Mayhem and Magic

Hockey Players

The boys were playing hockey in the playroom.  Shirtless Hockey, obviously.  (Naked Hockey has been played in our house in the past, but is now discouraged, so Shirtless Hockey was next best.)

They wanted numbers on themselves, because all good sports players have numbers, but the shirtless-ness was a problem.  So I wrote numbers on their chests with a marker.  They were so proud!  They chose the numbers themselves.  Pumpkin's number is "fifty ten" which comes after fifty-nine.  (Duh!)

Look at my skinny little Sparkle!  He's actually a better eater than Pumpkin, but he looks so scrawy in these pictures to me!

Adult Sibling Relationships

Well, the day after I wrote about Pumpkin's toilet stubbornness, he spontaneously used the toilet all day, for everything, with almost no reminders or encouragement.  It didn't last...  I have decided to ignore the issue for a while, just to avoid frustration.  I put a pull-up on him for church today, rather than worry about taking him to the bathroom before Sunday school.

I've been thinking about what Krissy said about Pumpkin's attitude regarding discipline meaning that he won't care too much what other people think when he's older. 

Isn't it funny how the things we love most about a person are also the things that drive us crazy?  I've mostly heard people talk about that as it relates to romantic partners, but it's true regarding kids as well.

It sometimes frustrates me that Pumpkin seems to care less about being disciplined.  But I do think that as an older child and adult he will be more able to think for himself and less prone to blindly following his peers.

Sparkle, on the other hand, though I love his soft, sweet heart, seems like the kind of kid who might be devastated when he's disappointed by other people, and more likely to go along with potentially bad ideas in order to maintain his friendships. 

If we can teach Pumpkin to follow the lead of people he knows are wise, he'll be okay.  If we can teach Sparkle that the most important relationships to maintain are with God and with his family, he'll be okay.

I think their personalities will serve them well with the right guidance, and with God's grace.

I've also be wondering how the boys will relate to each other as they grow up.  I know quite a few people who have siblings with whom they have little or no relationship.  It doesn't seem to bother them. 

But, oh, I want my boys to value each other and support each other and enjoy one another's company, even when Beloved and I are long gone.

I wish there was a way to guarantee that they will be friends when they're older.  We do make a point of saying things like, "You boys are good brothers," and "Brothers are brothers, no matter what,"  and "Work it out with your brother-- he's your brother and you're good friend, and you need to get along."  Every once in a while they'll spontaneously hug one another and one will say, "This is my good brother" or something.  That completely melts my heart.  I love, love, love that they watch out for one another at school.

Growing up, I was closest to my next oldest brother.  We actually did a good job of staying connected through college, and then kind of lost touch a little bit.  I got married and moved to Washington, for starters, so it was just harder.  Now I'm definitely closer to my sister, who is adorable and funny and smart and fabulous in every way.  (Hi, Hwang!) 

Even though my siblings and I are not all the very, very closest of friends, I quite sure that we all like each other and we all basically get along really well.  We enjoy spending time together, though it's pretty rare that we're actually all in the same place at the same time.

I'm trying to think if there was anything about our childhoods or anything our parents did to help us stay close and maintain friendships, but I'm just not sure.  Maybe I'll ask them when they're here.

(Next week!  Hooray!)

Pumpkin and the Toilet

Blogging feels difficult lately.  How many times can a blogger write, "We're really busy.  Things are fine and the kids are great, but I don't have the time or energy to write about anything, even when things are fabulous."  Hmmm, not that exciting to read, eh? 

Pumpkin is driving me crazy.  He'll be dry all day at school, then come home and wet his pants.  Or (even worse) poop in his pants.  I hate it!  It's really hard for me to not let my frustration show.  Actually, I'm quite sure Pumpkin can see my frustration.  What I'm hoping for is that he doesn't sense anger from me.  Though I have felt anger about it at times.  I've contemplated at what age a child might need some sort of negative consequence for refusing to use the toilet, rather than the promise of rewards for appropriate behavior. 

(Don't worry, there have been no negative consequences.  Yet...  Other than having his poopy Lightning McQueen underwear thrown away, which I think is pretty much just a logical consequence, not punishment.  I cannot wash truly poopy underwear.  The thought of handling it or putting it in my wash machine grosses me out.  It gets thrown away.)

Usually rewards and positive reinforcement work well for Pumpkin.  He's a bit upset about time outs, but he's stubborn enough that they don't bother him much.  In fact, I think most of our discipline issues with Pumpkin (though, honestly, he's mostly an "easy" kid to parent, so there aren't many issues), come from his stubbornness. 

Sparkle is heartbroken when we're upset with him, and his apologies are so genuine.  We can just feel and see how hard Sparkle works to make good decisions and control himself.  It's harder for him, so sometimes it seems "harder" to parent him, but his heart is so soft! 

