OmegaMom

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…

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.  )

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.

The story of the single mom who adopted a 7-year-old from Russia, then sent him back unaccompanied on an international flight with a letter that said—essentially—“I’m sending the defective goods back” has been reverberating through the news and the adoptive community for the past week.

I’m trying to organize my thoughts here, so I think I’ll do it bullet-point wise while I’m organizing.

• They had had the boy for six months.  Um.  Okay; everything I’ve read says that it takes the child being in a family as long as the child has been in an institution for any real attachment to take place.  Six months is no time at all in terms of family growth and re-settlement and stability and and and…
• The adoption agency in the U.S. had been doing the follow-up visits and reported no problems at the last visit, which was about a month ago.
• Russia is angry.  Well, dammit, they’ve been angry about a series of adoption-related issues over the past few years; what does it take to (a) have them realize that good and solid information about a child’s behaviors and issues is needful and necessary for a safe and stable adoption situation; (b) have them decide there are serious problems with the current Russian-international adoption approach and figure out how to change it; (c) have them just decide to shut down the international adoption program entirely?

Now, a lot of folks are faulting the adoption agency for approving this woman for adoption.  The adoption agency in question is actually used quite often by families in Alaska for adoptions from China, and they have always had good “cred” in the Alaska FCC mailing list.

I’ve read their “questions and answers” sheet about the case, and, reading between the lines, it sounds like this woman never asked for help.  In addition, the agency claims that they have always found another family for a child who is not a “good fit” with the family that adopts him/her.

Why didn’t this woman ask for help???

Was she unprepared?

Well, supposedly she had ten hours’ worth of training in the ins and outs of international adoption.

Okay.  First off, ten hours isn’t shit.  It’s what’s required by law, but it’s still not shit.  Not for something like adoption.  Period.  Oh, we had that same ten hours of training ourselves, via videos from our out-of-state adoption agency.  Even so, even though it’s a lick and a swipe at the potential issues that can crop up in adoption, it certainly mentioned the worse-case scenarios multiple times.

At which point, we went online and researched it for ourselves.

Well, actually, we had gone online and researched it for ourselves long before we got those videos.  We joined email lists.  We read up on attachment issues.  We read up on ways to foster attachment.  If we had been adopting an older child, we would have researched ideas for fostering attachment in older children.  We talked and talked and talked about these possibilities.

But y’know, there are a lot of people out there who are…blinded…by their hopes and dreams.  A person who is blinded like that will hear the training, but not listen.  They will fall victim to magical thinking:  “Oh, yes, that sort of thing happens, but it won’t happen to us!”  Or, “Oh, yes, if that happens to us, we will be able to Make It All Better Through True Love!”  Or something.  Probably, we, too, were victims of magical thinking.  But when it became obvious to us that OmegaDotter had some issues, we didn’t cover our ears and sing, “La, la, la, I’m not listening!”  All that prior research made it very easy for me to go to our pediatrician and discuss our worries and specify why we had them, and our selection of a pediatrician with international adoption experience made it so that when I approached her about these issues, she was able to come up with a therapist (occupational therapy) who could help.

Right there, though, is a crucial element:  We asked for help.  When we realized we needed help, we reached out.

While I am fully aware that journalists are incredibly able to twist a story or leave out important details, and that speaking to the grandmother in a case like this is, essentially, relying on hearsay, the grandmother claims that the mother “talked” to psychologists, but did not take the child in for any sort of therapy.

Dudes.  If you’ve adopted, and you’re facing problems with your newly adopted child, you don’t rely on a phone call or two for either diagnosis or therapy.  Period.  You get your child into therapy with a qualified therapist of some type who has experience with children adopted from institutions, experience with attachment disorders, sensory disorders.  To boot, any psychologist who makes a diagnosis over the phone without seeing the person in question is a disgrace to the profession.  (Some of my long-time readers may recall a specific controversial instance where this was done.)

If you are adopting, here’s a word of advice:  Your agency is there to help you.  Not just before the adoption.  Not just during the adoption trip.  If you’re having problems, your agency should be able to help you.  It’s part of what you’re paying them for. 

But because these options are available doesn’t mean all people take advantage of them.  If you’re a person who has been blinded by the “I’m going to rescue a poooor helpless cheee-ild from a cold, loveless, dead-end life in a (::shudder::) orphanage!” spiel, you’re probably not going to be the kind of person who actually listens to the (ain’t shit) ten hours of training.  You’re probably not going to be the kind of person who realizes that, with older children, there’s a honeymoon period, and after the honeymoon period, it takes hard work.  Even if you’ve got a beautiful, innocent, sweet baby girl, being a parent takes hard work once the honeymoon period is over with.

(I’d be very, very interested to find out the percentage of adoption disruptions correlated to age at adoption and country of origin.  It would be nice if this information were actually tracked.  Certainly, it seems that there are a helluva lot more news stories about disruptions or accounts of abuse for children adopted from Russia; is this actually the case, or am I suffering from confirmation bias here?  I find myself wondering if there’s an inherent issue at work, being that people who are adopting from Russia are [typically] adopting from there in hopes of not being a “conspicuous family”, and, not having it in-your-face, as it were, are less likely to internalize the need to confront the less pleasant aspects of older child/international adoption/adopting institutionalized children?)

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.

Well.

When I wrote that last post, it was going to be followed up by the “And she’s all better now, whew!” post.  But I had things to do that weekend, and places to go, so didn’t write.

But I did notice that mom hadn’t blogged for a few days, and she hadn’t sent me any email.  So I picked up the phone to call her (I previously had been calling her every day, but then thought she was better, so stopped).

At which point, she asked me to come out to Arizona again, saying that things were worse.

So here I am in Arizona, with mom.  I managed to sneak in during a break between the storms that have hit Arizona (and California before that).  The airplane was delayed two hours on the tarmac in Big City due to a malfunction that turned out to be a Ghost In The Machine, and missed my connecting flight in Salt Lake City…but Delta showed how absolutely wonderful it is by automagically rebooking all the people who had missed their flights onto the next available flight.  This was very cool–all we had to do was take our existing boarding pass, run it beneath a scanner, and a brand spanking new boarding pass for the rebooked flight was printed out.

But when I got to Phoenix and got to the car rental place, a snag occurred.  It seems that we didn’t have enough money in our account to cover any car rental (if I had had a credit card, that would have worked, but they automatically block out more money for debit cards, no matter how little an amount of time you want to rent)…paychecks being deposited on Saturday didn’t help.  I was tired.  I just wanted to get up to mom.  So I parked myself on one of the chairs in the middle of the huge car rental complex and proceeded to sob my heart out.

Then I called OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love OmegaDad?  Well, okay, just thought I’d mention it again.

Anyway, he arranged for the inter-city shuttle to pick me up and get me up to Prescott.  Yay, OmegaDad!

Driving up was an adventure–but the good kind.  See, since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have to worry about all the water crossing the road, or the high winds, and was perched up nice and high so I could peer out the windows and see over concrete barriers on bridges and wash crossings.  All of which were flooded with rushing water.  Waves.  Crests on the waves.  Waterfalls coming down the rocky roadcuts that we were traveling between.  Snow mixing with the heavy rain when we got to Prescott.

(Up in Small Mountain University Town, they have had something like four feet of snow.  Roofs are collapsing on businesses–the ice rink, the big, comfy used bookstore, the fabric store, more–and the city mayor has declared that all businesses must clear their roofs or face a fine.  The powers that be also closed the main highways around SMUT for 24 hours.)

