Back to School, Part 1

While going back to school is probably routine for most parents of 9-year-olds, I couldn’t be more excited or nervous about DJ starting school. Every fall for the last ten or so years, I’ve dreamed about my child’s first day and all of the back-to-school preparations. As usual in the world of parenting–adoptive or not–things aren’t going exactly how I had envisioned them once upon a time.

First, DJ will be starting 4th grade, not pre-school or kindergarten. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of me is jealous of all those moms sending their kids off to their “real” first day of school. One of the hardest parts about being an adoptive parent of an older child is that you’ve already missed so many important “firsts” in your child’s life. Nonetheless, I’m fairly confident that I’ll be just as proud as any parent when the bus pulls up on  Thursday morning.

Second, school shopping with a 9-year-old boy was not the warm-and-fuzzy experience that I was expecting. Go figure, huh? Turns out that DJ would rather be checking out the Legos in the Toys Department (like most other 9-year-old boys) than helping me pick out new clothes. In fact, I had to promise him ice cream in order to get him to try on exactly five pairs of pants, none of which fit him, of course.

Fortunately, DJ brought a lot of clothes with him and has two aunts who have been very generous  in sharing clothes outgrown by my nephews so our failure to buy new clothes really isn’t a problem. At least not for DJ. I, on the other hand, am a different story.

While I pride myself on being a fairly non-materialistic person, I was actually sad that DJ didn’t want a bunch of new clothes for school. I think most of my angst, however, was more about growing up in a large family where money was always pretty stressful than conspicuous consumption. Now as an adult who is financially stable, I struggle with the desire to want to give my child more than what I had and yet raise them to be a responsible consumer. Or put less graciously, I don’t want a child who is spoiled rotten.

Nonetheless, I managed to cover my disappointment and resigned myself to just buying a couple of shirts, including a retro Star Wars t-shirt that I’m secretly hoping he chooses to wear on the first day of school. Okay, I also splurged on a $30 Pittsburgh Steelers hoodie even though he absolutely didn’t need it. What can I say?

Then we moved on to the highly-anticipated (at least for me) school supply portion of the shopping trip. Thankfully, DJ was much more willing to shop for pencils and folders than shirts and pants. His predilection for being indecisive, however, meant that we spent an inordinate amount of time debating mechanical pencils vs. #2 pencils, Clone Wars folders vs. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and on and on. I wouldn’t have minded, but the poor kid agonized over every purchase. He didn’t say it out loud, but I could tell that he was worried about having the “right” kind of everything for his new school and the possibility of appearing “baby-ish.”

Finally, I never expected to be so emotional about DJ starting school. I teared up just talking to his school principal on the phone out of sheer joy! I also feel an overwhelming sense of relief that he’ll (hopefully!) make friends–something that he’s refused to even try to do all summer–and won’t have to rely on me as his primary playmate.

Warning: blatant self promotion

At the same time though, I’m a little worried that I’ll be really lonely once he’s gone. After waiting so long for a child, I’m reluctant to give him up, even if it is for school. I keep telling myself though that it will be great to get back to more of a pre-kid routine, including my freelance editing work and spending hours in coffee shops as well as the really mundane like uninterrupted time in the bathroom.

So that’s where we stand with T-minus 36 hours before DJ’s first day of school in Pittsburgh. Hopefully I’ll have a post up in a couple of days with how the first day actually went! In the meantime, feel free to write in the comments about how you imagined your child’s first day of school and whether or not it actually turned out that way.

A Day at the Museum

To be perfectly honest, it was closer to 1 hour & 29 minutes, but that’s still pretty good for the boy who has been telling me for weeks that he doesn’t want to go to the Carnegie Natural History Museum. I’ll admit though that I took him to Bruegger’s for bagels this morning to soften him up, and after several rounds of no’s he finally agreed to go. (For those of you who were really paying attention at the beginning, there were concerns about him being sensitive to gluten, but so far the only allergies that still seem to be significant are peanuts & pork.)

