Tag Archives: Parenthood

Jul 11 2011

BEST SWIM INSTRUCTOR EVER

So my child loves the water but doesn’t really know how to swim.

There, I’ve confessed.

She can flail around until she gets to the side of the pool, but the last swimming lesson she had was at the local YMCA with about ten other children, so Rabbit spent most of the 30 minutes on the toddler dock, bouncing in chest-high water, having a pretend tea party with a little plastic watering can while waiting for her 20 seconds with the instructor.

We endured two six-week sessions of these “swimming lessons” and gave up.  That was about three years ago.  Since then, her daycare and summer day camp groups have had swim days, and Rabbit is fearless in the water.  She stays in the shallow end and dives under to touch the bottom, looks around while wearing goggles, frog-swims under the water and jumps in gleefully.  I honestly hadn’t felt too much urgency about getting Rabbit into swimming lessons, since she was getting by okay.

However, this past May, a local girl, aged ten, drowned in a nearby lake when she was overcome by waves – she had never learned to swim.  She disappeared just a few yards from her family – on Mother’s Day.  I vowed that day that my daughter was going to learn to swim, and learn to swim well.

After soliciting recommendations from friends on facebook, I got the name of a swim instructor who holds lessons in the pool in her back yard in the summer and rents out an indoor hotel pool during cold months.  She limits each class to four children who have similar ages and skill levels, and each lesson is 30 minutes.  Each lesson is $10, which is a little more than the cost at the Y, but we decided to go for it.

Rabbit had her first lesson today and at the end of 30 minutes, she had already surpasses 12 cumulative weeks of skills that would have been taught at the YMCA.  That’s both an indictment of the Y’s lessons and a praise for her new swim instructor.

She was taught how to exhale when coming up from the water (“Yell ‘PAH!” from your puffy cheeks!” said Miss Jana), how to be safe (“Keep your ears above the water and your back against the side of the pool when it’s not your turn, okay?”)  and more.  I loved the approach this instructor took:  ”Reach for the water and GRAB it, and push it behind you!” and “Okay, now we’re going to float on the barbells and do our Superman arms!”

I watched the end of the lesson before Rabbit’s, with children just slightly more advanced than she was. The kids were already doing the breast stroke, even if it was a little messy and tangled and they sputtered water at the end.

One little girl in Rabbit’s class was extremely nervous in the water, and the little boy in her class had a strong kick but kept swallowing water and stressing out.  Rabbit was in ecstasy, easily diving to the bottom to retrieve a ring, relaxing on her back to float, her eyes closed and her limbs drifting apart until she looked like a starfish.

After the lesson was done, each kid high-fived the teacher and padded over to the patio table to choose a sucker from the giant bin, streaming water and leaving behind little footprints on the hot concrete.  The next group trailed in, and Jana shouted “Hey buddy!  Hey sweetie!  How are you? Hop in!”

Just finding this swim instructor feels like we’ve hit the jackpot – I’m so excited for my Rabbit, for what she’s learning and the fun she’s having in the process.  If you have little kids, I would HIGHLY recommend finding an instructor like ours.

She trained in Wisconsin to be an instructor with Swimtastic Swim School (check out their website to learn about their philosophy and methods).  Then she moved back here and met a family who had lost their son in a drowning accident, which led them to form a water safety program called Josh the Otter, which really inspired her to work with young children.

If you’re local and interested in learning about the swim lessons Rabbit takes so you can enroll your child, email me and I will send you her name and a link to her swim instructor’s website.

Jul 10 2011

Happy 5th Adoption Day!

Tiny and tall, she is finally graduated from toddler size clothing and wearing the smallest available sizes in the little girls’ section:  size 6 extra slim.  She is three months shy of her 9th birthday.

Delicate and sensitive, she cannot watch the commercial on television for abused animals needing shelter because it makes her burst into tears.

Mischievous and silly, she cracks occasional jokes and is still overly amused by the sound of her own breaking wind, and the word “toilet.”

Giving and kind, she enjoys what she has twice as much when she gives half of it away. Whether it be a cookie, a handful of rubber bands, a popsicle or a box of crayons, she will offer to share it with you and  will be well and truly disappointed if you decline, however politely.

