OmegaMom

Adoption ranting alert!

Whoop!  Whoop!  WHOOP!  Brrrp…brrrp…brrrp…brrrp!

At this point in family life, I normally let the usual mainstream media faux pas (tell me how to pluralize that?  Please?!) about adoption pass me by.  At this point, life is less about Deep Musings About Adoption and more about how to survive the few weeks at the end of school year that are jam-packed with stuff like "Teacher Appreciation Week" (please bring a dish–Monday is breakfast, have it there by 8:30!, Tuesday is casseroles, Wednesday is sandwiches–but the staff are bringing the makings so don’t bother, Thursday is salads, and Friday is desserts) and "The Kindergarden Circus" (in which the dotter is being–natch–a "prancing horse"–and they really need volunteers to help sell popcorn before the circus) and ballet picture day (scheduled for the middle of the morning?  Oh, well, at least it’s not in the middle of school, since school ends two days before) and Ballet Recital Madness (update:  no, littlies don’t need to be there at oh-dark-thirty and stay for 24 hours straight, thank heavens!).

In other words, general adoption stuff has taken a back-burner to Real Life.

(Which is not to say "general adoption stuff" doesn’t happen, and isn’t important.  It does, and it is.  It’s just that what pops into the ol’ noggin to write about tends to be more on the panicky side than on the thinking deeply side.)

But when egregious mainstream media cluelessness attacks, I just have to sit up and take notice.

Brought to my attention by two adoption bloggers is this little lovely:  The category in the Mother’s Day TV special "America’s Favorite Mom" that is called–wait for it–"Non-Mom Moms".

I had a few "non-mom moms" in my life.  There was Aunt Lou, my mom’s best friend.  There was Mrs. Crysanthemum, who lived next door to my paternal grandparents, and who stunned me, absolutely stunned me, when she announced to me, at 16, that I should stop calling her "Mrs. Crysanthemum" and call her by her first name.  It took me years to be able to follow that request without feeling both awkward and disrespectful.  These were women who spent a lot of time with me, disciplined me, gave me hugs, fed me, let me have adventures with their kids, knew me from the time I was a wee chee-ild until I was a grown adult.

I never, ever though of Mrs. Libby, who lived on the other side of my grandparents and had an adopted kiddo, as a "non-mom mom".  Honest!  She was just Jarrett’s mom.

NBC and its minions, though, would place her (and me, and every other adoptive mommy on earth) smack dab into that category.

There it is, in all it’s glory, among the "semi-finalists" in the category "Non-Mom Moms":  "She was an adopted child who is now mom to her own daughter, plus six adopted children who started life as "meth babies"."

First off, even by their skewed standards, she’s a "mom mom":  she has "her own daughter".

OmegaDotter, of course, is not "my own daughter".  I’m just play-acting mommy for her.

Secondly, there’s that old cliche, the "crack baby", recycled as the "meth baby".

Thirdly, she’s not being a "mom" to those adopted children, oh no.  She’s being a "non-mom mom".

Sweet Kozmik All above.  Don’t these people think?  Don’t they have any concept of what "adoption" is?  Don’t they realize how they’ve dissed all the adoptive moms in their audience by that casual sweep of the semantic hand that dusts adoptive moms off into the "non-mom mom" dustbin?

Gah.  Get a grip, NBC.  My dotter has two moms, and they’re equally valid and important in my dotter’s life.  (Which I will talk about on Mother’s Day, I think.)

Frick-frackin’ rowrbazzlin’ dim-witted dismissive twits.

The dotter is losing teeth left and right.  The last one was one of the two top front teeth; this left the second one, also loose, all on its lonesome and able to stick out by itself when her lips were closed.  It was cute and adorable.  It also became quite wiggly.

At which point, it is my job to supervise the evening ablutions.  While both OmegaDad and I get the heebie-jeebies at really wiggly teeth, I have teeny-tiny heebie-jeebies; OmegaDad gets wigged out and has to leave the bathroom entirely.

Of course, it reached that particular point that parents the world over know:  it wiggled itself loose on one side and not on the other, and the dotter had reached the pinnacle of impatience.  I assured her it would come out over the next few days, but OmegaDad decided to promote the tie-a-string-around-the-tooth approach.

This resulted in severe dithering.  First it was "Oooh, yeah!"  Then it was "Ewwww, no!  Stop it!"  Then it was "Maybe I’ll try it."  Then it was tears and "I can’t do it!"  And all of this was before the string ever reached the tooth.

Like going zero to 60 and back to zero within a minute.  Whiplash!

So we abandoned the attempt and the dotter and I headed off to her bedroom for story time.

At which point, she decided she wanted to try it again.

This time, we avoided the bathroom, so she couldn’t see what was going on.  Apparently, it was seeing that was scaring her.  So we plopped her down on a dining chair conveniently scooched near the kitchen door, took the neat little lariat that OmegaDad had made out of cooking twine, and I slipped it over her tooth and cinched it down almost tight.

At which point, she decided she didn’t want to try it again.

Foreseeing an hour or two of this back-and-forthing, I reaching for the string, saying "Okay, okay, kiddo!  I’m taking the string off!" and surreptitiously yanked with one hand on the string while the other was making ineffectual forays at the string-encased tooth.

Pop!  Out came the tooth (of course).  (There was one moment of resistance, and I had a queasy fear that it wouldn’t work and the dotter would be both in pain and brokenhearted that Mommy was torturing her.)  The dotter had one moment of "Owww!" and then realized what had happened.  Much surprise and great swelled-headedness on her part:  "I did it!"  She totally thought that I had really been trying to untie the tooth…

Later on, in her bedroom, I whispered to her, "You know what?  I was sneaky.  I wasn’t trying to take the string off, I just yanked…"

She thinks it’s hilarious.  She has spent the last day giggling about it, and saying, "Ooooh, you’re so sneaky, Mommy!"  (Tee hee!)

She now has a two-tooth gap.  Another tooth is loose.  The Tooth Fairy is soon going to have to make another run to the bank for Sacajawea dollars.  I have it on good authority from the girls at gymnastics that at least one kid gets $20 per tooth, and another $8.  Whoa.  I got quarters.  The dotter gets the nice golden Sacajawea dollars.  And the Tooth Fairy is running out Real Soon Now.

You invited the dotter to your daughter’s birthday party.

The party was in Big City at the science museum.

WAY kewl!

Um.

But.

Um.

That’s a fifty mile drive.  One way.  It takes an hour to drive.  One way.

Sorry, we’re not going.

(Does it strike anyone else as a wee tad overboard to be having your six-year-old’s birthday party at a big science museum that is an hour’s drive away?)

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Elvis.

Of course.

And an island in a deep blue sea.  The island, I suspect, is related to Lilo and Stitch.

An important question, brought to my attention by Whatever:

Created by OnePlusYou

The utterly hilarious "An Engineer’s Guide to Cats", copped from Miss C Recommends:

We were discussing nicknames over dinner the other night.  I mentioned that my mother calls me "Katya" and that my dad called me "Puddin’".  The dotter said:  "Awwwww.  That’s sweet."  Then she thought for a moment.  Then she said, "He’s dead, y’know."  Cause–>effect.  Or something like that.