Anyway, I am here with GrannyJ.  We are working on getting her into a nursing home for a few weeks, to see if they can do anything.  We’re talking about her maybe moving to live with my brother.  Lots of things to talk about.  She is not doing well, but she is–as ever–my sharp-witted, fun, sweet mom.

In the meantime, consider me a poster child for the Sandwich Generation:  OmegaDotter’s birthday is tomorrow, and she is in her first “real” gymnastics meet tomorrow, too, with judges and not every participant getting a trophy.  We had a little birthday dinner Wednesday, and gave her the family presents, but I wasn’t able to arrange her party in time…that’s up to OmegaDad.

I know a lot of bloggers who are having issues with their moms these days.  Kat Kaz (damn, should proofread when I’m posting at midnight!), Laurie, Lorrie, V…I’ve kept so quiet with them about their problems because…well, it’s kind of a “La, la, la, I’m ignoring things!” approach.  But we’re past the ignoring problems part here, and I want to apologize and shout out to all of you to say, “Hang in there, kiddos.”

I will keep all & sundry posted; I wasn’t planning to post tonight, but saw Anon in AV’s comment, and thought I should update.

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.

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…

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:

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.

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.

Remember this?

It happened again, this evening.

So, instead of relaxing and watching some nice dark science fiction (aka Stargate Universe), OmegaDad and I have spent the past 40 minutes dealing with OmegaDotter’s social life–or, currently, lack thereof.

Once again, she started making plans with A.–as in, “We’ll pick you up at…”–without sitting down and asking us first.

It’s not a lot to ask, I think.  I’d like to have her request that a friend can spend the night, and actually talk about it with us, before she starts making plans with that friend.

Not to mention, she had already asked a different friend to come over tomorrow afternoon.  (A friend whose phone number we do not have, by the way, so we can’t call his folks and say “It’s off, sorry!”.)

Not to mention, she had already asked me if she could do “Parents’ Night Out” at her gymnastics facility.

The result:  No friends over at all tomorrow.  No overnight.  And “Parents’ Night Out” only if (a) they have space, and (b) she behaves supremely well tomorrow.

I wanted to talk about other things in my post today, but I’m grumpy and tired and about to head off to bed to wallow in being Mean Mommy.

OmegaDotter long ago decided that she wanted to be a Rock Star for Halloween.  This would be, thankfully, a generic Rock Star, not, say, Miley Cyrus or Lady GaGa or anyone in particular.  We tossed around ideas for a while, finally settling on a long-haired wig, an electric guitar, camouflage pants, and a jacket.

All, of course, in the dotter’s favorite color:  PINK.  (Oy.)  (But, hey, someday she will decide that PINK is, like, so totally boooring–like her mother–and come to like some other colors.  There are hints that she will welcome other colors beginning to burgeon, so I have hope.  Maybe by the time she is 13 or 14…)

I had seen pink camo pants on Target.com, so assumed they would be available at our local Chez Target.  We set out for a shopping trip.  Much to my dismay, there were no pink camo pants to be found.  So we scrounged around the store and finally settled upon a pink and black leopard dress, and the Rock Star transitioned from a hard-rocker (though PINK) to a more glam-rocker.

The dotter had been hankering for months after a Barbie play electric guitar; I sniffed.  Barbie.  Humph.  Play guitar.  Humph.  So, to counteract this, I told her she had to buy it herself.  Our shopping trip was her chance; she raided her money jar and quite happily purchased this plastic faux confection.  Much to my amazement when we got home and I had liberated it from its multiple-tie-down jail, it turned out to be fairly cool–once one got past the huge Barbie logo and the PINKness and the whiteness and the daintiness.  It has pre-loaded tunes.  It has the ability to do some rockin’ screamin’ guitar noises.  And it has a “wa-waaaa” lever to emulate the guitarist sliding her hands up and down the guitar strings.  All in all, much more tolerable than I had expected.

Then there was the wig.  We purchased a wig, even though I knew it wasn’t what she wanted.  But it was blonde and it was curly and it had some Disney princess or other on the package, and the dotter oohed and ahhed.  Hey.  It was nine bucks; what harm was there in purchasing the darned thing so that she could try it on and discover it was…well, not the look she wanted.

So the question remained:  what to do about the wig.  Amazon, of course, came through with a long-haired hot-pink wig with bangs…but I forgot to order it.  The dotter kept reminding me at the wrong time–say, as we were getting out of the car at gymnastics, or as she was doing her daily homework, or while we were out shopping.  Since my mind is a sieve these days, these reminders didn’t do much good; she would tell me, I’d nod and say “Yeah, will do!”, and then, a few minutes later–Oh!  Look!  Something shiny!

Somehow I managed to remember it last week; I believe the dotter wised up and reminded me as she was falling asleep, so that I would get online afterwards.  So after getting her down to bed, I wandered down to the office and ordered the thing, paid for it, and then figured all was well.

Until I bothered to actually read the confirmation email, which mentioned, rather nonchalantly, that the delivery date was anywhere between October 27 (good) and November 3 (ooops!).  I read the email on Tuesday, when I was wondering when the darned thing would arrive.

I didn’t tell the dotter about that November 3 date.  Nope, nosirree.  I figured if it didn’t show up, we would figure something out.

But today it arrived, and as soon as the dotter arrived home from school we went into full-fledged dress-up mode.

She tried it on first, of course, in her school clothes, then I had to try it on while she dashed upstairs to get the rest of her outfit:

And then she pulled everything together, like so:

The pink flannel pants are more orange-y, so we’re considering whether leggings might work instead.  Anyway, there you have it, the Saga Of The Rock Star.

We have also carved the pumpkin, OmegaDad and the dotter have been putting together a gingerbread haunted house, we have made fondant ghosts, and it seems that A. is on for Trick-or-Treating again, thus allowing me to avoid the whole K. question.

(Oh, yes.  The dotter did deliver her apology notes this evening at gymnastics, which went over very well.  She got an approving nod from Coach John and a hug from A.  Afterwards, while she was starting her session, I saw them comparing notes and chuckling over the idiosyncratic spelling…”Couch John”, and she was sorry she “heart A.’s arm”…)

The questions that trouble a parent shift and change as the child grows.  At first, the troubles–though they seem huge and insurmountable–are actually pretty straightforward:  kiddo cries, you figure out whether she’s wet or has pooped or needs Orajel or is tired or sick, take care of things, and voila, the problem is solved.  Then you move on to “why is she waking up two or three times in the middle of the night??” and the concurrent “Oh.  My.  God.  I am soooooo sleepy I think I may just collapse right here in the hallway at work and take a little snooze; I’m sure no one will mind.  Right?”  You’ve got the kid biting…or being bit…or both.

Then it’s time to worry about just how soon the kiddo is going to realize just what the words she is singing to the song on the radio mean.  You wince when “Greased Lightning” is playing while she’s watching Grease, and hope that she never turns to you and asks, “What’s a ‘pussy wagon’?” or “That’s weird:  why would anyone say ‘the chicks’ll cream!’?”

Ahem.

(As she gets older, she will start singing more popular songs from the radio, and you’ll realize, after waxing nostalgic for the good ol’ rock songs of your yout’, that you’d have to go back in time about 100 years to find songs that you don’t find yourself casting the hairy eyeball at…It’s amazing the amount of slang devoted to sex and violence, and the amount of popular music of many eras devoted to sex and violence as well.  Just look at all those folk songs.  People are having sex and dying violently all over the place in those.)