Every day when I leave her at day camp or school, she tells me “Bye Mommy!  Have a good day at work! Be safe on the road!”

Every time we hold hands to walk into a store or a building or even to cross the street, she whispers “I love you very much.”

Yes, she scowls and occasionally disobeys, or feigns deafness at our requests to clean her room or pick up her towels or clip her fingernails.

But her heart, to us, appears to be crafted from pure gold and spun sugar.  She is a blessing beyond our wildest imagination, a gift and a joy and and endlessly entertaining wonder.

Five years ago today, we finally were able to legally adopt this enchanting and amazing little girl who had been our foster daughter for the previous two and a half years.  We were able to sit in a courtroom and pledge before a judge, a court reporter, a bailiff, and some friends that we would love, protect, care for and cherish this child forever.  And she was able to officially petition the judge, in her tiny voice in the microphone, “I would like…some lipstick.”

There was laughter, and there were tears that day, tears of joy and relief and release.  Hugs and ice cream and disbelief that this had finally, finally happened.

Every July 10, we celebrate our Rabbit’s adoption day – our family’s birthday, the day we cherish as much as her birthday or our wedding anniversary, perhaps even more.

Happy Adoption Day to our magical, precious and irreplaceable A.G.R., aka Rabbit.  The world is a better place for having you, and you have made us better people for being your mom and dad.  We love you!

Jun 22 2011

The Solace of a Clean Bedroom

Someone found this blog today by typing in the search term “woman with cat headstone.”  Yikes.

But aside from someone who perhaps thought I will turn into a cat lady, I have to say thank you for all the kind comments and emails from people who read yesterday’s post about bankruptcy. I appreciate it so much.

And before I talk about Rabbit, I wanted to share this AMAZING recipe I found today for barbecue chicken.  Put six frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts (you know the kind, flash frozen that we buy in 3lb bags) in your crock pot.  Then combine in a bowl: 12 ounces of bottled barbecue sauce (use the cheap stuff); 1/4 cup brown sugar; 1/2 cup Italian salad dressing (not creamy Italian; use the oil and vinegar kind); and 2TB Worcestershire sauce. Mix well and pour this over the chicken and cook on low for 6-8 hours.  Take the chicken out to cool and strain the sauce into a pan on the stove.  Bring sauce to a boil and reduce heat and simmer til it reduces by half.  Meanwhile shred the chicken.  Mix with sauce to coat.  Serve on buns and take all the credit – this stuff is GOOD!

Okay, so on to Rabbit’s situation.  I spent today cleaning up Rabbit’s bedroom.  She does okay at it when it’s only at Def-con 1 or 2, but this week, the mess in her room has been at Def-con 17.

I emptied every drawer and shelf, hauled everything out of her closet, emptied her desk, and raked everything out from under her bed before I started.  As I got going, I found a slice of petrified Kraft American cheese, a kleenex box full of candy wrappers, 11 dirty socks, about 45lbs of scrap paper, countless Barbie shoes, and legos.

I swept up sand and beads and rocks and confetti and rubber bands and erasers and tips of crayons. I pulled pennies and dimes off the wall (they’d been taped there with clear packing tape – over a dollar’s worth). I saved a small box of her papers from this school year to put away for her, and put the rest in the recycling. I boxed up her baby and toddler story books to put away in the basement. I filled two trash bags with her outgrown clothing to take to Goodwill.

I found puzzle pieces and lumps of dried play-doh and dice and happy meal toys and homemade valentines and at least fifty of those folded cootie-catcher/fortune teller things little girls make in elementary school. There were easy bake oven pans and toy food items and real food items and cracker crumbs and disgraced underpants and deflated mylar balloons and Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

There were stickers on the wall and a flannel board of Madeline under the dresser and small boxes full of Polly Pocket clothes and a ZhuZhu pet toy and its clothing and a light bulb and plastic forks and labels I had cut off some dish towels and thrown away. I found miniature playing cards and plastic earrings and a tiara and pictures she had cut out of magazines and ten spiral notebooks full of pictures she had drawn of her cat, the solar system, birds and flowers.

