Via Ukraine

It’s been like a week since I posted! I have like a million things running through my brain I need to get out. Here are the ones that jump out:

• Tomorrow is Oldest’s birthday. We’re really trying to minimize his expectations so we can avoid a huge emotional fallout (this is actually a much bigger post I’ll do later).
• Youngest owns one pair of long socks that go mid-calf. He insists on wearing them only with shorts. Thankfully I convinced him to stop wearing them with sandals, too.
• For the first time in my memory (so like 25 years) I wore a bathing suit in public without some huge cover up or shorts on when I went to the pool this weekend. I’d like to say it was liberating, but not yet.
• Tomorrow is the boys’ last day of school.
• Our summer is filling up, but we don’t have anything planned the first three weeks and I’m a little worried.
• I’m still looking for a job - blah.
• We’re having a Diamond Jubilee party in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s 60th anniversary this weekend - I need plan a bland food menu.
• As of last Friday I have lost 7.5 pounds in 12 days on the 17 Day Diet and I feel better than I have in years.
• I jokingly told my husband I wanted to go to Paris by myself for a week this summer. He told me to go while the boys are at YMCA day camp for a week in August. I booked the flight before he could change his mind.
• I am super excited and super nervous about leaving for a week.
• Mostly excited.
• And then guilty.
• But then excited again.

Because all I got were stupid answers at Oldest’s last math meeting of the year.

For example the (moron) school psychologist told me Oldest’s composite ESL score was 2.3. I asked out of what. She told me composite means all the scores are averaged together. Eventually someone else told me it was out of 6, but only after I told her that 2.3 is meaningless with out the scale.

This happened with pretty much every piece of data they handed me. She went off on a tangent, I had to cut her off and ask basic questions that she didn’t have the answers to.

Anyway, the husband and I just played nice today. We’re going to push hard for the IEP next year (because he won’t have 45 minutes to just give up for extra math time in middle school). In September they won’t be able to tell us he can’t add because he doesn’t speak English. As a matter of fact, they all were amazed by his progress in language, so hopefully they’ll come around and see the huge discrepancy between math and English without me having to get mean.

Everything everybody does makes me want to scream. So far, I’m only mildly scolding but, sweet baby jebus, if I get asked one more ridiculous question or someone tries to tell me the plot of some asinine cartoon they watched last night I might start flipping tables.

So, there is this mom whose blog I have been following who is pretty amazing. She and her husband adopted two ten year old girls from Ukraine right around the same time we brought the boys home last year. She already had a ten year old girl she had adopted the year before from Ukraine. It’s early, so I’ll do the math for you - she has three 10 year old girls now.

Three. Ten -year-old. Girls.

I can’t even fathom the giggling and the arguments over hair bows and high-pitched shrieks when they are happy.

Anyway, this mom is planning on hosting another girl from Ukraine this summer (which is how she ended up adopting in the first place) and that costs money. In addition to food and all the other things that go in to having a child spend several weeks with you over the summer there is fee involved just to get her here.

To help cover these fees she is making matryoshka note cards:

She will put as many of the little nesting dolls on them as you want and will personalize them, too.

It’s $1 a card + $2 shipping (so 10 cards = $12).

I already ordered myself some, because as much as I wish I could host I can’t. Money aside, I am 99% sure I’d end up wanting to keep the kid I hosted and my family isn’t ready for that (yet). So, you can help bring over a girl to enjoy the summer in America and hopefully find a forever family for a few bucks.

Check out her blog here.

Middle is home sick again. Last month he had to stay home a few days because of a sore throat and fever and now he’s got the same problem. We took him to the doctor and it’s not strep, so at least there’s that.

Anyway, there are obviously a lot of things I do with the boys because they came to me at an older age that I might do differently than if I had given birth to them. One of those things is how I treat them when they stay home from school.

When I was growing up I had to stay in my room all day (also - there was only one heating vent to the entire upstairs and my mother would refuse to close the one in the dining room so there was no heat coming up to my room - but I digress) and I hated it. It wasn’t the staying in my room so much as it was being completely ignored and even yelled at if I needed to say, go to the bathroom or throw up or get a drink. I knew when I had kids I would be much more doting on them when they were sick.

