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.

Recovered Bean

I thought I'd give an update on Delaney's status as a lot of people have been asking after her recently. The picture attached really says it all about her mental state. Completely unaffected and the whole thing is forgotten. Physically, she has a little raised scar under her eye and a little indented scar above same eye, for polarity. The puncture wound on her left cheek is indented and now everyone thinks it's a dimple. Not too bad for a dog bite. I suppose some of these will leave behind remnants but I am slathering them with Vitamin E so maybe it will be hardly noticeable by the time she's a teenager and these things start to matter. I am trying to limit the things she can hate me for from the get-go, but obviously, I'm not off to a great start.

And as far as I go, I still catch a potted plant's tendrils wave in the breeze or a shadow move with the shifting light and for a split second I think "Gordon". It's a fragment of a forget. I know he's gone, but his presence was so strong and so constant, that it's a real adjustment to sweep the crumbs off the floor and not wait for him to come hoover them up. Justin and I both have noted that while we miss him, Delaney's growing personality has begun to fill in the gaps right down to the fact that she palm-slaps her way over to us if we have a plate of food. She has even begun to look up expectantly. Maybe we'll work on the crumbs soon...

Shellshocked

I don't want to only write when there is trouble, but I am reliving the nightmare that was last weekend over and over in my head and hoping that writing about it will exorcise it from my memory. I will start out by saying that Delaney is fine.

On Thursday evening Gordon attacked Delaney. I have to say attacked because there is really no other word for it. I was sitting in the living room in a chair with my daughter on the ground at my feet. My dad was sitting across the room with Gordon next to him and we were chitty-chatting, having a good time, enjoying his visit which was just beginning. No food, no toys, no climbing or pulling on tails. Out of nowhere (or so I thought at the time) Gordon lunges across the room, low to the ground with a snarl in his throat and goes at Delaney. It was so fast and so unexpected and the whole memory seems stuck in slow motion as I leapt to my feet to get him off of her. I pulled him off and saw her on the ground screaming. At first I thought (hoped) that he had just knocked her down. But when I picked her up, blood was dripping down her face and clothes. Her right eye had taken most of the bite and it was hard to see how bad it was. Dad had thrown the dog in the backyard and somehow we made it into the car, Dad holding Delaney while strangely she slept soundly on his chest the whole way.

I felt myself tightening up into a ball on the drive. Her bloody little face was facing me while she slept and I began to alternately cry and hyperventilate on the drive to the ER. Justin had called moments after the attack had happened to tell us he was on his way home. I must have shouted something into the phone like "Gordon attack, ER, Delaney, blood!" before I got out the door. He was there waiting for us at the ER and dad got out with Delaney while I went to park the car. I heard Justin ask "Is it bad?" and then say "Oh my god." when he saw her face. Driving through the stupid, insignificant parking lot, trying to find a wretched, empty parking space I screamed and screamed at the top of my lungs.

Inside we are seen fairly quickly for an ER and Delaney's wounds are assessed by a wonderful NP who tells us that there is a lot of blood, which is good because the wounds flush out the dog germs that way. She has a puncture wound on her left cheek where a tooth went straight through to the inside. The thought of this wound in particular makes me sick as I think of me checking Gordon's teeth periodically for tarter and cavities. The rest of the bite is over her eye, the brow and cheekbone taking most of the hit and saving her little coffee bean peeper from harm. The wounds are bloody but not deep. They are irrigated with saline, a process which makes her scream and shake while I die at her feet. I sing and sing to her the favorite songs. Itsy Bitsy Spider, Patty-cake, nonsense songs that only she and I know. Then another round of screaming while they put sticky tape dressings over each cut. After 5 hours with the ER crew, we are finally sent home with antibiotics, pain medication, ice packs, and an exhausted, battered, baby girl. She sleeps soundly through the night and we all go in many times to look at her, check her breathing, feel her skin.

