OmegaMom

While I sit here alternately reading election returns and berating myself for reading election returns (“Why are you hitting your head against the wall?”  “Because it feels so good when it stops!”), I thought I would put together a post on our Halloween shenanigans.

Mostly, our annual Halloween haunted gingerbread house.  This was last year’s version.  This year, OmegaDad decided that we needed a haunted movie theater.  It would have a movie screen, and various ghouls and ghosties and witches and whatnot sitting in the audience, and you would only be able to see it through holes in the decorated walls…

First, he and OmegaDotter decided on a movie to be playing (Monsters Versus Aliens), and then the dotter produced a sketch of what should be showing on screen  (I like the “Dude!”):

While OmegaDad was putting together the walls, the dotter worked on translating her sketch to the royal icing movie screen:

With this as the end result:

Note that working with edible ink pens on royal icing is, frankly, a pain in the butt.  She’s great with pencil on paper, and good with markers on paper, but the edible ink pens/royal icing combo was killer for her.

Then she and OmegaDad spent a while creating theater seats and various monsters to inhabit the seats.  At the front, you will see three ghosts, a Frankenstein, and a witch off to the side; behind them are tombstones and the beginnings of two Candy Corn Creatures.  OmegaDad is working on the movie house framework and, I believe, beginning to populate the theater:

The inside was completed, and before they put the roof on and finished the outside, I took a photo:

I love the candy corn wall sconces!

And then they really got to working.  I present to you—The Boojou Theatre!

This is the front.  Note the movie poster for Monsters Versus Aliens, the skeletal booth attendant, and the Candy Corn Creature.  (OmegaDad downloaded a variety of monster movie posters, shrunk them, printed them out, and then plastered them onto slabs of royal icing.)  A close-up of the front:

The left side, with "The Creature From The Black Lagoon”, “The Giant Gila Monster”, ghosts, tombstones, Candy Corn Critter, and a view inside, and the back, with a monstrous spider, glowy-eyeball black cats, and another movie poster:

A view of the right side.  The movie poster is “Beach Girls and the Monster”.  You can see the movie “playing” inside:

So, it was grand and grand fun.  On the whole, however, both OmegaDad and I preferred last year’s creation.  He is already planning next year’s, which currently is slated to be a haunted disco, and titled “BOOgie Nights”.  Har!

OmegaDotter was a sorceress for Halloween, with a grand black-and-white wig which she very carefully styled into a sixties-style hairdo.  There was purple eye shadow and purple lips, and a splendid staff made of black painted PVC with a purple/pink painted wiffle ball and glowsticks inserted inside. 

She insisted that I dress up a bit, so we scampered around Sunday afternoon and pulled together a Mama Bunny look:

We both discovered that the face paint itched like crazy after a while.

So that was our Halloween!

Now…back to reading ::sob!:: election returns.

To reassure all my readers that my life is not totally Doom And Gloom And Misery these days, I haste to mention that it has been time for the State Fair, and all the wonders that it encompasses, for the past few weeks.  What with OmegaDad being laid up by his elbow and me being busy packing the wound with gauze (ew yuck) (it’s all healing nicely now and hasn’t needed the gauze packing for a week, thank heavens!) and neither of us feeling particularly like exposing The Elbow to the exigencies of fairdom, we put everything off until this weekend.

One reason we couldn’t put it off any longer is that the dotter’s gymnastics facility was Putting On A Show, and the dotter was in it.  Three times in one day.  Seven hours of hanging around the fair.  In the drizzle.  Waiting for a break in the weather.  They cancelled the first show, and didn’t make up their minds about doing the second show until five minutes before show time.  But!  Then it went on, and the third show as well.

Alas, being in the show meant that all the kids had various restrictions, the most important of which was “NO RIDES”.  It seems that in the past, gymnasts went gallivanting off to enjoy the carnival rides between the shows, and often showed up for second and third shows green in the face and about to vomit and had to sit the show out.

In between various attempts to get the show going, I managed to catch this quartet of musicians who had gotten Fair Hair and face paint:

So we had the dotter hanging around with us in the drizzly grayness and not being allowed to do anything fun, except hanging out with buddies under the umbrella we brought along:

And a quick break for hula-hooping:

I got some pics of the performance, and a video (I may try some screen grabs later), and then ran out of memory in my camera.  Bah!  But here is a pic of the dotter waiting between portions of the performance:

The remedy for the lack of fun was for us to go to the fair again today.

Today was beautiful.  Sunny.  Clear.  Blue skies.  Warm.  Crowded.

The only clouds around were a few fluffy white clumps in the sky, and the drifts of lifting fog around the mountains.

Our first stop was the dotter and I joining forces to steer the little race cars around the track:

In previous years, she has provided the foot on the gas; this year she provided the steering and I powered the vehicle.  We roared past all the other cars, weaving in and out (at very low speeds) and had a great time.

We ate, we wandered, we purchased stuff—at good prices, amazingly enough, because today was the last day of the fair.  We all went through the Dungeon of Doom and shrieked at all the sudden noises, bangs, and ghosties.  Then the dotter and I indulged ourselves in carnival rides, which OmegaDad doesn’t like—we slid down the SuperSlide, we rode the super swings, we got in the spacecraft with the virtual roller coaster ride inside, we did the centrifugal tilt-a-whirl ride where you’re all standing up and the force is holding you against the outer wall…?

A sad side note:  as we passed one of the pony rides, I asked the dotter if she wanted to do it, and she said, “No.  That’s for little kids.  I don’t do that anymore.”  Wah!  OmegaDad whispered to me that she still liked to ride horses, it was just that she doesn’t like the going-around-in-circles pony rides anymore.  Still, it’s evidence that she’s growing more and more.

Then, of course, it was time for Fair Hair.  This year, rather than the spray-in paint that gets sculpted into wondrous structures, she voted for colored hair extensions.

Getting the first one put in:

And this is the final result:

The extensions supposedly last two to three months.  Luckily, the hair place also hands out a note on how to remove the extensions—for people who decide that their extensions are really just not what they wanted after all.  Or who get tired of them…

The finale to our time at the fair was the annual face painting.  This time, she got something called “SuperBling Princess”.  Yes, that’s really the name of the look.

It was amazing.  Apparently the face painter was so pleased with it that she took a picture of it to put on her wall; she said it was the best she had done at the fair.  It made the dotter look like either a Hindu goddess, a Bollywood star, or a Chinese Opera star.

After leaving the fair, we went off to a nice restaurant for dinner, and had multitudes of people compliment her on her look, including a nice old grandfatherly type who asked if he could take her picture to show the folks back in Indiana what real Alaskans looked like!

So.  Not all doom and gloom here.  I have located a therapist who sounds like she’s my type of people, and am about to organize some serious therapy work to deal with the ongoing grief.

In The Book of the Dun Cow, there is a dog, Mundo Cani, who joins forces with the hero, Chaunticleer the rooster and helps him defeat The Evil.  At times, Mundo Cani erupts into a miserable, lonesome howling of “Marooooooooooned!”  I read the book years and years ago, once, but that image always stuck with me, a sort of archetypal outpouring of grief and mourning and lonesomeness.

I find myself, at times, tempted to just throw my head back and howl to the world, “Maroooooooooned!”

Most of the time this summer, however, I have been merely frozen.

Like a rolypoly bug, I have curled in upon myself, not bothering to write the blog until nagged to by BlogHer’s automatic “We Miss You!” email that explains, sadly, that the ads are being withdrawn until the blog is updated.  Not bothering to look at my email.  Not bothering to respond to emails, or calls.  Not reaching out to local acquaintances.  Just sort of surviving, with a feeling of “One must go through the motions.”  Reading a lot.  Dealing with family things, but mostly with half a mind, or a pane of glass or frozen ice between me and everything else.

Now and then, I pull myself together and do something related to mom’s death.  At which point the ice shatters, and a piece stabs into my belly and I find myself gritting my teeth, pulling my hair, pacing, finally crying.  Afterwards, I carefully retreat back behind the ice, back where it’s safe and it doesn’t hurt.