Makronee

Ol it tac for makronee is nootls and sos

Spgedeey

Ol it tac for spgedeey is nootls and meetdls and sos

(Translation:

Macaroni - All it takes for macaroni is noodles and sauce.

Spaghetti - All it takes for spaghetti is noodles and meatballs and sauce.)

Bon appetit!

So Scribbit nails it here, about how it feels right now in Alaska, in the season that is known elsewhere as "Spring".  Yes, you read it correctly when you hit the line "The sun isn’t going down until nearly nine o’clock now".

OmegaDad returns from a field trip this evening after two days away.  On the home front, the dotter and I have been cooking and hanging out.  She is now quite handy in the kitchen and I have even started allowing her to cut ingredients up with The Knife.  Let me tell you how hard it is to act nonchalant while your daughter is very carefully cutting up green peppers and Italian sausage with The Knife, which is Sharp.  Very.  I kept having visions of her slicing one of her fingers through, but she managed in spite of my parental and discreet hyperventilating behind her.

A side effect of the Food Network is that she is determined to be a chef someday, and has taken to actually eating weird combinations of foods.  "Weird", that is, in a six-year-old’s world view.  We had kung pao chicken on Tuesday night–full of "weird" ingredients.  She ate it all.  She liked it!  She called it "yummy"!  And she asked if I could make it again next week!

Whoa.

This was followed by the next night’s homemade spaghetti sauce (thus the green peppers and Italian sausage), which, unfortunately, was not as great a hit.  Even though she had specifically asked for it two nights running.

My mommy satisfaction quotient was quite high after these mother-dotter bonding experiences.  In fact, my head was swelled.  But then, at the dinner table last night, she informed me that "It’s just not as fun without daddy here."  *Pop* went my MSQ, deflating to nothing.

Then, when talking with OmegaDad on the phone afterwards, he reminded me that she had missed me terribly while I was down in Arizona, and went on to say that he was fun, but I was comfort.

Heh.  Which I proceeded to illustrate yesterday night by convincing the dotter that saying "I will have good dreams tonight" ten times in a row would make sure she didn’t have a nightmare, like she had had the night before.  (A real doozy, that involved crying.)

Anyway, since the man has been away, and I have been devoting time to the dotter, the blog has suffered. 

And it shows!  Sheesh, guys.  I don’t post for a day and my hits plummet.  Bah!  I say, BAH!  Nowadays I don’t like looking at my site meter some days, because it makes me feel antsy and like someone is going to tell me to clean up my room.

In the meantime, I am trying (very hard) to put up an itty bitty video of her cartwheeling.  Well, it’s up on my website, but how to get it to display is another thing.  Some research is in order.

A recent Disney film is now available on DVD.  So, since we’ve instituted "family movie night", wherein we watch a movie together and eat dinner in the family room, and since it’s a Disney movie, a fairy tale, we figured we’d get it and watch it and have a pleasant evening.

It’s a fun movie!  Really!  See, there’s this princess locked away by a prince’s evil stepmother, who’s very Snow-White-esque, singing to all the birds and animals and daydreaming of her handsome prince.  The prince hears her singing…he searches out the beauteous voice…he finds the princess…she’s swept off her feet…

And then the evil stepmother, trying to keep her away from the prince, dumps her into a wishing well that has, as it’s other end, New York City.

At which point, the movie turns from a cartoon into real life.

All well and good.  Lots of hilarity ensues when this dewy-eyed innocent Disney princess tries to cope with real-life NYC.

She meets a man.  She starts falling for the man.  The prince and a henchman of the stepmother also go through the wishing well to rescue her/keep the prince from rescuing her…

And then the evil stepmother, deciding her henchman is worthless, jumps into NYC herself.

At which point, the dotter crawled up into my lap.

And then the witch, foiled in various connivings, busts loose with lots of flames and witchery and turns into a very well-done CGI dragon lizard thing, big and scaly and scary.

"Scary" being the operative word.

Really scary for a six-year-old who has only encountered scary stuff in The Wizard of Oz (which is banned from the house for a few years) and in cartoons.  She’s quite the adept at the scary stuff in cartoons, because she’s well aware that it’s Not Real.  But CGI that’s presented in a realistic way?

Really, really scary.

I spent quite a bit of time last night in the dotter’s bedroom before she fell asleep, having to explain how it was all Make Believe.  How it was all done with computers.  How it wasn’t a real dragon lizard thing, and the witch wasn’t a real witch, and it wasn’t real fire, and it was all pretend, and everything was okay.

I felt blindsided, frankly.  I didn’t even think to research the movie beforehand–after all, it’s Disney, fer cryin’ out loud!  A Disney children’s movie.

So:  Make sure your kiddos aren’t quite as innocent about scary special effects as mine was before you show it to them.

One of the things that really bugs OmegaDad and me is when OmegaDotter doesn’t respond when we say something to her.

Case in point:  This afternoon, after putting up still more drapery hardware (the office needs some more drapery rings, because I thought 30 of the darned things would be enough, but, hey, more are on the way and I’ve learned my lesson for the time, ten years from now, that we do this thing again), OmegaDad and I joined the dotter on the futon to watch the last 40 minutes of Karate Kid.

Cool movie.  All sorts of Good Stuff about focusing, and working hard to reach your goals, and not using physical prowess to beat up skinny boys, and how you Shouldn’t Cheat, all with a few things slipped in about the effect the Manzanar camps had and the ease with which some folks use racial slurs to put Asians down.  I know that there are oodles of Asian Americans out there who get grumpy about Pat Morita being a token Asian whose acting was full of stereotypes, but I actually think the Karate Kid can prompt a lot of good discussion.

("Focus" being one of our latest, not really related to this post.  I think.  Hmmm.)

Anyway, the dotter was on my lap, waiting for Daniel to do the Crane Kick and beat the Bad Boys.

Daniel does the Crane Kick, the bad boys are beaten, all is well with the world…

I say to the dotter, "Okie doke, up you go!"  Happy tone of voice, all ready to jump up and get to work on other weekend projects.

And she sits there.  Not a word, not a twitch, no response.

I say again, "Dotter, off the lap, I want to get up!"  Still happy, though less so.

And she sits there.  Not a word, not a twitch, no response.

We’re talking a minute at a time.

Dudes, I wanted to get up.  And I did not want to be ignored.  I wanted my lap back, thankyewverramuch.  So I got grumpy, announced I was getting up, and dumped the dotter off to the side.

After which ensued a (loud) discussion about how it behooves people in the family to respond when other people in the family talk to them, yadda, yadda, yadda.  The dotter sitting and looking sullen, which is her modus operandi when she knows she’s in the wrong.  Then a talking-to from daddy.  Then she got angry ("I was getting up, it just was taking me a while!"–coulda fooled me, and besides, this "taking a while" can last up to five minutes and was repeated over and over this weekend) and broke the reins to her new poseable stuffed horsie.  And then it was waterworks time, complete with a "Mommy, can you fix my reins?"

Oy.

