This weekend we’re moving to our new condo in a neighboring town! Because adopting a two-year just wasn’t hectic and exciting enough! As a co-worker told me, “Just think, the rest of your life will seem really boring compared to this.”
A. seems unfazed by how I’m slowly putting everything in our apartment into boxes, although we haven’t gotten to any of his stuff yet. I don’t think it will hit home until his toys are taped into a box and we unleash him in his new environs. Yesterday we did the final walk-through of our new place with the real estate agents and we took him on a tour, showing him where he would slept and take baths, and he seemed a little like “Okay, whatever, I’m going to run around now because there’s no furniture.”
Courtesy of the packing process, he has learned a new word, “box,” which he pronounces “bock-ess” (and when its plural, it’s “bock-ess-ess.”) He likes to get into the empty boxes and hide, goading me verbally into pretending I don’t know where he is and then “finding” him.
Fragile!
As part of the post-placement adoption process, we have to show our social worker 10 pictures of A., and as cute as he is, I don’t think that will be one of them.
Later that day he curled up into another box and took a nap. When he awoke, he was very proud of himself, pointing repeatedly at the box and saying “A. tenny” (which means sleep.) When Daddy came home, he saw the picture and said, “Is he pretending to be homeless?”
Sleeping in a Box
When A.’s not playing with boxes, he’s working on his English. He’s very eager to communicate with us.
- A. has mastered “hot” and “cold,” though he doesn’t understand “warm.”
- We’re working on the colors using play-doh.
- I used a book of photos of children playing happily at a day care to teach him “boy” and “girl,” a concept that he really got into and began pointing at all pictures of kids and labeling them as such; in doing so, I inadvertently created a third gender, “baby.”
- I also screwed up by demonstrating the concept of “bad” by slapping my wrist, which probably won’t help with his proclivity for hitting (though this behavior has lessened).
- He calls baths “bubbles” and knows that Mommy and Daddy take “showers.”
- One of his favorite words is “careful;” he using it to refer to the act of being careful as well as the effect of not being careful (e.g., dripping yogurt on his shirt — “A. no careful”) and if a situation is not as dangerous as Mommy and Daddy are telling him (e.g., standing on a chair and not falling –“careful no”).
So he’s definitely making an effort, but it’s hard. Yesterday he kept pointing to a surface scratch on his arm and I kept telling him it was “okay;” he pointed to a deeper scratch on my hand (that he made while flailing in bed) and said “Okay? Okay?” “No,” I smiled. “Not okay.”
