We accepted our referral for Little Boy almost exactly one year ago. Almost a week prior to that, on a weekday at about 10am, I had gotten out of a meeting at work when I came back to my desk and saw a Skype message from Mr. P. saying that the case manager at our agency had called me and left a voicemail; he wrote in big letters: WE HAVE A REFERRAL. Surprise! My heart raced as I typed back to him, joyous, incredulous… and confused. We had only been officially waiting 10 months when we were expecting to wait 12-14 months. We hadn’t even had our “referral preparation” phone call with our case manager, which was scheduled some weeks away. Within minutes, we were on a conference call with the case manager, who admitted it was a surprise to be talking to us so soon before telling us everything the agency knew about Little Boy: his name, his age (30 months), the region he was from, some basic health information. She emailed us two photos of him. He looked sad, scared… and confused.

Only 3 months before that, we had changed the age range of our adoption request from 0-12 months to 0-36 months. Now, with the dramatic slowdown in Ethiopian adoptions, a lot of families are doing the same thing, but our reasons had less to do with expediency and more to do with an awareness of what we were prepared to handle. When we first began the adoption process, our social worker cautioned us that children who came from Ethiopia were often much older than their paperwork claimed, and that a 3 year old child could actually be 5. Factor in the time it would take to travel to Ethiopia twice, and “You could be bringing home a Kindergartner,” she said, which was a bit unsettling. But, after reading the stories of families who adopted older children from Ethiopia, we realized we could handle it. And we knew that the older children were the ones really in need of families — there’s hundreds if not thousands of people waiting to adopt babies, which has lead to the very corruption that, I predict, will ultimately end international adoption in Ethiopia within a few years. So we changed our age range to 0-36 months and joked nervously about the teenager we’d soon be bringing home.

(It strikes me that, if we had not changed our age range from 0-12 months, we would still be waiting for a referral. I frequent the circuit of Ethiopian adoption blogs from families using our agency, including one written by a woman who has been waiting nearly 26 months for a referral for a child 0-18 months of either gender. She wrote the other day about how she couldn’t believe her and her husband were facing another Christmas without even a picture of a child to hold and cherish, and my heart broke for her, because adoption is the only option for her, and because we, too, could have still been waiting.)

The same day we received our referral, I emailed his photo and his health records to an international adoption doctor who does referral screenings. This is standard procedure for most adoptions, having become critical when adoption in Russia was big and children could be screened for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome from their facial dimensions. With Ethiopia, there’s not a whole lot the doctor can tell you, and in fact most of the things she did caution us about turned out to be non-issues (she told us “not to believe” that he was really toilet-trained; she told us his belly was distended because of parasites). She gave us some positives too, noting his large head circumference indicated that his brain was growing. The one thing we really drilled her about was his age. “His eyes look… old, don’t they?” I asked. “Do you think he could be 5 instead of 2 and a half?” She admitted there was a possibility he was older, not 5 but maybe 3, yet there was no way she could tell for sure from a photo. And so, with great excitement and a little fear of the unknown, we accepted the referral.

One year ago, we first saw his picture, and he was scared, sad, and confused. So much can change in a year! Last night, I cuddled with Little Boy in bed as he stretched out his little body and wrapped his little arms around me. “I tired!” he yawned before giggling and snuggling his head against my chest. I wanted to freeze time, to forever be able to hold and behold this youth, this joy, this little bird broken out of his egg.

The biggest source of friction between Little Boy and myself comes in the car, when we’re driving either to or from home and work/day care. “Mom, look! Look!” he’ll call from the back seat. I, ever the cautious driver, will make vague noises of interest, as experience has taught me he wants to show me a truck, a police car, or (lately) Christmas lights, or he simply wants me to look at him while he is regaling me with day care tales.

“You no looking at me?” he’ll say when he fails to detect my eyes.

“Mommy has to look at the road,” I’ll explain.

