Weekend of Urban Goodness…

On Saturday morning, R and I pulled ourselves up out of flu hell and drove down to Phoenix for a weekend of fun and frivolity, pitched to The Bee’s cultural tastes…first, the FCC-AZ Chinese New Year event.

We ate:

We watched another girl do some cool spinning toy on a rope, helped out by an older woman…

so we ran over and decided to do it ourselves…

we watched and learned…

we thought we were doing pretty well…

and then we even got our own helping hand (although The Bee was better at this than the seven-year-old; I’m not sure why or how)…

Then we tried the hula hoop…

followed by the purchase of a purple parasol…

followed by jumping on the trampoline toy…

which we did much better at than last time…

thanks, I think, to Tiny Tots Gymnastics…

Then we tried some sticker art…

Followed by watching the dragon dance…

and then we ran…

up on stage with all the kids…

and promptly hugged them (the only kid who hugged!…not sure if that means she needs lessons in appropriate boundaries or whether she’s well-socialized…I’m sort of proud, actually)…

And then we watched a magician…although we clearly haven’t been disciplined by attending school yet since we choose not to sit in the semi-circle with the other kids…

In the afternoon, we went to see the Great Green Room come alive in a stage production of Goodnight Moon. (No pictures. Not allowed.)

On Sunday, we saw the Doodlebops.

we loved the whirligig light toy…

and we rocked out to the music…

Phew.

Congratulations…

to Maia, Ryan, Spike, and Bell JiFang on becoming a family of four…go see, go see!

Maia’s also doing some yeoman blogging from Nanjing on what to expect for future families….

West Wind

Happy Valentine’s Day…

okay, so two little Valentine’s tidbits…

my favorite love song is “Into My Arms” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds…if you don’t know it, look it up on itunes.

I recently came across what I think might be the most romantic line ever written…by Anton Chekov, in a letter to his last wife…

“Hello, the last page of my life…” Love that.

R. and I are both sick today. Not the best way to spend Valentine’s, although since we haven’t been out together sans Bee since we met her, I can’t imagine it would have mattered. The Bee is not sick. She has been sick a grand total of ONE time since we met (a cough and runny nose last month) and has NEVER had a fever since we’ve had her. Amazing.

We have a jam-packed weekend planned, so I’m hoping the elders of the household feel more spiffy soon. We are going down to the Valley of Death on Saturday to celebrate Chinese New Year with a dragon parade and hang out with the FCC folks, and then in the afternoon we’re going to see the musical version of Goodnight Moon (one of The Bee’s all-time favorite books) on stage. We’ll spend the night in a hotel, and then on Sunday afternoon we’re off to see the Doodlebops. Which I imagine will involve buying The Bee a pink wig.

Ahem.

Glimpses.

Once in a while, The Bee pulls a shocker that makes me draw in my breath. She was 20 months when we met her, and we didn’t expect her to ever wax on about her time in the orphanage…she won’t remember it, right?

Well, you’ll remember her Buddhist prayer stance that I blogged about last summer here. This morning we were in the bathroom, and she was going through drawers, per usual. She has become fascinated by an oversize medicine dropper that has a rubber squeeze bulb on one end. Today she was playing with it and signed “baby” followed by “milk.” Now, I have never told her that feeding babies (particularly babies affected by clefting) milk is one of the possible uses of this device. And I can’t imagine she’s ever seen images of this on TV. She hasn’t. So it gave me not just a few goosebumps to realize that she was accessing some residual memory from The Before Time. It’s so eerie–and rewarding–to see that part of her life popping up, preserved in her, even if it is only in remainders.

The other thing she did this morning was equally fascinating (to me), although not nostalgic: she woke up quite upset, crying. (I’m assuming a bad dream.) She usually gets up out of bed now and will come greet us in our room, and then either climbs in bed with us or goes back to her room and turns on her music (she operates her CD machine now) and reads books for a while. This morning, she just stayed in bed and cried. When I hugged her, I asked her why she was crying (you know, trying to get the child to articulate her feelings and all that jazz), and she signed “boys, girls, play, sad.” This is the exact combination of signs she always used to make when I dropped her off at the Y’s daycare, while I went to work out. For weeks, she signed “boys, girls, play, sad” when I asked her why she was crying at KidZone. So, I thought it was incredibly interesting that she connected that feeling to her emotions in bed this morning…feelings of being alone, of being left behind. She was really thinking about what she was feeling and was trying to explain it to me through a parallel experience. There’s so much going on in there, and I’m grateful for these clues about the person my daughter is becoming.

Finally, Happy Lunar New Year. We have desert pack rats running around the ranch. They are huge. And hoarders. And have nests of salvaged flim and flam, not unlike my own habitat. So, cool beans to the Year of the Rat.

What We Woke Up To…

this morning…our first (and I expect only) snow of the year:

It was gone by noon.

