going to arrive home to a bona fide grading situation: students will have submitted 4 papers and 3 dozen discussion posts by that time, all of which need to be responded to and quickly, since it's just a 4-week class and they will need time to revise. Oh yes, and I have two boys to parent. Yikes!

Oh well. It will all work out somehow in this best of all possible worlds.

And we will be picking up our boys on Monday or Tuesday! I can't quite believe it. I thought I would feel more ready. I've thought about nothing else for months; I've read dozens of books, hundreds of blogs. I have taken parenting classes and even have documents from several organizations, including the U.S. and Ethiopian governments, stating that I have been found fit to be a parent. But I don't feel remotely prepared for this! Do I still have time to feel more ready before Monday?? Maybe if I reread a few of the parenting books during the flight?

Review of the Yebsabi Guest House in Addis Ababa

2011-05-10T09:58:00.003-06:00

When we traveled for court, we stayed at the Yebsabi Guest House. Our impressions:

The Plus Column:
*Easily the cleanest place I have ever stayed in my life. Staff is constantly mopping, sweeping, scrubbing. The floors sparkled. Our room--the whole building--was immaculate.

*Our room shared a living room and kitchen and so we had access to a fridge, microwave, and hot plate. Very convenient.

*Nice views of the city from the rooftop.

*Staff is excellent, exceptionally helpful and friendly. We were delayed at the airport and the driver waited two hours for us. Whenever we needed something, staff made it happen quickly.

*Spacious lobby with couches and tables, big TV, computer.

*Gated paved courtyard for drawing with sidewalk chalk, kicking balls, etc.

*Large free breakfast.

*Kaldi's was a 10 minute walk away.

The Negative Column:
*Walls were paper thin. We could hear every conversation in the room next door. We were awakened dozens of times by our neighbors having conversations, and it's not like they were raising their voices either.

*Bedrooms were very small, and while this was somewhat mitigated by the shared living room, if you didn't know the family with whom you were sharing the space, it didn't feel that comfortable to just go hang out outside the bedroom.

*The food was terrible. Breakfast was ok, but we stopped eating dinner there after two largely inedible meals. I am not a picky eater, but a plate of scrambled eggs shouldn't leave a thick coat of oil on your plate. Nor should rice. But other guests seemed to like the food, so maybe I'm more picky than I realize? Or maybe they're just more polite than I am?

Next time, we'll probably stay here (hotel where our agency wants us to stay) or here.

A Little Sequence I Call "Mama's Camera"

2011-05-06T07:34:00.001-06:00

One thing I have already learned about parenting is that it can be hard to predict what might cause agonizing pain in the heart of a six year old. For instance. Daniel is obsessed--OBSESSED--with the camera. His main joy in life--besides kicking the soccer ball or screaming "Ferras!" (horse) as he snaps imaginary reins while R dutifully gives him a piggy back ride around the compound--is taking photos. And the moment he saw my spiffy, shiny brand new red digital camera, he fell in love. The first day we were at Sele Enat, he relieved me of the camera before I even knew what had happened. I was going to take it back--because the red camera is "Mama's camera"--but he treated it with the respect such shiny redness deserved. So I let him take pictures for two hours. Then I discovered that the main complaint in online reviews of this camera was absolutely right: the battery dies very quickly. We had brought an extra, but we didn't have converters and adapters and so forth to recharge, so we couldn't afford to have the second battery die. The red camera had to be Mama's camera once again.

But that was okay, for Mama had planned for this and brought the scuffed old silver digital camera just for the children to use. It's slow but still plods steadily along. On Day 2, she whipped out the silver camera, thinking that Daniel really wouldn't know the difference. He's 6! What does he know about digital cameras?

Ha! He knew enough to know this wasn't Shiny Red. While holding Old Silver in his hand, he kept asking "Camera? Camera?" Yes! You have a camera! Very smart! He was having none of it. His little face fell and he began to cry.

But after throwing a bit of a fit, he rallied and ran off to snap pictures with Old Silver. He got a nice sequence of shoes lined up outside the boys' bedroom and snapped a mural from every possible angle.

But then disaster struck! Mama pulled out Shiny Red to take her own photos. First, there was elation. There was Shiny Red after all! So shiny! So new! So red! But then, disaster! Mama refused to hand over Shiny Red. "Mama's camera," she said. She shook her finger in the universal sign of no. Disbelieving, he reached his tiny hands out, opening and closing his fingers. "Camera? Camera?"

