A blog about foster care, and the kids and pets who make our lives hilariously, hair-pullingly, wonderfully chaotic.

Woes and Joys

My body is an a$$hole.

I have never seen my rheumatologist flummoxed before today. She’s always confident and reassuring and has a plan of defense against my errant immune system. But today it all got to her, and we don’t have a good defense strategy at the moment. It’s a “wait and see if what you’re on works with a little more time” game.

Gastroenterology is more confident still, but she’s newer to this rollercoaster ride with my body, so maybe give her some more time to be broken by it!

I’ve been having major gastrointestinal issues that we’ve been blaming on ulcerative colitis for several years now. I’m on the correct dose of Stelara now for UC, and it should be controlling the symptoms but isn’t. So I’m currently on heavy doses of steroids to try to knock back this flare up. But every time we go down even a little in dose of the prednisone, the symptoms come roaring back with a vengeance.

New players to the game are mouth sores, but are they a sign I actually have Crohn’s disease rather than ulcerative colitis? Or are they from lupus? Or even something else? Damn hard to say. Either way, Stelara and methotrexate and prednisone should be controlling them, but they only go away on the highest doses of prednisone and come back if we drop the dose at all.

Steroids, though? They’re frigging great. They make me want to eat everything in sight (downside) but they make me feel positively human (upside) when they’re working. I have more energy, and less joint pain. So while I need to get off the damn things, I’m also not totally sad I’m on them.

Speaking of joint pain, as my rheumatologist felt my finger joints and I reported that they “really aren’t feeling that bad today,” she looked at me quizzically. Paused. Then said “I think your body is just getting used to being in pain because they feel swollen as heck.” Ah well. I had hoped they were better. But alas!

Anywho, wait and see is the name of the game. I only went up on dose of Stelara about 2 months ago, and we need to control this flare up for a bit to give the new dose a chance to work. If it doesn’t improve soon, we’ll try a new med. I’m told there are more out there that I can try. Because the whole pharmacopeia is fun to experiment with!

SEVEN

My daughter turned seven last week. I’m not ok! She is growing up so fast!

She’s doing amazing. We got her cleared by her orthopedic surgeon to start gymnastics, and she’s head over heels in love with it (see what I did there? Ha!) Seriously, it’s all she wants to do.

The only other thing she wants to do is play outside with the neighbor girl who is about the same age. They play together rain or shine, freezing cold or mosquitoes and sweltering heat. They ride bikes, and play “Frozen” (wherein Anna loses Elsa and calls her name at the top of her lungs over and over again). They play in the swings and build things out of sticks and pine cones. I love that my girl is an outside kid, preferring scraped knees and rain boots to an iPad or television. We go through a lot of bandaids and Bactine, but she’s tough as nails and no injuries deter her. She just gets back up and does another cartwheel in the gravel driveway. And then another.

We have noticed an uptick in moments of ‘tude with this age. She’s a fiercely independent kid anyway, and somehow developmentally she thinks she can do anything and everything because of her advanced age, except for the fact that her mean parents hold her back from, you know, lighting herself on fire by accident, or staying up until midnight.

She’s a good kid overall, but man. There have had to have been some stern moments lately on my part and that always leaves me wondering if I’m doing things the right way. Connection over correction and all that.

Anyone else find freshly minted seven-year-olds a challenge?

Kitty!

I haven’t talked much about our cats in a while. Not long ago we had 5 cats, including ones ages 19, 18, 17, and 15, plus one young ‘un age 4 (a ginger girl named Astrid).

We lost the entirety of the geriatric squad in about a year. It was devastating and really hard on Sprout.

Then a number of months ago I added kitten Pierre to the mix. He’s an absolute hoot of a cat. He was bottle fed by a friend of mine, and no one has ever been mean to him so he has tons of confidence. He’s affectionate and playful. He’s roughly 10 months old now.

And he’s been bored. He’s spent too much time literally gnawing on poor Astrid.

Fat orange cat and her annoying little brother watching birdies.

So on Sunday we added another kitten to the mix to provide a friend for Pierre and some relief for Astrid.

The grownups didn’t sleep last night because 4-month-old Louis wanted reassuring pets all night long, about once an hour. He’d come up to me purring and meowing, then after some attention he’d start biting my moving fingers. Good times at 2 am. Plus Pierre is still unsure about Louis and would occasionally forget about him, jump on the bed to get his own attention, and bump into unsuspecting Louis which would shock a hiss out of Pierre. It was absurd. And cute. Thank god for the cute part!

Anywho, it’s positively lovely to have a house full of young playful cat and kitten energy. It coincides with the spring-ish weather and is putting folks in a good mood and making everyone laugh. So here’s to spring, and to kittens, and to thriving kids!

Pierre’s expression upon seeing Louis for the first time, shooting daggers at me with his eyes. “What. Have. You. Done?!?”

Louis being a kitten with all his might.

Book Rec Time!

I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for a long time, and finally picked it up today to read it.

It’s a middle grade reader and it’s written in verse, so it’s a super quick read. I got through it with several interruptions in less than 2 hours. But boy does it pack a lot into those few verses!