Anyway…

To get back to my original subject:  Trouble.

These days, I find myself worrying about friendships.  The dotter has, for some reason, decided she doesn’t want to visit her best bud A.–who OmegaDad and I find absolutely charming.  She’ll hang on the phone with him for hours, playing (ugh) ToonTown, but ever since she returned from an overnight and immediately developed the Not-Flu, she has been avoiding his house.  (There is also the question of dogs.  A.’s mom is a vet for a no-kill shelter.  Their house is filled with dogs and cats.  I have wondered if she’s not subconsciously upset by all the dogs reminding her of Kai.  Then I figure I’m just overanalyzing things, and it’s just a phase.)

A. was supposed to come Trick-or-Treating with us.  Now A. is not.  The dotter immediately suggested K.  K. is the diametric opposite of A.  K. is female, a year older than the dotter, lazy, and snotty.  She’s also the girl who has her finger directly on all of the dotter’s buttons, including adoption issues.  OmegaDad and I don’t like K.

Ugh.

BUT.  That wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about; it just came pouring out in the stream of consciousness brought on by the word “trouble”.

My original point with the word “trouble” is that the dotter got in serious trouble this evening at gymnastics.  Coach Christina had given her group a water break, and they came barreling across the gymnasium floor in a thundering herd, led by the dotter, who was not looking where she was going.

At the same time, A., the oh-my-gosh-she’s-powerful-and-damned-good young gymnast whose team practices at the same time as the dotter’s, was starting a power sprint aimed at a rolling dive flip into the foam pit.

The two paths intersected right by the side of the foam pit.

The inevitable bad and painful collision was only avoided at the very last minute by some extremely quick thinking and movement on A.’s part, with the result that, rather than her normal perfect flip into the pit, she angled into the pit and came crashing down on her arm.

After the gasps of horror and brief adrenaline rush was over for everyone, Coach John (the head coach at the facility) gave the dotter quite a dressing down.  Since they were a distance away from my perch on the bleachers, I couldn’t hear, but there was finger-shaking involved.  She proceeded to the water fountain.  When she was done, I gave her quite a dressing down, of the “Don’t you ever, ever do something like that again!  You need to pay attention to where you’re going and what’s going on on the gymnasium floor!” type.  There was some “You could have been seriously hurt!” and “You could have seriously hurt someone else!” mixed in there, along with some finger-shaking on my part too.

She was suitably subdued afterwards.

On the drive home, I told her she needed to write a note of apology to Coach John and to A., who spent the next half hour favoring her arm.  This worried me; A. is really very, very good and I’d hate for her to be out of commission for a few weeks due to this…total and absolute inattentiveness.

Much to my surprise and amazement, right after we got home, the dotter retreated to her bedroom, then returned a few minutes later, said, “I’m done!”, and handed me two very contrite notes for Coach John and A.

Now all that’s left is for the dotter to deliver them to the recipients herself, on Thursday.  (She wanted me to do it.  Har.  As if.)

Damned episode scared the snot out of me.  Someone could have been very seriously hurt.  At the same time, while one part of me is still seething about the aforementioned total and absolute inattentiveness, the other part of me is just slumgustered at the immediate note-writing and the well-written apologies.  Bit by bit, she’s growing up.

(I won’t mention the zits.)  (Maybe in my next post.)  (Yes.  Zits.  Not a lot.  But, still…)

The scene:  OmegaDotter picks up the phone, dials a number.

“Hello?  This is OmegaDotter, who is this?…Can I please speak with A.?”

“Hi, A.?  It’s OmegaDotter.  I blew it.”

“I made a poor choice.”

“You can’t come to the fair with us tomorrow.  I’m sorry I said you probably could.”

The backstory:

A.–OmegaDotter’s current best buddy–is coming over for a sleepover tomorrow night, as a result of some parental badgering on the dotter’s part.  The Big Fair is running from yesterday through September 8.  We were planning to go tomorrow.  The dotter asked us prior to dinner–while on the phone with A.–if he could come to the fair with us.  We said we’d make our minds up later, but it was dinnertime and time to get off the phone.

During dinner, she asked again.  And again.  OmegaDad said that he had been wanting a “just family” day.  I personally was leaning towards saying, sure, why not, let’s bring A. along, it’ll be fun, but said we needed to decide later.

Dinner was over, the dotter cleared the table, I stepped out for a smoke, OmegaDad stepped out with the dawg to do the dawgly duty.

When we got back inside, the dotter was on the phone with A., telling him that yes, he could almost certainly come to the fair with us.

Oops.  Big mistake, kiddo.  Don’t go making plans with someone else based on no decision from your parents.  We told her to say goodbye to A., that she’d call him back later, and to get her cute little butt back to the dinner table so we could Talk To Her.  At which point, we laid out the fact that (a) we had not made the decision yet, (b) she called A. and told him we had, (c) as a result, our decision was that he was not coming with us, even though I had been leaning towards taking him along, and (d) she had to call A. back, tell him she was wrong, and apologize.

Oh, lordy.  Y’know, sometimes being a parent is just a plain old pain in the ass.  Damn.  Chores need to be supervised, so it’s more work than just doing it myself.  We need to remind her to do the chickens.  We have to explain that not everything is going to go her way.  We have to explain courtesy, and patience, and junk like that.  (We also have to explain that talking in class is a Bad Idea, that while it’s polite to listen to someone who is talking (!!!  Yes!  She claimed she was listening and talking to A. in class because he was talking to her and it was the polite thing to do!), the teacher talking takes precedence, and quiet time in class takes precedence, and, and, and…)

Bah.

On the good side, though, we applauded her phone call (she was saying it all very quietly, in another room, so it wasn’t for show), we all played five-card draw, and B.S., and Crazy Eights, and I read another chapter of her Karito Kids book to her before bedtime.  I guess it all balances out.

So what is the family doing with our spare time now that the dotter is back in school, in the second grade?  Are we doing Quality Time Things with her?  Teaching her great moral truths?  Helping her understand the principles behind basic mathematics?  Discussing the political situations of the day?

No.

We are teaching her to play poker.

At, I might add, her request.  I have no idea where she came up with the idea, but while OmegaDad was out of town on the East Coast, I gave it a (lousy) whirl.  When I concluded that I couldn’t remember it very well, and certainly couldn’t remember the ranking of the various hands, I copped out:  I told her to wait until Daddy came home, and ask him to teach her to play.

Which she did.  And he did.  And we’ve been having a grand old time playing five-card poker, not Stud, for pennies from the zippy full of one hundred pennies that the dotter took to school last year for the 100th Day festivities.  At the end of the game session, we check to see who has the most pennies to declare the winner, and then the pennies go back into the zippy.

Our first night, the dotter won just about everything, and wiped out OmegaDad’s funds.  Beginner’s luck!

The second night, OmegaDad won.  This will probably be the default, because he has been playing poker for many years.  (”Weyall…the boys and I was playin’ poker in Nebraska City one night…”, said in one’s best Western drawl, is one of our favorite family lines, because he was playing poker with the boys in Nebraska City one night, whilst on a business trip…)

Hopefully, one of these days the dotter will learn what a “poker face” is.

I have had a cold.  It laid me low Thursday and Friday, and kept me from re-starting my (new) exercise regimen on Saturday and Sunday.  Worst of all, I had this goopy cough, wheezy breath, and found myself getting tired just going up the stairs.

