What's Up?

Yes, it has been a while since we’ve added anything to our blog.

What’s up?

Hmm. Not sure how to go about answering that question. Did I mention that back in early October we packed for, traveled to and returned from Taiwan? And that we now have a fourth child, a sweet bear-like boy named Seth?

I took a month or so off work. I went back to work. And we’re now partway between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I suppose your better question would be, What’s not up?

There’s a busy-ness with parenting, whether it’s one child or more. But if you only have one child don’t fool yourself into thinking that four’s probably not that much more difficult. You only have 24 hours in the day, no matter how you look at it. Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t realize it until entering the realm of four-children-hood that the Time Gods figure that you’ve already hit your family allotment – everyone is given a maximum of 120 hours per day per family. So as long as you stay with five and under, you’re okay. Once you get to the sixth, you start seeing a reduction in your personal allotment. Your kids still get 24 hours. But the parents see theirs reduced accordingly. So with four kids at 24 hours each, that gives you about 12 hours each, on average. Some days I give Sheri 16 or 18 hours and drink a lot of coffee, and other days she’ll give me more than my 12 hours. I hear, though, that once you have teenagers there’s a whole different way of calculating things. Something about the square root of despair, but that doesn’t make much sense to me yet.

Anyway, what about Seth? He’s doing well. Great. Okay. Up and down. Clingy and then oblivious. Eats and sleeps without much problem. He got sick about two weeks after we got home and I must say that it was horrible – particularly because we didn’t know that he was sick. He just seemed to be grouchy, inconsolable, was sleeping poorly, and wanted nothing to do with me whatsoever. We considered the latter a good thing (though sad for me) because we could see it as a stage in the bonding process, and realized that attaching to Sheri was better than attaching to me, because of a little fact that I eventually was going to have to make my way back to work. But once he worked his way through the virus, he was back to his easygoing self, as easily going to me as to Sheri. And that’s good. But it’s not good. It’s good because he’s pretty easy to live with – feed him, change him, rock him, hug and tickle him, throw him way over your head (ah, that’s me – Sheri threatens divorce when she sees some of my super-tosses), and he’s happy. But it’s bad because there’s still something missing. I think that if we packed him up and brought him back to St. Lucy’s he would be sad – having left some great people behind – but he would transition back to what he knew. The completion of attaching means that’s impossible, that his very DNA wouldn't allow such a hand off. And I mean it. All this nature vs. nurture crap comes from sociologists who have never adopted a child. There comes a point when you are connected by more than an adoption decree and mutual fondness. I think if you’d dig through my DNA code, and that of my children, you’d be surprised to see that there are common strands among all of us, adopted or biological. That’s the mystery of adoption.

I’m not yet ready to say that the months of waiting – the needless extra months of waiting because of a lazy bureaucratic judge – are disappearing. I can’t say that it was worth the wait or that it was all in its own perfect timing, two things people kept saying to console us. The wait was wrong. And for me, until he is fully bonded with us (and us with him) I won’t be able to forgive that judge. Think of it this way. If this adoption had happened in June as it was supposed to have, we would be four months closer to the end of this attachment period.

So, that’s what’s up. Oh, yeah, and the house is a mess and we have very little clean laundry. But I do have a 1L bottle of Jagermeister in the freezer. I tell the kids that it's my cold medecine.