It was a cold and rainy summer here.  It was sunny and warm here while I was in Arizona, dealing with mom’s hospitalization and death.  But shortly after I returned home, the gray horizon-to-horizon clouds moved in and the temperature dropped and it stayed chilly and drizzly and shadowy.  We broke a weather record for most consecutive days with rain, and the lovely little current-temperatures-versus-average-temperatures graph on Big City’s NOAA weather page showed consistently below average temperatures.  The sun didn’t come out until the first day of OmegaDotter’s new school year…

OmegaDad had his surgery early in the summer, and recuperated slowly.  Then, a week and a half ago, he awoke with a bump on his elbow—which I assumed was some kind of bug or spider bite—which, by the end of the day, had morphed into a horrible angry red baseball-sized swelling.  To give you an idea of how ugly it seemed, I was the one who insisted we go to the emergency room for it, since we had missed closing time at the local urgent care doc-in-a-boxes.  (Normally, I’m the one who wants to wait; OmegaDad accuses me of generally wanting to wait until he’s passed out on the floor before I grudgingly admit that he needs to see a doc.)  Anyway, the thing turned out to be a staph infection (not MRSA, thank heavens for small favors!), and we spent the week traipsing off to the osteopathic surgeon’s office on an almost daily basis to have it drained and bandaged and tut-tutted over.  The prognosis on Friday was if things hadn’t settled down by this Monday, he would have to go to the hospital to have elbow surgery; but, in the meantime, the doc upped his antibiotics.  This, thankfully, turned the tide, and by Monday the doc was most pleased and allowed us to stop packing the wound with gauze and let it start closing naturally.

So this week I finally wrote up an invitation to family and friends to our scattering of mom’s ashes, which we’ll be doing in mid-October.  This, of course, cracked the ice and led to a torrent of tears.  Then I retreated back again.  Tonight, I pulled together email addresses and sent it out.  There are more names and email addresses I need to get, but this is the majority of them, I think.  The ice cracked again.  Since OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are asleep, my outlet is here, at the blog.

OmegaDad wants me to find a grief counselor.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how to start.  As I am not religious in the least, I don’t have—or want—a priest or pastor handy to turn to.  And, as I am not religious in the least, I do not want counseling based in belief of heaven or hell or the afterlife. 

I am at a loss.

In the meantime, the season is rapidly turning towards autumn; trees are yellowing, leaves are falling, blossoms are fading.  Winter is on the way. 

So OmegaDotter is starting third grade today.  Ah, me!  How the time is flying!  We recently looked at some pictures from just two and a half years ago, and she looked so much younger.  Now she’s swiftly moving into the “tweens”.

We finished her new bedroom look, and she is thrilled.  Zebra stripes, bright pink, orcas everywhere, and her most favorite stuffed animals clustered by the headboard of the new bed: 

This is probably the last year I’ll be taking her into her classroom on the first day of school.  I asked her on the drive in (all four minutes of it!) whether she wanted me to keep doing it, and she was rather firm on the subject.  So we marched in, meeting her teacher from last year acting as traffic cop in the hallway; Mr. Snows was pleased that she got the particular teacher she got and amused that her partner in crime and best friend A. was in her class but carefully placed at the opposite end of the room.

Here she is, all dressed in her new teal outfit (it’s more teal-y in person):

You can’t see it, but she is sporting brand new pierced ears.  I had been saying she could do it when she was twelve, but this past weekend, when we were buying new school clothes, we stopped into Claire’s as usual, and another girl about her age was getting her ears pierced, and…well…there you go.

But, while she’s getting bigger and more grown-up by the day, she also still likes to play hard.  She spent the other day “sneaking” around the house as a ninja.  As she’s wearing a pair of my sweats that she begged to have as hers, she looks like a droopy-bottomed gangster:

It’s been a busy few weeks.  Lots of things going on.  I may pull myself together to post on a current “hot issue” over at the Rumor Queen.

Then again, I may not.

The Chinese name request lasted two days, tops.  She’s still interested; there was an interesting discussion about how she figured she would still be her even if she had a different name (Shakespeare, anyone?), but the question of having friends call her OmegaDotter and others call her ChineseName bothered her.  I suggested that when she starts school we could talk with her teacher, and maybe her teacher could call her by her Chinese name.  She’s dubious at this point, but she realizes that we can do this any time she wants.

Maybe that’s all she was after—that reassurance?

Chinese camp was a blast for her.  There was a performance on Saturday that included a demonstration of Chinese yo-yoing by a one-time Taiwanese yo-yo champion (who had been teaching the kids), a variety of dances that were quite well done and very long for 7-10 year olds, and a potluck. 

Here’s the “Happy Farmer” dance the kids performed.  It’s –>six<— minutes long, so only watch if you’re really interested!

I was overjoyed at the prospect of no longer driving an hour to Big City, an hour back, working, then driving another hour to Big City and an hour back.

So now that Chinese camp was over and done with, the next big project began.  OmegaDotter has been agitating for redecoration of her bedroom.  Sunday, she and I went to the local bedroom furniture shop and purchased a new bed and mattress for her, and then went off to Target and bought a zebra-stripe comforter and bright pink sheets…the original plan was to do her bedroom in orcas, but she decided she loved the zebra-stripe and that her stuffed orca collection would go well with it.

Every day since then we have been going through the (HUGE.  MONSTROUS.  APPALLING.) mess conglomeration of stuff in her room, sorting it into “keep”, “donate”, and “throw out” bags, a couple of hours a day.

It has been emotionally wrenching for me.

She put her Polly Pockets into the donate bag.

She said, “None of my friends my age plays with My Little Ponies any more,” and *poof* went the MLP collection into the donation pile.

She went through her collection of horsies with ruthlessness, culling her herd to half its size.

Tonight, we went through a box of her old schoolwork and artwork.  All I can say is: “WAAAAAAH!!!!”

There were kindergarten projects.  Pictures.  Old notes to and from friends.  A sign she had designed for the TV cooking show she and OmegaDad were going to do.  An illustrated “mennyoo” with idiosyncratic spellings.  Various stories.  She was ruthless there, too—keeping much less of it than I had expected.  Some things I grabbed for myself, many she “gave” to me to avoid saying she didn’t want to keep them but sort of did want to keep them at the same time.

The old bed gets listed on Craigslist for this weekend; the new bed gets delivered soon.

Folks, it’s the end of an era…

Early this summer, I signed OmegaDotter up for Chinese Camp in Big City.  When she heard, she pouted—seriously.  She did not want to go, no, no, no!  This came with associated stomping of feet and whining.  This Monday, as we were driving in to Big City early in the morning on the way to her week’s worth of Chinese Camp, she whimpered some more, and I laid down the law:  She was going to Chinese Camp, she was going every year we could do it, and we’d make her do it when she was a teenager, too.

Why?  She whined.

Well, because we want you to get at least a smidgen (I gestured with my fingers less than an inch apart) of an idea of Chinese culture and her heritage.  Oh, and, by the way, adults who were adopted from other Asian countries who didn’t get to go to culture camps as youngsters felt more deprived than those who did.  (Not to say those who did go felt “not deprived”, just a little “less deprived”.)

She flounced in the front seat of the car and “hmphed” and made various unhappy sounds as we pulled into the parking lot.

When I picked her up that afternoon, she was much happier about the whole thing.

Tuesday, she did a performance of the dance she was learning for OmegaDad and me after dinner.

Today, she showed us a (really cool!) “magic” trick with Chinese yo-yos that she has practiced.

And tonight, at dinner, she asked us if she could use her “real name” rather than the name we gave her when we adopted her.

Well.  What a difference a few days makes!

Now, first off, I remember very distinctly being about nine years old and telling my parents—also at dinner time—that I wanted to be called “Elizabeth”.  No real reason—I just liked the name much better than my given name, Katharine.  I also remember my mom and dad acquiescing, and calling me Elizabeth for a week, at which point I begged them to puh-leeze call me Kate again.

However, OmegaDotter has a reason:  SiSi is the name she had before we adopted her.  It’s a connection to China and her past and her heritage.  So we’re going to do our best to remember to call her that all the time, rather than OmegaDotter.  She’s asked to do it for a week to see if she can get used to it.  She wants to be registered at school using that name—I’m not sure we’ll be able to do that, alas, but maybe we can ask her teacher to call her SiSi instead of OmegaDotter.  We did tell her that she would have to get used to telling people how to pronounce it, since any American seeing it will call her “Sissy” instead of “Siih-Siih”.  In fact, OmegaDad and I, who have used her Chinese Name on a semi-regular basis anyway, pronounce it incorrectly, calling her “Ss-Suh”.  (There’s a very small schwa in there after the first S, but I don’t know how to put in a schwa, so just imagine it, please.)

We did, however, tell her that we wouldn’t change it legally for a while, because that requires going before a judge, and we wanted her to be sure.

We’ll see how this goes.

(For those wondering:  I am using her Chinese name in this one post, but will continue to refer to her as OmegaDotter.  Since her legal name is not SiSi, and none of her friends know her as that—so far—I figure one post with her Chinese name is okay.)

The dotter and I went to the bookstore a week ago; I wanted a specific title.  She kept asking if we could buy her a book, and I kept grumbling that she didn’t bother to read the ones she already had, so why should I buy her a new one?!  But, in the end, I bought her…

A Hannah Montana “what’s your rock star style?” activity book, to wit, the Hannah Montana My Secret Superstar Syle Book.  (This is, interestingly enough, not locatable on the Amazon site by searching on “Hannah Montana Secret Superstar Style” (no quotes), or “Secret Superstar Style” (again, no quotes), but only by searching on “Secret Superstar”.  No, I can’t explain it, but did find it very frustrating.)

