Zhe shi wo ying

The kung fu/Arisia weekend

2012-01-19T21:36:00.003-05:00

Well, AwesomeCloud missed most of Arisia. This is a good thing. I had to be on a panel as soon as we got there on Friday, and when I got to the table, my husband reported that the Kiddo had been behaving very well. The table was completely set up and ready for business, so obviously he hadn't been too disruptive. However, as soon as Rick left us, Cloud subjected me to a solid hour of whining, writhing on my lap as I tried to look professional for potential customers, and demonstrating a generally klutzy three-year-old lack of coordination. You know how small children flail mindlessly whenever they're bored? And how the closer they are to something that should not be knocked over, the more carelessly they flail? Yeah.

So, I'm not going to complain that he was terrible, but I will say that having him stay over his Auntie and Uncle's house Saturday and Sunday was probably more fun for everyone. Someday Cloud will be useful at cons. Maybe when he's six. Right now, he usually falls somewhere between, "He was good but bored and restless" and "He couldn't stand being anywhere near the table."

And, to be honest, it's tough being a vendor. You need a lot of stamina. At least he's not traumatized by crowds, right?

On Saturday morning, all three of us skipped out on Arisia, leaving the table closed for business, to attend Cloud's kung fu belt test/ceremony. I'd been under the impression that he had his orange belt (which was accidentally yellow) and was earning his purple belt, but actually he was going from his yellow belt to his orange belt. Whatever. The colored belts are just for fun at this age anyway. They can throw in as many colored belts as they want in there; at the age of 3, there's no way he's going to outcompete an adult novice at real kung fu, and the real purpose of the lessons is to teach him how to pay attention, follow directions, and challenge his body.

In fact here he is demonstrating a skill he has worked long and hard on - kicking. Learning to kick has been a long, hard road for him. His leg strength and his sense of balance have always been weak areas. In fact, when he started kung fu, his Early Intervention therapist told me to warn the instructor that he was 'floppy'. He's still, maybe, a little bit floppier than he has to be at his age. I don't know; maybe it's a personality quirk. But part of the issue was just a lack of strength, and he's been addressing that(with some encouragement).

I've started telling him, "If you practice kung fu every day, you'll get really good at it." And then I get down on the floor and do push-ups with him, or sometimes without him, and as a result I've been getting a little better myself.

I haven't tried doing pushups while raised on pads, though, like Tai Si Hing is getting ready to have Cloud do here.

Oh, and apropos of nothing, this stormtrooper is a cake. It's about 10 inches taller than I am, but still a cake. Just sayin'.

Anyway, Kid has an orange belt now, and I think I've already seen some improvement in his ability to follow directions. Also, we made good sales at Arisia and met lots of good people.

Arisia 2012, here we come

2012-01-12T17:10:00.002-05:00

AwesomeCloud doesn't have a costume, but he does have a vendor's table at Artist Alley. We're still working on teaching him the phrase, "Buy our books!" Maybe this is the year it clicks.

Arisia is a great con, and although we'll be busy with 9 panels between my husband and me, and our intern will be present only on Sunday, we anticipate having a lot of fun. It's close by in Boston, so we're commuting. Even better, Cloud's kung fu purple belt test is Saturday morning, and we both want to attend that, so we're skipping out right in the middle for a kung fu ceremony!

Oh my goodness, I'm tired just thinking about it.

Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to say in my five panels...

Oh hey, my panels are the following:
Fri: Nonfiction Comics
Sat afternoon: Finishing What You Started (comics)
Sat evening: Race, Gender, and Disability in Comics
Sun afternoon: Minicomics
Sun evening: How Comics Are Made

I don't think I'll be speechless for any of those. I could just start yammering about any or all five topics at a moment's notice. But I should really show up with a plan.

AwesomeCloud's first self portrait

2012-01-02T15:16:00.004-05:00

So far, Cloud hasn't been known for his artistic skills, his ability to concentrate on where his pencil is going, or his inclination to care. He enjoys scribbling on whatever I draw. But drawing something himself? Not really... until now.

Here are, as far as I know, his first two self-portraits ever! (aside from whatever bits of glue and crayon scribbles were labeled as 'self-portraits' by his preschool teacher, and there probably have been some, but I can't absolutely be sure. Almost everything he draws looks like the path taken by his trusty imaginary train.)

Invasion of the culture snatchers

2012-01-02T08:18:00.003-05:00

"You never know what could happen," my mother intones. My father goes off on some diatribe on using guns as a means to protect one's family.

My family has embraced the 'culture of fear', a term I use because today's level of parental fear seems to be a cultural thing and not based on any actual, tangible trends or occurrences. According to the news, horrific crimes occur to children every once in a while. National news reports children missing several times a year, in various states, occasionally up to three simultaneously. Admittedly it's pretty scary to be sitting in front of the TV and hear someone say, "A 9-year-old girl from Indiana was reported missing today; 5-year-olf Thomas B. the boy missing in Texas last week still has not been found, and the 11-year-old we reported on last month is presumed dead."

However, I don't watch TV. If a child goes missing in my town, I may join the search party. So far, that has not happened yet. Statistically, it's highly unlikely to. Pick any random town, and odds are good that some crime worthy of appearing in the national news will occur there within a block of 30 to 50 years. In my town, we've had a spate of young gang members shooting each other through their bedroom windows. National news? Nope. Still waiting.

Pick any random child in that town, and the odds that a crime will occur to that child is... well, 99% of kidnappings, murder, and abuse are perpetrated by someone close to the child, often a parent or someone the parent is intimately involved with. Barring that, there are not so many incidents.

What I really need to protect my child from is not the murderers and pedophiles lurking behind every tree, or the gang members poking guns through our windows, but all the many, many people who try to restrict him for his own hypothetical safety. People who tell ME that I'm the one doing it wrong, and I should restrict and shelter him more. Those people are everywhere. They're in his school. They teach his kung fu class. They're in our family.

No, I will not carry a gun in my purse to shoot dead the evil person who will surely accost us while we're taking a walk. (Really?! How, tell me, is THAT such a brilliant idea?) I will not prohibit him from riding the school bus, nor ride the city bus alone when he's developmentally ready for that. I will encourage him to learn to be independent. Most kids in his generation are being boxed in and held close by their parents and school systems, and if I can avoid making that mistake with him, he'll have a huge advantage over his peers.

You can see the phenomenon in my own generation, how broken and scared some of us were, how we stepped out into the world with hardly any self-sufficiency skills and then turned around and moved back into the safety of our parents' homes. I know at least five adults in their 30's and 40's who still rely on their parents. I know a few in their 20's, but it's a tough economy and they may still take flight. We didn't grow up with the level of paranoia that's pervasive today, but our generation still has some examples of the effects. What is my son's generation going to be like? It will depend on the successes of ambitious kids who break out of their chains and take crash courses on how to be responsibly independent, some who will fail that course and a few that will succeed, and on parents who buck the trend and work hard to teach their kids to believe in and rely on themselves.

Real-life risk assessment is famously hard, and it's a well-known fact that almost everyone in the world is bad at it. But that doesn't mean that I should just resign myself to being bad at it and reassure myself that, hey, at least my kid won't be the one American that gets brutally victimized by a murderous pedophile once every 5-20 years. No, what I need to do is accept that my son is probably also going to be bad at risk assessment, and I should teach myself how to be good at it so I can teach him to be good at it.

Good risk assessment doesn't teach that if a little caution is a good thing, then a ton of caution is excellent. It doesn't teach you to prepare for worst-case freak occurrences first. Yes, it would be nice if awful freak occurrences didn't happen. But you shouldn't prepare for them FIRST, because you can't anticipate them! That's why they're FREAK! And if you tell me you're successfully avoiding them by preparing for them first... I won't believe you.

And I'll think of the much more tangible sacrifices you're making in your kid's life.

But it irks me that I'm essentially fighting everyone, that the culture of fear is so pervasive in our culture that it has essentially become our culture, and that I don't really have any philosophical allies. Except my husband, because he doesn't wonder what other people think he should be afraid of. He's evidence that risk assessment is easier if you do it yourself. And thank goodness.

Train-riding kid

2011-12-23T22:10:00.001-05:00

My boys went to Boston to visit friends and ride the T.

I stayed home and... uh... untangled yarn. And listened to Trans-Siberian Orchestra. And not a whole much else.

Cats - an anniversary (and now that I've added these pictures, I'm kind of shocked at the difference)

2011-12-16T20:36:00.005-05:00

Nervous Riley

Comfortable Riley

Skinny Ban Lu

Healthy Ban Lu

December 23 is the two-year anniversary of the day we brought Riley home. Getting a cat two days before Christmas is a really crazy and stupid idea, I know - but it actually wasn't that bad. The proximity to Christmas was mostly a coincidence - Trixie had died close to Thanksgiving, which was also a coincidence, and letting a month pass between your old cat and your new cat is a reasonable thing to do.

My husband's school vacation started around then, so we were all available to go down together.

Riley's shelter was in Rhode Island, and we were planning to be in RI that day anyway, to see family members and visit graves.

Most of the Christmas festivities weren't even at our house, so Riley and our other cat Melody didn't even have to endure a whole day of crinkly paper, loud children, and tons of people-food.

Also, AwesomeCloud had only been home for three months. Three months between Cloud's entrance into the family and Riley's! We were keeping the festivities very low-key for his sake. In a certain way, it was the perfect Christmas for a new cat.

And then a month later we brought home Ban Lu. We had offered to take them home together, but Ban Lu was being held at the shelter for medical reasons, and the shelter then contacted us in January saying he was terminally ill and were we still interested? Yup, we were. What's a terminally ill cat on top of a crazy hyperthyroid cat and a newly adopted toddler?

Obviously, the story has changed now. Ban Lu is still with us, and he's fit and healthy. It's not that the shelter vet was wrong; the vet's diagnosis was mostly accurate. His digestive system really was going to kill him. It's just that we found a way around that, and once he was able to eat normally, he was also able to live normally. And Riley still has hyperthyroidism, and we still think of her as crazy, but actually she's improved tremendously.

And AwesomeCloud... well... I don't think we could have a Christmas as low-key as that one anymore.

I still miss Trixie, though. She's not the only loved one I've lost near Thanksgiving. She's not even the only beloved cat who passed away near Thanksgiving. And there will surely be more in the future.

Maybe this is one reason why I'd like to get into fostering cats. Foster cats hardly ever die in your possession. They move on quickly, replaced by more and more foster cats; they do not live with you for 15-20 years until you can't imagine life without them before dying. I have no problem saying goodbye to someone going out into the world, on to bigger and better things. But I'm not so good with grief.

We went Chinese house!

2011-12-14T20:47:00.003-05:00

Today was a mostly Chinese-themed day. I've been lax in introducing Hanyu into the household, so today I looked up a bunch of verbs in the dictionary and tried to get AwesomeCloud to practice them with me.

pǎo - run
tíng - stop
tiào - jump
tī - kick

He wasn't very interested when I tried to do it at home. He mostly just wanted to watch TV.

But this afternoon he had a kung fu class, and we somehow arrived several minutes early, so while we waited, I had him running around the kwan and following my newly learned Chinese verbs, and then he started to get into it. I think that more practice will help. He responds just fine to words that he's learned before, although he speaks very few of them himself, and is a little resistant to coaching. If I just keep trying, the Chinese vocabulary, what little of it I can offer him, will sink in.

Kung fu itself is a lot of work, as well. The class is taught a little above his age level, most certainly above his maturity level, and he's expected to work hard and practice high levels of concentration. The older kids who take kung fu seriously are good classmates for him, and help him focus a little bit better. (The 'older' kids are four years old, five at the most. So we're not talking much of a range of abilities.) I'm trying to make the work easier for him by psyching him up for class before we arrive, and by practicing at home.

And yes, I realize that no matter what I do, AwesomeCloud is still a three-year-old taking kung fu. He is clearly more humorously adorable than he is fantastically skillful. In his little kung fu uniform with the little orange belt... he makes everyone fawn and giggle at the same time.

But life is full of difficult tasks for people to overcome, and teaching oneself Chinese is definitely a very difficult task, requiring a lot of self-discipline. If Cloud learns a tiny crumb of self-discipline at age 3... I'm not saying he'll be fluent in Chinese in no time, and able to kick the butts of anyone who looks at him funny no matter how big... but if he learns a tiny bit of self-discipline now, he'll open the door to learning a lot of self-discipline later.

And he probably will need it. It's a big ol' world out there, and I can't teach him everything.

It would be really cool if he learned kung fu IN Chinese, but that's not really what this kung fu studio is about, and that would be kind of too much of a niche market for our area, anyhow. (I bet there are a few in Boston.) It's not about being Chinese there; nobody else there is even Chinese. (All those moms who worry that there are only three other Chinese students in their kids' kindergarten class... yeah, we can't do that here. Here, I inwardly cheer if there's a kid who's not blond, and even that doesn't happen every time.) It's about learning kung fu for the self-discipline, and using the self-discipline to learn other things, such as but not limited to Hanyu. And he will get the extra bonus of being able to say that he's studied kung fu (as opposed to tae kwon do or peewee hockey or Suzuki piano or whatever). Now, whether it will bother him that all his kung fu teachers have been non-Chinese people... that will be up to him.

I just want him to have some Chinese people in his life, in some context. And not just in restaurants. Someday, when he's old enough to understand, or probably before, I'll explain that the Asian population has a majority in the world, and that Asian-type people outnumber us pale-type people by almost 3 to 1. I will also tell him that thanks to human migration, he and I have a common ancestor who is not all that far back. But I also want Asian-ness to feel normal to him, and that's quite an achievement around here.

Fortunately, it's not impossible. You see, after kung fu, our family had the great honor of dinner with the Chinese students from my husband's school. They were delightful. They loved AwesomeCloud. They answered my questions about speaking Hanyu. I went over my newly learned verbs with them, and they reinforced and slightly corrected my efforts. They even managed to coax a few words out of Cloud.

When we left their dorm, Cloud happily referred to it as, "Chinese house!"

I'm always glad when he uses the word "Chinese" with a positive tone. He told our friend at the restaurant that she was Chinese, but he said it proudly. If he's not always interested in learning vocabulary when I'm practicing it on him, at least he seems to feel that Chinese things, and being Chinese, are good.

I will be sad and angry when he hears people state otherwise. I'm sure that's coming soon. I hope that maybe non-China-loving people will try to be diplomatic when they're around him when he's a little older. I hope he doesn't allow any anti-Chinese sentiment to sink in until after he's developed a sense of cultural and individual pride.

Traditions that are dying a painful, ungraceful death

2011-12-02T10:55:00.002-05:00

I'm going to miss door-to-door caroling. I've actually been door-to-door caroling. Someone even gave us hot chocolate. It's a memory I'll always cherish. Has anyone else ever been door-to-door caroling?

The tradition was well on its way out when I was a kid. It's not like I did it every year, nor did my house ever get carolers when I was growing up. But it's the principle of the thing. Nobody carols anymore. Nobody likes strangers anymore.

Maybe they think that "We want some figgy pudding" is actually a euphemism.

Weird things I scream at my kid

2011-11-22T12:25:00.002-05:00

I screamed at my kid, "I'M SORRY! IT WAS A MISTAKE! I MEANT TO SAVE YOU THE MAC'N'CHEESE WRAPPER BUT I FORGOT! I! AM! SORRY! I'M SORRY!"

Then I told him that he needed a couple of minutes to pull himself together, and that I was going downstairs and I'd come back when he felt better. So what does he do? He stands at the bottom of the stairs and begs three times in rapid succession for a treat.

And just now I told him, "Might I suggest that you be careful how much you bother me about treats. My threshold for whining is fairly low right now, so you may not want to bother me very much."

I love the fact that AwesomeCloud talks. I love it to death. Now I'm setting on that long, slow path of teaching him language comprehension and rational negotiation. Oh, how the years drag on.

AwesomeCloud's sense of materialism

2011-11-06T21:27:00.002-05:00

My son is three. Therefore he loves his toys. He really loves his toys. He walks around clutching a tractor in one hand and a plushie cat in another hand, and if he needs to use his hands to do something, like use the potty, he stands there, clutching his toys, and howls until I do it for him. (Eating is the exception. He lines his toys up on his seat, because they're not allowed on the table, and reaches down to touch them between bites.)

When he goes to a library or a preschool or, as happens rarely, a friend's house, he immediately selects the 4 or 5 toys he likes the best and he holds onto them. He'll run around playing and shrieking with a fire engine, two school buses, a caboose, and a delivery truck (for instance) all clutched awkwardly to his chest. If one falls, he carefully stops to pick it up and then rearranges his whole collection until his grip on it is solid.

When we transition from one place, or one task, to another, his preferred toys change too. If I tell him to get in the car, he drops his previous handful on the floor and runs to get some very specific toy out of a pile in the other room. Sometimes it can get very specific. Not just any tractor; the green tractor. Not Brown Cat; Orange Cat.

I find the whole thing hilarious. I see greater messages of human behavior in his antics. Some people still cherish their possessions just as strongly when they're adults. Those people have their rationales - "I didn't have much growing up, so I'm making up for lost time." "I've lost valuable stuff before, and I don't want that to happen again." "I've worked hard for all this stuff. It took me years to build up my collection." "It's what makes me happy in life."

I have mixed feelings. I get the urge to purge stuff as often as I wish to keep it. The two instincts sometimes conflict with each other, and I sometimes have to make hard decisions against myself.

I think what I really want is to have less stuff so I can feel more strongly about wanting to get and keep stuff. It's easier to furnish a bare room to your liking than a cluttered room. So I try to bring my rooms a little closer to bare once in a while so that I regain the impression that, if we get more stuff, it'll be okay.

New hobbies are the most difficult. I'm supposed to be teaching myself how to design and sew geeky plushies. But sewing supplies take up so much space! There's nothing I can do about it. If I want to get anywhere with the sewing, I need to get more stuff. I don't want more stuff. Well, I do, especially if it's free... but...

I've been holding off, dragging my feet, wondering if maybe we can jettison the accumulation from an old hobby before adding a new one. I look at my piles of yarn and wonder if I should kill the crocheting. But I don't want to. I crochet quite a bit and I enjoy doing it. Not a whole lot; not enough to turn three baskets of yarn into storeable items anytime soon. But it's certainly not a dead hobby.

In anticipation of Christmas, and the addition of more toys, I've been trying to guess which toys Cloud has outgrown, or are redundant, and boxing them up in the basement for removal later. But he's onto me. He found the boxes under the basement stairs, and now, every couple of days, he goes down to see what toy he hasn't played with in awhile. Nevermind the fact that I generally choose toys that have sat around untouched in his room for a month or more. If they're in the basement boxes, they feel new again to him. And precious all over again.

Also, the number of small, almost-junky-but-not-quite toys he accumulates is staggering. You know, not the McDonald's prizes, but the toys a notch above that? The ones that don't look like trash anymore because you have some actual McDonald's prizes to compare them favorably to? It's fun to let him pick out a cheap cheap toy at a yard sale, figuring you'll box it up in a month or two and in the meantime it's worth $0.50 to let him clutch it for a while. But when it comes time to purge all those old $0.50 toys, it's harder than it sounds.

Once I do finally get them all in a box, there he is ready to rediscover his old/new toys all over again.

And I don't really want to break the cycle by getting rid of the boxes immediately after filling them. Rediscovering his toys is fun. Well, it's fun to him. That's good enough.

Small child, growing up

2011-11-02T13:33:00.002-04:00

Today marks two major firsts.

First first: Today I exchanged the crib for the toddler bed. We can't have them both around at the same time because they both share the same mattress. Therefore, the toddler bed going up means the crib comes down for good. Why was he still in a crib? Inertia, for one. He wasn't objecting to still sleeping in a crib, so I wasn't scrambling to make the switch. For two, enforced naptimes are easy with a crib and impossible with a bed. I need enforced naptimes in order to do my job.

Second first: I'm working. Right now. And he's downstairs by himself and has been for an hour. I set him up with some Halloween candy and told him he could watch TV by himself or play with any toys he wanted. He could take a nap by himself any time he wanted. Best of all, when I went down to check on him, he'd gone to the potty by himself.

My baby is turning into a little boy. Sigh.

Goodby Halloween, hello NaNoWriMo!

2011-10-31T22:07:00.003-04:00

No kids came to our house, as usual. But we did manage to take Cloud trick-or-treating twice today, and while I was idly waiting, I hacked out a jack-o-lantern. Which I would post here, but I can't find the camera card port. Sorry.

Then I toasted the seeds. Burned them slightly, but who cares. Cloud won't be eating any. All he wants is chocolate and lollipops. He really likes lollipops. He chooses them over anything else, which means there's less chocolate for me. But I have pumpkin seeds.

Tomorrow we will leave all this behind us and start NaNoWriMo, during which I and my husband will each write a 50,000+ word novel in a month. In the month of November, no less. Funny funny. I don't expect to succeed, but success is hardly the point. I just want a solid track record. I don't want to have to admit that I skipped out for a year because I have a small child. That year could turn into two or five or ten. No thanks. I'd rather write about nothing and fall far short on my word count than to admit defeat before I've started.

In fact I don't have an idea yet.

I'm starting tomorrow anyway!

Bad words out of the mouths of... wait, what counts as a bad word?

2011-10-27T15:44:00.003-04:00

I was at my mommy group last Tuesday, and the topic of children speaking bad words came up.

(I have a mommy group now! It only took me two years to get into one!)

One mom's elementary-school-age daughter came home from school with a citation. For assault. Her crime? Making a razzberry at her classmate. The mom reported that she supported the teacher's decision by giving the girl a very stern lecture.

Another mom described how she caught her son saying, "Darn it!"

My husband and I are... hmm, how shall I put this? We are not like that. We yell the S word when we drop things on our toes. we refer to the TV show "Bullshit" by its proper name. We wonder what the hell has gotten into people. We laugh at silly euphemisms. ("We gotta get these monkeyfighting snakes off this Monday-Friday plane!")

We have a game we play with our son. It goes like this:

Cloud: "Oh geeeeze!"
Me: "Oh man!"
Daddy: "Oh drat!"

On and on, ad nauseum.

Can my kid get in trouble at school for talking the same way at school as he does at home? My guess is, absolutely! And then what will I do?

Teachers believe that I should support their decisions. I know because I'm married to a teacher, and because I read articles on the internet by teachers making this request. It's a reasonable request. Teachers don't want to be stuck in an endless cycle of discipline drama. When a parent supports the child over the teacher, it undermines the teacher's authority, and losing authority means losing control in the class.

However, I can't be sternly lecturing my child over every unfair citation given to him over silly behavior disagreements. I don't want him to be a bully, but I don't want him to be completely unexposed to the idea of childhood teasing either. Teasing is a fact of life. It happens in adulthood, too. What will happen if he grows up, and then one day finds a comment on his blog that says, "YOU SUC YOU STUPID MORON I HAVE PERSINNAL EXPEIRENCE WITH THS TOPIC AND PPL LIK YOU DEZERVE TO BE SHOT!"?

Of course, in today's culture, the slightest teasing sentiment is met by admonitions that the kid has just irrevocably traumatized his classmate. It's the hit-a-fly-with-a-sledgehammer style solution. I know that kids can be cruel to each other. I was, if not excessively teased per se, at least not very far up the social ladder.

(The social ladder is a terrible construct, and I think encouraging kids to abolish it is a better solution than shaming them for teasing each other. Teasing is just a symptom of the social hierarchy game. It used to be that kids formed a social ladder naturally based on their ages, but when all the kids are the same age, they tend to try to force a social hierarchy into existence. They don't have to. But once a few of them start the process, it consumes everyone.)

Anyway, I think there's a middle ground between letting my kid get away with bad behavior in the classroom and stomping on him every time he scowls at his classmates. I can't support a really bad discipline decision made by the teacher. For one thing, my stern lecture will sound totally insincere - I have a policy of honesty with my son, and I'll let him know my true feelings. How else will he learn how the world works? Superimposing a partly fictional world of false rules and imaginary order onto real life helps no one, not even kids.

(That's why I'm not pushing the Santa Claus thing. When people ask me why I'm doing such a sloppy job at convincing him of Santa Claus, I say, "Come on, it's not that good a story. If I'm going to pull a fast one on my kid, it'll be over something much better conceived.")

And for another thing, if self-esteem is the issue here, I don't see how citing small children for tiny infractions will help their self-esteem. The girl performing the razzberry knows it was grossly unfair, the girl who received the razzberry knows it was grossly unfair, and the teacher's authority has been usurped by a sense of distrust and suspicion. I know. I harbored distrust and suspicion for every teacher who ever shamed me and/or treated me unfairly. There was no particular teacher who did it a lot. Most only did it once. But one incident would make me shut down in front of that teacher forever after. I was a deeply distrustful kid. It really took unfailing and genuine fairness to keep me open.

I think I'm much more forgiving now. I let small things slide. But I have my limits, and I still have the instinct to protect my kid.

I just don't protect him from the eight words you can't say on television. And this new thing about protecting kids from mildly negative words like "darn" and "stupid" and "hate" ain't happening. I can't imagine the amount of self-censorship that would require. And to what end? If you remove the word "hate" from a child's vocabulary, you take away his ability to express a lot of really important thoughts! At least until he learns the phrases, "That bothers me" and "I could probably stand to live without that."

