In Sickness and in Health

It's no secret that children are mobile germ recruiting centers, I was very fortunate (or sheltered?) in the first year of Delaney's life to experience very few illnesses with her. She seemed resilient and superhuman while around me babies were sniffling and hacking, spiking high fevers and emptying out their stomachs on whatever was closest.

The second year however, has seen a dramatic shift in the health pattern. More hours spent at the Y day care while mommy works out? The start of preschool? Nature's way of catching up? Who can say. But for a while I began to feel like a dry area under her nose was the exception rather than the rule. They can't blow their nose at this age, no matter how many times I make like a circus clown and blow a pretend trumpet blast out of my own nose into a tissue to demonstrate. Delaney will gamely hold the tissue to her nose and blow out of her mouth in an Ffff sound, like she does for her soup. Often asking "Mommy, hot?" about the tissue I've given her.

I have a friend who is her child's own personal Neti pot. She lays her daughter on her back while blowing hard into one nostril, forcing the congestion out of the other. It's impressive, but not my scene, man. It feels a little too National Geographic for me. I usually end up pulling out the bulb syringe sent home with me from the hospital when she was an infant. Or as I have named it, after witnessing it's beauty in action - The Snotsucker. Delaney doesn't really like the Snotsucker, but she doesn't hate it either. Sometimes she'll actually lean into it to help me drag out the green noodles that are clogging her breathing. I like to think we're a team when she's like this, battling the illnesses that seem to hit kids weekly at certain times of the year. The Snotsucker makes her cough and sputter, but she does breathe better after it's used and I believe her little two year-old brain reluctantly admits that the thing works. Plus she's seen her buddy undergo the National Geographic method and that she has lesser of two evils by her own calculations.

Mark Twain!

Summer is almost over and my little Bean approaches the two year mark. Makes me wanna shout "Mark Twain!" just for the sake of where we live and where she is. We have been to France and Florida and will probably head to Philadelphia before the year is out. A very alliterative travel year. As she grows and develops, I get to watch her personality unfold more and more each day. I still marvel every day that I made a person. I still look at pregnant women with awe and respect -"Oh, you're making one too." The day to day process of just keeping her alive, which is how I looked at her infancy through the first year, is over and now I have to take a harder look and figure out how to make her into a whole being, well-balanced, compassionate, intelligent and of course, fun.

Because at her age, with her personality flexing and growing like a tomato vine in June, she is the most fun thing I've ever been around. She laughs at anything and like most children, it's a highly contagious sound. Music, water, champagne - all the metaphors are accurate and you want to hear it again and again. I'm hoping that in addition to a few lessons about danger when she gets too near knives and high places, right now we can just concentrate on having fun, learning how to share and draw with crayons and run fast and wash our hands and get dirty. Everything she touches, views, and experiences is for her a new way to have fun and it's written all over her face as it's happening, as she's experiencing it. There is no hopeful tomorrow, or sorrowed past. It's all right here, right now and let's have the most fun doing it. In fact, let's sing while we're doing it. Loudly.

So what I'm saying in an obvious, connect the dots kinda way, is the lesson is mine too. As usual, I am learning more from this child, than I feel like I am teaching her. How to be present, how to have fun doing nothing and everything, and how to forget about the past and not worry about the future. My own little pint-sized Eckhart Tolle with diapers and an attitude extolling the power of now before she can form a complete sentence.

It's a self-indulgent post this one - well, aren't they all? But there's a line in the movie The Natural where Robert Redford, says to his old lover, "God, I love baseball." It's after so many rotten things have happened to him and he's almost to old to be a player anymore. But he says it so convincingly, so simply, so beautifully, that you see how all the bad things can fall away and you have just this pure, unpolluted love of the game. That's how I feel about motherhood two years down the line. I don't think about the infertility or the adoption or the wacky pregnancy diagnoses anymore. I just love being a mother. Mark Twain!

Salad Bowl

No matter how I cut it, it always looks like the classic bowl style. Now I understand why so many kids sported this do. I've wrestled with barrettes, pins, elastics and headbands. They either get pulled out or slide out on their own, only to disappear forever. The funny part is, Delaney has a natural little lift in her hair that really makes it look like more bowl-ish than other children. Like my own straight and stringy, I've decided not to fight it. Here she is giving away the secret anyway.

Mother's Little Helper

I used to love wine. I loved to shop for it, weigh my options, discuss the different qualities of a particular vineyard or country with my friends, my husband, the wine merchant. In New York, Justin and I hosted fabulous (if I do say so myself) wine tastings where we hid labels and compared grapes and regions and ate wine-loving food to compliment the whole experience. I own large, heavy books about wine and I even have a certificate from the French Culinary Institute where I took a seminar on wine. Well, that's not completely true. I volunteered to empty the spit buckets and pour the wine out for the people who paid to take the class. But in exchange, I got to attend the class, taste the wine and get the same certificate the spit or swallowers did. For free! What price the love of wine?

