Coming out of the fog

I think. I've been living in crisis-management mode for five and a half years now, since B was born. Although I didn't really like being pregnant, when I look back at those days now, they seem almost idyllic. Life got incredibly busy and stressful starting the moment we walked in the front door with him in our arms. He was a fussy baby who wanted to be held 24/7. He refused to sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time for months on end. When he was about six months old, we discovered he had a pretty serious case of GERD, and by coincidence, a number of other health issues cropped up at the same time. It was a terrifying month filled spent in doctors' offices and hospital waiting rooms. In the end, it turned out he was fine, except for the GERD, which we managed to successfully control with medication until he turned one, at which point he outgrew it.

But even after we got past all that, B was not an easy toddler. His demand for constant parental attention continued. I saw friends' kids who could play for a few minutes on their own, or maybe watch a video or something, but B never could. He was prone to yelling/crying fits, or worse, hitting, biting or scratching, when he didn't get his way. [B was later diagnosed with birth trauma and spent a few months earlier this year in play therapy to deal with it, but the details of that are another post for another day. Maybe.]

Enter Z, when B was four years old. If we thought it was hard before, boy, were we in for a shock. There was a honeymoon period when B thought having a baby sister was the coolest thing ever, but it lasted less then a month. Then he decided two things: (1) he was going to get rid of that little girl by whatever means necessary, and (2) he hated M & me and didn't want to be in our family anymore. This made life very unpleasant for M and me for about a year, and I don't even want to imagine how unpleasant it was for poor Z at times. The chaos in our house was constant, and M & I felt like we spent more time yelling at B than playing with him some days.

The effect of these past five and a half years on me (afterall, isn't this blog all about me? not really, but it is MINE) was stress. All day, every day. For five and a half years, I have felt incompetent at almost everything I do -- my kids didn't get along and behaved badly in public, my house was a wreck, long-term projects like organizing photos or painting rooms got put off indefinitely, I rarely found time to exercise, I fed my kids not exactly junk food, but certainly not the kind of whole, healthy foods I'd always imagined I'd feed my kids, and M and I didn't have even a fraction of the time we needed together. The time I spent with friends slid down to virtually nil, I did pretty much no reading for pleasure (only parenting books, which I devoured in search of a solution), and all of my hobbies disappeared. I have felt out of control of my own life for a long time now.

But I sense a change taking place. Slowly but surely, I'm beginning to feel like I'm getting my groove back. I've been running consistently for almost three months now, and it feels great. Things have been surprisingly mellow around our house for the last couple of weeks, with the kids getting along beautifully with each other without our constant participation. B has been fun to be around (most of the time -- hey, we don't expect perfection!), and has been wonderfully helpful around the house and is trying hard to be a good big brother to Z. M & I actually sat in the living room and talked for a whole hour the other night after the kids went to bed. We didn't even talk about the kids or money! It was freaky. But so nice. In the midst of all of this, I have gradually tapered off the happy pill I've taken for the past six years, and I feel fine. F.I.N.E. The house is still a wreck and we're still about neck-deep in debt (better than the eyeball-deep it was a few months ago), but really, how much change can a woman expect at once?

Is it possible? Am I getting my life back? I sure hope so. It feels good.

5 minutes

That's all it took for the evil genius to accomplish this. I went to take a shower, and came downstairs to this:





Is it just me, or does he look a little smug about it?



Z was perfectly happy to be taped to her booster seat though. She seemed to think it was fun. In fact, in that first picture, she's trying to smile and say "cheese."

Brain dump (with pictures)

Not of my brain. The pictures, that is. That would be scary.

First off, the main thing on my mind this week (month): kindergarten. Schools #6, 7 and 8 from this post called this week to offer a spot to B this fall. We decided to tell school #6 "thanks but no thanks," mainly because we decided it's just too far off our normal home-preschool-work commute to be convenient or practical. I toured school #7 this afternoon, and was not terribly impressed. It's hard to explain why; there were no glaring problems like teachers spanking kids or padded cells or anything like that. I just wasn't wild about it. I'm touring school #8 in the morning and have high hopes. I've talked to the principal on the phone, and she seems very warm and friendly. We have to tell these two schools yes or no by Friday. My thought is to say yes to one of them, with the hope that our favorite (#2 in the aforementioned OCD post) will eventually come through with space for B. In the meantime, one of these two would certainly be better than our neighborhood school.

