R.I.P. Cutie (And it's all Mommy's fault)

I once heard it said that giving your child a pet fish is one way to introduce him to the realities of death.

And now we know all about that.

When we gave Caleb an aquarium filled with five fish for Christmas, we told him that they needed to eat three times a day - whenever he was eating a meal, he should feed his fish.

But, it is easy for a little boy to forget.

And that means that I was constantly reminding him. And his response was almost always, "Oh, Mom, I forgot. Can you do it for me?"

Pretty soon I decided that I had enough other responsibilities without always making sure that Molly, Orangie, Cutie, Frankie, and Frankie Jr. were getting their tummies full.

It was time to let my son carry the weight of his own responsibilities. And if somebody went belly-up, well, it would be a hard but natural lesson about taking care of things that belong to us.

And last night it happened. My husband came out of the boys' room with a grim look.

"We have a floater," he announced.

In the moments that followed, there was the shock of disbelief.

There was grief and despair. "Orangie was my favorite one!" Um, actually it was Cutie. "Well, Cutie was really my favorite one!"

There was a big sister who got right to the heart of the matter. "Caleb, did your feed your fish at all today??"

And in that moment when realization dawned on his tender face, there was a Mom whose resolve weakened.

Now I know it is important to allow children to have natural consequences, but discovering that you're guilty of negligent homicide when you're only six suddenly seemed a little extreme, so I rushed in to bail him out.

"Oh, buddy, I'm sure that it wasn't your fault. One day of not eating wouldn't kill a fish." I reassured him.

"Well," he said as the tears came in earnest, "I don't think I fed them yesterday either."

I continued to soothe his guilt anyway, trying to ignore the fact that I was enabling his irresponsibility.

But the ungrateful little child didn't even hesitate to throw me under the bus a mere two minutes later.

"Well, it's all Mommy's fault anyway," he sniffed from Daddy's lap. "Because she bought the cheap food from Target instead of getting it from the pet store like you're supposed to."

It makes precious little difference where you buy the fish flakes if you don't ever give it them, I wanted to tell him.

But I bit my tongue.

"Maybe now would be a good time to feed the other fish," I suggested instead.

But he was busy grieving.

"Oh, Mom, can you do it for me?"

Signs that Your Three-Year-Old May Be Giving Up His Nap

The first clue is when he spends all of naptime knocking loudly on his door and yelling his version of, "Mommy, let me out!"

But in this house, rest time is crucial so I determinedly put him down the next afternoon, explaining that it is very important for him Mommy to have a rest time.

I enjoyed a peaceful, if a little strange, kind of quiet for the next hour and half, and I managed to convince myself that he must have certainly fallen asleep.


Not so much.

I later discovered that he was very, very busy during naptime. The entire bookshelf was emptied along with all of the toy bins. And all of Caleb's clothes - those hanging up really high as well as the ones in the dresser - were removed and stuffed into a hiding spot.

Not that I found any of this shocking. This is, after all child number three for me.

It takes more than a ransacked room to faze me.

But when I discovered that he changed his own diaper (rather thoroughly actually), left the used diaper and wipes in a neat pile for me, securely fastened a clean diaper on himself and resumed playing - that'll do it.



Yeah, I realize that it's way past time for potty training, and I'm gonna get to that tomorrow.

But right now I need a nap.

An Unexpected Source of Entertainment

If you - like us - come across an old boom box in your closet that doesn't work anymore, you could toss it.

OR, you could give your kids a couple of screwdrivers and let them be engineers for the afternoon.

Seriously, don't underestimate the fun in this.


It also works for old keyboards, cell phones, cordless phones...

A few days later Caleb was heard saying about a toy, "This doesn't work anymore. I'm going to engineer it."

PS - It's a nice little bonus if you happen to have a real engineer at your house so your kids actually learn something.

A Man's Work Space

I sometimes wonder how anyone could parent both boys and girls and not acknowledge the glaring gender differences.

For example, girls don't think it's fun to play in the garage. And it's not often that you find your daughter playing with a hacksaw, pruning shears, and hammer and nails.

Boys, on the other hand....

"But Mom," he protested when I caught him with all of the above items and a large cardboard box, "I'm making a boat and I need to hammer some nails in to make it stay."

As I took the all the sharp items away, I tried to explain that he would not want to play in a box that had nails sticking through it.

"Oh, I only used nails on the diving board," he explained.