Much to my surprise, she is actually wanting to do the things in this book.

One of the activities was (of course) a quiz to determine your rock star style, just like well-known and loved Internet memes!  As I was reading the questions, I knew what her answers would be, though she surprised me with a few.  (For instance, she chose the “golden sling purse shaped like a guitar” over the “pink rhinestone and glitter handbag”.)  She ended up being “Rock Royalty” instead of “Pop Princess”—which, if I had to peg her pre-quiz, would not have been my choice.

So one evening this week, we managed to dig out two single-color T-shirts and do the “Tear ‘Em Up!” “punk” look mixed with the “sassy” look.  I thought it turned out pretty well!  When I wanted to do pics, the dotter insisted on putting on her ratty old capri jeans, which she adores and I refuse to let her wear to school or summer camp.

Here are the results; this pose shows the cute rucked-up sides:

Another view, showing the asymmetrical sleeves (one side was laced, the other side was plain):

And then a third view, where the dotter did a back bend into a bridge, just because:

She wore it to sleep that night.  She wore it to summer camp the next day.

BUT.  She wouldn’t take her sweatshirt off.  By the time I picked her up late in the afternoon, the sweatshirt had come off, and her 20s-ish camp counselor gushed over how rockin’ the style looked.

Anyway, the end result is that the Sekrit Superstar Style book is actually kind of fun.  Who would’a thunk it?

(ETA:  Oh, just an FYI.  The price of the Amazon Kindle has dropped to $189—the result of competition from the Apple iPad.  Anyway, if you’re interested in a Kindle now that it’s almost worth while buying, if you use my Amazon search link, or the links above, I get a leetle referral $$.  Hint, hint.  )

I spent Thursday driving down to Phoenix and flying from there to Big City, Alaska.  A lot of it, I spent just feeling miserable; for some reason, the knowledge that this was the last time I’d be flying to Arizona to see Mom and the last time I’d be flying home from such a visit was just…hard.  Oh, we’ll be going back, lots, I know.  But it was just so…final.

Then I arrived home and—of course—after weeks of beautiful warm, clear weather in Suburban Alaska, it turned cold, grey, and drizzly.  And our furnace was out.  And the house was getting cold.  And—after days of doing, doing, doing, suddenly I had little to do, and the grey drizzlies outside matched the grey drizzlies inside, and it was A Very Bad Day.

But today dawned bright and sunny, and OmegaDad was working in the yard.  I ventured out there pre-shower and pottered around the yard with him, and then noticed a pair of butterflies that were…um…making little baby butterflies together in the bushes near the veggie beds.  I didn’t have the camera, and didn’t think it was possible that the S E X would continue, but every time I peered over there, there they were, cavorting shamelessly in the sun.

The dotter called out the window for something:  “Mom!  MOM!”

I called back, “Yo, OD!  Wanna see some butterflies having sex?!”

(Really, I did!)

She was intrigued, but then wanted me to come inside to see something (cat vomit—oh, my life is so glamorous!), and while I was there, I grabbed the camera and OmegaDotter’s arm, hauling both out to the backyard to see the spectacle.

The dotter had, in the meanwhile, located her brand-new good butterfly net, and determined to capture the butterflies, which neither OmegaDad nor I thought very kosher.  Y’know, there they were, very involved and all that, it just didn’t seem sporting…

She managed to (gently) get the netting over the butterflies, then scooped them up.  And, whaddayaknow, they were still at it.  And I had my camera.  So I managed to get some smutty butterfly pictures, as seen above and below.

Then we demanded the dotter release the butterflies.  This caused some consternation; she wasn’t quite sure how to do it.  So I reached into the net, and the next thing I knew, I had a pair of copulating butterflies crawling on my arm.  The dotter reached out, and they climbed onto her hand.

Right after that, they flew away.

All the time, I was doing the “Oh, wow, Mom just has to see this!” and the associated “Damn.  She can’t.  And I can’t tell her.”

So it goes.

So, yeah, I’m back home.  We’re going to scatter her ashes in early October, a good time weather-wise; Arizona has suddenly entered the very hot season, and our visit out to the place where we scattered Dad’s ashes was already hot enough that we figured all Mom’s more elderly friends would have severe difficulties if we tried during the summer.  I will be contacting friends and family about where and when the event will be…

It occurred to me this morning that having this picture on that post was a BAD IDEA, given what weird pervos might be searching on the term h@rd-on…So here it is, split out by itself.

A gratuitous shot of the dotter, sitting on my Big Red Lips.  Look at how big she’s gotten!  We had to buy her a new bicycle because she’s grown so much.  Also, because she left her bicycle lying in our neighbor’s driveway and it got smashed when the neighbor backed out of the garage.  (She had to pitch in some of her own hard-earned money to get the replacement.)

Spring has finally arrived Chez OmegaMom.  The snow has completely melted from the yard.  Robins are serenading us in the morning and deep into the “night”.  The gloaming is creeping up; it is 11 p.m. as I write this, and it’s still late twilight outside—sunrise was at 5:51 a.m., sunset at 10:05 p.m.  The trees and shrubbery are filled with leaf buds, which I swear seem to grow as you watch.  You can definitely see the changes from day to day.

Within a few weeks, all the houses on all the streets in our area will be hidden from view again by the riotous abundance of greenery surrounding them.

And, as happens each spring, the rhubarbs get a hard-on.  Thick, red, hard penile stubs emerge from the ground in clumps and look infinitely pornographic for a few days.

Then the hard-ons explode into wildly wrinkled, alien looking baby leaves.  A week or so later, suddenly the plants look like ordinary rhubarbs:  the aliens have vanished.

It’s an amazing transformation.

Alas, the pics we had of the hard-on stage were out of focus, but here we have some aliens emerging from the penile cocoon:

Here’s a more pornographic looking item; imagine it without its crinkled taffeta skirt:

Brains for the vegetarian zombies:

The rhubarb plants give my hubby and me something to giggle about in delayed adolescence.  Then, later in the year, they give my hubby rhubarb to make pies.

I, unfortunately, am not fond of rhubarb pie.  Hopefully we’ll be able to ship one off to OmegaGranny.

Aside from that, I have been walking in the mornings, enjoying the sunshine, the explosion of growth, the rich smells of moist dirt and growing things.  And getting mosquito bites—of course.  And raking—endlessly—the yard, in bits and pieces.

This week, the dotter announced before the weekend that she had been spending too much time with her friends on weekends, and she wanted to Do Nothing this weekend.  This was okay with us, of course—it was, in fact, very gratifying; you mean you want to spend time with your boring old Mom and Dad?!  Well, okie dokie, then!

Yesterday being sunny and warm and beautiful, we did things outside (I picked up a winter’s worth of garbage revealed by melted snow, and began the unending raking of the lawn) and ran errands.  Today being chillier and cloudy, I promised her we’d go to the movies.  So she and I headed out this afternoon to catch “How To Train Your Dragon”.

I loved it.  I thought it was sweet and funny and uplifting, and I do so like movies that have the nerdy type being the hero.  I even—towards the end—got a bit weepy-eyed.

Then we went off to Cold Stone Creamery for a goodie, and then back home.

I settled down at the computer for a bit of late afternoon computing.  An hour later, OmegaDad came in and said, “You have to come see this!  She’s made a dragon.  It’s splendid, and 3-D.  Bring your camera!”

Herewith the dragon, sans wings and rider:

Later, when she was done with the wings and the rider, she brought it down to me in the office, where I was doing laundry.  She asked me to put it on the internet, so here it is:

And another view:

Coincidentally enough, I had been researching local art classes for her.  I think, now that she’s eight, garnering “most creative” votes from her classmates, willing to freak freely with her art, and getting more and more elaborate with her creations, it’s time for her to get a little bit of more formal instruction.  Neither OmegaDad nor I have much—if any—artistic ability, and definitely neither of us has any training in techniques.  And, with the NCLB mandating Readin’, Writin’ and ‘Rithmetic, there’s no funding or time for such frivolities as art; we’re lucky to have a music class (of sorts) once every three days, rotated with library and phys ed.  Which means we’re on our own when it comes to art work.

In my research, I happened upon a listing of local teachers of various sorts who are willing to accept contracts with homeschoolers (local homeschoolers can sign up with the school district for vouchers), and what a goldmine that was!  Listings of art teachers, music teachers, tutoring, Greek teachers, Russian teachers…and on and on.  (Alas, no Chinese teachers, bah, even though Big City has a thriving Mandarin immersion program at one of the public schools…)

Too late for now, but I will definitely be looking into at least one of the art teachers for next school year.

She slides through the water, her body long and slim and straight, her arms curving upward and over, flashing back into the water cleanly, effortlessly, moving swiftly and aimed straight.