I can't wait that long. I know what it's like to have a kid whose ability to communicate lags far behind his ability to think of things he wishes to communicate. I want him to have his tools as early as possible! Even if those tools have the word "hate" in them.

Also, the "Oh darn! Oh geez!" game is really cute.

Playdates, or, Mama and Cloud both get social lives

2011-10-19T15:02:00.003-04:00

You may have noticed that this blog rarely contains mentions of other people. There is my husband, there are random encounters with people in public, and there are occasional references to relatives who live far away.

All of that is... probably not about to change very much. I've been making better efforts at befriending other moms and their kids, and having more success. But I'm going to respect their privacy by not talking about them much.

However, meeting them has affected me, and I'm always happy to talk about me. Likewise Cloud.

The first friendship was a long time coming. I met her on the playground a long, long time ago. I looked at her Asian kids and she looked at my Asian kid and we said, "Hey! Adoption connection!" But we sorta let the opportunity slide by, and then next time we saw each other we were both in a hurry, so she slipped me her business card and I found it a year later and emailed her asking if she remembered me. That email turned into a playdate, which has turned into a group playdate because she already has friends and she invites all of us at once. Neat. Instant group.

The group is mixed age, and all but one of the kids is older than Cloud. That's good for him, though. The older kids give him language models and, for better or for worse, behavior models.

My other new friend is the mom of one of Cloud's preschool classmates. The four of us have our playdates at the library after school gets out.

Thirdly, I have joined a parent chat organized by a local child development group. It's at a preschool, upstairs where the kids don't go, and we may leave our kids in the preschool if we bring them. Three other moms participate, and two of them have four-year-olds. The other has two children in grade school. I like the group a lot - the moms aren't exceptionally similar to me, but we all want the same thing out of the group - support and adult conversation.

Coollatta

2011-10-09T12:51:00.007-04:00

I am descended from Confucius

2011-09-30T13:56:00.002-04:00

Yes, me. No, this is not a pun, a metaphor, or a figurative truism. It is the truth. At least, according to this man's description of population genetics plus statistics, it is.

In other videos, he explains how race is not a genetic trait. I've come across this point in several other sources, too. Genetic traits are inherited individually, and race is a sweeping social construct that comprises a package deal of physical traits. It's easy to say that people with similar characteristics from a certain place constitute a race, but if you mix those people in with other populations, race is the first thing to disappear from their descendants.

That's why people invent things like the "drop of blood" rule - if there's any African ancestry in you at all, then you have a drop of African blood, and the privileged light-skinned people may oppress you with impunity.

Except, well, we're all Africans. We're all Asians and we're all descended from Caesar.

I already knew I was descended from Caesar, actually, but I'm glad to learn that my son is, too, and that I am descended from Confucius. Now, Caesar probably appears in my family tree a bazillion times, and Confucius most certainly appears in Cloud's tree a bazillion times. That's what being Han Chinese, in his case, or Italian in my case, is all about. And of course I knew that his tree and mine converge somewhere, that we had a Most Recent Common Ancestor a long time ago.

It wasn't that long ago, though, apparently. 550-1000 BCE... that was like yesterday in biological time! I'd been thinking something like 30,000 BCE.

But actually, the way humans move around so much, that now seems unlikely. 32,000 years is something like 1200 generations. Which would still make us fairly closely related... but that would only make sense if humans only moved outward and never moved back. They absolutely do move back. And forth and back and up and down and all around.

I've been pondering how to explain race to my son ever since adoption first came up as a possibility. If my explanation evolves... if it's more scientifically current and accurate than the one recommended to us by the experts... then, yay. I'm for that.

2 years today!

2011-09-21T22:10:00.004-04:00

Happy Adoption Day, AwesomeCloud!

Playdate

2011-09-21T14:50:00.002-04:00

Today we had a playdate with two wonderful, brilliant local kids (and their mom). She invited another mom, and someone else they knew was there too, so I got lots of social time.

The playdate was at a playground, and the playground had no restroom, and consequences ensued.

Amusingly, though, ever since we got home, he's been insisting on using the potty by himself without help every 20 minutes. I've been letting him. He announces, "Be right back, okay? Be right back! Okay?" And then he keeps saying it while he's doing his thing by himself in the room - just to hear the sound of my voice, I suppose.

In other news, he's hit a contrarian phase. If I say "don't" he does. If I say "do" he doesn't. He's always done that to some degree, but this time it's intentional more often - I can't blame the language barrier or the two-year-old mentality anymore - and his giggling is a dead giveaway.

I try not to sweat the small stuff. But sometimes I end up yelling anyway. Oh well.

Child trafficking in China

2011-09-18T13:34:00.002-04:00

This article in the NYT is pretty unnerving.

AwesomeCloud is highly unlikely to have been abducted or otherwise trafficked. There's no sense in child traffickers choosing special needs children. But I'm alarmed just the same. We're told that China handles its adoptions ethically. But just because the government oversees all adoptions doesn't mean everything is ethical. I mean, ponder that idea for a while and see how ridiculous it is. Still, we have to believe in something, so we put aside any reason for suspicion and go forward with our adoptions, assuring ourselves that our agencies are trustworthy and keeping our minds on the children that will soon be ours.

Anyway, it's not as if China is the only adoption scandal surprise. What about Spain? That trafficking scheme went from the 1950's to the 1980's and was perpetrated by Catholic clergy.

Same story for the child trafficking scandal in Australia.

Don't think it's just Guatemala and Vietnam. (Those were surprises, too, as I recall.)

What's the root of the problem here? People wanting to make money off of other people's suffering? Authority figures making women's life decisions for them and against their will?

Yes, yes, and more. However, as much as it pains me to say it, the biggest root of the problem is demand. There are too many families willing to pay large amounts of money for a healthy infant. We adoptive parents create the market. Without the market, it would be difficult to illegally traffic any child.

We view it too much as a women's rights issue, I think. If women have the right to decide whether and when to have children, and how many children to have, then surely women who have trouble giving birth themselves should be extended the same rights. Right? Affluent families deserve every possible opportunity to strategically form a family to fit their wants and needs. (With adoption, you can even - ethically - choose the child's gender. How cool is that?)

I don't really believe that, though. Maybe that makes me a misfit in affluent society. It will certainly make me unpopular with the adoptive parents. But I believe that my parental rights as an adoptive parent should only be addressed after the rights of the original parents are completely taken care of. I believe I should be outraged when I hear that they are not. I think I should take these scandals seriously and be sickened by them. I believe that I should take measures to not be part of the problem.

We did that by choosing special needs. Actually, our local agent declared she was limiting herself to special needs adoptions, because the NSN programs were getting out of hand, and we decided we were totally on board with that. Even though we weren't specifically trying to help where the need was greatest, we were certainly open to the idea of adopting a perfectly good child whom, due to circumstances, few people wanted. I have always found that the best way to get through life was to go where the competition was least. The idea that adopting through the special needs program helps me avoid scandals is a great bonus.

A very valuable bonus, in fact. I can't imagine having to live with the guilt of finding out my kid might have been the victim of a child trafficking scandal. No wonder so many parents just close their eyes to the possibility. It's a horrible thing to have been the cause of. It's horrible to think that you and your money and your sheer determination to create a family your way, consequences be damned, inspired someone to commit a crime against the child and his/her original family.

My own defense is that, well, as much as I hate the One-Child Policy and the crappy medical system in China, and the stigma placed on children of imperfect health, those things do exist at this time and therefore my son fell through some very real cracks and was very legitimately in need of some love and stability in his life. There were not a lot of other people clamoring to step up and act like parents to him. If China improves socially, and the adoption market more-or-less dries up, I will be absolutely thrilled. If it had already done so, I'd like to think, we would not have pursued this adoption. Our thought process at the time supports this claim. We were looking for the path of least resistance.

I'd also love it if the US social services cleaned up its act and began to act efficiently and ethically. That would be the best of both worlds.

All of a sudden, he is not traumatized by preschool!

2011-09-17T10:49:00.002-04:00

A lot of things have been happening lately. To tell a coherent story about our life, I really should post every day. (Haha. Sorry, I don't like blogging THAT much. I did when we were stuck waiting and idle, but now that we're living and busy, not so much.)

Yesterday was AwesomeCloud's third day of preschool. It was obvious when we got there that he'd hit a turning point. He wanted to swing on the swings and run laps around the field while we waited for people to show up. (I like being early. I think I'll keep doing it. It's more fun to spend a minute getting coats and shoes on and ten minutes running around the school grounds than vice versa.)

Then when kids and parents started gathering near the door, he came willingly and shuffled around instead of hanging onto me.

And then when the teacher showed up, he said, "Bye!" and didn't even look back for one last panicked, sorrowful look.

He was happy to see me when school was over, but actually I think he was happy to see I put his Beanie Baby cat in my purse with its head hanging out. I did that the first day of school, and he cheered up when he saw it. On the second day, he was disappointed that the cat wasn't in my purse, he opened my purse up and checked every pocket inside, even though I told him I was sorry I had forgotten Cat. Third day, I remembered. Apparently, having Cat peeking out of my purse when I get Cloud is an essential new tradition.

I like this new tradition. It's easy - as long as I can remember it.

Another weird little thing - he compares where I park to pick him up to where I parked to drop him off. At first he asked, "Moved car?" As if he were surprised I'd do such a thing. As if I'd spent 2.5 hours twiddling my thumbs while sitting in the driver's seat. He probably didn't realize 2.5 hours had passed. He probably isn't ready to wonder what I'm doing when I'm not right there with him.

On the third day I parked in the same place twice. So, in effect, maybe I didn't move the car and maybe I did sit in it the whole time he was in school. This time, however, he seemed surprised that I didn't move the car.

Afterwards we went out for lunch to the Chinese restaurant. Wo men pengyou (our friend, the owner of the restaurant) had a friend of hers working there. Or maybe they were sisters, or cousins; who knows. This new woman is a recent arrival and has a child Cloud's age. We immediately started chatting playdate. Pengyou also has a 3-year-old son.

There's also the butterfly garden. Another season is ending. It was fun to watch AwesomeCloud improving his butterfly garden skills again this year. At first he started off interested in the digging and weeding we do in the spring, but as time went on, he grew impatient with that. By July, I started going in the morning once a week by myself, just to keep up with the weeding. But then data collection began, and that involved walking and looking around. At first, Cloud was uninterested or even afraid of the butterflies. I remember his first close-up sighting - I was weeding, and I looked up and saw a Checkerspot on the orange flowers. It was right next to where Cloud was standing.

"Look, a butterfly," I said.

Cloud looked around but didn't see it.

"It's right there," I said. "Right next to you. Near your arm. On the flower right there."

He saw it and recoiled, startled. I assured him it was harmless and we stared and stared and stared.

Now he can spot the sulphurs before I do and he can even tell an orange from a clouded sulphur. It'll be a while before he learns the challenging species, like pearl crescent or American copper, but I think he's learning to ID the cabbage leaf, and he knows a monarch, even if he mangles its name.

The end-of-season party is in two weeks, and I'd love to show off his skills to the other volunteers if he'll cooperate. But he probably won't. He may be a type A personality, but he gets performance-shy just like most kids his age.

Second day of school

2011-09-13T17:50:00.002-04:00

First, a funny conversation in which Cloud picks up on my mannerisms:

Cloud: "Snack?"
Me: "No, you can't have another snack."
Cloud: "Lunch?"
Me: "Not until lunchtime. Why are you asking for food? You're not hungry. You just ate a giant cookie. Your tummy is full."
Cloud: "I wish."

That was yesterday on the way to... something or other. Audubon? Library? What did we do yesterday morning? Yesterday afternoon he started kung fu again. I really like the group of kids he's with this time. There is one boy with limb differences who, if he can't follow all the instructions to the letter, is a really sharp listener and understands what the instructions are. There's one boy whose attention span isn't great but he's not wildly bouncing off the walls either. And one girl who is very timid and cries a lot and who needs her daddy to come rescue her a lot. When she finds her kung fu comfort zone, she is probably going to achieve all new levels of personal growth. I hope she sticks with it long enough for that to happen.

And then there's Cloud, who thinks everything is funny, still has trouble understanding what's going on, and has to follow every instruction ever given at all times. (Actually, he's gotten better. He lets the other kids take their turns now.)

The Chinese motifs around the kuan make me more than ever wish that there were some Chinese being spoken there. He's so ready to hear Chinese now. I will have to pursue my other resources. One is the lady who owns the local Chinese take-out restaurant. She has taken an interest in Cloud. I plan to take Cloud out for lunch there at least once a week, if I can afford it, just so we can practice our words on her and learn new words. Last Friday she taught us "lu se" (green) and "hong se" (red). I told her I already knew "lan se" (blue). I also know "bai se" (white) and I looked up "huang se" (yellow). We are ready to learn colors!

Also, Cloud and I invented a game called "Qu, lai." I tell him, "Qu! Qu! Qu qu qu!" and he runs away. Then I shout, "Lai lai lai lai!" and he comes back. That's two verbs learned right there! Maybe we can add more verbs to the game later.

Anyway, today was his second day of preschool. He seems to have adjusted right away. I made him do exercises before we left home, and then we got there early so he could swing on the swings for a few minutes. When the crowds came and the teachers came out to get the kids, he got that wide-eyed look again. He seems unnerved by being asked to stand against the wall and leave me standing several feet away from him. But this time, he said, "Bye!" He still looked scared, but he was resolutely going to go through with the painful task of entering the school building.

Then his classmate began to cry, and the boy's mother hastened away with a pained look on her face, and for a moment I thought Cloud was going to bolt. But he didn't, and he went in and I left. I was going to take a nap when I got home - I have a horrible head cold and I didn't sleep at all last night. But I couldn't lie down and anyway my boss called me needing a document.

Speaking of, I'm going to finish this later because my vision is blurry and even though I still can't lie down, I need to at least sit and close my eyes.

Black, white, whatever

2011-09-11T20:56:00.002-04:00

This slam poet is awesome.

Is my son a 'whatever'?

In other parts of the world, I'd be a freak and he'd be the status quo. Does it sound appealing to go to those places, just to see what it feels like? Just to have that experience? Even if you didn't have to?

How about if someone took you and brought you there? Would you do all right as a 'whatever'?

I'm home alone (Wheee!)

2011-09-09T09:59:00.004-04:00

AwesomeCloud is at preschool. Without me. For the very first time. I came home right away and here I am.

He was cheerful and playful until he realized that the teacher holding his hand was going to drag him into the school. Then he made a grab for me. So I picked him up, hugged him hard, reminded him that school was fun with lots of toys and a snack, and put him down again. The teacher grabbed his hand and pulled him forcefully into the school.

The administrator I really like came up to me and asked me how I was doing, assuring me that it was hard to let go and I could call the school in a while and ask how he's doing. Now I feel like I ought to call the school and ask how he's doing. I'm pretty sure how he's doing involves crying. Do I want any more information than that? How early is too early to call? How late is too late?

My boss hit me with a document I need to revise and email to him immediately. It's 10:00 already. 2.5 hours isn't a lot of time.

I'm refusing to stress-eat. I did have a peach.

This post is just about me stressing and otherwise not very informative, so I'm going to stop here.

In which I get indoctrinated into modern preschool mommy culture

2011-09-06T20:54:00.006-04:00

This morning, AwesomeCloud had his first day of preschool. Actually it was an hour-long orientation and meet-the-teachers event. His actual first day will be Friday.

This is the season for blog posts about our kids' first days of school. My post is not going to be any more witty or brilliant than the average back-to-school post. However, the experience was interesting to me because I am new at this. It is strange to me. And my ideas about preschool and the parenthood of preschoolers are a little bit... uh... outdated.

First of all, I wasn't even certain he was going to be in preschool. For most of the summer, the uncertainty hung over me. His speech therapist last year was going to make an effort to snag him a spot, but then she and the entire administration left on summer vacation, and when they returned they got busy sending me paperwork and robocalls but were not often there to answer the phone and answer my question directly:

"Is my son enrolled in preschool?"

I left messages on several voice mails, and then I got a call from one of the people in charge, a very friendly woman whom I like very much. She told me that Cloud was in, and that he was scheduled for two mornings per week.... but she didn't know which mornings.

So, for about a week, we were left hanging on which two calendar columns to fill up with little 'school' notations. That dragged into two weeks, as Hurricane Irene delayed the opening of the entire public school system by a week.

Today, less than an hour before orientation was to start, Cloud's old speech therapist called me back. She informed me that he would be attending on Tuesdays and Fridays. She assured me that he would see her. (He'd been asking for her. Or rather, every time I tried to get him to say the name of his new teacher, he'd say her name instead.) I told her I was coming to the orientation and she told me she'd see us there.

Once there, I found Cloud's classroom and we entered. There were five other children present, and two of them were nonwhite. No other Asians, unfortunately. There was an African-American girl and a medium-brown-skinned girl of unclear ethnicity. I hope Cloud enjoys the diversity of preschool, because it will probably get worse as he goes into the higher grades. I'm pleasantly amazed at the significant scattering of nonwhite children at that school. It's a little pocket of diversity in a region where it's hard to find places with races all mixed together. Cloud may not spend much time looking at faces that resemble his, but he can look at various other types of faces.

(On that note, I'm glad I didn't end up paying to send him to a private preschool. I'll take free diversity over expensive homogeneity!)

I introduced Cloud to his teachers, who were conveniently labeled with name tags, and they took him to the craft table to play with Play-Doh. He was eager to get playing. However, when I told him I was going to pop into orientation and then come back and play with him, he bolted out of his seat and announced, "I come too." He took my hand and started toward the door. The teachers looked on in amusement.

"Um," I said. "This is grownup stuff. I'm just going to listen to them tell me something. Then I'll come back, I promise."

The head teacher jumped up. "Sometimes we let the kids see the room, just so they'll know where Mommy is."

So we did that, walking together to the room. I opened the door, and when Cloud saw the boring rows of chairs with dull grownups sitting in them, he hesitated.

"Let's go play with Play-Doh," the teacher told Cloud, and he moved away from the door... and then the administrator I really like came up behind me and gave me a push. "Just go," she whispered. "Quickly before he has time to think."

So I went in and sat down and began initiation rites.

Actually, much of it made sense to me. The oddest bits of orientation mostly seemed like little clashes between the school's needs and parental behavior. For instance:

"Park on the street across from the school and you won't have any problems," the speaker said. She then launched into a long, complicated description of moms and buses jockeying for position in the same strip of drop-off curb, and how leaving your vehicle to walk your child to the teacher was both necessary and a matter of crucial timing, and how parents in a hurry do crazy stupid things and endanger everyone (so don't be that parent!), and throughout it all I kept thinking, "Sheesh, I'm just going to park on the street."

It's not a busy street and it's not that long a walk. Sure, Cloud and I got rained on when we parked on the street this morning, but rain happens. We're not afraid of rain. I'm more afraid of blocking a school bus and getting admonished for it.

(Later, as Cloud and I were walking back to the car, I overheard one mom say to another mom, "That's the dropoff curb." The other mom nodded appreciatively. What? Didn't they hear the advice to park across the street? Hey, if they want to jostle with school buses, more power to them.)

Then there was the whole thing about classroom birthday parties. The general message was, "Sigh... if you must... we're going to make it really hard for you and limit your options."More literally, it was, "Warn the teacher ahead of time, don't bring any food, and make it relevant to the curriculum." That's not a birthday party - that's classroom volunteering. With extra stickers. Not that I'm opposed to classroom birthday parties - there can only be a maximum of 15 birthdays a year, and that's if Cloud's classroom ultimately fills out to its maximum 15 kids, and none of them were born in summer. But when I was in preschool, all we did was have our name put at the top of the felt board and then the class sang "Happy Birthday" and that was it. I think that was kinda nice. We all felt important enough, just being sung to. And anyway, I don't want to throw my son a classroom birthday party. He already gets like 5 parties per birthday with just his extended family members.

It's a peanut-free school, which sounds a little extreme until you learn that there is actually at least one student who is deathly allergic to peanuts. It's not hypothetical. I'm in favor of letting that kid get through the school year alive. That's what sunflower seed butter is for, anyway. But in preschool it's not an issue because the teachers provide all the snacks themselves. Fruit or crackers or cheese, they said. Fine with me. If Cloud learns to like fruit at preschool, I will be happy.

When I reentered the classroom, Cloud wasn't crying. The teachers praised him to me. However, as soon as he saw me, he demanded, "Go home, eat lunch." Over and over again, repeatedly, until we walked out the door. (At that point, he suggested, "Restaurant?") It was only 11:00 AM. Oh my goodness.

Supposedly there was a list of supplies for me to buy hidden somewhere in my packet of paperwork, but I didn't see it. I just remember something about travel tissues (got those already), a bottle of soap, sanitary wipes, and a backpack. The backpack is for Cloud, obviously. The other three items are for the teacher, and if there's more on the list, I don't know what it is.

Anyway, while Cloud and I were out shopping for another item, I got it in my head to find some backpacks and let him pick one out. It had to be cheap, and small, and I was hoping to find something tasteful and boyish but unique. First we went to Marshall's, where I discovered that small backpacks are really, really hard to find. There was a good selection of backpacks. There were plain black backpacks, backpacks with sports logos on them, Dora and Thomas the Tank Engine backpacks... and they were all HUGE.

"Who would buy this?" I pondered out loud as I held up a Thomas the Tank Engine backpack that was almost as tall as my son. A passer-by overheard me and grinningly agreed with me. Seriously, anyone under ten would struggle to drag that monstrosity across the school grounds.

Cloud was disappointed. He was in love with the idea of picking his own backpack, and Thomas is at the top of his list of favorite motifs. But Mama was on a grand search for a small backpack, and he was helpless to change that.

We went to Ocean State Job Lot next. I figured that OSJL has a lot of odd things, and apparently, small backpacks are odd things. No luck. But right next to OSJL is TJ Maxx, so I figured, what the heck, it's just like Marshall's but we're already right here. So we went in.

The selection was decent, and with a whole lot of searching, Cloud and I found kid-themed backpacks in the back. The smallest one had Dora the Explorer on it, and Cloud was happy to consider getting that one, but I nixed that idea without telling him why. We then found a tiny black one with a basketball player logo protruding out of it. "We can buy a patch with any picture you want," I told Cloud, "and sew it on." After I pried that gawdawful logo off of it, of course. "We can go to the railroad gift store and get a patch with a train on it, or..."

"Train!" agreed Cloud.

"...Or a boat..."

"Train!" Cloud insisted.

At the register, we saw more backpacks, and as if by magic, there was an even tinier black backpack with a nonprotruding, embroidered logo on it. I made him try it, and then I made him trade his other one for it, and then he reminded me that he wanted a train patch for it. "Yeah," I agreed, "It will be even easier to sew a train patch onto THIS backpack." Cloud was sold.

The cashier fawned over him, telling him fifty-plus times that he was sooooo cute with his tiny backpack. He put it next to his seat in the car, occasionally bringing up the promised train patch, and proudly showed it off to Daddy when we got home.

Oh my god. I hope I can find a train patch. Imagine if the railroad gift store doesn't sell patches?! I can try the hobby store, too... gah, I hope patches aren't so totally out of style that no one sells them anymore. I will paint a train with acrylic paints onto that thing if I have to. But I kinda like the idea of using tourist mementos to personalize one's possessions. It'd be so... so Cape Cod of us.

Words keep a-comin' all day long

2011-09-05T15:23:00.003-04:00

I have a talking kid.

I also have a potty-trained kid, at least mostly, but I'm not going to discuss his private doings all over the internet.

So, I have a talking kid.

This is a hugely welcome development. My husband and I are both extremely verbal communicators, and it's not easy having a nonverbal person in the household. Especially when we are in charge of meeting that person's every need. It's like having another cat - but worse, because cats lick themselves and use their own litter boxes (ideally) and you can rest assured they're not intelligent enough to be dwelling on their experiences of pain and trauma.

Children, however, start dwelling on pain and trauma at some point in their lives, and even though I don't expect my son to be an open book all the time, it bothers me to think that he can't express ANY thought that he has. Not even "I want milk."

For a long time, the 'language explosions' were tiny. As far as I was concerned, five new words in a single day was a language explosion. Ten words in a week was, too. I didn't know what people were talking about when they said children's language acquisition was amazing. It's not amazing! It's excruciating.

Until now. Now we are in a bona fide language explosion. Pronouns! Still used incorrectly some of the time, but there are more of them.

Here's a funny development: when Cloud momentarily forgets which of us is 'I" and which is 'you" he asks for "own." As in, "Own muffin... please!" when he doesn't want to share my muffin. "Own spoon" when he wants to use his baby spoon instead of a regular teaspoon. It gets the point across in an innovative way, and i don't correct his pronoun usage as much.

Verbs! He now has the phrase "I want" and uses it copiously. He can 'walk' 'ride' 'dim' (swim) and 'deep' (sleep). He likes to go 'dogging' (jogging).

He answers questions. And not just randomly - he actually listens to and understands the questions and then answers them with actual intent. This is huge.

He has learned the skill of diversion - changing the subject if he doesn't want to go along with what I'm telling him, or asking for something else if I tell him he can't have one thing.

He has learned to nag and whine. Someday I will count how many times in a row he can ask for a snack. It's a lot. He also barely pauses for breath in between inquiries. (He and Riley the cat have that trait in common.)