I still like wine a lot, but we have a different relationship now. I need wine now. I'm not saying I have a problem or anything. I just really, REALLY look forward to my glass(es) of wine every night after I put Delaney to bed. And when I say look forward, I mean I am watching the clock, wondering if I can sip on a glass while I watch her take a bath. I could lie and say I use plastic, but I'm not that depraved yet.

And now, because she goes to the grocery store with me, there's no perusing the labels, pondering the varietals, talking shop with the suppliers. I've got Little Miss Grabby Hands in the buggy, reaching out at the teetering towers of Tempranillo as we roll past, a fraction away from creating a world class catastrophe in the wine aisle. I've got to grab my stash and run. The upside is I've come home with some lovelies I never would have chosen had I not been on a mad dash to escape disaster. Stuff I just threw on top of the broccoli and oatmeal and hoped for the best. And of course the opposite is true as I've come home with some real stinkers, that I gamely swallow down because I can't just pour it down the drain. That would mean I'd have to brave the wine aisle with her again that much sooner. And brave it I will to restock my supply.

What can I say? I don't smoke pot or take valium or practice yoga for that matter. I may not Love it as much as I used to, but with a toddler, I sure do appreciate it more and isn't that the groundwork for all good relationships?

Double Down

I am fortunate in many ways, but sometimes the pattern of my life is downright karmically charged. Serendipitous if you will.

With Delaney's arrival, Justin and I had to eventually make a choice whether to keep our name in the hat so to speak for our original China adoption ( see 2007 archives) or call it a day and officially pull out (pun intended!) of the process. We received another bill from our adoption agency recently for $1800 dollars which would allow us to stay in the program and I presume enable them to keep paying their staff to send us letters about how it is still taking a long time to adopt from China. This last bill came at a particularly tight time for us and after a lengthy discussion, we decided to let it go. Let it go. I like the phrase because in my mind I picture a balloon on a string. It's so easy just to open your hand and let it go, almost a relief because the balloon is straining so hard against the string and your hand is sore from holding onto it for so long. But once it's gone that's it. You can't reclaim your released balloon and you can't jump back into the adoption process. You have to start again from the top. By sending my agency more money I was buying myself some time before a final decision had to be made, essentially letting the ballon out on longer and longer string, dragging out the decision interminably.

To let this process go was very easy to verbalize and then do nothing, especially not sending in the check for $1800 dollars. But inside, I suffered. I have two accordion folders, red for Russia and blue for China. China's began in 2005 and Russia's in 2006. Both are packed full with paperwork, documentation, copies of documentation, receipts, instructions, years and years of work and dreams. It was hard to let go and a year and a half after Delaney's birth and our decision not to adopt, I can't quite bring myself to throw them away. One day.

All of which bring me to the topic of serendipity and fortune that I started this entry with. Because my close friend Jennifer completed her adoption thesis after three years of hard labor and was rewarded with a beautiful Korean baby girl flown into my very own Hartsfield-Jackson airport fresh from Seoul via Chicago, via San Francisco. I got to watch the completion of an adoption in a front row seat, close enough to touch. And it was so very cathartic for me to see the baby, so frightened, so confused, and so beautiful, coming down the airport hallway and into the lives of her waiting family. I had pictured this scene for myself many times and in many different ways. I got to wonder about her birth mother with Jennifer and what she must have gone through to reach this decision. And then sympathize with Jen about Scarlett's foster mother who had loved this little one for 11 months and then let her go into a better life. Listen and speculate about the plans and fears and joys that go with parenting an adopted child that was really going to come home.

And then poof, the three years are gone and there she is in the airport, in your arms, in your LIFE. I am doing a rotten job of describing it. But it's just extraordinary to come from a place so far away, a place filled with paper and interviews and money of course and waiting and wondering and nerves and frustration. Then it's over and there is a baby. Your baby. And in watching this union from the sidelines, I could let go of my balloon completely. It was exhilerating and cathartic and I felt like the luckiest woman in the world. Twice.

Shake your Groove Thang

I took Delaney to a Kindermusik Class today, our first. The class is marketed to kids ages 0 (really) through 3. It looked like most of the kids were around her age when we got there, which was a good thing. I didn't want to have the only walker in a class full of nursers. But in an effort to encourage more people to register, they are allowing people to sign up for blocks of 4 week classes instead of the standard 10 weeks. What I didn't know was that the 4 week blocks are inside the current 10 week classes. So everyone in our class was a seasoned 10 week-er and had been meeting and singing for weeks before Delaney and I, the sole newbies, arrived. Not only that, but I didn't get the download they sent via email with the songs and words and activities on it to get us up to speed. I should have called about it, but it's been busy around here.