“No. You no looking at me!” he’ll say, his voice full of hurt.

“Mommy has to look at the road!” I’ll say. “I don’t want to hit another car. I don’t want to get into an accident.” But for all my carefully-worded logic about all the bad things that could happen if Mommy lifted her eyes from the road in order to look at a light-strung bush, he is deeply offended and starts muttering things like “Mommy no good, Mommy bad” for the duration of the car ride home while I turn up the radio and try to look happy.

There is little I can do. I’m not going to start sneaking peeks away from the road simply to appease him, and anyway, he is starting to understand or at least absorb my reasoning. The other night, we were reading a book that features a rabbit, bird, and mouse in non sequitur situations with various trucks. In the garbage truck scene, the bird and mouse tending to the trash bins while the rabbit sat in the driver’s seat. “Where is the rabbit?” Little Boy asked.

“He’s driving,” I said, pointing to the rabbit. “Driving, like Mommy.”

“Yes!” he said. Pause, and then “We have to look at the road,” he said, and the intonation was an exact imitation of me. “We have to look at the road.”

“Yes, the rabbit has to look at the road,” I confirmed, somewhat abashed.

“We have to look at the road!” he repeated. “We have to look at the road!”

Oh gawd. Do I really sound like such a prim nag?

Little Boy then carefully strung together a question, the gist of which was: When he is big (a concept that I’ve been emphasizing lately because he was steadfast in his refusal to “get big” until I explained he couldn’t drive a car unless he was big), and I am little (a concept that I have no idea where he got), and when I sit in the little seat and he is driving, will he “have to look at the road?” Oh, ha, he was being snarky without even trying. And he is dreaming of his revenge.

Once time, I didn’t look at the road. We were driving in a residential neighborhood and I heard, “Mommy, look! Look! Christmas moose!”

“What? What?” I said, my eyes seeking out his pointing finger so I could follow its guidance to a small herd of cheap plastic reindeer on a crowded lawn. “Moose?”

“Christmas moose!”

I stifled my giggles and floated home in mirth. Maybe I should stop looking at the road more often.

Earlier this week, our town celebrated the lighting of its Christmas tree in the town center on a chilly evening. Traffic was blocked to accommodate the festivities, which included free hot chocolate/fried dough/cupcakes, face painting, Santa Claus, and the pièce de résistance: fake snow blowing down from the roof of the bank onto a stretch of sidewalk.

This was right before the beloved balloon slipped off of his wrist and floated into the sky, to Little Boy’s profound disappointment. But it was fun while it lasted.

At 6:30pm, Santa turned on the tree lights and got into a house-drawn Christmas chariot (which confused a few wee ones expecting reindeer), and made his way down the street to the bank, where he would pose for photos. I tried to maintain a brisk pace to the bank so we wouldn’t have to wait long to see Santa, but the throng of parents and children made it impossible, and I refused to be one of those aggressive parents who weaved and bobbed rudely through the crowd. By the time we reached the bank, the line was 50-deep and Little Boy was pretty uninterested, so we grabbed a free hot chocolate and sat on a bench.

Mr. P showed up. Little Boy was enjoying his hot chocolate (“I love drinking chocolate,” he repeatedly told us) and was full of news for Daddy about the “snow,” about Santa, about a man in snowman costume, and…. what’s this? “Mommy, boys, one-two!” (In Little Boy speak, he was essentially saying that I associated in some way with two boys/men.)

“Oh really?” Mr. P asked. “That’s very interesting!”

“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” I said.

Then he said it again. “Mommy, boys, one-two!”

“He must be talking about the man at the bank,” I said. “I entered the raffle. I talked to him. But two boys? I don’t know.”

“One-two boys!” Little Boy said, pointing at me.

“Thank you for reporting this to me,” Mr. P said in a serious voice that was brimming with hilarity.

