Mommy's Bad Morning

I was alone with the girls this morning. The Dad was on one of his rare business trips. The following events transpired between 7am and 9am.

7am- Upon awakening, La Nina realized her sister was enjoying the Wiggles which meant she had missed her current favorite show: Hi-5. Tears.

7:15am- La Nina fed up with the Aussies changes the station during "Fruit Salad" in order to catch the last part of Miss Spider. The Magster is devastated. Tears.

7:20am- I threaten to turn off television..The Wiggles end. I put on Diego as a compromise...all is well.

7:30am- For some reason, Maggie curls into the fetal position on her bed and refuses to get dressed. At the same time, her sister, clad in a ball gown, is laying in the hall sobbing because I refused to let her wear makeup to school.

7:45am- After I prepared the breakfasts according to the girls' requests, they told me their meals were "disgusting" and they refused to eat.

7:46am- I told both girls I'm not a short order cook and they better eat, 'cuz this was all they were getting. The Magster made a plea for a cookie, I glared at her. She ate her waffle. La Nina ate some canned pear and grumbled more about the disgustingness of cereal.

8:15am- Face washing time. Both girls refuse to cooperate and scream that washing faces is not necessary. I advise them it is necessary, pin their bodies between my legs and wash their faces. Both girls beg for their father to return. I tell them he can't get home quick enough for me either.

8:30am- Maggie is in pants. La Nina's in her ball gown and I'm in a skirt. La Nina tells Maggie that she is a "Man" because she's wearing pants. This causes the Magster to dissolve into tears. Just as I get her settled down, La Nina runs passed us and says, "MAN". More tears. I advise La Nina she is on thin ice, and send the girls to get in the car.

8:35am- There are more 'Man' comments, more tears, a convulted, yet passionate, 'Sticks and Stones' statement, and I finally forbid the kids from speaking in the van. We begin driving to school, but I stop the car every time a word (which is usually "Man") is uttered. Finally, the kids figure out I'm serious, and they stop speaking. I have 5 minutes of peace. Not enough.

8:55am- We arrive at the school. I advise the girls to get out of their seats, but La Nina shrugs her shoulders. I ask her what's wrong, I get a shrug. Then she begins waving her hands. Finally, I tell her it's okay to talk and she tells me I told her she couldn't talk. I ask her about the hands...sign language, she answers. OK. Then she tells me she doesn't like the jacket we brought and wants a different one that's at home.

8:56am- I tell her to get out of her car seat.

9:00am- I get back in the van after signing the girls into their classes. I'm exhausted. Time to go to work. What a way to start a day.

And now we wait....

Did I scare you with that headline? We're not waiting for a baby, but waiting to find out the elementary school that La Nina will attend. Yesterday was Kindergarten walk through in our area. The day when all that extra paper work pays off and my delayed registration of birth is worth its weight in gold, because it reduces by one the lines for registration.

A few notes on the day:

1.) We've applied for La Nina to attend a dual immersion program for Spanish. The program works by immersing the kids into a foreign language. All subjects are taught in Spanish and English is only spoken a small percentage of the time in the classroom until 3rd grade. (Yes, I would've picked Mandarin if they had it, but they didn't...so Spanish it is.) By 5th grade, the kids are bi-literate and bi-lingual in both languages. We'll know by mid-June if we're in the program or not.

2.) For the first time, I had to check a box that identifies La Nina's race. Until yesterday, I'd never checked anything but the "honky" box for myself and checking another box sort of bothered me. I mean, does it really matter? Should I have gone "decline to state"? The box never bothered me before, but now I find it a slightly offensive. And I really wonder about its relevancy.

3.) So, it's no secret I'm not a young Mommy, but I never felt so old as yesterday. There were people 15 years younger than me registering kids for Kindergarten. I think there was a woman who was born in the 1980's standing next to me. It was really grim. Most of the people I know have kids under 10 and they're my age, so I sort of lose contact with the fact I'm an old bat....until yesterday. At least no one asked me if I was registering my granddaughter.

When I told La Nina she was signed up, she asked: "Will they let me take a nap there?" Poor kid, she has no idea what she's in for.

And now what???

The Dad discovered the Leapster....and I think I heard him and La Nina arguing over "turns" this evening. I may have to buy him one too.

The Magster Wins Again!

For her birthday, we gave La Nina a Leapster. She'd seen one at a friends house, loved it and the other Mom gave it good reviews, so we got her one. Little did we know the mayhem it would bring to our house.

While La Nina likes the Leapster, the Magster loves it. For the past 10 days, the Magster has gotten up in the morning, found the game and started playing before I'd finished making the coffee. I have to shut it off to get her to eat. She regularly walks into walls because her head is bent in concentration over the game. She can pause it, navigate it to home, use the stylus or key pad....frankly, she's teaching La Nina how to use the thing. Of course the problem was it belonged to La Nina

Needless to say, it annoyed La Nina that she had to ask her sister for a turn whenever she wanted to use it. I can't say that I blame her. Maggie was annoying me too. And if ever she wrestled the toy away from her sister, Maggie would be whining for a turn within minutes.

If you've been following this blog for awhile, then you've read my tales of Maggie's persistence. The kid has the tenacity of a NFL Lineman. She just doesn't stop. I'd try to distract her to let La Nina play without her sister breathing down her neck, but it didn't work. If La Nina left the toy for a split second the Magster would swoop in, scoop up the toy and hide herself under the table to play with it.