Her crayons (over 100 of them) were scattered everywhere and needed to be boxed, along with stencils and pencils and paper and stickers and erasers and scissors and clay and an exploded bottle of glitter and some glue and a hole punch and CALGON TAKE ME AWAY!!!  I ended up filling four trash bags and two recycle totes, and carted a box of books downstairs, two bags of clothes to the car and have three more loads of laundry to do from clothes I found stuffed under her bed and in the back of her closet.

PC got on my case about cleaning it for her when it’s her responsibility.  But I kind of feel like it’s the same situation as our finances…she could work on it to her full capability for weeks and weeks and never make a dent in it or accomplish what I did in one day.  She just needed someone to help.

But damn…what a mess!

 

May 27 2011

Lessons From a Farting, Madras-Clad Second Grader

My daughter, the delicate little flower, is capable of producing audible and sustained flatulence that sounds like a drumroll. When she’s finished, she’s helplessly laughing while my jaw drops in horror.  Later, when I do the laundry, I give an outraged shout at the state of her tiny underwear, some of which I simply throw in the garbage.

Talking to my sister tonight on the phone, we laughed ourselves sick about her son and my daughter, four months apart in age and half a continent away from one another, who have the same “problem.”  She tells him to do a better job wiping.  I tell my sister I’m pretty sure there are times when Rabbit just grabs three squares of toilet paper and waves it in the general vicinity of her behind.

“A white flag!” my sister said.

“I surrender!” I said.

And then we dissolved in gales of laughter.

Rabbit’s newly found independence has extended to her showering without assistance.  Up until recently, that is.   I have gone back to washing her hair for her, after I found out that when she runs out of shampoo, she simply uses bar soap in her hair, or she washes it with conditioner.  Her hair had become a listless, dishwater-colored clump on her head, and her forehead was sprinkled with pimples.  An eight year old with pimples?

She got a fabulous haircut last weekend, but since it is shorter, with layers at the ends, when she goes to bed with damp hair, the morning hairdo is quite a spectacle.  Giant lumps of hair curve out from above her ears and the back of her hair looks like it’s been teased and hairsprayed.  So for the past few mornings, I’ve flat ironed her hair back into submission while she stands in the bathroom pouting.

Today she agonized over what she would wear from the selection of new clothing I’d gotten her yesterday.  She settled on a horizontally pinstriped halter top with hearts and buttons sewn on the front, paired with pink and tan madras plaid shorts.

“Rabbit, you can’t wear that to school!”

She tossed her head defiantly.  ”Yes I can,” she said, thinking I was referring to the skimpiness of the halter top.  ”We can wear shirts without shoulders to school if we put on a jacket or sweater over it.”

She promptly dragged on a purple zipped sweatshirt my friend Lynda had sent her two years ago, which was covered in kindergarten reading words and a hand-painted illustration of Fancy Nancy on one side.

“No, Rabbit, I mean that you can’t wear stripes and plaid together.”

“Why not?”

And really, I couldn’t explain it to her.  In the end, I convinced her that the last day of school, when she was going to meet the teacher she’d have for third grade next fall, was not a good time to experiment.  She agreed to a white short sleeved shirt with a fuchsia calf-length skirt.

As I dropped her off and watched her skip up to the doors of the school looking like she was going to a business luncheon, I realized that her original choice would have been perfect for this day.  That ensemble would have shown her new teacher exactly who Rabbit was, and how delightful it would be to teach her.  I’d simply managed to make her blend in with the rest of the kids in school.

It’s amazing to me that just when I start to lecture my daughter and point out her failings and “mistakes,” she manages to show me that I make plenty of mistakes myself.

May 7 2011

Honoring Her First Mother

In the adoption community, we traditionally reserve the day before Mother’s Day to honor birth mothers.  No matter their circumstances, they make our Mother’s Days possible.

My daughter’s birth mother has essentially disappeared into the nameless, faceless realm of the wandering and damaged underbelly of our city.  She has lost all five children she gave birth to…they went into foster care and either ran away, went to live with relatives, or in the case of her two youngest daughters, were adopted by two separate families.