Now, on to the pictures. I know that's why you're really here anyway. Nobody outside my family cares about where B goes to kindergarten or how we go about deciding where he should go. I know that; I just torture you with the details because writing about it helps me sort out my thoughts. Sorry. Not really. Sorry I'm not sorry. Ha! Oh, I'm on a roll tonight, cracking myself up.

OK, on to the serious stuff: Z's hair. It is SO dry! And thin, and fine. Almost every morning, we get this:

Keep in mind, I took this picture at least an hour after she'd gotten up. It's not like I snatched her out of her crib & snapped a photo before her hair had a chance to calm down. It would have stayed this way all day if I hadn't spritzed it with water & combed it down. Or if her dad had taken her to preschool that day (he says hair care is women's work; I say it looks like her parents don't care when she goes to school like that). What to do? I've invested heavily in high-quality conditioners to no avail. At first we thought maybe it was due to malnutrition, but she's had the benefit of great nutrition & her hair's been cut enough times over the past almost-a-year (!) for me to know that argument doesn't hold water. I'm open to suggestions, other than shaving her head.

And now a seriously important topic: B's big-brother skills have shown massive improvement in the past two months. I think it was over the Christmas holidays, when the kids & I were "on vacation" for two weeks, that we really started to notice this. They play together a lot more than ever before, and B has begun to take great pride in his ability to both entertain and protect Z. He talks to her in the sweetest little voice, super high-pitched, like he imagines grown-ups are supposed to talk to babies. And he always talks in third person with her, as in "Z, watch B. Watch B fix the toy for Z." He also talks in his own sort of baby-talk to her: "Z, watch B. B fix toy." It's completely endearing and I'm so proud of him. Here they are on a day (at a moment) when they liked each other:

But don't get me wrong. There are still plenty of days when B feels more like this:

He's mercurial. He can go from the first picture to the second in a split-second. He did, in fact. But that second picture cracks me up. It's SUCH a B-face.

Speaking of my B's face...he's getting freckles! Just like his mommy. I hated mine with a passion when I was younger. I tried everything to get rid of them. I even laid out in the sun with lemon juice on my face in an effort to bleach them! My only thought on that now is this: how many of the wrinkles that I have now can I blame on the lemon juice? Behold B's freckles:

Last but not least, a totally random picture. I was painting my toenails a luscious hot pink one night, and when Z saw what I was doing, she demanded I paint hers too. Of course, then I had to offer to paint B's. He rejected the pink (understandably) and demanded blue. Luckily for him, I had two shades of blue for him to choose between. He chose the one that he thought was closest to the shade of blue in Luke Skywalker's lightsaber. We couldn't leave M out, so I painted his next. Here we are, all with painted toenails (the hairy toes are M's, in case you couldn't guess):

One last tidbit (no photo though): B is still talking about his new girlfriend Piper. There's now a picture of the two of them together on his bulletin board, per his request. And he told me yesterday that he's been taking all his preschool friends on imaginary trips to "Minnasoka" to visit Piper. They're all riding on his airplane, and he's driving. B's got a little crush...

How did a whole week go by?

This past week just flew by. It was supposed to be "my" week, since I was going to have kid-free time on my hands for the first time in three months. Z started child care, but instead of lounging around on the couch reading trashy novels and eating bonbons, I spent most of my time working in the garden. [OK, I did spend half a day at a spa, and I got all my hair cut off one day -- so short that I have to wear makeup now, so people know I'm a girl.] We had a huge load of compost delivered on Monday:

We ordered the same stuff last year when we re-landscaped the backyard, and the gardens back there went absolutely berserk. They're like little jungles. I'm hoping my front gardens do the same this year. They're nice, but have always been a little anemic. There was rock in this garden when we bought the house, which the previous owners had put down when they removed 30 year-old juniper. I hate juniper. It's scratchy, stinky, dirty, and full of spiders in late summer. Not to mention ugly. It's the lazy man's answer to landscaping. And it leaves the soil very acidic for several years after you remove it. That's my excuse for why this garden hasn't thrived. I'm hoping that four years' worth of gardening plus this infusion of lovely, dark, rich compost will help. If I don't have the happiest gardens in the neighborhood this summer, I think I'll give up on gardening entirely. Here's how the front garden looks now:

I'm going to photograph it again in a month, just so I can compare and see if the compost made everyone happy.