It’s written from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl who was adopted as a baby. She writes about all the secret thoughts and worries she has about her adoption, and what it means about her. She notices her adoptive parents don’t tell people she’s adopted, and she worries it’s a dirty secret they’re helping her keep. Her friend who was adopted gets bullied on the playground and the bully specifically drags her friend for having been “unwanted” by her birth mom. She wonders a great deal about her birth parents, and what it means that they gave her away. And so much more.

I feel like every single adoptive parent out there should read this book so they can have a glimpse into the kinds of things a child’s brain will come up with about their adoption, especially if it isn’t openly discussed, or if the child’s story is told to them in a way that causes unintentional hurt. It’s insight into the way adoption affects a child’s self esteem and self image.

This book may make an adoptive parent’s stomach hurt, and make them want to say “but not every adopted child and not mine!” But I encourage adoptive parents to dig deep, and sit with their emotions, and THEN after they’ve processed their own feelings, start conversation with their adopted child about their experiences.

I also think every adopted tween should have access to this book, so they can feel their many thoughts and wonders and worries and fears being validated.

I got a used copy from the Am of zons back before I was boycotting them, for a whopping dollar and change. It’s not available at Barnes and Noble, but might be something you could order from a local bookstore instead of supporting Jeff Bezos. But get it from somewhere – I won’t judge. It’s so worth a read!

Adoption. Is. Trauma.

I got a note from Sprout’s teacher on Friday saying Sprout had a rough week. She refused to do her work unless an adult helped her (she is in a 12:1:1 classroom so that help is thankfully available). She was sometimes uncooperative. And the work she did do was not her best.

Let me start by saying I adore Sprout’s teacher. She’s amazeballs. She taught Sunny first, and this is Sprout’s second year in her classroom, so we know this teacher well and have infinite respect for her and her methods of handling both teaching and trauma-caused behaviors. Truly. She is da bomb diggety of special ed teachers!

I wrote back that I wasn’t sure what was going on, but that I was aware Sprout is having some trouble with a kid on the bus, and I’d follow up on that issue for starters in case that was what was bothering her.

It took me all weekend to work the truth gently out of little Sprout. And the answer, when it came, broke my heart:

She misses her first family terribly right now and doesn’t understand why she was treated differently than her siblings, and wants to know what her life would be like if she lived with them. They live with a relative, who is getting permanent guardianship of them.

The truth is that the relative who has her siblings didn’t step up to take Sprout when she was removed from her Mama’s care. He wasn’t able to. He was living halfway across the country and struggling to manage his own family at the time. I suspect he was also frustrated with Sprout’s Mama and maybe thought having one less child in her care would help her care for the remaining four kids. We all hoped that.

At the time when Sprout was removed, Sprout was desperately ill and on death’s door. If we didn’t get her to eat and drink immediately, she’d be hospitalized and intubated with a feeding tube because she was so sick. We were given 24 hours to get her to take in pediasure in a volume greater than her output, or we had to take her to the ER. We weighed diapers and measured pediasure in syringes, injecting tiny tastes of it into her mouth every 20 minutes around the clock. She pulled through – thank whatever God or Gods are out there – but it was touch and go.

At that moment in time, her siblings were older and healthier and the judge only removed the desperately sick baby from the house and let the remaining four kids stay.

It took two and a half more years before everyone gave up on Mama and decided she could not adequately care for those four siblings. They weren’t going to school, they weren’t getting medical care, and two of them have the same rare genetic disorder Sprout has that causes dwarfism, heart defects, joint problems, vision problems, etc. Medical care was crucial.

By then, the relative lived near Mama again, and was far more stable and able to take on three of the four kids, including one with disabilities. We took the fourth kid, Sunny, for an additional 2 years before the relative was ready to take her on, too. Once the relative told us he could take her, we gave Sunny the choice whether to stay with us or go live with her relative, and she chose to go. We made sure it happened.

By then, though, Sprout had been adopted by us. She had lived with us for the only years she remembers (she was 1 when she came to us). She still needs lots of medical care, and her relative was not prepared to provide for yet another kid with high medical needs.

Did the agency and courts screw things up? Holy hell yes. All the kids should have been removed when Sprout was removed. The conditions they were living in were not safe or appropriate. But the system is so damn broken it didn’t happen for years. So Sprout wound up separated from her four siblings at least until she’s 18 years old. Then she can decide to go live with her first family or not.

What does all this mean for Sprout?

First of all, a hell of a lot of heartache. She misses her siblings terribly, and her Mama too, and even her aunties and uncles and especially her cousins. She’s got the best damn cousins ever.

Sprout is only 6 years old and is wrestling with issues lots of adults can’t handle. She wonders why she’s separated from her family and can’t yet grasp the explanations that are appropriate for her at this age. Hell, I’m not sure *I* grasp the why in this case. It should not have gone down as it did. She lives with constant heartache for relatives she can’t see often enough (they live 2 hours away). She lives with FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) for the lives they live. She asked me if she can go live with them when she turns 18, and of course I said yes. But damn. 18 is a long way away, and is 12 more years of feeling like she is missing out.

