Did I mention...

One Zehlahlum

This was before digital cameras and phones with cameras in there to provide evidence of the beginning of this story, just work with me here

Two Zehlahlums:

2002 

(although this picture is from 2004)

Three Zehlahlums: 

2006

Four: 

 2008

Boohoo made Five Zehlahlums: 

2010

2011

2012

2013

One Zehlahlum, two Zehlahlum, three Zehlahlums, four.

Then we had five Zehlahlums and hey, what's one more?!

BABY ZEHLAHLUM COMING OCTOBER 2013! 

Our Pattern, The Pit & Impefection

I've had this refrain in my head for several weeks now when I thought about my blog. It went like this, "Liar liar, pants of fire!" Charming little ditty, right? (No.)

We've fallen into a bit of a pit with (The Child Previously Known as) Boohoo. The things that were going well ceased going well, the behaviors that we thought we had under control went out of control, our reactions that we thought we had mastered grew horns and stabbed us with them.

And honestly, I've waited long enough to blog about this that we're starting to climb back out of the pit now. Sure, we're bleeding a little, broken a little, and banged up, but not dead yet.

So this is kinda my struggle now. When I come here and say "We're doing better" and then we're not I feel like a liar. I feel like I'm suddenly a Used Rainbows & Unicorns saleswoman. All my happy and optimistic words are spears lining the bottom of our pit and are now skewering me while I writhe. (How's that for some fresh Monday morning imagery?)

Even after all this time when I can look, see, and, know that our pattern goes: progress, progress, la la la la, progress, slipping, hey are we slipping?, is this slippery? ahhhhh, we're falling! No the pit! Doom! Despair! Misery! Emotional wreckage! Cue Jamey's "What-if Track of Woes!" Wallow, whine, wallow!  Get tired of whining, wallowing, woe-ing and sloooooooooooowly start doing the things that need to be done to slooooooooooooooooooowly work my way out of the pit, progress, progress, la la la la, blithely frolicking along sure that will never happen again until ONE DAY.....hey are we slipping?

Mostly we're better, but sometimes we're not and let's just be honest this is so hard, so hard. We struggle ferociously. I cry. I yell. I vent. I freak out. I panic. I mess it all up. I want to quit a hundred times a minute/hour/day. I want to quit as hard as I can. I am sure that I will never ever ever be able to do this.

But we ARE still doing it. We may never do this easily or painlessly. I may never learn to quit asking why and or ever fully give up the what-ifs but I can do this despite that. I may not agree with the adoption promotionals that tout "all you need is love" but I don't need to be perfect either. We don't need to be perfect together.

We can do this one imperfect day at a time.

A New Road

We are fast creeping up on being home with Boohoo for three years. It's very, "Of course we are" and very "no possible way" all at the same time. I certainly will not claim to have Arrived as parent, therapeutic, or otherwise, but I look at that me from almost three years ago and she looks very very young and naive (and soon to be in need of a stiff drink). And, just to be a little braggy...the me of today could totally kick her butt. I am way tougher now. Of course, she's skinnier so I can't get too braggy. 

And my daughter of three years ago was no more real to me than a (treasured) handful of sentences on a page and a scattering of pictures that I would share with anyone I could force to look at them. 

And then we brought Boohoo "home" and found out just how real she (and her trauma) really was. Very real. The last almost three years have been very real, very hard, very confusing, very dark, very lost feeling, very hanging on by our nails, very relentless, very depth of your soul revealing, very vulnerable, very end of my rope, very unending Jesus. 

We're not done, we're not there. We have not "fixed" Boohoo (which while well-intentioned was the wrong goal entirely) and we are not always or even mostly always sure that what we are doing at this moment is the right thing to do. 

But.

This road in front of us now is very different than the one behind us. 

I had a friend tell me once that it took her three years before she enjoyed parenting her daughter. And that by six years it was great. I thought she was C.R.AZ.Y. CRAZY. Seriously, crazy. I knew that I would never be able to make it that long. But here I am, looking at three years and finally feeling for the first time that we're on an upwards trajectory. By six years, maybe we will be golden too. 

We are making progress.

*Acceptance. It sounds overly simple, but it's been super complicated to arrive here. Boohoo is on a trajectory that is all her own. The only standard to hold her to and compare her against is the one that she's on. Also, accepting some of the parts of her as her and not as something to change. Lots of reframing happening here. I use the word "exuberant" a lot. lol

* Travel: I've talked about this before, but Boohoo was terrified to travel at first and eventually that displayed itself as superhuman amounts of anxiety in the car. She was a disaster in the car. We used every coping tool and calming-down aid that was out there and eventually we got to the point where she was a tolerable ball of nerves who was constantly on high-alert and ready to freak out. Even with doctor approved intervention and what should have knocked out a grown man she was just so nervous it barely took the edge off for her. On our last trip, there was one mini-meltdown, but without any anything SHE SLEPT IN THE CAR. It was astonishing. 