So I ended up sitting down with her, asking her how she would feel if she asked me to stop tickling her and I just kept on doing it, not saying anything, even after she asked me multiple times. 

At wits’ end about how to get her to actually think about it, I made her write sentences.  "I will answer when Mommy or Daddy asks me a question."

Oy!  I felt like a Mean Mommy.

So:  Any really good suggestions?

Or, more properly, the eggs and us.  Or we.  Or something.

Today was egg-dying day.  This year, OmegaDad read the instructions before preparing the dye (as opposed to after), so this year’s pink was…pink.  Rather than last year’s watery, pale, washed out color, it was deep and rich and dyed the eggs quickly.  Which, of course, suited OmegaDotter just fine, as she is still deeply into the Pink Phase of life.

Note the predominance of pink. 

This year’s egg-dying kit was a bug-themed thing with lots of unnecessary plastic objects.  OmegaDad had previously purchased a Princess egg-dying kit.  I am utterly, thoroughly, completely, absolutely over the Princess Thing.  Luckily, OmegaDad showed me his score late at night after the dotter was asleep.  I took one look at it over the top of the book I was reading, sighed, and said, succinctly, "No.  No more princesses.  Let’s find something else."  Bless his heart, he found something else last night, just about the only egg-dying kit left in all of suburban Alaska.

The dotter and I set to coloring eggs.  Note my dubious expression.  (Please do not look at the bags under my eyes.)  Note the dotter hamming it up.  (Please do not look at the holes in her OMG favorite T-shirt.)  (Also note the blue dye around the lips.  I have no idea how that happened.)

Some egg-cellent results (with pink):

The bugs were actually quite fun, once I decided to squelch my inner wet-blanket, which was snarling at the obsessive use of petrochemicals and the overpackaging of all U.S. consumer products, and join in the fun of decorating with stickers and plastic and wings and stuff.

The bugs posing:

The bugs at rest around our table centerpiece:

The dotter really wanted to hide the eggs immediately.  OmegaDad and I, thinking of the dawg and the cat that comes upstairs, and considering waking up to half-eaten eggs around the house, or considering waking up to an Awful Smell sometime in the future, nixed this idea.  We will hide them for her tomorrow, she will find them, then she will hide them for us, and we will be sure to find every last one of them.

The Easter Bunny is set to show up this evening.  The dotter has been asking me, multiple times and in multiple ways, if OmegaDad and/or I are/am the Easter Bunny.  "S. thinks that it’s the parents!" she informed me.  When she asked me if I were the Easter Bunny, I was quite happy to say "no".  Not a lie:  OmegaDad is the Easter Bunny.  He’s also Santa Claus.  I am the Tooth Fairy.  Anyway, I gave her one more year of ambiguity.  Maybe next year The Truth Will Out, but I hope that by that time she is in the frame of mind to love the magic even though it’s her (gasp!) parents doing it…

Most folks know that saying:  "A sound mind in a healthy body".

I’ve been thinking about this lately while ferrying OmegaDotter around to her various activities.

We placed the dotter, who wanted to "dance like a princess", into ballet last year in Small Mountain University Town.  She had a blast–the teacher was a wonder with children and kept them interested and involved and having fun.  So this year, we signed her up again, here in Suburban Alaska.  This time, it’s not turning out so well; the class is a lot slower, more focused on official balletic curriculum tenets, and less fun in general.  Around late November, she was whining complaining about it being boring and how she didn’t want to do it any more, but when she realized that ditching the class also meant ditching the recital (girly costumes!  makeup!  twirling around onstage!), after some bargaining attempts to get to do the recital without the class, she bowed to reality and said she’d finish off the year.  I suspect that ballet is going to bite the dust after the recital.

Towards the beginning of last summer, when we knew we were moving, a buddy of the dotter’s had a "take your friend to your gymnastics class" day.  Striving to ensure that she got as much contact with all her old buddies before she had to move, and influenced by her OT’s ongoing "you should put her in gymnastics, it would help her a great deal", we leaped on the chance.  She had a blast with that, too.  When it turned out that her before-and-after-school care facility was actually a gymnastics facility that offered gymnastics classes, I signed her up.  She loved the gymnastics so much that in November I signed her up for a second class per week.

She’s doing wonderfully.  She can do an awesome cartwheel.  (I never could do a cartwheel.  I was always a wuss about it, and I don’t know why.  Apparently, neither OmegaGranny nor Great Grandma could do cartwheels, either.)  She’s working on handstands.  The bouncing, the jumping, the balancing–all things necessary for her to get that "I want to thump into things!" modality out of her system–she glows when she’s done with class.

Now, I must admit to having had a horrible prejudice against gymnastics in general before this.  All I could think of was the horror stories about girls being browbeaten by ambitious coaches into anorexia.  It seemed a celebration of all that was "tiny" and "delicate", conjoined with a somewhat condescending "omigosh, lookit that girrrrl bounce around!"

But when I haul the dotter off to gymnastics and sit on the bleachers watching the ongoing three-ring circus of varying ages and abilities of boys and girls whirling and twirling and flipping and bouncing and climbing…

It’s a different world than I expected.

I see all these strong girls.  Flexible girls.  Girls with muscle.  (And boys, too, but as a parent of a girl, I’m much more aware of the girls defying age-old stereotypes.)  All ages, all sizes.  None of them look to be anorexic; there are, in fact, some Amazonian teens in the older gymnastic team practices, tall and lithe and muscular, well-proportioned and tall and still flipping over backwards and doing handstands and soaring from one uneven bar to the next.

The administration are always handing out flyers about good nutrition, things that emphasize the need for breakfast, for healthy snacks and proteins before a practice and afterwards.  Not a word about worrying about weight.  It’s refreshing.  And, of course, it’s totally counter to my prejudgment.

Yesterday I was focused on two girls, maybe seven or eight years old.  They were climbing up the ropes in the foam pit.  The gymnasium is two stories tall, and the ropes go the entire two stories.  There is a bell at the top of the rope; anyone who makes it to the top rings the bell, then heads on down.

These two girls–little things–worked their way up the ropes.  All the way.  They rang the bells.  Then they climbed down.

I couldn’t have been prouder of them than if they were my own dotters:  No-one was forcing them up those ropes.  No one was shouting at them to force them on, no one would have dissed them if they hadn’t made it all the way.  They were doing it because they wanted to, and they were determined about it.

In the end, I find these budding gymnasts inspiring and exciting to watch.  And when I get glimpses of the dotter, way off on the other side of the gymnasium, between the junior gymnastics team girls on the beams, or the boys on the rings, succeeding after weeks of work at a particular move on the bars–well, it makes me feel just all warm-n-fuzzy inside.

One of the Great Truths about me is that I never mastered Big Hair.  The only time I came close was when I had my poodle perm (see this post).  My hair has always been, and always will be, fine, straight, thin, silky hair that loses any hint of a curl when the relative humidity goes past 20%.  Since I grew up in Chicago, and lived there during the majority of the ’80s, perms were the only path to curldom.