What I Wish I Had Written…

Here is a post from my dear friend Maia that says nearly exactly what I want to say about my adoption: Perfect. (And I assure you I don’t just admire it for the kind words she said about my own blogs…she’s a gem, though, for that. )

It’s high time there was a more genuinely positive discourse about SN adoptions out there. Back in the day, I was never one of those people who ever thought I could “handle” it either. I just wanted a kid, quicker. Thank god we have the ability to learn, to be transformed.

More Harping on Time.

Today, February 1st, The Bee is two-and-a-half. In honor of the half-birthday, here are some shots of her from last weekend, when she was making her brother a finger-paint present for his twenty-first birthday. (OMG!–I knew my stepson when he was 12! How is this possible?)

Tick, tock.

Em told me it was a picture of a helipcopter and a rainbow, with “EM” (meaning her) in the picture too somewhere:

Tick, Tock.

Many (most?) of the comments on my last catch-up post focused on the news that we’re leaving the ranch and moving to the L.A. area in the spring…so, a few thoughts on that.

Timing really is everything. When R. and I moved to the property five years ago, we really did think this was it. As in, forever it. I wanted to garden–seriously garden. I wanted to never want for a ripe tomato in late summer. (And if you know me well, I can literally eat dozens of garden tomatoes a day.) I wanted to plant an entire eyespace with nothing but waves of hummingbird mint. And I wanted to write and live in a place that inspired writing. I wanted to learn a new language–a language of rocks and wildflowers and birds and scrub. A language peculiar to the Southwest. A language that was rich and strange at once.

I wanted to be able to disappear into the stars at night.

I got all that. I did all that, for several years. I was very, very lucky, and I’m grateful for the ranch. But one of the lessons of motherhood is that what works–what suffices, what inspires, what transports–changes with the change of focus. When your focus becomes a little girl with the deepest brown eyes you’ve ever seen and a devilish giggle, your Mommynoia kicks in. Because, frankly, a toddler can’t climb a staircase of stones without falling–most likely, into one of the cactus lining the trail. A toddler who unapologetically grins while pulling off her shoes and socks every chance she gets can’t be trusted to live near the occasional rogue scorpion. Not to mention rattlesnake. So the beauty that once inspired becomes the burden that terrifies. The strangeness is no longer appealing. Exoticism really does mask anxiety, I guess.

Tick, tock.

A toddler needs sidewalks and (grassy) parks and playgrounds and other children to stimulate her development. She needs libraries with story hours that don’t take an hour to get to. And mom needs a coffeehouse to hang out in once in a while. A friend to walk around the block with. (And a block to walk around.) Or to call on the spur of the moment, for god’s sake. Would you roll your eyes at me if I actually admitted that I didn’t realize at my first blush of motherhood that moms need breaks every once in a while? That moms need support systems? Um, yeah. I’m a bit of a habitual hermit.

So, for instance: I always took it as ideal that my office (where my computer and the internets live) is in a building separate from the main house. Down a path through the scrub. Damn dark at night, which means that I never venture there then. I thought it was great that the division of physical space mandated a division of mental space…when I left the computer every afternoon, I left it. No web cruising at random hours. No checking email right before bed. Life clearly delineated.

Only problem is, life is never clearly delineated when you have a kid. Especially, I guess, when you’re a SAHM. Diapers and a crib in my office now is a given. I crave internet access up in the kitchen, in the T.V. room, in the closet–anywhere–but we can’t pick up the signal in the house. And there’s no cable in the rural desert. And, so, my onetime haven of creativity has turned into the bane of my existence. I hate my office. I want a laptop next to my stove. I want to check email while I pee. I don’t want to have to choose between an hour on the treadmill (if I put The Bee down for her nap in her room) and an hour on the computer (if I put her down in my office) because that means making a choice between exercising the body or exercising the mind that day.

Not that any of this heralds the coming of the Apocalypse. I’ll survive. We’ll survive. But there are days when having a “grown up” house (as R. and I refer to it) instead of this eclectic kingdom of boulders would make things a whole lot easier. Habits need to be broken when their usefulness runs its course.

Tick, tock.

So we chose easier. Sooner than we expected to. R.’s change of professions (he’s gone to work for his father’s business, located in southern California) meant that we would move to SoCal at some point. We originally thought in three years or so. We originally thought to San Diego. But we have very close friends in Pasadena–R.’s best friend from boyhood and his artist wife–and so I dropped the idea of moving there instead, since R.’s commute to the palm tree farm would really be almost the same from either city. I crave friendship right now. I crave society.

I worry that this post is turning into a defense of the bourgeois life. Ah, well. More anxiety. We’re leasing a house rather than buying in case we get there and can’t hack it. R. has already announced that he’s going to need to “take off into the desert” every so often. And we’re not selling the ranch of rocks anytime soon (Can you imagine finding that sort of buyer in this market?…although if you know anyone who might be interested in a gussied-up, double-wide trailer on a shrine-strewn, ex-religious retreat, let me know). I have a feeling we’ll be able to hack it. I have a feeling that The Bee will thrive in the L.A. area with its cultural opportunities and its diversity. Me, too.

