Post Trick-or-Treating

Brother, can you spare a lolly?

Halloween Mystery Messages

While PisecoDad and BabyGirl napped this afternoon, JediBoy and I had fun making each other mystery messages. We mixed equal amounts of baking soda and water, then used Q-tips to write with that mixture on plain white paper. After the writing had dried, we painted over the papers with a very thin watercolor - and the mystery messages were revealed!

We both got quite a kick out of this, and also for the first time (yes, in more than 5 years of life) JediBoy actually asked me to help show him how to draw something (a pumpkin). We were having so much fun with that, and playing with BabyGirl when she woke up (he likes to pretend to eat her feet), that I didn’t realize one important fact: the mystery messages are NOT PERMANENT! We now have lots of pieces of paper that are faintly orange and faintly black, with no pictures or writing on them at all. I was too slow with the camera today, so I don’t have pictures to share. But it was a fun and very easy way to pass the time this afternoon.

He also read aloud from one of our Bill Martin Jr. Sounds… texts - I think Sounds in the Wind - the story of the Turnip as well as Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice. We read together our latest installment of Supa Strikas - a soccer comic from South Africa. We’re saving our energy & resting now to be ready for trick or treating tonight!

We Are Family

Today was my chance to see how I can adapt to family life with two kids plus a migraine. It didn’t go so well… fortunately PisecoDad is still home (he doesn’t go back to work until next Wednesday). The morning (the pre-migraine part of the day) went fine. We went to the portrait studio and got some nice Halloween pictures, then took baby for her first US restaurant meal - in the mall - and did a little shopping as well. She’s often quite content to hang out in the sling and watch the world go by. JediBoy read me a new book (a level 2 I Can Read reader about the Land Before Time) at the bookstore and we bought it for him to bring home. BabyGirl and her dad settled in for an afternoon nap when we got home, and that’s about the time my migraine started to take hold. I tried to appease the migraine gods with Rapid Action Tylenol and a little first season Doctor, but the wicked migraine gods were having none of it.

By now - 7:30 in the evening - I’ve had it with the wicked migraine gods and I’m throwing everything I have at them.

Fortunately, my sweet little boy is too. I don’t know how or when he started the tradition of making notes and pictures to cheer us up when we’re sad or sick and to apologize when he’s done something we didn’t like, but I love the idea and it always makes me smile - and often cry in gratitude. Here’s tonight’s offering… “My Family.”

You can see his preferred pairing - I’m holding his hand and Dad is holding the baby. That’s a sparkly jewel in my hair, in case you were wondering, and scruff on Dad’s face (he tends not to shave on vacation!).

Smiling Princess

She’s not always tearful, of course!

And he never says no to dressing up for pictures.

Together, they melt my heart.

Sugar Chalk and Halloween Books

Today we passed a pleasant half hour making and drawing with sugar chalk. It’s very easy - dissolve 1/3 cup sugar into 1 cup water. Drop in some pieces of colored chalk and let them soak about ten minutes (enough time to read two or three more books from your Halloween heap), then use the wet sugar chalk to draw on dark construction paper.

First he was just testing the chalk out, to see what it would do. It wrote very smoothly along the paper, and he made a simple spiderweb. I think the big white blob started out as a spider, but the white chalk was so wet that he had a hard time controlling it.

Then, since we were still on a Halloween kick, we each made a haunted house. This was his (just had to make that clear!) - the glowing orange moon was the most fun part to make. The orange chalk really did well with the sugar water and the color was glowing straight away. You can see, though, that he picked up some of the chalks too quickly from the dish of sugar water and they dripped across his paper as he moved them. He says a haunted house is “old and run down and twisted.”

Then, as always, he had to draw a sword, here with a chest plate on the left and a shield on the right.

The dried artwork does sparkle a bit in the right light, but as usual he was more interested in the creation of the works than in the finished product!

We’re still on our Halloween books kick, of course. His favorites this year include:
One Halloween Night by Mark Teague
The Pumpkinville Mystery by Bruce B. Cole
Porkchop’s Halloween by Susan Pearson
Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson
Boo! It’s Halloween by Wendy Watson, especially the knock-knock jokes!

Adoption-Colic

I was so prepared, intellectually, for adopting an 11 month old baby from Guatemala, and the work it would take to create a secure bond with her. I did so much reading, researching, reflecting.

And I do know, in my heart, that what we’re going through is normal, expected, and temporary. But.

Some days are like glorious rays of sunshine. She’s happy, we’re well-rested, we have an easy and free-flowing family dynamic that lets us spend time in various combinations of parent-and-child, parents-awake-with-children-asleep, one-parent-alone-and-the-other-with-both-kids, giving us a balance of bonding time and time alone. Things feel great.

Other nights and days she’s nearly inconsolable, whining all the time and having a hard time staying asleep, screaming in terror when she does wake up. We hold her as long as we can bear, then pass her off to the other exhausted parent. Things feel hopeless.