Then there was the fact that, if one really wanted it, one could get Big Hair by spending inordinate amounts of time in the bathroom, fiddling with curlers, curling irons, hair spray, and teasing.  I had more important things to do, such as read.  Or write.

Anyway, I muddled through the ’80s as best I could.

Another Great Truth:  the dotter, though totally genetically unrelated to me, has that same hair:  fine, straight, thin, silky.

So last night, as you know, I subjected the dotter to soft curlers all over her head.

Of course, some came out during the night.

But!  The rest stayed in, and when they were unrolled, her hair was quite bouncy and curly.

I combed.  I sprayed.  I curling-ironed her bangs.  I didn’t do any hair-teasing because I am morally against such things.  So here’s our ’80s cowgirl, looking sassy (i.e., making a face):

It actually was big!  Here’s a close-up (the color is off and I couldn’t figure out how to correct it):

In which you can immediately tell that the bang curls didn’t do what they’re supposed to, and you can see some straight hairs that escaped the entire curler fiasco.

But the sad thing is that the dotter’s hair, like mine, immediately began to go flat.  Obviously, even though I applied what I thought was a dreadful amount of hair spray, lifting locks and spraying under them, holding them up so they’d dry a bit fluffy, it was all for naught.  By the time I haul her off to gymnastics this afternoon, the curls will be a sad, sorry shadow of themselves.  All that will be left is sticky residue.

Sigh.

The good news is that she will not be subjected to an entire decade of trying to do this every morning.

There were no shoulder pads (how could I forget shoulder pads?!  But I did!).  There were, however, jean legs tucked into the boots, and a hair pick in the back pocket.

It’s spring break week.  The dotter is at "camp" at her after-school care place, and they’re doing "Blast From The Past" as the theme this week.  Monday was the ’40s, Tuesday the ’50s, etc.  The kids are dressing up each day.  The dotter won for best dress-up on Wednesday–she had a mini skirt, a top with paisleys and funky colors, and a headband over carefully parted straight hair.

Tomorrow is the final day.  The ’80s.  Big Hair is my immediate response.  So we’ve purchased soft rollers and I plan to torture have tortured the child with them tonight, covered the result with a kerchief, sent her to bed, and plan to fill her hair with hair spray tomorrow.

From the back:

Looking winsome from the front:

Laughing:

Notice all the pink.  I spared you the picture of the dotter in her kerchief in her pink room.

I don’t really know how to do Big Hair, but we have a curling iron for Big Bangs and lots of hair spray.  I will display results tomorrow.

In the meantime…there’s talk of a Netherlands documentary about Chinese adoption, specifically that there are lots of folks these days who are having their kids kidnapped by government officials and dumped at orphanages.  There are those who are appalled and those who think it’s old news.  In the meantime, I sit here and realize that, while it was easier to think of someone reclaiming OmegaDotter when she was just a babe, she is firmly entrenched in my heart now and the thought of having someone tell me our adoption was null and void at this point would–yes–make me spend a lifetime and a fortune in court, fighting tooth and nail to keep her with us.  That aside, I will write up some thoughts on the issue tomorrow.

Saturday I got out of bed absolutely grumpy.  Grumpy enough to be shouting and slamming doors.  Why?  Because our lovely dotter had decided to spend an hour pestering me and OmegaDad.

I’m not proud, but, hey, there it is:  I am a Bad Mommy sometimes.

It didn’t last long.  Especially because of this:

And then, a few minutes later, there was this:

Which, of course, made me laugh, and so I was, indeed, hapee.

This afternoon, as we were driving off to get a movie for "family movie night", the dotter had her car window cranked all the way down, and was shouting with glee out the window.  The one that sticks in my head:

"Hellooooooooo!  Hello all you nice people out there!  I don’t know your names, but I looooooooove you!"

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.

Wouldn’t that be a great title for a blog?

My brother and I spent the time at mom’s ferrying her around to appointments, grocery stores, phoning banks and brokers to learn the procedures for establishing death, purchasing various technical toys and gadgets, and taking her out into the woods to look at water flowing over dams.

At one lake, there was a sheet of ice covering one end, with a hole in the middle of the icy expanse.  The ducks and geese who like to hang out there, eager for handouts from visitors, congregated in the hole and made occasional forays outward when they saw suckers visitors who might throw food stood by the shore.  At which point, the ducks would start waddling towards the suckers visitors in a single file line across the ice.

One boy out on the frozen-in dock kept yelling out with wild enjoyment, "Mom!  Mom!  Look!  It’s a mob of angry ducks!"

They weren’t actually angry, nor were they a mob, but they made for great pictures.  Unfortunately, all the pictures I took were with mom’s camera, and are now happily ensconced on mom’s (new!) external hard drive, rather than here, so I can’t provide illustrations.

So.  I am home.

I have a cold, which my body determinedly held off while we were at mom’s house.  I have one of those horrid itchy noses that keeps saying "I’m gonna sneeze!  I’m gonna sneeze!" and then, moments later, "Gotcha!  Hah!  Pwned!", leaving me with sneezus interruptus.  The scratchy throat and cough are par for the course, but the I-really-wanna-sneeze feeling is the worst.

When I finally pulled up to the house last night, after an interminable day of traveling, the dotter came barreling out into the garage, clad only in her gymnastics leotard, dancing around, jumping up and down and screaming, "Mommy!  Mommy!"  When I walked into the garage, she flung herself at me, jumped into my arms, wrapped her legs and arms around me, and said, "I missed you.  A lot!"  Wow.  A person could get used to a greeting like that.

Apparently, while I was gone, she informed OmegaDad that while he was allowed to travel, she didn’t like it, but that Mommy Was Not Allowed To Travel.  At all.

In the car on the way home:

"What the heck!" quoth the dotter about something.

"You shouldn’t say that," replies OmegaMom.

"But you say it!"

OmegaMom winces and says, like a wuss, "Well, some people don’t like it."

"You say ‘heck’, and ‘bloody’.  ‘Bloody’!  That’s gross!"

OmegaMom squints into the twilight, and muses that that particular phrase comes from OmegaGranny.

"And you say ‘dangit’, which isn’t good."

The litany continues:

"And you say ‘God bless America!’"

"Well, that’s actually a nice thing to say!" OmegaMom protests, then adds contritely, "But not the way I say it."

So I pulled into our driveway thinking that my cursing has been toned done quite a bit as a result of having the dotter around.  Which, of course, makes me want to say:

Fuck!  Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck!

This was a tag phrase on one list I was on.  (Since some people got the emails at work, too, it was generally abbreviated in the subject line, so when an email came in with Re: FFFityF, you knew a rant was coming about kids or spouses or insurance or something equally irritating in life.)

Later on, the dotter hauled out a new February calendar from her backpack, saying, "Miss Grossfalconhome made a new calendar because she screwed the old one up!"

Um.  Oh, well.  I’m trying to figure out if that one comes from us, or from Miss Grossfalconhome, the student teacher who is now flying solo while Miss Shoetree takes a few months of well-deserved rest, observing from afar.  At least the dotter has the formation down pat, so she says "screwed the old one up" instead of "screwed up the old one".  Though no doubt the English grammar purists would prefer the latter, the old fuddy duddies.

