Learning to trust (two by four not required)

With his two-year-old brother at the Shakespeare Festival concert

What our frige looked like AFTER A Maus in the House cleaned it out for us.
Thanks, Carol, and thanks to our friends who bought gift certificates for us!

With big sister on the merry go round at the park.

You can go higher on park swings!

Inside the play tunnel at the park.

Warming up between swims at the Aquatic Center

Playing in the shallow end with mom and brother.

The International Adoption Clinic at the University of Minnesota gets rave reviews from other parents who have taken their kids there. We’ve already consulted with their nurse coordinator once and their child psychologist twice. The team there sees hundreds of internationally adopted kids every year—it’s their specialty, and they know of what they speak.

I’m going to suggest they add a service that they don’t currently offer, though, and it’s called: “Follow Naive New Parents Around With a Two By Four and If They Show the Slightest Sign of Getting Adventurous with Their Kid, Hit Them Over the Head While Repeatedly Yelling, ‘Stay Home! Stay Small! Keep to a Boring but Reassuringly Predictable Routine!’”

Yes, we took Alex to the concert on the green for the opening of the Shakespeare Festival on Saturday night. Yes, we took him to the playground on Sunday, which he loved. Later in the day, we took him to the Aquatic Center, a giant municipal pool complex that was packed to the gills Sunday night. He enjoyed that, too, kicking and dogpaddling (with me holding him by the chest). We all had fun.

Until we got home. Whoa, Nellie. For the next twenty-four hours Alex provided us with a textbook depiction of what happens when you take a kid who has been in a crib most of his waking hours for his entire life and suddenly throw him into the deep end of life. (Literally, in this case—well, not the deep end, but deep enough.)

Partly it’s hard to put on the brakes because it’s difficult to imagine that such innocuous activities could send a kid over the edge…. People can tell you about it: “Look, when you take a kid who is used to a very set, limited routine and introduce all sorts of new things, and they can’t communicate, then suddenly, you’ve made their world a very unpredictable, unsafe place; now, anything could happen at any time.” People can tell you that your child has been so severely deprived of sensory input for the crucial first five years of his life that sensory overload will freak him out, but it’s hard to believe it.

So our new resolution is to follow the textbook advice: Keep him at home. Keep a routine. Keep a BORING routine, of a few limited activities. Remember that keeping him up and active twelve hours a day is a major change for him already.

Unfortunately, this is going to be a little difficult with all the doctor’s appointments he has, beginning with a big two-night overnight stay for the International Adoption Clinic appointment in the Twin Cities at the end of this week. I am sure we will pay for that.

Well, in other news…we visited with the county social worker today to get hooked up with the wide variety of support services Alex and our family will be needing. Looks like another two to three months’ worth of paperwork again, but the social worker was nice.

Also, our two year old child is finally acting two. He is a HANDFUL, in some ways more so than Alex. He would like to hug Alex, but when he tries, Alex warns him off, which makes him cry; other times, he tries pouring things on Alex’s head, or deliberately picks up a toy Alex is playing with and walks away with it, smiling all the time. Grr.

On the parental front, we are “getting by.” We have had two friends who have been a near-constant presence for the past week or so; that ends at the end of this week, unfortunately (hey, they have lives, too). We have had wonderful meals brought to our door every evening, and wonderiful friends stopping by or calling. We are figuring out how to work Alex’s presence into our routine; now we need to get to the point where one person can take on Alex and all four kids at once, so the other can work. (Yeah, work…you know, that blissful time when you’re productively occupied in the quiet, beautiful adult world, and people actually pay you for it?) Right now we wake up with the kids between 6:30 and 7:00 and are on kids constantly until 9 or 9:30, which leaves precious little time for paperwork (or blogging) if we’re going to get a full night’s sleep. In a normal summer, we’d split the day in two, with Susan working from 6:30 to 1:30 and me working the rest of the afternoon until dinner. Right now it feels like we need two parents on pretty much constantly. Overall, I’d say things are trending better, although having Alex revert back to some of his earlier behaviors was discouraging.

On the upside, when he learns English, he should be a regular chatterbox. During his bath and bedtime routine he was happily talking up a storm about something or other. I’m glad that he seems to know what he’s going on about! Susan tried to teach him how to play with Legos again, and was partially successful; he is still mostly interested in throwing them. I tried him on crayons and paper, but got absolutely no interest. He doesn’t seem to get what it means to read a book, even when it’s done in Russian. We will continue to work on these school readiness activities, though, and see what happens.

I listened to a talk recently by Fr. Thomas Richter called “Trust in the Lord.” Did you know that your greatest weakness or helplessness—that which you are powerless to change?—is also potentially the most holy ground of your life? That’s because it’s where we need to depend on God to get us through, to do what we are incapable of doing, and that vulnerable dependence opens us up more fully to receive all the good things God wants for us. G. K. Chesterton apparently advised "suicide of consciousness" when we're in extremis--unable to control events around us. Stop thinking so much...stop worrying...take your consciousness to a higher place, where it meets God's presence. Fr. Richter (drawing on the tradition) recommends that instead of focusing our prayer on our “storm” (the problems we have no control over), we focus our prayer on trusting God. The simple prayer he suggested is: “Jesus, I trust in you.”

I have been praying that a lot today!