Ew, yuck.  Time to hie myself off to the doctor, I said.  So I hied to the doc-in-a-box.

And at the doctor’s office, I waited.  And waited.  And waited.

While I waited, I saw parent after parent leading a child in–or out–for a shot.

Today, by the way, is the first day of school.

The first day when the new varicella vaccination rules are in place.

The “new” varicella vaccine rules which were communicated to me (a parent) multiple times waaaay back in March.  And April.  And May.  With handouts.  With notes from the school nurse.  In the newsletter.  There was even a special mailing, also from the school nurse.

All of which said:  No varicella vaccine, no school for your kid.  Period.  End of statement.

The nurse who was taking my vitals had to quickly leave the exam room to go help administer a shot to an eight-year-old who was screaming his head off in another exam room.

The doctor told me–when he finally got to me, two hours after I got there–that he was cross-eyed from seeing the kids and getting them their shots.  He estimated he had already seen twenty kids.

Helloooooooo!!!!

Folks!  Get a grip!  You’ve had plenty of notice!  Months of notice!  You’ve had a whole summer in which to get this thing done!  WHY ARE YOU WAITING UNTIL THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL TO TAKE CARE OF IT?!?!?!

Gah.  Twits.

OmegaMom wanders off, muttering darkly to herself and shaking her fist in the air.

The chores proceed apace, which is making me happy.  OmegaDad discovered the Internet Bonanza of American Girl doll accoutrements, and the dotter is agog.  And eager to buy, buy, buy!  Which, of course, means money, money, money!  Which leads to chores.

Ahhhh.  So the dotter is sweeping, and vacuuming, and cleaning the catbox, and sorting laundry, and carrying laundry back upstairs and putting it away (I know I mentioned every single one of these things before, but it’s so damn nice to have it done, even if I do have to follow around and give pointers and make sure she does more than a seven-year-old’s slapdash job).

OmegaDad has been making bread.  He recently made two loaves of challah, one for us, one for our next-door neighbor, who just got married.  The late afternoon sunshine just made the warmth and goodness pop out in the picture.  Aren’t they purty?

Also enjoying the afternoon warmth was one of our cats, Wooly.  Piggy, the scaredy cat, rarely (if ever) ventures upstairs, but Wooly is everywhere.  Including on our laptop.  Which means that, after I took this picture, I spent five minutes closing obscure Windows windows and making sure he hadn’t accidentally switched screen resolutions, or turned on Armenian language, or shut off all the keyboard shortcuts.  For reference, this was what he looked like a few years ago, when he was only five or six weeks old.

Our new chickens are laying eggs now–yay!  So we get a wide variety of egg sizes.  The big one is from one of our older girls; the little one is from one of the new layers.  Our Silkies lay eggs only a bit bigger than the little one, but the new girls’ eggs will end up as big as the one on the left in a few months.

Another shot of Cinderella, posing:

She starts second grade tomorrow.  She’s been wandering the house shouting excitedly about school starting; that excitement will disappear very soon.  Right now, she’s upset that her second-grade teacher is male:  “A dude?!  I don’t want a dude for a teacher!!”  There is an implied “WTF?!” in there that she hasn’t taken to using.  Yet.  (I, of course, am quite aware that she tends to get ferocious crushes on young men who are coaches or counselors or teachers, so fully expect her to be [occasionally] sighing about Mr. Snows.  When she’s not complaining about the homework.)

Oh, yes, and in the midst of all the early/mid August stuff, I totally spaced out that OmegaMom, the blog, is now four years old.  Whoa.

It’s August, and–as every parent of a school-aged kid knows–that means it’s time for registration.

Registration for school, for gymnastics, for dance or ice skating.  Checking to be sure the shots are up to date.  Perusing the school supply list.  Time to check winter coats and boots for fit.  Eyeing schedules.  Considering how to transition to “school year” bedtime, as opposed to happy-go-lucky summer bedtime.

I schlepped over to the elementary school this afternoon to do the annual signature-fest, and was just as irritated this year as last.

See, for returning students, the school has you check a printout with a variety of information on it (name, DOB, address, parents’ names, phone numbers, emergency contacts, ethnicity, yadda yadda yadda).  And then you have a sheaf of additional paperwork to fill out–still more emergency contact information, permissions for Internet use (or not), permission to use pictures (or not), permission to dispense ibuprofen/tylenol/cough drops/etc. (or not), signatures that you’ve received (and read and agreed to) the school’s student handbook, and the borough’s student handbook.

And on and on.

The thing that makes this database programmer’s stomach churn is that you get that printout, which has name, DOB, student ID number, and a variety of other information…all printed out, spit out straight from the belly of the Great Database in the Borough School District Offices.  But all those other forms?  The endless sheets, in the endless array of colors?

Those you have to fill out by hand.

Including all that information that is already on the printout.

Twenty sheets of info.  (Well, okay, ten.)  All with student name, DOB, student ID number.  Some with parent name and phone number.  All of which could be generated by a mail-merge using the data direct from the Great Database in the Borough School District Offices.  None of which are.

So folks, there you have it:  Here we are, in the year of our Lord 2009.  We have to fill out forms about Internet permissions–Internet permissions!!!–by hand.

We’re lucky in that we have only one kid to do this for.  When I sat down at the array of tables with my sheaf of color-coded paperwork in my hand, girding my fist to do battle with the pen, next to me was Mike, parent of A., OmegaDotter’s best bud from school.  He has four kids.  One is in middle school, so he has a different sheaf of paperwork to do for her; the middle two were returning students, and the last is going into kindergarten this year.  He had three sets of paperwork he was filling out mindlessly.

We commiserated, swapped names and phone numbers as emergency contacts (he and his family arrived in Alaska after us, and they are about as sociable as we are, which is to say, not very), and wrote.  And wrote.  And wrote.

Gah.  What century are we in now?  Why are universities and community colleges all set up to do this stuff by web, and the local schools aren’t?  I know it’s expensive, but surely the borough school district has an IT staff, whose job it is to do things like this?

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Answers to questions and comments from yesterday’s post:  Mamasan–We had totally forgotten the camera, so no need to feel guilt!  Tonggu Mama–We haven’t read the book yet, so don’t know whether it’s any good or not.  There is a website with games and what-not, and the games emphasize different cultures, different countries, and the “tokens” you win (passport stamps) can be redeemed for $$ to go to charities.  VinegarMartini–I’d like to claim that the dollar-a-missed-turn-signal was all the dotter’s idea, but am not sure.  She was, however, relentless in catching the misses!  Also, thanks for the tip on Target vis-a-vis the outfits; that will help immensely!  Jean–Alas, I think OmegaDad did not miss any turn signals on purpose.  He truly has a problem with being distracted by conversation or the radio, and howls with frustration when he is caught.

This is Ling, from Karito Kids.  Ling is very expensive, like the American Girls dolls.

OmegaDad spotted her first, at the local fancy toy store (very Waldorf-y place…lots of wooden toys, silky dress-up, fabric dolls, that kind of thing).  So he showed her to the dotter, who swooned with delight:  “She could be my little sister!”  Then came the catch:  No, we wouldn’t buy it for her.  She had to buy it, with her very own money.

Then we hammered out the list of possible ways to make money:  Sweep and Swiffer the living room and kitchen twice a week.  Unload the laundry chute and sort clothes.  Put clothes away after Mommy was done washing and folding them.  Brush the dawg.  Vacuum the downstairs.  Clean the cat box every night.

Then she came up with her very own idea.