* Crying: We (lovingly) call the child Boohoo for a reason. Initially she cried, screamed, tantrummed her way through the day every day. You would not know that such a small body could produce that much tears and noise and snot. It was alarming. It lasted a really really really really long time. It's not over and our little chica can still  (and does) cry at the blink of an eye, but she can also go through a day without a crying jag or go through several days with only minor amounts of crying. Remember how God dried up the Red Sea for the Israelites? Well, it's like that except with crying. (And I will tell my children and my children's children about how the Lord dried up the waters so I could pass through my house unscathed.) 

So, if you find yourself wondering why the blog is quiet. It's for a good reason. Attachment and trauma is not the focal point of my day, it's not the peg our life is hung on. And while yes, it will probably always be a spice to flavor our life we're turning out to be not a one-note dish. 

Underneath It All

I’ve talked a lot about love on this blog. And my daughter. And what love is while I’m trying to love my daughter. I’ve said before that I didn’t think that I loved my daughter. I still cringe every time I say that. If that’s a feeling that you have I recommend being careful where you say it. For instance, most women in your “Mommy, Mozart & Me” class are not going to want to sit by you if you tell them. Clearly a semi-anonymous blog is the much better choice. Here’s the thing. I was wrong. Being wrong happens to the best of us…and to me.

I’ve even said that I was wrong before. In one of my more cleverly titled blog posts, “Caw caw squawk silence” I ate my crow (seriously, I still that is funny two years later) and admitted that I loved her,

“more of a "bite the bullet" love than any kind of love that is likely to be mass produced and stamped onto wrapping paper. It's nitty-gritty love, survival love, drag you to therapy love, stage an intervention love, tough love, make a fool out of myself love, do it anyway love, hold you while you cry love, cry myself to sleep for you love love, look past your crap love, bang my head into a wall love, not bang your head into a wall love, refuse to quit love, refuse to let you quit love, force the truth love, reject the lies love, hold your pain love, change myself for you love.”

And honestly, today has been a day that I’m counting it as love that I haven’t banged any heads into a wall. Naptime may never be over today. But I said something wrong in that post,

“yes, I love her and yes, I love my boys, and no, it's not the same, and yes, that's okay.”

That’s the wrong part, where I say it’s not the same as I love my boys. The way I feel for my boys is nice and easy and satisfying. I’d venture that maybe there’s a little bit of too much pride in there for something that’s more luck than anything else like buying Park Place and then Boardwalk both on your first trip around the Monopoly board. But the way that I feel is not a measure of love, just of how much fluff we have on top of the love. 

In typical spoiled American-privileged way I identified that easiness and happiness as love. It’s nothing but the surface of love. It’s like looking at gold-filigreed wallpaper and thinking that’s what holding up your house.

Loving Boohoo is work, the hardest work I’ve ever done. We are not ready to put up wallpaper. Frankly, three years in and I think we’re barely starting to hang drywall. We are still framing this (what I’m hoping will be the most awesome ever) house of love. And I’ve never had to build love quite like this so sometimes I put the wall up in the wrong place and then we’re all running into and finding out that if I leave that wall there that later on we’re never going to be able to add plumbing (I have never actually built a house, don’t look too closely at this metaphor) and I so I stomp around and she has a tantrum and we snipe at each other and then take that wall down and fix the problem. It’s not easy. It’s not pretty. It is love. And it’s not some second-rate love that I have for “someone else’s child who is so lucky” adoption jargon boys.

The only difference between my love for Boohoo and my love for my sons is that the love I have for them has had the blessing of being largely untested. It’s been years of happy fluffy blubbery easy love. But if something happened and that decorative easy to feel fluffy love was gone *I* wouldn’t be gone and my actual love wouldn’t be gone. The love I have for them has the same steely-fierce-never-quit strength behind it. I just don’t have to think about it very often/ever (knock on wood). We have years of Fluffy Love and the accompanying Fluffy Feelings to protect me from the terror, pain, tears, and God-given stubbornness that come with the hard work of building love from the ground up.

Quick Recap:
Real Love: Never Quits, Super Painful, Totally Underrated, Indispensible to Healthy Relationships, Produces convoluted feelings of terror and hope
Fluffy Love: Only Culturally Acknowledged Form of Love, Promoted by Unicorns, Hallmark, and Made for TV movies, Sneaky because it tries to convince you it is Real, Easy, Likes to Frolic, Produces Fluffy Feelings,Truly Nice to Have Around but Not Actually Vital

Quicker Recap:
Wall::Wallpaper
Real Love::Fluffy Love

The Point:
Boohoo and I continue to build/have the good stuff we just don’t have the fluffy stuff.
Yet. 