Pumpkin, on the other hand, is easy-going.  He has a long attention span, he catches on to things easily, and he just naturally follows the lead of teachers and parents fairly easily.  He seems "easier" to parent most of the time.  But...  He'll act upset about being sent to time-out, but his tears are mostly for show.  He can dry his tears in a second.  When time-out is over and a parent comes to have the brief talk with him that happens after every time-out, he's already looking over our shoulders, anxious to get back to playing.  His apologies are very, "I'msorry.Willyouforgiveme?CanIgoplaynow?" and his post-time-out reconciliation hug is brief.

So, in some important ways, he's "harder" to parent.  I very much want him to develop a true desire to be in agreement with us as his parents.  I want to see real repentance, rather than going through the motions of asking for forgiveness.

How did all of this come out of my frustration with toilet training?!

I understand that he wants to be in control of this, and he'll do it when he's ready, on his terms, the stubborn little booger.  How can I convince him that he's READY, it's TIME ALREADY!?

He's not sick or constipated.  He's not afraid of the toilet.  He is physically mature enough.  He is aware of his body and I believe he knows when he needs to go.  He resists reminders and really resists when we actually bring him to bathroom when we can see that he needs to go.  We've tried setting a timer and taking him every 30 minutes, regardless.  We've offered the egg reward every time he goes, and a bigger reward (a new Lightning McQueen figure!) for a full day clean and dry.  Ugh.  Grandma!!  Come back!  We need you!!

Monster Tag

I'm not sure what was going on here, but I think they were playing "Monster Tag," which means Beloved growls and stomps and chases them, screaming, around the house!

More About the Trip

Thanks for being excited for us!  I'm planning to blog about our preparations and hopefully throughout the trip.

What we know so far is that we will be in South Africa for just over two weeks, with most of that time spent around Pretoria and Johannesburg.  My parents are coming with us.  (Hooray!  And also, Whew!)

We started saving for this trip almost immediately after we came home with Sparkle in 2003, so we've been looking forward to it for a long time.

We have only one major goal:  Have fun in South Africa!

Even before we met Sparkle, we had some ideas about when we might visit South Africa again.  This may turn out to be flawed logic, who knows, but here's what we've thought about visiting the country of our internationally adopted child.  We don't want visiting his birth country to be a one-time-only event.  We want South Africa to be a real place for us, not just a travel destination, or, in Sparkle's mind, the mythical land of giraffes and Nelson Mandela.  If it's at all financially possible, we'd like for him (really, for all our family) to have a whole collection of memories and plans about time spent in South Africa.  At this point, we hope this will be the first of three family trips to South Africa.  (I'm cringing a little because it sounds... ambitious... to think we can go three times when so far we haven't even been back once.  I suppose we'll start saving again as soon as we get home.)

We want to go once when Sparkle is young enough to anticipate going to South Africa as an adventure, but not feel a lot of pressure to Explore His Roots.  We want him to come away from the trip basically just with a positive impression of South Africa, some exciting memories of time together, and a positive (if very tentative) self-identification as a South African.

It seems to me (and obviously this is just me, a non-adopted white woman), that it would be hard to identify with a culture and country that you know next to nothing about.  Honestly, right now Sparkle knows that South Africa is far away (he can usually find it on a map or globe but not always), there are lions and giraffes there but no tigers, and Nelson Mandela was president, and his first mother lives there.  I'm simplifying a little, but basically he only knows what we tell him, and has very little personal feelings about South Africa that are actually based in his experience.

Right now he may be too young to fully appreciate the experience of traveling to South Africa, but in a way, that's kind of the point.  I want him to grow up into the experience of being a Black South African American.  And having some personal experience of actually being South African in South Africa seems kind of critical to that goal, you know?

Already, I can see him exploring this a little.  He asked yesterday, "When we go to South Africa, will I still be African American?"

I think it's a darn good question. 

(I'm so proud of him, by the way.  Have I mentioned that?)

Somewhere along the line I read that sometimes an adopted kid might get nervous about seeing first family or traveling to the area where he was born because he wonders if he's going to get left there again.  We didn't want Sparkle to be nervous about that at all, so we have looked at the calendar to see the date we leave, the days we'll be in South Africa, the day we leave South Africa, and the day we'll get home.  We made sure he knew we are all going, and we are all coming back.  Either we calmed that fear pretty effectively, or he hasn't felt nervous about being left so far, because it hasn't come up at all.

It will be interesting to see what questions or expectations he has as we get closer to the trip. 

I feel like I'm rambling a bit now.

In the next few months, I'd like to blog about what we're planning to do in South Africa, our tentative hope that we might be able to contact Sparkle's first family, and our plans for visiting South Africa several times as Sparkle grows up. 

Tickets: Purchased

It's official.  We're going to South Africa!!

We're very excited! 

The tickets are purchased, so we're about $6000 committed to the trip right there. 