Ha. Sometimes, it can be really cute and funny to have a son with a non-precise grasp on the English language. And other times, it can break up your marriage. Happy holidays!

The only two boys in my life.... looking at the tree

Life is never boring with a 3 year old boy around. I have dim recollections of pre-Little Boy life: decompressing from the work day on the ride home by blaring too-loud alternative music, maybe going to a hot yoga class, maybe going into Cambridge for an event at a bookstore, maybe planning a weekend adventure in the mountains, and then enjoying a leisurely 8pm dinner with Mr. P followed a movie filled with guns, sex, and/or bad language. Now I realize that existence, that is boring.

At 5pm or so, I pick Little Boy up from day care, which is down the street from my office. When I enter his room, the teacher says “Little Boy, look who’s here!” (If she doesn’t see me, the other kids rush to take up the chorus.) Some days he greets me with an exuberant “Mommy!” and rushes to be swooped up in my arms. This usually happens earlier in the week. By Thursday or Friday, he glances at me and puts on his jacket with reluctance, especially if he was in the middle of doing something cool like playing with trains or “reading” a book. Sometimes he’ll show me an art project that his class worked on. This week it was a giant paper turkey, with paper tail feathers on which the teacher wrote what each kid was thankful for. Most kids said they were thankful for their parents or their pets. Little Boy: “I’m thankful for cars.”

On our way to the car, he’s either asking about the weather (raining? cold?) or talking about what wants to eat for dinner (if he’s feeling optimistic, he’ll rally for pizza; if he’s feeling realistic, he’ll ask for pasta, meat, sauce and cheese, which is replete with hidden veggies, hee hee hee.) Now that the sun sets at 5pm, he’s a bit sad about not going outside. He’s also scared of the dark and insists I put a light on in the backseat of the car. We drive home listening to not-too-loud alternative music. When we drive through woodsy Concord and Lincoln, he’ll point to the trees and ask me about bears or lions. When we drive past where Route 2 intersects with I-95, he’ll sigh and say “Too many cars.” (But… I thought you were thankful for cars, right?)

When we get home, he’s focused again on dinner. Some nights I can just heat things up and serve right away; other nights, I have to cook 30+ more minutes — grating carrots and zucchini, cutting onions and red peppers needle-thin, and sauteing it all with ground meat and spices. He does not like being hungry and months ago I would have plied him with pre-meal snacks so he does not have to be hungry (which must feel horrible to a child who was malnourished for the first years of his life), but we’re slowly trying to normalize his eating and teach him that being a little bit hungry before dinner is okay. It helps if I show him the food is cooking and let him stir the food. (I wouldn’t mind the snacking if he didn’t have such a voracious appetite, many times eating more food than me while bragging about how he ate four sandwiches for lunch at school. And I’m training for a marathon.) After he eats two bowls of pasta-meat-sauce-cheese-hidden veggies, he’ll usually demand more food (bread and chocolate or cream cheese), and lately I’ve been giving him oranges instead. He’s reluctant to eat it and suddenly loses his appetite and asks to “go down” from the table.

After his dinner, he starts demanding “television, television,” often with a pained whimper. Oh, how I miss the days when he ignored the television! He does this even though our rule is no television until after Mommy and Daddy eat. So he ends up playing while Mommy studies for the GREs (how many times have I studied for this test? Around 4x-12¾=2√2 times. It’s funny to see what age is doing to my mind. The verbal sections are easier than ever, while the math is ridiculously hard and often borderline absurd. Still, it’s for a good cause… finally aiming to get my Masters.) Daddy will arrive home to great fanfare and immediately be enlisted to play. For little boys, playing is not what I remember. I remember playing quietly, in a self-contained area with my dolls or my record player. When he plays, everything in the house becomes a potential prop. Lately he’s started getting into building “guns” out of his legos and shooting everything and everyone in his sight: “Bwew, Bwew!” This is a bit disturbing to me, especially the time he said “Mommy, look!” and “shoot” himself in the head while crumbling to the floor. But I ultimately know this is a natural mode of fantasy play for young boys, and to tell him to stop would be squashing his imagination. So I smile and try not to get offended when he repeatedly blasts my head off.