It’s as if her body has taken the past three years of gymnastics, and the sporadic dips into swim lessons, put them together and realized, “Ahah!  This is how it goes!”  All the various portions of her body are suddenly working in unison, propelling her through the water like an arrow.

Now, breathing?  That’s a different matter!  But it’s clear to me, watching, that she is getting the hang of that, too, the coordination of the head turn, the arms moving, the legs kicking, the water flowing, the air coming out of the body and breathing back in.

She will become a good swimmer, a fast swimmer, I can tell.

Last night at bedtime, she got off onto a discussion of how we are all related, everyone on earth.

She is coming up with funky, kicky clothes combos—definitely not my style, but very definitely her style.

So there she is, poised, on the brink, transforming while we watch from a little girl to a young lady.  Oh, it takes more time than this, she is still only eight, she goes into silly fits with her best bud, she still stands stock still in shock when she’s spilled something rather than running to get a paper towel to clean it up, she still crows with glee when she wins at a game and pouts when she loses (no matter how many times we talk about “being a good sport” yadda yadda yadda), and many days she just wants to wear a sloppy T-shirt and a pair of my sweat pants pooling around her feet.  But the future her peeks out again and again, more and more often.

The story of Artyom has lured me back into reading adult adoptee blogs again, but now I read them with less of a distance.  It hits me like a punch in the gut, reading about an adult adoptee who has reunited with her parents in Taiwan, and how she feels lost between two worlds, how she mourns her could-have-beens with her birthparents at the same time as she cherishes her did-thats with her adoptive parents.  Here, there, in-between.  Moving toward some vague semblance of the comfort that families should have, realizing it will never truly happen, because back in time, when she was just a babe, she was removed from there and placed here, and “here” and “there” are different cultures, different languages, different families, different behaviors totally.

So I look at my butterfly-in-the-chrysalis, my girl arrowing through the water, and my heart breaks for her.  Is she going to feel like that in the future?  Is my funny, smart, bouncing, athletic, silly girl going to be a 30-year-old staring helplessly at the past and realizing:  This is the Could Have Been, this is the past, this is the Never-Happened, this is my life in microcosm and I can never go back there, and how do I take these two halves that are halfway across the world and put them back together to make a whole that is Me?

Part of me scoffs, saying, “Girl!  She’s not that introspective!  She’s a live-life-full-bore-charging-off-without-consideration type of kid!”  The other part of me says, “She’s eight.  What will she be like when she’s 13?  When she’s 25?  When she’s 31?  Maybe she will slow down and it will hit her then.”  Another part of me listens to her at bedtime asking “why did Kai have to die?” or “Are we all—everyone in the world—related?” and knows that even if she doesn’t obsess over every facet, every particle, every “what-if”, she’s already starting the process of maturation that leads to questions like those.

It’s less academic now, more real.  Day by day, she’s moving towards a more adult way of looking at the world, of thinking about things.  I won’t be able to protect her when things hurt.  I shouldn’t protect her—it’s her life, not mine.  But sometimes it’s an arrow to the heart to think about it.

One thing about the tale of Artyem, the Russian boy adopted then returned, which I have seen only one post directly address, and which has been bothering the hell out of me:

When was some idiot child going to use that tale to be mean to my dotter?  When was someone going to tell her that we were going to send her back, because that’s what people do to adopted kids?

Oh, there were plenty of posts about the feeling of loss and abandonment that some adopted people feel, long into their adult years.  There were plenty of posts about the whys and wherefores of this woman’s case.  There were plenty of posts about the ethical, moral issues.  But not really any specifically saying:  I have an eight-year-old child who was adopted, and I’m terrified that someone is going to use this story to HURT HER.

There was one night last week where she was snuggled up on the Big Chair in the living room.  I was walking by, and she asked me to sit with her because she had something to say to me.  Now, OmegaDotter has a tendency to do this when you’re not paying attention to her, and it always turns out to be something lame, being used an an excuse to Get Attention.  I was dubious.  Then she said, “I’m sad about adoption.”

Oh, boy.  I immediately sat down.  So we talked—a little bit—about what made her sad.  She’s getting better at being able to say these things, but not any better about the whys.  I asked her why she was sad, and how she was sad, and all she could do was say she was sad.

“I know it’s sad for you sometimes.  It’s happy and sad for your dad and me; we’re happy that we adopted you, but sad that you had to lose your birth family for us to adopt you, and sad that it makes you sad.”

So I had to ask her, “Has anyone been teasing you about being adopted?”  She shook her head no.  We snuggled a bit, she bounced up, and that was that.

Um.  Okay.  Was that all?  Hm.

I kept wondering during the week, what do I do?  Do I ask her directly if she’s heard about the story?  Do I just let it sit?  What if I let it sit and someone pulls it out like a trump card in the midst of a kid fight?  Will she talk to us about it or just keep it hidden tight?  What do I do?!

This evening at bedtime, the dam busted.  I was giving her her goodnight kiss, and looking at her I couldn’t just let her be defenseless against this story.  I knew that at some point, someone would pull it and cut with it and it would hurt like a knife.

“Hey, kiddo.  Anyone at school tell you about the boy who was adopted and sent back?”

Hey, I never said I was subtle about these things…

Her eyes widened, and she shook her head.

“Anyone tease you about being sent back to China?”

“No.  Why?”

“Well, there was this story in the news this week about a 7-year-old boy who was adopted by a woman who ended up sending him back.”  I held her by the side of her head and stared into her eyes.  “And I just want you to know:  We would never, ever ‘send you back to China’.  Never, ever.  You’re stuck with us, girl!”  I kind of choked up on the word “stuck” so it came out funny.

“Styuck?!  Ha!  You’re styuck with me!” she giggled.

“I mean it.  You’re stuck with us.  We would never send you back to China, no matter how horribly you behave.”  I gave her the hairy eyeball (my tone and my mugged expression made sure that the “no matter how horribly you behave” was taken as an exaggeration, not a condemnation).  She smiled.  It wasn’t a “haha, that’s funny!” smile.  It wasn’t a “I’m being cute and know it” smile.  It was a big happy smile. 

“No matter how bad I am?!”

“No matter what, kiddo.”

Then she needed the details of the story, so I gave her an abbreviated version.  She asked me when it happened.  I told her.  She got indignant:  “On your birthday!  That’s sucky!”  I mentally blinked—that hadn’t even occurred to me.  She decided she wanted to go KILL the woman.  Oops, nip that in the bud right quick, OmegaMom!  Then she decided she wanted to write a letter telling the woman she was mean and cruel and—bad word alert!—shhhh!—stupid.  She wanted to see a picture of the woman; was she pretty or ugly?  Which was a good opening to OmegaMom’s standard “pretty people can be mean, too; it’s not what’s on the outside that matters, it’s what’s on the inside” shtick.

Which, of course, led to the dotter pretending to rip off her skin (her own skin) to see what was inside (all very dramatic and done in a silly way), which led to “did you know my bladder is right here”, pointing to the middle of her abdomen, “not down here”, pointing to right above the pubic bone.  Which led to the dotter explaining that her teacher had shown a picture of the insides and the bladder was in the middle and did I know the stomach wasn’t round, but was shaped like a banana?

So.  I feel better just getting it out there in the open.  The story itself, and the underlying fear that some adult adoptees say they always had, that they would be “sent back”.

Some posts on the story:  Yoon’s Blur and Harlow’s Monkey ask why adult adoptees are never interviewed about stories like these?  Random Babble talks blunt talk.  Pundit Mom says Children Don’t Come With Return Policies and also doesn’t like the media slant on these stories.  Lisa Belkin talks about the case in the context of whether international adoptions should be done at all.  Patricia Cogen talks about how the mother in the case should have searched for help.  KJ Dell’Antonia says “I Did Not Love My Adopted Child”—the gist of which is that older child adoption can be hard, and adoptive parents should talk about it more openly—but which has rubbed many people the wrong way (see comments on the story and on Twitter).  And John Raible’s post, Learning from Aryom’s plight, was the one that specifically said that adopted children—right here, right now—might be impacted and APs need to be proactive about it.  Thanks, John; I think that spurred me on to bulling through the subject in my blundering way.

OmegaDotter bounced in the garage door, letting it slam shut behind her, kicked off her shoes, pulled off her jacket, tossed her book bag on the futon and was talking a mile a minute.

“Mom!  Mom, Joey’s family next door is moving out, and they want to sell the goat, can we buy the goat, please, please, I promise I’ll take care of it and it needs a home, puh-leeeeeze!”

Last fall, Joey’s family moved into the house next door.  We were delighted; the people who had lived there before had Mean Dogs that would chase me and the dotter as we walked back from the bus stop, that had invaded our other next door neighbor’s yard and chewed up one of their dogs, and would regularly raid our garbage can.  They also didn’t clean their yard at all, so it was totally overgrown and weedy—they didn’t even pick up the deck fencing that had fallen down onto the former lawn.  We were so glad to see that family go!  But Joey was a classmate of the dotter’s, he had brothers, they were a quiet(ish) family, and they cleaned up the property right away so it looked…decent…again.