As promised.  The sea scene:

I am jazzed by my fishies.  The dotter, too, was jazzed, and made sure we brought the fishies home to hang in her bedroom.

The cake:

It was expensive.  And full of gooey goodness.  And had a bracelet.

My new home-based business plan:  rent OmegaDad out to birthday parties as entertainment.  He got the kids all giggly and riled up by chasing them as a Big Noisy Monster.  Here, The Chase:

Then, he appropriated the magic wand we were using for a pinata buster and used it to magically change each kiddo into an animal of some sort.  Then, he did the "Funny Alphabet", which is where he gathers the kids around and pretends to have major problems with the Alphabet Song–always good for a laugh with the kids, who keep telling him how the song goes, every time he messes up.  Anyway, I think we could make Big Bucks renting him out.

Making jellyfish:

I like the demon red-eye anonymizing effect, don’t you??

Presents:

That box, by the way, contained the most irritatingly tied-down of girly goodness that I have yet encountered.  This was what was inside:

The whole contraption was secured with fifty kazillion pieces of scotch tape.  There were multiple layers of transparent plastic holding things in place.  The ponies were tied down with twisty ties.  The bed was tied down with twisty ties.  The frog on the second floor was tied down with miniscule transparent elastic stuff.  The teeter-totter was tied down.  The dresser was secured with the transparent elastic stuff.  The mailbox (complete with mail!) was tied down.  The dishes on the table were tied down.  I was untying this ungodly mess for a full half-hour–the entire time the dotter was trying to play with various bits and pieces, until I morphed into Evil Grumpy Mom who bellowed "DOTTER!  TAKE THE PONIES OVER THERE AND PLAY WITH THEM THERE!"

Then there was the pinata, which we discovered, after purchasing, was not a string-pulled but a whack-’em type of pinata.  Alas, the venue did not allow pinata-whacking.  OmegaDad proceeded to appall–yes, appall!–OmegaMom by blatantly encouraging the chilluns to flout the rules.  In other words, there was whacking.  Lots of whacking.  Finally, a mighty blow by K. managed to crack the shell, and then there were kids all over the floor scrambling for candy:

A good time was had by all.  The family stumbled into bed quite early yesterday as a result of all this partying, and had a deep slumber.

Another year.  The dotter is six now.  I brought the requisite cupcakes to school…it was like another world, one I don’t see very often.  It occurred to me that more and more, as she gets older, she’ll be moving out into that other world, and I will know less and less what’s going on with her life.

Gack!  What a depressing outlook!

But oh golly.  She’s six years old.  She’s 44 inches tall.  She’s about 43 pounds (pretty cool:  one pound per inch–it doesn’t work that way for the rest of your life, girly!).  She’s learning to read, bit by bit.  She’s writing lots of stuff–phonetically, but, hey, it’s readable. She’s turning to princesses and Barbie more and more, and now dots her "i"s with little hearts or flowers.  I grit my teeth silently and say to myself, "It’s a phase.  It’s a phase.  She’ll grow out of princesses, Barbies, hearts and flowers."  She’s very girly-girl right now–she brought home a book all about Barbies (a more grown-up kind of book, actually, sort of a "Barbie reference book") from school library, and buys fake makeup and fake nail polish and sparkly things when she gets money to spend.

She still, however, went ga-ga when we located her box of horsies and unpacked it.

The party is on Sunday.  So far, we still have only 4 girls total.  But I am warned by various folk that the phrase "RSVP" doesn’t mean much to people, and that we’ll have others show up who didn’t tell us ahead of time, and some that said they’d show who won’t.  I am contemplating the goodie bags and how many to make.

Still…six.  Wow.  It boggles my mind.

Said in a snooty, chef-style voice.  "The salad has beans, and celery, and vanilla wine."

Ooookay.

The dotter is deeply into all things restaurateur these days, partly as a result of watching the Food Network.  Instead of building forts or castles, she builds restaurants.  Though she does confuse business enterprise with chivalry when she bows you into her restaurant and asks, "Would you like a menu, m’lady?"

I thought the vanilla wine was an especially nice touch.

Then there’s this piece of highly useful information:

"Mommy, did you know that when people get married, they kiss, and the woman’s foot goes up like this?", complete with a demonstration of classic 1940s-style foot-in-the-air type kiss.  Please note, that kind of kiss does not happen normally, only when you get married.

Then this evening we were talking at the dinner table (after the wondrous salad presentation, which consisted of a variety of stuff–faux lipstick, a row of stickers, some chapstick, the top to one of my little coffees–inside a large clamshell).  The topic turned to boobies.

Don’t ask me why.

But the dotter very seriously said, "Daddy, your boobies are different than mommy’s."  She went on, thoughtfully:  "They’re not so…round.  They don’t stick out as much.  They’re not as…squishy.  Or as…floppy."  It was quite the litany of differences.  Too bad that daddy and mommy busted up laughing.  But then we got off on a discussion of how if you don’t milk goats, their boobies hurt, and that the same thing happens with women who are breastfeeding babies.  "Oh, my, that’s not good!" quoth the dotter.

I’d actually like to discuss some more thought-provoking items, such as, say, political primaries, or Sony BMG’s very short-lived attempt to get people to purchase key-cards so they can download Sony BMG music, which segued into Sony BMG, very red-faced, deciding to just let people download their music via Amazon.

But some of these dotter-isms need to be recorded for posterity.

Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in the office fiddling around the Intertubes, and the dotter was in the family room watching a movie and snoozing, still recuperating from The Virus.

Suddenly she started moaning and whining.  This means, in general, that she’s waking up.  (The dotter, when woken up from a nap, or from a lousy night’s sleep, is just plain horrid.  Whiny, miserable, doing her best to make everyone else miserable type horrid.)  So I called to her, to let her know where I was, and told her if she wanted something, she needed to come in to tell me, rather than whining in the other room.

She dragged herself in, eyes heavy, hair askew, leaned on me, and asked to get in my lap.

I pulled, she pushed, and she fell into my lap.

She tossed, she turned, she wiggled her feet around, she dug her head into my chest…

And then she fell asleep again.

It’s been an age since she’s fallen asleep in my lap.  I have a picture from when she was 2-1/2, both of us in the garden in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods, and she’s sprawled across me, fast asleep, while I have a book in my hands.  We were in the dappled sunlight beneath one of the pine trees; OmegaDad was fiddling in the yard, the dawg was at my feet–it was a pleasant Sunday afternoon.

But as I said, it’s been a long time.  She wiggled some more, dug her head into my chest some more, and her breathing evened out and became heavy and slow.

I reached around her to carefully type usernames and passwords while I checked email or clicked on links.  She’d shift a bit, then settle back down.

It was warm.  It was cozy.  It was peaceful and restful.  I smelled her hair, I listened to her breathing, I snuggled her in my arms.

Of course, by the time forty-five minutes had passed, my back was aching and I really, really wanted to go to the bathroom.