Will Sprout get better medical care with us? Yes, she sees the premier orthopedic surgeon in the world for pediatric dwarfism. Will she get a better education with us? Oh HELL YES. Will she have “better life opportunities” with us? Yep, by all commercial definitions. She has all the clothes and toys and games and STUFF her heart could desire.

But is it enough? I sure as hell don’t know. We love her to pieces and dote on her and give her opportunities to travel the world. She’s been to Paris and Lyon and lots of cities in the U.S. She’s been to Euro Disney. I’m determined to get her to London soon, where my sister, brother-in-law, and niece live.

Things are the way they are, for better or for worse. Sprout has forgotten all the Burmese language she ever knew and she mourns that loss. I’m hoping to find her a Burmese language teacher but haven’t been able to yet because of how far we live from the Burmese immigrant population of our city. We intend to move closer within the next year but until then she’s sad about it. We feed her Burmese food often, but it isn’t as good as her family’s cooking. She’s Asian in a predominantly white school district – again something we hope to change soon but not soon enough. And she’s a little person growing up in a family of average height people and not with her sisters who also have dwarfism.

In short, we are trying and will do our best, but we will never really be enough to make up for the colossal losses she has experienced and will continue to experience throughout her life because of this adoption.

We can’t undo what has been done and would never want to. But that’s really the heart of the problem. The situation is as it is, and one little girl is struggling mightily to find a way to be “okay” with her circumstances.

What can we do? We told Sprout’s teacher what is going on and asked her to extend her usual mix of grace and firmness. We told Sprout’s therapist, who was delighted Sprout was telling me what’s on her heart and mind, because that’s progress for Sprout. And now they will talk about adoption in therapy. And we tell Sprout how sorry we are that she is sad, that we understand why she is sad, and that it’s okay to feel sad. We scheduled a visit with her family this coming Saturday, too. She needs their actual hugs, not virtual ones.

We will work to do better on her school district (it’s great academically but way too white and conservative), and her proximity to Burmese resources by finishing the work on our house and moving as soon as we can. It’s been hard getting a contractor in to finish our bathroom but we do have it lined up so it feels like we are moving forward.

Beyond that? All we can do is validate Sprout’s feelings and hold her close while she is sad.

Anyone who says adoption isn’t traumatic is full of it. The loss is tremendous and lifelong. And I’m helplessly watching it unfold in the human being I hold most dear.

Health Update Time

A while back I posted about my health challenges. (See here and here if you aren’t caught up).

I’ve been placed on Stelara for my ulcerative colitis (“UC”), which is an immunosuppressant that is aimed at UC and at psoriatic arthritis. It’s helping with the UC though is not putting me in remission. Regardless, I’ll take the progress. TMI, but I’m pooping like 3-4 times a day, down from 8 or more. So poo doesn’t feel like it’s controlling my very existence any more. Hooray for that!

The catch is that while Stelara is clearly helping me with my UC, it has not touched what had been diagnosed previously as Psoriatic Arthritis. I may in fact have Psoriatic Arthritis, or I may not. But it seems I also have either seronegative Rheumatoid Arthritis (“RA”) or lupus going on, doing damage to my joints and causing extreme fatigue problems.

So, my rheumatologist started me on methotrexate, which is a chemotherapeutic drug. I’m on a much lower dose than folks with cancer would take, but it’s still got some chemo side effects like nausea and hair loss.

Zofran (anti nausea med) is my best friend.

I take methotrexate one day a week, and folic acid the other six days, which helps flush the methotrexate out of my system. Then I do it all again the next week.

Is it working? It’s hard to tell. I developed a random ear infection that caused me to have to go off methotrexate and took three full weeks of intense antibiotics to get rid of. (I’m sure that helped my poor guts. 🙄) Now I’m back on it, but it’s only been a few weeks. It hasn’t touched the fatigue, and my ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate – and indicator of inflammation) is still elevated, but my hand pain is no longer so severe that it’s keeping me from sleeping. So I’m wicked hopeful that it’s going to help at least with the pain.

Mind you, I’m not taking care of myself the way I probably should. I’m trying to still live a life that’s got some joy and fun in it! I went to the P!NK concert in Syracuse with a good buddy of mine. That meant walking up and down the steep Syracuse University hill. It also meant climbing ginormous stairs at the Dome because all we could afford was nose bleed tickets. The concert was phenomenal. Best concert I’ve ever been to. The woman can sing, and she’s an amazing aerialist, and funny as hell. Just all around an amazing concert.

Only problem? I literally could not walk the next day without my right knee seizing and giving out. That’s the second time that’s happened – the first was on the steep hills of Old Lyon, France. So, I made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon for next week for new x-rays and maybe an MRI to find out what, exactly, is wrong in my knee, and whether there’s anything that can be done for it. Maybe he’ll be able to tell what’s causing the issue – Psoriatic Arthritis has a signature look on an x-ray, as does osteoarthritis. If he recommends shots I’m here for them. If he recommends replacement I’m here for that. I want to be able to go for walks around my hilly village still, for pity’s sake! I’m not giving up on movement at age 48. Especially not with young kids!