Although DJ vehemently hates getting his picture taken–so much for the photo album that I bought to keep pictures of all of our family firsts–I managed to get a few shots. His favorite exhibit, by far, was the minerals & gems, which was one of my favorites as a kid.

Polar World at the Carnegie Natural History Museum

DJ’s unwillingness to try things has definitely been one of our biggest challenges. And like so many things, it’s hard to discern when his reluctance is your run-of-the-mill 9-year-old behavior or something deeper or most likely a bit of both. I’m sure that I’m not the first mom to say this, but if I hear “Boring!” or “I don’t want to” one more time, I might lose my mind.

But as I keep reminding myself, I always knew that parenthood would be one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever attempted to do.

When you go through the adoption process for an older child, you are asked many times & in many different ways what kind of child are you willing to accept. I’m sure for every couple some questions are obvious, even idiotic. For us, accepting a child of any race was a no-brainer. We also knew that there was a strong likelihood that our adopted child would be born of parents who abused drugs and alcohol, possibly while pregnant.

And then there were the difficult and disturbing questions that remind prospective parents yet again how much these waiting children have already endured in their short lives. Are you willing to accept a child who has been physically or sexually abused? A child with a terminal illness? A child of rape/incest? A child who starts fires or smears feces or abuses animals?

After years of filling out these types of forms and attending classes for foster/adoptive parents, I feel like we had a fairly realistic picture of the types of issues and challenges that our adoptive child might be bringing to our family.

So while we’ve probably had more than our fair share of “bad days” and hours-long tantrums in the last two months, I’m choosing to focus on the incredible job that DJ has been doing as he adjusts to his new life with us. The times that he said “yes” to something new, like going to the museum today, or told us that he loves us “the mostest.”

And when I think that I can’t take him choosing to play video games over going for a walk on a beautiful summer day like I imagine all of the “good” moms & kids are doing, I’m going to remind myself that my boy is trying his best, and I love him exactly as he is right now.

A Very Good Day

Morning:

• Rise & shine at a very reasonable 8:30 (for the kid who claims to want to sleep in until noon) and no fussing over his morning shower
• Bagels at Bruegger’s; reading Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary and Parents magazine (I’ll let you guess who was reading what)
• Visit to the Squirrel Hill library

Afternoon:

• Trip to Target; lots of excitement over new Lego Star Wars sets. Plus, I worked up enough courage to allow DJ to stay in the Toys dept. for a couple of minutes on his own while I did some grocery shopping
• No complaints from DJ about his reduced screen time, and he even put WWE 12 on mute while I was trying to do some work!
• First time that I’ve seen DJ drink more than one glass of water in a day thanks to his new water bottle–why do things always taste better to kids when it comes in a bottle?

Evening:

• Yummy dinner of lemon chicken, fried red cabbage, and rice (DJ still had his regular Kraft Mac & Cheese, but at least he tried the chicken & didn’t say anything looked gross which was a nice improvement)
• Fireman’s Fair in Castle Shannon with Uncle N & the cousins–one of the summertime rituals of my adolescence that I was excited to share with DJ for the first time. Rides, games, Slurpees, & funnel cake…what’s not to love? Really wish that I had some pics to share, but guess who HATES getting his picture taken 😦
• Started the 2nd Diary of a Wimpy Kid book for story time
• DJ falling asleep to his book-on-CD, Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
• Laying in bed writing this post and listening to John watch Arrested Development

One month, five days, & ten hours

Give or take an hour or so, it has been one month, five days, and ten hours since we arrived home with DJ. And while I’ve tried to get back to my poor, neglected blog at least a dozen times since then, it seems like every time that I started to write that (a) it was almost 11pm, (b) I was exhausted, and (c) my attempt always dissolved into surfing the internet for information about tennis lessons or bouncy houses or some other DJ-related topic.