My concern over him being lacerated by protruding nails shifted when I considered his intention to dive into a box less than three inches deep. Maybe I had better keep a better eye on this project.

"Caleb, why don't you bring your box inside to work on."

He looked at me. "Mom, this is my work space."



Right there next to the dead cockroach. Awesome.

So Much for Being a Cool Mom....

Phil and I take our job as parents very seriously.

We know that as parents, we are responsible for loving and nurturing our children, protecting them, teaching them what is right and good, and, when they are old enough, embarrassing them by our very existence.

At what age do kids start to find their parents embarrassing?

When I was a kid, we spent a lot of time at the public pool, and my dad (love you, Dad!) always went through this little exercise of hopping up and down on one foot and shaking his head up and down - "This is how you get the water out of your ears, kids!"

One day we're all hopping around with him, completely unconcerned with how we appear, and the next day mortification sets in. "Dad, you have to stop doing that in public!"

So the other night as I talking to Grace she said, "You know, Mommy, you have a weird bumpy thing on your nose."

"Oh, that's a little mole."

"Well, it's not normal to have something like that," she informed me.

"Really?"

"Well," her tone became more diplomatic. "I'm just worried that maybe one of my friends will say something to you and then you'll feel bad."

"I see."

"Do you think you could tell the doctor to take it off?" she asked.

"I don't think that's necessary and besides it would most likely leave a scar," I told her.

"Oh." And then after some more thought: "Well, you could always try to push it in for an hour and see if stays in."

I'll get right on it, Sweetie.

And some other humorous comments she made this weekend:

To Phil: "You're just trying to get me to crack!"

And when I suggested that I might start charging the kids ten cents every time they come out of their rooms after bedtime, she accused me of this: "You're just trying to get rich off your kids!"

She's on to me. I figure that if each of them come out a couple of times each night, I can save up and get me a pack of Tic Tacs.

Except I can't leave the house.

I'll be too busy trying to push my mole in.

Genius Tendencies

I wonder if it's true that children who are always seeing detailed pictures in everyday objects are gifted.

The other day Caleb came to me in a flurry of excitement. "Mom!" he exclaimed, "I set my train tracks up in a new way and it made a cool picture. You'll never guess what it is!"

He pulled me into the room and I sat staring at the tracks, trying to figure out what the picture could possibly be.

Seeing that I wasn't getting it, he explained: "It's a man sitting down picking his nose!"

Our New Favorite Toy

...is aluminum foil!

It's shiny, it's flexible, it's...

Rocket shoes!


Caleb explained: "I'm going to wear my rocket shoes to bed tonight in case I need to blast off into space."

His little brother seemed to understand. He didn't want to be left behind.



He not only had the shoes ready to go, he remembered the aluminum foil for his head because, as every savvy space-traveller knows, one can't just go jetting through the cosmos without proper head attire:

Allergies

My kids have lately become aware that many of their peers have allergies of one type or another and they are feeling a little left out.

"What am I allergic to, Mom?" Caleb keeps asking me. "I must be allergic to something."

I have recently come to realize that my poor children do suffer from an allergy and it is the same one: They are allergic to warm clothing.

Consider first, Grace, who is perhaps the most hot-blooded creature on earth. When it is my night to put her to bed, I make sure to bundle up good, because even though she will be wearing her summer jammies, she will be throwing covers off complaining that it is so hot in here! She turns her fan on as high as it can go until her room becomes a wind tunnel and my teeth are chattering, but she is still too hot.

Now fortunately for my children, our weather here doesn't require that we bundle up too often. But recently, we were preparing for a bike ride on a very cold and downright wintry day. This is how Grace was dressed (and yes I know her clothes doesn't match - that's another story):

After a few minutes of arguing and showing her the temperature gauge and the trees bending in the wind outside, she agreed to dress a little more warmly. This was what she came up with:


I suppose there's something nice about living in a place where you can where flip-flops year round and not worry about frostbite.

Anyway, then we have Caleb. Now, he is not opposed to dressing warmly during the day. He waits until nighttime when the temperature drops to state his objection to clothing.

"Big boys do not wear shirts to bed," he adamantly insists.

Now, I'm not totally sure how he came to this conclusion. Now that our nights are cold, his Daddy can be found wearing a shirt to bed, and sometimes even a wool hat on his head, because there's (ahem) not a lot of hair up there anymore to provide warmth.