I also have fibromyalgia. My tender points have been really bad lately. My rheumatologist went through the options for controlling fibromyalgia pain: Effexor or Cymbalta? Already on Effexor. Gabapentin? Already on it. So we don’t really have other good drugs in the arsenal for it, though new studies have demonstrated increased understanding of the disrupted pain sensing system that constitutes the driver of fibromyalgia pain, so maybe someday soon we’ll have some new meds available.

Fatigue continues to be the controlling factor in my life. I go to bed at 6 pm every night. If I don’t, I am a mess the next day. For my volunteer work for my church I sometimes have late meetings that mean a day of brain fog and exhaustion will follow. I don’t learn though – I signed up to ring handbells this fall and rehearsals start at 7, so I’m sometimes my own worst enemy. But oh, I love playing handbells!

I get up between 5 am and 6 am. So that means I’m getting 11-12 hours of sleep a night, assuming no meetings or bells. Then I MUST lie down during the day, and often nap. If I didn’t get to bed at 6 the night before I’ll sometimes wind up in bed more hours than I’m up.

Frankly, it sucks.

I’m grateful to be on disability so I can survive financially. But I’m also irritated with the government, which owes me $13,000 in back payments. When I call to inquire about it, they tell me “huh, it’s strange, I see you’re owed the back payment but it doesn’t look like anyone’s doing anything to get that paid.” GAH.

I worry so much about my future. If I can’t go back to work, how will I ever “retire” and survive old age? The caps on the amount I can put in retirement while on disability are way too low. Plus, I feel angry that I’m sleeping my life away. There’s so much I don’t get to do because I’m too tired. It took me an entire month to recover from my lovely week-long family trip to France. Will I decide it’s worth traveling again? I hope so as I love travel. But it’s getting harder to find the desire to struggle for so long after just one week of travel.

I’ve always wanted to go to India with my BFF.

I want to go to Morocco.

I want to go to Costa Rica with Kiddo when she’s 18 and can get a passport – that’s the place she says she wants me to take her for her first international trip.

I want to expose Sprout to more international travel too. She loved our trip to France. I want to take her to London next year, as my sister and niece now live there.

So many places, so little time. And money. And energy.

Anyway, I’m generally an optimist and thank heavens for that. I still am hoping the meds I’m on will start working better. I’m still hoping new meds will come out. I’m happy to do surgeries to replace bad joints if it will help. Whatever I need to do to improve my quality of life, I’m here for it.

Sprout continues to be sort of oblivious about the fact that her Mom has limitations. Thank heavens. She doesn’t complain that it’s weird that we go to bed at the same time (she too needs a lot of sleep, as is often the case for trauma kids. And she, too, lives with chronic pain because of her joint problems caused by her dwarfism). But someday she’ll notice that her Mom can’t keep up. All I can hope is that she’ll continue to be the kind, compassionate kid she is now, and give me lots of grace.

Generational Trauma and our kids

Sprout These Days

Sprout is doing remarkably well.

I’ll start with school academics. She’s getting retested for speech and OT services but likely won’t need either going forward, and her father and I wholeheartedly agree with those services being dropped. While she continues to be in a 12:1:1 classroom, she’s thriving in it, and we suspect she will be returning to a regular classroom before too long – maybe even next year. Her focus and attention continue to be an issue for her, but she’s reading short sentences of small words and retaining some meaning from the exercise, and at just 6 and starting 1st grade, I can’t ask for more!

Socially she’s on par or ahead of her peers in a lot of ways. She’s a popular kid, and honestly, is a bit of a big fish in her little pond. Kids in the middle and high school know her name, plus of course the elementary school kids know her. We get stopped in public by random bus drivers who have never driven her but know her by name anyway. She stands out from the crowd physically since she’s Asian (one of 4 Asian kids in her school per school statistics) and she’s tiny. Plus, she’s feisty as hell. She gets noticed!

Per her therapist, she’s an intellectual kid. She’ll do everything in her power to understand what’s happening around her, and because of this, she spends a lot of time analyzing and making sense of her peers and their behaviors. It’s serving her well in some respects. Sometimes we see her interacting with kids who are a year or two older and we are shocked at their level of development because we are used to Sprout, who is ahead socially.

There’s a downside, though, to her intellectual bent: she’ll also do everything in her power to avoid feeling feelings. If you’ve ever tried to stuff your emotions you’ll know they have a way of creeping back up on you when you least expect it.

We’ve experienced some night terrors? Maybe? Or at least nighttime crying jags that we can’t explain. She’ll fall asleep as usual but awaken a few hours later crying hysterically and inconsolably. We can’t soothe her and just have to ride out the storm and wait for her to go back to sleep. In the morning, sometimes she’ll remember crying but not remember why, and other times she’ll not remember crying at all.

Those crying jags are hard to witness. We’ve tried everything in our arsenal to soothe her, from firm hugs, to cradling her, to rubbing her back, to playing music. Sometimes deep humming helps if you hold her tight, but that’s about it, and that’s only about 50/50 on efficacy.

There are other times when she’ll become inconsolable when she’s awake, too. Again, sometimes she can identify a reason for her tears, like that another *bleeping* kid picked her up against her will and called her “cute.” That enrages her, and rightly so. But other times she cannot identify why she’s crying at all, let alone so hard.