Determined to come home with photos of something besides Matchbox cars, ears, and the creepy mural on the wall, Mama held tight to the red camera. "Look!" she said. "I'll take photos of you!" But Daniel wouldn't look at the camera. He moped off to the corner of the yard and collapsed in a sad heap. He stared vacantly ahead. He turned away to gaze through the fence. He plucked at the grass. He felt the Full Tragedy of the moment. Which Mama used Shiny Red to capture for posterity.

Thankfully, even though this was a Full Tragedy, it was also a Brief Tragedy. He was not able to resist the lure of the soccer ball for very long, and pretty soon he was laughing and tearing around. But every day thereafter, there was a moment when his face fell as he was given Old Silver instead of Shiny Red.

What Happens When a 6 Year Old Gets the Camera

2011-05-05T10:47:00.002-06:00

There were several dozen in this special series of car and ball on dirt. As well as several dozen of eyes, ears, noses, and lips in extreme, unflattering, and often unrecognizable close-ups.

A couple more photos

2011-05-04T18:29:00.002-06:00

Sent by a family who was there just last week, bringing home their kids. ("Wisconsin"!)

Please also note Temesgen is wearing pink Keens. He really loves pink.

A Photo Blog

2011-05-04T10:03:00.014-06:00

Here are some photos of "I South Dakota"--both of them.

Homeschooling No More

2011-05-03T14:26:00.000-06:00

So I've spent the last 6 months or so reading everything I can get my hands on about homeschooling. I was so certain that I would be homeschooling our boys.

And then I met them.

I haven't spent a lot of time around children at all, I was an only child, and I was--and still am--a girl. So when I imagine what it will be like to be a parent, I imagine parenting two children who were much like me, only they happen to be boys and African. I liked to play quietly with dolls and have tea parties with imaginary tea and color (preferably princesses or Cinderellas--a ball gown was the sign of a good coloring book) and read. Going to the library was the highlight of my week.

My children are not like that. Not at all. They run. They somersault. They cartwheel. They jump fences. They kick balls and kick balls and kick balls. Then they throw balls and throw balls and throw balls. Then they throw AND kick balls. I was so exhausted spending just two hours a day with them. It makes me rather faint at heart to imagine spending 24 hours a day with them. Every day. For the rest of their childhoods. Am I going to have enough energy to keep up? Am I EVER going to be able to wear them out? Is it wrong to consider getting a kiddie treadmill and putting them on it for an hour or two a day?

Moreover, my children are pack children. They were sorely disappointed to discover that they will be the only children in our family. Their relationships with other children are their primary relationships and bonds. It was astonishing to watch the dynamics among the children in the orphanage and to realize just how much the older children are raising the younger ones. Within 10 minutes of meeting them, I had given up the plan to homeschool because I couldn't imagine keeping them from their main opportunity to be with other children.

And okay, also if your kids are in school, you get to have quiet time. You get to sit. Read. Nap. Work. You do not have to kick or throw a ball. School is good.

Mom and Dad, Come Faster

2011-05-02T14:15:00.003-06:00

I got the most amazing Facebook message from a family currently in Ethiopia to pick up their terrific older kids with whom we were lucky enough to spend time while we were at the orphanage. Temesgen apparently pulled the mom aside on their last day and asked her to compose a letter to send to us. He had seen me taking dictation on a letter for the family of another older sibling set, so perhaps that's how the idea got into his head. In any case, I was shocked and surprised and very pleased to get this letter from him. Not only do we get addressed by name (as opposed to the "Hey!" he used while we were in Ethiopia), we get a strong sense that he's pretty much behind the whole adoption thing, which I wasn't entirely sure of while we were in Ethiopia.

Mom and Dad,
Come faster. Mom, Dad I love you. Thank you. Picture come. I like snow. I like tv, game, skateboard,motorcycle, swimming, guitar, burgers, chicken, cookies, chocolate,movies, X-men, Star Wars, Toy Story, Batman, music, dancing, penguins, school, Scooby Doo, Father Bear (cartoon) and soccer.

I love you Mom and Dad.

As it happens, I spent the last week stocking up on all kinds of X-men, Star Wars, Scooby Doo, and Batman movies, t-shirts, books, and even underwear, so it's good to know I was on the right track when it comes to his special interests.

I love the randomness of penguins.