Caleb is very proud of his new bare-chested status and posed for this picture at bedtime the other night:



And that brings us to Joshua. We don't even bother to put his jammies on before he goes to sleep because it only takes him about ten seconds to unzip them and fling them onto the floor in disdain.

I recently just put him to bed with his clothes still on (because he can't undress himself from regular clothes yet), but as soon as he was put in his bed, he began writhing around trying to get himself undressed. Pretty soon, the neck of his shirt was stuck around his waist and he had this determined little look on his face that said Must. Get. Clothes. Off. Now!

Of all of my children, though, I can understand Joshua's need to be free of clothes. The nannies in Chinese orphanages are well-known for dressing babies in so many layers of clothing that they can actually have underdeveloped muscles, kind of like this:

We had always assumed they did it to keep children warm, but when Phil dressed him like that for fun recently, we discovered the real reason they do it: all those layers of clothing act like a straight-jacket and slow him way down.

Maybe if we keep dressing him like this, we can stay out of Urgent Care : )

All I Want For Christmas Is...

Hand sanitizer. And maybe some beef jerky.

This from my oldest child.

"Um, okay. Is there anything else you can think of?" I asked her.

"Well...(thinking)....(big sigh)..See, the thing is, I have so much stuff already and I can't keep my room clean," she explained.

My thoughts exactly!!

I handed her a bag and suggested she go through her room and find some things she was ready to get rid of. She agreed and disappeared for about 30 minutes to sort through toys. I was so pleased that she was finally mature enough to handle the thought of getting rid of things she doesn't play with anymore. I would no longer have to wait until she was asleep or gone to do it for her.

A half an hour later she returned with the bag of items she was ready to part with. It contained: three crayons, a green necklace, one doll shoe, and a pretend piece of bologna.

I noticed also that everything had a price tag. Grace explained: "I was thinking that instead of just giving my stuff away, we could have a garage sale and make some money, ya know."

So, here we are, with a house full of toys, and a little girl who cannot think of one thing she is lacking, and who would probably be content to unwrap hand sanitizer for Christmas. But I have to think of something to buy her (besides hand sanitizer), and caught in the madness of Christmas shopping mode, I ignore the blessing of her spirit of contentment and keep prodding, "There must be something you want..."

If only I had let her watch more TV, then she would have seen enough commercials to know what she is supposed to want . But alas, she is hopelessly in the dark. Recently someone asked her if she wanted a Hannah Montana poster. "Who's Anna Motana?" Grace responded to their incredulous looks and I don't think I'm imagining their scathing, "What a bad mother" looks.

But after I browsed suggested gifts for seven-year-old girls, hand sanitizer started looking better all the time. I think I'll throw in some beef jerky and let her be a little girl a little longer.

Fortunately, Grace is pretty good at using the recycle bin to make whatever she or anyone else might want. Here is Caleb working on a laptop she made him.



The other night Phil walked in her room, to find her standing in front of her "computer" complete with mouse and printer. She requested a few more minutes of privacy so she could finish Skyping with her imaginary friends.

Finally she opened the door. "Sorry, it took so long," she said sheepishly. "The President wanted to talk to me too."

What I'm Thankful For

Give thanks to the Lord because He is good. His faithful love continues forever.
-Psalm 118:1

I'm thankful that I caught Caleb with the scissors before he started cutting his hair.

I'm thankful that I caught Caleb with the scissors before he started cutting Grace's hair. ("But you only said I couldn't cut my hair!")

I'm thankful that our adult friend who was lectured by Grace for not dressing modestly has a good sense of humor.

And I am thankful that Joshua has finally begun saying "mama." (But I must tell you that sometimes, sometimes I kind of wish he had learned "dada" first. I mean it's sweet and all, but in the wee hours of the morning when he pops out of bed and bellows, "Mama!" forcefully down the hallway, I think, Why couldn't it be Dada?)

Digging for Gems

Gold has been discovered in my backyard. And diamonds. Lots of diamonds.

Seriously, don't knock on my door with a shovel tomorrow. We have been studying rocks and gems lately and my kids are way into it. "Hey!" I heard one suggest, "Let's go dig in the backyard and see if we find any gems!"

"Yeah, we're going to be rich!" was the response and off they went. My kitchen counter now has several piles of "precious stones" just waiting to be polished.

