Parenting

Napping homeschool girl

Aug 252010

Every once in awhile Madison just CRASHES. I knew today would be one of those days because she woke up whiny and it just got worse as the day wore on. It culminated with her in tears on the couch because of something she said to someone when she was four that she doesn’t remember but she knows was mean and the guilt — after two years — was finally overwhelming. So first I told her that even the nicest people do mean things sometimes and that she IS one of the nicest people I know and then I tucked her into bed and lay down with her for a few minutes. It’s been an hour and a half and she’s still sleeping.

Today would be her first day of school if she was going to our neighborhood school across the way. Or maybe yesterday would have been, I don’t know because the schools in our district got to choose which of those two days to start and I didn’t bother to get the details. We get a little foot traffic from kids in backpacks in front of our house and sometimes minivans park there if there’s an assembly of some kind.

We hear the school “bell” (it’s really a buzzer) go off, too, and all the kids romping on the playground. It makes for a nice nieghborhood-y feel.

Tomorrow I start school and I was thinking about how a lot of the moms on Facebook/Twitter have been counting down the days/hours/minutes until their kids go and I thought it’d be funny if Noah was doing the same thing about me but no one would get it since pretty much all his friends on Facebook are either kids or homeschooling parents of his friends. I feel like that was a potentially hilarious piece of satire that will never get to be.

Every year I ask the kids if they feel left out when they know other people are going to school and every year they say no. They say no while sitting in their jammies knowing their schooled peers are already at their desks so it’s likely not a fair context for the question. I did ask Noah once on the last day of school when there was a huge fair out on the playground field with bouncy houses and a DJ and he said, “But see how happy they are that they get to LEAVE?”

Listen, there are downsides to homeschooling mainly for me but the kids are awfully happy about it.

Temporarily losing my religion

Judaism, Parenting 13 Responses »

Aug 232010

We’re not doing religious school with the kids this year and it’s the right decision but I’m sad about it. Both the kids are on board but both (well, Noah — Madison is reflecting sadness back at us but she’s pretty neutral) are sad about it, too.

It’s hard having kids in two widely different age ranges because our synagogue building is very small and so they stagger the classes. It means our Sundays are basically eaten up by taking kids and dropping them off. Last year it was from 8:30 to 1:30 (with an exchange of kids in the middle) but this year Noah would start going at about 3pm so we would have a four hour window in the middle of the day but that would be it.

So that’s part of it.

The other part of it is that being a member of the temple and sending both kids to religious school is really expensive and we don’t have it right now. We could get financial aid but it’s a process and we’re kind of overwhelmed with process right now (my school; Brett’s temp job, which is requiring a whole lot of bureaucratic hoop jumping to get on there permanently). Also maybe we are late for applying, I don’t know. Brett kept putting it off because he hates having to ask for it.

Brett and I talked about it over the weekend and we know that this school year will be busier than ever because I’ll be in school. And our Saturdays are already getting booked because of kid activities and now Madison’s soccer practice is on Friday evenings. (Argh.) (Plus side to soccer — we requested she be on the team coached by one of the dads in our local transracial adoption support group so Madison will be one of several black kids with white parents AND the coach is a really nice, laid back guy so she is VERY EXCITED. Obviously this totally outweighs the awkward practice time. Go Stingrays!)

Now for Noah, anything he does past bar mitzvah is gravy. About half his friends won’t be going but two of his favorites probably are so he’s sad about that. He also says that if he misses one year, he doesn’t want to drop back in next year. So for him, he’s feeling like this is the end of his religious education. (I am hoping that he doesn’t feel that way next year.) When we told him we’d still go to temple events — most particularly the Purim carnival — he was somewhat mollified. But religious school has been part of his life for eight years now and he values it and this is a real loss for him. What made him WANT to not go (because we presented the option and then gave them a choice and listened to them discuss it with themselves) is that if we don’t do religious school this frees up time (and money) to take some weekends away.

And that is the final part of this.

We used to take minivacations. We’d leave just for a weekend and stay overnight someplace quiet and come back refreshed. I want to take that tradition back up so that when school is hectic, we can get away. When we used to do them Brett would romp the kids (well, kid — we’ve only had one of these trips since Madison arrived) and I’d stay back wherever to work. The state park lodges are ideal for this. They have great big open areas with fireplaces and tables for working. There isn’t wifi, which is good if you need to focus (you can pay for it if you really feel like you need it). There are also pools and hiking trails and there’s a decent restaurant on site so you can park your car and forget about it. The scenery is always pretty. So we’d like to do that once in awhile.