But still, it was a quiet, restful period of time, rare these days when the dotter is zipping around, chattering at every chance, pushing new artwork into my hands, asking me tough questions (like, "Mom?  What is ‘life’?"  Um.  Jeez, kiddo, can’t you ask something like "Why is the sky blue?"), or needing Mommy comfort when she and daddy bang heads accidentally (like just this past minute).

I love watching the dotter grow and mature…she’s learning new things all the time.  But I miss those days of baby-holding.  I really do. 

As promised, an early morning pic of our winter wonderland, birches towering over spruce trees.  Right now, at 2:30 p.m., that corner of the yard is actually a little bit sunlit, but the photo was taken shortly after sunrise.

Miss C. wants to know what the difference between hoarfrost and rime frost is; so far as I can tell, the difference is that hoarfrost is ice that deposits on surfaces directly from cold, moist air, whereas the rime frost is deposited when there’s cold fog that builds up crystals.  Hoarfrost, I believe, tends to form small beady shapes on surfaces; this frost is all feathery ice crystals fanning out from the surface of the trees.

Herewith a lousy pic to maybe show you what it looks like a little closer:

And here is the dotter’s decor–which, I assure you, no longer looks quite so pristine, but is now covered with horsies on the tops and various stuff shoved into the cubbies:

However, she actually grasps the concept of "sorting" and "storing" now; we have two of the drawers filled with legos, one filled with cars, one with dolls, one with airplanes and rockets, etc.  More later!

One thing we get here in Alaska that we never got in our mountain home in Arizona is frost due to fog on freezing nights.  It’s not actually "hoarfrost", it seems, but rime frost, but I thought it was hoarfrost and it made a splendid post title.

Last night, we were under a dense fog advisory, with visibility down to 1/4 mile.  This morning the dotter woke me up with a question:  "Mommy, why are the trees so white?"  Blurry with sleep, I replied it was because we have birch trees, and they have white trunks, unlike the pine trees in Flagstaff.

But then I woke up, and actually looked out the window when the sun came up.  It was a lacy, icy fairyland.  All the trees were covered with a soft feathering of ice crystals, looking like flocked Christmas trees.  You could see where the fog level had been; since we’re down in a hollow, the fog didn’t get all the way down to the ground, but about halfway down the trees.  Many of the spruce (? firs?) in our yard are much smaller than the birch trees, so we have an interesting effect of lacy white branches on trees with white trunks, towering over dark green spruce.  It’s really quite picturesque.

Of course, I’ve kept meaning to take pictures all day, and now, as I sit down prepared to write this post, the light has disappeared and I can’t get that picture.  Bah.  Tomorrow, I promise!

Household-wise, OmegaDad finally bit the bullet and hauled the dotter out with him to look at furniture for her bedroom, specifically storage furniture.  Why are we doing it so long after we moved?  Well, there was another plan originally, consisting of painting the rustic low-level bookcase-ish thing made of orange crates and boards, and then moving it into the dotter’s room…it kept being discussed, but never done.  Then finally OmegaDad wiffled and waffled and allowed as to how he really wanted that particular item to go into the storage shed, for his use.  Ahhhh!

So, anyway, the two of them went out yesterday and returned with two Cubeicals, a little storage bench, and a bunch of pink and faux-zebra and faux-leopard fabric drawers to fit.  OmegaDotter chose these herself.  It’s amazingly kewl.

So OmegaDad has spent the day hammering and swearing, while I try to keep OmegaDotter out of his hair.  I will, of course, provide pics of that, as well.

"Hi!  I’m Rachael Ray!  Today, I’m not going to be teaching you about food–I’m going to teach you about farms!"

She flourishes a pink cowgirl hat…whispers, "You’re a teenager…"

"Now!  You’re a teenager!  And you have a job.  And you want to be a cowgirl.  And you want to be married.  And you want to be a teenager."

Mommy:  "Hi.  I want to be a cowgirl."

"Okay!  You want to be a cowgirl.  And you’re a teenager!  And that’s okay.  Now, after you get married, you can become a cowgirl!  And go to your job.  And come back and be a cowgirl!"

She pushes the cowgirl hat onto mommy’s head.

"You need a cowgirl hat to be a cowgirl!  Now you’re a cowgirl!  But you are still a teenager.  And you’re getting married!  Cowgirls can be married!"

She gestures to the "stable".

"You have horses!  This is Kayla and this is Spot.  Kayla’s kind of shy, so be gentle!  You need to feed them some oats.  And some hay.  This is how they eat!"

Kayla (formerly Frankie) nibbles from her hand.

Mommy suggests that maybe they need a feed bucket.

She grabs a box from Lands End.

"Now!  This is for their food!  What are the oats?  The purple socks are the oats!  And the white–orange–socks are the hay!  And now we’re going to feed the horses!" 

She grabs a bright orange plastic school bus and drags it in front of "Spot" (the wooden rocking horse).

"Now, Spot is a pony, a shepherd pony.  But that’s okay!"  (For the uninitiated, "shepherd" is a confused Shetland.)

"Now we’re going to give them some treats!"

And on and on from there…

Rachael Ray, I have to say, is everywhere.  A few weeks ago, I had no idea who Rachael Ray was, or that she was everywhere.  However, a few weeks ago, we lugged the second TV upstairs to the living room and plugged it in to the cable.  The first station that showed up?  The Food Network.  The dotter was mesmerized. 

We haven’t bothered to figure out how to change the station.

She laughs at and with Paula (just watching Paula puts pounds on your hips, trust me; I think Paula could deep-fry everything), but she adores Rachael Ray.  And now, when we go out shopping, she sees Rachael Ray on everything.  There are Rachael Ray Triscuits.  Rachael Ray on cereal boxes.  Rachael Ray on magazine covers.  Rachael Ray being interviewed on TVs in department stores.  Trust me, this woman is everywhere.  And, trust me, the dotter sees her where-ever she is.

The dotter also announced this morning that Hannah Montana was "the grrrreatest rock star ever!"  We quickly disabused her of this notion.  Or tried to.  OmegaDad claimed Elvis.  I said The Who or Eric Clapton or anyone else but HM.  The dotter promptly said:

"Okay!  Elvis is number two!  Hannah Montana is number one!"

Ahem.  No, that’s not what we said…

So right now, the dotter wants to be a cowgirl/rockstar/cook/girl who does hair when she grows up.

In other news.  The doc-in-a-box xrayed me, did the blood test thing, tsk-tsked over my cholesterol levels, said my blood sugar was just fine, told me about his lead sled dog whose name is Paxil, wrote me some painkilling prescriptions and sent me on my way.  (Can I just say how neat is it that the doc-in-a-box has a sled-dog team?)

He kept insisting it was arthritis pain, and when I’d say it was an electric shock would repeat back to me that it was a stabbing pain.  No, that’s not what I said, dammit!  I know a stabbing pain and I know an electric shock type of pain, and I know the difference.  And I sure as heck know the difference between arthritic pain and nerve pain.  But, hey, I’ll give the prescriptions a try and rest reassured that I’m not about to explode with hypo- or hyperglycemia.

And in the biggest news…

The best news…

Today?  Today on the weather page?  Where it says how much daylight there is hereabouts?

Today, rather than a "loss", it was a "gain".  Of 2 seconds.