OmegaDad, you see, has this…problem…with using his turn signal.  In other words, he often forgets.  The dotter has noticed this, and is a regular little back-seat driver about it.  (She also gives me approval, because I don’t forget the turn signal.  Ah, little victories!)

So one or the other of them proposed a deal:  If she caught him not using his turn signal while driving, he would give her…

…A DOLLAR!!!…PER WHACK!!!

Um.  Now, if I had been consulted before this little dealio went down, I would have put my foot down, and proposed a quarter per offense.  However, the first I heard of it was after the deal was pinkie sealed.

The girl is destined to be a wheeler-dealer scam artist, fer shur.  Because she made sure that daddy would pick her up from summer camp almost every day–and this was a source of $2, $3, or more per drive!  (I told you he had a problem with turn signals!)

Every night, she and OmegaDad would count up the dollars in her Mason jar.  Finally, on Friday night, she came bouncing down to the office, where I was watching a YouTube of the Chinese Brittney Spears, Jolin Tsai, shouting out, “How can I make three dollars and fifty cents before tomorrow?!”  See, that brass ring was in sight.  She wanted Ling so much she ached.  She had already created a bed for Ling in her bedroom.  She had set up her pseudo-computer (gift from Grandma Jeannie) so that Ling could sit in front of it.  She had pulled out her biggest horse, ready for Ling to ride.  And all she needed now was $3.50.

So she spent Friday evening in a frenzy–she swept, she Swiffered, she vacuumed, she cleaned the cat box.  She got her extra money.

Saturday morning, she grabbed her Mason jar of money:

…and we drove off to the swanky toy store, where she got this huge bag:

And mommy spent half-an-hour releasing Ling from durance vile (aka the packaging).  Lemme tell you, this doll is pretty cool.  Her head tilts and bends.  Her arms and legs have ball-and-socket type joints, so you can move them in more natural style than other big dolls.  And, like the American Girls dolls, she comes with a book:

At which point, poor OmegaDotter had to schlep off to her previously arranged sleep-over with A., her best bud from school.  OmegaDad and I were instructed to make sure Ling got to bed–in OmegaDotter’s bed, since she wouldn’t be there–and get her up and put her in front of her computer.

I, in the meanwhile, am hoping that we can get more chore-work out of the dotter without major whining–it’s been nice to have her so motivated!  There are plenty of accessories for Ling, so we’ll probably be able to get the dotter into the habit of doing chores for weekly allowance.

We have returned.  We had a lovely time visiting with GrannyJ and OmegaBro and family.  We swam, we walked, we visited, I worked (multiple days, bah, but it was mostly my own stupid fault), we hung out, we got lots and lots of sun, and OmegaDotter now is no longer scared of bugs but is busy collecting them (courtesy of OmegaBro and Niece and Nephew).  I got lots of dark nights (yay!) and some stars (yay!) and lots of clear electric blue skies, ponderosa pines, and monsoon storms.

But I will discuss those things in more detail later.  Maybe.

The most important thing, though, was that I managed to locate and contact One And Only True Love’s family in secret and managed to get the dotter up to Small Mountain University Town for a visit with him without her knowing what was going on.

I lied my head off to do this.  I told her I had looked them up in the phone book and couldn’t find them.  I told her the surprise I was working on didn’t work out.  When I said we were going up to SMUT, with a stop at Slide Rock State Park, and she asked if we could please, please, puh-leeze find a way to meet up with OAOTL, I shook my head with a sad smile and reminded her that I couldn’t get their information and didn’t remember where they lived.

Hah-hah!

So we did Slide Rock, then motored on up the hill to SMUT, and she fell asleep–worn out from playing, and I had to drive out one of my favorite roads hoping I could time her rise from her nap to coincide with us getting back into the right neighborhood at the right time.

Which I did.  (Picture OmegaMom with a smirky, triumphant grin right now.)

At which point–she was awake and excited to be back in SMUT–I said, “Hmmm.  Now I think I can remember where he lived–wasn’t their house down this way?” and turned off the road onto another, and then another, and she started recognizing things and got excited.  I pulled the car to a stop across the street from their house–which had been painted so I couldn’t recognize it when I went scouting–and she said, with great excitement, “That’s it!  That’s his house!” 

I said, doubtfully, “Hmm.  I’m not sure, love, it doesn’t look the same to me.  But maybe we could knock on the door and see if they know where he lives now.”  We went across the street, up the deck stairs, to the door, and before I could even ring the doorbell OmegaDotter was trying to open the screen door, and OAOTL’s mom was there, and OAOTL was barging out saying, “OMEGADOTTER!“

At which point, OmegaDotter became quite suddenly still and stiff and shy, which she has been doing lately.

Um.

Now this I had not expected.  I had expected her to swarm all over him like a crazed monkey.  I had expected her to stand with her hands clasped at her waist with a particularly goofy grin that she has when she’s over-the-moon happy.  I did not expect awkward silence.

At this point, I was terrified that everything was Going To Go Wrong.  But she pulled my head down and whispered into my ear to ask if this was my surprise, and said, quietly shocked, “You lied!  Oh, you bad mommy!”

So she and OAOTL sat, awkwardly, on different spots on the sofa while OAOTL’s mom and I made small talk.

OAOTL produced the most lovely, sweet drawing with “I LOVE YOU OMEGADOTTER!” written on it, and huge hearts, and two pictures of two kids holding hands, one in a boat.  OMG.  It was simply not the sort of thing you’d expect from a seven-year-old boy.  (OAOTL’s mom tells me that all of his “girlfriends” have looked just like her, and his latest had said something like “OmegaDotter, OmegaDotter, OmegaDotter!  I am so tired of you talking about OmegaDotter!” shortly before she stopped being his friend…)

The kids, however, were still not smiling or touching or anything at this point.  It was…just plain awkward.

Luckily, we had made arrangements to take them off swimming at the swanky new aquatic center.  By the time we got there, the awkwardness had evaporated: the dotter and OAOTL were chattering their heads off, and once we were in the pool area, she and OAOTL sprinted off to the waiting line to go down the immense water slide.  We hung out there for an hour, and then headed off for pizza at the cheap Chuck E. Cheez clone, and then back to OAOTL’s house for trampoline jumping and playing, and then it was time to go…

Both kids swarmed into OAOTL’s bedroom, scampered up onto his bunk bed, and started bouncing onto and off of each other and shouting “NO!” and “Can’t I spend the night?!” and “When can she come back?!”

OmegaDotter later told me I was the very best mom ever, and it was the greatest surprise ever.

Here are the kids towards the beginning of the visit, just beginning to warm up again:

And here they are when trying to avoid her going back to GrannyJ’s:

I now have address, phone number, and email address safely sent–via email–to all three of my email addresses, so there is no way we can lose them now.

Life has been busy here, Chez OmegaFamily.  I have tales of the China Camp finale, the sad tale of how Ruby the duckling died, the rockin’ and rollin’ earthquake (5.4 magnitude) we had this morning that actually caused me to duck down beneath my desk, the bunny that OmegaDotter and her neighborhood girlfriends found, and further progress on the villa/greenhouse complex.

But right now, I just want to protest.

Remember how I gushed about Mr. L., the elementary school music teacher who is leaving for greener pastures, and how worried I am about who will replace him?  Well, we have now encountered a music teacher who is diametrically opposed to him in personality. 