(In fact, I have accidentally called him Riley a few times now.)

I have begun, occasionally, to tell him to shut up and/or stop whining. I try not to say those things very often. How often is not very often? 20% of the time? 5%? 5% still has me shushing him at least once a day.

He has begun repeating phrases after hearing them only once. He's especially good at this if the phrase contains words he already knows. For instance, I doubt he'll say 'brachiosaurus' again without prodding, but he could say "going to flea market" again soon.

I guess this means it's prime time to start him on Mandarin.

(I've been a little complacent about the whole Mandarin thing. I've been working at it a little... a very very little... but I have some ideas I could pursue.)

Our day with Irene

2011-09-01T07:26:00.002-04:00

Howdy all! We have internet again! Hurricane Irene knocked our power out for 9 hours, or phone for 3 days, and our internet finally came on late last night.

On Saturday night, it rained, but by Sunday when the winds picked up the rain was already gone. We live on high ground (Compared to the waterfront, that is) so we didn't see any tidal surge. (If we had, half the Cape would've been washed to sea!) So, for us, it wasn't the water - it was the wind.

At around 10:30 AM, the lights flickered, so I put on a pot of rice pilaf. The power went out for good soon after the water boiled. At noon, we ate the rice pilaf, which was still warm, and that was the last hot food we had for the next nine hours. We also had grapes and crackers, and for supper I made peanut butter and honey sandwiches out of hot dog rolls. The fridge and freezer were taped shut so that little fingers or forgetful minds wouldn't accidentally open them.

We took out two board games - Candyland for the Kiddo, and Empire Builder for the grownups. Empire Builder is an epic railroad game. Cloud loves to look at the pictures of trains. He picked the game out for Daddy last Christmas, most likely because he liked the pictures of trains. We like to play it, but it's difficult to play it with guests because it's just too epic.

With the lights out, and no rain outside, and aside from 30-40 mph gusts it being a beautiful day, inevitably we all went outside. We started patrolling our street to look for fallen branches, and we found lots of them. It became part of our routine - play a round of Candyland, take a few turns of Empire Builder, catch the news every half hour on the radio, and then go outside to clear the road of any fallen branches.

After we cleared one intersection of fallen locust branches, two men came along with a camera. They pointed the camera at our new pile of branches by the side of the road.

"You missed it," I said. "These were all on the street. We already cleaned it up."

"Wow, all these were on the street?!" they said.

Well, most of them. Those trees are really brittle.

When dusk arrived, we took out two flashlights and attempted to keep playing our game. Cloud invented his own new game - hog the flashlights. We had candles, too, and eventually we just let him have the flashlights because at least it kept him away from the candles.

The power came on just before bedtime. In the morning Cloud and I went grocery shopping and got enough food to make a nice big hot baked chicken meal, half of which I brought over to our elderly neighbor. It turned out he'd been at his daughter's house and not stranded without power in our neighborhood, but he took the chicken anyway.

Hey, it was good chicken.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-28T07:23:00.002-04:00

Hi! We are just to the east of Hurricane Irene. The wind is fun to watch; we didn't leave much outside to blow around in it. Anyway it seems to be in the 5-20 mph range - no 50 mph gusts yet. No basement flooding (yet).

I have several half-finished posts in 'edit' mode on this blog. I guess I haven't felt like writing much. AwesomeCloud is in a true language explosion, and half the time he has me cracking up. The other half he makes me groan and bang my head on the nearest solid object. For instance, I asked him to do something and he replied, "No, too late." A few minutes later he was plunging an open sharpie into his mouth.

"Really?" I asked. "You were going to eat a sharpie? Really?"

He just grinned and headbutted me.

Sneaking adoption into casual conversation with a 3-year-old

2011-08-16T17:54:00.002-04:00

My newest dilemma: AwesomeCloud is almost three and a half and I've hardly made any effort to talk to him about adoption, families, our family, and China. He's overheard me talking about those topics to other people, but those conversations happen less frequently as he gets older. There was a time when random people on the street would come up and boldly initiate conversation, and I would share and educate. Because I was lonely, because they were interested, because they needed to be corrected.

Nowadays, not so much. People are less bold and I'm less sharing.

Cloud is old enough to understand what's going on; I think people are able to correctly assume that at first glance. However, he's not verbally articulated enough to hold a conversation about such topics on his own. If you want to talk about trains, trucks, or cats, he's all there - as long as you don't need him to utter all the words that form complete sentences. He kind of skips around like someone on a cell phone with a bad connection. That's fine if he needs to ask for apple juice. It's not great if he wants to inquire about his first mommy.

I thought maybe I could just start rambling to him about it while we were doing other things. But that's easier said than done. It's not like talking at a wordless baby anymore. He interrupts me to talk about trains or trucks or cats, because there is usually a train or truck or cat nearby to be discussed. So far, he's done it every time I've mentioned adoption. But so far, I haven't mentioned adoption very much.

It's not like he's living in a vacuum. He has picture books. He goes to adoption agency events. A couple of times, we've spent time with other families with mismatched races. We don't have travel group reunions like some other families, because we didn't have a travel group. We don't have any China adoption BFFs. I am possibly failing my kid by not immersing him in Adoption-World or China-World. But he's not completely isolated from it, either.

I don't know what I plan to say when I do get to talk to him. But I'm not anxious about it yet. I just want to get the basics out first. I hope he'll ask questions when he can; I may need the extra prodding. THEN I can be anxious. But I'm much better at answering questions than I am at blurting things out.

The wonderful thing about tiggers

2011-08-12T19:42:00.002-04:00

Cloud thought my rendition of Tigger's theme song was HILARIOUS.

Also, he was awesome in KMart. I'm so proud of my well-behaved little shopper who keeps his hands to himself. And this was AFTER I got him a smoothie at McD's for no reason at all except that I had a coupon. It used to be that treats made him want to whine more, not less.

Actually, he hasn't whined more after a treat since last spring, when I had some harsh words for him about a lollipop. I said, "You know, I gave you that lollipop because I thought it would make you happy. You don't sound happy. Maybe lollipops don't make you happy, and I should just stop giving them to you."

I had to say it twice, on two different incidents, for it to sink in. But if I managed to sound serious, I was. I wasn't trying to manipulate my kid by scaring him. I was seriously giving weight to the idea of no longer giving him lollipops, and being honest and up front with him about my concerns. In some cases, this approach might be a poor one. But in the case of treats, it totally worked.

Now, when he's anticipating a lollipop at the bank or a cookie at the supermarket, he'll sometimes say, "Happy! Happy!" It sounds odd to an observer, but he does it to remind me that he's happy and deserves a treat. I encourage it and I hold him to his promise.

Sometimes Mama is cold and distant

2011-08-08T19:55:00.002-04:00

Today was a bad parenting day for me. I wasn't exactly a bad parent, but I was a very reluctant parent, and I'm going to blame it on the disgusting mess I found lurking in rarely-checked corners of my kitchen. And also all over one of the kitchen chairs.

It's going to be okay. However, I've been breathing in cleaning fluid fumes all day and I still smell it on me, and I've gotten to the point where if I hear a small child's whine coming on, I run away.

Cloud tried to initiate a make-believe game with his two Beanie Babies, and I went along with it for a while, but my make-believe stamina was very short today and I feel a little guilty about it.

On the bright side, I made fried rice for supper and I think it was my best yet. I'm learning some tricks. For instance, make sure the rice is cooled all the way down before adding it to the veggies and meat. And garlic goes really well with soy sauce - so well, in fact, that I don't have to add anything else.

I've had a few off days lately. Today was the offest day so far. I'm sure it'll get better, though.

Small linguistic improvements

2011-08-05T15:37:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, Cloud and I were driving by a certain pond and looking for the resident swans.

"There they are," I said.

He replied, "Right, right. She's right."

If his reply sounds oddly out of context... well, it is. But it has two things going for it!

1) Correct gender in gender-specific pronoun.
2) Expressing a positive thought.

It just so happens that he was talking to me when he referred to me as 'she'. And while 'right' is a synonym for 'yes', it is not always an appropriate alternative.

But I don't care! My kid is saying new things. He's experimenting with language. He'll get the nuances down later.

A cat named Cat: an attachment story

2011-08-02T15:43:00.005-04:00

Here's Trixie, the real deal

Here's Cat, with Ban Lu

Somewhere in my pre-adoption reading, I came across an explanation for why children have loveys - toys or objects that they project their feelings of attachment onto. For instance, the security blanket that Linus is so attached to in Peanuts. The book mentioned that adopted children who struggle with attachment issues may not have enough feelings of attachment for a lovey. They're working so hard to form attachments to their adoptive parent(s) that they have nothing left over for the toy or blanket.

Okay, fair enough. But we bought a few Beanie Babies for AwesomeCloud just in case. In case he needed something soft to hug. In case he found it easier to bond with the toy than with us. In case he happened to like stuffed animals.

Well, he didn't. We brought the calico cat with us to China. We chose it because it resembled our cat Trixie, who, we assumed, would be a fixture in his life when he got home. He wanted nothing to do with the Beanie Baby cat, and after all our cajoling and patience, the toys he responded to were made of hard plastic and had buttons that beeped or played tunes.

I understand why some people gripe about electronic baby toys, but for us, they were the only toys that would draw his gaze. Eventually, he also grew to like plastic trucks and matchbox cars. Soft toys, toys with faces, and especially stuffed animals repelled him. Sometimes they terrified him. To this day he still has a little problem with puppets.

He learned to like real cats; however, Trixie died two months after he met her. She was very good with him, but she lost her vision, and then her balance, and then she was gone. (So, as most people reading this know, we got two more cats! But neither of them are calico, so the Beanie Baby no longer resembles a household member.)

Cloud's Early Intervention teacher went to work on his phobias. She brought in all sorts of toys he was afraid of, and put them away when he cried. I was almost amazed that he didn't develop a phobia of her, she did it so frequently. But, nope, he grew to like her. He really dug her. And one day she invented a game so irresistible that he didn't even mind that it involved the calico cat. See, she started playing a wonderfully silly song about cats running around in a circle. And then she made our two Beanie Baby cats run in a circle. After a few runs, Cloud even wanted to hold one of the cats himself.

I don't know what happened to the leopard-print cat. The calico was his preferred Beanie of the two. He called it "Tat." We started calling it "Cat."

He started taking it in the car with him once in a while. Sometimes we'd bring it back into the house, and sometimes he'd realize he wanted it and we'd go into the car to fetch it for him. One day he brought it into a store. Sometime later, Daddy let him bring it to church. He began asking for it as "Tiy tat." (Kitty cat.)

His k sounds are improving, and sometimes he calls it "Cat" now. Recently, he has begun taking it to bed with him. Several times, when he lost track of Cat, he began to cry.

We bought a spare.

We're not going to do anything elaborate, like secretly switch the cats so they age similarly. No, he's already seen that Beanie model in the store, shiny and new, while he clutched his dirty old one. In fact AC Moore carries hem, and he likes to bring Cat into the store to say hi to all the other Beanie cats. Someday, if he loses the original Cat, we'll pull our replacement Cat and tell him the truth about it. Then he can make the hard adjustment in his own time.

I don't know how amazed I should be that this has happened. I don't know what the statistics are for attachment-challenged children growing into the ability to keep a lovey. I do know that not every child with healthy attachment engages in this behavior - 'normal' does not necessarily mean 'universal'.

But I'm glad that he's growing and learning and developing a personality. I'm glad that he's mindful of his surroundings. I'm glad that he's doing things that almost any mom can totally relate to, even if her kids' circumstances were nothing like mine's.

One think I am most definitely amazed about, though, is the Kid's ability to keep track of Cat. Admittedly we live in a small house, and there are only so many places he can leave her. But today in Trader Joe's, he showed remarkable mindfulness. He was pushing one of the kid-sized carts, and when we emptied our groceries onto the register, he announced, "Cart back!" I encouraged him to go put the cart back and then return to our register, and as I watched him, the lady behind me observed, "He put his stuffed animal in the cart. Will he remember to take it?"

"Oh yes," I assured her. "And if he doesn't, I will."

Well, I didn't. He lost sight of me on his way back - he got caught behind a cluster of other customers - and I was waving so hard I forgot to notice he didn't have Cat with him. No matter! He realized it right away, ran all the way back, and had an easier time finding me the second time.

I should probably put our phone number on her tag, though. Just in case. He can remember her just in time 30 times in a row, but it's that one time he completely forgets that matters.

Still, I was impressed, and so were the lady and the cashier.

Talking to people - plus, urine-soaked Cheerios

2011-07-30T23:00:00.002-04:00

Today we visited a group of friends and then a group of relatives. There were small children for AwesomeCloud to play with in both cases. I think he really, really needed the social time with other kids. It seems like he's been hanging out with his folks too much lately. We haven't even brought him to the big playground lately. Once earlier this week I took him to the playground across the street, which no kid ever, ever goes to. We just played with each other, as usual.

I think it's sad that the school playground is empty and silent all summer. It seems to me like it should be crawling with kids who wander in from neighborhoods on all four sides. In fact, it seems to me that those very neighborhoods are awfully devoid of kids. Maybe we should sign Cloud up for more activities so he'll have a chance to make friends. However, he already goes to some activities, and he never has time while he's there to make any friends - he's always too busy doing the activity.

Or not doing the activity, in the case of swimming lessons. He manages to avoid accomplishing anything at swimming lessons. However, when I'm in the water with him, he wants to kick his feet while I hold him. He wants to dip his chin in. He seems confident in the water. But as soon as I step away, it's all over.

On the bright side, today at the pool with friends, he was emulating the other kids and getting all sorts of wet. He was a kid playing in the pool, rather than a kid standing in water up to his knees and whining. It was pretty cool to see.

Know what else is amazing to see? He can talk and other people can understand him. Sometimes. I'm not saying his speech is as clear as a bell, and his syntax can be confusing. He speaks in keywords - noun, adjective, verb, and everything else gets skipped.

"Go Hyannis beach!"
"Socks on peeeze."
"Restaurant eat mac'n'cheese?"

But more and more, people react with understanding, and it always fills me with excitement and relief. My husband and I have a lot of practice understanding him, but it's nice to think that we won't be the only ones for much longer.

Sometimes he puzzles us, too, though. And he has a weird, annoying habit of saying "yeah" to all our wrong guesses. For instance:

"Pango." Points to fridge.
"What do you want? Yogurt?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, here's the yogurt."
"No! No yogurt!"
"Oh, what do you want, then?"
"Pango."
"Um... um... orange juice?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, I'll pour you a glass or orange juice."
"No! No orange juice!"
"Oh. Point to what you want."
"Pango!"
"Point to it."
"Pango!"
"Pineapple?"
"Yeah."
"Really? Really pineapple?"
"Yeah."
"This here? You want this pineapple?"
"Pineapple!"
"Oh, okay, here you go."

Sometimes I never guess what he's saying. Sometimes he says yes to all our wrong guesses and I never find out if any were right.

I would like him to utter the word 'the' someday. I tried coaching him, and I got him to say it twice, but it hasn't stuck.

I was going to write about the urine-soaked Cheerios earlier, but when my husband offered to take Cloud out somewhere, I was so relieved that I just scrubbed the kitchen really, really well and decided I didn't want to talk about it. It's not as weird as it sounds, anyway. Cheerios end up on the floor all the time. That morning, I thought I'd work a little bit on potty-training, but then some other stuff happened, and perhaps I wasn't as available for potty guidance as I should have been. Also, he'd refused to pee a few minutes earlier, so I figured that meant he just didn't have to. Anyway, it gave me something new to complain about, and resulted in a much cleaner kitchen. I guess ultimately that was a win. Except that, well, we'd originally planned to spend the day doing other things, so in that respect the whole day was a loss.

I think the moral of this blog post is that I like some things about Age 3. I like the improved talking. Other things, not so much.

What happened to my outdoors-loving kid?

2011-07-28T06:49:00.002-04:00

He keeps wanting to turn around and go back inside and watch TV. Or eat. Or run in circles around the living room. Anything but stay outside.

He hates wearing shoes or going barefoot - he just wants to wear socks all the time. I would rather not let him wear socks outside and get them all muddy, but sometimes I do anyway. Otherwise I'd never get any of my vegetable waste to the compost pile, and my landscaping project (such as it is) would never progress beyond a stack of retaining wall bricks in the back yard. (I mean, not that I'm making much progress anyway. I need to spend hours at a time on that project, not minutes.)

And even then, the kid cannot wait to get back inside!

I'm very sad about this. I've tried just going out myself and coaxing him to join me, and not giving in when he tries to coax him back in. No use.

Maybe he'd do better if we were going to playgrounds again. But I can't work on my yard while I'm at a playground. Maybe it's just the yard that's boring.

And overgrown, and neglected, with bricks lying around... you know, if he'd let me spend some time on it, it would look better.

Fish

2011-07-21T07:20:00.001-04:00

For your viewing pleasure.

(I'm using my blog as an image hosting site again. Hehe.)

Mozart will not make my son smarter!

2011-07-20T19:46:00.003-04:00

But I make him listen to the classical station anyway.

I want him, someday when he's older and hears some classical music, to think, "Hey, I kinda like that! I used to listen to it when I was little." Instead of, "What the heck is this? I can't relate to it."

I don't know very much about classical music myself; all I know is that the radio station goes on, the radio station goes off. Sometimes the DJ says something interesting. For instance, yesterday after one lovely but unmemorable piece, he mentioned that the composer was William Herschel, the astronomer who discovered Uranus, binary and multiple stars, and nebulae.

Maybe if my son starts earlier, he will do better. Maybe he'll not only be able to discern Bach from Beethoven, but Aubin from Orff.

With visual art, I can do a little better. Exposing a child to visual art is not as easy as switching on the classical station at random in the car, but my parents made sure I got some exposure, and I can do the same. Art museums can be fun. Anyone who takes a kid to an art museum without making it fun is missing out on something great. I also want to inure my child to the traditional staples of art - the nude, the abstract, and the high concept, for some examples. The first time I took a figure drawing course, some of the other students had a very hard time adjusting to the presence of the nude model - they may have been art students, but they'd never had a chance to accept that nudity can be artistic. It's part of our culture. Nudity as a taboo is also part of our culture. The two seem to contradict, but they don't have to create cognitive dissonance if you give a kid time to get used to it.

I want to expose the kid to theater. Theater is fun. It's like movies, but better because it's in person. Cinema is an industry, and that's fine, and he'll inevitably watch a lot of movies in his lifetime. But theater is people creating art right in front of you. I can't keep him away from that. He may even want to try it himself.

I don't expect the arts to make him smarter or better, or even to prepare him for the real world (although they might contribute to that). I don't want to steer him into an arts career - I went to art school and I wouldn't recommend it to people who are good at anything else.

I just want him to love the arts because art is great. Art is part of being human. Maybe there are studies showing that babies who listen to Mozart have better brain waves, and students who join band are better at math. Maybe there aren't. I don't care about that. (Well, I'd like him to be better at math, of course.) I just want him to know what arts are out there, and be familiar with them already, and not have to play catch-up when he's older. Or worse, find himself intimidated by the sheer volume of art and avoid or even scorn it. There are lots of things in life we cannot give him, and he'll be playing catch-up in some way or other. We're not great athletes. We're too poor to engage in many expensive hobbies. We travel a lot, but our travel habits are very specific and leave out a lot of options. It's a big, full, rich, diverse world out there, and if I can't give him all of it, I at least want to give him a well-rounded sampling of it.

I don't expect art to change him. I don't want to influence who he is. I just want to influence what he has.

My kid is covered in stickers

2011-07-19T15:23:00.002-04:00

My kid is covered in stickers.

This is a side effect of potty training. Last week, we were at the stage where he would only do his business in the potty if we pulled his pants down ourselves and stuck him there. Now he's doing both the pulling and the sitting voluntarily. Every 5-10 minutes. And then begging for stickers. Insisting on peeling the stickers himself and managing to get 3 or 4 at a time because, hey, Mama's sweeping or folding laundry, so why the heck not?

I took him to the library covered in stickers. Now he's at the post office with Daddy, still covered in stickers. They plan to go to the beach afterwards, so at that point the stickers will have to come off. Except the ones on his shirt - if his shirt stays dry, the stickers might stay.

Next up: bladder control.

(One can hope.)

Oh! And as an addendum to my last post about things Cloud says... some of the things he says sound like me. I know that's to be expected. We spend so much time together, and at least half of his language comes from me. But sometimes he blurts out a phrase that has me written all over it, and after I do a double-take, I have to laugh.

For instance:

"Good enough." (I use this phrase so I can avoid yelling at him when he's doing something unhelpful but not exactly destructive. I guess that happens a lot, because Cloud says it a lot.)

"I don't think so." (I cracked up when he said this. He even got my inflections right.)

"Don't touch! Don't touch!" (Self-explanatory, I think. Usually he says "I do it!" when he wants me to stop interfering, but I guess he wanted to sound more like Mama this time.)

Also, lately he's been saying, "Yeah... true." Sometimes it's appropriate, as in: "Look, there's a robin." "Yeah... true." Sometimes not, as in, "Let's get a cookie." "Yeah... true." So I guess 'true' is just a synonym for 'yeah' right now.

(Do I say "yeah, true" often? I catch myself saying "Good enough" more often than ever now, but I can't recall saying "Yeah... true" to any significant degree. Weird.)

Weird things my kid has said

2011-07-15T16:54:00.003-04:00

I'm dedicating today to a cleaning frenzy... at least, the part of today that I didn't spend dragging my kid around town so my husband could have some peace and quiet. But I can multitask, so while I flit from task to task, I'll also pause to list some of the odd/amusing/firsttime utterances my kid has been making lately.

At Audubon:

"Swallowwort."
"Chalk." (For a butterfly I later learned I'd misidentified - it was a clouded sulphur, not a yellow chalk. Easy mistake to make.)
"Boardwalk growing." (Referring to grass growing between some boards on the path.)
"Turkey back!" (I don't know what he meant by this, but he was addressing a turkey at the farm.)

At the playground:
"You stay here. I go trash." (An unusual spark of independence! Usually he wants me to go with him if he's moving a distance greater than six feet. When he got to the trash can, another kid's mom was there and he announced to her what he was doing. She looked startled at first but then praised him.)
"Horses sleeping." (That was just weird because the horses were quite clearly not sleeping.)

Elsewhere:
"Di dian? Di dian?" (What time is it? in Chinese. Only weird because he had been ignoring the Chinese language CD for a long time previously.)

The really weird stuff is yet to come, when he can string together words to make random-sounding sentences. One thing he can do now is blurt out words in a way that makes it sound like he's taking inventory of his vocabulary: "Cat... truck... train... hi... eat... take look... apple... tree... yeah... train... big... running..."

Anime baby (Connecticon 2011)

2011-07-11T15:28:00.005-04:00

I should post pictures, but I don't know where they are.

We just got back from Connecticon, an Anime/Manga/video game convention. The list of events was actually pretty small; there were only eight rooms and three halls, including the artists' area. But we hardly had time to do anything anyway; we had to mind our comic book table. Fortunately, with three adults (myself, my husband, and our new intern) it was easy to keep the table staffed. At all times, one person was with Cloud, one person was selling comic books, and one person was free to play games or go shopping. It was nice.

The number one thing to do, though, was watch costumes.

Wow. We estimated that as many as 80% of the attendees had costumes. And some were spectacular.

I brought my lab coat, which I wore until it got too hot in the crowded artists' room. So at least I was that much dressed up. We don't like to go all out with the costuming anyhow, because it detracts from our ability to put people's focus on the books. The characters in Zephyr & Reginald: Minions For Hire wear lab coats, so my lab coat was thematic. I'd love to dress like Picorna from Perils of Picorna, but I'm afraid that won't happen soon.

I did get a really cute black and gold dress for only $20. It has an elastic waist and a flaring skirt that complement my hourglass figure. I may not be skinny, but I'm shaped like a woman, so I may as well emphasize it. One great thing about cosplay conventions is that the skinny girls don't necessarily get all the attention.

We had a room at a motel that was supposedly easily accessed by shuttle bus, but that turned out not to be the case at first. We complained to the motel staff about the lack of shuttle bus, but they told us their shuttle driver was unavailable, and that was that. Sorry. Parking at the convention center was ex$pen$ive, so we had really wanted that shuttle.

Oddly, though, when we drove around Hartford center looking for a cheaper parking garage, everything was closed... except one garage... which was free. We parked there, of course! And then we walked five blocks to the con.

On Saturday afternoon, I returned to the motel to give Cloud a nap, and we learned that the shuttle bus was operational. Yay! When Cloud learned he'd get to ride on a bus, he became obsessively excited, almost intolerably so. We still had to wait 20 minutes for the driver to get ready, and those 20 minutes felt like 20 hours. Cloud refused to leave the side of the bus, not even to run inside for a quick drink of water. I had to think up 20 minutes' worth of different ways to assure him we'd really get to ride the bus.

The bus was just a white van, which I think was a little disappointing to him - he must have been picturing one of the big blue city buses - but he seemed pleased enough when we climbed inside. "There are different kinds of buses," I explained. "The shuttle bus is just one kind."