WOOT!!!  Yes, folks, today marks the solstice.  From here on out, until June 21 or thereabouts, we’ll be gaining sunlight.

OmegaMom does the Snoopy Dance out the door.

The seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on a carousel of time.
We can’t return
We can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Painted pony number one:  Five years ago Saturday, we met our dotter for the first time.  It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been so long already.  We’ve gone from a tiny little baby coming home for the first time:

To an almost six-year-old full of creativity and vitality:

Her first tooth to come out is just about out–it’s at that stage where it can lie almost flat.  We almost thought it was out tonight, but it looks like at least one more day, after all.

Our trip to Arizona has blindsided us with some Issues.  The dotter decided–unbeknownst to us–that it meant we were moving again.  Um.  Oops.  Then, since OmegaDad’s job is still fairly new, we had decided early on that he would stay only a few days, while the dotter and I would stay longer.  So I spent this evening in the bathroom with her in full-blown brokenhearted weeping mode–Daddy was gone, she missed him, I would be gone on Wednesday (a trip to the office) and would leave her all alone, and she first refused to believe we were actually going home on Sunday, and then declared in tears that she wanted to go home now, and then told me that Sunday would never come.

Some kid point-of-view things just blindside you, y’know?

Painted pony number two:  A person who I have posted with for years on various debate boards died of colon cancer this week.  She was in her early 40s.

Painted pony number three:  Marguerite, coming up on her 104th birthday, had a bad infection that required her to be on antibiotics.  The infection and antibiotic combo, along with heparin, had her hallucinating and sleepless for three days and nights, unsteadily wandering the halls of her assisted living center and falling often.  No broken bones, but they finally hospitalized her, got the infection under control, figured out the right antibiotic, and got her to sleep.

But the assisted living center said they couldn’t handle her anymore, and she needed a nursing home.

Sigh.

So Great Grandma (my own grandmother) is now in a nursing home, and sad and confused.  Nothing tastes good.  She can’t hear well.  Her eyesight is going, with black spots in her vision that make her think there are black bugs wandering all over her food and her clothes.  And she, like OmegaDotter, wants to go home.  Imagine going to sleep in one place and waking up in another–with the intervening days and nights just vanished from your memory–and being told, "This is your new home."

I’m so glad that we had planned a party for Great Grandma, so that there were lots of folks in town to help my mom out during this extremely stressful time.  But it’s so sad for us all–we have been spoiled…Marguerite was still bowling up until 1999, she was still out playing bridge at the assisted living center two years ago, she has always been sharp as a tack and filled with tart commentary and memories.  Having her in this state is…heartbreaking.

This evening, at bedtime, the dotter quizzed me:  "Why is Great Grandma like that?"  And I had to explain to her that Great Grandma is 104 years old, that most people don’t live that long, that she’s wanting to go home and is having a hard time realizing that she has a new home, and that she’s just tired tired tired.  So in the midst of all the upheaval, all the worries about moving again, the dotter is learning some other things that are very difficult to process.

Parenting is hard sometimes.

Life is hard sometimes.

But I’m so glad we have the dotter with us.  I’m so glad my family can pull together like this.  I’m so glad we all have each other.  Because it makes the hard stuff more bearable.

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Jess asked about the T-shirt the dotter was wearing in the previous post.  The T-shirt does, indeed, say, “I’m the BIG sister”.  The T-shirt has no meaning in our family, alas, though we’d really like it to.  Someone at summer camp had the T-shirt.  The dotter liked it.  That someone handed it over to the dotter, because that someone’s mom had spilled bleach on it and the bleach had eaten holes in it and who cared, right?

When birthmother sensitivity goes bad–OmegaDotter to OmegaDad in the car last night, conversing about her birthmother:  “Oh, yeah?  Well, I’ve got her in my heart, dork!”  Okay, to really grok that last item, say it with a typical kids “neener-neener” tone to it, then top it with the emphatic “dork!”  OmegaDad and I busted up laughing in the darkness.  Then I informed the dotter that we don’t call people “dorks”.  Like that’ll stop her (”He did it first!”).

The “ACK!  Run away!  Run away!” department:  OmegaDotter has taken to decorating her “i”s with flowers when she writes.  She’s learned this perfidious practice from some older kids at after-school care.  She is very careful and detailed.  This is too, too cliché.  I will try to get a picture.

Tomorrow we head off to Arizona!  Yes!  For sunshine!  And my grandmother’s 104th birthday!  Yes!  And I’m excited!  Yes!

Later than planned, but here it is:

OmegaDad makes a sad face because he has never made a gingerbread house in his life.  A deprived childhood, obviously.  (We’ll leave aside the fact that OmegaMom has never made a gingerbread house, either, shall we?)  Anyway, it made a fine excuse for him to insist on making a gingerbread house with the dotter.

But he didn’t get too carried away.  None of this make-it-from-scratch silliness, for instance.  Nope, he scoured the local grocery stores for a gingerbread house kit, which you see over to the right.  It comes with walls, roof panels, icing packets, geegaws to decorate with, and a little gingerbread man to put out front.  The knife doesn’t come with the kit; it is a special OmegaFamily tool for opening shrink-wrapped gingerbread house components…

Dad and dotter examine the kit and decide how to approach things:

Note the dotter’s pink T-shirt.  Note the holes in it on the shoulder.  Note that OmegaMom was firm in her demand that the dotter wear a sweatshirt over that old thang when she wanted to wear it to school the other day.  Note that when OmegaMom picked up the dotter at after-school care, the sweatshirt had been long since pulled off, and the dotter had been rampaging around the classroom in the gnarly, holy old thing without a care in her heart.

Starting the construction:

Three walls up:

Raising the roof:

Holding down the roof (you have to get the icing to “set”):

Making the front door:

Dotter decorating with dots.  This is serious work, y’know…:

The finished product!

The purple-y thing by the sidewalk is the gingerbread girl; the purple is her hair.

Of course, once the gingerbread house was completed, the dotter wanted to eat it.

What?!?!  Gads, no! sayeth OmegaMom, wanting a cute little gingerbread house gracing the top of the glass-front bookcase as part of Christmas decor.

Well…yesterday, I succumbed, and told the dotter she could eat the gingerbread girl to see whether she liked it or not.  Thus, if she didn’t like it, the house would be saved.

Alas, she liked it.  The house still stands, but I don’t know how much longer.

For your amusement:  The TRUTH about wireless devices!

Remember, I didn’t participate (whew!).  But bunches and bunches of my regular blogstops did, and the whole slew of them are getting practically giddy with relief now that today is the final day and they are out of Blogging Durance Vile.

As a reader, of course, this sucks, because I’ve been happily seeing 25-30 new posts every morning by some of my faves.  And then 20 more as the day goes by.

But they’re giddy, I tell you!  Yelling “Whoopeee!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Thank GOD that’s over with!”  Dancing in the blogging streets.  Setting off fireworks.  Revelry. 

Bah.  Pooey.  Pbbbbbttt to the lot of them.  Harrumph.