We stay up all night, my dad and Justin and me. We discuss the process of the whole attack over and over. We drink bottles of wine and try to make sense of it. I see it and describe it again and again, looking for a clue. How could this dog, my dog, who has sat with the child for hours and hours in the past do this? And then the hard questions start, but inside I know the answers are not all that difficult. He is out back as we discuss all this and when I look at him I see that he has no idea he has done anything wrong. I hate him and love him for his stupidity all at once and my tears flow again. We discuss our options again the next day with each other, with my dad, with the vet. Delaney wakes up in a great mood, but looks like she went ten rounds with the champ. I hold her while I look out the window at Gordon and think about what could have happened. He could have killed her. He could have snapped her neck, bitten her jugular, punctured her skull. This girl it took me so long to get. From a dog it took me so long to train. My whole body shakes when these thoughts pass through. Like I can shake them off of me like cobwebs. But I can't. And they sit there. Just waiting to come out and stab me again.

I can't have him here anymore and I can't give him away for fear he would bite someone else's child. There are no-kill shelters, but I can't imagine my bouncing, springing dog locked up in a kennel 23 hours a day. We decide to have him put down, like I knew we would in the end and I am aghast at the fresh wave of sorrow this decision brings. I see him out there wagging his tail and waiting for someone to come play fetch and I know that he is just a dog and that I have humanized him. Delaney points to him and laughs like she always did and I hope she will never remember this dreadful thing.

As I write this, I see myself trying to make excuses for my feelings and I guess I am a victim too. I am eternally grateful my girl is alive and shining. But my heart is broken in so many ways, in so many pieces because I feel like I failed my daughter and I failed my dog. With research, we find that dog problems can increase with infants who are learning to crawl. Mobility seems to be a turning point for a once peaceful coexistence in some dogs. And again, I realize I love a dog. A creature whose natural instincts are still a mystery to me even though I've invited him into my home, fed him, washed, him, loved him. There were warning signs, I just didn't know what they were when he was exhibiting them.

So I scrunched his head one more time and gave him a last high five. This dog that bit my daughter. I only want to remember the sweet Gordon and not the snarling dog who felt compelled to attack her for sitting there. The Gordon who peeled out of the house when you opened a beer, self-trained to know that this usually meant "I'm going outside". The Gordon who would fetch and fetch and fetch until your arm was sore from throwing. And the Gordon who sat patiently until you put his food bowl down, just like I 'd trained him. Justin took him to the vet on Friday and had his own Gethsemane with him that I'll never know about. And he slept his way out of our lives. I am shellshocked yet and conflicted with guilt, emotions, sorrow. He is gone. And I'll be damned if I don't miss him. But it's time to start healing.

Snooze Button

I have a lot of time on my hands to observe Delaney's behavior and at this age, while extraordinarily cute, she doesn't seem all that complicated physiologically.  You put in the food, it comes out fairly regularly.  You make a funny face and she gives you a wonderful little smile  But for the life of me I can't figure out why, if she's tired, I have to teach her how to sleep.  

Sleep.  It's what babies are famous for.  There's the old phrase "sleeping like a baby".  Did the author of that little nugget have to wrestle with themselves about when to put the baby down for a nap?  Do you nurse the baby to sleep or put them down drowsy so they can fall asleep on their own?  Do you go pick them up when they wake in the night or wait and let them get themselves back to sleep?  And if the author went the cry-it-out method, did they pace the floor chewing their fingernails, resting one hand on the doorknob, tears streaming down there own cheeks, wondering if they are ruining their child forever by letting her cry.  Or perhaps they tried the pick the baby up when it cries method, where you are up all night because she is only napping for 45 minutes at a time and in 4 hour waves at night and you are practically dead on your feet, but don't want to break the bond of trust you are supposed to be establishing with the baby when she cries.

I look forward to teaching her to read, swim, and eat olives.  I know she'll need help with a two wheeled bicycle and walking on her feet.  I had no idea sleep was going to be the first lesson we'd conquer together, nor that it would be so absolutely confounding to elucidate.  "You kind of put your head down.  When you are frantically rubbing your eyes and beginning to yawn is always a good time.  You close your eyes usually and perhaps shift your position a little and then you sort of go to sleep."

Either she's a poor study or I'm a crap teacher.  I'm betting on the latter.