I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that pretty much everything has changed since we met DJ. While that is definitely true for both John and myself, probably a bit more so for me since I’m the one home with DJ now that John is back at work. I’ve gone from someone who pretty much operated on her own schedule for the last few years–minus the occasional demands from part-time work, the dogs, and extended family–to someone whose days pretty much revolve around someone else. Not that I’m complaining…the past few weeks have been the most amazing of my entire life, but it has been a lot of transition for all of us. I’ve just been trying really hard to give DJ as much structure as possible–especially during this difficult time of transition–and structure has been missing from my life in a big way since I stopped working full-time.

Rather than summing up everything that has happened in a single post–and so that I can actually publish a post after my long hiatus–I’ll just make the rest of this post a series of lists. Hopefully some of you will be inspired to add your own responses!

I know it’s early on, but these are some of my favorite things about being a new mom:

1. Family story time before bed–we’ve already blown through two Origami Yoda books and most of the way through the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid!

2. Hugs

3. Telling DJ how awesome he is everyday

4. Going to the library & hanging out in the children’s section

5. Having an excuse to watch kids’ movies–although that’s wearing out surprisingly fast. If DJ had his way, he’d watch a movie with me during the day and watch the same movie with John at night everyday.

My New Guilty Pleasures

1. Watching The Regular Show

2. Miniature golf in the middle of a weekday

3. Ice cream (okay, that’s not a “new” guilty pleasure but somehow it tastes better with DJ around)

4. Buying books & toys for DJ

5. YouTube

Things I Miss

1. Eating Indian food

2. My blissful ignorance of all things WWE

3. Silence

4. Choosing the radio station in the car

5. Watching non-children’s TV

 

I’m so grateful for all of my readers’ support and interest! I will get back to more regular posting as soon as I can. In the meantime, please feel free to add your own additions to the lists.

I Feel It All

I accidentally hit “publish” before I made final revisions so sorry to everyone who got the unrevised version!!

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Okay, so I’m shamelessly stealing my title from a song by Feist, but it perfectly expresses what our trip has been like so far. The last few days have been amazing and wonderful as well as heartwrenching and exhausting. Our trip began very early on Sunday morning, around 4am to be exact. Or 3:15 if you count when I woke up & couldn’t fall back asleep because of the stress & excitement.

Despite getting up in the middle of the night, we still managed to cut it a little close for our first flight. Who knew the airport would be so crowded at 6 o’clock  in the morning? Actually, probably everyone else but us, but I digress.

The first leg of our cross-country journey was Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. From there, we flew to Seattle. Believe it or not, this was my first time west of Missouri. For the record, I’m not a total “yinzer” (slang for someone from Pittsburgh). I’ve been to Europe & the Canary Islands but just never out west.

 For the final part of our trip, we took one of those puddle jumpers to the town where DJ’s foster family lives. As soon as we walked out of the tiny airport outside to our rental car, we knew that we weren’t in Pittsburgh anymore. In fact, the differences between our urban neighborhood and DJ’s current hometown became clearer the further we drove away from the airport. It’s not that we hadn’t realized before that DJ was living in a fairly rural area, but I couldn’t help but feel a little bitter that he would have yet another thing to adjust to on top of all of the other major life changes that were rapidly approaching.

I wish that I could say that I remembered exactly how I felt as we drove closer to the house, but honestly, like most of the last 72 hours, it still doesn’t feel real. I know that I was excited and terrified. Would I burst into tears as soon as I saw him & scare him? Would he recognize us as the people who were going to take him away from his loving foster family and friends & hate us on the spot? Would he run & jump into our arms? Would he be just as sweet & cute as he was in his pictures and video?

To be brutally honest, that very first face-to-face meeting was actually a bit anti-climactic. Nobody cried, and nobody jumped into anyone’s arms. But DJ was as sweet & as cute as we thought he would be, and he immediately put us at ease with his shy but eager demeanor.

His very first question was both simple and revealing: “what school am I going to go to?” I think John & I were both relieved to be thrown such a soft ball on our first question. Our answer must’ve satisfied him because he seemed to visibly relax.