AwesomeCloud was largely pretty good. There were escalators for him to play on and a patio to run around on. He largely ignored the people in costumes, unless they had candy. For instance, Ev, our artist friend who had his own table, was dressed as a pirate and Cloud shied away from him until Ev offered Cloud some Japanese gummy hearts. Then, Cloud was in love. He stopped by Ev's table frequently to get more gummy hearts. It became a running joke - Pavlov's kid, pumped up on sugar, etc.

The MENSA booth was giving out chocolate. Cloud memorized their location, too. After a while, I felt so bad about intruding on their space that I made some vague promises about trying to take their admission test sometime.

(Don't get any ideas! I said VAGUE promises, SOMETIME! And I said trying. I didn't say how hard I'd try.)

In the middle of all this, Cloud somehow developed a phobia of people dressed as cardboard robots, and the puppets at the puppet show made him cry. (Ironically, as we were leaving the puppet show, we walked right by a 6-foot-something Tusken Raider and he didn't blink an eye.) He also began to cry more readily as the con dragged on and exhaustion set in. But all things considered, he was a real trouper throughout the weekend.

On Saturday night, there were fireworks after bedtime, which were visible through our motel window. Cloud was still awake at that time, so I opened the curtains and let him watch from his crib. He filled in the silence (the fireworks were fairly distant) by shouting, "KaBOOM!" every now and then.

Aside from the ill-fated puppet show, I only attended one event - a plushie workshop. I made a kung fu kitty for Cloud. He likes it well enough, but I think he wishes it had a face. I shall embroider a face onto it as soon as I find my embroidery floss, and after I mop up the basement (which flooded) and unpack and mow the lawn. And rest awhile.

My sister and her boys are coming on Wednesday. So I may forget about Kung Fu Kitty for a while until I have less stuff to do.

Heading To Hartford This Weekend For ConnectiCon!

2011-07-07T16:16:00.002-04:00

This will be Cloud's sixth (or so) convention - his second with a hotel room.

We don't have any new books for this con, but we've never had a table at ConnectiCon before, so in some ways it's all new.

Hopefully having the hotel room will make things easier for Cloud. He can take naps.

Back on Monday! Have a nice weekend!

Raising a child Unitarian (and why I am)

2011-07-04T22:07:00.002-04:00

I'm not a Unitarian Universalist, but I play one in church. :) The thing is, as a lapsed Catholic and an avid explorer of all things spiritual, I don't want any labels for myself. I don't want to make a commitment. People latch on to labels, and when I fail to match the label, instead of adjusting their labels, they just get annoyed at me for disappointing them.

I am also not calling my son a Unitarian Universalist. He can figure out the label thing himself later. For now, we attend the local church, we avail him of its religious ed program, and we contribute financially to the churchgoing endeavor. No 'tithe' for us; it's 'payment for services rendered.' I like that better. It's less pretentious.

What's nice about UU is how normal it is. Yesterday we went to July 4th festivities at Aunt and Uncle's house, and they invited two couples their own age. The first couple informed us that they attend the UU church in Brewster. The second couple attends a UU church in New Jersey. Not that they are... they attend. They were lovely people and I enjoyed meeting them. My mother, who has nothing but vitriol for the UU church, would have found them delightful as well. They were just so pleasant and normal. To hear my mother talk about UU's, you'd expect them to be some sort of freaks of nature. No, sorry, pleasant and normal it was.

There are a few things that i especially like about UU's:

1) The religious ed program is an overview of world religions. That was the type of religious education I was planning to give my son anyway. His spiritual heritage is ancient and complex, and very few white people respect that. Ultimately, he'll decide for himself how much he cares about Confucianism, daoism, and buddhism.

I was talking to a teenage girl who had attended UU RE all her life, and she said, "They try to give you enough information to decide your religious path for yourself, but most people I know just stay with the church." I guess the latter bit is universal. By and large, people hate change, unless something goes seriously wrong with the religious institution they grew up with. Not to say that exploration isn't common; I think it's both common and important. Hey, I did a ton of exploration, and at the end I was all set to return to the Catholic church... until something went wrong with it.

Whatever Cloud decides to do, I'm gonna let him do it. At least I will be assured that he's not going into his spiritual explorations blind - he'll have a well-rounded background in what religion is all about. I took that liberty for myself without being nearly as prepared, and I turned out all right.

2) UU is like a clearinghouse of social justice and environmentalism causes. What could possibly appeal to me more? Pure, unabashed altruism, no strings attached!

3) Half the members are fine artists. Seriously, this church is stacked with old ladies wielding a mean paintbrush. Admittedly, there's only a scattering of other types of artists - a few talented singers, some crafters, some cooks, and one woman who is really into theater. But fine arts is where my interests lie. I've been stalled out for years now - working on the comic books but lacking any sort of direction when it came to doing paintings and stuff. The best way to jolt oneself out of a rut is to surround oneself with the thing you aspire to create yourself, and I think it's starting to work. I'm interested in making it work.

4) No pressure. I hate social pressure. It makes me want to go away. Many religious communities are so rigid - I can't do that. And I want my son to have some spiritual elbow room too. He's not going to be like everyone else, no matter what happens. Why not accept that from the start and give him room to grow? Who knows what he'll grow into? It might be someone really amazing!

Sometimes he does something totally unique and unexpected, and I laugh and cheer him on. I'm from the Neil deGrasse Tyson school of parenting - if he's damaging something truly valuable and irreplaceable, like a cat*, stop him. If not, let him go. And appreciate the results, whatever they may be.

And only hold his hand when he's reaching for me. And when crossing the street. Any time other than that, I can have a little faith in the kid. And try not to let him see me gnawing my fingernails in anxiety for him.

*Cats in general may be easily replaceable, but individual cats are not.

Who wants a postcard?

2011-07-02T20:33:00.003-04:00

I have two 'Boston' postcards sitting around. Who wants to get a postcard from me? First two commenters win. Just leave me your email address so I can ask for your address privately.

AwesomeCloud at Chowderfest

2011-06-30T22:01:00.000-04:00

Chowdafest - a Cape Cod tradition that was just begging to be invented. A thousand people packed into an outdoor concert pavilion, taste-testing chowder from a dozen local restaurants and voting for the best one.

It's hot, loud, hard to move around, and by the end of the day everyone is covered in clam chowder splatters. AwesomeCloud had a grand old time. Unlimited chowder! In tiny cups! plus... free ice cream! (Which his parents forced him to wait until the end to get).

Interesting note: Cloud has now learned that if he asks for chocolate, he won't get any surprises. I'm pretty sure that's what's been going on when he demands chocolate ice cream. I can rattle off weird ice cream names like "moose tracks" and "lime sorbet" all I want, but those names must all sound risky to him. Better to demand chocolate.

Once, I ordered him cotton candy ice cream and he liked it just fine. My logic was that he will probably lose his taste for cotton candy ice cream in the next few years, so he may as well enjoy it now. However, when he's allowed to choose his own flavor, chocolate it is.

In other news, kung fu has ended for the next two months (we'll take it up again in September, when preschool starts) but my husband has managed to sign him up for swimming lessons. There were two choices available - toddlers in the water, and real swimming. My husband opted for real swimming. I'm interested in seeing how well this goes. I'd love for AwesomeCloud to be able to swim. He's safer that way, if, for instance, he's in a kayak and accidentally falls out.

Could happen. I'm not saying it will, just that it could.

Landscaping with a small child

2011-06-24T14:21:00.002-04:00

I like digging in the yard with AwesomeCloud. He likes to be outside, and he's getting used to hearing me say, "I can't help you right now; I have a shovel in my hands." Sometimes I do drop the shovel and help him, but if I did that every time, I wouldn't be doing anything anyone would call 'yardwork'.

What I've been doing in the yard, however, hasn't really been landscaping, due to a lack of time, money, and inspiration. I'm working on the inspiration part, and trying to dance around the money issue, but landscaping on a tight budget often involves a lot more time, as you do things by hand with small tools that could be done more efficiently by paying a professional with large tools.

However, if I pay a professional, I don't learn anything. I'm hoping to save money AND learn something. I'm hoping to teach AwesomeCloud something - like, digging in your own yard is normal, and it's okay to play by yourself in the driveway with only half of Mama's attention on you.

The vegetable garden isn't doing very well this year, partially due to neglect, but maybe if I rearrange the yard, I can give myself more vegetable-growing options. One of my primary aims is to greatly reduce the amount of lawn we have. I see no point in growing grass in a yard as small as mine, with oak trees all around the edges. Grass is just a big, fat waste of resources. The strawberries have been doing pretty well, though, and the oregano has grown like it owns the place.

I guess I'll keep digging, and maybe something interesting will sprout up.

A hundred little daily rituals

2011-06-21T22:40:00.002-04:00

I think my husband and I are giving the kiddo a reasonably rich and varied life - considering that, for our community, we are not rich and have only one car and we've both been utterly exhausted lately. But small children have a way of necessitating - and contributing - a lot of repetition.

The routine of diaper changing is slowly giving way to potty training rituals. Elaborate negotiations for stickers. Careful selection of toys to play with while sitting on the potty. Today Cloud asked for an open cup of water and then plunged his hand into it - apparently a trick Daddy taught him.

I think the crying spells are mostly over (the potty-related ones, that is). The accidents are not. I'm trying to be all Zen about it, but sometimes I fail. All these drama scenes and accidents can be frustrating. He now knows what the purpose of the potty is, and what he has to do to earn a sticker, but he needs to do a lot of work on timing his efforts. Asking to go to the potty voluntarily seems like it's a long way away. He tried that this morning, but it was immediately after he went in his diaper. It probably occurred to him, seconds too late, that he could've used that peepee to get a sticker instead of wasting it.

The thought of saving money on diapers, and releasing fewer diapers into the environment, keeps me motivated. I pulled out the cloth diapers again - at least he feels a little discomfort when they're wet, even if he never acknowledges it - but they're not really designed to prevent a three-year-old from making a mess. They were great when he was two.

Everything else in life has routines and rituals, too. Some of them are funny. When I want him to sit on a chair, or next to me on the couch, he says, "Up cat! Up cat! Up cat!" Until I say "Up, cat," and then he jumps up. Sadly, he's not as graceful as a cat.

This evening we were taking a walk to the horse barn (the only place he ever wants to walk to these days) and he announced, "No roof!" A convertible had just driven by. The last few times we'd seen convertibles, like, last week, I'd said, "Look! That car has no roof!" Apparently if I'm too slow to say it, now he'll say it for me.

We adopted the same kid twice

2011-06-16T13:53:00.005-04:00

Lots going on lately! I can barely remember what it all is. That's probably why I chose to tell the story of the crow and the corn muffin. Trivialities are easier.

Yesterday morning, the three of us showed up at court bright and early to readopt AwesomeCloud. Two families were ahead of us. There was a lot of waiting, and our agent, who'd planned to meet us at the courthouse, was late. After a while, I took Cloud outside for some elbow room and tried to reach her by phone. When I finally got through, she told me she was having an emergency. Fair enough. An adoption agent with many clients and a family of her own is actually highly likely at any given time to encounter an emergency. My husband was nervous about going ahead without her, but it turned out that the hard parts were all done and we just had to stand before the judge and smile a lot and look cute.

At one point, the judge said, "Someone is supposed to give a speech." He looked around, and probably realized that our agent had volunteered to give the speech. Finally he turned to the two of us and said, "Now you need to say a little something to convince me this adoption should go ahead."

"Well, the adoption's already legal," I explained. "However, his birth certificate is in Chinese, and people have kind of a struggle when dealing with it, and so we're doing this to update his documents so they're in English. Also, his birth certificate says he was found, not born, so we'd like to change that."

(I'm paraphrasing. I can't quote anyone verbatim, not even myself.)

The judge seemed pleased with that. He noted that AwesomeCloud was very clearly a member of our family, which is always nice to hear. Cloud was in fact behaving very well. Not extraordinarily well beyond his age, but certainly well enough to make people smile.

(Oh my goodness, this kid attracts so much doting attention. Some of the clerks and attorneys passing through the waiting area stopped and made lengthy conversation with him (and us)! It was Lonely Grandmother City! And even the people who didn't come right over and coo over him cracked a smile when they saw him. Even when he was crying. I am ever amazed by the way his charm descends upon strangers like a cloud of bubbles. He is going to love love love everyone as he grows up! I'm glad. I don't know how I'll teach him stranger discernment, but social confidence will serve him well throughout his life, much better than social caution ever will.)

Immediately after that was Cloud's last day of 'school', where his 'teacher' (who is really a speech therapist, and it's really just half-hour sessions of therapy, but it's in the preschool building so I call it school) gave us some potential good news about real preschool for September. Cloud's test scores had to be below a certain level to qualify for preschool, and they were a bit too high. His last therapist recommended him for preschool, but scores are scores, and there was nothing we could do to hide the progress he'd been making.

"Because I want him to" is not a real reason. Neither is "because I can't afford private preschool." I mean, we probably could afford it, if he only went once a week or I found a second income. Or he quit kung fu. (Noooo! We love kung fu!)

I'm happy his scores were high. I'm not saying I wish they were low. And since he is naturally outgoing, he didn't freeze up during the evaluation.

Before all this, we trekked up to Waltham to see a specialist. I was dreading the trip - the last MD we talked to from that office was very unpleasant to talk to. He and I just didn't connect. But this time we saw a woman, and not only was she delightful, but she gave us more things not to worry about with Cloud's health. I love the absence of bad news! It's as good as good news! But it was a long trip, and the next day we all had travel fatigue.

Potty training has begun in earnest... um, sort of. We have a plan. It's not a very detailed plan. It's actually kind of vague and uninspired. I bought some stickers, though, in case Cloud suddenly decides to get potty trained.

Cape Cod Zen and a crow with a corn muffin

2011-06-14T22:04:00.004-04:00

I've taken up Zen, again, after quitting it, again. This time I'm back at the informal meetings, which I like better but which are in the morning. Mornings are impossible during the school year, what with Cloud being young and rambunctious and all, but doable in the summer when my husband can stay home with him. It's one thing to attempt Zen meditation at home, with a cat on my lap and a small child trying to climb up my back and sit onm y head (or just hit me repeatedly and demand attention). It's quite another thing to subject the good people of the Zen Center to such behavior. Plus, to be perfectly honest, practicing kung fu stances 1, 2, and 3 or "cross jab kick" is a much more effective way to introduce a three-year-old to an Americanized version of his culture.

(I also count in Mandarin with him, and use the small handful of Mandarin phrases I know, so in spite of my terrible American accent, he's getting somehing genuinely Chinese too... well, sort of genuine.)

(Also, teaching a child to count to 100 in Mandarin is soooo much easier than teaching him in English! Counting in English falls apart as soon as you get to eleven and doesn't pick up again until around thirty. Mandarin has no such weakness.)

I like informal Zen better than formal because... well, just because. Because I do. Because while the robes are cute, I'm not really into them. Because I'm too fat to sit cross-legged on the floor, but quite comfortable folding up on the old church sofa. Because I like the silly talk of life's little nothings much better than the lectures on the fundamentals of Buddhism. Because I don't care one ounce about hierarchies. Because kung-ans are just in-jokes, just like the pun strings shared by old British fellows, or the drinking references fraternity brothers make to each other.

Because sitting in quiet meditation is the FUN part of Buddhism! Eking out a pathetic garden on a mountaintop is the hard part. Meditation and kung-ans are the perks that attract new monk recruits. That, and not having to feed 5-10 children in addition to yourself and your wife with that pathetic garden. Traditionally, Buddhism was just an alternative method of living in poverty.

Buddhism was a painkiller for the soul before there was widespread wealth, just like biting a stick was a painkiller for the body before there was ibuprofen.

It's intended to be both fun and profound, even for the desperately poor. Well, I'm not poor, and I don't need profundity, so I'm going with fun. I have no intention of becoming a member, of taking the precepts or achieving anything, of ever calling myself a Buddhist. The only thing I want to achieve is nothing, and that's quite possible with informal Zen.

I left the house a little early this morning so I could stop and get something to eat. That something was a corn muffin that was frozen in the middle. (I'm sad that local businesses sell such things. I deliberately chose this place over Dunkie's so I could keep my money in the community, and I wish my efforts weren't rewarded with frozen muffins, but that seems par for the course with this establishment, and at this point I think the owners are just trying to run their business into the ground so they can sell it cheap and move on with their lives.) Past the parking lot was a lovely little ancient cemetery (17th to 19th century, primarily, although I did see one stone that was dated 2010) and in the cemetery was a lone crow being harassed by a lone blue jay.

I watched them for a while, and after a few minutes, I suspected that the crow was eying my muffin. So I threw him a piece. (No big loss; it was a frozen bit.) He flew off with it, the blue jay hot on his heels, and landed on a different stone. I wandered over and threw him two more bites. Then I wrapped up the rest to take home to my son, figuring that the muffin would thaw during Zen.

So, Jim, that's what I meant by "feeding a corn muffin to a crow."

I'm sure cornbread doesn't have a whole lot of the nutritional value that a crow needs to be healthy. That's okay. It's better than a chocolate muffin, right? And I have some vague notion that most acts of compassion that people perform are not really all that helpful, on the grand scale of things in life that would be helpful. Maybe I feel this way because I read a lot of history. (We white people are fantastic at compassionately messing things up for nonwhites all over the world.) Maybe it's because I'm involved in the community of adoption, where every silver lining comes with a dark cloud for somebody, and nothing is entirely good. Many good deeds fall into a moral gray area, and I'm getting better at recognizing those areas.

Zen practitioners speak of an end to all suffering.

But you know what - doesn't everyone?

When in doubt, find a cat

2011-06-11T15:10:00.002-04:00

Here's Ban Lu, looking like he belongs to our family with all his books. (Notice "American Lion" directly over his shoulder.)

Cats and books. Books and cats.

I should write something about my son, too. Let's see. Cloud's imaginative play is becoming hilarious. I'm glad he's not waiting until his speech catches up before launching into elaborate play scenarios. Today he rode a (invisible) car, train, and boat with his beanie baby cat, named Cat (played by me) with frequent pauses for cat naps, cat food, and falling off the boat and needing rescuing. It was a very, very repetitive game (I think he fell off the boat between 20 and 30 times in a row! Oh my goodness, the attention span of that child amazes me) but I'm impressed by his ability to innovate.

I'm sure the development charts will tell me his play skills are nothing special. But that's why I threw out the development charts. Every time he does something new, I'm astonished at how much he can do. I have no other child to compare him to, and that's the way I like it.

How strangers talk to us - updated version

2011-06-10T20:11:00.002-04:00

I thinkmy internet connection problem is fixed. I'm afraid to cheer just yet, but we've made some very dramatic fixes, and it seems to me that the internet should just stay on already. Sheesh. This service ain't cheap, y'know.

Of course, as soon as I lose the ability to post on my blog, I get a flood of inspiration. It's been a long time since I described the generalities of life as an adoptive family.

One of my earlier concerns, you may remember, was how to deal with strangers' prying questions as Cloud gets older and understands English more. It seems the problem is working itself out. Conveniently, the prying questions have all but dried up. Now people just say, "He's so CUTE!" Sometimes they say it to me, sometimes they say it to each other, and sometimes they say it to the air. Black men of all ages, however, continue to be the exception - they address him directly, saying, "S'up, little man?" I think that's awesome. Addressing the child directly! And speaking to him like he's a regular person, worthy of respect! What a concept.

My bigger problem now is to stop voluntarily educating people when I don't have to. Many people are curious about our family, even if they don't come right out and inquire about us, and I get the urge to meet them halfway and open the conversation for questions they may have. I have to stop doing that. I've been doing it less often, but really, at this rate Cloud is still going to learn all about his history via Mama's conversations with strangers. (Or near-strangers. For instance, the last person who I allowed to ask me adoption questions was the library storyteller, and we've 'known' her for a year now.)

Someday I will have to have conversations with my son, so he knows more about himself than anyone else does. I hope I remember it all. Not everything of importance is written down in this blog. (If it were, that would defeat the whole thing about him knowing more than anyone else.) It's getting easier to talk to him, as his speech grows ever more sophisticated. I know I should start talking to him about adoption now, because it's unnecessary to wait until he can formulate a question before answering it. I know what many of his questions will be.

But although it feels like the speech thing is making progress, I find it hard sometimes to communicate. For instance, last night I had to discipline him, and I dumped him in his crib without saying a word. It didn't seem unreasonable at the time; after all, what was there to say? I've already told him that hitting was bad. He knows. But in retrospect, this whole Silent Mom Discipline seems a little weird.

It's just... you know... sometimes I talk a whole heck of a lot and say nothing, and sometimes I go to say something and nothing comes out.

Which brings me to another little thing about how strangers' questions and my answers have changed. When somebody asks about some odd little behavior that Cloud is exhibiting, I reply, "It's a thing."

"Oh, a thing," they say. And if they try to get more information out of me, they fail, because I've already explained it to the very best of my ability. I don't know adoption psychology. And even if I did, I'm under no obligation to share my special knowledge with them. "It's a thing" covers all they need to know: I'm aware of what my son is doing, I'm not worried, and they shouldn't worry either.

I mean, he's three years old. The kid says "thank you" every chance he gets. He makes eye contact. He laughs if you act friendly toward him. What more could they possibly want?!

I shall return (dum dum dummmm)

2011-06-08T22:48:00.002-04:00

The Comcast guy is coming tomorrow morning to replace our bad internet connection with a good one. Theoretically, that means I'll be able to blog more, since I'll have a reliable internet connection 24/7, not just a few hours in the middle of the night.

No promises until it actually happens, though.

The littlest kung fu master

2011-06-05T21:31:00.007-04:00

AwesomeCloud got his orange belt in kung fu yesterday.

My parents were in town for a convention, and they attended the ceremony, as did our local friend. That was really, really great. I think Cloud felt very important, having all those people hugging him and cheering him on. Without them, it might have just felt like one long hour of doing the same old moves he always practices at kung fu, followed by having to walk up to a big table and being handed a new belt.

He is not actually the littlest. One girl is ever-so-slightly littler than him, although she may be older, I don't know. I was proud of how well the little girl did. On normal class days, she and Cloud contend to see who can pay attention the least.

(I jest. They're actually admirably good at following directions, all things considered.)

We got some really nice pictures. I will post the bad ones, as usual, for privacy reasons.

Here he is doing one of the exercises.

Bowing to Sifu.

Small child standing by himself at the big table to receive his belt and certificate.

He wondered aloud whether he'd also earned a sticker, but when we showered accolades all over him for his new belt, he didn't seem too disappointed that there were no stickers.

Apparently many people in the audience squeed about his cuteness. During the exercises, he was doing that adorable thing where he shouts out the commands after the sifu gives them. I suspect that being Asian in a kung fu studio gives him an extra level of attraction. But also, he is just inherently cute.

It's potty time!

2011-06-02T14:51:00.004-04:00

Cloud had his first successful potty use today. Usually he just sits on it and says, "Pee pee pee" and then pretends to flush. But today he actually did it right.

I didn't have my stickers ready. I searched around and the best I could find was a yellow circle that said "$.50." I gave it to him and he stuck it on his hand like they do with the stickers at kung fu.

And then we had an incident with pee pee on the floor. Cloud began to say no to the potty and became more vehement each time I asked, although I was very careful to not be pushy. What I did do was switch him back to the cloth diapers, which don't hold very much of a three-year-old's urine. They were fine when he was two, and the disposables gave him certain problems that I will not discuss here. But lately, the disposables have been fine, and their extra absorbency makes it possible to think of other things for most of the day. Cloth diapers have to be changed once an hour. It really is a pain. But I'm trying to use their inconvenience to my advantage.

It worked once today. I feel like we can manage this potty training thing, with maybe a few bumps and hills in the process.

Maybe once I get some real stickers, Cloud's resistance will break down a bit. He really wasn't excited about the fifty cents sticker. But then, I gave it to him apologetically. He can tell by my tone of voice when I'm not entirely pleased about stuff.

Following the pee pee accident, and amidst the potty resistance, Cloud also:
1) Tried to run across the busy road while cars were coming
2) Fell to his knees when I finally did allow him to cross, which forced me to drag/carry him
3) Fell off the kitchen chair while I was making lunch, because he was jumping around on it
4) Asked me twenty million times for mac'n'cheese after throwing his lunch in the trash (this is becoming a pattern)

At that point, Mama needed a time out. In fact I wasn't very easy to engage today. Sometimes I was too busy cleaning, and sometimes I was just too emotionally distant. There are a million games and crafts and life lessons I could be practicing with my son throughout the day. And yet I spend more time sitting in a lawn chair, or on the couch, muttering half-hearted, "That's nice" phrases, than actually playing with him. I know that if many mothers with their multiple kids with difficult personalities traded places with me, it would feel to them like a vacation. But I'm just out of energy a lot of the time. I'm lonely, distracted, in a rut, and discouraged. My To-Do list makes me cry, and I haven't even finished adding to it yet. I'm wasting a beautiful spring being unproductive and unengaged.

Also, this stupid spotty internet connection drives me batty. Stay connected, you dumb computer! The tech came by and looked at it, and his diagnosis was, "You're just too far away from the main server." Well, that's real helpful.

What got me down today, I think, was the incident about crossing the road. I was taking him for a walk, which was awfully nice of me to do considering how tired and run-down I've been feeling. I was trying to sing with him and point out interesting things we passed. When he started acting like a little brat, I thought, okay, I can roll with this. But then when he pulled up his feet just as I was leading him through a break in traffic, it seemed to me that if he were willing to risk his life to spite me, that was a little too much bad behavior. Of course, he didn't see it that way.