It is, after all, the right time for it.

Uncle.

Okay, okay. I cry Uncle. I’m here, and I’m alive, and All Is Well. Or relatively thereabouts. Or somewhat thereabouts.

Thank you for checking up on me. Which many of you did. I feel a little bit like quoting Sally Field (as in, “You like me, you really like me“), but then you’d have to shoot me.

Speaking of, is anyone else as annoyed by Sally’s osteoporosis commercials as my hubby is? Because R. remarks to me at least twice a week that those can’t really be her grandchildren she’s trying to pass off as her grandchildren. I’ve got to say, I’m a little less than sympathetic as to this line of questioning. I’m trying to keep some brain space left alive and kicking, and Sally Field doesn’t really factor in to that effort.

The Bee is doing fine. Fine as in Great. We discovered in early December that she knows all her capital letters (this was a bit of a shock since…good mother that I am…ahem…I did not teach them to her). And now she knows the lower case letters, too.

Speaking of, do you realize it’s really like learning two separate alphabets? ‘Cause until I stopped and thought about it, I didn’t realize that I have seamlessly internalized the upper and lower case letters into a single alphabet system. But think about how different an upper-case A looks from a lower-case a. Or a G from a g. And it’s really like learning two individual sign systems, and then re-integrating them. I took a bunch of graduate linguistic courses and should have thought about this before–but, again, meager brain space. So, cool.

She’s almost reading short words like “cat” straight off the page. She can spell her name. And she now says “no,” loudly and clearly, I might add. Heh. The other linguistic thing she’s doing that I find pretty interesting is that, if she doesn’t have a sign for something, she’ll use the closest sign she does know that rhymes. I swear she’s a poet. So, for instance, when we visited the lovely Maia and family in December, The Bee had no sign for her new best buddy, Spike. So she started signing “bike” when she wanted Spike. Or “more bike” to be exact. When she wants rice (which we do not know the sign for), she signs “ice.” When she wants Dora on Noggin, she makes the slamming “door” sign. I love the way she uses cognate sounds to draw relationships between words. I’m totally clueless on that sort of language acquisition, so it’ll be interesting to watch how her habits change and grow.

My only disappointment lately in her language development is that she’s stopped saying “uh, um” and started (correctly) saying “uh, oh.” I guess that should please me, but I really sort of liked her “uh, um” stage…it always sounded to me like she was sort of questioning whatever topsy-turvy thing had just happened. I miss the wonder of the “um.”

As to the wonder of Em, here are a few shots I’ve collected over the past two months…most of them are holiday-oriented:

At my parents’ house in early December–the money shot:

With “more bike” in New York:

The Santa photo on Christmas Eve (Should I complain that Santa is missing his hat? or that he’s a bit too patriotically adorned for my taste? I like to see some white fur and big buckled belt on my Santa. Call me crazy.):

Helping to write Santa a note on Christmas Eve:

Christmas Morning Chaos:

Visiting grandparents in California, the day after Christmas:

So, she is doing really, really well. She is so happy, so adaptable. She started going to the KidZone at the YMCA, a drop-off-your-kid-for-an-hour-or-two-at-daycare-so-mommy-can-work-out (more on that part later). As soon as she figured out that I was coming back for her, she was just happy as a clam to get out among her peeps. And she started Tots Gymnastics, in which she IS the social butterfly, holding all the other kids’ hands as they bop down the trampoline together (although, me suspects this is merely a ploy to finagle more jumping time…yep…my girl’s a master charmer already). And it turns out she doesn’t need more surgery right now. So, way cool.

I took a little HY-AH-TUS just to get my shit in order. I had a pretty emotional visit home the first 10 days of December to see my parents, and my dad is in a severe decline from the Parkinson’s. And mom is killing herself taking care of him. And there’s no remedy for any of this in sight, and it sent me reeling a bit. But me and my serotonin are re-discovering our balance, slowly but surely.

Oh, and we’re moving. I think I probably mentioned that before at some point–that R.’s new job with the family farm means a move to California. But the plan’s shifted a bit. Like, to March. As in, six weeks from now. Heh. And we’re going to Pasadena, rather than the San Diego area. More on that later. I’m deep into trying to find a house to rent and a preschool to pay thousands of dollars to. If anyone knows anything I should know about Pasadena, please leave a comment. Or two.

And in the midst of all this, R. and I decided it might not be the right time for us to be thinking about expanding our family. So there was also the anxiety and the heart-wringing and the hesitations and the second-guessing and the decision-making process on that front. In the end, we ended up not going forward with a second adoption, although we hope to revisit this subject again in a year or two.

I have been keeping up with my blog reading, by the way. But my commenting has been in poor shape. So, sorry for that. I think that NaBloPoMoCo whatever the hell it was did me in. And I wasn’t even blogging.