Catching Up

Some pictures from last Friday after I washed the girls' hair.

Not such a flattering picture of me (I hadn't done anything to myself since I woke up!) but I have precious few pictures of me with the kids so I decided to post this one (for the album).

Love this picture of Isaiah riding the garbage truck.

It has been awhile since I have written a post . . . something about getting ready for Christmas! 

A big milestone occurred at church yesterday: Isaiah went to his class – and stayed in his class - during all of the church service!  The first time we went to church (many weeks ago) and all walked Abram to his class, Isaiah went in and started playing. But, of course we took him out and kept him with us. We have intentionally not let him see Abram going to his class, knowing that he would want to play. On the way to church today we threw out the idea of taking him with us to drop Abram off and seeing what he does. He walked right in and started playing. I asked him if he wanted to stay and play – he said, “yes.” I told him that mommy was going to go (and pointed the other direction) - he said, “okay.” And that was that! I kept my phone very handy and checked it a lot but they never needed to call me. The teacher said that when she was changing Abram’s diaper, Isaiah wandered out the door looking for Abram. J . If Abram weren’t in his class, I don’t think it would have gone so smoothly the first time. I’m thankful it did.

I was glad to have survived last week. It was difficult in ways I couldn’t figure out for awhile. Besides Isaiah having a hard time early in the week, the girls had a pretty good week so there weren’t major behavior issues that were creating difficulty. By the end of each day, though, I was utterly exhausted and felt like crying. Little things were affecting me emotionally in unusually BIG ways. I couldn’t bounce back from the things that were bothering me emotionally like I usually can.  Finally Jason and I talked - after I had communicated poorly with him a number of times. J

This new life has begun to feel very “normal” - there are many good things about it, I love my kids and they feel like my kids so I didn’t know what there was to be upset about.  But, as Jason and I talked, I realized that although life has seemed “normal,” it is not exactly normal when you don’t speak the same language as your children. Yes, we can communicate basic needs and instructions but as I thought about it I realized there is a lot of “unseen” energy/emotion exerted in staying relationally connected to children I don’t speak the same language as. It totally reminded me of how it felt to live in a different country/culture. You can’t just wake up and go about your day without giving concerted effort to what used to be normal, daily functioning because those thing are much different than at “home” (or in my case, my “old life”). Therefore, this creates a baseline stress within you that isn’t always apparent. While I didn’t often feel stress from an obvious source, there is just a higher level of unapparent stress that goes into parenting kids who are not yet speaking your language or attached to you.

This has caused me scale back in trying to do much of anything else outside of my home and my kids. (Last week I tried to do a few more things because I thought things were going well.)

I need to start jotting down more of the mixed-cultural communication that happens around here on a very regular basis (all the time, really!).  Like when Jason reminds the girls to put their seat belts on in the van and one of them says, ‘seatbelt de ja.’ I don’t know French but because I know what “de ja vu” means, I have picked up that “de ja” (which the kids say a lot) means already. So, she was telling us that she already had her seat belt on. We knew what she said so the communication was a success.

The lingala or French word “de” means “of” so the girls are constantly using a mix of English and their language saying “water bottle de me?” (asking where her water bottle is) or “friend de mommy” (mommy’s friend). It is this kind of communication that has become so normal to us, but if any outside person were to spend an hour with our family, I think it would probably seem quite abnormal! And I am totally fine with that. God has given me much grace - at this point to not have expectations of what this new family should look like. I have no idea how long it is going to take before we can fully communicate with our kids. And I need His grace to continue to help me not worry about that.

Today has been a very difficult day . . . a lot having to do with the girls wanting extensions in their hair for Christmas but not expecting that I would do it myself instead of going to get it done. The staff in C paid to have it done before they came here so in their minds we should just go pay to get it done. I tried explaining that it would cost hundreds of dollars to have someone else do it. So, there was all kinds of misunderstanding and disappointment this morning.  I did put four extensions in Claire’s hair this morning (thanks to calling a friend at church to walk me through it). But she has since decided she wants to wait until after New Year’s to have me do it (she wasn’t upset, I think she just realized the amount of time it would take and wants to wait). So, we took out the four extensions. We’ll chalk those up to practice! The jury is still out on whether Zoe will have me do her hair.

We had some other big control issues at lunch. I gave a few sardines from the last container to one child, which caused another child to be very upset that they could not have the whole container of sardines to themselves. That child refused to eat lunch. I showed a time on the clock and said if the lunch wasn’t eaten by that time, lunch time would be finished and the food would be put away. No lunch was eaten. I said I would be happy to provide more food at snack time and dinner and that would be the next time to eat. This child was in tears a good part of the afternoon because he/she was suffering the consequences of his/her choice to not eat lunch.