But I don't think like a toddler, and maybe what happened was that I needed some time to figure out how to think like a toddler. The fact that every kid engages in this behavior doesn't help me.

So I told him to play by himself quietly and leave me alone. That lasted a respectable five minutes, and then he was hanging on my knees, meowing and asking for cat food, or, more sincerely, mac'n'cheese.

I dunno. I wish I were better able to feign playfulness. I wish I could do a mental 180 like he can and forget a difficult moment that has just happened.

Also, geez, how is he still falling off chairs? I told him that I could keep him safe by strapping him into his orange chair from now on, but that news only made him cry harder. I'm not sure what he expects me to do. I don't think there's really any right answer. I want a right answer, because if I were confident in my own actions, these little things wouldn't weigh so heavily. I could say, "I screwed up; of course I can do better." But then I don't do better, and it's also worth noting that there are worse ways of handling 3-year-old behavior than my way.

I may also be in the throes of a midlife crisis. Having a small child is traditionally the domain of younger people, and the things I'm learning to do at my ripe age are things that twenty-somethings do too. I'm not unusual as an older mom in modern times. But historically, I'm going against the social grain. I feel like I should have a whole lotta life ahead of me. But I really only have half a life.

Kids' songs for the musically (but not linguistically) inclined

2011-05-27T21:46:00.002-04:00

Cloud has learned to sing songs by himself. The results are hilarious. He skips words and sometimes groups of words, but always leaves an adequate pause in their place, as if mentally counting off the syllables.

For instance, "C is For Cookie" goes like this:

"Hee... kiki... ... ...me,
Hee... kiki... ... ...me! Nom nom nom nom."

The Alphabet Song has a different twist:

"Bee bee bee bee bee bee...
Emm emm emm enn..." (At which point I interrupt and sing it with him correctly, because I am thrilled at the idea that he's interested in the alphabet.)

Today I overheard him tackling Old MacDonald:

"EIEIO... meow meow meow... meow meow meow... meow meow meow meow meow meow meow... EIEIO."

I'm impressed at how well the kid can carry a tune! I'm also excited at his improvements in sentence structure. And his use of pronouns. He uses pronouns incorrectly - and by that I mean 90% of the time he uses the wrong pronoun - but I'm working hard to teach him which pronoun applies to which person in each context. (I find this really frustrating. When I'm not correcting his use of pronouns, I'm dwelling on his use of pronouns. It's such a tangled mess! I don't know how to untangle it! When my young cousin had the same problem, he was much more easily corrected. When I try to correct Cloud in the same way, he just laughs.)

(Don't get me wrong - I love that he laughs so easily. That's one of his defining traits.)

(Another defining trait is the way he tries to yank me off the couch, whining and crying, when I lie down to take a rest. That trait is less endearing. Yes, I know that I'm experiencing an acute, chronic energy deficiency lately. I know I'm boring when I'm tired. I know I'm Cloud's only possible playmate when we're chillin' at home. I'm sorry. I'm tired. That's life.)

In other news, summer arrived suddenly today, which made Cloud very happy. Not only did he get to go outside without a jacket, but I actually let him wear shorts. OMG. Life is just so good.

AwesomeCloud and the random exhortations

2011-05-23T22:24:00.003-04:00

Hi.

I haven't posted in a while.

Today is my birthday. The weather was dreary, and nobody was in exactly a good mood. Yesterday we had a vendor table at the Maine Comic Arts Festival, which was in MAINE, yo. It was a fun show, but the trip was looooong, and now everyone's tired.

Here, have some coyote pups from our new minicomic, Unpopular Species #3:

AwesomeCloud's vocabulary has been growing exponentially. He blurts out the strangest things for no apparent reason. Sometimes he takes on our mannerisms, saying, "Oh my goodness" or "suuuure" just like mama or dad. And some things he says... I haven't figured out yet.

Daddy got him to say "arbitrary" today. After we praised him for attempting to say it, he said it repeatedly until we reached Friendly's (for a birthday ice cream cake).

Arbitrary!

The ice cream cake was a big hit, although I'm not sure the kid noticed it was for me. He waited impatiently for Daddy to sing "Happy Birthday," and then he streeeeetched over the table and plunged his spoon into the cake.

He has also learned to lick the ice cream off the bottoms of candles. That was my doing. Oh well.

He likes to lick serving spoons, too. When he asks, "Yick? Yick? Yick?" sometimes I get confused about what he wants, but I'm learning.

At some point he'll learn to speak in complete sentences.

Oh! Also, he ate his first corn dog. While we waited for our meal to arrive at the table, I drew a corn dog for him with crayons so he'd know what to expect. I think it really helped. When he received the real corn dog, he picked it up with a decent degree of confidence.

Kung fu promotion

2011-05-16T22:43:00.002-04:00

Kiddo is learning a ton of stuff at kung fu. Here he is surrounded by blonde girls. There used to be boys in the class, too, but they either joined the older kids' class or dropped out.

At this age, showing up is more than half the battle. Therefore, it's already time for Cloud to get promoted to his orange belt! He gets an A for effort and an A+ for showing up, and that's all it takes.

Apparently the promotion ceremony is a big deal. Sifu told us that people invite family, friends, and even teachers. Now I feel bad. I don't think we have anyone to ask. The people we're close to emotionally, aren't close enough physically. And I feel a little silly explaining to my few local friends that I want them to come to a... thing... to celebrate my son showing up to his kuan for eight weeks straight.

He may as well get used to having a fan club of two people... at least until he makes some close friendships himself. Anyway, at age 3 he's unable to differentiate between parents who surround themselves with all sorts of intimate BFFs and parents who mostly just have each other. The important thing is that he gets to learn martial arts, and he'll probably excel in it, especially if we can afford to keep sending him.

He learned to kick today. Like, really kick with his foot flying up in the air and everything. Something must have clicked during his lesson today, and all of a sudden he was kicking. Then when we came home I tried to teach him to dance in 4/4 time, and he showed signs of understanding what I was getting at.

That lady is a BAD influence

2011-05-13T14:17:00.002-04:00

Do you ever find yourself coaching your child while they play? In and of itself, it's not an unreasonable act. It feels perfectly normal to stand next to the slide and tell your kid, "Go slowly. Let the little boy go by. Be careful." But when you have twenty parents standing over twenty children in one playground, step back a little and listen. See if it doesn't sound a little weird.

AwesomeCloud and I were the first ones to arrive at the playground this morning. Soon a mom and her two-year-old daughter joined us. It was the most natural thing in the world to coach Cloud, "Don't push the baby. Wait your turn. Watch out you don't kick her when you do that. Gently, now."

"Oh, don't worry," the other mom assured me. "He's fine."

Yeah, he's just friendly and competitive at the same time. Which is a great way to be when he's playing with boys his own age and energy level.

Fortunately, as the playground filled up, AwesomeCloud's potential playmates diversified. He ended up latching onto a group of three other boys, two four years old and one three years old. The two older boys began competing with each other, jumping off a part of the playground structure that was about three feet off the ground and had a kind of ladder thing for toddlers attached to it.

I started exclaiming "Nice jump!" to them after they had landed.

AwesomeCloud and the other three-year-old boy wanted to join in too. They couldn't jump down that far, but they could climb up. And there was a lower landing right next to that spot that they could jump off. So they started taking turns jumping off the lower landing and getting in the bigger boys' way.

"Great jump!" I'd say to one or another or the next boy in rapid succession. "A bit of a wobbly landing there. Good one! A little more practice and you'll get it. Good landing! Good one! There you go! Swing jump, woohoo! Whoa, nice running jump!"

The boys ate it up. They glanced expectantly at me before and after every jump or climb, their eyes shining. I stood there with a coffee mug in one hand and a sippy cup in the other and shouted out encouragement.

Joey, Kieran, Theo, and Cloud.* I'd already met Kieran's granddad on the other side of the playground; he was definitely the type to park himself on the nearest bench and gruffly coach his grandson's play. At first, at the same time I was saying, "Great jump!" he'd bark out, "Kieran, don't jump!" Kieran, don't do this. Kieran, don't do that.

Joey's father, or possibly grandfather, was on the same bench with a coffee and a newspaper. His coaching was just as gruff. "Joey, watch out for that little boy," he coached, while the little boy's Mama said to Joey, "Oooh, nice dodge, and, jump! Good one!"

Theo's mom was more of a classic micromanager, being concerned about injury, or risk of injury, or suggestion of risk of injury. I think that parents of pale children are more cautious, although that may be a prejudice on my part. Or maybe, when the very sun can injure your child, you justifiably have more to worry about. Anyhow, Theo obviously didn't want to be fragile, and took some wild jumps off the low end and some careless risks up the toddler ladder, and his mother was at a distinct disadvantage because she was on the wrong side of the structure, attempting to coach him through the bars and not getting very much of his attention.

Instead, he was all about listening to me as I shouted gratifying praise at his antics.

None of the parents said anything to me about thwarting their efforts to get their kids to be careful. So I kept doing it. The boys were just being boys, and amid the chorus of parents coaching, it struck me that boys at play was a beautiful thing. Like a couple of warblers among grackles. I was disappointed that none of the other parents were moved to utter something positive to their children, but as the two dads/granddads gradually gave up, and Theo's mom stopped trying so hard, I tried to say enough positive things for all of us.

Of course, there was one inevitable moment when Joey bumped into Theo and all the other grownups caught their hearts in their throats. But Theo, possibly empowered by his inclusion in some real boys' play, caught himself with his hands and stood proudly back up. The kids endured a little verbal scolding, and that was it.

When Cloud and I left, Theo's mom said goodbye to us.

I don't want Cloud to become careless to the point of being a danger to himself or others. I want him to be aware and considerate. I want him to learn the physics of hurling his body around on playground equipment. It seems to me that the best way to accomplish that is not to ride him all the time, but to gently remind him to be aware and then let him experience real play with real kids. Let him learn by doing. And a little positive reinforcement won't hurt. I don't want him to feel like he's under the microscope every time I accompany him to the playground.

Incidentally... at some point Theo said to his mom, "I'm having lots of fun!"

"You're having lots of fun?" his mom repeated, as if it weren't a phrase her child used every day.

And maybe it wasn't.

*Not their real names, but close enough.

Ticks

2011-05-12T14:57:00.000-04:00

I'm sure AwesomeCloud doesn't want me writing about ticks. He's been getting a little paranoid about them lately. I don't really want to write about ticks, either. So I'll just say the bare minimum.

It's a bad year for ticks - unless you're a tick; then you'd consider it a good year.

Two weeks ago, we went to Audubon to start the year's work on the butterfly garden. Lots of ticks found us there - at least a dozen. Then, between being squicked by ticks and all the rain we've been getting, we avoided going back to the garden for the past two weeks.

We went today. It was cold and windy, although finally not rainy. We pulled a few weeds. We saw a prairie warbler and a gigantic green frog. AwesomeCloud took pictures. And when we came home, we found two hangers-on.

I'm sure there'll be more of them.

You know, I never had any strong objection to them... until I found them on my kid.

And that's all I'll say about ticks.

Cat people, dog people, weird people, and birds

2011-05-08T19:27:00.000-04:00

Last Friday morning, when Cloud and I went outside, we saw a car parked on our front lawn. This wasn't unusual; it was on the very edge of our property, in a little alcove type area that allows people room to pull over on a street that is largely not conducive to pulling over. We watched the car for a minute, but it didn't do anything, so we went about our business of digging in the dirt.

Then a tow truck pulled over. The tow truck driver got out, spoke to the person in the car, and then shouted at us, "She got a flat tire! May we use the entrance of your driveway?"

"Sure," I said.

The tow truck driver added, "She didn't want to get out. She was afraid there might be a dog."

"Um," I said.

Then the driver of the car peeked her head around the juniper bushes and said, "I was afraid there might be a dog."

"This is our dog," I replied, pointing down at Riley. "She says meow."

"Meow," said Riley. She's helpful like that.

The woman didn't seem very amused by my remark, nor did she light up upon the recognition of a fellow cat person. But she was distracted with her flat tire, so I can't blame her. Riley, who in spite of being the most doglike of all of our cats is still very much a cat, disappeared under the juniper bushes.

Later on, I started thinking about dog people versus cat people. I don't put a lot of credence into the idea. Sure, some people love one and hate the other. Some people adore one and tolerate the other. But ultimately, cats and dogs are both animals, both mammals, both domesticated, and their similarities far outweigh their differences. For many people, the issue is whether or not they care to include an animal in their household. If they do, then the choice between cat and dog is just nuance.

A friend of mine recently confided that now that she's owned a few cats and a few dogs, she feels somewhat more affinity for the cats. I can relate to that. I like the idea of taking walks with dogs, and playing Frisbee with dogs, but when it comes to the day in, day out responsibility of dog ownership, I'd like it a little better if it were like owning a cat. I'm not always very affectionate, I don't want to take walks several times a day, and I hate drool. OMG, I absolutely hate drool.

My friend treats her dogs like I treat Riley, anyway, so in that respect having Riley is a bit like having a dog. They both wait at the door to go out, and all I have to do is open the door and then watch for her to be ready to come back in again. They both try to eat people food, so shooing Riley off the counter 50 times a day is like having a dog... a dog who jumps like a cat, which is worse than having a real dog. (Fortunately she's only 8 lbs. A dog 30+ lbs who jumps like a cat would be terrible.)

AwesomeCloud was enraptured by the presence of the tow truck, and he also enjoyed observing the tow truck guy change the lady's tire.

We saw a Baltimore oriole in the backyard, so we filled a birdfeeder and also put a half grapefruit out for the birds. Now we have grackles, woodpeckers, a goldfinch, and English sparrows in addition to our orioles. It's funny how quickly the birds come back. I've been neglecting the birdfeeder ever since AwesomeCloud came home, a year and a half ago; it didn't seem worth the effort when he wasn't interested in looking out the window. Now, however, he's thrilled to see birds of all different colors - yellow finches, red cardinals, orange orioles, blue jays - and maybe I can get myself to keep the feeder filled this year.

The cat is a problem. I know. I don't have any brilliant solutions to that problem.

Baby steps toward bilingualism

2011-05-05T13:14:00.000-04:00

It was the best of days; it was the worst of days. The 'worst' part is me suffering from multiple simultaneous health problems, the most presentable of which is a chest/throat/head cold that is threatening to choke me to death. It's a secondary infection, which makes me think of pneumonia, but it probably isn't real pneumonia. (If it is, you can all admonish me later on for not seeing a doctor.)

The 'best' part involves AwesomeCloud speaking Hanyu (AKA Mandarin Chinese).

I can't explain my reasoning, but it seems that somehow, once speech therapy started, I began to develop an inordinate interest in speaking Hanyu to him. He's had Early Intervention speech therapy, but it ended last March, and nothing like this happened then. But now we have him in preschool-related speech therapy. His first session was Monday; his second session was today.

This morning, I put a Chinese cartoon in the DVD player. It featured Lan Mao (Blue Cat), an obnoxious character played by a man who speaks like himself and doesn't even try to do a cartoony voice. Lan Mao's face is apparently used on a lot of merchandise in China, like baby formula and plastic toys. His voice may make him sound as if he probably has a cigarette in one hand, but apparently he's popular with the kiddies.

There were also lots of CGI dinosaurs.

I don't know what that was all about; don't ask me. It was entirely in Hanyu. (Interestingly, the subtitles were also in Hanyu.)

Anyway, whenever I heard a phrase I recognized, I'd repeat it to Cloud. Sometimes Cloud and I would also imitate unfamiliar phrases. I think we're learning something. For instance, I learned 'lan mao'.

Then we went to the park, because if I can't spend the whole day in bed, I may as well go to the park. I sat on a bench next to the little playground, nursing my tea, while Cloud more-or-less played by himself. He also wandered off a teeny tiny bit. Wandering off by himself is not his strong suit; in fact even leaving me on the bench to play on a slide 6 feet away from me has been a challenge until recently. Today, however, he went on the slide, then to the edge of the woods, then onto the baseball field where he found a stray ball, played with it a tiny bit and then abandoned it, and even threw our empty snack wrapper in the trash all by himself. It was nice - a foretaste of free-range parenting. :)

But he also sat with me on the bench quite a bit. And while we sat, I was moved to tell him, "Zhe shi niao." (That's a bird.) And some other phrases that popped into my head. Cloud didn't repeat any of them - he wanted to call a bird a bird, and that was fine.

Later on, we went to our local Chinese take-out for lunch. The young woman there is the one who gave us the Chinese cartoon DVDs. I haltingly spoke a little Hanyu to her, just for practice, and she helpfully responded in kind. Then we sat down and ate.

As we were leaving, I turned to the woman and said, "Zai jian!"

"Zai jian!" she said. "Can little boy say zai jian?"

"Cloud," I prodded. 'Say zai jian to our friend."

He turned around, looked her square in the eye, and said, "Bu dong."

That means 'I don't understand.' It was very unexpected; he knows zai jian at least as well as he knows bu dong. I've only started saying bu dong to him in the last week. But still, it's the right language, and I'm proud.

Whiny McCriesalot

2011-04-27T14:06:00.005-04:00

I feel like I go through the day, moment to moment, trying to find ways to get the kiddo to stop whining and crying.

I think he's going through a phase. My husband claims he's not having the same problem, but when the boys are out together, they're always DOING something. I am not always DOING something. I spend awhile each day expecting Cloud to entertain himself while I wash dishes or dig dandelions or fold laundry.

But even when I am doing something with him, the kid manages to find some reason to treat life as one grand tragedy. Often about food.

What complicates things is that he's started to say "no" when he might actually want to say "yes." He might be preemptively bracing himself for disappointment in these cases; but while he's doing that, I'm trying to get a straight answer out of him as to whether or not he would like to do X.

It's a good thing he's only three years old, because most of the time I can just force his shoes on and march him into the car and take him to X, where he'll enjoy himself because he actually really likes X.

(X could be the playground, Trader Joe's, the library, the beach... the list goes on. It could be the bank. He likes the bank. The bank has lollipops, and lots of doting female bank tellers to hand him the lollipops even when Mama tells him that 8:30 AM is too early for a lollipop.)

Today we did manage to go to the library. Then we crossed the street to visit the horses. Well, Cloud wanted to visit the horses. I knew that if we walked just past the horses, we'd find ourselves on the grounds of the old abandoned elementary school. (It's only been abandoned for a year and a half, so mostly the grounds and the playgrounds were quite nice, if a bit litter-strewn.)

At age 3, Cloud is firmly in that awkward stage of independence where he can't do much of anything by himself, but he wants to. Well, it's healthy for him to want to. Sometimes I fully expect him to want to do things himself, but instead he plunks down next to me and bawls until I do it for him. He can bawl for quite awhile.

And I'm in that awkward stage where I don't know how much I should interfere. Should I stand back and let him discover the new playground all by himself? Or should I get in with him and teach him how to play? If all he wants to do is kneel at the foot of each slide and ask me to take his picture, should I just snap pictures over and over or should I encourage him to climb on something else?

Ultimately, I tried a mix of both approaches. I went down the widest slide, which was made of metal but still somehow not the least bit slippery. But there wasn't much else on the playground for a person of my size and skill set. So I spent some time sitting on the bench, watching, and then I used the wooden perimeter of the playground as a giant balance beam, an act which intrigued Cloud but was too difficult for him to emulate.

And then we saw the horses again on our way back to the car.

And then he asked for yogurt, and when I told him there would be a whole big lunch when we got home, he cried.

However, once I put the bowl of elbow macaroni and sauce in front of him, he devoured it, happily saying, "Elbows," over and over again, and asking for seconds.

Today's notable moments - boogers and bunnies

2011-04-25T15:01:00.003-04:00

Woohoo! I'm back into blogging, it seems. Blog entries several days in a row.

This morning at breakfast, AwesomeCloud said, "Here." And then he handed me a booger.

"A booger," I said. "Hmm. Uh. Thanks." Then I did the "Ew ewwy eww" fuss and dance all the way to the kitchen sink and washed it off.

After breakfast I took him to the "BIG playground." That's the playground that was designed and built for disabled children, with all the latest bells and whistles and playground technology, that Lenore Skenazy would probably mock because of its numerous safety features, but AwesomeCloud loves it. It's just so BIG. Also, it's right next to a baseball field, so parents can let their kids roam free if we want to.

(On the other side of the baseball field is a rusty old fire engine thing, and a real, authentic, vintage metal slide, just like the kind I grew up with, and it is probably almost as old as I am. I hope nobody comes along and removes it, because I want to show it off to AwesomeCloud in a couple of years, when he's old enough to appreciate the phrase, "When Mama and Dad were little...")

It was only 8:00 AM when we arrived at the playground, and we were essentially alone except for two siblings whose parents also thought it would be cool to bring them to a playground at 8:00 AM. It was a bit of nature out there. We graaaked like the grackles, whistled with the cardinals, and then...

...we saw rabbits.

Four of them.

I let Cloud try to sneak up on them. He was awesome. He moved slowly and quietly and he got pretty close to one rabbit before it bolted.

Then he forgot himself and shouted back at me, something about how wonderful it was to be close to wild rabbits, I'm sure, although it sounded more like, "Dee daum!"

"Yes, I know!" I replied in a stage whisper. "Rabbits are pretty cool!"

Then he turned in time to see the last of the rabbits disappear into the tangled underbrush.

Then we ran the bases on the baseball field.

Easter and the 5th birthday party

2011-04-24T19:35:00.002-04:00

We just got back from my family's house, where we'd eaten Easter dinner for 5 and a half hours straight.

Not to boast or anything, but Italian-Americans know how to throw a holiday feast. I cannot imagine belonging to a better family. Or eating better food (even though I didn't get any of the ham or the eggplant parm - I meant to grab some, but there was just too much other stuff). Or raising my kid with a better bunch of relatives.

Here's AwesomeCloud receiving his 5th 3rd birthday party - a month after his actual birthday, but hey, the family was together and they brought gifts. And they gave him chocolate and other snacks, which was nice because Rick and I didn't buy any Easter candy this year. No chocolate eggs to hide; no basket full of goodies to wake up to. I don't know why we didn't make the effort, and I guess we could've, but maybe it seemed kinda pointless to patch together some Easter Bunny surprises when we had the Family Feast to look forward to.

Cloud also got a toothbrush. Many thanks to my sister! He loves it, incidentally. He digs toothbrushes.

The very bad day

2011-04-22T13:09:00.002-04:00

Everybody has bad days. Today is becoming a fairly typical bad day for AwesomeCloud and me.

First he cried about his oatmeal for breakfast. So I put the uneaten oatmeal in the fridge, and he asked for yogurt. He cried over his yogurt. I put the uneaten yogurt in the fridge, and he asked for some of my leftover sausage and penne. "No," I told him. "Go play," I told him. So he cried over that.

Then we went outside, after crying over jacket and shoes, and he wanted to rake. So we raked. I'm glad AwesomeCloud likes to rake, even if his idea of raking is to actually watch ME rake. Then I was tired, so I sat on the front stoop with a book and told him to play. More crying.

At this point, it was only 9:00 AM and I'd had enough. So I decided to not become emotionally involved. I went all Zen-like and meditated on the idea that being outside was good for the kiddo's health. I got him to sit next to me and crumple up some dry oak leaves. We made a nice pile of oak leaf bits on the front walk.

Then I got him to eat his oatmeal by pretending I wanted to eat it myself, which wasn't much of a stretch, because it was Trader Joe's Blueberry Oatmeal, which happens to be really good.

Then Cloud wanted to take a walk, in the stroller, which didn't thrill me because I was more tired than he was so why should I have to do all the walking and pushing while he just sits there? Our walk was very, very short, and perhaps a little disappointing to the passenger inside the stroller. When we got home, I flopped on the couch, while AwesomeCloud... cried. Of course.

Then I changed the bedsheets and let him jump in the pile of dirty sheets. He pulled out some Legos and played with them for about 90 seconds, and then when he wanted to go out and I told him to pick the Legos up first, he cried.

His drama over picking things up frustrates me. He enjoys perfectly well the act of putting the toys in the box, but he acts as if it's going to be torture. Typical, I suppose.

So. More crying, then we get it all done, then we go outside.

Where he bursts into tears because I won't find his rake for him. I had sat down to weed around the hostas, and as soon as I stood up, I saw the rake. "It's right there," I said. "On the ground. It's red. Look for something red."

This was followed by a crying jag at least ten minutes long, probably longer, as I told him, "It's right there. No, get your own rake. Go back over there. You're practically standing on it. No, don't turn around. Look down. Look down on the ground. Down, like this. No, it's over there. Go back over there. Look for something red."

FINALLY he found it, and then he sat down beside me and watched me pick weeds.

Then he got an early nap (slightly) but I let him take his book into the crib, so it should be all right. Now I only have to get through this afternoon and evening. (My husband is at Anime Boston with a vendor table, all by himself.)

If I had a huge heaping bowl of ice cream... alas, there are no decadent snacks in the house. I've been making an effort not to buy them. There are Cheezits, but those are not decadent. I have already had a Cheezit and it did nothing for me.