Little Boy gets about 20 minutes of television a night, usually a movie. Lately we’ve been watching Christmas movies, and he now has some understanding of the approaching holiday. Since Daylight Savings ended, we’ve start putting him to bed at 8:30 rather than 9 (which frequently turned into 9:30). Bedtime is never easy, as he seems to have a burst of fresh energy the minute the pajamas go on. Mr. P and I alternate who puts him to bed. We always read at least one book with him. We don’t actually read the words, as he cannot yet follow and is usually too focused on pointing at the pictures and making observations. He has an incredible eye for detail in the pictures. Then the lights go off. He cannot yet fall asleep on his own and craves a lot of affection while he’s falling asleep. It’s so peaceful — at last, peaceful! — that if I’m not careful, I too will drift off, only to wake several hours later with various pains from the cramped bed and stumble to the cold side of our bed. All in all though, I actually sleep better now than in Pre-Little Boy days… probably because I’m being run ragged.

Getting Ready for Bed (and vamping for the camera)

One source of continuing discomfiture for Little Boy is this concept that we have to work and he has to go to school. Some morning are very hard, with him avidly protesting the day’s docket (i.e., him school, us work) while proposing alternative agendas (usually going to the playground, playing with cars, or eating cream cheese).

Way back when I was on half-maternity leave, Mr. P countered Little Boy’s opposition to him leaving the house for work by explaining that Daddy needed to “go get the money.” This was the only justification that seemed to hold any sway with Little Boy. When the French grandparents came for their week-long visit, they reported that Little Boy seemed very concerned about “Daddy money,” as that was all he would talk about, sometimes for more than an hour: “Daddy money?” he would ask them, apparently obsessed with this notion that once Daddy got the money, he would return home.

Now, I know it’s probably not progressive child-rearin’ to constantly reinforce the link between work and money; ideally, we should be teaching him that work is a pleasurable experience that one engages in for self-edification and to make the world a better place, and that school is a place he goes not because Mommy and Daddy work but because education is paramount and learning is fun, but these arguments hold little sway with a 3-year old. He understands money, though. Once we were in a toy store in Provincetown and he spotted a version of the classic Operation game that featured Buzz Lightyear as the patient. Of course he pleaded with us to buy it. Of course we were not buying a game that buzzes annoyingly in accordance with the player’s lack of fine motor skills, so we pointed at the $30 price tag and explained it was too much money. So what did Little Boy do? He mulled around the store and found a penny! He ran to Mr. P, excited, proud, holding the penny up: “Daddy, look! Look! Money!” He pointed to the game, confident it would now be his. “Good work!” we told him. “Now do that 2999 more times!”

Little Boy associates me less with work and money, but I’ll discuss his innate “Leave it to Beaver” sensibilities another day. Actually, this could be because I’m less likely to use “money” as my reason for going to work. “You have to go to school, I have to go to work,” I’ll explain, pushing on his sneakers and pulling on his jacket. “Because we’re upper-middle class slaves, and that is our lot in life.” I try to say this happily.

Yesterday morning Little Boy was particularly upset at the prospect of saying good-bye to Daddy, who had to leave early. “Little Boy, I have to go to work to get the money,” he explained, and Little Boy suddenly ran into the living room and returned with a big handful of coins from our change bowl, offering it to Daddy with the same pride and excitement that he had when he presented the penny in the toy store. We praised him for his resourcefulness — yea, Little Boy found the money, he fixed everything! It was a beautiful moment which, like too many, was followed by crushing disappointment when Daddy went to work, Little Boy went to school, and Mommy went to that purgatory where working Mommies go.

"I'd Rather Be Hauling Wood Chips

Playground Fun