I’ve tried to track down Miss L, to be able to send her a letter and photos of my daughter Rabbit so she could know that this child is loved and safe and happy.  The authorities who used to handle her case have consigned her to the back of the file, dismissed her, moved on.  The guardian ad litem who used to represent our daughter’s interests in court during her time in foster care had advised us to just forget about Miss L.

I could never do that. Since I cannot send a letter to Miss L., I will write it here and send it out into the world.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dear Miss L.,

In the morning I will wake up and it will be Mother’s Day.  I wanted you to have this letter on the Saturday before, in honor of what some people observe as Birth Mother’s Day. I want you to know about the little girl you gave life to, that you carried around on your hip for a year before the downward spiral of your life tore apart your little family and your life and everything changed forever.

If you’d been able to read the letters I write to you every so often, you’d know that our little girl is nicknamed “Rabbit.”  I say it all the time, but it bears repeating that this little girl is magical.

She is eight years old now, and in the second grade.  She went to school this year on the first day wearing a pink plaid dress, a headband in her hair.  She smiled shyly for our camera as we took her picture under the oak tree in front of our house.  That day, she came home from school with dandelions and interesting rocks in the bottom of her backpack, along with a book about kittens.

Rabbit spent today cleaning her bedroom in preparation for a friend from school to come over for the afternoon.  She didn’t really accomplish too much until she turned on her music, and even though it drove me crazy, she got everything done while singing along, over and over, to the song “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More!”

Today in the car, she sneezed a couple of times, pronouncing it: “AAA-choo” as though demonstrating the perfect sneeze for an audio dictionary.  Each time I said “Bless you,” she replied “Thank you, Mommy.”  We went to the grocery store for a few things, and when the elderly lady sacking groceries offered her a granola bar, Rabbit took it happily and then on the way out thanked the lady and gave her a hug.

Rabbit finally graduated out of toddler sizing in pants this year – she’s growing more slender but is still short for her age. She wears size six slim jeans, her little legs making her look like a sandpiper.  She’s worn the knees out of almost all her jeans because she plays so hard at school.  When I pick her up to come home, it takes her a while to leave because she has so many friends run up to hug her goodbye.

She has not yet mastered the tongue-twister “Rubber baby buggy bumpers,” and practices endlessly in the car.  She makes intricate cat forts for her cat Flower, taping and stapling together a series of cardboard boxes into tunnels and anterooms, lining the bottom with fleece blankets.  She still sucks her thumb at night, snuggling down with Piggy, her most treasured stuffed animal.

It’s not all rainbows and unicorns, obviously.  We battled a plague of head lice she caught at school this year.  Rabbit currently is sporting a mildly unflattering homemade haircut I gave her until we can get her to the beautician.  She didn’t have any major illnesses this year, but has developed a little sass in front of her friends when we ask her to do something.  She gets car sick now, which caused her one day last week to have to get out of the car in front of a Walgreens at a busy intersection and throw up into the grass as rush hour traffic whizzed by. She’s struggling with math and sometimes cries while doing her homework.  Her Grandpa Bill, my dad, died last June and while she didn’t know him very much, all the sadness in the house was hard for her.

All these things are ordinary.  In fact, most of her life could be called ordinary.  She’s a whiz at MarioKart on the Wii video game we got at Christmas.  A little boy at school sent her a love note.  Her favorite foods are peanut butter, spaghetti, chicken scallopine with capers…and candy.  She’s going to take swimming lessons this summer.  Her favorite TV shows are reruns of Looney Tunes cartoons, and recorded episodes of Paula Deen cooking on FoodTV.  She still thinks the funniest word in the English language is “toilet.”

She is infinitely tenderhearted and generous.  If she has one cookie, she will offer to share it with you and if you decline, I swear she can’t enjoy the cookie as much.  She is generous with her affection, telling us many times each day that she loves us, and hugging us whenever we’re nearby.

She has your picture in her special treasure box, and she knows she came from you before she came to us.  It’s sometimes hard for her to grasp this concept and it troubles her to think of someone losing a child.  She doesn’t know all the details, but she does know you loved her, that you still love her.  And in her way, in her understanding, she loves you too.