And I want to dote. I want to snuggle up with Middle all day and read him books and let him watch TV and let him eat crackers on the couch. If I do that, though, I know he’ll pretend to be sick all the time. He’ll see staying home as a reward and then we’ll have a ton of problems at school. So, instead, I make him stay in his room the whole day. He’s allowed to come down to eat and I let him watch TV at the end of the day with his brothers, but otherwise he’s up there pretty much on his own. I do check on him and I will read him a couple of books and rub his back, but I have to be careful to not over do it.

Just add it to the list of things I didn’t expect.

So, our first Mother’s Day was really nice. The boys made me pancakes, we went to a Polish/Russian buffet for lunch (the children get offended when they are only allowed one plate of food at a restaurant) and then we came home and I was forced got to watch the three of them play soccer in the front yard. They were all very excited about making it a special day for me.

Each of them made me a little project at school, too. Youngest dictated a poem to his teacher and drew a picture to go with it, Middle wrote a thank you note, and Oldest made note cards and wrote me a little letter that thanked me for coming to get him from Ukraine (I may or may not have had to use all my powers to not cry when he gave that to me).

I was a little worried that they might freak out, since their Ukraine mom was nowhere around, but there was no mention of her and they were all very well behaved. I don’t know if they’re just really good at suppressing all those feelings or what. I’m hoping that they’ve realized that a mom is supposed to take care of you and they’re processing that she wasn’t really that involved in their lives and it’s okay to love me. Or it could have been the promise of all the potato-based goodies awaiting them at lunch. Whatever, they held it together.

I wish I had some profound thing to say to women who really wanted to celebrate Sunday, but are still waiting for their kids. I was never angry about Mother’s Day before the boys. I didn’t long for the time when I’d get to have them bring me presents or give extra hugs just because the calendar said they were supposed to.

I know for many, Mother’s Day is a reminder or what isn’t, and my heart is with you. For me, though, celebrating Mother’s Day wouldn’t have even cracked the top 100 of things I was looking forward to about being a mom. I’m kind of glad it’s over and the pressure is off everyone. Now we can just go back to everyone tattling on everyone else and keeping detailed notes about juice consumption. Ahh, motherhood.

I put up a pic of the boys and me from today. If you want to see send an ask (not a reply to this post).

The husband and I have been married 11 years as of today. Holy Crap. It’s gone by fast, but it still feels like we got married a long time ago. Does that make sense?

So, I read the article that went with the “Are You Mom Enough?” cover story from this week’s Time magazine. It’s lame, you guys. Hands down, the most incendiary part of the whole thing is the cover photo. It’s a story kind of about Dr. Sears, the man who started the whole attachment parenting movement and kind of about how that movement is pretty popular. It doesn’t take a stance on one side or the other, or have a bunch of people saying why a certain parenting style is better than any other. It doesn’t really do much anything, to be honest, other than give you a very brief outline of Dr. Sear’s life and literary accomplishments (although, it did kind of make me hate him and his wife when they suggested it was a better idea to take out a second mortgage than for a mom to go back to work).

And the woman on the cover? She is mentioned a total of -wait for it- one time. She’s in the six page article for a single sentence. Clearly the editors at Time knew a model-pretty mom with a boob out would sell a lot more magazines than a photo of a 72 year old doctor.

So here’s my take on the whole “attachment parenting” thing. I really don’t care. Breast feed until your kid is 7, whatever. Go on with your bad self and put him in a sling. I also don’t really care if your kid was cry-trained or uses sign language or any of the other ten thousand things that some expert says you really must do or you kid is going to end up a crack whore. If you’re happy and your kid is happy, that’s really all that matters.

My issue with attachment parenting (much like my issue with organized religion) is that people who practice can get a tad condescending to people who don’t. Just like you don’t want to be judged for shoving your boob in the mouth of a pre-schooler, I don’t want to be judged for insisting my kids sleep in their own rooms every night. If I want your opinion, I will ask for it.

Parenting is hard. No one really knows what they’re doing. We’re all just trying to do the best we can with what we have. As long as your kids aren’t being abused, at the end of the day who really has time to worry about how other people are doing it?