And they bought a goat, Dottie.  The idea, I suppose, was that in time, as she grew, they could milk her.  The dotter was charmed.

At odd times during the winter, I’d be sitting in the dotter’s bedroom reading after we had done our bedtime routine, and hear her going “Maa-aah-aaah!  Maa-aah-aaaah!”  It would startle me until I remembered:  There’s a goat next door.  I’d worry vaguely about how she was doing in the cold, but other than that she didn’t impinge upon my life.

Until yesterday.

“No.  No goat!” I said.

“Moooom!  Puh-leeze!”

“NO GOAT.”  I said.

“Why not?!”

“Because I said so.”  Oh, what a great comeback!

She kept tossing various reasons why we should buy the goat, then reverted to calling me a meanyhead, and then her flighty attention got caught by something else and the subject was dropped.

We bought the first chickens after a bout of OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trying to wheedle me into a goat.  This came after years of OmegaDad trying to wheedle me into a llama.  No llamas, I said for years.  No goats! I reiterated when that particular flight of fancy caught their mutual attention.  But when they finally scaled back to something more reasonable—to wit, chickens—I finally said yes.

A goat, I know, would end up being Yet Another Responsibility.  Yet Another Animal to care for during those long, dark, icy cold winter days and nights.  Yet Another Reason to emerge from the warm house and go trudging across the snowpacked back yard.  Yet Another Expense in terms of food and shelter.  And, oh Kozmik All above use, Yet Another Reason for Vet Bills!

Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter did not mention the goat to her father.  But I knew it would come soon, so at bedtime, when I had crawled into bed and snuggled up against OmegaDad in the dark, I muttered, “Are you awake?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Joey’s family is moving out and they want to sell their goat.  NO.”  I said.

There was a silence for a moment, then he turned to face me in the darkness.  “Wait a minute.  I’m confused.  If it’s ‘NO’, then why are you telling me about it?!”

“Because I know that the dotter will try the classic end run where she asks you because she knows you’ll say ‘Yes’.  And I’m saying ‘No’.”

“I thought you were telling me because you wanted the goat.”

“NO!  I don’t want the goat!”  O panic.  No, no, NO, that’s not what I meant!

“Oh.  Okay.”  He turned back over and snuggled up against me again.

Then, in the dark, he sharply turned his head back towards me, in a silent version of a comic, “Are you sure?!”

I snickered.

He did it again, as if to say, “Now, y’know, a goat would be cool!”  I snickered again and poked him in the back.  He did it one final time, and I whapped him gently on the head.  “Enough!  No goat!”

We fell asleep.

Goatless.  Thank heavens.

Hail thee, festival day!
Bless’d day that art hallowed forever–
Day whereon Christ arose,
Breaking the kingdom of death!

I am not religious, in any manner whatsoever.  But I have lovely memories of Easter Sundays as a child, going with my grandparents to Easter service at a high Episcopalian church with The.  Most.  Awesome.  Pipe organ.  And singing that particular hymn, which is indelibly engraved on my memory.  The pipe organ would play the deepest notes possible, making the flagstone pavement vibrate, and then…then, when the Joyous!  Triumphant!  part of the hymns was hit, the trumpets making a blaring fanfare to celebrate.  (Much to my dismay, a long, detailed article about that organ is no longer available.)

So today was Easter.  Of course, we had an Easter basket for the dotter…but we had no dotter for the Easter basket!  She spent the night at her friend A.’s house, and blew eggs and dyed them and hunted them there.  So our Easter basket sat on the table, alone and forlorn:

(Note the mini basket up front, for her doll Ling.  Credit for this entire creation goes to OmegaDad.)

While we hung around (in blissful quietude!), OmegaDad was making pita bread, tortillas, and lavosh.  Yum!  The pita bread/lavosh dough produced a lot of gas, so much so that it looked like the rising bowl was going to…well, rise itself!

Eventually the dotter decided she wanted to come home, at which point she dove into the basket:

Inside the basket was a bounty of crinkle-cut paper confetti in many spring colors, in place of the green plastic grass that ends up being eaten by pets the world around on Easter day.  OmegaDad and the dotter decided to pile it on top of my head, topped off with a whirling yellow pinwheel:

Then she and I had to dye eggs, which is always fun.  We had a polka-dotted affair:

We had a starburst:

And we had one that really, truly looked like a planet.  It wasn’t just me who thought so; I was staring at it pensively thinking how much like Jupiter it looked, when OmegaDotter saw it and gasped, “OMG!  It looks just like a planet, Mom!  Let’s make it Saturn!  Let’s paint a ring around it!”  So I did; in fact, I painted two rings:

From this angle, alas, it looks either like the X chromosome or like an elongated infinity sign (the dotter’s notion, again) or an analemma.  (Windows LiveWriter, by the way, does not recognize the word “analemma”, harrumph.)

Our array of eggs:

I hope your day was as fun and filled with confetti as ours!

This past fall and winter, we had two hens die, so now that it is springtime, the husband’s thoughts lightly turned to—of course—new baby chicks.  So, this fine Easter weekend morning, OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trekked off to the local hatchery and brought back a Belgian Bearded d’Uccle Bantam (mille fleurs variety) and a Frizzle, both about two weeks old.  We now have Miss Frizzle:

And Millie:

They are happily ensconced in a heated plastic tub in the garage, and I am, of course, falling in love with them because they are so cute.

Yes, spring is rapidly springing here.  The snow has melted off the north side of our front yard.  Now, you’d expect it to melt off the south side first, but the south side of our yard is shaded by trees, so the north side gets freed up first.  In the back yard, the back two vegetable beds are now snow-free, and we have purchased black plastic to wrap the beds to heat them up and thaw the soil in preparation for planting.

In our rock garden at the foot of the kitchen stairs, one happy Leopard’s Bane is leafing out luxuriantly.  In the garden behind the house, the lilacs are budding their leaves. 

A mama moose and her calf have been wandering the neighborhood eating everything they can find that has sap running through it, so I am planning to cut up strips of Bounce to tie onto the lilac bushes (this is rumored to keep moose away).

The trees have pussy willows bursting out at the tops.

Today it unofficially hit 50F here in Suburban Alaska.

Spring!

So yesterday was the first time I was able to see the dotter at one of her gymnastics meets.  Her first real meet was two days after I headed off to Arizona to help take care of mom, and she had a second one while I was still there.  Being a doting mom, I just have to show off her beam routine:

Her handstand was a thing of beauty.  Everyone around us commented on how long she held it and how straight it was.  Alas, her landing wasn’t that good, which ended up moving her from a 9.0+ to an 8.9, and a red ribbon on the beam as opposed to a blue.  Wah!  And, yes, her split jump isn’t very good, but everything else she does on the beam is generally great.

Of course, since she had filled my camera card up with videos of Newman the cat encountering Wooly the cat, when I went to record other routines, the video card was filled up.  After gnashing my teeth at the small capacity of my memory card, I investigated, and promptly deleted two videos of yowling cats rolling around on my office floor, and was able to record her bar routine, too:

So she may be going up to Level 4 this summer, which is honest-for-goodness’-sake team level.  IF she stays focused and works hard, and doesn’t goof off with her buddy K. all the time, which she tends to do.  Doesn’t matter to me, but she and K. have been bitching and moaning about not moving up to Level 4 and how they want to and, gee, they can do their back handsprings and a Level 4 dismount, and blah, blah, blah.

In the meantime, the planet is blasting onward towards the spring equinox.  Tonight, the sun will set at 8:00.  This throws our entire dinner-time zeitgeist off—OmegaDad spends the winter with dinner being cooked after the sun sets (most often long after the sun sets), and the rapid shifting of the seasonal light takes a while to mesh with his cooking brain. 

All the light does not mean warm weather, alas.  In fact, we had well above average temps for two months—mostly while I was in Arizona—and as we move towards official Spring, the temperature has plunged below normal for the past two weeks.  This leaves me generally grumpy.  I managed to rant and rave and cry at OmegaDad this week about how I HATE Alaska and I just WANT TO GO HOOOOOME!  Um.  What can I say?  Seeing all the pictures around the intertubes of people’s swiftly growing snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and what-not, and reading about bike rides and lovely weather…well, it just makes me mighty damned jealous.

::OmegaMom walks into the blog space, blows some dust off the furnishings, looks around…::

Hey there.  It’s been long enough for a post from me that BlogHer advertising sent me a “tsk, tsk” email and turned off the ads.  Hah!

Oh, well; I’ve been busy and tired and uptight enough that blogging (and Twitter) has taken second (third?  Last?) place in the scheme of things.