This all sounds good and sensible and reasonable but just like religious school has been part of Noah’s life for eight years, it’s been part of my life, too, and I’m grieving it as well.

Noah and I talked about it at length last night and in a continued testimony to sharing feelings, once Noah felt ok to talk about how sad he was to leave, he was able to make a definitive decision about leaving. He just wanted to be reassured that he could choose to NOT go and still be able to talk about missing it. You know, he wants to be able to make a decision without us throwing it back up in his face if he gets gloomy about it. And don’t we all want room to be ambivalent? I certainly feel ambivalent. I definitely WANTED to take a break this year until the kids both agreed to it and then I got sad, too.

We’ve decided that we’ll try to take a day trip very soon in order to cement our decision and celebrate it.

Move move move

Parenting 16 Responses »

Aug 192010

I was reading about learning styles the other day and when I read about kinesthetic learners, boy, did I see Madison in that!

Core Characteristics:

* Sensory – internalizes information through bodily sensation
* Reflexive – responds quickly and intuitively to physical stimulus
* Tactile – demonstrates well-developed gross and/or fine motor skills
* Concrete – expresses feelings and ideas through body movement
* Coordinated – shows dexterity, agility, flexibility, balance and poise
* Task Orientated – strive to learn by doing

Students with a strong kinesthetic intelligence:

* Seek to interact with their environment
* Enjoy hands-on activities
* Can remain focused on a hands-on task for an extended period of time
* May demonstrate strong fine and/or gross motor ability
* Prefer learning centers to seat work
* Seek out other students who are physically gregarious
* Master a principle once they can manipulate materials that demonstrate the concept
* Enjoy group games and active learning tasks
* Are different from children who are hyperactive

from here.

Playing with cornstarch and food coloring

Madison has always lived very much in her body. When she was a baby, a sure way to get her to stop crying was to take her outside where the air was moving. She’d feel it on her face and laugh. She can’t NOT touch. She experiences everything through her sense of touch and smell (she is always smelling things although she is better about not tasting stuff — I am amazed that we have never had to call poison control on her). Reading that line about focus (“can remain focused on a hands-on task for an extended period of time”) is true, too, which is why I know she isn’t ADHD although folks have floated that out before after spending an afternoon with her. She actually has tremendous focus as long as she can MOVE and CHATTER. She talks back to television shows, can sit and color for longer than she can sit and look at books (books are so passive). She turns almost anything she’s doing into a conversation between things. Spoons and forks, markers, combs. Yesterday she got out my button collection and they had long conversations with each other.

She touches people a lot. At religious school, she fiddles with her friends clothes and hair without thinking. I watched her standing with a group of kids the other day listening to someone explain the rules of a game and her hand crept up to her friend’s collar and started fiddling the way she fiddles with her clothes (and our clothes) when she’s trying to sleep. She is always petting us and leaning in to sniff, like a puppy.

Her memory is amazing but she’s not reading fluently yet. She has terrific fine motor control but still draws some letters backwards. I was eyeballing this — I know it’s normal but her left-handedness and slow to start reading made me wonder but then I was looking at some of the writing of friends’ her age last night and decided to put the worry on the back burner.

She has been off-and-on interested in outside activities but she is more interested now and we’re exploring what might suit her. The things Noah did at this age (Junior Great Books, Chess) don’t seem like such a good fit for her so we’re thinking sports and music. She sings all the time while she plays and dances everywhere so I think music is something that organizes her brain. Because of that, I wondered if she would be good at math but she hasn’t shown any spontaneous math interest.

I told a friend yesterday that I find reading chapter books with her a trial because she is always asking questions about the book that are outside of the story (or way back in the story) and then I think she’s not listening (I have to stop so often to answer her) but she is. She hears every word even while her brain is running around all over the place. And she does sit nicely when she is being read to as long as you let her do a lot of talking. (This does not come naturally to me because I like to be IN the story and not constantly yanked out to answer questions. Brett is better at it.) She can hear a song or a story once and then repeat whole swathes of it.

I tell her often how much I love her energy and her need to move and we try to create lots of opportunity for it. We rearranged the furniture to open up the living room and give her more room to spin but she is at her best outside. When it was too hot to do much playing in the yard we all really felt the loss of that. She was much crankier without a lot of romping and the wading pool and sprinkler eventually paled. I have always though trampolines were tools of Satan but now I’m wondering about one with a net and then having our gym teacher friend come over and give her some safety lessons on it. She is a child who makes me rethink many of my absolutes!