Of course we discussed the situation with her therapist, and she told us it’s partly because she’s avoiding her feelings when she should be dealing with them, and they’re overcoming her at odd times. She also said developmentally, she’s advanced, but her nervous system is working at about a 3-year-old’s level.

The therapist explained that Sprout experienced so much trauma and (unintentional) neglect in utero and in her first two years that her nervous system wasn’t really developing right during that time. And while Sprout is in a stable, healthy environment now, those nerve pathways are just now making up for that lost time.

As a result, we see some three year old behaviors on occasion. She wants to control the play at all times as means of controlling her environment. Sometimes she throws colossal tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, even though that behavior doesn’t ever get rewarded in our household. And very often she needs to be held and/or snuggled – more than you’d expect in an average six-year-old.

She’s making up for lost time.

As if that’s not enough…

Too, there’s the fact of Sprout’s parents’ traumas, and their parents’ traumas, weighing on her. Epigenetics are the real deal, and while they’re fascinating, they also explain a lot about almost all kids in foster care.

Take, for instance, this study:

Researchers took a bunch of male mice and exposed them to a particular scent (something akin to cherry and almond) while simultaneously exposing them to electric shocks. The mice became super sensitized to that scent, trembling whenever they were exposed to it, because they knew shocks were coming.

But here’s the fascinating part: they bred those mice, but the offspring were never in contact with the mice that had received the shocks. And those offspring? They freaked out when they smelled cherry and almond too, even though they had never been exposed to electric shocks. And the offspring of the offspring? Same thing. For three generations, those mice were petrified of the scent of cherry and almond, just because someone had shocked their great grandfathers during exposure to that scent.

Here’s the study, if you want to read it. It was also mentioned recently in this excellent podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, which is how I found it.

The results were eventually recreated with female mice, and even using in vitro fertilization.

So what does this mean for kids in foster care, and for Sprout in particular? Well, intergenerational trauma is a fact and is often a reason why kids wind up in foster care. Very often the parents of the kids in foster care experienced neglect, abuse, racism, neighborhood violence, or even foster care themselves. It’s not universally true, but it sure is the case much of the time. So the kids in foster care are fighting to overcome their own traumas, and thanks to epigenetics, their parents’ traumas too. And those parents we are quick to blame for their kids being in foster care? They’re weighed down by their own traumatic experiences, and those of their parents and grandparents too.

For Sprout in particular, the intergenerational trauma runs deep deep deep. We’ve talked to her relatives about things they and Sprout’s grandparents have experienced in a war-torn country that has seen very few peaceful years since the British invaded in the 1820s, and especially not since the end of World War II. In their family, there has been poverty, illness and injury that went without treatment, extreme lack of food and clean water, flight from religious persecution, and scraping out an existence in a refugee camp where the locals treated the refugees abominably. I do not doubt the stories and believe the relative has only scratched the surface of the stories of horror in their family.

What can we do with all this knowledge about epigenetics?

For starters, we can give people more grace.

Maybe the person raging at the checkout counter in front of you is indeed a jerk who is privileged and spoiled and exploding because they’re not getting their way. Or maybe they’re behaving like that because their nervous system is primed to jump into “freak out” mode over small triggers we can’t even see.

We can be extra patient with kids who have experienced trauma, and with kids of parents who have experienced trauma, because we can’t always know why their nervous systems are doing what they’re doing. Always try to treat kids with kindness and patience even if you don’t like their behaviors, because you never know what’s happening for them at home now, or what’s happened to their parents before.

Don’t neglect yourself, either. Perhaps it’s most important to start giving extra grace to yourself.

Kid Harmony

For the past two years, Sprout (now 6) has regularly voiced that she doesn’t like Kiddo (now 12) because Kiddo is “mean to” her. And frankly, I had a hard time arguing with her! For while Sunny (now 10, and Sprout’s sister) was with us, any time Kiddo visited for a weekend, Sunny and Kiddo would band together and either exclude Sprout or be expressly mean to her.

I could understand why, but that didn’t help Sprout. Kiddo has grown up in a mean girls culture that she perpetuates and we’ve never been able to get her to stop. Starting at age 4 in pre-K, she got into a mean girls trio and those kids were nasty to each other! We talked with Kiddo repeatedly. She got in trouble with the principal at school. We imposed consequences. We certainly modeled kindness and acceptance. We read her books on being nice. But nothing seemed to work. The pattern has continued as she’s gotten older, and now that she lives with her Mom, we have less of a finger on the pulse of her meanness levels.

I think the primary reason nothing worked is the reason bullies exist with such prevalence in our society: it can feel good to belong, and one way to belong is to exclude others. When you’ve got a kid with low self esteem, sometimes excluding someone else is the easy way to feel like s/he belongs. It’s been Kiddo’s go-to since age 4 when we met her.

I’d like to note for the record that she can be extraordinarily kind and thoughtful. It’s just if Kiddo gets anxious in a social situation she can resort to meanness so she has a way to feel like she’s fitting in.

