OmegaMom

OmegaDotter’s march into semi-maturity goes on.

After years of co-sleeping, or sleeping in our bedroom in her little nest, and six months of intensive propaganda about being a big girl when she turned six, she started sleeping in her bedroom in January.  She has slept there since.  Oh, she occasionally does an end run by slipping into bed with us in the wee hours of the night, when we’re both so sound asleep a marching band could wander through the room without waking us up…but, on the whole, she goes to sleep there and stays asleep there and wakes up around 5:30 a.m.

This is major, major news in the Omega household.  OmegaDad and I are still stunned.  I have kept quiet on the whole affair because I was afraid of jinxing it.  It’s blissful.

The other "when you’re six" issue, though…

Well, she sucks her thumb.  Intensely.  And she claimed, for months, that she would stop when she turned six.

The problem is that we have entered a seasonal period of skin chapping.  (Springtime…and the chappin’ is easy…)  I’ve broken out my stash of the addictive Carmex and have been slathering it on, and the dotter and I have been sharing hand lotion.  On the whole, it’s much less damaging here, where we have endless humidity, compared to back in Arizona, but nonetheless, it’s that time of year.

But the thumb.  Oh, OmegaDotter’s poor thumb.  We’re talking serious chapping here.  We’re talking a thumb with skin that splits and bleeds if you look at it cross-eyed.

We’re slathering the lotion on it.  I’m continually on her case about it, and when I call her on it, she surreptitiously slips her thumb into her fist and keeps loudly sucking, giggling slyly all the while.  She’s doing much better with it than she used to, but it’s oh-so-hard for her.  And it breaks my heart to see the white, cracked skin and calluses on her little thumb.  (I don’t worry about it causing her to need orthodontia any more, because her two adult teeth in the bottom have come in crooked from the get-go, so we’ll be purchasing braces when she’s 9 or 10 anyway.)

As a person who sucked my thumb until my teens, I sympathize.  It’s not easy to break a habit that ingrained.  I’ve suggested twirling her hair.  I’d suggest biting her fingernails instead, but I was doing both as a child and nibbling those nails down to nubbins on a regular basis, so I don’t want her to deal with inflamed, bleeding, infected nailbeds, either.

Any assvice?  Nice, gentle assvice, please?  I don’t want to do the hot-sauce on the thumb routine, though I have considered just slathering it with petroleum jelly to both protect and provide a disincentive…

OmegaMom is a happy, happy camper right now.

I sit here typing this at my new desk.  In my newly painted office, painted a bright and cheery duck yellow color with white trim.  Filled with nice, new, white office furniture from The P0ttery B@rn.  With lots of study, well built filing cabinets.

All of which made me happy enough, because now it actually looks like an office, and I feel like it’s my space now, and I can actually try to organize things and keep things clear and clean in at least one room of the house.

But the creme de la creme…the thing that is making me dance on air tonight…

I don’t know if I mentioned this in the blog at any point; I know I’ve mentioned it in a comment or two on other people’s blogs:

We had lost all of OmegaDotter’s adoption paperwork except for the original official red folder containing the adoption certificate.

Birth certificate?  Vanished.  Abandonment decree?  Vanished.  Registration of adoption?  Vanished.  Chinese passport?  Vanished.  Long since.  We had become resigned to the idea of having to spend many dollars and much time trying to recreate these items.  I was too embarrassed to talk about it on the blog.  What kind of devoted mom of a Chinese adoptee was I, anyways?!

But tonight, filled with the Urge To Organize brought on by the new (sturdy!  attractive!) office furniture, I delved into the ratty old chintzy falling-to-pieces filing cabinets and started going through files, tossing out ancient insurance certificates and owner’s manuals for things we haven’t had in our possession for years.  The bottom drawer of the first filing cabinet had been jammed shut for quite a while by the aforementioned owner’s manuals, but some determined digging and reaching and yanking out jammed pieces of slick paper finally undammed the jam.

And there, in the midst of some totally unrelated stuff…

I found the buried treasure, the Ark of the Lost Covenant, Shangri-La itself:

Birth certificate, abandonment decree, registration of adoption, and Chinese passport.

Woot!

Next weekend we put up curtains and put in bookshelves, and I will post pics.