One of my children is much more into this than the others and he is quite serious about it. I tried to join him the other day and he explained to me which ones were diamonds and which were rubies or sapphires as we sifted through the gravel. Trying to participate, I found a rock with some sparkle to it and excitedly showed him my "diamond."

After a brief inspection, he broke the news to me. "No, Mom, that's just a rock," he said with disdain.

I gave up and left the gem hunting to the pros.

Dressed For Success

Some people say homeschool kids are a little different. I don't know anything about that. My kids are perfectly normal. Here's a picture of Caleb when we were running errands this morning:



I'm not really sure why he insists on wearing the goggles everywhere these days. I think that ever since his green boots had to be thrown away (and when the cat starts putting dead birds in them they do have to be thrown away), he's been looking for that special item to add a little flair to his wardrobe. Sometimes he wears smaller goggles:


Quite honestly, I have bigger battles to save my energy for, although I am beginning to wonder if I should be concerned about his fashion sense. Here are a couple of the outfits he put together recently.

Hey, buttons are hard when you're four.


Not bad, except we were expecting temperatures over 100 degrees.

Oops, those are Josh's pants.

One thing I will say for him, though, is that he never forgets to put on smile. Now if we could just lose the goggles...

Roommates

Ever since his surgery, Joshua has been having some serious "sleep disturbances" as they are euphemistically called in the adoption world. We are told this is quite common with adopted children, especially with the added trauma of surgery. Truthfully, they have come and gone since he came home with us and that has probably been one of the hardest things in this whole adjustment period for us.

People that have visited his orphanage have pointed out that the children there sleep dormitory style with other cribs on all sides, and it is just really hard to transition to sleeping alone. So, in a desperate move that may be bordering on lunacy, we have moved ALL of our children into the same room.

It's either going to work or there are going to be five sleep-deprived people in this house.

The first change Grace made to the room was to take down the sign on the door that said "Joshua" and put new ones up to more accurately reflect who sleeps there:


So Long, Olympics...

I have to admit, I'm glad the Olympics are over. Now we can turn off the TV and have our life back. It was fun to watch, though, and, this being the first Olympics my kids really watched, here are some things we learned:

1. A broom does not make a good pole vault.

2. Sisters don't make good spotters for back flips.

3. Diving off the fireplace does not produce the same results as diving into a pool.

4. Diving speedos are NOT appropriate swim attire.

5. Even though most of the stuff Mom serves for dinner is not well-received around here, at least we don't get scorpions on a stick for a treat.

6. And lastly, special thanks to the men's relay swimmers from France who provided a timely illustration to our memory verse: "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled."

My Two Sons

Children are not things to be molded, but people to be unfolded. - Jesse Lair

I believe a study of the natural world reveals an imaginative and whimsical Creator who delights in variety. As a mom, I think a study in the varied personalities of my children reveals the same thing.

I have two sons, as different from each other in temperment and personality as night and day. One of them is boisterous, exuberant, determined, and insistent (qualities that probably served him well competing for attention in an orphanage). The other is waaay more laid-back and easy-going, with a gentle spirit.

Consider the way each starts the day...

Josh races the sun up each morning, and, despite multiple layers of blankets and other items covering his window, begins yelling at me from his crib at a terribly ungodly hour. When I go in to greet him, there is no good morning hug, no smile, just shouting and desperate reaching for the door. "Come on! The day is going to start without me!" he seems to say.

When I finally let him out, he marches down the hallway in a purposeful way that says, "Let's go, I've got things to do!" He then lets me know in no uncertain terms what is and is not acceptable to feed him for breakfast.

About two hours later when I go in to wake up Caleb, he slowly yawns and sits up. He rubs his eyes, considers the day, and, ever the sunny optimist, remarks, "You know, Mom, if I ever get one of my fingers chopped off, well, it's okay because I got nine more!"

God has gifted each of them with the unique qualities and personalities to fit His purposes for them and we are excited to see what the future holds.

The Entrepreneur

Grace has become quite the student of the free market system. For example, she decided that people that work at McDonald's make way more than engineers. Her reasoning is that there are always cars lined up outside McDonald's to buy stuff from them, but Daddy never has any customers at his work.

She has decided that she definitely wants to be a store keeper when she grows up because that's where people go to spend their money. And she is so interested in making money, that she decided to get a head start.