I feel like I should confess at this point that I thought that I was fairly prepared–emotionally and mentally–to meet my son in-person, but I was wrong. I could never express both the happiness and the longing that I’ve felt since that first meeting. Immediately, I wanted to be able to take him in my arms and make everything in his world safe and good. I wanted to tell him how much I loved him and how I would do anything for him and that I would always be there for him no matter what.

And at the same time, I understood intrinsically that I couldn’t do any of those things. Yet. That the very best thing thing that I could do for him was to be patient. To trust that someday I’ll be able to hug him tightly and that he’ll know through & through that he is the most amazing gift that we could’ve ever hoped for.

Almost Home

(Drum roll please) Here are the pics of DJ’s really-close-to-being-totally-finished room. Except for some minor floor repairs and the rug, we’re pretty much done. Yes, I said floor repairs…it’s the room that just keeps on giving, but we’re really happy with how it turned out.

Fun sports bedding from Aunt L, Uncle N, & cousins

Drafting table from Aunt T & Uncle D

Curtains made by Aunt S and installed with the help of Uncle M

Built-in bookcase that J & I refinished

We’re finally down to the last few days before we head across the country to bring DJ home. The nervous energy that I was feeling for the last week or so has morphed into an eerie calm of sorts. All of my lists that I’ve been working on for the past few months have gradually gotten shorter & shorter. More importantly, I’m also starting to accept the fact that we’ll never be completely ready for this momentous event that’s going to change our lives forever. Instead of sheer panic, however, there’s just this strong pull willing me through the minutes, hours, & days until I meet my son face-to-face for the first time.

Since most of the work has been finished on the room, we spent a fair amount of time this week working on what we call the “DJ Plan.” Basically, trying to sketch out a daily routine for him and to finalize our “house rules,” including things like chores, allowance, and screen time. Of course, I made the mistake of looking on Pinterest for ideas for a chore chart. Suddenly, my little black-and-white chart made on Word felt pretty uninspired. Fortunately for me, I have a big sister who kindly told me that sometimes a particular version of her chore chart doesn’t last more than a week. Since she’s one of the most creative (and all-around amazing) moms that I know, her reassurance made me feel a lot better!

As instructed in our adoption classes, we also wanted to have a short list of rules that we could give to DJ right away to help him transition into our home. Here’s what we came up with:

1. Respect yourself
2. Be kind
3. Be honest
4. Be gentle with the dogs

As for Rule #1, we mean it to include things like daily hygiene as well as helping him to develop a healthy self esteem. Anyone who knows us probably guessed that rules #2 and #3 were mine and John’s respectively. Kindness is a big deal to me; it’s free, it takes relatively little effort, and it makes people feel good…what more could you ask for? For John, honestly is extremely important. We really want to create the type of environment for DJ that he’ll feel comfortable enough to be honest with us, even with the hard stuff that we might not “want” to hear but should.

I’ve also been researching summer learning activites, which has been even more intimidating than the chore charts. Being a college professor who is used to explaining to students that I’m not here to entertain them, I feel woefully unqualified to develop a fun curriculum for a 4th grader. (Although the fact that I just debated curricula vs. curriculum for several seconds makes me wonder if I’m still qualified to be a professor.) Anyway, I’m already planning numerous trips to all of the local museums…that counts as educational, right?

I’m also hoping to implement a regular reading time everyday in addition to reading with DJ before bed. In fact, going to the library is one of the things at the top of my list of summer activities–and yes, there’s really a list. Maybe I’ll include it in an upcoming post if anyone is curious or just wants to help make sure that I check everything off.

After years of waiting for this moment, it’s really hard to believe that it’s real. In fact, I’m so excited that I’m half-concerned that this entire post is gibberish. But whether I can wrap my head around it or not, it’s almost time to stop all of the planning and get down to the nitty gritty like packing and cleaning our house for the pet sitter. Actually, knowing us, it’s probably a bit past that time, and there will be quite a frenzy of activity between now & getting on the plane. (I love that our family & friends have been dropping little hints by asking us if we’re packed yet. LOL!)