The Year of the Book

I’ve been doing some homeschool evaluation lately. It seemed like a good time because, well, the New Year, and because with our wonky homeschool schedule Peanut is within a few weeks of finishing up his kindergarten curriculum (we’ve already moved on to first grade work in math) so I’m seeing what’s been working, what hasn’t been working and what will change as we transition to first grade. Additionally, we’ll be adding a student to our humble little homeschool in August when Boohoo hits mandatory kindergarten age. She’s a totally different learner (and person) than Peanut so I’m doing what homeschool allows me to do and individualizing her curriculum so we get the best fit possible. Let’s also not downplay the fact that since I’ll add a kindergartner every year for the first three years we homeschool that there will be a lot of changes! lol

The first issue that was glaringly obvious to me, was that we weren’t spending enough time reading. Yes, we use Sonlight, which is a literature based curriculum, and I’d read to the kids here and there throughout the day and I’d try to read while they were eating, and we were pretty good about bedtime reading, but I wanted more! I want quantity AND quality though. When my kids are adults I want them to remember a childhood spent cuddled up (sometimes we settle for nonviolently nearby) with a stack of books and covered in blankets. I also want a chance to be able to teach them all simultaneously when possible and I’ve been reading up on Circle Time from Preschoolers and Peace.

To combat this unacceptability, I declared this The Year of the Book. First up, we instituted Morning Reading Time. It started as 30 minutes straight of me reading aloud, all bodies and brains required to be present. I kept track for a week and we read forty books altogether all together. Take that Disney Jr.! Once the kids got accustomed to the reading time (which was not that challenging at all) I started adding this as the time that we practice our (remembering) Memory Work. The practice is mandatory for Peanut and highly encouraged for the other two, but if they don’t want to participate they have to keep their lips zipped. Boohoo likes to give it a go. Pickle does as Pickle does. Once we’re used to the routine of Reading and Remembering I’d like to add one or two other 10 minute “subjects” that we can do as a group. I have more to say on this whole Circle Time concept, but I’ll do a bigger post on that later.

Morning Reading Time has been the biggest change right off the bat, but I’ve gotten stricter with myself about making sure we read at other times too (including me!) because really, if my kids go out of this house loving and serving Jesus and loving and learning from books then I’m going to pat myself on the back…and sit down with my feet up for the next eighteen years.

Our Not Official Until I Typed It Out Reading Schedule on ideal days goes like this:

• During breakfast I read our Bible story. We finished My First Message and are reading through Egermeier’s Storybook Bible. 10-15 minutes
• Morning Reading Time 30 minutes reading (usually not “school books”)
• During lunch I read for 15-20 minutes…this is when I read the read-alouds from Sonlight that everyone will enjoy like the poetry, the James Herriot Treasury, “The House at Pooh Corner”, and the other lighter selections that they’ve included in Core A.
• During naptime I am forcing myself trying hard to make it to each child individually and spend 5-10 minutes reading to them alone. Peanut gets probably 15-20 minutes depending on what we’re reading for school, sometimes we get this done during the regular day by letting “the babies” watch a Leapfrog DVD. Right now we’re reading “The BFG”. When I’m reading to Pickle and Boohoo it’s still mostly storybooks. Pickle is in the long picture book phase and early chapter books like “Frog and Toad”, “Nate the Great”, and “Magic Treehouse”. He loves to be read to and loves his nonfiction selections as well. Boohoo is still filling up on easier picture books like the “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” books, “The Hungry Caterpillar”, and Little Critter books and some boardbooks still.  I’m reading them over and over and over and over again and she’s starting to remember and being able to fill in words and answer basic questions.
• There’s no official afternoon reading time it’s just per request. I do try to sit down myself while the kids are playing with a book because I haven’t been reading that much lately either! I also don’t read at dinner. Peanut does have required minutes of reading for school and he’ll do that in the afternoons often. Right now, he has to read for 15 minutes out loud and probably the time that Boohoo starts her schooling with us I’ll be transitioning him to having independent reading time, starting with 15 minutes and working our way up.
• Bedtime reading is by bedroom so for Boohoo it’s very much the same as naptime. The boys are together though and it can be a little tricky to find books that they both like (except for Magic Treehouse, which I do NOT like to read aloud) without Peanut thinking it’s babyish or Pickle being a little left out. They both loved “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” but when I tried “The BGF” Pickle was scared so that’s a Peanut-only book now. It ends up being about 15-20 minutes per room.

All in all, that makes about two hours a day that I’m reading out loud (when we get it all in, which obviously we don’t always) and I’m happy with that considering the ages of my kids. How about you? How much reading out loud do you? How do you combine ages? What would you read to a 4 AND 6 year old boy?