We had some friends over for dinner last weekend. They have a son who is one month older than Ben, and another who is about three months younger than Z. We get together with this family every now & then -- they're fun -- but hadn't since we'd both had two kids. It was CHAOS. Crazy! Kids everywhere. Constant screaming. We adults shoved our dinner into our mouths in under five minutes so as to continue supervising the monsters, making sure the big ones didn't injure the little ones. We wound up the evening by roasting marshmallows on our backyard fire. Here's B and his friend, whom he calls Bashi:

M is getting a new bike, and it's arriving at our house in bits and pieces. One of the bits came in a very nice plastic box. I saw it in the trash and pulled it out for B, thinking it would make a nice place to store markers or action figures or something small like that. What did he decide to put in it? His snuggle animals:

That's Underdog (actually a fire-safety dog given to him by my brother, with his fire department's name on the t-shirt, renamed by B arter he saw the movie), Pink Panther, and Beak. These are the three animals he sleeps with every night. It's a bit of a problem sometimes, because they are so small that they are easily lost. About once a week, he wakes us up in the middle of the night because he can't find one of them.

The first night he had this box, I went in to check on him before I went to bed, to make sure he had his blankets on. He was sound asleep, clutching this:

Not very snuggly, in my opinion, but I guess it's not mine that counts.

We survived our first week

Sometimes having two kids is easier than having one. When they play together so I can make dinner, for instance. Most of the time, it's not. Especially not when we're at the outlet mall and both kids are screaming. We are learning how to do this though, and having plenty of fun along the way. We bought a sit-n-stand stroller today (2 kids can ride in it), and I think that will help a lot. B gets tired and jealous when Z gets to ride and he has to walk, so it should at least prevent some future meltdowns in public places.

It helps that Z has slept through the night for the past THREE NIGHTS IN A ROW!!! We decided to try having her sleep in her own room (instead of in our room), and it's been so so SO much better. The first two nights, one of us slept with her on an aerobed, but last night, she spent the entire night by herself, and we never heard a peep. She doesn't even cry when she wakes up alone in the morning; she just starts talking until we come get her. What a good baby girl! And it's making our lives so much easier.

Z had her appointment at the pediatrician on Tuesday. She got four vaccines, which didn't make for a happy baby for the next couple of days. She ran a little fever and was pretty fussy, but a little Tylenol helped a lot, and she's all better now. The pediatrician thinks that she is right on target developmentally, in terms of everything really -- language, motor skills, emotional and cognitive development. This is really wonderful news, and certainly not what you expect to hear when you adopt a child who is almost 17 months old. We feel very lucky, and know that Z was lucky to have received good care before she came home. She is a bit on the slender side in comparison to her height, but she doesn't look skinny at all. She's got an extra little chin and some chubby baby thighs. I suspect she could use a little bit of fattening up, but I think she's just got a long, lean body.

Yesterday I took the kids to get their pictures taken at Kiddie Kandids. It didn't go exactly the way I planned it. We got about two pictures taken before Z started fussing, and she really never stopped. Then B somehow fell over right on his nose, and cried for awhile. Poor little dude. He recovered enough for us to get these two gems:

They definitely capture B's personality, happy and silly. What a handsome Bee!

Here are two of them together, the only two out of about 20 when neither was crying and nobody had their eyes closed, or was tipped over, or had a hand in front of a face:

Family, keep an eye on the mailbox for your copies!

B continues to be a stellar big brother. He's gentle and affectionate, and tries to play with her and help her. She sometimes doesn't want him to hold her or be too close, but I think she'll get over that with a little time. She's still a bit of a mama & baba's girl right now. He's still so proud to be a big brother. He tells everyone he sees the things he's taught her to do: have her nails clipped, brush her teeth, and pick her nose.

I'm afraid I only took three pictures on the digital camera this week before the card was full, and none of them are worth sharing. I started downloading pictures tonight though, so now I don't have that excuse for not taking pictures. I'll also start downloading video tomorrow, and should soon have some video from China, including the moment Little Z was handed to us, and the hilarious belly laughs we got an hour later. Stay tuned...