We are amused by his love of snow, given that he has never seen or experienced it. But good to know he is happy about it. (That was one of his first questions. Are there brothers and sisters? No. Sad face. Is there a dog? Yes. Happy face! Is it a black dog? Well, as it turns out, it IS a black dog. More happy face! Is there snow? Yes, lots of it. Very happy face! Then we showed him the photo of the black dog wearing her coat and frolicking in the snow. Goodness all around.)

And as it turns out, WE like tv and movies too! And cookies and chocolate! So even if nothing else works, we can all sit in front of the tv with big bowls of cookies and chocolate and watch movies.

I South Dakota

2011-04-30T07:34:00.002-06:00

It took Temesgen no time at all to learn the name and location of his new state, very conveniently located near Colorado, where several of his friends live. Most of the children have been matched with families, and they identify themselves by their new place name. On our first day there, we learned states rather than names. M. pointed to himself and said, "Wisconsin." S. offered "California." It took another day or so to sort everyone out by names and states.

They pulled a huge US map out to show us their locations and speculate about the distance between states. M. and S., very close friends, wanted to know exactly how long it takes to drive from Wisconsin to California. I told them and then suggested that the airplane might be a more efficient mode of transportation. "Ah yes! Jet!"

More than anything else (except a Gameboy), Temesgen longs for a South Dakota t-shirt so that he can visibly brand himself with his new state.

If you take out the teeming city of four million people, Ethiopia doesn't look that different from South Dakota. You have to subtract some other things too, like acacia trees and hibiscus that grow as big as our house. But the basic features of the landscape do recall the Black Hills and rolling plains of this area.

Normally, I am never far from complaint about where we live. But after spending 10 days in Addis Ababa, I was actually happy to get back to my dinky little town of 4,000. There's open space, clean air, and quiet streets. Unlike many of the children at Sele Enat, our children grew up in Addis, and the city is part of who they are. I'm not sure how they will adjust to the big open nothingness of western South Dakota.

The First Day in Ethiopia

2011-04-29T19:13:00.005-06:00

I've been putting it off writing about our trip to Ethiopia because I don't know where to begin. And once I begin, I don't know how I will stop. My mind is still full of the place and the people, especially the children at Sele Enat, the orphanage where our boys have lived for the past year and a half. We spent a couple of hours each day at Sele Enat. R. mostly played with the younger kids and I mostly hung out with the older kids. I fell in love with all the older kids. If we ever adopt again (a big if!), we'll seriously consider kids who are 10 or 11 or 12, because we wanted to bring all of the older kids home with us.

I almost chickened out of going the first day we arrived in Addis Ababa. I was so nervous to meet our children. Nervous to the point of wanting to throw up. They weren't expecting us until Saturday, so we did have a day's reprieve if we wanted to take it. But I was embarrassed by my reluctance to go meet our children when all I had thought about for the past six months was meeting our children. So I pulled myself together, and we called for a driver.

In the end, it worked out perfectly. We walked inside the compound and the first child I saw was a friend of our boys who has been in many photos with them. One by one, small children I recognized from photos spilled out of the boys' bedroom. I had spent so much time looking at these kids in pictures, it felt oddly like being surrounded by celebrities. But no sign of our boys--for the very good reason that they, along with all of the children older than 6, were still at school. I could stop hyperventilating. They weren't even there yet. I got my reprieve after all. Not having spent much time around kids, I really had no idea what to do with all these little ones, but they made it easy. Four and five-year-old kids politely held out their hands to shake. Little T., who is being adopted by a family in Colorado, asked my name. I told him and asked his, though I already knew it. A couple of toddlers demanded to be picked up and carried, so we did that for awhile, and then the basketball and soccer ball were brought out. These would be the mainstays of our visit.

I was busy talking with one of the little girls when suddenly I was attack hugged from behind. I looked down, and there was Temesgen, our oldest son, grinning hugely. He hugged me, then tore off to hug R. Daniel, the youngest son, was close behind. They had gotten the word somehow on their walk home from school that their family was waiting for them at the orphanage, and they tore home, well ahead of the other kids.

The first meeting was nothing like I had imagined. I had imagined the first meeting would be all nerves and awkwardness, with shy, standoffish kids and at least one shy parent (that would be me). I just couldn't fathom how the first meeting could be anything but uncomfortable. But it wasn't. The kids were ready for hugs, a little conversation, and lots of play. And they were exactly as I'd imagined they would be from their photos and the few short videos we'd seen. Daniel all smiles and laughter and energy. Temesgen thoughtful and responsible and intense. We liked them very much.

The first day was perfect.

