Sunday constitutional
Nanny Norma bought Oscar a leash. A cute leash, attached to a Curious George-like backpack, but a leash nonetheless. We’ve been using it to walk around our very, very long and hilly block.
Excited about our upcoming expedition
Checking out his surroundings
Critiquing the architecture
Wondering what's next
It all looks somewhat similar
Strike in front of Consul General's house
How can I get her to pick me up?
Getting a ride down the hill from mommy
Happy to be home
Third time’s a charm?
I started my dossier yesterday! Given that it’s the fourth dossier I’ve put together, and the third in the past five months in search of baby #2, I’m hoping it isn’t going to take too long. I’ve been waiting for my agency to pull together the last new forms that are required, since I would prefer to get everything signed and notarized on the same day – maybe they’ll get them to me next week? I’m going to be dragging one of the notaries from my office all over Silicon Valley in the next week or two so I can get all of my letters (including from two different doctors and five different friends, a bank and the police) taken care of. Poor woman. I don’t think she knows what she’s in for. Well, maybe she does. She’s the one who notarized both my Thai and Ethiopian dossiers, after which she declared, “you know, it really would be easier for you to do this the old-fashioned way.” Yikes. Glad I’m not adopting because of fertility issues.
I do think this will be my final dossier, though. This was a lot easier when I was blindly pulling together docs for Oscar’s dossier, clueless about the fact that programs could close, agencies could lie to you about the child you were agreeing to adopt and/or countries could decide you were no longer an attractive candidate to parent their children because of your lack of a spouse (let alone all the other things I know about international adoption now). Takes a lot of emotional energy to get your hopes up again.
So that’s what I was supposed to be doing
Oscar had his first visit from his home teacher Julia. It went fine. She is very young and sweet and approached him pretty much the perfect way. He actually warmed up to her enough that towards the end of the session he hugged her. Quite nice.
I’m not really all that sure what I’m supposed to expect from these visits, but I did learn a few subtle things even during this first one. I am fairly good about keeping a running narrative about what we’re doing – the hope is that Oscar will understand what the words I’m saying mean. She took this to a whole new level, though. I had no idea there was so much to be said in describing playing with a car. I seem to have been wrong, though.
What do we do with the car? “Drive the car, car, car.” Where are we driving it? “Drive the car up, up, up mom’s leg, leg, leg.” What’s special about the car? “The purple car goes down, down, down.” What noises does the car make? Well, we’re very good on this one. And on and on and on. I do touch on a lot of this stuff, but I pretty much play with him and make silly noises instead of repeating this stuff over and over. I need to be more vigilant in describing what seems to me to be mundane.
What I got out of this is that I am missing a lot of opportunities to subtly let Oscar know what words mean. I’ll try to pick up on more of these from now on.
The injustice
When I brought Oscar into the kitchen this morning for breakfast, Nanny Norma met us and asked me if I had given him a bottle in the middle of the night? Why? “Oscar no cry”! That’s right, people, Oscar no cry last night. He did wake up briefly around 3:30 and moaned a little and was a little restless, but I grabbed him and once he snuggled in, he was out for the rest of the night - and that means until 6:45 this morning. I’m a little annoyed that she would assume that I would break down and give him a bottle. I mean, I do have some willpower - but I can get over the injustice. I don’t want to jinx it, but maybe we’re over the worst of it?
A mess of my own making
I’m reluctant to write this, as I am sure your first reaction is going to be anything but empathy, but here goes. I am now (yes, just now) cutting out Oscar’s night time bottle. The kid started out with me at 7 1/2 months weighing a whopping 12.5 pounds, okay? Now that he weighs 25 very heavy pounds 10 months later, I’ve decided that we don’t need to feed him round the clock. The not so little monster has other ideas. For the past two nights he’s pitched an ever-increasing fit, demanding the bottle. Screaming, sobbing, hitting, kicking, you name it, he’s done it. He even reached over and looked into my eyes ever so earnestly and signed “milk” over and over, with big fat tears slowly falling down his cheeks. Like I was withholding the only nourishment he’d get all day. How could I deny him? How? By understanding that if I gave in last night this cycle of madness would continue.
I have not had an uninterrupted night’s sleep since last February. I need to not awaken two times a night to give him his bottle (and a third to comfort him when he realizes that his bottle is empty). I’ve tried tapering him off the bottle, replacing the milk with water, it just doesn’t matter. Letting him cry over this is the right method, isn’t it? He’s not going hungry. He eats a lot during the day and gets cereal after his dinner. I think the bottle is just a security object. Any insights out there?