Dong bu dong? D@mmit! (or, baby's first cussword)

2011-04-20T13:36:00.002-04:00

The inevitable has happened. I'm sure most parents have an equivalent story. It's the story of baby's first cussword.

Daddy was very frustrated about something and shouted, "Dammit!"

"Dammit!" Cloud happily repeated.

"Oh no," said Daddy, realizing what he'd done. "Hey Cloud, don't say that. Can you say 'censorship'?"

"Dammit!" Cloud crowed. "Dammit!"

"Censorship," said Daddy. "Censorship!"

"Dammit!"

"Cloud," I tried, "Say, 'Don't say that, Daddy.'"

"Dammit!" said Cloud.

Fortunately, he wound down and hasn't said it since. Seriously, though, who made that word up? It is way too toddler-friendly.

***

In the meantime, something else inevitable has begun: I have started giving Cloud Mandarin lessons.

You may be wondering whether I speak Mandarin. No, I don't. We're learning together as a family.

I'm starting very slowly, because he's so delayed in English that I don't want to set his speech back by introducing too much Mandarin all at once. (Ha ha, like that would ever happen.) So far, all I've done is count to ten, which requires a bit of effort on my part as I struggle to remember the order of the numbers. I always get stuck on lìu, which is six.

I have also begun to shrug my shoulders and say, "Bu dòng," which means "I don't understand." I've started saying that a lot, because while Cloud's vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds, his pronunciation hasn't improved much at all. I'm having trouble keeping up with all this new Toddlerese. So I say to him, "What? What? Shen me? Bu dong."

He finds this endlessly entertaining, and gives up on whatever he was trying to tell me to say, "Bu dong! Bu dong!"

It's a start. A slow start, but a start.

Cats by name

2011-04-18T07:35:00.003-04:00

AwesomeCloud has started to refer to the cats by their names. Previously, he'd been calling them all "cat" and only tried to say their names when he was imitating daddy or me. Now he makes a point of properly identifying each cat on his own.

Riley is "Aye-ee" or sometimes "Rye-ee." Melody is the hardest to understand: "Eh-dee" or even sometimes "Eh-ee." He loves to say Ban Lu's name; sometimes he even yodels it: "Bah-OOoooh!"

Ban Lu hates it when his name is yodeled. When he hears it, he flees, because he knows that sound is always accompanied by an exuberant toddler.

*

Yesterday we got free loam from the local transfer station. Every year the transfer station puts out a gigantic pile of loam and a gigantic pile of wood chips for the people in town to take for ourselves. It gets snatched up pretty quickly - all the landscapers and construction workers fill their flatbed trucks and trailers. We just use storage bins in the back of our Prius, so we have to work harder to get less.

Cloud woke up from his nap (what little nap he managed to take) to discover that I was too busy spreading loam to pay attention to him. I gave him water, but no snack, and then I dumped the howling child on Daddy while I went out to finish the job. When Daddy took him outside, though, things changed. He stomped in the loam. He tried to rake it flat. When I stuck my rake in his pile to help him flatten it, he cried, "No! Mine!"

"Mine" is his new favorite word, although he confuses it with "Yours" sometimes. He also mixes up "me" and "you" somewhat arbitrarily.

Today we will get more loam, and then I don't know what we'll do for the rest of the day.

Milestones I'm missing

2011-04-16T20:09:00.004-04:00

Kiddo has been growing like a weed, with new words and achievements every day. I'm not blogging about them; they come too fast. When Cloud does something particularly interesting, it occurs to me momentarily that I might want to blog about it, but then I don't.

I haven't really felt like typing.

I've felt like gardening, and I cannot wait for the weather to improve so Cloud and I can spend significant amounts of time in the garden. Right now, our outdoor thing is raking. Our yard is full of oak trees, and oak trees require a lot of raking in the springtime.

Raking can be fun with hardly any effort. After all, piles of leaves have been a childhood playtime staple ever since children have lived in areas where trees lose their leaves.

Good times, good times.

*

Cloud loves to try out new phrases, and some of the phrases he chooses are arbitrary and hilarious. "High priority." "Black beans. " He spent two whole days practicing "Mike Tullman." No sign of complete sentences yet, but the verb-noun combinations have started. "Eat muffin?" "Eat mac cheese?" "Eat snack?" Okay, so most of his verb-nouns are about food. That's okay. It's a start.

Last Friday, one of the mallwalkers took an interest in us and prodded us into walking alongside her. Normally, she is too fast for us; Cloud likes to dawdle and drag his feet while all the old ladies whoosh past us. But on Friday, he grabbed this lady's hand and kept pace with her for almost two whole laps around the mall. (One lap equals approximately one mile, or so I've heard.) He was huffing and puffing by the end, but he refused to give up.

Afterwards we went to the library, where he encountered a slightly older boy. I sat in a nearby seat with a copy of The New Yorker and watched them from a distance. The other boy's mother was more inclined to hover. But they started playing so nicely, with so much laughter, that eventually she backed off too.

"I have to look for a book for your brother," she told him impatiently.

He ignored her and did something with a plastic elephant that made Cloud dissolve into hysterical laughter.

So off she went... okay, by that I meant that she went over to a shelf that was as far away from the boys as I was, and still within view.

And the boys continued to play. Apparently, if you're speech delayed, laughing hysterically will make you a popular playmate in spite of the communication gap. Kids have trouble with peers who do not talk as well as they do. Several times, children have judged, "He's a baby!" Others just seem at a loss when he fails to respond to their question or doesn't follow their demands. But he's such a sociable little guy that he's bound to find some way to join in.

*

Kung fu is going well, too. Cloud has been attending for three weeks now, out of the eight we signed up for. (The course goes in eight-week cycles, and we can sign him up for as many cycles as we want, but we're just getting through one cycle before we make any decisions about the next.) Again, his speech delays interfere with his performance a bit. He giggles too much - kung fu artists are NOT supposed to giggle! And they shouldn't shriek when they get in place! And he's the youngest student, developmentally and perhaps literally. But he's actually much better than many of the other kids at following directions.

There are some directions he really struggles to follow, like when he is told to run in place. He just doesn't have the coordination to run in place. He knows the phrase "listening position" but he gets listening positions 1, 2 and 3 mixed up and follows the other kids' examples. But the other kids have more of a tendency to twirl in place, or to drift off and stare at the decorations on the walls, or to chat with each other. Cloud just has a better attention span.

Segregated school lunch, or Children Hate Change

2011-04-14T14:38:00.003-04:00

Jackson, Missouri Middle School, which segregated lunchtime by gender this year, has been getting a lot of attention. It seems that some people on the internet are critical of the policy. Some people have worried that gender segregation will harm the children's development of social skills. The principal claims that the children's behavior has improved since the change.

What do you all think?

I think I'm a little skeptical about the level of cause-and-effect here. I believe it's possible that having girls eat lunch with girls and boys eat lunch with boys is not inherently behavior-changing. Rather, it's change for change's sake that causes the kids to behave better.

Kids hate drastic change. If you tell the kids that the change is their fault, they often take it to heart. If you tell them that you're controlling who they eat lunch with because their behavior has been poor, and you hope that the new structure will inspire them to behave better, they just might. Especially in middle school, where they're just starting to learn how to grow up and are afraid of getting it wrong.

The kids didn't realize that they had so much influence on their world, and now that the routine has been changed so dramatically, they want to stop and take stock before they inadvertently change the world again.

The effect may be reduced by the fact that only the sixth grade eats lunch under the gender separation policy, so they're new to the school already. And the policy was implemented at the beginning of the year, so the kids weren't forcibly ripped from their pre-established social circles in the middle of the year. Therefore, my hypothesis only works if merely telling the kids about the change is enough to get them thinking self-consciously.

Here's something interesting: the students want to keep the gender-segregated lunches. That kind of supports my hypothesis. Kids hate change, want to avoid it, vote against it.

I'm really skeptical of the idea that not socializing with kids of the opposite sex for an hour a day for one year will set kids behind socially. The kids who are at high risk of falling behind in their opposite-gender social skills are going to fall behind with or without opportunity.

(Take ALL opportunity away, and then you've got a problem.)

Happiest time

2011-04-13T20:18:00.002-04:00

I think this is the happiest time in my life.

My son is thriving. He's learning, moving around, talking (sort of), interacting with other people, and excited about life in general. The parenting thing has stopped being hard - I'm no longer tired at the end of the day just on account of being a parent. I'm past the point of worrying about developmental delays - he's overcome most of them already. I don't have the whole medical issues thing hanging over me anymore, either. The kid is as healthy as a horse. A healthy horse.

My husband is wonderful, we own our own house, my job may be dead-end but it's stable for now, I feel optimistic about my art, I have one eye on the future, it's springtime, no cats are currently on their deathbeds, the world hasn't exploded yet, and I've been making some very tasty meals in the crockpot.

I'm not saying everything is perfect - if someone asked me what I would like right now, I'd be able to rattle off a list. (Sorry, nothing on my list would make a good birthday present.) But I am saying it seems pretty darn good. It IS pretty darn good. I'm not used to things being pretty darn good, but I think they are. I could get used to this.

Greater social investment in sustainable energies... that would be nice.

Dumb adoption question

2011-04-03T09:08:00.002-04:00

I almost forgot to post this. Last week sometime, somebody asked me, "Are you going to tell your son he's adopted?"

I only thought of it just now because of this amusing post about dumb questions people ask adoptive parents.

I replied, "Uh... um... he's Chinese."

The person failed to take a hint, and seemed dead set on having me take her question seriously.

"Well, we know a bunch of other adoptive families. We're in the adoption community," I explained.

"Ah," she said, finally satisfied.

Here are some of my other witty comebacks:

"He doesn't look Chinese!"
"Yes, he does."

"I thought you could only adopt girls from China. How did you get a boy?"
"Things change. They're changing faster than you know. Your information is old."

"Was it hard, adopting from China? Did you have to wait long?"
"Every adoption is hard."

"He's from China? Ugh, I have real problems with China. They should free Tibet."
"I agree. And we should free Hawaii."

"Where's he from?"
"Marstons Mills. Where are you from?"

Yesterday in the supermarket, I saw a white woman in her 50's pushing a grocery cart with an adorable brown baby in it. I smiled at her. She scowled and looked away. I smiled at her again. She finally managed to smile back. She probably didn't see my own nonwhite baby until after the whole exchange was over, because he was a few steps behind me, clutching his kitty in one hand and using the other hand to touch each grocery item exactly once as he walked down the aisle.

And now I must go. Family calls.

Toy in the trash - a growing-up milestone

2011-04-01T17:35:00.002-04:00

Today, Cloud found a toy in the trash. It was an orange zebra eraser-thing, the tiniest piece of junk that you ever did see, and its legs were removable. The only thing Cloud has ever done to it was remove its legs and strew the bits all over the kitchen.

I found the body and one leg under some mail this morning and threw them away.

Later, when I was cooking lunch, Cloud looked up at me and asked, "Trash?" He was holding the zebra and his foot was on the trashcan pedal, holding it open.

"I threw it in the trash," I explained. "It's broken. It has no feet. The feet are gone."

He looked up at me mournfully.

"It's broken," I explained again, emphatically, not bothering to add that he was the one who broke it. "Put it back in the trash."

He did so, heaved a heavy sigh, and went off to look for something else to play with.

A difficult lesson to learn, but he survived it.

Adoption representative in everyday life

2011-03-30T21:24:00.002-04:00

There comes a point in every adoptive parent's life when she has to decide just how open she will be toward curious strangers. In fact, there are often several such points, as things change - our children get older, we have more children, we get tired of old approaches or find them ineffective. I decided early on that I would be quite open and friendly, unless I had a reason not to. I would be an educator when people needed to be educated, and a pleasant conversationalist when they were just trying to chat.

It's worked out pretty well so far. I was worried, at first, that I'd have to work hard to rein myself in as AwesomeCloud got older and understood more, but as it turns out, fewer people grill me when he's around. The vast majority of people act as if they barely notice that Cloud and I are different races. Or they ask if he's adopted, or if we're related at all, and stop there.

We live in a good area for this. In general, people in our region are wise to interracial adoption, domestic or international, and often they know someone who has adopted. Or, at least, they know enough about adoption in general to be satisfied with my vaguest answers.

I haven't run into anyone who has wanted to discuss the politics of Tibet and/or the One-Child Policy in a long time.

Today at kung fu, one of the other mothers showed a particular interest in the fact that AwesomeCloud was adopted. She soon revealed that she was considering adopting a child herself, and wanted to discuss the possibility with her husband, but wasn't sure exactly what to say about it. Someone she knew was trying to adopt a little boy through DSS, and had run into some systematic difficulties, as well as having certain difficulties with the child himself. The woman knew that one adoption story wasn't nearly enough information to go on, so she wanted to hear my story too. She was heartened by seeing Cloud laughing and thriving. The kid can really brighten a room, I'm telling ya!

I described the stunningly positive experience we had with the China Special Needs program, and gave her the usual warnings about never quite knowing what your child will be like. She seemed undeterred by that - it was, apparently, the only thing about adoption she really knew ahead of time - but was very thorough about asking questions and considering my answers. I have faith that she'll be talking to some other people, too, which is important. It's not a great idea to make a decision about adoption after only talking to me.

I don't wish to be an advocate for adoption - it's not my place to go around telling people that they should adopt, because as far as I know, maybe they shouldn't. I can't use my son's wonderfulness as evidence that adoption is always great - Cloud is Cloud, and whoever a family adopts may also be a wonderful kid, but it won't be Cloud. Also, as my sister-in-law said, the parameters that we jumped so eagerly at would scare off a lot of prospective parents. Cloud's age, his special need... maybe we were just too stupid and naive to think of him as a risk. But we risked, and we won.

Actually, I think what we did is we came to the conclusion that our risk assessment skills were inadequate to reliably navigate the murky waters of adoption. So we went with choosing a child that was adoptable with no ethical obstacles, who was not in very high demand by other waiting families, and left the other factors to chance.

And we won.

I think our story is worth telling. I don't mind allowing myself to be used as a representative of one possible outcome of adoption. There are still tragic stories out there, and stories involving a lot more struggle before the success comes. Stories in which success has to be redefined before it will come. Those are important too. Every adoption story involves loss and trauma, including ours.

But... well... here I am. Here we all are. So we may as well talk.

Kung fooooooo!

2011-03-29T15:02:00.003-04:00

AwesomeCloud had his free trial kung fu lesson yesterday. It was hilarious. The class consisted of him, in all his three years and two days old glory, plus two very blonde three-year-old girls whose moms were there with coupons, plus five or six four-to-six-year-olds wearing their gis.

Cloud followed every instruction, including ones not meant for him. For example:

Instructor: "Cloud, you stand right here. Very good. Now Julie, you stand here-- no, no, Cloud, this is Julie's spot. Cloud, stand right here. Very good!"

Cloud: "Yaaaay!"

Instructor: "Okay, now Julie... you stand here. No, Cloud-- okay, fine, Cloud, stand here, and Julie, stand over... here. Good. Cloud, no. Go back over there. I'm trying to get you all in a line. Stand right here, like this. Now Alex, stand... No, Cloud, stand over there. Over there. Okay, fine, Alex, you stand over there."

He was so cute, though, that nobody seemed to mind much. All us parents were looking through the window and laughing our heads off.

The sifu, owner of the dojo, talked us into two sessions a week for eight weeks. Kung fu will end up being, well, not exactly the cheapest activity ever, but probably very good for him. It'll improve his coordination and listening skills. We've already started practicing the exercises at home - if we can get him to remain on his belly during push-ups, and sticking his arms in the air for jumping jacks, he will be able to pass off some semblance of cooperating and following directions.

And... someday... he'll be able to say, "I've been taking kung fu since two days after my third birthday."

Is that worth the money? I'll have to ask him someday.

In regards to the nuclear power plant crisis in Japan

2011-03-27T21:54:00.002-04:00

I have deep concern for the citizens of Japan who are suffering from the toxic fallout of the damaged power plants. I feel for the self-sacrificing heroes who are trying to control the problem, and for their families who have to sit by helplessly and take care of themselves.

I've never been a big proponent of nuclear power. I understand the argument that we need more power, that nuclear is more sustainable than fossil fuels, yada yada. That the consequences of a fossil fuel related catastrophe can be bad, too. (for instance, the BP oil spill.)

However, I prefer the austerity approach. I believe in using less energy for the sake of using less energy. I believe in turning off lights and turning down heat. I believe in small houses and fuel-efficient cars - as few as a family can stand to live with. I believe in subsistence gardening and natural landscaping. I believe in staycations (or at least crashing with friends when traveling, when we can). I believe in yard sales and thrift shops.

"Demand" is such an unpleasant word. I believe we should ask nicely for our power, and use it like we cherish it.

Speaking of austerity, I think we're going to be practicing some extra austerity in this household. It's beginning to dawn on us that kung fu for three-year-olds is such a novel concept because the people who send their three-year-olds to kung fu are... how shall I say this... a tiny bit more affluent than us.

I have some ideas, though. Easy, low-effort, non-disruptive ideas - the best kind.

I only have two of them, though.

3

2011-03-27T21:51:00.000-04:00

I've always wanted a three-year-old.

Now I have one.

Happy birthday, AwesomeCloud. (Only a day late! Oh well, he got his gifts on time.)

AwesomeCloud's early gift

2011-03-24T14:25:00.002-04:00

SPACE

2011-03-23T13:51:00.004-04:00

I'm back from SPACE, and boy is my autograph-signing hand tired!

No, really, it is. I'm not actually joking. So this entry is going to be another short one. I also still don't have my voice back, in spite of it being Wednesday already.

However, I do have my AwesomeCloud minicomic completed and I can show it off to you. Here's the cover:

It sold well enough, although not as well as I'd hoped at a memoir-friendly show like SPACE.

Oh well. Now I have plenty of copies left over to sell at this Sunday's show. It's a local comic show and we're bringing Cloud. Sunday is the day after his birthday. I have some posts in mind, mostly about him turning 3 but also some about adoption in general, but I continue to not feel much like typing.

Hope you're all well.

My trip into SPACE

2011-03-16T14:52:00.001-04:00

I'm going to Ohio. I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm headed for the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo, or SPACE.

There I will debut my new minicomic, "AwesomeCloud and the Butterfly Garden."

I'd post the cover, but I haven't finished it yet. I'm finishing it right now.

Rapid changes, slow blogging

2011-03-15T20:16:00.002-04:00

Sorry I haven't been blogging much lately. AwesomeCloud has been making great strides in all areas, especially speech. And in boundary-testing. He's still not a little toddler terror, but he is keeping me on my toes and defying various house rules to varying degrees at various times.

His infectious laugh forces everyone to forgive him, though... most of the time.

I have a few momentous blog posts in mind, and one or two have already been started. Whether they'll ever see the light of day is anyone's guess. I compose them in my mind while I'm doing other things, but by naptime, I no longer feel like typing them in.

Cloud is turning three, which marks a bunch of developmental milestones, plus some adoption timeline milestones too. By 3/26, he will have been a member of our family for as long as he wasn't. 18 months in a Chinese orphanage; 18 months in a Cape Cod family. Pretty exciting.

I feel guilty for not blogging this chapter of our life better. I feel like I owe it to my son to record this time in his life for posterity. I can't give him a moment of his first 18 months of life, but the second 18 months have been unfolding with me present to witness it, every moment, every day, and I want to save it all for him.

But I hate making videos, and I can only blog so much, and I'm going to have to trust that I'm already saving enough memories for him.

There are so many things in life that I will never be able to give him.

I will never be able to answer his questions about his original family. I'll never know why they let go of him. I can't reassure him that their reasons were sound, because I don't know what their reasons were.

I can never give him the ability to blend anonymously into the crowd - not while we live in White Person Central, and not if we move to Chinese-filled China. When it comes to race, our family is conspicuously mixed. Mostly, that's okay. We don't have to blend in every moment. But when you never blend in at any moment, the whole act of blending in takes on a greater meaning. I'm used to blending in; I did it all my life until recently. I can't give my son that kind of foundation. Race will be relevant to him right from the start.

I can't teach him about his heritage. We'll have to learn about Chinese culture together, as a family, as outsiders.

I can't teach him witty ripostes to schoolyard bullying and badgering, because I don't know how to do that stuff myself. The best I can do is teach him geek pride, and hope it sticks.

I can't provide every mentor he'll ever need. His dad and I can guide him through many of the important lessons in life, but when it comes time for him to see what an Asian-American can do, I can only hope there will be some Asian-Americans around for him to look up to. I'm working on that.

I can't offer him any birth stories, genetic history, or genealogy.

I can't protect him from the deeply disturbing and brutal history of his anonymous ancestors, and I'm not going to try. I doubt anything really terrible ever happened to my bloodline, not since the Samnites held off the encroaching Holy Roman Empire in the rough terrain of the Abruzzi mountains. It's very unlikely that my son's bloodline had nearly as much comfort and security as mine.

I shouldn't dwell on the things I lack. Life is tough. Nobody has everything they want. The good thing about being born into an imperfect situation is that you can always strive to make it better.

But it's a mother's instinct to provide a perfect life for her child. No one wants to see her child struggle. But all humans struggle. I struggle. Don't you?

I worry because someone I know has a daughter who struggles with adoption and race issues. Because in the age of blogging, I can read dozens of people's innermost thoughts about their struggles. I can learn all about adoption identity issues without ever having been adopted, without needing to lose my parents for even a second. I can read and ponder and empathize, and then I can anticipate my son experiencing the same struggles.

I knew this would happen. I wouldn't have adopted blindly. This is all well within expectations. Adoption involves a lot of personal loss and trauma. I just have to find the right balance between learning about it and coping with it.

I should blog more. Or at least, I should blog well. I'm trying.

Japan earthquake/tsunami

2011-03-11T13:27:00.002-05:00

An 8.9 point earthquake! How exciting! And not in a good way.

This morning, the mallwalkers asked me whether Cloud's home was affected. I didn't know, so I looked it up. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that China has pledged to give aid to Japan. I'll talk about my thoughts on China as a world power some other time; for now, i'll say their generosity makes me happy.

Their tsunami warnings have been downgraded; apparently the east coast of China is only expecting waves a foot and a half high.

Meanwhile, there was a separate earthquake in Yunnan province, unrelated to the Japan earthquake (the two regions are on different tectonic plates), in which 25 people died. Yunnan is part of that vast region of China that does not have disaster-resistant architecture. The mallwalkers and i were talking about that, too. The lack of disaster-resistant architecture continues to be a problem in most of China.

When I told them I wasn't worried about Shanghai, because their buildings were designed to withstand whatever tremors they got from the distant earthquake, the mallwalkers said, 'Of course."

Actually, no, not 'of course.'

Everybody is kung fu fighting

2011-03-08T15:40:00.004-05:00

I'm all excited. I was mulling over introducing my son to martial arts, and now I've decided I'm really going to do it.

I'm inordinately excited. Excited beyond reason. Why? Am I living vicariously? Do I wish my parents had signed me up for kung fu as a child? (Actually, yes I do, after the fact. As a child I can't imagine what I would have thought of the concept. Fewer girls were doing it, and there were no cultural references to girls taking martial arts lessons when I was little. But now, I would have loved to have.)

I'd like to say that my son's own sudden interest was the deciding factor. He is interested. A tae kwon do demonstration gave him thrills last month. "Kung Fu Panda" fascinated him - he started jumping around, howling and kicking. (He only watched half, which was quite enough for someone his age.)

But I think it was actually a foregone conclusion.

We found a kung fu studio in the next town that looks promising. It has the two most important factors:

1) They teach a class for 3-year-olds.
2) Kung fu is culturally Chinese.

They are apparently not into laying on the Chinese culture, which is too bad. Their website casually mentions Shaolin, but their style and method is largely American.

Still, it seems like a good starting point. It's nearby, it'll take kids his age, and the sifu seems really nice from what little I've heard. If AwesomeCloud develops a passion for kung fu, we can always explore additional options later.

Like, I dunno, going to China and sending him to study on a mountaintop.

Just kidding. I've been reading National Geographic too much. (The February issue had a great article about Shaolin monks who live on mountaintops. The photography was breathtaking. And maybe a little dream-inspiring.)

Now I just have to make contact with the sifu, sit in on a class for free, and find out precisely how much maturity the kiddo will need in order to get started. Should we plan to start him this summer? Wait until he can talk in complete sentences? Is it worthwhile to pay for classes before he's old enough to grasp what martial arts are for?

They're for exercise, by the way. I'm being realistic. I don't expect him to be able to take on a gang of street thugs single-handedly, nor do I ever want him to.

They're for exercise, balance, self-discipline, following directions, and occasionally competition if he ever wants to enter tournaments.

They're also for clout. I admit it. When his curious classmates ask him dumb questions about his Chinese heritage, they will inevitably ask him, "Do you know karate?" I want him to be able to answer, "The Chinese martial art is called kung fu, and yes, I know it."

I'm shallow like that.

I'll sign him up for Chinese brush-painting classes, too, if any come our way. Why not? He's got a body and lots of energy, so why not kung fu? He has hands and the house is full of art supplies, so why not brush painting?

Mangled English is so cute!

2011-03-04T21:14:00.003-05:00

Today my son and I were driving to the library. It was hot in the car, so I cracked open the front passenger window, and then I cracked open his window in the back. He loves it when I open his window, even just the tiniest crack.