Dreams

2011-03-31T06:26:00.003-06:00

A couple of nights ago, I dreamed we met the boys for the first time. At first, they were themselves. But as the dream went on, dream logic set in, and T. turned into a puppy and D. turned into a cat who looked suspiciously like Wilhemina. I asked T. the puppy in my pidgin Amharic if he was hungry and he nodded his little puppy head. Later on, I was carrying D. around and introducing him to people as my son. "I know he looks like a cat, but he's really a boy," I kept saying.

Then last night, I dreamed again that we were meeting the boys for the first time. We had brought Wilhemina with us to Ethiopia in a backpack and I was really stressed about finding her a litter box. Why can't I get that cat out of my dreams?? This time, the boys were burly teenagers. They looked like they were about to run out onto the football field and play linebacker. I was just like, "Wow, you've both grown a lot since the last photo we had."

TWELVE DAYS!

2011-03-25T09:58:00.003-06:00

It's hard to believe, but we leave in 12 days for Ethiopia and will be meeting our boys for the first time in exactly 2 weeks.

I have crossed off most of the things on my to-do list, with the exception of a few out-there projects, like painting the dining room trim and buying a deep freezer. I still want to do those things, but it may not be feasible before traveling, especially given my work schedule for the next week.

I have been reading more on adoption parenting and attachment and disorders this week, and it's rather demoralizing. All the books say that "normal" parenting isn't enough, but they don't really tell you what to do instead, besides things I would already do as part of "normal" parenting--like making sure I spend 15-30 minutes a day playing one-on-one with my children, having a structured daily routine, looking at my children when I talk to them, hugging them often. Aren't these normal parenting techniques? Occasionally you'll see a different technique described, but frankly, it's usually something I just can't see myself doing. Like putting a cracker or a piece of candy on my nose and telling my kids to look at me! Um, what?!

Even as I am trying to be prepared and have resources available, at the same time there's this part of me that refuses to believe that my children will have some of the problems described in these books. Look at them! Look how sweet they are! Love will definitely be enough for MY children. But I know it doesn't work that way. Last week, I read several blogs by adoptive parents on attachment and trying to have hope in situations that seem hopeless. Some of the situations they describe with their children seem so miserable.

Last night, after reading several articles about sleep issues, I asked R.--just like the article suggested--to discuss our "sleep philosophy" because apparently we need to have one. I am the kind of person who does weeks of research before starting anything new; I've read dozens of adoptive parenting books; follow a hundred or so blogs; have two notebooks of parenting notes to consult; etc. R. is the kind of person who wings it. Needless to say, he was very confused by the whole concept of a "sleep philosophy." Once I explained it to him and he finished giving me a quizzical look, he confessed that he doesn't believe in firm bedtimes!! And he believes in letting them cry it out! ARGH! Parenting incompatibility! But at least we do have some common ground: co-sleeping is ok. Only our bed is not big enough to be a Family Bed because it is already a Cat Bed. Most nights, we have over 50 pounds of cat in the bed with us. I don't see how boys would fit.

Introducing Trixie

2011-03-19T19:14:00.000-06:00

Trixie is what I have decided to call my new Kindle. She is currently charging while I read her manual and learn about all of her functions. Trixie is amazing! I thought she was all about books, but she can play audiobooks and music too! She can go online! She can download files from my computer! That means I could take my OWN novel-in-progress with me to Ethiopia if I choose (Which I don't. But if I did...)!! Trixie makes me want to use lots of exclamation marks!!!

Planning travel reading is a great pleasure as well as an art. It's difficult to know what book will suit my mood when I'm planning 2 or 3 weeks into the future. Or how many to bring. My travel nightmare isn't the delayed flight or missed connection: it's finishing all my books and running out of reading material. With Trixie, that's no longer an issue. A few clicks of the mouse, and I've got Trollope's The Way We Live Now and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend downloaded for free. Also free: Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, Elizabeth von Arnim's A Solitary Summer, Elinor Pruitt Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Jane Austen's Emma, P.G. Wodehouse's Right Ho, Jeeves, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Henry James's What Maisie Knew, a couple of novellas by Edith Wharton. I could be happily reading for months just on what I've downloaded for free.

But of course part of the pleasure of travel reading is choosing new books, and I am still making final selections.

Here's what I know for sure I'm buying:
Room by Emma Donaghue
Wait for Me by Deborah Mitford
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

That may be all, because I would like to get to some of my free downloads. But there are also some maybes:
Goat Song by Brad Kessler
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Puck

2011-03-17T07:39:00.000-06:00

Puck is going to live forever because he is the laziest cat I've ever met, with the possible exception of his brother, Xander. (See them together in the box below).