I have been taking OmegaDotter in to summer camp around 9 a.m.  The first day of the second week of camp, as I chivvied the dotter in to the facility, we were greeted by all the kiddos lined up, hands on their hearts, and a middle-aged battle-axe of a lady playing the national anthem on the piano.  Now, I have little against the national anthem aside from the fact that it’s horrible to sing, and it actually makes me sad to hear it played so…so…mechanically is not quite the word I am looking for, but it comes close.  Every note played perfectly, but no rhythm, no swing, no soul.  Give me a musician who botches notes left and right, but does it with verve and joy any day!

I stood there with the dotter, feeling somewhat awkward, while the kids and counselors sang.  Then this lady moved right into a lecture about how it’s our duty to remember all the sacrifices Our Men In The Service have made, and that they have fought for the Right To Sing This Song.  And then she led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I am not what you would call a highly patriotic person in the normal sense of the word.  I really love my country.  I love the fact that we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness (in general*), and regard countries such as Italy (which had something like 40 governments within the space of six years at one point) with pop-eyed sympathy and a genteel shudder about the instability of it all.  I don’t like totalitarian governments, and cheered with everyone else when the Berlin Wall fell.

But bombastic “My country, right or wrong!”, “America!  Love it or leave it!” patriotism just isn’t my schtick.

So Miss Liza has two strikes against her in my book from the get-go:  she radiates rigid self-righteous belief in country, and she massacres music.  She sets my teeth on edge.

In other words, I took an immediate and violent dislike to the woman.

The problem is, it turns out that she is the “music teacher” for half an hour every morning at camp.

I am hoping and praying that she doesn’t kill all the joy in music for these children while she has them in her oh-so-patriotic clutches.

Today was the dotter’s first day back at her regular summer camp.  There was a handout next to the sign-in book.  I grabbed one and glanced at it.  It was a letter from Miss Liza.  It ensured that I think not only is she an uptight bitch who slaughters music, she’s pompous to boot and can’t write well (though she probably thinks she can).

The subject of this letter was first off how “we are gaining an understanding of rhythm and melody, by taking notice of the various applications and integrations, of those two fundamentals”, and how important music is in our lives.  So she asks that children bring in a CD each week to share with the class (just part of one song).  BUT…Miss Liza will judge the appropriateness of the music, and expects parents to help out by making sure their children avoid music with “inappropriate language, or subject content”.  This includes such things as (of course) drugs and alcohol, and also “mutilation” or “death”.  THEN she adds that they are “exploring musically the area of service and the effect it has had in shaping our country”, so the kids are asked to bring in pictures of family members who have been in service in some way.

Well.

I’m sorry, folks.  A lot of these are things that I think are just fine and dandy–that I agree with if presented thoughtfully and allowing questions–but this woman has set my back up and the entire tone of this letter set the hackles on my neck rising.  So of course, I had to show it to OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love this guy?

Y’know why?  The very first thing he did after reading it was to tell me we needed a good selection of protest songs to send in with the dotter.  Then he googled “protest music for kids”.  Then we spent an hour batting around songs that we thought we might be able to get in past the “inappropriate language” taboo (alas, they probably wouldn’t make it past the “mutilation or death” filter).  We thought of some classic folk songs from the 30s, war protest songs from the 60s and 70s, I tossed in U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and Midnight Oil.

OmegaDad really wants to do this.  I just feel like withdrawing the dotter from camp…

(*Yes, there’s a certain amount of irony in that “we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness” statement coupled with a protest video portraying the Chicago riots in 1968.  But–hey.  Look.  The riots died down, people voted, Nixon won, and America went on.  And when Nixon was brought down by Watergate, the country didn’t dissolve into chaos–Jerry Ford moved into the White House, Chevy Chase made a fortune with his “bumbling Jerry” routine on SNL, and America went on.  Part of what made it go on–perhaps–were these very protests.)

I never had a “passion” for anything, or nothing that I would call a “passion”.  My brother knew at about 11 or 12 that he wanted to go into biology, and he planned his life accordingly.  He currently works for the Dark Service as an ecologist.  A friend, two years younger than I, realized in early high school that he was really, really into theatre and special effects and lighting.  Many many years later, he is a professor of lighting technology who has written “the” theatre lighting textbook.  Another friend wandered from job to job for quite a while, decided to go back to college to get a degree in creative writing, and had an epiphany due to a breast-lump scare that switched her from her almost-degreed creative writing focus to pre-med, med school, and a current career as an emergency room doctor.

Me?  I kind of floated.  I wanted to write historical romances for quite a while, but my first year of college scared the snot out of me, so I dropped out.  Also, there was this miscommunication with my parents…Then I spent years in and out of college, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, until the ongoing interaction with computers in every job I was in lured me into a career in programming and software support.

Lurking behind all of this was the fact that my parents never, ever pushed me.  They never told me, “You must get a job as a doctor/scientist/journalist/what-have-you that will allow you to make lots of money/gain fame and fortune/load you with prestige.”  They let me work my way through all these adult decisions, trusting that somehow, some way, I would land on my feet and be–if not famous, filthy rich, and winning the Nobel Prize–at least happy and satisfied.

Sure enough, there I am, relatively happy and satisfied with what I’m doing.  Fer cryin’ out loud, I am paid to do puzzles!  I get to puzzle out what’s wrong with people’s computers.  I get to puzzle out how to grab just the right data from a database.  I get to puzzle out how to make the computer Do What I Want It To.  I get to do logic puzzles.  It’s fun!  I like it!  And they pay me!  Well, heck.  How could I not be satisfied with that??

But there are lots of parents out there who don’t follow the philosophy that my parents followed.  Parents who want to aim their children–like arrows–at a particular career.  Parents who will do everything in their power to make their children go into that career–whether that’s what their children want to do or not.

Sometimes this works out well; I am thinking of Johnny, whose parents made him get a degree in electrical engineering, and who is now happily working his 20th year (I think?) at MegaloCorp, currently doing project management.

Other times…

Well, what brought this post on was a post on PostMimi (how many times can I use the word “post” within one sentence???).  “Mimi” means “secret” in Chinese, and this is a sort of PostSecret specifically for AsianAmericans.  Today there was a post that read:

This is what i was doing with my life
MUSIC/OPERA/CLASSICAL BY DAY
A course away from GRAD
WORKING AS A CHEF BY NIGHT
Working with some of the most amazing/professional people i’ve ever met.

I was happy and excited at the direction it was headed
PERFORMANCE OPPORTUNITIES
A once in a life time chance to perform all over Europe
A CHANCE TO LEAD A FULL KITCHEN
A position i have been working up to.

My parents wanted none of it
“You will end up teaching…failing…wasting money…”

I am now forced to go back to school to Major in Sciences, something i never wanted to do.  I have just given up on a happy life.

It breaks my heart.  I want to shout:  “STOP!!  Don’t do it!  Don’t let your parents rule your life!  Live your passion!!!” 

But I don’t know this person’s life.  It’s quite possible that this person’s parents are paying for college, and refuse to pay any more unless s/he goes into sciences.  It’s oh-so-easy for me, from my perspective as a (gasp!) 50-year-old looking back, with a (gasp!) 50-year-old’s self-confidence, and my personal experience of no pushing from my parents, to say “follow your dreams!” to this young college student.  But when I look back, and think of my passive personality, if my parents had been like that…would I have had that courage?  Would I have been able to toss my feelings of comfort in my family, my utter belief in their utter belief in me, to the winds?  I don’t know.