"Window," he said.

"Two windows," I replied.

"One-dow, two-dow," he said.

So cute!!!!

Well, I thought it was cute.

He also did a bunch of things today, and in the past couple of weeks, that I think were so cute and wonderful, but would probably bore you all to death. I'm in the middle of that awkward toddler-mom phase, where the kid is doing amazing new things he's never done before several times a day, but they're the same amazing things every toddler does.

The fact that he still has significant speech delays changes the tenor of my joy. Every time his speech improves, I think it's ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL, in a way that a parent whose child does not have speech delays probably doesn't experience. It was the same thing with physical achievements, when AwesomeCloud had physical delays. For instance, when Cloud finally learned to walk, I was overcome with relief. A huge burden had been lifted.

That's life for a parent of a child with delays. You know it's likely that your child will do this and that and the other thing, eventually, but you're never completely 100% sure until it happens.

It's not the kind of worry I would choose to have, except... well, I did. We chose this. On purpose. And we're pretty happy about it.

I've been attending Zen meditation again. Zen Teacher Jim is off gallivanting in Europe (just kidding) and Zen Teacher Tim is running the show at home. Although I don't have the same rapport with Tim as I do with Jim, Tim says some things now and then that really sink in. American Zen is starting to gel with me. It's not precisely Chinese culture, per se, but it's a Western-style window into Eastern thinking. We Westerners treat the Asian worldview as mysterious and opaque, and so it becomes. But it doesn't have to be so unapproachable. I can approach it if I try hard enough. If I listen intently enough.

Plus, some of this Zen stuff is just plain brilliant, and worth knowing just for its own sake. I hope Cloud develops some cultural pride. He has a lot to be culturally proud of.

AwesomeCloud, pet photographer

2011-02-27T13:29:00.003-05:00

AwesomeCloud loves things with buttons. That includes cameras. He's taken pictures before, but I've been giving him instructions and his skills are improving. He can now point the camera at the desired subject. He can also push the button when I tell him to. He can't frame the photo yet, but with a little trial and error, he can at least get the cat into the photo some of the time. This morning he was chasing Riley around with the camera, with some encouragement from me.

Here she is practicing her favorite pastime - searching for forgotten morsels of dry food on the kitchen floor.

Later I found a piece of yarn, and Riley chased the yarn while Cloud chased Riley.

Melody noticed the yarn and had to play, too, but she absolutely refused to face the camera.

Then Cloud and I switched roles and I got a couple of decent shots of him and Riley playing together. Forgive the mess in the living room. I have no clever excuses. It's just a toy-strewn living room, and that's that.

Random cat photo - Ban Lu

2011-02-25T20:47:00.003-05:00

Here's my male cat, Ban Lu, aka "Old Man," making a face.

I'm only posting this photo because I want to link it to another site that doesn't allow uploads, and if I upload it to Flickr, then all you guys wouldn't arbitrarily be enjoying his grand catness.

In other news, the men of the house (human, that is) went to the Museum of Science in Boston today. I wish I'd gone. Now I've missed my son's first visit to the MoS. Bummer.

I lounge around while my son becomes a real person

2011-02-24T20:21:00.002-05:00

Age three is fast approaching, and oh my !!!! it's amazing to watch. AwesomeCloud is undergoing an amazing transformation. No longer is he our little sack of potatoes, staring dully out into the world as if nothing were there. No longer is he our little clinging monkey-boy, latched onto mama and daddy like a baby chimpanzee.

He does stuff now. Amazing stuff. Human stuff.

I love to watch his lips move when he talks. Maybe I'm afraid I'm imagining the words coming out of his mouth... maybe it just astonishes me that the same lips that only ever said, "Ah ah ah" and "WAAAAAAH" a year ago have gained such versatility. Maybe I'm afraid he'll stop talking again. There's no reason for me to expect that. His speech development is full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes.

He plays with Beanie Baby cats. Not only is he not afraid of them; he actually loves them. He carries them around with him and makes them eat invisible food. He makes them play "Head Shoulders Knees and Toes" and he actually sings the whole song himself - the tune if not quite exactly the words. He folds them over so their paws are touching various body parts.

He has renamed himself "Jack." I don't know why. I think it's hilarious. I go along with it and call him Jack both in private and in public if he asks me to. Daddy isn't as amused by it; I assured him that it would probably stop in a day or two and Cloud would forget all about his little name-change game, but he hasn't. Today at the mall he asked me to call him "Jack" while we were playing Trot-Trot. Then just before bedtime, we were tumbling on the bed and he asked me to call him "Jack" again. He'd leave the room repeatedly, and return shouting, "Baack!"

"Jack is back!" I'd say.

This was the funniest thing in the whole world.

He carries on conversations with friendly strangers. He can't tell them his name, but he can answer "How old are you?" ("TWOOO!") and "How are you?" ("Gooh.")

He asks for food and then rejects it. He tries kicking me, just to see what will happen. (Nothing good happens.) When we're getting our jackets on, we can tell him where we're headed and he understands and looks forward to getting there.

He's memorized all the places in town that have free snacks, like Trader Joe's, and he will ask to go there.

He says, "Help? Help? Help?" to get your attention when all he really wants is for you to play with him.

He blurts out certain words of his bedtime stories.

Sometimes he grabs the phone and play-talks on it, and his mannerisms are so convincing I sometimes do a double-take to see if he's really talking to someone.

In general, he's taking on his parents' mannerisms. It's like watching the blossoming of a mini-me, except he's a combination of both of us.

He says, "Oh well," and shrugs his shoulders when he's told he can't have something he wants.

He's doing aaaaallll this amazing growth and development, and what am I doing? Something close to nothing. I sit back and watch him passively. I laugh sometimes. I reprimand him sometimes. I show him new things sometimes. I get annoyed and impatient sometimes.

But most of the time I watch, and I wonder why I hadn't prepared myself mentally for this stage happening so fast.

This afternoon, we had a throwback moment. Cloud woke up from his nap and started crying and wailing for all he was worth. He cried into his macaroni. He wailed through a diaper change. He clenched his fists and gushed tears while I held him on my lap and rocked him.

"Just like old times," I joked to him, but he would not be humored or comforted. Rocking and holding never worked during old times, either. It always seemed like an exercise in futility. I couldn't solve his problems, and my presence wasn't even a small comfort. Lately I'd forgotten what that felt like, but Cloud reminded me today.

It feels like it will never end, like you'll be powerless to comfort him forever and ever. I'm very good at remembering that nothing lasts forever, but I know what it feels like to have to remind myself every moment.

Of course it gets better. It has to get better. How long could I possibly be a stranger to my own son?

Well, it got better. On these rare moments when the bad parts return, it can be scary, but I know the bad parts were just making a cameo. When the screaming stops, Cloud is a little boy again. A laughing, imaginative, almost-talking little boy who knows exactly where he is and rather likes it.

A kid who developmental experts fawn over instead of frown over, as his test scores go up and up and up. A kid who strangers no longer remark on as "What a big baby!" when you know he's actually a small toddler. A kid who pays attention to every adult conversation, every multisyllabic word, and saves it all up for later.

Someday he's going to say 'ionic compound' or 'heterogeneous' or one of the other big words we commonly use in this household, and I'm going to throw a party.

With cake.

You're invited.

The beginning of the end of separation anxiety

2011-02-16T22:06:00.002-05:00

I often worry about Cloud's inability to be separated from me (except when he's with his daddy; he's fine with that). There might be preschool in his future, and babysitters, and of course sometimes I'd like to use the bathroom in peace without compelling him to interrupt his game.

We recently discovered the Sturgis library, which has a wonderful new train table. It's essentially the same as every other library's train table (train tables seem to be popular in libraries around here) but that doesn't matter - it's new to Cloud, and therefore it's irresistible.

Unfortunately, just as Cloud was ripping off his jacket and laying claim to the train table, I informed him that I had to use the restroom. I asked, "Do you want to come with me or stay here and play with the trains?"

"Teens," he said emphatically, but he followed me into the restroom. (It was right there, barely 5 feet away from the train table. I'd been hoping...)

So I closed the door behind us, and he immediately tried to open it again.

So I asked him again.

"Teens," he said.

I opened the door and told him to make up his mind, trains or restroom, because I was about to shut the door again if he didn't hurry up.

And he left! He went right to the train table, and when I came out again, he was still there and he was perfectly fine.

I'm not letting my hopes rise too far up, though. One paltry example of him entertaining himself for a minute and a half without me isn't an official Turning Point. I know that, at his age, clinginess isn't entirely abnormal. I've been told that I can work on the issue by gradually backing away from him, until he eventually learns that he's perfectly fine if I'm not standing directly next to him.

I've tried that, and it backfires. He starts watching me carefully for any signs that I might pull the backing-away stunt again. He gets so sensitive that any teeny step backwards or glance toward the door gets him grabbing at me or shadowing me. It's at the point where I don't feel like it's worth the effort anymore. I'm stuck letting him cling. If anyone's going to be moving away, it has to be Cloud.

Maybe there's hope. Maybe he won't have the absolute worst case of separation anxiety the preschool has ever seen, and maybe he will soon be able to continue playing games he's immersed in without interrupting himself to follow me into another room.

Part of my problem is that I'm doing that horrible mommy thing of believing my child will never ever ever grow and change. He'll be clingy in middle school. He'll be clingy in college. While everyone else's kids will be growing up and enjoying life, mine will still be following me into the bathroom in his 40's.

That's just gross.

Maybe this worry is just supplanting the last one - what if he never talks? I'm pretty sure he'll learn to talk. He's making improvements every day. He hasn't completely crossed the line from "nonverbal" to "verbal" yet, but he's getting there. He can say enough to give the impression of being able to hold a rudimentary, but real, conversation. He'll talk.

But I'm still doing the "But what if he never...?" thing.

Why do parents do that?

(I know the answer to that one already, actually. "What if" worrying can be helpful, anyway, if it helps us prepare for eventualities that may seem hypothetical today, but could still come true later.)

Note to my son: Other people's pain

2011-02-13T18:45:00.004-05:00

From AdoptionTalk:

Abducted v. Adopted: What's the Difference?

At Huffington Post, Jennifer Lauck, author of Found: A Memoir and Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found, asks that question:

Carlina White said she always had a sense she did not belong to the family that raised her. The twenty-three-year-old woman had been abducted in 1987 from a Harlem Hospital when she was nineteen-days-old. White was then raised by her abductor, Ann Pettway. Pettway is now in custody for kidnapping.

What White expresses about her sense of belonging is what I have felt for all the years of my own life -- only I am called adopted versus abducted.

And in the comments section:

Anonymous said... With all due respect, making the decision to sign away the rights to your child are not in any way the same as having a child taken by force as perpetrated in the crime discussed in this article.

Sorry, but second thoughts and regrets are just not the same.

While I may be sympathetic to mothers who felt they had no recourse or faced societal pressures and stigmas, pretending its the same, doesn't make it so.

Dear AwesomeCloud,

Don't ever diminish other people's pain. Not even if you think their pain is unjustified. Not even if you think they're overcomparing it to something much worse than anything they've ever experienced. Not even if your pain is clearly greater than theirs.

Not even if you could out-angst them with one hand tied behind your back, on your birthday, with cake.

Not even if they obviously don't know what they're talking about. Not even if they say, "I know exactly how you feel. My friend got a puppy when it was too young, and it whined a lot and missed its mom for a whole year."

Not even if they say, "I feel terribly, terribly alone in the world, and don't tell me I have a wonderful family, because I still feel terribly, terribly alone in the world."

Let me tell you something about other people's pain: it's annoying. That's right, it's annoying. If you hear somebody complain about how hard it is to be them, and you get annoyed, you're not alone. Everybody does. And it goes both ways: everyone gets annoyed when you talk about your pain, too.

The response to hearing about other people's pain often goes two ways: an urge to try to help them, or an urge to convince them to shut up. Both responses are natural. The urge to help is often practiced by helper-type personalities, and is their kinder, gentler way to get the complainer to shut up. The helper-type believes that a rosier outlook will cheer the complainer up. Sometimes - okay, usually - the complainer isn't willing to be cheered up, and resists all helpful suggestions. The complainer feels un-listened-to and diminished instead of cheered up.

Sometimes you may feel too impatient to help, like the commenter I cited at the beginning, and you'll want to directly diminish the complainer.

Don't do either one of these. Don't get annoyed in the first place. If you find yourself getting annoyed, stop and say to yourself, It's not annoying. It's honest.

That person isn't just a complainer. She's a person with pain.

The pain of alienation is the most common thing in the human race. Everyone feels alienation. Maybe we all shouldn't, but we all do. People who appear to live charmed lives feel alienation. People who make all the friends, get all the money, travel around the world, win all the college scholarships, and make high honors every semester... every one of them feels alienation. So do the people who struggle to make friends, can't hold a job, struggle in school, and rarely leave their houses.

Why does everyone feel alienation? I believe it's a byproduct of empathy. We humans can empathize with each other, but we're not actually empathic with each other. We can guess what other people are thinking and feeling, but we can't actually get into their heads to feel the exact feelings they're feeling. (Some people will tell you they can. They might claim to be empaths. My guess is that they believe exceptionally strongly in their empathetic guesses.) So we feel like we're missing something crucially important about being human - that interconnectedness that we swear we should feel but... we... just... don't.

But there are lots of things in life that will heighten feelings of alienation by piling more alienation onto the original feelings. Things like adoption trauma. Things like being abandoned, ignored, marginalized, or diminished.

People with disabilities feel alienation. Remember that whenever you meet a person with a disability - if you alienate her by treating her poorly, you're just adding more alienation on top of the mounds and mounds of alienation she's already experienced. Even if all your friends treat her poorly; if you do too, you become just one more hurtful jerk in a sea of jerks. You can do better. So can your friends, and you should remind them of that.

People with above-average intelligence feel alienated. So do people with below-average intelligence. So do people with average intelligence if they're in a group of people that can't connect with them. Being of like mind with our companions is extremely important to us humans. Forget that. People who think differently from you are more interesting than people who are just like you. If you can't listen to people who think differently from you, and who experience pain differently from you, you'll never learn why they feel alienated.

Sometimes their thoughts may seem bizarre and convoluted. For instance, the hypothetical kid who compares adoption to a puppy. It's a silly comparison, but it almost makes sense in a certain way: the kid is trying. He's grasping. He's trying to imagine the experience of being abruptly ripped from one home and put in another, and he's never experienced it himself, but he remembers the puppy. Something about the puppy's ordeal struck him, saddened him, enough to make him remember it now.

Yes, it's a stupid thing to say, but it's all the kid has to offer. However, there's something else the kid has, that he's afraid to mention - he has feelings of alienation too. How do you know? Because everyone has them. That kid may not know what it's like to abruptly and involuntarily switch families, but he knows what alienation feels like, and that's why he's trying to connect with you. Perhaps lamely, but he's trying.

The writer of the "Abducted vs. Adopted" post above felt a connection to the woman in the news story. She read the woman's description of her feelings of alienation and said, "Hey, that describes my feelings too!" And why wouldn't it? If she described her feelings of alienation without referring to the abduction article, would anybody be surprised?

We may not want to hear other people describe their feelings of alienation at all. We may find such complaints annoying. That annoyance may come about because we're comparing justifications for other people's pain - whether we feel our pain is more justified or less justified.

But it's not a contest. People shouldn't need to prove their pain is justified before they talk about it. So what if it's silly, or if you don't want to hear it anymore? They're not complaining for your sake. They're not asking you to rate their pain from one to ten. They're not really claiming their pain is really the same as this or that; that adopted people are the same as puppies or abductees.

We humans are always trying to find common threads between us. One common thread is the basic feeling of alienation. The details don't matter.

Well, actually they do matter, but not in any way that makes it appropriate to diminish someone whose pain isn't like yours.

And maybe they'll respond respectfully when you describe your pain. If you ever do. You don't have to if you don't want to.

AwesomeCloud kills with cuteness at Templecon

2011-02-07T18:57:00.009-05:00

We had a blast at Templecon this past weekend. In terms of the dealer table, it wasn't great, but the show itself was so colorful and musical that we couldn't help having fun.

Cloud was at his very best. Although our personal space at the table was tiny, some of Cloud's favorite activities were nearby, so Daddy and I could take turns wandering off with him without inconveniencing whichever of us was left at the table.

As the con went on, Cloud got more and more popular. Everybody recognized him. Twenty or thirty people passed us in the hallway and stopped and squealed, "I saw you DANCING!" Apparently, Cloud did a lot of dancing. There were bands onstage at all hours of day and night, so the stage became the go-to place for us.

"Look, look, there's the cute kid I was telling you about!" shouted one young woman in an elaborate white dress to her friends. "Isn't he adorable?!" Then to me she asked, "Was he dressed like Mario last night?"

"Only accidentally," I explained. "But I'll take it!"

See, we had an official costume for him - a tweed jacket, a velvet vest and purple shirt and tie, plus dress pants and patent leather shoes. For a prop we got him a vintage brass toy horn. That's what he wore on Saturday. On Friday, he had on jean overalls, and somehow ended up in a red shirt. All he needed was the Mario hat! We will have to find one someday.

Other comments he elicited:

"He's not afraid of the zombies at all. That is so awesome." (When we walked in on the makeup session preceding the zombie crawl)

"OMG. He is the cutest kid in the world. I'm just going to die." (When he attempted to help a woman pull her wheeled suitcase down the hall)

"I was telling my mom about my new adopted friend, and she said, 'How old is this guy?' and I was like, 'He's two.' And she was all like, 'Ohh... hrmmm.' But I didn't care. He's my new best adopted friend!" (A female staff member who was friendly and helpful and also adopted)

"Hi, little guy! Wow, he's pretty cute in that getup. How old are you?" (A big burly guy in the elevator with piercings and leather and a big ol' bandolier strapped across his chest)

"He looked just like a real photographer! He had all the moves!" (A woman who watched Cloud take 'pictures' of one of the musical acts from all angles - unfortunately he wasn't pressing down hard enough on the shutter release, so I can't show you any wacky-angle shots he took. But he put on quite a convincing performance. The woman was heartbroken to learn that he hadn't taken any pictures, after all that angling he did.)

Here are some photos taken by other people, though:

Our friends in their finery.

AwesomeCloud finds a dancing partner with some upper body strength.

Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band was a favorite.

And Cloud was a favorite with the Ladies of the Fancy Hat Booth.

Spontaneous politeness

2011-02-04T12:12:00.003-05:00

I can't quite explain it, but it's happening. My son says "Thank you." Okay, that's an easy one; I've worked hard on that one by saying "Thank you" myself all day every day. I say it when he gives me something and I say it when I give him something. I say it after he says it, instead of "You're welcome." As a result, he doesn't know "You're welcome" but he says "Thank you" unprompted at least twenty times a day.

But where did "Please" come from?

He hears the word "please" often enough, and the speech therapist uses it a lot too. But language-wise, it's just noise. He's not ready for noise yet. He's still at the stage of blurting out a single word (or the occasional two-word phrase, as long as the two words go together, like "Brown Bear" when he's asking for his kiddie CD). But now, when he wants something, he'll name the item, pause, and add, "Peeeeze!" Or he'll just say "Peeeeze!" and hopes I guess what he wants.

He also says "Excuse me" (or "Hoo hee") but he only says it to cats.

Now I'm wondering if I can teach him to spontaneously say "Sorry." Can you imagine? That would be incredible. Then I can become one of those obnoxious moms who says, "Parents these days don't bother to teach their children common etiquette. That's what's wrong with the world today. Look at my AwesomeCloud here; he says 'Please' and 'Thank you' and 'I'm sorry' without even any prompting."

Old ladies would love me! Everyone else, not so much.

In other news, we have a dealer table at Templecon starting this evening. Here's a picture of our dealer table at a recent con, PiCon:
At Templecon, we're all going in Victorian... well... more like Edwardian garb. Even Cloud. It should be fun.

It must be cabin fever

2011-02-03T12:23:00.002-05:00

I've been unusually cynical and sarcastic on this blog, haven't I? Not quite ranty, fortunately, but I seem to be looking down on my hypothetical audience. Any real people reading this should rest assured that I still respect you.

Among AwesomeCloud's great accomplishments today was drawing in a library book for the first time. With a pen, of course. He is no longer at the age where I can keep all pens and paper products safe from him. Not in the House of 4000 Books and almost as many pens.

Another great accomplishment was that he climbed up on my knees while I was sprawled on the couch, attempting to read the library book (before the pen incident) and shouted, "Top!" He shouted it until I said "Top" too.

Yay top.

In hindsight, I think the library book was specifically targeted. It was taking my attention away from him, and therefore when he found the opportunity to deface something, it was the obvious choice.

He also went way out of his way to get it, leaning over several other things made of paper to reach it on the other side of the kitchen table while I was busy doing other things. It looks targeted to me. Umm. That doesn't help me figure out what to do about it, though. Stop getting library books? I dunno. I like library books.

Misconceptions about disability

2011-02-02T14:31:00.002-05:00

Twice recently people have inquired about Melody, our cat with cerebellar hypoplasia. Once it was the speech therapist - she watched Melody stumble in from the bedroom and said, "How does that cat get from one side of the house to the other every day... well, I guess she's used to it...?"

(Which was hilarious in itself because it's less than 20 feet from her bed in the bedroom to her food bowl in the kitchen, and her litter box is in the bathroom in between them. She doesn't do stairs, so her available territory is actually very, very small.)

And then the Early Intervention teacher said, as she saw Melody come out a few days later, "Oh, there's Melody. How is she doing? Is she feeling okay?"

Whenever someone shows concern about Mel, I always get enormous glee out of answering, "Oh, she's the healthy one. She's no trouble at all. It's the other two that give me problems and are sick all the time." And then I laugh at the shock and confusion on their faces.

Cerebellar hypoplasia is a lot like cerebral palsy - it's a single instance of brain damage, usually in utero, followed by a potentially long, healthy life (depending on the cat's living environment). Some cats with CH have heart defects, and some are incontinent, but Melody has neither of those. She's just a healthy, normal cat, with the personality of your average cat and the common sense of one too, whose muscle control is very poor and who stumbles when she walks and can't coordinate all four legs well enough to jump. She's easy. She never bolts out the front door, and she never eats the pizza I forgot I left on the counter.

The other two, however, are on a special diet because of their IBS. If either one of them eats commercial cat food, they get very, very ill. Plus, Riley has all sorts of behavior problems and food issues as a result of her abdominal discomfort, and she seems utterly convinced that she's starving to death.

Yeah, Melody is definitely not the poor, poor sick kitty in this family. And I will laugh at you endlessly if you think otherwise. :)

That's all I wanted to post about - just a post about my cats. If this post had been about kids with disabilities, it might have been a keeper. But it's not. Just cats.

Okay, I'll write about something else too.

AwesomeCloud and I went to the library today. We overheard two librarians talking about one's granddaughter. "She's an only child, and she doesn't like it at all."

Doesn't like being an only child? Hmm. Seems to me they're doing it wrong. Siblings are great - I have two and I loved growing up with them - but if you only have the one child to begin with, and you're not giving her a rich enough life to satisfy her, you're missing a golden opportunity. You can life an interesting, enriching life... and take the kid along.

That's the number one reason why I keep thinking of our Child #2 as a "maybe." With one, we've had to make a few modifications to our lifestyle, but it's still essentially the same lifestyle. Everyone always says that when you become a parent, you look back on your old life... especially if you have your child later in life, after spending 10 or 20 years enjoying an adult lifestyle. Not us. We find a way to accommodate the kid! Why wouldn't we? There's so much stuff in the world to discover and experience and learn, and he should learn it too. Learning and experiencing the world now only saves him time later. When he's a little bit older and wondering how to find his place in the world, he'll already know what the world is like. He won't waste his adolescence in an ignorant, fearful haze, like I did, afraid to take even the tiniest step out into the world because I was so sure I was going to crash and burn in that horrible, alien place. And what do you know, that's exactly what happened to me. I crashed. I burned. I floundered, struggled, and rejected numerous opportunities to succeed in life because all opportunities looked equally dangerous to me. Some kids entering adulthood do better than me... most... but think of what would happen if the opposite were true. Think of raising a child as a citizen of the world right from the start. Imagine exposing your child to adulthood for his entire life. So that when he finally becomes an adult, it's old hat.

You can do that with an only child.

I also found a parenting book called "Bringing Up Geeks" which seems to be worth a better look. I wasn't going to read any more parenting books, but my kid's a geek being raised by geeks, so apparently I'm the target audience. I may even be past the target audience, as the author defines "geek" as "a child who is empowered to be himself and be genuinely interested in real things rather than following trends and fads in pursuit of short-term popularity" not "child who goes to gaming conventions and sells comic books at his family's dealer table, occasionally while in costume."

Black History Month, and my reading recommendation

2011-02-01T17:58:00.002-05:00

February is Black History Month.

To celebrate, I recommend picking up a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It's the story of a black woman who dies of cervical cancer in the 1950's and then revolutionizes the human cell research industry.

It's also the story of a grad student who gets swept up in the drama of the surviving members of the Lacks family as she researches the book.

The science is approachable, the human stories are compelling, and the victories and tragedies experienced by the people involved might make you cry a little. It's an important bit of American history that hardly anyone knows about (except everyone who helped make this book a well-deserved best-seller) and it's the best book I've read in a long, long time.