The good news is that my mom is so, so, so much better.  We moved her into assisted living yesterday; she has all the furniture she needs and today’s chores include moving some plants and paintings and photos so that her space is even more her space.

Every day in the past two weeks has been jam-packed with things related to getting her better, getting the move coordinated, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, vacuuming, cleaning.  Twenty-five years at one location does tend to make one accumulate stuff…and much of it, as mom says, “Nothing precious”.  My main learning point–aside from the need for retirement funds, and how expensive assisted living is–is that the investment in a weekly cleaning person is a Must for those who do not have the cleaning gene.  All the dust and the stress has combined to give me a lovely cold with a dollop of super-duper sinus infection on top.  Hah!

Arizona has been irritatingly sunny and beautiful, all the while I have been unable to rest and enjoy it.  Grrr.

My brother arrives today–yay!  Someone else to take the burden!  And I head home on Sunday, to a dotter who finally last night broke down during our nightly phone conversation to say, “I want you to COME HOME!!!”, with her voice cracking into tears on the last two words.  Oh, yes, OmegaDad wants me home, too, but he hasn’t cried–it’s been me bursting into spontaneous tearfests on his long-distance shoulder every few days.  He’s a good dude, y’know?  I’ve done something right to have the Kozmik All let me find him all those years ago.

My main focus with mom’s move–aside from, well, the move–has been to create a colorful and welcoming space for her in her new place.  One of the things I did was taken directly from a blog that my commenter and long-time virtual friend Kaz pointed me to named Attic24.  The lady who writes Attic24 is a lover of all things bright and colorful, and her January 21 post made me re-assess my inward sneer at tulips.

I have always thought that tulips are just too, too niffy-naffy and snooty for words.  Stiff, formal, upright–ptooey.  But in the midst of her posts filled with bright mixes of color, A24 showed a vase jam-packed with multi-colored tulips.  It was bright, springy, the furthest thing from “formal” you could imagine.  So I started searching the local florist shops for tulips.

Of course, none of the local florist shops had gotten the word:  tulips in arrangements meant all one color, all stiff, semi- to very formal, and very little variety in color.  Red was big.  So was white.  And pink.  Never in the same store, though!  Bah.  But Monday I was at the local grocery store, struck by the “manager’s specials” of leftover Valentine’s Day bouquets and tchatchkes, and was lured into their flower cooler.  There, in the corner, was a bucket of tulips, gathered into groups of five stems, each group one color.  But they had orange.  They had red.  They had purple.  Pink.  White.  Yellow.  A riot of colors.  So I cornered the young lady who was putting “for sale!” signs on the manager’s specials, and described what I wanted.

She came through!  One of the nicest things about the move was walking mom into her new place and having her delighted with the (beginnings of) big splashes of color…one of which was a small vase jam-packed with tulips of all different colors, sitting on her dining table.

It’s the small things that make me happy sometimes.  That vase of colorful tulips was a symbol to me, a symbol that mom’s life is not going to shrivel up into a blank nursing home stare, that she’s going to have spring and life and color for time to come.

Science fairs will be in late March, so OmegaDad decided to get started with some experiments with the dotter.  Unfortunately, the experiments are daddy’s ideas, but, hey, get the kid used to doing it, right?

Firstly, she was very possessive about “MY lab!”  In other words, I had to explain to her that real scientists these days were very open about their research (see PLOS) and, if they’re excited about their experiments, they’re very happy to have people in, show them around, tell them what the experiment is about, etc.

Anyway.  Since OmegaDad has been Doing Bread this past year (and very nicely, too!), and trying out sourdough starters with wild yeast, he thought it might be fun to see if you could get a sourdough starter from varying fruits.  He selected grapes and blueberries because both fruits have a blush on them; apples, because they don’t have a blush; and then we had a control of just plain ol’ flour and water.  Herewith the ingredients:

Then there’s the scientist herself:

Note that she is wearing “goggles”.  She was very concerned that everyone in her lab wear goggles, because, as she explained, “You never know when you’re going to get an explosion!”  Then she demonstrated how things would blow up:

Please note the “lab coat”.  Folks!  Let me tell you about this amazing new costume for your kids!  It’s a chef’s coat!  It’s a lab coat!  It’s two—two!—two coats in one!  OmegaDotter received a chef outfit for herself plus a matching chef outfit for her Karito Kids Ling doll, and has since taken to wearing the pink striped black pants as pajama pants or loungewear ever since, and when time came to do the experiment set-up, she decided it would make a fine lab coat.

What followed:  Placing one cup of blueberries into a Mason jar:

Mushing grapes before putting them into a Mason jar (an action shot!):

Explaining what comes next, and how you need to be careful (note the goggles again!):

Adding flour (we got a lot of flour all over everything, including the floor.  There were also a grape or blueberry or two on the floor, sigh.  Not that I really want you to look at our floor; please edit those shots mentally.):

Adding water:

Stirring (please note that we used different spoons for each jar, so that we had no intermixing):

She has the Evil Scientist pose down perfectly—“I have created LIFE!!!  Bwahahaha!”

And then, the finale, a “Ta-da!” pose:

And then she signed off with, “Thanks for watching Weird Science!”

We are home in Alaska.  It has been an interesting few weeks, with its major ups and downs, which I may or may not discuss later.

When we got on our flight home, OmegaDotter was more than ready to be home.  I was, frankly, more than ready for OmegaDad to do some high-quality one-on-one with the dotter; she is high-maintenance at times, very touchy-feely, needing attention, bouncing, chattering, “on” all the time.  I was not looking forward to six hours of her trapped in an airplane.

We didn’t get a window seat.  We were both very sad about this.  We settled into our seats, and I was hoping (hope-hope-hoping) that the last seat wouldn’t be filled, though we had been informed that it was a full flight, so that seemed unlikely.  And then he showed up, with his tattooed arms, his leather jacket, his bald head, and jocular “I don’t follow directions very well!” comment about carry-on luggage stowage.

We took off, OmegaDotter chattering all the way.

He took out a notebook and began sketching.

OmegaDotter, on the other side of me, peered at his sketchbook and whispered, “What’s he drawing?”

I said, “I don’t know.  I think he’s trying to figure it out.”

She whispered excitedly (and loudly), “I think it’s a flower!  See how it swirls and goes around?”  I looked again, and said to her, “Hm.  It’s beginning to look like a rose…”

She got out her travel art box, and her latest version of Pippi Longstocking on her horse, then leaned in and whispered very quietly to me, “Can I show him my picture?  What is he drawing?”

“Maybe you should ask him?”

She squirmed, shyly.  I chivvied her on (I am trying to get her to ask her own questions, request her own interactions).  Finally, she leaned over me and asked, “Do you want to see my drawing?” 

He said he’d love to.  She handed it over, saying shyly, “It’s—“ and he finished, “Pippi Longstocking!  She’s the one with the pigtails that stick out, and the monkey, right?  That’s very good.  You’ve got a lot of detail going on there!”  She pointed to the sign and said, “It’s Villa Villa Coola.”  They talked Pippi for a short while, then he handed it back.  She asked what he was drawing, and he told her about using light blue as a base for sketching, then coloring over it, any mistakes in the light blue being hidden by the darker colors.  He said that he had started out drawing something else, but he heard her say it was a flower, and he went from there.

Both went back to their artwork.  OmegaDotter added a second story.  He added some wording and shaded in the rose.  She handed him her picture again.  He looked at it, and asked what was around the windows.  She replied, “Wood”.  He asked her what color the wood was.  She quickly began coloring in the window frames, then handed it back to him.  He asked what color the gate was.  She said light blue.  He handed back the picture and she quickly filled in the coloring…this back and forth went on for a few more iterations, with him asking what this area was, and what color should it be, and her making decisions and completing more.  He lent her some of his coloring pencils when she was short a color; he helped her figure out how to make new colors when she didn’t have a particular color.

When she was done, he offered a trade:  His picture for hers.  He wanted hers, he said, so that when she was famous, he could say he knew her when…

I want an art teacher like that for her.  Someone who—rather than prescribing or describing—asks questions and guides her.  She was in heaven.  He was patient and inspiring.

So, to Shane Ruggle, aka “Rug”, the Phoenix tattoo artist:  Thank you.  Thank you, thank you.  Love is a gift, yes, and so is the sharing of your knowledge of art.

I bought a Very Special Gift for OmegaDotter this Christmas.  It was very small.  So I decided to do the box-within-a-box-within-a-box approach; I wrapped the VSG, put a bow on it, and a note saying it was the last box, dumped it all into another box, gift-wrapped that one with bow and note, etc.  The end result was nice and big.

I was actually rather nervous about doing this:  either she would think it was funny, or she would get horribly frustrated, and I had no idea which way she would lean.