As always, we honor you on Birth Mother’s Day.  We wish for you only good things, peace and kindness and a share of the love the world has to offer.   Our prayers go out to you today and always – to the first mother of our child, whose struggle and sacrifice has given us our greatest blessing.

Apr 6 2011

Feeling Lousy – Literally

And then, in an effort to remind us that joy and bliss are not meant to be permanent states of mind lest we explode from happiness or simply look foolish by smiling, the Universe clears her throat and says “Ahem.”

All afternoon yesterday and all evening, I was (we all were) in a state of euphoria from the news that my biopsy came back benign.  Then today was PC’s birthday, and we went out to dinner, had great food, and came home with leftovers.

Rabbit wanted to have daddy’s birthday cake right away but we made her get in the shower first, because we were so stuffed we needed to rest a while before eating.

I went in to wash Rabbit’s hair, and she informed me she had found two bugs in her hair.  My heart sank.  I started looking and found another.

WONDERFUL.  My daughter has, for the fourth time in a couple of months, another infestation of head lice.

About ten live bugs and maybe as many eggs were all I found, but it was an hour of sectioning my daughter’s super thick hair and fine-tooth-combing through each section while she squirmed and whistled and stretched and slumped and huffed and sighed and whined and complained and cried and asked for ice cream and wondered aloud why God invented head lice.

Now I’m off to work on the laundry.

Mar 25 2011

Eight Year Old Scientist

Rabbit has been watching a lot of pre-recorded episodes of Nature and Nova, since PC and I are huge fans of both shows, and public television in general.

Today, Rabbit stayed home from day camp, as she’s had a cough and been feeling a little punk.  I let her stay in her jammies, and she was wrapped in a fleece blanket on the sofa, watching a show about telescopes.

When I came in to sit down, she said “Do you know how Saturn got its rings?”

I told her I didn’t.

“Well,” she said, taking her thumb out of her mouth, “I think an asteroid hit one of Saturn’s moons and it broke into a lot of pieces of rock and gas and ice and all that stuff started going in circles around Saturn and that’s the rings.”

She was all casual about it, like she’d just described to me how you put on a coat or open a door.  I stared at her, slack-jawed, as she put her thumb back in her mouth and settled in on the sofa to finish watching Nova.

Later, she was drawing on a long piece of paper I’d unrolled from a printer’s roll, about 18 inches wide by about ten feet long.  She drew cats and houses and roads and flowers, and then, bored by the mundane, she began to, as she said “draw science.”

She worked steadily for almost two hours, cutting wide sections from the roll of paper and producing huge pencil drawings of the Milky Way, Saturn, different constellations, and stars.

Later, she produced drawings of birds (we watched a whole Nature special about hummingbirds last week and she’s been captivated by them ever since).  She drew a hummingbird, a cardinal, a robin, a woodpecker, a crow, a bluejay and a “just a bird” bird.  With color.  And details.  And captions.

And people think funding for public television is a waste?  Puh-leeze!

Jan 29 2011

My Daughter The Stage Critic

Today, I commandeered the Wii from my daughter so I could use the Wii Fit and get some exercise.

She sat in a chair and watched me “run” and do rhythm boxing, admired my form while I did lunges (which hurt like crazy) and mostly, oddly, kept her usual running commentary to herself.

But toward the end, when I chose to do ten minutes of free step, she couldn’t contain herself.

“This is boring,” she declared, watching me step onto the platform and then back off it, on it and off, on and off, over and over.  I ignored her as I concentrated on the images on the TV screen, my little Mii cartoon stepping on and off, left and right, the spotlight trained on her.

“Mommy, is that supposed to be a stage?” she asked, pointing to the screen where the other characters were keeping time and people in a dimly lit audience appeared to be clapping in rhythm as I stepped on and off.

“Yep,” I panted, my middle aged self in terrible condition from way too much chips and salsa.  ”Some show they get to go to, huh Rabbit?”

She was silent and then rendered her opinion.

“If I went to something like that, I would ask for my money back.”