To my kind readers who have been following our story: life is about to become fairly hectic, but I’ll do my best to update the blog in the not-too-distant future. The exciting part is that the next time that you hear from me, I’ll be a M-O-M. Let the real adventures begin!

Decorating DJ’s Room

Someone pointed out the other day that getting ready for DJ is a bit like trying to compress nine months into a couple of weeks, and I wholeheartedly agree.

There have been so many things to do and to think about that life has felt a bit surreal. After fourteen years of it just being John and me, we will become a family of three!

But despite the years of waiting and preparing leading up to all of this, I’ve been in a constant state of feeling overwhelmed and unprepared ever since we found out that we were chosen to be DJ’s forever family. At the same time though, I’ve also been horribly impatient for him to be here.

One of our biggest projects has been transforming our former office/dogs room into a bedroom for a boy who is not quite a tween but not a little boy either.

My ever-industrious husband had a whole list of to-do’s before we could even start painting or buying furniture. He updated the outlets, added a ceiling fan, patched up the walls, fixed the windows, and refinished the floor. Meanwhile, I had the much easier tasks of searching Pinterest for decorating & furniture ideas and coming up with a color pallet for the room.

Decorating my child’s room has been a dream of mine for a long time. While part of me was a little disappointed that we wouldn’t be starting off with a nursery, I can honestly say that decorating DJ’s room has truly been a labor of love. I’m not normally much of a shopper, but I loved looking for things for DJ’s room. Here are some of my favorites:

Of course, once we finally started the painting, the city experienced a rather unusual heatwave, even for late May. The up-side was that we had a lot of time to listen to Pittsburgh Pirates baseball on the radio. (Normally, listening to the Pirates wouldn’t be very enjoyable, but they’re doing pretty well so far this season so we’re determined to enjoy it while it lasts. Let’s go Bucs!)

Here are some pics of our progress…we finished all of the painting this weekend and my awesome brother & sis-in-law installed the curtains (that my sis-in-law made herself!) on Monday.

So that’s all for now. Folks will have to wait for the big reveal since we’re not quite there yet. In the meantime, we’re keeping busy making our travel plans out west, finishing up the room, and making a big list of all of the great things that we’re going to do with DJ this summer.

A Shower of Friends

This gallery contains 32 photos.

A few weeks ago, our friends threw us a wonderful party to celebrate DJ’s upcoming arrival. My best friend and her DH hosted the shower in their beautiful house on the North Side. It was a perfect spring day filled with friends and laughter and good food. Our friends really went all out…three types of […]

My First (Almost) Mother’s Day

My first mother’s day as a mom…I can’t even type that without tearing up. For years I have anticipated the second Sunday of May with a mixture of gratitude for all of the great mothers in my life and despair because I still wasn’t a mom myself. But even though DJ isn’t here yet, this was a really wonderful Mother’s Day.

In the morning, I walked in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Curewith several members of my family. While I was nervous about the weather (it is Pittsburgh so it was bound to be rainy & chilly regardless of how nice it has been lately), the event felt especially important this year since a good friend of my sis-in-law is battling breast cancer. I know from doing the walk in the past that it is a very humbling and empowering experience being surrounded by so many cancer survivors and their loved ones. I also felt really fortunate to be able to participate this year as a mom myself.

In the afternoon, my family threw us a book-themed shower for DJ. Like every event that my family plans, it was amazing! From my favorite flowers to the delicious food to the great decorations, I was really blown away.

Photo by Susie Puskar

Photo by Susie Puskar

One of the best parts was the “advice tree” that they made where all of the guests could pin their words of wisdom for John and me. As you might’ve guessed, the advice ranged from the profound to the silly. I was really touched by how often family members encouraged us to call on them when we needed help or encouragement. Our family has been so amazingly supportive throughout all of this, and I feel an immense sense of gratitude to all of them.

Some of the most poignant advice came from our nieces & nephews:

Play toys with him.