We know that this is all a part of her attachment process, and that she’s experiencing grief at losing the foster family she knew, and that everything is different here: sights, sounds, smells, temperature, rhythm, sunlight, everything. It has to be terrifying. So there are nights, or days, or, like today, nights followed by days when she just cannot be soothed by us, because we are not soothing to her.

All I can think is that this must be what it feels like to have a baby with colic. We love her. We want her to be comforted by us. And we just can’t bear the crying. It’s… adoption-colic.

We did make it out to the pumpkin farm today. The weather was gorgeous, if chilly. We picked out four nice pumpkins and enjoyed looking at the small area of farm animals, mostly noisy ducks and turkeys. But I had in my mind’s eye one perfect picture of brother and sister sitting in the pumpkin patch. That was not meant to be. While she was whiny in the sling, set down among the cold pumpkins the tears turned immediately on. All I can hold onto is that one day we’ll look back at this series of photos and laugh, and marvel at how far we’ve come.

Holiday Feet

We’ve been having a cranky day - more on that later - but an email in my box saying that I won a pair of these lovely Robeez holiday shoes was a nice surprise!

Thanks, Robeez! (And Celebrity Baby Blog, who hosted the contest.)

Book Basket & Site Tweaks

We’re finally feeling semi-normal this morning! We all still have coughs and need some more rest, but things are looking up.

I’ve always been so inspired reading other homeschooling blogs that I decided to try and polish up some of my sidebar widgets. I’ve been working with LibraryThing this morning and so I’m working on that widget first.

I have, for a long time now, collected a weekly book basket in a very casual way. Sunday afternoons often find me reshelving the many books we’ve read that week, returning books to their rightful shelves so we can find them again when we need them. And most weeks I also am pulling out books, choosing things I might want to read aloud that week. Our book basket (which is sometimes a basket, often a bag, occasionally just a pile, and this week a heap) is usually full of seasonal or holiday books for the week or month, or books by an author whose birthday is coming up, and sometimes just full of books I haven’t read in a while that I want to read again. I love to see what others have been reading each week, so I’m going to try using a “basket” tag for the books in my basket/bag/pile/heap for the week so that you can see in the sidebar a selection of books for the week. (I have the widget set to show 8 random titles from the week’s basket, which is usually much more than 8 - so each time you come back you should see new titles.)

This week’s book basket heap is all of our Halloween titles - we’ve read something like 30 different Halloween books just since I pulled them out yesterday afternoon, and that’s only about half the heap!

I’m also finally ready to jump on the fall/Halloween bandwagon and wasn’t happy with the sidebar presentation in my last site theme, so I’ve changed to this strikingly fall theme! The sun is out here after several days of rain and it just feels right, since our heads & bodies are finally starting to clear after several days of illness. We’ve got to get out and enjoy this fall!

One Week Home

Right about this time one week ago today we arrived home with our baby girl.

Here she is, world!

We have had quite the exhausting two weeks. Right now we’re all nursing colds - and JediBoy and I have pinkeye as well - and we haven’t slept well the past two nights. Hopefully I’ll be back in the swing of blogging more next week - I have pictures and stories to share, of course! But for now - we’re home, we’re safe, all is well.

Watch This

Just in case you think I can think of absolutely nothing other than preparing for our trip…

I was clearing off our catch-all bookcase and gave JediBoy a handful of coins for his pig. Imagine my surprise when he told me the bank was so full, he couldn’t fit them in! So… we dumped the pig. It’s a sweet porcelain pig that was my mothers, and has a real cork in the nose that you pull out with a metal ring. I’d forgotten that I started the pig for him with the money my mom had kept in it - a pile of Kennedy half-dollars. Here’s today’s impromptu lesson in the value of coins, and the comparative size of a pile of 100 pennies to a pile of 20 nickels, 10 dimes or 4 quarters. We talked about foreign money as we rooted out a handful of coins from my dad, and about the age of coins too. I pulled a jar from the recycle bin and we filled it full, counting as we went. I marked it with his name, the date and the amount, and put the freshly emptied pig back in place.

He’s also been reading to me all day - thrilled with himself now that he can read most of his Sesame Street paperbacks and all of our lovely old Maisy books, which I assured him his baby sister will love as much as he did. We did some watercolor painting last night and some beading this morning. We’re getting ready to go out for dinner - one last highchair-free dinner - with our friends tonight, and I took advantage of the time to sit down and check my Google reader.

This was my favorite find - a link from Whedonesque led me to a neat film clip. It’s from a tv show created by Tim Minear and Ben Queen, cancelled after only 6 episodes (the Nathan Fillion jinx? watch out, Desperate Housewives!) which followed several families in an illegal cross-country road race. The clip is an amazing blend of live shots, green screen, CGI and other techniques that creates a completely seamless scene - no jumping from angle to angle - which is unheard of in road races! I never saw the show and know very little about the plot, but the scene just made my eyes pop.