I fully expect to find him with mold on his fur because he moves so seldom and so slowly.

He is probably our most personable cat: he loves company and loves a lap more than anything else. (At 18 pounds, he doesn't really fit.)

We have only one photo of him playing (see below: he likes shoes), because play doesn't fit his overall policy of energy conservation. Puck sleeps.

He appears to have double-jointed shoulders, which is actually how he got his name: he can flatten himself out like a hockey puck.

He is Wilhemina's most hated foe, though he seems entirely unaware of their long shared history of enmity. A few times a week, she has a huge hissing fit when she sees him and may do a little air boxing in front of his face. He merely sits regally and stares off into the distance, as if nothing is happening.

He never bathes himself, yet his coat is always shiny and sleek, as if he were just brushed.

He has many questionable personable habits, especially when it comes to eating things that make him throw up. He likes to eat flowers. He loves to eat brooms. String is also a special treat. He lost two of his nine lives to emergency stomach surgery after consuming long strings that got tied up in his intestines. When his dinner is late, he eats hair balls off the floor and then pukes them up. He is not always the most charming cat.

But he's very handsome.

Fergus

2011-03-15T15:08:00.000-06:00

Wilhemina in a Box

2011-03-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

Silly Abby

2011-03-10T14:47:00.002-07:00

Abby is the cat who makes us laugh the most. She does something silly just about every hour of the day. She still doesn't know her name, but she loves EVERYBODY. She does not understand body language or boundaries, and she is pretty sure that everybody else loves her as much as she loves them. A warning sign like a growl or swat is sure to have the opposite effect with Abby: she thinks it means come a little closer. She loves a cardboard box and a packing envelope above all other things. They rip so nicely into tiny confetti. She loves to wrestle and to snuggle. She loves a ponytail and a hood. She loves Pilates and yoga. She is full of insta-purrs when you pick her up. She doesn't care much for a human lap, but a cat lap is another story: other cats make a wonderful soft pillow for a nap.

We take a lot of photos of Abby, and here's why:

Finally! The Boys' Room

2011-03-10T14:42:00.004-07:00

Their bedroom used to be a kitchen, and we decided to keep the cabinets since they offer great storage. The sink stayed because it's kind of cute and it would have been a pain to remove it. I really love how the room turned out! We haven't put much stuff into it or decorated much because we figure the boys will want to put their own stamp on it.

Lola in a Basket

2011-03-09T14:40:00.006-07:00

Vaccines; or :-(

2011-03-08T18:10:00.002-07:00

Yesterday, R. and I met with a doctor specializing in travel medicine. (If you need to pause while it sinks in that Rapid City, South Dakota, has a doctor who specializes in travel medicine, go right ahead. I certainly did.) We ended up getting vaccines for Hepatitis A, Typhoid, Meningitis, and Tetanus and Polio boosters. We skipped Yellow Fever, which is recommended if you're traveling outside of Addis Ababa (we're not), and also skipped malaria prevention medicines for the same reason. Apparently, the mosquitoes that carry these diseases can't live at Addis's altitude (7726 feet).

I am a bit squeamish about most things at the doctor's office. R. went first, and I made many faces--warming up my face muscles, the nurse said--while R. got poked. "Little poke," the nurse kept saying, then she'd punch the needle violently into his arm. It didn't look like a little poke to me! But I was pleasantly surprised: the shots themselves didn't really hurt at all. I could feel them, but I wouldn't even really describe it as uncomfortable.

About two hours later, however, my upper arms began to feel as though I'd been punched repeatedly. By bedtime, I couldn't lift my arms without serious pain. I sleep on my side, so sleep was challenging, since neither side was an option. Twenty-four hours later, they're still tender, but otherwise, I don't seem to be having any negative effects from the vaccines. After reading the list of potential side affects for each vaccine, I was fully expecting a fever of at least 102 and a migraine.

Before we got our vaccines, we did some shopping for our trip--mostly stocking our traveling pharmacy and buying some small gifts to leave for the caregivers (lotions and chocolate, which is apparently hard to find in Ethiopia--horrors!).

We had yet another snowstorm today, while in Ethiopia it was partly cloudy and 77 degrees.

In exactly one month from today, we'll meet our boys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Little Blog Break + Big Exciting News

2011-03-05T13:12:00.003-07:00

I've been on a little blog break, which does happen from time to time. No reason for it. Just being a lazy blogger.