Anyway.  Since she opened it first, I wasn’t ready with the camera, so the settings were wrong for the first box:

Second box—she was kind of perplexed:

Third box—she was getting the hang of it, and was amused.  I have a picture of her laughing, with the box already unwrapped, so we’ll use this one:

Fourth box—she’s giggling:

The VSG revealed—I think she likes it:  she screamed!

What was it?  An iPod nano, filled to the brim with songs I knew she liked.  She has since wandered the house with it connected by umbilical cord, belting out various songs—in particular, Fireflies by Owl City, which has been an earworm for both of us, as well as various Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus songs. 

Now, onto the consumer review:  OMG.  Apple has the “user-friendly”, ergonomic approach down to an art.  Or a science.  When I was setting it up for her, I pulled it out of its little box, plugged it into the computer, and *boom*, it hooked to my iTunes and started walking me through it.  Once it was loaded with music, *boom*, I was using it.  I am truly, truly impressed with the ease-of-use of this gadget—the dotter had figured out all the buttons (in particular, how to replay Fireflies over and over and over again) within a short time.  Now I want one…or maybe an iPhone, which does all the same stuff, plus.

Then:

Now:

It doesn’t seem possible that seven years have passed.  Seven years ago, right now, we were on our way to Nanning after a lovely dim sum breakfast in the Guangzhou airport.  We actually signed the papers around 5 p.m. on December 8 in China, which would be around 7 a.m. here, and we met her around 6 p.m., which would be 8 a.m. here.

She’s pretty amazing.  We’re pretty damned lucky.

I’ve got a little list of music to buy the dotter for Christmas, to go with her Big Present from me.  We’ve got some Don Henley, Elton John, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Petty, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, Feist’s “1-2-3-4″, Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, Taylor Swift, Kidz Bop, a Beyonce, some Chris Rock, a Sean Kingston, some High School Musical and Shrek…and to fill in the Chinese pop section, we have some Wilber Pan, Angela Zhang, S.H.E., and Jolin Tsai.

But I need some suggestions for classic or older rock, more C-pop, and new American stuff.  So, parents of 8-9-10 year olds:  What are your kids listening to?

Peach said, in response to my Dear Diary post:

I have to admit that when I read your response to her questions (maybe not given to her, but the ones you expressed ~ about it being unlikely that she could find her first parents, or her poster could get her parents in trouble?), it bothered me.
As adoptees we grow up completely believing what our adoptive parents tell us about the circumstances around our adoption. But when we become adults and find out more information (more than our parents said was available) it brings with it emotions that “just is” ~ nothing our adoptive parents could say or do will take them away or keep us from having to walk through the grief, no matter how hard they try. And it even more invalidation when we sense our adoptive parents are trying so hard to do this for us ~ to take away our pain, through their answers, honest or not.

It’s a hard balance.  I admit that I am a glass-half-empty person a lot of the time–one way of looking at it, though I prefer to think of it as “pragmatic” or “realistic”.  I do think it unlikely that, given what information we have, we could find anything, due to the fact that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.

Or at least, the information we were given says that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.  Which is one of the problems:  that information could be made up of whole cloth.  And we don’t know.

How do you carefully get this across to an almost-eight-year-old?  We don’t know.  Anything.  For sure.  How do you tell a child who hasn’t experienced a really big city just how many people there are there?  How do you explain that what information we have is a grain of sand on a big beach?  How do you say, “Even what we know, we don’t know that it is true”?

I have been very careful, all along, to say, “We think” or “we were told” or “the orphanage says” about these things.  But what one person says, another person may not hear, or may hear through a filter.  I say, “We think it must have been very hard for your birthmother to leave you.”  OmegaDotter may hear, “Your birthmother was devastated.”  I say, “The orphanage says you were left at the gates of XYZ.”  She may hear, “That is where you were left.”  How do you tell a child that adults lie about things like this?  She’s still at a stage where hearing me say “Bullshit!” accidentally when we’re playing B.S. (a card game–quite fun, taught to us by Aunt L. and cousins K. and I.) makes her gasp and say, “Oh!  You said the b…sh… word!  That means cow poop, but you’re not supposed to say it!”

Yes, I want to protect her.  Yes, I know it doesn’t help, in the end.  But the things that are wrapped around these questions are…well, more mature issues, questions of honesty and decency in adults, questions of the general ethics of international adoptions, questions of the problems of involving large amounts of money in the transferrence of responsibility for a small human being, questions of “human trafficking”.  I want her to know about these things, but in an age-appropriate manner.  So I start small.  I use weasel words, semantics…”we think”, “we were told”, “the orphanage says”…all of which are true, and all of which mean “this is information but it’s not the biblical truth”.  I have, in talking about her birthmother, told the dotter about the one child laws, and how they have changed; I have also mentioned that it’s possible her mother was young and unable to raise a child.  As she gets older, the more nuanced versions come out more.

Youngsters are concrete thinkers.  But as the dotter is getting older, she is becoming more aware that black-white thinking doesn’t always fit the world around her.  International adoption–hell, private domestic adoption, even adoption through the state–all of these have shades of grey on all sides.  So as she becomes more able to shade her own thinking about the world, so can we start offering more shades to her own story.

There are people who have searched for Chinese birthparents, with some successes.  Brian Stuy, of Research-China, has interviewed some birthmothers, and in Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China, Kay Ann Johnson also found and interviewed a number of Chinese birthmothers.  So birth families can be found, and some people have located their own children’s birth families.  Then I have heard tales of birth parents who have anonymously contacted people trying to locate them, pleading with them to not continue, because they are afraid of the repercussions.

There have been tens of thousands of children adopted from China in the past 15 years, and the number of located birthparents is still very small.

So:  How to say, “we will help you look” without it turning–in a child’s magical way of thinking–into “we will find your birthmother NOW”?  How to instill a realistic view of the probabilities?  How to find that balance?

The subject of international birth parent searching has also recently been discussed on This Woman’s Work and today on American Family.  Let me know what y’all think, too…

The real estate agent who helped us find our house (and is a dear, close, personal friend of our ex-governor’s) is a relentless saleswoman.  We get letters in the mail with helpful tips and tricks!  We get–at irregular intervals–a coupon to a local ice cream store or dollars off on purchases at a locally owned business.  And, this Thanksgiving, we were given a pie, apple or pumpkin.

So, we now have a store-bought pumpkin pie for free, sitting in our fridge.

We have a turkey thawing out, alternately in the sink and in the fridge.

We have lemons and rosemary and garlic to stuff the turkey with.

We have taters, parsley, and cheese for OmegaDad’s trademarked Green Smashed Potatoes.  (Om nom nom!)

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

All that’s left is for us to put together the feast.  I will provide chopping and dicing; OmegaDad is le chef and I will do only his bidding in the kitchen.

It is time to list the things in life that make us thankful.  Really, it would be a good idea to do this on a regular basis; maybe the world would be a better place for it.  So long as it’s quiet and private and not trumpeted to the world.  My tidbits of thankfulness wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the world; they’re all small and personal and, face it, pretty damned selfish.  What I am thankful for, someone else may find picayune, and vice versa.

Number one on my list is OmegaDad.  This guy is an endless font of incredible spoonerisms and malaprops that leave me laughing at the same time as I am left in gaping awe at his inventiveness.  I have asked how he does it, and he shrugs:  it just sort of “comes out–I don’t do it on purpose…”  We have been together for almost 16 years, and I still find things to talk with him about, still find him gentle and sweet and thoughtful and intelligent.  And, dayum, he cooks up a storm, dontcha know!  This year’s focus has been bread, and we have been the recipients of yummy flatbreads, lavosh, pizza dough, challah, plain white bread, breadsticks, French bread, tortillas, and homemade hamburger buns.  Wow.

Next is OmegaDotter.  She’s just amazing.  OmegaDad recently challenged her to finally pin down her back flip, offering a differing amount of money depending on how long it takes her to get it solid.  In the course of a week, she has managed to reach the point of always flipping over and 75% of the time ending up on her feet again.  (The practice is on our bed.)  She is reading by herself, and we alternate nights when I read to her with nights when she reads to me.  Every once in a while she will bestow a piece of artwork on us that makes my jaw drop.  And she’s beginning to bring out more and more unasked-for flashes of empathy and moral grounding.  Yee-haw!

Then there’s GrannyJ.  She’s 82 and still going strong, walking her small town, taking photographs, blogging and nourishing a local blogging community, and challenging me with new and interesting science fiction authors all the time.

We have our health.  We have our house.  We have friends and family.  We have a standard of living that would make 70% of the world gasp in awe.

We had Kai for eleven years–that’s good.  We’ve discovered that chickens, though they may be pretty damned dumb, still have a lot of personality.  Our garden overflowed with vegetables, even though we were moosed at times.  We have long, lovely hours of sunshine in the summer to balance out the cold dark months of winter.