Three things

Adoption, Parenting 9 Responses »

Aug 062010

1. I edited the BlogHer giveaway because people kept commenting about how great I look in those pics. So I put a disclaimer right below the pictures (since I’m assuming people scanning before they comment might notice bold print right below the pics) explaining who Pennie is. It would be fun to pretend that I am that good looking but it would not be fair. Thus the disclaimer.

2. Yesterday Madison was so dang chipper, you wouldn’t believe it. She is often like this after we push through an emotional roadblock. Before breakfast I told her, “I will never leave you.” And she solemnly took my face in both her chubby little hands, looked deep into my eyes and said as if I were stating the obvious, “I know that.” Then she licked me.

3. Last night thinking about the whole “stating the obvious” tone of her reply, I said, “Madison, do you ever think that maybe you get mad at me when you’re really mad at someone else?” Expecting some push back, I settled in for a discussion but instead she said airily, “Oh yeah, I do that.” She said it is because I am “always around” and because she is not shy with me. I pushed it further and said, “I think that you are mad about XYZ and that’s why you were so upset the other night.” And she stopped dancing (because she is often dancing — she is prone to bursting into spontaneous dance) and thought about it for a millisecond then agreed that I probably had that nailed. So I ventured, “How about next time you are mad about XYZ instead of getting mad AT me you tell me and then I’ll help you with your feelings.” Noah, who was sitting across the room, said he was available for talking, too. She said, “I love having a big brother!” Then she climbed into my lap and hugged me before pirouetting off again.

I love her SO. MUCH.

Mad Madison

Adoption, Parenting 18 Responses »

Aug 052010

Madison is not only whiny, she’s also mad. I’m sure part of her being extra whiny is that she is also extra mad. We just put it together in the past couple of days when we (as a family) went on Operation Control the Whine. She would not like me to tell you the details of her anger so I won’t.

Last night even Brett — who is often blind to these things — could see she was using one thing as a cover for another. We were sitting on the couch having a talk about one of her outbursts (and here I’ll disguise all details) ostensibly about pink shoes. And she was saying, “I want pink shoes! I want pink shoes! Because my feet hurt when no one is carrying me anymore!” And then it was clear that it was not about pink shoes but a bigger sorrow. (Again, this wasn’t it but this stand-in will let you see the superficial masking the deep stuff.) So I took that leap that is always scary to take and said, “I don’t think this is about pink shoes; I think this is about feeling sad when you are not carried.”

This is something I want to talk about here, about moving her to the next phase in her feelings so we can get from the superficial to the deep. It can be really hard with Madison. Her mind is much busier and much more back and forth than Noah’s. Noah is straight forward. He has usually done a lot of inward processing before he shares something and this was true even at six. He could easily see when his apparent frustration about one thing was really frustration about something else and so it was easy to help him move from a place of stuck to a place of freedom. He would come to us and say, “I think I’m upset about the pink shoes because it reminds me of how no one carries me anymore and if people are going to make me walk, I’d like to have nice shoes to cheer myself up.”

In a lot of ways, I think Madison’s sunshine-y attitude is a huge blessing. She is open to joy in a way that inspires me. But the flip side to it is that hard feelings scare her and she will do anything she can to scramble away from them. The harder the feelings, the bigger the scramble. But she has gotten better at this and I think she will continue to get better as she grows.

For example, recently there was an event that hurt her feelings and she didn’t feel like she could tell the person involved because to share hurt feelings is to be vulnerable (I think this is an adoptee issue — look here and scroll down to “Feelings of Abandonment”). But she did. She called them and told them (squeezing my hand really hard while she talked) and she hung up the phone in triumph, extremely proud for being a self-advocate.

It is hard to get her to talk when she is scurrying around trying to get away from her bad feelings. Her deep sadness often turns into anger and when Madison is angry, oh lord, it’s volcanic. It’s obscures everything because it is so huge and so loud and so PINK SHOES!! PINK SHOES!! that unless you’ve very patient (and I’m not always patient) and very focused (and it takes time for me to realize I need to stop and breathe and focus) you can miss whatever is running underneath. Besides which sometimes there is nothing else running underneath and sometimes she’s just having a regular old tantrum about not getting her way or being tired or being hungry or being overwhelmed after a busy day. But it has become a habit to rifle through my mind as I storm after her down the hallway thinking, “Has she eaten lately? Did she sleep well? Did she have a growth spurt? Did XYZ happen recently?”