And Sunny? She and Sprout butt heads like nothing on earth. The sisters are both strong personalities, which doesn’t help matters any. And they’re both intolerably jealous of each other. The jealousy would spark absolute rages in Sunny that would make her hit and claw at little Sprout at times. Sunny is also easily led by older or more forceful kids, and Kiddo is both. So she was ripe for turning against Sprout, and joined in Kiddo’s exclusion efforts readily.

You know that saying “two is company, three is a crowd…”? Yeah…

I told Sprout things would get better when her sister went to live with their relative, and boy was I right!

This is the first weekend I’ve been alone with just Kiddo and Sprout for long periods of time. I’ve gone through two weeks’ worth of spoons in three days but it’s been a blast!

First, I took the girls to Strong Museum of Play in Rochester NY. I haven’t been there in a while and it’s got a lot of new exhibits that are fantastic. It also has ropes courses for older and younger kids. There are endless adjoining rooms of games and books and fodder for the imagination. The kids did the ropes courses, then frolicked through the entire downstairs of the huge museum. We ended the day so tired that Sprout was asleep in the car before we pulled out of the parking garage!

Then Sunday I took the girls to see Inside Out 2 in the theater. It is one of the best films I’ve seen in many years. We all absolutely loved it, and Kiddo and I related most to poor chonky blushing embarrassment.

Embarrassment in all his blushing glory!

Today I discovered Kiddo had little by way of back-to-school anything. She had only a few pairs of undies, two bras, and just about 0 pants or t-shirts. I don’t have much by way of cash but she needed some stuff, so we decided it was the perfect day for the mall. (It’s pouring down gray uninteresting rain). We shopped for Kiddo, ate lunch at the food court, and now they are running off their energy at Billy Beez.

And how has it gone?

It’s gone so beautifully I could cry.

They’ve laughed together a bunch. Kiddo has been a wonderful older friend, helping Sprout through Billy Beez, taking her down slides she was scared to go on, holding her hand on uneven surfaces that are hard for Sprout with her knee issues. They called each other’s names in excitement about 8,364 times at the Strong Museum: “[Kiddo!] You have to see this!” and “Oh my gosh! [Sprout!] This is so cool!” I’ve gotten a bunch of hammy photos of the two of them together which is nearly impossible most of the time. When Sprout hit her sensory limit at the Museum, Kiddo agreed it was time to leave with absolutely no fuss, even though she wanted to keep going.

They both say they’ve had a wonderful long weekend together. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it’s been so close to perfect I can’t think of a single moment to identify as having been an issue! Will it always be perfect? Of course not. There will be moments of rivalry. But I think the more secure I can make each kid feel in the affections of the adults, the better it will be.

I love these two kids more than anything, and their love can get me through anything. And when they’re loving on each other? It makes my heart so happy it hurts.

Travels with Sprout

Sprout and I have spent the last week adventuring.

Sunday morning I attended the memorial service for my beloved friend, bonus father figure, Buddhist Monk, and author Terrence Keenan. It was at Hoenji, which is the Zen Center of Syracuse. After the service was over my husband and Sprout joined the gathering for lunch, and we spent a lovely hour with his kids, who are the dearest of friends, before Sprout and I took off for southern Pennsylvania. We spent the night at a Home2Suites hotel, which, by the way, are great hotels and that one gives a steep discount to anyone there for Nemours Children’s Hospital.

Monday morning we crossed into Delaware and Sprout had her medical appointments at Nemours. They went great – she’s thriving. She needs more PT to work on some mobility quirks related to her dwarfism and knee surgeries, but is doing really well.

That afternoon we went to a family fun center where she played games and won prizes and had an absolute blast. Her best games are throwing games – basketball, bowling, ring toss – the kid’s got an arm on her!

Tuesday we toured the Nemours Estate, which bored the socks off Sprout but which I enjoyed immensely. The grounds in particular are absolutely gorgeous.

We then headed to DC for 6 nights at a tiny basement apartment Air BNB.

In DC, we have done the following:

National Children’s Museum, where she slid on a slide repeatedly until she got motion sickness, and learned a little science
Smithsonian Natural History Museum, where she saw mummies, dinosaur bones, all sorts of bugs and spiders, and learned about evolution for the first time.
Smithsonian Asian Art Museum, which was a short visit because Sprout realized she had left her backpack at the cafe where we had lunch, and we had to rush back to retrieve it. But she did love that all the artists were Asian, like her!
The National Zoo, which was the highlight of the trip for both of us, really. We caught a sea lion show and saw otters and seals, all manner of birds and some bears, giant fish and snakes, and even some big cats. The zoo is a lovely park, filled with botany and wild birds, and we were there early in the day so there were no crowds. A perfect day.
Arlington National Cemetery, which I think overwhelmed both of us with the sheer number of graves and its consequent oppressive atmosphere. She really wanted to see it since she’s fascinated by cemeteries, but this may have cured her of that fascination for a while.
Washington Monument and the Capitol, which we only saw from a bit of a distance but we talked about their significance. We also talked about the Lincoln Memorial and the process involved in the freeing of enslaved people in this country, though we never made it to the Lincoln Memorial.
The Yards Park, where Sprout is happily splashing in the big pool while we wait for a friend who lives in DC to join us.