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. friends and readers, and generally thankful warm fuzzies to my non-U.S. followers!

One of the joys of Teh Intarwebz is that you can hover on the cusp of current culture, dip in and out like a hummingbird, and still live your own old boring everyday life.

For example:  I have taken to watching shows on Hulu.com.  Alas, I am also aware that Hulu.com is talking about becoming a subscription-only (that means $$) service come sometime in 2010; having found Hulu, I am about to lose Hulu.  Anyway, enough grief; I have found that I can watch Glee and Stargate: Universe on Hulu if I miss those shows the night before, and am happy.

In addition, when brouhahas such as Kanye West’s drunken outburst disrespecting Nice Girl Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Video awards occur, I can scour the web the day after to (a) see what actually happened, and (b) get down with all the nominated music videos.

Which leads me to my headline.  Actually, “led me to my headline”–I watched the nominated videos and found…

There’s a new Star (use your joisey accent on that:  “Stah!”) in the pop music firmament name of Lady Ga-Ga.  Lady Ga-Ga sings catchy pop songs that drip sexual innuendo in music videos that are pop art celebrations of out-and-out (::gasp!:: ::OMG!:: ::catch me while I blush and faint::) lewd sexuality.  She wears nude body suits.  She feels herself up.  She feels up guys.  They feel her up.  She wears outre makeup.  She wears outre clothes.  It is a wild Warholian act; it’s also a wild dionysian act.

And damn.  I love her.

I am aware that some of my readers absolutely positively thoroughly despise her.  (I’m talking to you, PAgent!)  I am aware that my cachet as an intellectual pseudo-counter-cultural ex-almost-hippie is tarnished beyond repair by saying it, but there it is.

I think she’s hilarious.  I love her over-the-top persona, her over-the-top hair, her over-the-top makeup, and her over-the-top music videos.  (I will admit, however, that these are music videos I do not want the dotter seeing.  When the dotter arrived home one day humming the tune to “Poker Face” and saying she had to show me a video, I practically plotzed.  Who the #@!& was showing this smutty stuff to my seven-year-old daughter?!?!  And then she started singing the words, and I realized that she was smitten by a parody video.  Whew.  Crisis averted!)

Then I discovered some interviews of her.  And I loved those–she’s snarky and snotty and playing the interviewers and leaps upon sexism.  And I discovered plenty of YouTubery where she’s doing her hit songs in live venues, small clubs or radio stations, one-on-one, just her and her piano.  I loved those, too–she sings like a torch singer, then switches off into a staccato singing silliness, then back to the torch singer.

Lady Ga-Ga is a mix of early Madonna, Elton John at his most flamboyant, and…and…oh, damn, give me a name of a torch singer from the forties, please.  She is a character and a half, and I go ga-ga over her.

Here’s the parody:

Here’s the original–no embedding, bah.

And here’s a live version:

Mid-day yesterday, my back started hurting right beneath my bottom ribs.  I have no idea what I did to it, though given the location worry about kidneys and stuff like that.  It kept on hurting throughout the day.  When the dotter came home from school, I grumped about it…the next thing I know, she brings me an ice pack from the freezer and asks where to put it.

Later that night, in bed, I was still hurting.  Half asleep, half awake, middle of the night, I sort of mumble an “ow!” or two.  The dotter has been sleeping in our bed while OmegaDad is out of town, in a nest of sleeping bag, her favorite “Chix rule!” blankie, a down comforter, her roll-up pink fake-fur kitty cat pillow, and a stuffed duck.  So there I am, dazed and asleep and hurting, and suddenly a hand reaches out, pats me three times, strokes me gently, and she whispers, “There, there.  It’s okay.”  And I go back to sleep.

Aw, man.  She’s a Good Kid, dammit.

November keeps going, and I keep posting.  But by this point in time, it starts dragging.  I open up the blogging software and stare at a blank page, thinking, “There must be something interesting to blog about!”

Oh, there is.

I have my little list of questions to answer, from earlier in the month.  There’s still the “did you ever think of a sibling for OmegaDotter?” and the “There are people who deliberately cut off the culture of heritage?!?!” questions.

There’s also the comments on my “Dear Diary” post, which I do mean to respond to.

I also have a “great ladies of the family” series of posts in mind, talking about my great-aunties and how really nifty they were.

Plus a few more book reviews.

But right now, here’s the reality:

OmegaDad is out of town, at Chena Hot Springs (very cool place, by the way!), doing a work retreat/training/study combo.  I am left at home, holding down the fort.  This makes me realize just how very nice it is to have both of us here, together, functioning as a family, each of us (including the dotter) doing different things to keep the family rolling right along.  Not necessarily a lot, mind you, but each of us contributing enough to keep the rest from feeling like there’s just too much to do and not enough time to do it.

For instance, when OmegaDad is at home, I can take an hour earlier in the evening to putter about, think about things, and have something to start with when I face that blank page.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the parenting schtick, which takes time away from the blogging schtick.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the pet schtick.  Right now, that means checking on the chickens to be sure none of the other girls are coming down with The Chicken Plague.

With OmegaDad away, if I have a sick headache (like I did this afternoon), there are only two choices:  suck it up and deal with things while I’m feeling like puking and crying, or else (which I did) retreating to the bedroom, napping, and (a) letting the dotter play ToonTown and (b) letting the dotter watch TV until I wake up feeling better.  The dotter was a dream, making sure that she only did ToonTown for an hour (the Rule) and making sure that, when she turned on the TV, she turned it down and closed our bedroom door so it didn’t bother me.

It all boils down to one word:  Wah.  Or a command:  Pity me!  Har.  As if.  The world is full of single moms, and I salute them, because I don’t think I could do it all on my own, all the time.

Okay, not the dark.  But definitely the cold.

The local school district had H1N1 vaccinations for registered students.  Having read tales of people waiting in lines for three, four hours to get the shot, I determined we should get there early.  We got there, not the first, but close to it, and waited inside the outer doors, but were not allowed inside the inner doors until it was Time.

In the meantime, more people came with their kids.  And more.  The airlock filled up with people.  And then still more came.

And these idiots propped the door open.

It was 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gah.

But once the time came, we got in and out within ten minutes.  The dotter and I went off to lunch together, then off to her gymnastics class, and then home again.

Not a sign of pain in her arm, not a whiff of fever, not a single side effect.  She was happy as a clam all day long.

OmegaDotter has been gifted over the past year or so with many, many notebooks.  Each of them has been christened “my diary”, with great plans to write in it every day, and then, usually the day after, *poof* goes the idea, floating away with the wind.

Recently she dug up one of those notebooks and started actually writing in it.  Every day.  She has been writing at bed time, after I read (or she reads), and after we play the Feeling Game.  She stashes it under her pillow, and earnestly tells me that “it’s secret!”

Yesterday, she decided to make me read her entry.  It was about how Buffy died.

Tonight, she made me read her latest entry.

It started out:

Dear Diary - I relly miss my birth mom.”

She told the story of how “I became separated from her”, how her birth mother had not been able to keep her, because in China you can’t have more than one child.  (Okay, I have told her the whole “one child if a boy, two if the first is a girl”, but I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet.)  And how her birth mother kept her for a week, then left her by the side of the “rode”, and a policeman picked her up and took her to the “orfinije”.

There was a little drawing underneath, a framed picture with “I ♥ my birth mom”, sort of scrapbooking style.

So I climbed into bed with her and snuggled and talked about how it was okay to miss her birth mom, and it was okay to talk about it.  That we would be taking her to China for a visit when she was 10 or 11, and maybe we’d try to take her there every few years.

Our little lawyer immediately tried to negotiate the visit for 8 or 9 instead.  Ahem.

Then she wanted to print out posters with her picture on them, with the Chinese for “lost girl” on it, to take with us.  At which point…sigh.  How to explain to her that something like that could get her birth parents in trouble?  Or that it probably wouldn’t do much good, because, face it, where she was found is a city, a big city with 1.34 million in the urban area?

I suggested we could write a letter to the orphanage.

Then she made me read another entry she had written, about a dream about Kai, where I had taken his bones and made him come alive again.

Deep waters.  Each of these entries has dealt with “loss” in some form or another.  I told her I thought that writing down what she was feeling in her diary was a good idea, and that she could always talk to me or OmegaDad about her feelings.  And I told her that it was her diary, and I wouldn’t read it unless she wanted me to, and that she didn’t have to let me read it if she didn’t want to.

I must point out that there was a great deal of (normal, accustomed) squirming and twisting on her part, and some teasing on my part, wherein I told her that her birthmother would make her do her chores and her homework.  Plus some tickling, and, interspersed in the midst of it all, her trying to put her ankles behind her head.

(Once upon a time, I was able to do that.  I was able to put both ankles behind my head.  I told her ages ago.  She has tried to do it ever since.)

But still.  Deep.