So we went in green as a string bean and Delaney was a little clingy at first. I'm not much of an introvert (surprise!) and I love to sing even if it's just stringing words to what I'm thinking a la Buddy the Elf ("I'm heeere with my Dad and he wants me to sing him a sooong...."). As I'm trying to extract myself from Delaney's grip and beat on the drum I had been given, I noticed that Laurie the Teacher isn't having much luck getting the parents to sing along with her or after her or whatever she was asking them to do. Parents were singing in those hushy church voices so that their voice was never heard individually above anyone else's. At one point Laurie the Teacher even sang to the parents "It's alright for parents to sing la la la - lala. It shows the children that singing is fun la la la la " (Laurie sings everything a normal person would say. It's like talking to an opera star.) I always try to surreptitiously size up the parents when I go to these types of things, trying to suss out who potential mom friends might be. It doesn't look good for me in Kindermusik. Lots of turtlenecks, a grandma, a couple, and some moms way too young to remember the original Electric Company. I know, it's so superficial. Go ahead and judge me.

I decide I may be on my own in this class and I've already paid my $64 for these four weeks. Despite my lack of song and melody knowledge, I am going to sing my head off in this class because I want Delaney to know that singing IS fun. But more than that, I don't want her to be a wallflower. So I begin to belt it out like Barbra Streisand, songs I don't know about tigers and cats and dancing and jungles. Me and Laurie the Teacher are neck and neck for volume, though she's got me beat with melody. I have no idea where I'm going there. I do sound like Buddy the Elf. Laurie the Teacher looks at me with a quizzical, but encouraging smile. But Delaney loves it. As she sees me getting groovy, she begins to loosen up and takes the tambourine from the quiet kid next to her. I make her give it back, but inside I'm pleased. No breathy singing or hiding behind the big kids for us. I'm raising an extrovert.

Everywhere Signs

A good and wise friend clued me into teaching Delaney sign language to make it easier for us to communicate. I had seen several mothers at the YMCA uses sign language with their children and was always amazed at the ease which with both sides got their point across. Mother, signing -"Logan, come out of the pool right now." Child, also signing - "No. No. No. ". I also knew it required a lot of patience and consistency to make any headway. I am not the most consistent of people but I do love a challenge and I wanted to be able to better communicate with Delaney, as opposed to her whining and pointing and me lamely trying to supply the right answer. I must confess, I also envisioned us discussing the weather and and perhaps the subtle nuances of Big Red Barn in sign language while other mothers looked on in wonder at my gifted prodigy.

So I bought the book and the video, because you can never get all of your information in just one form of media. I watched the specialist, Dr. Joseph Garcia, who I admit turned me off a bit at first because he's a dead ringer for Heraldo Rivera, take me through 30 minutes of why signing was the greatest thing you could ever do for your child and then 5 minutes of showing me actual signs. Lots of hippie-looking moms signed voraciously throughout the video with their young, sometimes very young children and they all happily passed the salt and looked at the airplane with an ease of communication that hooked me right in.

I began signing the simple words first like they advise you to. At this point Deleny is about 11 months old. I made the signs for "milk" and "more" first and waited and watched for any sort of flickering hand movement to tell me she is getting it. When she made her first sign, which was "more", I was on the phone with my father and nearly deafened him. "She signed! She signed for more! Did you see that?" Which of course he didn't because we were speaking on the phone. I poured the entire box of cheerios on her tray, signing more, more, more, while I was doing so. She may have thought I was crazy, but she did look quite pleased with herself. Of course that could have been because of the the amount of cheerios I had suddenly dumped on her.

After that we learned a few more signs - milk, eat, ouch. It got a bit tricky here because a lot of these signs are similar. Take more and ouch for example. Very similar signs, so if you have no context you might think she is in agony, rather than simply wanting another cookie. I chose to think she was being poetic and was telling me she was hurting for more.

At 15 months she has turned a signing corner and a new problem is arising. She rapidly picks up signs now after being shown the sign only a few times. The problem is I don't know enough signs. The "help" sign for instance. Help was incredibly hard for us. We forgo the American Sign Language standard for this word and use a Dr. Joseph Garcia substitute which he says is easier for young hands to produce. You tap your hands to your chest a few times and that's it. So simple. It took an unbelievably long time for Delaney to get it, but I kept at it, thinking if I could just get her to ask for help our problems would be solved. And one day she does it! Tap Tap Tap on her chest when her toy box is closed. I rush over tap my own chest, yell Help! Help! And open the box. We are communicating!

Fast forward two weeks later and the child is running around my house beating her chest like King Kong at every obstacle in her path. Is it the sippy cup? Does she want the book? Is her diaper wet? I don't know! Help! Help! Help! In the grocery store, the YMCA, the library, there she is beating her chest with me shoving objects at her, trying to solve the mystery. I don't know the signs for "wait" or "patience" or "slow down". But is it better than whining and pointing? Definitely.