But now for the big exciting news: we have a court date!!!!! April 12. So in just over 30 days, we'll be traveling to Ethiopia and meeting T. and D. I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around that: I will meet my sons in 34 days. I will be in Africa in 34 days. AFRICA. After several days of unreality, it is starting to sink in and I am starting to get excited about it!

Yesterday, I spent several hours reading the Internet, putting together a first draft of our packing list (maybe I'll laminate it like I laminated my 2011 book challenge list?!), and following the stories of other families in Ethiopia. I hope that I can find the beauty in Addis Ababa. Most of the posts I read from traveling families concentrate on the traffic, the poverty, the pollution. I understand that those are realities. But I hope that my eyes will find other things there as well.

The packing list is turning into a small pharmacy. It seems particularly American to travel to Africa with a small pharmacy in one's suitcase. Are there any other cultures that medicate themselves as frequently as we do? Travelers were posting online about popping prescription sleeping pills (roosters, barking dogs, and, yes, traffic) with abandon. It put me in mind of scenes in movies where a character opens another character's medicine cabinet and finds row after row of bottles of prescription drugs. I don't even like taking an aspirin when I have a headache. And here I am with FOUR different remedies for stomach ailments on my packing list. Is that really necessary?? I bought 3 travel-sized bottles of hand sanitizer this week. Will that be enough? I already feel like I'm fast approaching that line between caution and idiocy.

And then there are so many minor-but-important decisions to make. What books to purchase for my new Kindle? What am I going to want to read on the flight and while I'm in Addis? What, besides photo books, should we take for our boys? Should we take treats for all the kids at the orphanage? Should we put the money that we'd use to buy fun stuff like bubbles and matchbox cars into items the orphanage might really need, like baby formula or school supplies? Most important of all, what should I wear to meet my sons for the first time?

Books about Books

2011-02-15T07:29:00.004-07:00

I had to buy Susan Hill's Howard's End Is on the Landing because I am a sucker for books about books. This one, ostensibly, is about novelist/publisher Susan Hill's year spent reading from her own bookshelves. A clever idea. But I'm a little mystified by this book's good reviews, because it really didn't come together for me.

It's a collection of impressions about reading (the essays aren't usually fully developed enough to truly be essays), but Hill does precious little reading. Mostly it's about books she once read and whether or not she'll keep the books on her shelf or send them to the charity bookshop. And it's about books on her shelves that she doesn't intend to ever read. And also about books she might want to read someday. And about authors she's met. The name-dropping in this book is rather shameless, especially given that she herself describes name-dropping as harmless but tedious. Unless the author has been safely dead for a hundred years, you can bet Susan Hill interviewed them, had tea with them, ran into them at a train station, or had a book dropped on her foot by them.

About halfway through the book, Hill comes up with an organizing principle for her musings: her desert island 40 books. I can't remember how she picks 40, but I like that number. It's far preferable to the usual 1, 5 or 10. But the rest of the essays only occasionally touch on the desert island 40, and many of the books printed on the final list are never mentioned at all in the book.

I suppose in some ways, reading this book is very much like looking at one's own bookshelves--that sense of the random, the serendipitous. The book itself browses. So in that way, it's quite cleverly done. But I was left wanting more.

Still, it sent me right to my bookshelves to find Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, which I haven't read since I was in my late teens. I read the whole of her diary sometime in my early 20s, when I went through my Bloomsbury period, but Hill convinced me that I wanted to reread A Writer's Diary rather than just start over with the full Diary.

So far, the great reading pleasures of 2011 have been the pleasures of rereading, and I am feeling a second Bloomsbury period coming on. There are Woolf novels that I've never even read!

A Weekend of Bad Movies + One Good One

2011-02-14T09:42:00.002-07:00

As any reader of my blog knows, I am a sucker for a list. And just recently, I was catching up on old issues of Entertainment Weekly and came across Lisa Schwarzbaum's Top 10 movies of 2010. Schwarzbaum is quite possibly the worst writer among film critics. She never learned the lesson about leaning on your nouns and verbs. Much as her adjective-laden sentences astonish me with their length and utter incomprehensibility, I cannot admire them. Still, as a sucker for a list, I started adding titles to my Netflix queue.