Possibly ever. I don't know.

It's an easy, effortless way to feel like you're celebrating Black History Month, and it's an easy book to get. I saw it in two displays this morning at B&N, and it's been out for over a year already, so there probably isn't a waiting list for it at your local library.

Hey, give me your recommendations, too. Right now I'm reading "The Woman Who Fell From the Sky" which is about a journalist who spent 3 weeks in Yemen. It's a fast read, though. What should I read next?

White people are the center of the universe

2011-01-31T13:43:00.004-05:00

I've been reading up on race issues, like I said I was going to. I've been working really hard to comprehend the concepts that I, as a white person in a white society in a world where white people enjoy the most power, haven't had to think about for most of my life. And I've run up against a little problem.

People who talk about racial issues cast it as The Most Important Social Issue One Can Experience. All other aspects of personhood are secondary. This attitude is pretty much ubiquitous, as far as I can tell. You never seem to read an account that goes, "At this point in my life I went to college, and had a bunch of college experiences, and here's some racism I encountered." It's always, "Racism was here in my life, and there, and at some point I also went to college."

And the white people who perpetrate the racism are simply accepted out of hand. As if it's a given that the white person is normal and the nonwhite person is exceptional by default.

I'm talking about minor incidents of racism, not WTF incidents like what happened to Kelley Williams Bolar. Things like casually insensitive comments and everyday stereotyping.

Things like a mom telling her friend, "Jimmy has some good friends at school, and a few of them are black." (Yay! Hey, some kids are black! It's some kind of phenomenon.)

Things like a family friend remarking, "Your son hardly even looks Chinese! His eyes are so round." (Yeah, and guess what - his hair is brown, and he speaks English almost exclusively, and he's 100% Han Chinese.)

Things like, "I'm going to work on my (transracially adopted) daughter's self-esteem, because I don't want her to feel too much like she's different."

Because the child is a nonwhite member of a predominantly white family, in a predominantly white society, and since white people are normal, nonwhite people are different.

Their teachers and classmates will reinforce this message, because they believe it too. Because the kids' parents believe it, and the teachers' colleagues and neighbors believe it. If you want to go where white people do not totally rule everything, you can go to little enclaves of ethnicity that exist here and there. Chinatown for Asians, African-American neighborhoods for blacks, Latin ghettos for Latinos. If your child is an ethnicity other than those big ones... um... good luck. Maybe there's a club you can join. But you'd better do something, or else your child will feel like a lone ethnic minority in a sea of normal white people.

I don't disagree that joining a club or going to Chinatown is a good thing to do. I'm totally in favor of making the extra effort, and I'm getting ready to do the same myself. (It can be hard... my son is still small and although he travels well, he still has limits appropriate to his age. And while I'm good at making small talk with strangers, I can't exactly make intimate long-term friendships with random local Chinese people at will. But I will do something... I dunno, something.)

But the attitude with which most white people avail their kids of the kids' racial culture of birth, seems a bit Anglocentric, if you know what I mean. They don't want the kids to feel too small, too left out. The cultural pride seems a bit forced at times. As if the greatest desire in any child's heart is - of course! - to be white.

Because being white is normal, as every white person knows, and therefore as any person who lives among white people knows, and it's everyone's desire to be normal.

It's just... weird. And icky. Well, I find it icky. Here I was, a sheltered white girl going out into the big wide multicolored world, just to find... that everyone wants to be like me. Or at least that's a common assumption. They just want to go to college and have a career and live in peace, like a white person does, and raise their children in a welcoming environment, except that the people they aspire to be like don't want to tarnish the 'normalness' of whiteness by including nonwhites in it. So the nonwhites can be successful, can be middle class, can send their kids to affluent schools as long as the kids behave (because they might not behave, you know, and that would be a problem) but they can't actually BE normal.

Because then the whole system would fall apart. What kind of normal would nonwhites aspire to, if not the white normal?

We use "But they're culturally assimilated" to defend the presence of ethnic groups, like the Puerto Ricans for instance. "They don't even have accents anymore. They live in the suburbs and act just like us."

What kind of a defense is that?! I've even said it myself once or twice. But now that I think about it, I think it's an awful thing to say!

I have even said to certain people, "Don't worry, my son will be growing up completely American." How horrible of me! Tell me, what's wrong with growing up Chinese? Not that he will - we'd have to move to China for that. But what's conceptually wrong with it? What's so abnormal about being Chinese?

There are 1.3 billion Chinese, compared to 300 million Americans. 67% of the world population is Asian, compared to less than 24% white. Who's normal now? And as far as human races go, we share 98.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, 90%-ish with squid, and a whopping 70% with oak trees. Oak trees!

And we share the elements that our cells are made of with the entire universe. That stuff floating around in space and burning up in stars... that's what we're made of.

It's a whole great big world out there. Any normal person should have the opportunity to learn about it and study it and make something out of it. Not just white normal people. All normal people. I do think that studying and preserving cultures is important. I think social/ethnic/individual identity is important, and interdependent. I think giving our kids a boost is crucial, especially when parents and kids don't share the same race. But I think we're doing our kids, and our neighbors, and ourselves, a grave disservice if we buy into the idea that white culture is some sort of epitome, and other cultures are novelties or onuses that it takes effort to learn to be proud of. Even when everyone you know thinks like that. Not everyone in the world thinks like that, after all. Some people could care less about white culture, and prefer to cast their own culture as normal.

Sometimes it doesn't seem like anyone values their own culture more than our culture, though, with Western pop culture leaking into the remotest corners of he world and English becoming the standard business language pretty much everywhere. And for those people who do believe their own culture is superior, we privately believe they are provincial and ignorant. And probably poor.

When you think of Chinese culture, you think of poor people, don't you?

Even though you know there's a rapidly growing middle class in China. All the newfound prosperity and technology in Asia doesn't define Asia. As long as there are poor people, lots and lots of poor people, the poor people will continue to define the culture.

And that's what my son will learn from the world. I don't know how I'm going to teach him differently... but I'm guessing it will start with me conditioning myself to think differently.

The most boring snow day ever

2011-01-27T21:34:00.003-05:00

No, really. It was. I'd tell you all about it, but there's nothing to tell. It was exceedingly boring.

As an example of how boring it was, I'll give you three highlights.

AwesomeCloud and Daddy played three games of Candyland. Actually, this was pretty cool in a "he's growing up" kind of way. He grasped the concept of taking turns, and of counting squares, but he wasn't very good at finding the right colors. He did find the correct picture of a candy, though, after he drew a picture card. Then everybody cheered, regardless of who won, because on a day like this you'll cheer about anything for any reason.

Yesterday I was breaking kindling and I injured my left hand. There was a round splinter in the palm of my hand - curious, indeed, but not easily removable with pliers. Today I wore a bandaid all day, and one winter glove to keep the bandaid in place, and also to keep grabby Cloud-hands from digging into my wound. And I didn't wash any dishes. (Except the ones I did wash.)

I drew an Africanized honeybee. Well, I pencilled it yesterday. I just inked it today.

Yesterday, while pencilling, I also read a graphic novel called "The Alcoholic" by Jonathan Ames. It was such an intense story, I kept getting disoriented and thinking, "What am I doing in this guy's head? I don't think like that!" The character's relentless self-destructiveness was like a hammer to my brain. It was an extremely clear picture of one of the trademark struggles of addicts - the guilt of knowing that they are the source of their own tragic problems, while people around them have tragic problems that aren't their fault. They may feel they don't have the right to suffer; that they never earned the right to suffer.

The book stabbed me right in the heart.

Nothing like that happened today. Today I did some word puzzles and wore a glove all day.

A day of weird mishaps

2011-01-24T13:52:00.003-05:00

First thing this morning, AwesomeCloud and I brought the Prius to Toyota to have the grill replaced, because the body shop didn't do it. That part was all right. They have a beautiful waiting room, with a playroom and snacks and nice bathrooms. We played for an hour, got a bit of sticker shock, recovered from our sticker shock, and happily drove home.

Then the mom we were going to have a playdate with called to say she was sick. I had volunteered to be on the Chinese New Year committee with my adoption agent, but I wasn't going to go to the meeting because I didn't want to cancel the playdate. However, with the playdate cancelled, I called up my agent and told her I'd be there.

"Great," she said. "It's been moved to noon, though, not eleven like the email said."

"That's fine," I replied. "We'll be there at noon."

I cleaned the house a little, made some soup for an early lunch, and then AwesomeCloud and I left to go to the meeting at the agent's office.

It was 5 degrees out, by the way. Not that this changes my story. It just adds an extra dimension of chill. Brrr.

We arrived at the agent's office, and it was empty. Vacated. Not even a stray pen cap or push pin left lying on the floor. Even the soundtrack of chirping crickets was missing, probably because it was noon on a January day with 5 degree temperatures.

Back into the car we went, with me planning to call her when we arrived home because I don't have a cell phone. I got on the highway, and something on the car made a mysterious crunch. Followed by a mysterious grating sound. I pulled over on the shoulder to look, and found a plastic part that had been under the bumper had cracked and was now hanging down and pressing against the left front tire. I taped it up with medical tape, managing not to get run over by oncoming highway traffic in the process (a hearty thank you to the guy in the semi and the guy in the SUV who pulled into the far lane before you reached me! You guys are awesome! And boooo to the fifty-odd people who didn't.)

Then, because we were only two exits away from Toyota, we went back there and told them that something was seriously wrong with something under our bumper, and it may or may not be related to the work they'd done this morning.

We played in the playroom again and ate more snacks. Then Toyota informed us that the broken piece was a piece that the body shop should have replaced, rather than quick-fixed, when our car was in the accident. And that if we took the car back there, maybe the $400+ cost of fixing it now could be covered by the insurance.

So now I have to get on the phone and call the body shop and the insurance. Because Toyota's quicker-quick-fix wasn't designed to last.

Yay.

At least AwesomeCloud was in a good mood all day. He was picky about eating his lunch, but then he'd had all those snacks, so who can blame him? This past weekend he was both finicky AND foul-tempered. I think he had a cold or something, with no outward symptoms but that left him feeling miserable just the same.

By the way, I still haven't found out what was up with the adoption agency. Obviously, they moved. But beyond the obvious, I know nothing, and I don't feel like calling her up and asking her about it right now. I'll do it later.

New comic: Kaeli and Rebecca

2011-01-20T19:19:00.002-05:00

Hey. Our new comic book is featured on the TempleCon website.

I just finished the back cover. Yay! Now it's off to the printer, and lots of nailbiting and hoping it arrives okay before the con.

TempleCon is in Warwick, RI on Feb 4-6 and we have a dealer table there. Yes, two dealer tables in two weeks. After that, we're going to Manchester, NH and Columbus, OH for more dealer tables.

It's a crash course in the comic book industry for Cloud. :)

AwesomeCloud the congoing kid

2011-01-17T20:47:00.002-05:00

This weekend, we had a dealer table at Arisia. It was in Boston, an hour and a half from where we live, so we commuted all four days. That's a lot of driving time for a toddler. Fortunately, AwesomeCloud does very well in the car.

Friday we got our dealer badges and set the table up. We said hello to our friend Everett who was sitting at the dealer table next to us. Everett and sells a comic book series called "Sky Pirates" with his wife Sue. If you like indie comics, I recommend checking it out. We all left at around 10:00 PM and got home after 11. Kiddo went to bed, and so did I. For some reason, his Kid Music CD was in the CD player instead of our usual Loreena McKennitt, so Cloud played "Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes" and other jump around and gesture games in his crib until midnight, when the CD skipped and i used that as an excuse to shut it off before the end.

On Saturday we all trekked back to Boston for a looooong day of dealing. Cloud discovered the joy of escalators. There were two of them just outside the dealers' room, and two more above those. He and i spent at least an hour that morning going up, up, down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, up, down, up, and down the escalators.

Other than that, he was too antsy and restless to stay behind the table for long, and I was really wishing I'd brought some toys. I always forget to bring toys. Other people fill their minivans with toys. I'm lucky if I find a stray Thomas the Train in my coat pocket so I can offer it to Cloud to play with.

Also, he got it into his head that he was ravenous for nothing but Nutrigrain bars. It became kind of a problem. I'd only brought five.

We got to meet lots of weird people, too. people in fabulous costumes, and people engaging in bizarre conversation. Like the woman who stood directly in front of my sale sign and told me all about her love for cats, spiders, and owls. (Everybody wants to talk about cats and spiders, because our logo is a cat and a spider and those animals feature prominently in our comic books. Owls, however, was a new one.) Then she described in excruciating detail how she got to have a phobia of tea, how she overcame it, and the intricate and elaborate tea-drinking habits practiced today by her husband and her.

People who don't go to geeky cons probably wouldn't appreciate that description, or they might think I'm exaggerating. The whole exchange took about 15 minutes. It felt like an hour. Each passerby who glanced over her shoulder at our books could have been a potential paying customer. Hey, I love wacky conversation as much as anyone, but I gotta make back the table fee, at the very least.

Then there was the woman accompanied by a little girl with long, scruffy hair and a slightly younger boy with long, scruffy hair. The woman was a talker, too. The girl interrupted her a few times to say she was interested in "Minions For Hire" #3. The woman herself showed interest in 'Perils of Picorna." The boy mostly just stood there and shuffled his feet. So here I am, thinking I could coax a sale out of her, and I said, "Perils of Picorna is a great comic book for women and girls who like female characters who don't fit the usual narrow female stereotypes."

The woman replied, "My son is a boy."

At that point i figured I had two choices: either i could point out that her daughter was a girl and she was a woman, or I could say that boys might enjoy it too. I went with the latter. The formers seemed too obnoxious.

So then she countered with numerous reasons why a boy wouldn't dare be caught with a comic book about a girl. Apparently the kid couldn't bear to be different.

"I'm raising my son in the industry," I said, "So I hope he doesn't ever feel like that. It really is an enjoyable book."

"That's probably different," the woman said. "I tried to teach him to be open-minded, but public school washed all of that away. Now he does everything he can not to stand out."

"Oh," I said, pretending to be sympathetic. "My son's Chinese, so he already stands out. Maybe he'll feel like he has nothing to lose."

"My son's mixed-race," the woman replied.

Okay.

Then I found out that the girl wasn't her daughter. My theory is that the mom is so used to having to explain to people that her long-haired little boy is not a girl that she jumped right into that role again without thinking that maybe I assumed that both kids were hers. I knew the boy was a boy. It took me a minute, but I'm astute like that. Zing.

On Sunday I woke up with a stress headache of doom, so I drove my husband to Arisia and then Cloud and I spent a quiet day at home until it was time to pick him back up again. On a whim, we decided to drive all the way in, park the car on the street outside, and take the Silver line into Chinatown for a social dinner at a nice restaurant. We had a lot of fun. Cloud recognized our friend Judy, which pleased her immensely, and he even said her name several times. He ate like a champ and charmed the waitstaff. I think it was good for him to be in a place where pretty much everyone there was Chinese except his parents. He is in the majority, if you count the entire world population, and I want him to get to experience being in the majority sometimes. Most days go by without him laying eyes on a single Asian face except his own.

On Monday, the con shut down at 2:00 PM, so we braved it again with all three of us at the dealer table. There was a last minute rush of sales, which was nice. And there was a photo shoot with a Stormtrooper. I'll insert that picture as soon as I find it. The guy in the Stormtrooper outfit was getting ready to apply for membership to the 501st Legion. I encouraged him, and promised to send a copy of the photo so he could use it in his application portfolio.

I'm always glad to help out a person striving for a good cause. :)

The whole Arisia experience has resulted in another language improvement for AwesomeCloud. He seems to experience a language surge after every big social event, I think. Now he's uttering two-word phrases more often, and some of his previously well-known words have gotten clearer. Today he said 'pillow' with near crystal clarity.

Also endlessly amusing: his attempts to whistle. I can whistle, just barely, but I can't do it at all when I'm laughing. So my attempts to teach him to do it right fell totally flat.

Oh yes: aaaand... I got him to say, "Buy my book!" (Sadly, he didn't win us any sales this way. What, isn't he $4.00 worth of cute? Just buy a book when the adorable but barely verbal two-year-old tells you to and everyone will be happy.)

"Cry it out" Toddler edition

2011-01-11T17:31:00.002-05:00

Usually the term "cry it out" is used to refer to infants being put in a crib by themselves for the first time. Some mommies practice the "cry it out" philosophy; some are opposed to it. (It's a philosophy. Hee hee. Parenting communities have turned the method by which one gets a baby acclimated to a crib into a philosophy. We're so nuts.)

I don't know anything about that.

What I do know is that AwesomeCloud cried for seven minutes straight when I told him he had to eat the old yogurt before I would open the new yogurt. I timed him.

I've sometimes been known to scold him when he's having an unnecessary crying jag. But it occurred to me that I don't know what scolding is supposed to accomplish. Actually, he does sometimes quiet down when I shush him. But it takes a whole lot of shushing, so maybe it's not the shushing per se but the amount of time I spend shushing him that matters.

Anyway, I thought that maybe standing there and waiting patiently would be a good thing to do. Maybe it was Zehlahlum Family's influence. If you want to read a blog that's more upfront about the trials of adoption, hers is tons better than mine. And also, some of her latest adventures have inspired me to try out the passive, nonreactive approach. It's so easy to say, "I believe in not reacting - I'm the parent, after all. I should be establishing the tone in this family." Shockingly, it doesn't work like that for very long. The moments during which you own your behavior become shorter and shorter, and the moments when you get inextricably caught up in the drama grow longer and longer, turning into weeks and months.

Zehlahlum says she's going to own her own behavior again, and I guess I'm kinda digging the idea too.

Because when you're chronically exhausted all day and barely have energy to accomplish 1/4 of the things you have planned each day, standing there passively and emotionlessly is a lot easier than scolding and shushing. Kids are gonna have bad behavior. Some kids have more bad behavior than others, but they all have some. So? Just intervene if the kid looks like he wants to strike the cat or smash a glass, or stab at the wall with a Sharpie, or whatever. Barring that, just wait. Cloud and I don't both have to work ourselves up.

Besides, maybe he doesn't actually like to be shushed. Maybe it only annoys him more on top of whatever else has offended him. I know it would annoy me.

Laugh, and the whole world laughs with y--Blue Prius!

2011-01-10T14:35:00.002-05:00

AwesomeCloud has the world's most contagious laugh. When he laughs, everyone in the room laughs, every time. And he laughs a lot.

Today we were hanging out in the library with the train table and a parenting book, and Cloud kept finding various things hilarious. The floppy Madeline doll whose legs kick every which way when you hold her by the back of the neck and make her dance - hilarious. Two trains crashing together - hilarious. All the animals falling out of the animal truck when you pull it by the string - hilarious.

Every time Cloud squealed in laughter, we'd hear the children's librarian laughing too. Whether she was at her desk, minding her own business, or shelving books on the opposite side of the room, he'd laugh and then she'd laugh.

Then a mom started to do it too.

And me, of course. I have never laughed so much in the course of a day at any point of my life as i do now. Every day it's like this. I almost can't believe it's me laughing so much. But what else can I do? Everyone is helpless under the spell of the Kid With the Contagious Laugh.

The adult-section librarian walked in, sidestepped two shrieking, giggling kids (my son and the other mom's son, who were playing some variation of hide-and-seek for kids too young to understand real hide-and-seek), and headed right for me.

"Hi," I said. Cloud stopped and stared.

She bent down, and in a very librarian-like whisper, she whispered over the racket, "Do you have a gray car with license plate such-and-such?"

"Nope," I whispered back. "We have a blue Prius."

"All right," she whispered, and set off, presumably to keep searching for the errant car owner. Cloud watched her go, and then he ran up to me and announced, "Boo Peeus!"

And he repeated "Boo Peeus" every five or ten minutes for the rest of the time we were there. And everyone laughed. We couldn't help it. "Boo Peeus" was obviously the funniest thing he, or any of us, had heard all day.

Plus, he gets bonus points for stringing two words together.

Everybody's getting fat except Mama Cat

2011-01-07T23:13:00.003-05:00

The whole family is adjusting to our new cat care regimen. Riley and I have it hardest, as I'm the feeder of the cats and dispenser of the medication, and Riley has suddenly had her delicious dry food removed from her diet.

Hey, she likes pureed chicken. She always begs for it when I scoop some out for Ban Lu. Now she gets it every day, every meal, exclusively.

What's that? She didn't want the pureed chicken exclusively? She wanted her chicken and cat food too? Aw. That's just too bad.

She's also on prednisone, probiotics, and now THREE hyperthyroid pills a day. Poor cat.

And poor me, having to give all that to her.

She's lost so much weight recently, though. She went from 11 lbs to 7 lbs, after coming home from the shelter at 9 lbs and then gaining those two more pounds quickly. Riley is now the lightest cat we've owned since Trixie came limping home half-dead and dangerously emaciated. In Trixie's case, she was so sick and hungry that she voluntarily ate cat food infused with multivitamins. She must have developed a taste for those nasty, bitter multivitamins, because once we fattened her back up to a healthy 7-8 lbs again, she would still eat them.

Riley eats anything, but then she always has. The vet hopes that controlling her out-of-control thyroid hormone levels will clear up her other problems. The vet also assured me that the kidney problem is not degenerative and may clear up too. Thank goodness. Because when Riley feels lousy, she picks fights with Ban Lu, and Ban Lu is only getting chunkier over time.

Kind of like the people in this household. Even AwesomeCloud is gearing up for another growth spurt. (I can't BELIEVE how much food that kid can put down! Who eats three helpings of mac&cheese with spinach for lunch? And then begs for cookies not ten seconds after I've cleared his plate?)

The melodrama of special-needs cats

2011-01-05T22:31:00.002-05:00

We rescue special-needs cats. It's a thing we do. Cats, in general, can be full of surprises... and I don't just mean the hairballs they leave on the floor beside the bed while you sleep.

Melody has cerebellar hypoplasia, which is similar to cerebral palsy in humans. Otherwise, she's very healthy.

Ban Lu was our attempt at hospicing a terminally ill cat, diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease and intestinal tumors. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that he is actually cancer-free, and will stay cancer-free for awhile longer if we control his IBS, which we do by boiling and pureeing two whole chickens a week.

(Pureed whole chickens are actually cheaper per pound than cheap store-brand cat food, but cost a lot more in time, energy, and stress on the food processor.)

Riley is our hyperthyroid, hyperactive cat. She eats a lot, poops and pees a lot, and hardly ever sleeps. (By cat standards, that is.) She's been having digestive troubles lately, which has led to behavior problems. She poops in my houseplants, and she has started a war with Ban Lu. Ban Lu, unfortunately, is a vengeful cat, and when she crosses him, he retaliates tenfold.

So today I brought Riley to the vet. I was afraid of two things: 1) that they'd tell me her hyperthyroid pills were no longer working and we'd have to get her the super-expensive radioactive iodine treatment. The problem with radioactive iodine, aside from being expensive itself, is that it produces a temporarily radioactive cat. We'd have to have the vet quarantine her for up to a month until the iodine leaves her system. And pet boarding ain't cheap. 2) That she has diabetes and we'd have to give her insulin shots for the rest of her life.

She's only 5 years old.

The diabetes fear came about from the enormous frequency with which she uses her litter box, and the amount of water she drinks, and also the fact that she's lost a LOT of weight this year.

I love my vet. She's so straightforward. She quickly assured me that Riley neither had diabetes nor needed radioactive iodine.

Nope. It's much more likely that Riley has a kidney disorder and IBS.

Yay?

Riley is now on Ban Lu's strict diet of pureed whole chickens and prednisone. She is also probably at risk of developing intestinal tumors. Hyperthyroidism, IBS, and kidney problems are a triple whammy that commonly occur together and indicate an autoimmune disorder.

Did I mention she's only 5?

The bright spot in all this is that, in spite of the grief Riley has caused me with her plant-pooping and her catfighting, she's still as gentle and affectionate as ever around her people. She's still Cloud's special kitty. We don't regret getting her, although we may get some gray hairs because of her.

My husband was reading about a woman who wanted a therapy cat to reduce her panic attacks, and he and I just looked at each other, thought of Riley, and burst out laughing.

***

Oh! Barely related story - but a cute one. Ban Lu is a big cat, you know. He's only 13 pounds, but he's very, very tall. He can rub his cheek against my hand when I'm just standing there. Enormous cat - people ask if he's part ocelot or something, and I have to say, "Nope, he's just a domestic shorthair."

So, Cloud and I were walking by the pet store (we shall momentarily overlook my moral objections to pet stores that still sell dogs) and we saw a husky puppy in the window.

"Cat," Cloud said, pointing to it.

"No," I corrected him, "it's a dog."

"Cat," he insisted.

"It's a dog with cat ears," I said.

"Cat," he insisted.

"Dog."

"Cat!"

"Dog!"

"Cat!"

As I watched the little gigantic husky puppy jump around in its glass cage, I realized that it couldn't have been any bigger than Ban Lu. Shrink the dog's head, lengthen the legs, and the two animals would look very similar. It is not outside Cloud's world experience for a cat to be that big.

Next week, the puppy will probably have outgrown Ban Lu and convinced Cloud that it is a dog after all. But for now, Ban Lu will continue to tower over the shih tsu puppies and give the husky puppies a run for their money.