At the same time, the thought of someone going into the sciences, or medicine, or teaching, or the humanities, or any career, against their wishes and with no spark or desire (or even an absolute dislike) for those subjects, makes me both sad for the person and sad for the others in those areas of expertise.  Do you want a doctor treating you who went into medicine solely because their parents said, “This is what you will do, or we will not pay for college/disown you/never love you again”?

There is certainly plenty of room in every profession for people who don’t have a passion, that’s true.  Plenty of people have gone into various fields with no great love for them, and done well.  But it sounds like this young person has worked hard to start a life in a particular set of creative areas where you have to have passion, you have to have that spark, or else you won’t do well.

Anyway.  I hope I remember this when the dotter is in college.  I hope I never push and push her in a direction she doesn’t want to go.  There are so many ways of making a living as an adult.  I know that she is passionate about art; she is always drawing and painting and creating.  It’s not easy to make a profitable living doing that, but it is easy to make enough.  So if that’s what she wants to do as an adult, trust me, I will do my best to say, “Do it!”

On the other hand, if she wants to be a rock star, I’m going to make sure she has some type of backup plan…;-)

I have come to a momentous conclusion:

When telling people when to visit Alaska, I should say, “Come in May.”

Rain?  What’s that?  Sunshine?  Oooh, lots.  Greenery?  Yup.  A few flowers–not as many as later on, but at least there’s no drizzly, chilly, rainy days.  It has just been glorious, and I highly recommend it to non-Alaskans as a good way to get to know Alaska.

The dotter tried to do her homework in the hammock this afternoon.  First there was the flat-on-her-back approach:

Then there was the sitting-up approach:

It ended up not working.  Too many distractions, too much sunshine, the breeze kept blowing her papers around, and then there was the problem that her pencil’s eraser was worn down.  Which, of course, meant she couldn’t do her work.  Oh, well; it was a fun afternoon anyway.

I might note that this is my hammock, now dangling from my new Pawley Island hammock frame, a Mother’s Day gift from the hubby and the dotter.  The hammock was my gift many years ago, and was hung between two trees in the back yard of our house in Small Mountain University Town.  Here, however, I was adamant that I needed a frame, rather than putting the hammock between trees; I wanted to be able to grab the sunshine, and anywhere we had two trees properly spaced, we didn’t have sunshine, or else it was right next to the next-door neighbor’s driveway. 

The lilac buds are proceeding apace.  The one bush is loaded with buds on every branch:

The other two bushes are just beginning to get their leaf buds, but I fully expect them to do just as nicely.

The pasque flower that was a bud last week is now fully open:

My other Mother’s Day gifts were a cake, decorated by the dotter:

And, of course, the obligatory hand-made Mother’s Day card:

Note the nascent cursive writing.  She’s not supposed to be doing cursive at school, but is busily producing her own version.  This will probably cause problems next year, or whenever they introduce cursive (if they do at all?)…

I would do Deep Thoughts about Mother’s Day, but will just give you the gist:  Mom’s day is one of the hardest holidays an infertile woman can cope with.  To all my readers who are still struggling with infertility, all I can say is that I hope you, too, will one day be getting the hand-made cards and the gifties made at school.  Another Mom’s day thought is that I found myself thinking of OmegaDotter’s birthmother a lot; the girl is so damned amazing and fun (and irritating and whiny) and smart (and capable of doing incredibly silly stuff), and I wonder what her mother is like, and feel sorrowful that she’s missing out on such a cool kid. 

Follow-up:  Not only did the New York Times quote OmegaMom, but Inside Edition emailed me, wanting to know about flu parties.  Since I don’t know diddly about flu parties, I passed the query on to one of my Tweets, who was interested in doing one.

The dotter is suddenly missing One And Only True Love with great intensity.  I had found his mother’s phone number a few months ago, but never wrote it down; at the dotter’s behest, I tried locating it today online.  Surprise!  It wasn’t there any more.

Insert great sinking feeling here.  I am deeply afraid they have moved away from Small Mountain University Town, and we may not have any way of finding them.

So tonight, at bedtime, after our normal routine, the dotter was snuggled down in bed and I had pulled out my book and was reading, when I heard…

Crying?

Oh, dear.

Sure enough, the dotter was crying.  A little gentle prodding, and I got, “I miss C.!” from her in quiet sobs.

So we spent an hour with her on my lap, crying, and missing her old friend.  It was a very helpless feeling, as there was nothing I could do except sympathize.  I am distinctly reminded of an occasion when I was suffering from a broken heart and sobbing my eyes out on my mother’s lap while I sat on the floor of a van filled with relatives on our way to my brother’s graduation.  I’m sure my mom had the same exact helpless feeling.

OmegaDotter’s school has a revolving “extra” class each day–one day it’s gym, another it’s music, and the third is a visit to the school library.

She tends to bring home horse books of one type or another, with, every once in a while, a Jack-and-Annie book or a topical book (The Halloweiner for Halloween, for instance).  Today, she brought back “How To Draw a Horse”.  She was very perturbed, and claimed it didn’t really show “how” to draw a horse.  So while she was spending a lot of time on the phone with her best buddy A., drawing a thousand dollar bill for her and A. to use in their restaurant (A. was similarly drawing money on the other end), I opened up the book and started following the instructions.

Herewith, a horse head:

And a Welsh pony (I think; it may have been a Shetland):

I think they turned out rather nicely.  If the dotter keeps up with her art books, I may end up learning something.  That’s what kids are for, dontcha know?!  Fergeddabout the hugs and kisses and snuggling and all that–it’s a way to learn things you carefully avoided for many years.

It didn’t start that way.

In fact, it started really nicely.  It started yesterday afternoon, when I went to meet OmegaDotter at the bus stop and stopped at the mail box congregation on the way only to find a Big Box from Ms. Lizard (an oft-time commenter here).  I deftly made the dotter think it was for me, and she only realized that it might be for her when I had it open on the kitchen table and started pulling out clothing from the Hanna Andersson Mothership.  Oooh.  Oooh, yeah.  A red velour dress, a purple and lavender striped day-dress/play-dress, and a poofy multi-colored skirt thing.  The dotter was in girly heaven; she wore the red velour dress all evening long, and this morning she couldn’t wait to pull on the purple striped dress (”It feels like pajamas!”).  (Note to Ms. Lizard:  VERY greatly appreciated!  VERY!)

And last night OmegaDad went on a late-night run to the grocery store and surprised me upon his return with a clump of cut daffodil buds.

That’s the nice start.

Then there was the earthquake around noon.

That’s our earthquake showing up on the Redoubt volcano monitors.  I was sitting in the office, shortly after ending my (short) work day, when I heard a bang (?) and definitely a rumble and the dog started to bark.  I thought it was the garbage truck picking up our roll-off box.  But then everything started to roll and sway.  Just when I was beginning to think “Now is the time to duck under my desk!”, it stopped.  Shortly thereafter it showed up on the volcano seismometers and OmegaDad called to ask if I felt it.  It was initially labeled a 4.7, now a 4.6.  They’re calling it a “light” earthquake.

OmegaDotter was frustrated that she missed the earthquake; the kids were coming in from recess right then, so no-one noticed.

Then there was the homework fuss.  Things have been very quiet on the homework front for months now, since I last vented about it, but today was a Bad Day.

But what made it a no-good, very bad, terrible, horrible day…

OmegaDotter and I went out for a walk with the dawg before dinner.  We went walking down the street that has her favorite horses.  We were having a grand time.  The dawg was well-behaved.  The horses were great.  The dotter was skipping and laughing and bright and cheerful.  But then came decision time:  Turn around and do the long block back, or go around a longer block in a circle?  She wanted to turn around and walk back past the horses.  I wanted to go around the longer block. 