Last night there was a big fit about ostensible pink shoes that had the house in a flurry. Like I said, her anger is so big and her arguments so convoluted that it seems like everything spins into chaos when it’s happening, which isn’t good for anyone least of all Madison. And (here is the other thing I want to write about) it all falls onto me. I have to manage Noah, who wants to help but just gets tangled up. I have to manage Brett, who will do anything — anything — to make it stop. (Brett has been known to bribe with treats in desperate moments although he knows this is pretty much the worst way to handle it.) And I often get sucked into it all, too, making a mess of things before I grab hold of myself and STOP. It’s what I was saying in the whining post. I get sucked in very very easily if there is discussion involved and since Madison’s arguments are full of dead-ends and cul de sacs, it quickly goes nowhere. I am trying to train myself to shut up but it’s hard going. I’m talking before I even know it and if I enter into a debate with Madison I always lose. She’s just better at it than I am.

(Madison has always been a big feeling person and managing her big feelings has always been one of the challenging parts of raising her. Now that she’s older and her always stellar verbal skills are even better, it is a whole new ballgame, lemme tell you.)

Back to being in the midst of it, the other thing is that as the mom I bear the brunt of her anger even when it has nothing to do with me. The pink shoes? NOTHING to do with me. In fact as far from me as is possible but boy was she mad at ME. Not Brett. Not the pink shoes. ME. I know it’s because I’m the safe person. I know it’s because I’ve done a good job of helping her feel secure but man, when you’re sitting in the middle of someone’s target getting blasted? There is nothing that feels good about that.

Last night, I was watching her (and listening to her) go off on me and fortunately we just had a conversation about whining that afternoon and about what we could do together to solve it (she wants me to try to say yes and I want her to try to be more reasonable in her requests — we shook on it). And it was making me think about pushing back more than I normally would. When she was littler, I took her anger towards me as par for the course. I’d lived through it with Noah and he eventually was able to identify for himself that he was making me a proxy. But Madison gets stuck in her feelings and I was waiting for her to make a leap that she wasn’t going to make herself so I had to push back. It wasn’t easy because to push back about this Pink Shoes subject was to force her to confront something painful about that subject. It felt scary to push her so I did it gently but I also had to do it firmly. (Madison needs firmer limits than Noah did when we’re having conversations. She needs more definite boundaries.) I am learning the art of defending myself while not showing any blood because I know that Madison needs me to be self-protective (because she needs me to be assertive without being combative) and she also needs me to be immune to true injury (because she needs me to be strong enough to withstand her anger). This can be a challenge when all I want to do is burst into tears or get down on her level and yell back.

It worked mostly. I mean it worked as well as things work when people are caught up in a whirlwind of emotions, which is to say that it dialed down the tornado to just a bad storm. For me, it was a realization that I need to be more assertive about cutting through her noise and find the balance between letting her lead the discussion and leading it for her. It’s harder to do it this way. If the person I’m talking to is clearly on the right path, I can support them by listening. I can support them by reminding them of what they were talking about. That was Noah. If the person I’m talking to is doing everything they can to avoid what they’re talking about and working hard to keep their own as well as my attention on other stuff, but desperately needing my help to move ON in their feelings, it takes much more concentration. I have to be listening hard and thinking hard then I have to be brave. I have to be willing to get it wrong but I also have to have the confidence to stick to it when I know I’m right and she says I’m wrong. Last night Madison flailed the first time I asserted another point — she wasn’t ready. We backed up and covered the pink shoes, listened to her go on and on about the pink shoes (I say we because Brett was sitting close by as a united front even though he didn’t talk) and then I said ENOUGH ABOUT PINK SHOES. Then we made her leap the track to what was really going on. This time she was ready. With only a glance or two at pink shoes, we finally got to her destination.

The destination though, is a huge huge huge complicated place to be and we will be visiting there for awhile. I’m sure we’ll get sidetracked again. I’m sure we’ll end up at the wrong bus stop again wearing pink shoes and shouting at each other. But at least we’re in the right place, right?

Madison’s verbal acuity has meant we’ve been able to process a lot with her very young but as she gets older and her hard feelings get harder, it can sometimes make things more difficult. I can see that we need to set precedent NOW because otherwise the teen years will be a mess. Think about it — precocious child running from her feelings and lashing out at those who love her? That is never good. We need to help our precocious child sit with her feelings and I know that is a life-long struggle.

Last night was hard. And painful for both of us. Madison went to sleep feeling better but I came out to cry on the couch. I feel like every step is a good step but sometimes it seems like such an awfully small step.

Those damn pink shoes.