Yesterday, we watched The Ghost Writer, which inconceivably received dozens of rave reviews. It was terrible. Terrible. Ewan MacGregor and Pierce Brosnan were quite good, and the whole thing was slick and stylish and nicely filmed. But the plot! The big discovery comes from a 2-second Google search. If only all crimes were so easy to solve. So many loose threads, so many incomprehensible detours. Such a waste of 128 minutes of my life.

I have no one but myself to blame for Sex and the City 2, because I knew how bad it would be. But I discovered a neat trick that made it watchable: the fast-forward button! I chose when to watch and when to fast-forward based on costume changes. When there was a new set of outfits, I began watching the scene. I watched until it became unbearable, then fast-forwarded to the next costume change. It was every bit as terrible as the reviews promised, yet my affection for the show makes it impossible for me to skip the movies, dreadful as they are. The one thing I really couldn't understand was the make-up. The four actresses look beautiful, but they are getting older, and aging skin generally looks better with less, not more. In several scenes, Charlotte and Carrie looked like raccoons, very tired raccoons. Also, Chris Noth has clearly discovered the fountain of youth. The man just looks better and better.

After two terrible movies, the quirky Paper Man, with Jeff Daniels, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, and Lisa Kudrow, probably seemed like a better movie than it actually was, but we really enjoyed it. Not much happens, and not much is really resolved, but there was life and heart and interest, as well as some fine performances, especially from Emma Stone.

Current Obesssion: The Casson Family

2011-02-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

I am giving myself the treat of rereading Hilary McKay's delightful series about the Casson family. There aren't many books I feel this way about, but I would very much like to wake up inside these novels. Only if I could bring a knapsack of real food, though, which would probably make me a welcome friend to the family. I covet Julia Denos's new covers:

See how pretty?

Read them in order:

Saffy's Angel
Indigo's Star
Permanent Rose
Caddy Ever After
Forever Rose
plus a new prequel, Caddy's World, which will be published in the U.S. in May

The Week in Picture Books

2011-02-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

Total: 11

I read three excellent books this week,Elsie's Bird, written by Jane Yolen and illustrated by the brilliant David Small, An Egg Is Quiet, written by Dianna Aston and illustrated by Sylvia Long, and The Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night, just awarded a Newbery Honor, written by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Rick Allen.

I loved a good western migration story, and Elsie's Bird is the story of a girl who moves from Boston to Nebraska. Small captures the Nebraska plains so well. The story is a bit marginal--pleasant but not memorably written, for me, until the very end, but the illustrations are superb.

An Egg Is Quiet is an exceptionally beautiful nonfiction (mostly) book about the wonders of the egg. Again, pleasant text with illustrations that really stand out.

The Dark Emperor's illustrations were fine, but the real draw here is Sidman's wonderful poetry.

I read a second book by Sidman this week, This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. I especially loved the response poems in the second half. This is one I would use in middle school or high school.

I read several good books that I enjoyed but weren't so great that I'm rushing to recommend them to others or wanting to add them to my personal collection:

The Mud Fairy written and illustrated by Amy Young, about a fairy who's not really very good at anything fairies are supposed to be good at. Over the course of the story, she discovers her true strengths. Bright cheerful illustrations, and a fine moral.

Audrey and Barbara, written and illustrated by Janet Lawson, the sweet story of Audrey, who longs to travel the world with her cat, Barbara. Barbara wants nothing more than to curl up on her pillow for a long nap. A cat named Barbara is just automatically funny.

The Pirate of Kindergarten written by George Ella Lyon and illustrated by Lynne Avril. This picture book just won a Schneider Family Award. It's about a little girl who has double vision; she struggles in school until she's diagnosed, and then everything gets better. The illustrations kind of elevate what is otherwise a fairly pedestrian story.

Polka Bats and Octopus Slacks: 14 Stories, nonsense poems written and illustrated by Calef Brown. Looks great, fun to read, not my cup of tea, but still a quality book.

The Red Chalk, written by Iris van Heide and illustrated by Marije Tolman. Perfect illustrations tell the story of Sara, bored with her own toy, some red chalk, and convinced that other children's toys are much more fun.

I also read two books that I didn't like:

Harry and Lulu, written by Arthur Yorinks and illustrated by Martin Matje. Lulu is a massive brat and abusive towards her dog, and even though Harry is a stuffed animal, he's also kind of a real dog. The illustrations were sweet, but the story left me cold.

I Love You Like Crazy Cakes. written by Rose Lewis and gorgeously illustrated by Jane Dyer. Odd story about adoption that focuses on the mother's feelings rather than the child's. But that seems pretty typical for the genre.