We’ve been talking about her maybe being able to walk to friends’ houses this summer, by herself.

She said (or I said, I can’t remember at this point) that she could walk back down the street, I could do the long block, and we’d meet back at the end of the street.

She thought we should make a race of it.

I asked if she was sure.  She was.

I was a little dubious, but we’d been talking and talking about her walking the neighborhood by herself.  I know that many of my readers are probably gasping in horror at this point, but dammit, we live here, we are familiar with the people, there are fifty kazillion kids who run wild in the area when it’s nice out, the kids are allowed to walk to school in April/May and September/October, and I’ve been influenced by FreeRangeKids…

We head our separate ways.  I walk as fast as I can, knowing that my route is longer.

I get there, and there’s no OmegaDotter in sight.

I think she’s lingered too long at the horses.  I walk down the street (remember:  rural/suburban area; 1- and 2-acre lots; dirt roads; no traffic to speak of and all the traffic that is there takes wide detours around kids and dogs).

No OmegaDotter.

Not at the horses, either.

I am hyperventilating at this point.

I walk very fast back to the corner where we’re supposed to meet, hoping that she was “hiding” to try to surprise me.

No OmegaDotter.

I start shouting her name.  Loudly.

Oh God.  What if she was too bouncy around the horses and got trampled?  What if she ran into an aggressive moose?  What if she was climbing one of the little hills in the woods to hide from me, and fell down, and hurt herself?  What if some freakazoid just happened to come across her, kidnapped her, raped her, killed her, and we would never know?!

But maybe she decided to walk all the way home.  KILL HER MYSELF if she did!

I start walking the rest of the way home, calling her name, very loudly, getting more and more panicky.

And just as I turn the very last corner before our street, there’s the car with OmegaDad and OmegaDotter in it.

I am about ready to KILL HER; she must have walked home by herself, she must have forgotten to wait for me, OMGWTFBBQ I am going to KILL HER for scaring me so badly…

I climb into the car and start the “OMG I AM SO GOING TO…” when OmegaDad, in a fury, informs me that she had gotten scared, started crying, some nice lady stopped to help her and let her use her cell phone to call home and he went to pick her up…

…and on and on.  I felt (and feel) lower than the lint in a worm’s navel.  I also still feel scared.  I also felt (and still feel) angry at OmegaDad for even thinking that I had just abandoned her to walk all the way home by herself.  This had the salutory effect of making him angrier because I was making him the Bad Guy.

Oh, yes, and after collapsing in hysterical tears just after I got home, I went upstairs to grab my little coffee and smokes with some vague idea of running off somewhere so I could recuperate, and hit a box that hit the kitchen island that made the shelves in one of the sets of cupboards in the island come tumbling down, complete with many containers of coins.  (We think the shelves were loosened by the earthquake.)

So.  It was very bad.  I don’t think I’ll be repeating that little experiment for quite a while.  I spent quite a while snuggling the dotter, realizing that it could have been much, much worse.  Gah.

ETA:  Just in case it’s not apparent:  I am horribly guilt-stricken.  I have apologized numerous times to the dotter for scaring her like that.  I have been wandering around wondering what the fuck I was thinking, and realizing that the only thing I can say is that she seems such a big girl these days that it just went *poof* out of my head that she’s seven, she’s still a little girl, she still has serious problems with being alone and being abandoned, and I can kick my own ass quite enough.

Dudes.  What is with our culture?!  Seriously.  Isn’t it good enough to be invited to participate in the state science fair?  Does every damned thing kids participate in require that every tender ego be protected from negative vibes?

All the kids at the State Science Fair got “participant” ribbons and a certificate.

Ah, well, it’s all for the chiiiiillllldrrrruuuuunnnn.  We must spare them any and all psychic harm, dontchaknow?

Bah.

That said…OmegaDotter came home with an official second-place ribbon, and we’re as pleased as punch with that.

The venue was a brand-new middle school in Big City.  A really pretty brand-new school.  With two art studios!  And a dance studio!  And an atrium filled with dangling glass mosaics in rainbow colors!  Holy cow, it looked like the set from High School Musical–there were balconies and swathes of glass and the principal’s office was a two-story high-ceilinged affair!  Man, we felt like we were in Swank City while we were there.

Friday evening was filled with standing in lines.  There was the line to check in to get a project number.  There was the “media release” line.  There was the line for the free T-shirt.  There was the line to pay for registration.  There was the line for the judging information and time selection for judging (for elementary students–older students had to be there for a full four hours).  There was the line for the FAQs (really–why on earth didn’t they just hand it out with the project number?!).  There was the line for the Safety Check, which in essence said that if you brought anything that could possibly, in any way, harm someone by giving them a boo-boo, it was out.  THEN, when all those lines were visited (older students also had the line-to-submit-abstracts and the line-for-human-research-protocol-checks), then you could visit the line where they told you where to put the project.

But even with all the lines, it only took us an hour.  Then we went off to dinner at a local Korean restaurant, overate, and went home, to return again this a.m.

These are the hanging mosaics at Very Bright Shiny New Middle School:

This was part of the scene in the gymnasium where the exhibits were displayed:

OmegaDotter talking with the judge.  We had walked her through various questions and answers beforehand, but were not allowed to be anywhere near her during the judging.  The gymnasium had an upper-level track around the periphery, so we went up there and spied from above.  Yes, it’s a bad picture; I zoomed too far and things pixilated.

Madame Scientista posing in front of her project:

One of the middle schoolers on the other side of the gymnasium also had a dissolving-egg-shells project; theirs was much more complex and involved measuring the thickness of the egg shells using calipers after four days of immersion, and they used Sprite instead of Dr Pepper and Pepsi.  The dotter was very interested in seeing their project, and they had to ask her if she bounced the nekkid eggs–which, of course, we had done.

Then we had five hours to kill before we could pick up the projects, so we drove down the coast of the inlet to Ski Resort Town, which we had never visited before.  I was astonished at how much snow they got there; OmegaDad kept telling me that this was the Rain Shadow Effect In Action.  Thank you very much, Herr Professor My Love!

We were intrigued by the effect of tides on ice in the inlet; there were many small iceberg-lets stranded on the mudflats at high tide, and the ice was not a solid sheet, but carved into canyons and mesas by the action of the tides (we assume).  Nothing like the ice on Lake Michigan in winter, which I remember very distinctly as a solid mass, with excellent frozen wave action on the edges (no waves in the inlet, so none of that here).

As we drove back, there was this large grey cloud to our left.  OmegaDad and I kept eyeing it, and we finally decided it must be an ash cloud from the volcano.  Note the brownish tinge to the bottom of the cloud layer at the top of the image below:

When we arrived home and checked the Alaska Volcano Observatory, sure enough, there had been yet another eruption (another day, another eruption; this is becoming almost routine by now), with an ash fall advisory in Big City.  Another eruption occurred after we got home, and this time the ash fall advisory is right here in Suburban Alaska.  So OmegaDad is outside taping up the cracks around the chicken coop.  Ah, life in Alaska…

As an aside:  last year, there were pictures of way kewl lightning around the eruption of Chaiten volcano in Chile.  Tonight, I am able to provide links to similar pictures of our very own volcano!

Oh, and greetings to any Mudflatters who are visiting.  Look around, kick the tires, see if you want to stay a while!