Things I’ve learned about my kid this week:

She loves seeing lots of Black and Asian folks around her, reinforcing that we have to move before too long, to a more diverse area.
She told me she wants to learn Burmese, so I’ve put out feelers to try to find her a tutor. I asked two acquaintances for ideas. One replied that I should check with Catholic Charities because they work with a lot of Burmese refugees. Smart idea – we may even be able to find someone who was a teacher in Burma.
She’s a phenomenal travel buddy… so long as you feed her often and thoroughly. She’s walked long distances with little complaint, and shown interest in nearly everything we saw and talked about. She asks smart questions, is good natured, and responds promptly when I ask her to do things. She’s just such a good kid. This fact was really reinforced at the Children’s Museum where I watched moms run after their kids who were about Sprout’s age, and drag them by the arm as they went limp refusing to leave. When we left I just had to ask her nicely, she asked for one more trip down the slide, which I granted, and we were happily off.
She keeps a pace similar to my own, meaning she needs lots of down time. We’ve spent our mornings and early afternoons being busy and our afternoons relaxing at our Air BNB before returning to the town for dinner. She’s let me nap when I needed it. She’s slept 12 hours each night with me. She’s even able to articulate when she’s overstimulated and needs a break from noise and confusion.
She’s flexible. She prefers Ubers, but has had a lot of patience with the Metro, changing trains and going up and down escalators single file so people can pass us. She’s perfected a little pirouette after stepping onto the escalator so she can get in front of me and not let go of my hand.

Honestly, it’s been an excellent trip in every way. She’s even had patience with my taking a zillion pictures of her. The only times that have been rough have been when I accidentally let her get hangry, and when she’s gotten a little motion sick on a tour bus, so we had to divert and do other things instead.

Tomorrow we will get up before dawn, pack up the car (which is currently parked in so I hope a car on one end or the other of my vehicle moves in the course of the day) and pick up Seth at the airport. That’s assuming flights are flying after the big mess with air traffic computers going down! Assuming he arrives as planned, we will drive down to Virginia to spend several days with Seth’s parents and sisters and Sprout’s new cousins. She’s super excited to be able to call them her cousins officially now. 🙂

Here’s to travel adventures with great kids!

Brown skin is beautiful, but my kid doesn’t believe it.

My gorgeous brown-skinned Asian kid just told me she wishes she had white skin because “it’s prettier.” My heart broke. It’s something I heard before from Kiddo when she was about 4.

I asked Sprout why she thought white skin is prettier, and she said “all the pictures are of pretty white-skinned girls.”

This kid consumes a lot of media featuring brown-skinned characters, but even so, at 6, she is still exposed to our racist advertising culture, where those who are looking glamorous are usually white women.

It does not help that her sister Sunny, who came to us at age 8, already knew about skin bleaching products from her family, and talked about how using them makes people “prettier.” It’s something I’ve heard their 14-year-old sister say more than once so I know it’s ingrained in her family culture. Sprout heard it from Sunny when she lived with us for nearly 2 years.

I clearly need to do better with brown-skinned role models for her in real life. That was a bit easier for Kiddo because I had some Black friends locally already, and finding a church with Black attendees wasn’t hard. But my usual circles don’t now include many Asian folks.

My husband and I suspect we need to move before too long to a more diverse community that includes Asian families. Sigh. We love where we live and we love our school district for its amazing special education programs. But we live in a very white community, and while Sprout has one Black friend in her class and one mixed-race bestie, and she’s got Kiddo who is mixed-race, she’s still surrounded by mostly white kids and parents and teachers and very few Asian role models. Sprout does adore our across-the-street neighbor and thinks she’s beautiful, and she’s Asian. I’m deeply grateful for that influence, not just because she’s a great role model but also because she’s an amazing neighbor and friend. But I’ll have to work on finding other Asian kids her age who look like Sprout to add to her day-to-day life, too.

I think this goes to show how important real-life influences are for kids. Sprout has quite a few books about Asian characters and books that talk about how brown skin and Asian-shaped eyes are gorgeous. She watches quite a few programs featuring brown-skinned girls. But none of that measures up to the importance of having real-life role models and friends.

I have to do better for my girl. Until then, I’ll tell her how gorgeous she is and have her repeat it after me. Maybe it’ll sink in a little bit. But my heart hurts.

Self care isn’t just a cliché

My therapist introduced me to Silk + Sonder journals recently. They’re monthly journals, meaning they’re designed for people like me who lose interest in old things and get excited about new. Just as I’m losing interest in last month’s journal the next one arrives, fresh with a new theme and clean pages of possibility. There is also a lovely and supportive online community of Silk + Sonder users in an app that comes along with subscribing to the journals.

One of the things the journals include is a page for determining what “goals” you have for each day. Mine vary a little month-to-month, but have essentially included the following as goals for each day:

Meditate (10 minutes)
Sit in nature doing nothing (10 minutes)
Walking
Reading (10 minutes)
Doing something creative

In total it requires about an hour each day to check off each box, though I seldom manage all of them in a day. Amazingly, though, I’m finding that just making a list and tracking my compliance is making me actually do those things more.