Cast yer eyebones over to the left.  The Giving Tree is gone; all my Donors Choose projects were funded, though not all the way by my readers.  In its place is the Shameless Commerce Division (shamelessly cribbed from Car Talk), an experiment wherein I signed up with the BlogHer Ad Network.  We shall see; I’m hoping it doesn’t end up stalling blog loading.  If it does, please let me know.  Goodness only knows if I’ll get a few cents per month.

I need to send you on to Almost Quintessence, BlueGrassGirl’s blog, for a particular post all about having a dead bird in the freezer.  BGG is the sister of Jozet (of Halushki fame).  There’s obviously a hilarity gene, and the girls have got it.

The OmegaFamily is working very hard on the concept of “frustration” and how to handle it.  OmegaDad, in a fit of genius, came up with “The Attention Game”.  He told the dotter all about using her “ability”, which included listening and paying attention.  He tests her by giving her tasks, and if she does them, she gets a point.  If she doesn’t get it right, he gets a point.  They’re playing up to 30 points this weekend.

This has been prompted by the dotter’s absolute inability lately to deal with frustration, in any way, shape, or form.  She melts down and goes into stubbornness mode, wherein she keeps trying to do whatever it is that is frustrating her, and is crying and keening and whining while she does it, and is generally a drama queen about it.

This frustrates me to no end, and makes me snappy and snarky.  OmegaDad rode his white horse to my rescue this evening with this game.  I’m hoping it actually sinks in a bit with the competitiveness aspect, because the dotter’s response to her frustration is just irritating as hell.  I end up feeling like I want to run screaming into the street, far, far away.  The dotter, of course, thinks I’m abandoning her, and follows no matter where I go.  This makes me more uptight, and makes me want to retreat, and she gets more panicky and wants to cling, and it turns into a Spiral of Disturbance.  Bleah.

I go away now and play with Etsy.

There.  Is it so damned hard to say?!

No.

It’s not.

Jen, over at MimiBoo, mentions, towards the end of her post on anxious attachment, a discussion on a list she’s on about “what do you call your child’s birthmother?”  Much to my dismay (and Jen’s), the “tummy lady” term is still being used, as in “you grew in her tummy, so she’s your tummy lady”.

Oy!

(Aside from the objectification of the birthmother that the phrase embodies, I can’t stand the concept of teaching that pregnancy means “coming from someone’s tummy”.  It’s my own hang-up, and poor OmegaDotter will probably complain to her therapist when she’s 30 that her mother kept telling her how babies grow in uteruses whenever she tried the “I grew in her tummy” statement.)

In this house, we call our child’s birthmother ”your mommy in China”.  Or “your Chinese mommy”.  Or, “your birthmother”.  And it’s “your daddy in China”, and “your other grandparents, who you have never met”.

I made damned sure those words would come easy to me by the time the dotter really needed to talk about such concepts.  I practiced telling her them from the day we brought her home.  Maybe the first time or two it was difficult.  But as a result, these days we have a dotter who feels quite safe in asking questions about her birthmother while we’re eating dinner, and let me tell you, that’s mighty damned important to me.

A helluva lot more important than reserving the Sacred Word “mommy” or “mother” for my use alone.

The “Tummy lady” term has repulsed me since the day I heard that Rosie O’Donnell was using that as her term for birthmother to her adopted children.  It wasn’t because it was being used by Rosie (har!), it was because it seemed to be–and still does seem to be–a way of deliberately distancing yourself and your child from her family of birth, a way of giving lipservice to the idea of discussing birthfamily without having to actually deal with the emotional reality.  OmegaDad, when I discussed it with him in bed last night, wrinkled his nose at the phrase and called it “incredibly impersonal”.

Of course, I have to hold my scorn towards people who use that term in check right now–because I have no idea what I’ll be like if OmegaDotter actually finds her birthmother.  Here and now, the main reaction I have to terms like “tummy lady” is:  Being comfortable with the term, the idea, of “birthmother” is not about me.  It’s about my dotter.  It’s not my life that was yanked about without my consent–it’s hers.  And if feeling comfortable enough to talk about her birth family while her mouth is full of cheesy pasta helps her, then that’s what counts.

For many years, my mom took me to see the Nutcracker in downtown Chicago.  I am trying to follow in her footsteps by taking the dotter as well.

Big City Ballet was showing the Nutcracker, so I bought (ack gasp!) (expensive!) tickets for the three of us for this afternoon.  Unfortunately, OmegaDad got the creeping crud yesterday and was feeling like hell today, so it was just the dotter and I.

Of course, we had already purchased the requisite fancy Christmas dress…last year’s is much too small, making me forcefully aware of how much bigger the girl has gotten.  (As Miss C. said in her commentary on my last post, OmegaDotter is forever three years old in memory.)

What might not be immediately evident in the above picture is the fact that this year’s requisite fancy shoes that grabbed the dotter’s fancy are…

…are…

Well…urg…they have heels.  ACK!

Strappy black shoes with heels.  I felt like I was introducing an innocent to something like crack.  Or like a traitor to feminism and battling the patriarchy.  Additionally, I felt like a dreadfully wussy woman, to cave to the dotter’s pleas for these shoes, no others.  But, dayum, they did look mighty cute.

In honor of the occasion, I, too, wore heels.

Let me just say:  I am out of practice with high heels.  My feet have gotten longer.  And fatter.  And flatter.  My darling husband, my the Kozmik All forever smile upon him, eyeballed the shoes and asked me, “You are going to take some ’sensible’ shoes with you, right?”  Quickly disabused of the idea of wearing them all the way to Big City and back, I backpedaled and said, ”Oh, of course!” and crammed my tootsies into my nice, comfy, ugly faux Ugg boots.

Thank heavens.

Because wearing the high heels and walking the two blocks from the parking garage to the ballet venue made me quite aware of how out of high-heel-shape my feet are.  By the time we sat down in our seats, I heaved a huge sigh of relief as I surreptitiously kicked my pointy-toed high heels off.

At intermission, out in the middle of the lobby while looking at kewl Christmas ornaments for sale, I slipped them off again, and just carried them with us wherever we went.

There was, of course, a whirlwind of little girls dressed in fancy dresses and holiday finery.  I adore looking at all the girly girls in their Christmas splendor, and sighed quietly at some of the dresses which OmegaDotter had nixed (in favor of that triumph of marketing, the fancy dress with the doll-sized version of the fancy dress hanging off, ready for your 18″ doll to wear to match you).

The problem was, at the end of the performance (which was splendid) I couldn’t just walk back to the car in my stocking feet.  By the time we got downstairs and outdoors, I was mincing and wincing with every step.

So say bye-bye to the pointy-toed high heel shoes.  They are hitting the “donate to Goodwill” pile as of this evening.  Too bad, because they are quite pretty…but I will not suffer for beauty!

(P.S.  For those who are wondering:  Yes.  That is a Christmas sweater.  Not only is it a Christmas sweater, but it has glitter and beads, to boot.  I have admitted in many previous posts that I am an anti-fashionista, and I’m sure the very fact that I have a Christmas sweater, let alone wear it, consigns me to the utter depths of non-fashionable depravity in some people’s eyes.)