When credit is due…
Maybe in the past I might have been just a teensy bit critical of USCIS. But I’ve got to say that today I’m loving them. I just made a run to get fingerprintted (is that a word?) and door to door it took me an hour. And I don’t work anywhere near their office in San Jose. When I had to do this before, they were just as efficient. Love that office. So there. I just proved that I’m not entirely anti-CIS. Now I’m off to tell my local CIS office to look out for my print results and that I need to switch countries.
Now, I have a question for you. I have a ton of little bites on me. They feel like mosquito bites, but they don’t really look like them. They’re tiny, but they’re incredibly itchy. I have them from my ankles up into my scalp. The only place I can imagine I got them was at this little playground I took Oscar to on our way back from music class. There was some sand that I stood in to push him on the swing. He has no bites (and he wasn’t standing in the sand). We have a playground near our house and I’ve never been bitten like this. Is this normal?
Why I think
the Nepal program might be right for me. I received my information packet from my agency today, which included a whole lot of documentation that I had provided to them previously. Instead of feeling annoyed that I had to complete all this stuff for the second time, I jumped on it. (note that this attitude does not extend to my still incompetent home study agency, which AGAIN is holding me up by failing to send me whatever ridiculous paperwork they’re demanding to update my home study (you know, the one I did four months ago but that they said needed to be redone since they expire in six months and six months is almost up – IF YOU IGNORE THE NEXT TWO MONTHS)). Sorry. Seem to have some residual resentment of them. Anywhoo, tomorrow I’m sending off my paperwork and first big check, and I’m happy about it in the same way I was happy about it when I started the process for Vietnam. I think this might bode well.
First day of school
Ok, maybe it’s a bit of an overstatement, but it was the first day of his first class. Oscar and I started music classes today. You can see pretty clearly from the photo that he wasn’t all that enthused about leaving the house this morning (those were tears you saw). We started fairly slowly; he was (naturally) the only kid in class who cried, BUT by the end of the first half hour, guess who was in the middle of the room trying to engage with one of the dads? Yep, the same little boy who earned the name “the kissing bandit,” for his propensity to get a little friendly with the two cuties in class. I guess I should mention that he also sort of hit one of them afterwards, but love is a battlefield. Overall, it was a success. It went so well, in fact, that I wondered if I should enroll him in our local soccer program, which starts next month. I think I’ll see how this goes first. Probably is enough time to let him wait out this session and still preserve his ability to make the 2028 Olympic team.
Stinky
When Nanny Norma changes a nasty diaper (you know, Oscar’s, not someone else’s), she waves her hand in front of her nose and makes a hissing noise, telling Oscar that it’s stinky. He’s done something similar while on his changing table, but we don’t think he knew that it actually related to an odor. Today, though, was different. Norma was cleaning the bathroom and sprayed some glass cleaner (of the non-toxic, environmentally and child-friendly variety). Oscar started hissing and when Norma looked at him, he was waving his hand in front of his face. He actually got that the smell was stinky and remembered the gesture. Yeah, I know, this is never going to come in handy in real life, but it was kind of funny, and more importantly, it showed that he recognizes some smells as different, perhaps as unpleasant. Theoretically it could come in handy, but Oscar’s diaper deposits are so incredibly toxic that no warning is necessary.
The process
I’ve had enough PMs from friends and acquaintances asking about the adoption process in Nepal that I thought I short-cut my responses by posting (lazy, hmm?). Here’s what I know.
The Nepali ministry overseeing international adoptions has issued a notice that informed the world that adoptions could start again. In response to allegations of corruption in the past, new reforms have been put in place. Referrals will be issued from a central authority and not from the individual orphanages (I love this, by the way). A limited number of agencies have been approved to work in country. Each of those may submit dossiers for 10 families each year. This may sound like a small number, but when you look at the State Department’s statistics on the number of children adopted from Nepal in the past, this limit multiplied by the number of agencies authorized, keeps the total number of children who may be adopted in the same ballpark as before (a little lower). It is an extremely small country.
The ministry has stated that if a family has a child in the home, the newly adopted child must be of the other gender. This means Oscar really is getting a sister. I’m torn here, both because I’d be inclined to ask for a boy and because there always is a demand for girls, which can prove to be more than simply problematic, but a rule’s a rule. Also, you apparently cannot alter birth order. This means for us that Oscar is getting a little sister. Again, same concern about asking for an infant/young toddler girl, but I figure that by the time my dossier actually gets logged, maybe I’ll be asking for an even older child, since Oscar will be that much older. I think this is going to be a slow-moving program; no one I’ve talked to thinks otherwise.
Couples who have been married at least four years and single women between 35-55 may adopt. There’s a lot of other info out there regarding fees, etc., which I don’t find all that interesting, so I won’t regurgitate it here. The full text of the terms and conditions released can be found here, although I’m betting only the very few of you actually adopting from there will read this (it’s a little dry).
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Etta’s Hats
Where I’ve Been