I’m not a rule breaker by nature. I feel like I should do those things because I’ve written them down. But also, I’ve started to recognize the effects of doing each of those little things on my well-being. And it’s massive, especially the meditation, sitting in nature, and reading.

***

It’s damp outside this morning, both from rain and the incredible humidity of yesterday. It’s dripping on me as I write this, though whether it comes from sky or trees overhead is a little unclear. I sat in my favorite outdoor chair and listened to bird songs for a solid 10 minutes before starting to write. My Merlin Bird ID app told me I was listening to the usual suspects (robin, cardinal, house finch, house sparrow, the ever-daft mourning dove, and the house wren that nested in our bird house this year). But I was delighted to hear some more unusual songs too (the shy ovenbird, the blazingly lovely Baltimore oriole, a Carolina wren).

Honestly, by the time I turned off the app I was feeling high off birds and cool-but-humid summer morning air.

(I’m also slightly mosquito bitten, but that’s neither here nor there. It just reminds me I’m human. Apparently I’m a juicy delicious one because damn, those things love me.)

***

Lately I’ve been making my way through the book Zen Encounters with Loneliness by my beloved friend Terrance Keenan, who just recently passed away. It is ostensibly about the practice of Zen Buddhism. It is more about the very human longing for connection and meaning in a world that can seem punishingly bleak in its obstacles, which in Keenan’s case were addiction and writer’s block. All of what Keenan writes about is grounded in nature, and my morning sit with the birds made me feel very connected with the book and the writer himself.

By the time I started writing this, I felt like I was breathing deeper and in connection with the wet grass under my toes and the singing birds. It turns out that’s a lovely way to start a day.

The theme for July’s Silk + Sonder journal is “curiosity,” and one of the pages is an acrostic prompt. When I finished mine I felt like it perfectly captures where I am with my re-discovery of the importance of tuning in to the natural world.

***

It’s amazing how 10 minutes each of meditation, time in nature, and reading are drilling through my toughened carapace. The last months of Sunny being here really took a toll, though truthfully it probably was longer than that that her being here was making me feel self-protective. She turned me into a rolly-polly pill bug emotionally. All the mean comments, fighting between the kids, and damage to my property did damage to me in ways I didn’t realize at the time. Now that she’s home where she wants to be and no longer a sad, confused dark cloud in my home, I am able to relax.

It helps, too, that I was finally awarded disability and we now don’t have to hold our breaths to make ends meet each month. And, it helps that it’s SUMMER, so I can sit outside without freezing to death and there are choruses of bird songs in the morning, and cicadas in the afternoons.

When I saw my therapist on Monday, she remarked that I looked “more well” than usual. She’s perceptive. She has noticed that the self-care I’m doing is making a difference. When I saw my psychiatrist on Tuesday, she, too, remarked on my appearance, noting that I look “happy.” And I suppose I’m trending that way, finally.

It’s not as though my worries are all resolved. Seth and I are still in couple’s counseling and have a long way to go. I’m stressing about the big trip Sprout and I leave for on Sunday. I’m mourning the loss of my friend Terry. I’m still big-time struggling with my health challenges, with fatigue in particular.

But doing the self-care items of time in nature, meditation, and reading are shifting something fundamental in me toward “solidly good.”

I encourage you to check out Silk + Sonder if you feel so inclined. But more, I encourage you to find little snippets of time for yourself. Find what makes you feel more whole and lean into it for 10 minutes each day. It’s a practice that is well worth finding time for.

Sometimes Rain is Better than Sun

My house is peaceful, joyful, and fun today despite crappy rainy weather and all somewhat overtired humans. No one got enough sleep. One grownup has a migraine.

But Kiddo and Sprout are playing so nicely together. No fighting. No exclusion. No meanness. I’m absolutely loving having my whole family together for the weekend.

And sadly, I am loving the atmosphere and energy so much more without Sunny here. It’s amazing how hard it is to cope with one small broken human sometimes. I keep finding myself tearing up over that realization. Heartbreaking.

I hope like hell she’s happier and doing well where she is. I’ve done a lot of meta-meditation for her already. 💔

And out of the blue, Kiddo asked me to do braids and beads in her hair again. It’s been at least a year since she’s let me touch her hair! I thought she’d “outgrown” beads at age 12, but she hasn’t apparently. She even asked for glow-in-the-dark beads.

It’s fascinating to see how much energy braiding hair takes. I have always known it makes my joints hurt, makes me tired, and makes me sweat like crazy. But my Visible app says I’ve already used up almost all my spoons for the day and I’m only 1/2 way done with her head!

This Visible app is teaching me fascinating things about my body, and what = exertion that exhausts me. It is also going to show me cycles of pain and intestinal problems, plus depression and anxiety, because it tracks those with a brief daily questionnaire. I’ll know if meds are working. I’ll see what hormones are doing to me. I’m really hopeful about how much this tool can help improve the quality of my life.

I need to go back to braiding. Then we’ll take a bunch of donation clothing and books to our church, return Sunny’s wheelchair to the place it was rented from, and hit the mall and Billy Beez for the girls to burn off energy. I can take them places now with ease and no worries about behaviors. It’s such a blessed relief. Relief tinged with sadness and a little guilt, which I’m trying to meet with more curiosity.