Sleeping in Boots

When Delaney has a missed or even abbreviated nap, it's usually a precursor to a rough afternoon/evening. She had an extremely short nap today due to a bad car-to-crib transition. I stupidly tried to get her boots off before putting her down. In extricating her foot with one hand while I held her with the other arm, I pulled the sock off too and her bare pigs touched my icy cold vinyl ski jacket which caused her to twitch and moan and ultimately wake up and look at me. I spent a good half an hour trying to get her to sleep again but when she picks her head up and smiles at me with an open mouth, I know the sleep boat has sailed.

So we're in for it now and by 4 o'clock I cave in to all sorts of verboten activities to keep her from following me around the house, arms outstretched in full blown whine mode. Sometimes I run from her when she's like this. I know it sounds cruel, but the thing is, when I pick her up when she's in this state of mind, she arches her back and pushes against me so that I almost drop her. I either have to hold her tightly so as not to let go of her or put her down, both of which piss her off royally. It's maddening. She wants comfort but won't be comforted. So we do back to back Baby Einsteins and empty the magical computer drawer (a total nightmare to clean up) and eat too many cookies and drink milk in my lap. But eventually it's all too much and I know I'm just putting off the inevitable.

At 5 o'clock she is the monster again, crying, whining and signing to me for things she thinks she wants but then changes her mind and flings them away. There's this dilemma at 5:00 which was really there at 4:00 too, but I got past it for an hour by giving her cookies and videos. If I put her to bed now, and I know she is acting this way because she is uber-tired, I risk upsetting the whole sleep schedule and she'll be up at 5:00 am tomorrow morning, tired for a nap at 9:00 am and ready for bed again at 5:00 pm. At some point you have to push through it and I'd rather do it now than have the pattern get more established. I know it sounds neurotic, but the sleep schedule is pretty golden in this house give or take an hour. I can put her to bed at 7:00 or even 6:00 but 4 or 5 is going to play games with all of us.

So at 5:00 she is whining and signing that she's hungry (this after the multiple peace-seeking cookies) so I make her a nice grilled cheese and cut up some apples and strawberries and put her in the highchair. She puts maybe a strawberry in her mouth, and then clears the tray with both hands so everything goes flying onto the floor. And I swear she looks at me and raises her eyebrows in a taunting "Did you see that?" look. I pull her out of the chair, and plunk her on the floor, cleaning up the mess while she gamely eats a few of the fallen items.

But soon she starts crying again and I hold her while she signs for a banana. We can make a dinner out of a banana I tell her and cut one up, get a fork because she like to eat them off the fork and stab a piece of banana with it. She flings the fork so the banana goes whizzing past my face and hits the oven, sliding down forlornly. I look at that banana while I feel like that banana. You would think I would learn by now, but no, she makes the eat sign again and I get out some yogurt, leave the crime scene that is the kitchen and sit her in my lap in the living room. And for a few bites she is happily eating yogurt and smiling. Is she toying with me now? Is she thinking "What a dope. What a patsy." Because when my guard is down she flips her hand down on the container and yogurt and spoon splatter over her, over me, over the couch and the rug. My face when this happened must have scared her because I didn't utter a word but she looked at me and howled. I wanted to howl too. I left her there howling while I got a cloth in the kitchen to clean up the mess, and also to take a deep breath. She follows me howling, snotty, covered in yogurt and completely, utterly miserable. I really want to run from her. But I pick her up and and she lays her little yogurt covered head on my shoulder and I slowly decompress. She's just a tired baby. Not a prescient, manipulative beast trying to foil my every move. It's over. I surrender. It's 5:30 now and I've got to get this girl in bed. If we're up at an ungodly hour, then we're up.

I run a quick bath for her and she comes to life again, playing in the bubbles, laughing at my antics. I can have her in bed by 5:45 with little trouble if I can keep this up. An enormous gas bubble escapes her and she giggles at herself. I giggle too because after all, farts are funny. Don't tell Justin. A few minutes later as I'm soaping her hair, like a gator hiding in the swamp I see a flash of brown go by under the bubbles. None of her bath toys are brown. I stand her up in the tub and of course, there is poop everywhere. I have to drain the tub, spray it down, spray her down, re-wash her hair because I'd unknowingly washed it with poop water all the while racing against the clock and the cold air that is in our house due to this uncanny cold spell we've been having. I lost the good mood she had acquired somewhere in that second bath. It ended with her crying, struggling to grab at the poop toys I had placed out of her reach until I could clean them, while I scrambled for the towel to try to keep her warm. My little, tired, poop girl. I stuffed her in some warm jammies, and she collapsed on my shoulder by 6:15. I did make it to the 6:00 hour after all, but I would have sacrificed the hour for a poop free bath. In the future, I will leave the boots on.