So, when the girls were fighting this morning before 8am over this toy, I made a decision. They were going to have to learn to share. I sat them both down, I explained why their behavior was bad, I told Maggie she needed to let her sister play with the toy, then I asked her if she understood.

"Yes, Mama....but I want ittt....."

To which her sister countered, "NOOOOOO, it's mine."

It forced a moment of clarity for me, this toy was driving me nuts. I was faced with a moral dilemma. Get a second Leapster for the crazy child or force the kids to learn a lesson. I decided, the lesson was the high road. So, I decided to solve the problem and I gave the Leapster a time out. I took it away from them until they agreed to share and they sat outside the toy time out closet all morning waiting to get it back. My hallway looked like Sproul Hall on a warm Spring Day. Around noon they made a half hearted promise to share, by one they were fighting again.

Fast forward to this afternoon. I'm in Target. The solution to my problems is staring me in the face for $50. But wouldn't that be rewarding the wrong behavior? Wouldn't I be devaluing La Nina's gift if I just gave a Leapster to her sister? Should I live up to my own parenting ideals or did I sell my soul for $50? I pondered all of this in the toy section of Target. Pathetic I know.

You know, a woman I know once told me she did her best parenting when she wasn't a parent. And I'd have to agree, but you know what, tonight our quiet evening was punctuated with electronic beeps and the girls were learning about sharing through the cartridges.

The End of the Innocence

Let me tell you, life with a five-year old La Nina is a whole different beast. One, I think she's officially smarter than me. Two, she's got it all figured out. I mean everything. Because I swore I'd never violate my daughter's privacy on this blog, I've thought long and hard how to share this latest chapter of our story without breaking my promise. I think this approach will protect her and her story yet let you in on what happened.

Adoptive parents: You know every question you're dreading answering and several you've never considered. The ones the books warn you about and the others they leave out... Yeah...those questions. Guess what the magic age is for those questions? Five.

My reaction to this development is as complicated as the questions themselves:

• Relief: I'm glad she felt comfortable enough to ask about her story.
• Sadness: It breaks my heart to hear her ask tough questions and to have her cry in my arms over the answers. I want her to stay innocent, but alas, the fairy-tale ended. Frankly it did sometime ago, she finally just let me in on her secret.
• Anger: Not at La Nina, but at her birthfamily. This emotional response caught me off guard. I thought I was neutral at the least toward her birth family, but I think seeing La Nina's pain brought out the Mama bear in me. I'm fairly certain my answers stayed neutral even if emotionally I wasn't feeling very neutral.
• Amazement: Given the complexity of her questions, it's clear she's been thinking about this on a pretty deep level for some time. I had no idea she was so intellectually capable. And I'm not selling her short. She asked some really hard questions.
  

I've talked to another Mom with a daughter La Nina's age and it's the same conversation with a few different twists going on in their house. The other Mom will never know how much our chats helped me in terms of reassurance and validation of some of the stuff I suspected was happening during these conversations. While I'm no expert on the best way to handle these questions, I do have some advice for all of you with younger kids:

1.) Don't try to guess what they're going to ask. Trust me, there is no script and the kid will go places you haven't thought about how to answer. You will not know all the answers. It happens, you'll figure it out.
2.) Expect it when you least expect it. When you're tired, half sick and really distracted, that's when they ask. It's uncanny. The first time, it took me a few minutes to figure out what was happening when she started, that's how distracted I was.
3.) Find someone who has a child the same age and compare notes. It's been so incredibly helpful to have someone to share this with that is going through the exact same thing.

After it happened, I told a friend of mine at work about the same number of details I've told you, and she asked if I wanted to go home and spend time with La Nina. (Note: this happened a few weeks ago.) I told her No. This is only the beginning of a dialogue that will last the rest of our lives...not that I don't want to spend time with my daughter. I want to keep this in the realm of normalcy. I'm trying not to make this a big deal, so La Nina doesn't.

My intuition tells me that La Nina has what she needs for now. I have no idea what she'll throw at me next, but I know, even if I'm not completely ready, she and I will get through it, find the right words and do our best to make sense of it all.

I was going to post, but then...

I was going to post to my blog last weekend, and then...

we got caught up in planning for and celebrating La Nina's fifth birthday. There were two parties to attend in her honor plus the normal weekend chaos, so I put posting off until Monday night which was going to be a saner night.

and then,
I dislocated Maggie's elbow. Yes, I pulled my child's arm out of the socket. It was an accident and I felt terrible. She told me "I ruined it" through a veil of tears which made me feel even worse. Luckily our neighbor is a nurse and she was able to put a temporary cast on it until we could get into a doctor early the next morning. Two and a half hours and an xray later, it was determined that her arm slipped back into joint and she was fine.

and then,
the whole emergency room thing made me change my flights for a planned business trip. I had to leave the hospital and head straight for the airport in order to make a new flight--which was delayed by two and a half hours, but who's counting.

and then,
I spent 31 hours in Manhattan, only about 7 of those hours were spent sleeping. The rest were spent working.

and then,
I had to fly straight home and make a cake to celebrate La Nina's actual fifth birthday. Luckily, I had wrapped presents before Monday night.

and then,
I collapsed about 7:30 last night from the sheer exhaustion of my week and now I'm posting, only six days after I thought I would.

And five years ago, I called my childless life crazy. What was I thinking?