Don’t ask about girlfriends.

Be good at packing lunches.

Don’t feed him peanuts. (DJ has a peanuts allergy)

But the single piece of advice that I’ll probably repeat to myself an infinite number of times over the next few years came from my dear brother-in-law:

It is always a good day when you don’t go to the emergency room.

Throughout the day, of course, my thoughts were with DJ. I couldn’t help but be envious of his foster mom who would be spending the day with him. What must be going through his young mind? For him, Mother’s Day must be–at best–bittersweet. And this year, not just a little confusing. He can’t be with his biological mom, and then there’s this strange “Mom” in Pittsburgh that he’s never talked to or seen in-person before.

It makes me more than a little sad that even though it will always be an especially joyful day for me, Mother’s Day will never be an easy or simple time for DJ. In the years to come, my hope will be to help Dominick make it a day that he can focus on good memories of all of his “mothers”: myself, his grandmothers, his aunts, his biological mother, and his foster moms. And more than anything, I hope he knows how proud I’ll be to be his mom!

It’s Complicated

Thanks to everyone who’s been checking in, and my apologies for not posting for so long. I’ve actually had quite a bit of trouble writing this latest post. About a week and a half ago, I fell into a bit of a pre-adoption funk, as I’ll call it, and it’s taken me a while to feel comfortable writing about it. Instead, I spent far too much time trying to make myself write about what I think that I should be feeling as an adoptive parent who is a couple weeks (hopefully!) away from meeting their child.

I slowly came to the realization though that if I’m going to blog about my experience with adoption that I should talk about the frustrations and disappointments that go along with it in addition to all of the joy and excitement…

After a very full and happy couple of weeks with lots of updates and progress, things have really slowed down as we’re waiting to hear when the final paperwork will be finished and when we will be able to travel to Oregon. At the same time, I finished up my semester–always a bittersweet time for me but especially now that I’m only an adjunct. I’ve also been babysitting my sweet one-year-old niece and working on getting DJ’s room ready. The result of all of this is that I have had too much time to dwell on the particular challenges of adopting an older child, especially one who lives across the country. All of this brooding has also brought to the surface some of my lingering grief about infertility.

In a traditional adoption, we would have had plenty of opportunities to get to know DJ by this point in the process. We would’ve started with visits with him and the foster family then day outings and built up to an overnight trip. At the very least, we would’ve met him several times and had a much better sense of his personality, his likes & dislikes, his habits, and vice versa. But instead, I’m pretty much a complete stranger to my son. And for now, this child who has become the most important person in my life is still a stranger to me.

In recent weeks, I’ve also been really surprised by how many feelings have come up again in relation to not being able to have biological children. Honestly, I thought my sadness about infertility would magically disappear once we got this far along in the adoption process. And the fact that it hasn’t has been an enormous source of guilt for me.

It’s not that I’m particularly sad about not having a biological child of my own–although I would be lying to say that I didn’t start tearing up when I recently watched the episode of Scrubs when J.D. and Turk find out that Carla is pregnant. In fact, I’m not sure that I’ll ever be completely over not experiencing a full-term pregnancy and giving birth, but that is familiar and well-tread territory.

What I’ve been so darn upset about lately is that I’ve already missed out on so much of my son’s life that I wouldn’t have if he were my biological son. DJ will be almost 9 1/2 years old when we meet him. I will never know him as a baby or as a toddler or a little boy. What I do know is almost entirely based on two phone calls with his case worker and official paperwork in big, white binders.

So that’s the ugly truth that I’ve been struggling with lately and will have to continue to deal with in the oncoming weeks and months and maybe even years. But like so many parts of our adoption story, even the rough parts can be beautiful. Because what I know is that I’ll be all the more grateful for the moments and the memories that I will have with DJ. And in the end, those will amount to a greater whole than I can possibly imagine now.

Thanks again for keeping up with my story. I plan to post in the next week about the wonderful showers hosted by my friends and family as well as my thoughts on my first Mother’s Day as an almost mother.