Some New Things I've Learned About My Sons

2011-02-05T14:51:00.004-07:00

A couple of days ago, I got a DVD with 38 photos and 22 videos from a family who'd traveled to Ethiopia to meet their children in December. Some things I already knew about my sons were confirmed a little more. T. is obsessed with sports shirts. D. is rarely without a soccer ball. Neither of them can wave for the camera without sticking their hands right in front of their faces. But we learned some new things too, mostly about T., because D. was rather scarce.

*T. loves pink Crocs. Loves them.
*T. can do a headstand for a really long time. And wave his legs around in the air very vigorously. And still stay in the headstand without falling.
*T. really likes cameras and videocameras.
*T. may also have a burgeoning fashion sense like his brother. In one video, he's rocking some camo manpri's, the usual sports t-shirt, and a very natty black blazer. (Along with pink crocs.)
*D. is sometimes very, very dirty. All that soccer in the dust!
*T. avoids games that involve singing.
*D. really likes suckers.
*And also to stick his tongue out when someone is taking his picture.

All I'm really thinking about these days is pleasepleaseplease hurry up, court date!

I might get started on a couple of court date projects: photo albums and photo posters for the boys! We can also bring a photo album for their birth mother. I have decided to use labels in the boys' albums because they do know some English. Maybe if all the pets are labeled, it won't seem like we have so many? That's probably wishful thinking. But maybe if they have names, they won't seem so much like vermin. Except for Lola. She looks kind of like a squirrel.

Good News about Adoption.... Sorta

2011-01-29T07:23:00.003-07:00

No, it IS good news: our paperwork has been officially submitted to MOWA (Ministry of Women's Affairs) and we are now officially awaiting a court date. Hopefully the next time we hear from Ethiopia, it will be to find out when we'll be traveling to meet our boys.

The "sorta" part is that I had thought we were officially submitted a few weeks ago. Instead of hearing this week that we are officially waiting, I thought I was going to hear about a court date. There was some extreme disappointment on Wednesday when I discovered where we really are on the time line. The extreme disappointment was somewhat mitigated by an impromptu middle-of-the-week date night.

Usually it takes a minimum of 4 weeks to be assigned a court date, but I am hoping for a miraculous turnaround in paperwork. Just because it's never happened for anyone else before doesn't mean it can't happen for us, right?

The Week in Picture Books

2011-01-26T11:06:00.006-07:00

This was a slow week in picture books. I had good intentions, but only ended up reading 5 books.

Total: 5

The only book I really didn't like was The Dinosaurs Are Back and It's All Your Fault, Edward, written by Wendy Hartmann and illustrated by Niki Daly. The illustrations are gorgeous, but the story is confusing and also way too scary for kids. I would have had nightmares for weeks after reading this book.

I finally read an Eric Carle book. I know, I know: how can I teach Children's Literature and never have read anything by Eric Carle? Hopefully it counts that I recommend Eric Carle to my students all the time! Anyway, my first Eric Carle was The Grouchy Ladybug. The story is kind of weird: the grouchy ladybug challenges every animal she meets to a fight. Each animal agrees to fight her, at which point she declines to battle, but in a crabby, superior way. The book looks really cool, especially two neat spreads using cut-outs and partial pages. I did have a hard time imagining this book being published now for kids. "Hey you, wanna fight?" isn't really a sentiment I see very often in children's books, and the ladybug's comeuppance is by no means morally clear: she learns to rein in her temper only when she's smacked halfway across the globe by a whale's tail.

Much better was the hilarious and perfectly illustrated Is Your Buffalo Ready for Kindergarten? written by Audrey Vernick and illustrated by Daniel Jennewein. I laughed out loud at the great scene where the buffalo chews his grass and then vomits it back up. But hey, "everyone is special in his or her own way." Loved it!

I also got my hands on two recent award winners: Ballet for Martha, written by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan and illustrated by Brian Floca, and Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave, written by Laban Carick Hill and illustrated by the amazing Bryan Collier, who won a much-deserved Caldecott Honor.

Ballet for Martha tells the story of the collaboration among Martha Graham, Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi to create the ballet, Appalachian Spring. I was surprised by how engaging I found this book and how much I wanted to read more about Martha Graham. Russell Freedman has a bio that I might check out.

Dave the Potter caught R's eye. He read the book last night and gave it some high praise: "If all picture books were as good as this one, I'd read them all the time." So now I'm on a quest to find more picture books that he'll love as much as Dave the Potter.