I found her out of bed well after her bedtime last night making all kinds of things to sell out of paper, aluminum foil, and various random items around her room. She was sure that someone would pay twelve dollars and seven cents for a flip phone made from aluminum foil, or four dollars and three cents for a marker lid ("It has a little lipstick in it," she explained). She recited the names of several neighbor kids who she was sure would pay seven dollars for a penny which included instructions for playing a game with it.

Not wanting to insult the quality of her products or her business sense, Phil and I thought it best not to say anything about how inflated her prices were. We felt that she would learn this naturally when she couldn't find anyone to pay eight dollars for a paper car.

We were wrong.

The shrewd little business woman knew exactly where to find a customer willing to pay her prices. I woke up to the sound of coins clinking and I walked in her room to find her little brother the proud owner of the paper car and Grace eagerly emptying his piggy bank.

"Are you sure you want to buy this?" I asked him.

"Oh, yes!" he replied and held up a square of aluminum foil. "She even gave me a parking lot to go with it for FREE!"

Things Kids Say

As we celebrate Josh's new attempts at words, I am reminded why I'm not in too much of a hurry to have him talking.

We went out for dinner last night and shortly after being seated, Caleb points and cries out, "Look at that lady's pink hair!"

Not five minutes later he again makes another embarrassing and loud observation about some people sitting across from us that is probably inappropriate to print.

As I'm quietly scolding him, I'm thinking, Didn't we just go over this last week when he asked the woman at the mall why her teeth were green?

Later, our waitress was admiring how cute Josh was. "He's a Chinese boy," Caleb informed her. "He sleeps in our doggy door."

What?!

Chinese Acrobats

My Chinese-American family is getting excited for next month's games in Beijing and was recently inspired by a Chinese acrobatic show. The kids watched the acrobats balance an astounding number of dishes on their bodies and decided to give it a try themselves.

Look at this concentration



Grandma Johnson recognizes talent when she sees it and was more than willing to assist the aspiring acrobats.


I think they may have a promising future.

The Best Toy

The best toy, in my opinion, is an extra-large box. Since we just got a new washing machine, we have had just such a box to provide hours of entertainment this week (after the novelty of the washing machine wore off).


I gave the kids a bunch of markers and let them decorate their box any they wished. They say that first-born children are very rules-oriented, so it wasn't a total surprise when I saw that my first-born had written out a list of rules on the front door of their new "playhouse."

Upon closer examination, I saw that these were not just any rules, but THE rules:


Personally, I question the necessity of having a posted prohibition against "adulchry" on child's playhouse, but perhaps the reminder not to "merder" each other is helpful. She also added her own personal addendum to the Ten Commandments:

Drastic Measures

I didn't realize how desperately Caleb wanted the tooth fairy to visit him. After failing at all attempts to get his teeth to fall out, he decided to pull one over on the tooth fairy.

"Can you please tell the tooth fairy that I lost a tooth," he asked me upon coming out of his room this morning.

"Where?" I wanted to know.

He opened his mouth and pointed to the back vaguely. I wasn't convinced, so he leaned in close and confided in a hushed tone, "Well, I didn't really lose one but I'm going to trick the tooth fairy! I put something else under my pillow to make her think it is my tooth."

He was obviously very proud of himself, but that "something else" turned out to be a push pin. When I explained to him that he could really get hurt sleeping on top of a sharp object, he considered for a moment and then said, "Well, but I might get some quarters."

The Tooth Fairy

The tooth fairy had reason to visit our house this week on more than one occasion. Grace lost a tooth early in the week (her fourth) and her daddy lost four teeth later in the week with the help of his dentist and some pliers.

Belief in the tooth fairy's existence, however, is faltering here. Grace has conducted a few informal surveys among her peers and noted that the tooth fairy is decidedly not paying the same amount of money at everyone's house.

"I'm pretty sure you and Daddy are the tooth fairy," she informed me. This conclusion was due in part to the fact that her reimbursement for lost teeth is on the low end of the spectrum and "'cause sometimes when I wake up my tooth is still there and no money yet and you tell me the tooth fairy is running late and we have to wait until after breakfast to check again."

Nevertheless, as Phil was leaving to get his wisdom teeth out she reminded him to bring his teeth home so that he could get some money from the tooth fairy.

Caleb has also taken notice of how profitable this losing teeth business can be. He has begun vigorously trying to wiggle his teeth loose, but without any success yet.