(We were committed anyway, we just didn't know when we'd go.) 

But now dates are set and detailed planning will commence!!

Fall 2008:  Mayhem and Magic comes to South Africa!

Pumpkin Rocks Out

Clipboard as guitar, Pumpkin rocks out.  The stereo was on, but I don't remember what was playing.  Something inspiring, obviously.

Updates:

- We're all home, and this is good.

- Work has been kicking my butt this week, and I'm worn out.

- Beloved has been busy too.  When we're tired, we both tend to want to be alone.  When we come home, we devote our attention to the boys--rough housing, reading, playing football or Cars, eating and talking with them.  Once they go to bed at 8:15 or so, we both just split!  It's kind of funny this week, actually.  We say goodnight to the boys, and we each grab a book, a remote, or a computer and find a corner of our own to huddle in, practically in the fetal position, just wanting to shut out everything else for a little while.  Beloved called our babysitter, and she's coming on Saturday evening.  We're planning to actually converse with one another!  Perhaps over a nice dinner!  I have a list of topics we need to cover.  (Seriously.)

- I got nothin' else.

Sparkle, Cookie Monster

Mmmm...  Cookies...

Me like Cookie...

Ahhh!!!Mmmm,numnumnum...

Friday with Pumpkin: A Photo Essay

On Friday Sparkle went to school, and Pumpkin stayed home with me.  I love, love, love having a whole day one-on-one with each of my boys. 

Most Fridays the three of us are all at home.  I try to have one "activity" planned out of the house, be it something fun (like a playdate) or an errand (dropping off Goodwill donations).  The errand has to be simple.  Like, SIMPLE.  Anything that requires me to concentrate at all, or even, say, take my eyes for a single second away from the children is an invitation to disaster.  I do have to say that it's not always a disaster, but the potential for Unbelievable Horror is much higher if I actually need to shop for something or make decisions of any kind.

With only one kid...  I can do anything!  Really, almost anything.  Grocery shopping, getting haircuts, cooking-- yep, all possible.  Once I took Sparkle with me on a day I needed to try on some clothing in a dressing room, and we both survived.  With one kid, he has all my attention, and whatever we do together is an adventure. 

Sometimes we don't go anywhere at all, and those are great days too.  Sometimes we just read books, and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and take a nap, and play with trains/cars/balls, and draw, and enjoy one another's company.

On Friday morning, Pumpkin played for a bit while I showered, and then I took him downstairs for breakfast.

He had cereal and cold rooibos tea (a red South African tea that we all love, no caffeine of course).  Note the Cars pajamas.  We totally sold out to the Disney Pixar Cars marketing.  Pumpkin loves Lightning McQueen so much!  It makes him so darn happy to have Cars PJs.  It seems silly to waste the opportunity to have something so simple (and relatively inexpensive) thrill him to his very three-year-old little soul.  Dude, if all it takes to make him dance with joy is with Cars merchandise, I guess we'll do it.  We are however, trying hard to shield his eyes from seeing any Diego, or we'll really be in trouble.

Later we made our favorite banana bread, and Pumpkin licked the spatula.  That is all the best of childhood, summed up right there: Licking the Spatula.  Note the Cars T-shirt.

We spent a lot of time in the playroom.  Pumpkin likes to make really  long tracks and really long trains.  They fall off the track and he gets frustrated, but he keeps trying. 

Fridays are the best.

Toilet training, by the way, is going great!  Super Grandma!  She brought some little plastic Easter eggs, and put them all in a big bowl.  Each one has a few Skittles or M&Ms or a Starburst or something inside.  He gets to choose one egg every time he goes.  We've tried treat bribery, too, in the past.  There's something about having the treat be a surprise, and getting to chose an egg that seems to be more motivating.  Whatever.  It doesn't matter to me, as long as it works!  Grandma rocks!

Can Anyone Explain Why...

Can any one explain why my mother is coming tomorrow, and I spent the day yesterday 1. cleaning the fridge, 2. taking out all the pots and pans from under the stove and cleaning the drawer, the stove, and the oven, 3. removing everything from the drawers in the kitchen and washing and reorganizing the drawers, and 4. taking down, washing, ironing, and rehanging the laundry room curtain?

My mom is so awesome.  I do not know why I have this weird nervous thing about her being at my house.  Like I'm afraid she'll see my truly cluttered house/life and think I'm not grown up enough??  Like I need to impress her with my fabulous homemaking skills??  So silly.   

I have high hopes for her visit this week.  Pumpkin is almost completely done with diapers.  He doesn't do a great job, however, of running to the bathroom on his own when he has to go.  Instead he begins The Wiggle, and we practically have to drag him to the bathroom.

My mom magically toilet trained Sparkle in a few days, right when he turned three.  I'm hoping that she's still got the magic, and Pumpkin will be done with diapers before she goes home.

Cross your fingers...