The sticky-note advent calendar

It's not like I'm about to become the centerfold in House Beautiful or anything, but I'm pretty happy with our new advent calendar.

Yup, there it is on the fridge, right next to the "Mommy Dollar Value Chart".  And yes, it's just a list of things to do covered with sticky notes.  I totally took my Christmas to-do list and pretended like it was fun.

December 1. Put up lights.
December 2. Decorate tree.
December 9. Write our sponsored children.
December 14. Make springerli.

 I interspersed my to-do list with a couple of pre-planned events:

December 8. Christmas Caroling with youth group.
December 19. Driver's license dinner.

 I added in a couple of wacky but Christmassy sounding things (I mean, wacky for us):

December 11.  Make X-mas music together.

 So far, I give this advent calendar a big Huzzah.  N-son in particular loves peeling back the sticky notes and seeing what's in store for the day.  And then he pesters me until we do it.

It's a great way for sharing tasks with the family.  In fact, for the first time ever, I handed the decoration tasks over to the kids.

 They had a blast stringing lights and putting ornaments on our cast-iron tree.  (This time of year, it's a Christmas tree, but other times of year it's an Easter tree or a Halloween tree or some such).

And when the calendar revealed that today was the day for making music together, N-son bugged me repeatedly.  When, Mom?

 Now, I play about three songs on the banjo: She'll be comin' round the mountain, Go tell Aunt Rhody, and Will the Circle be unbroken.  N-son plays drums, with equal amounts of talent and noise (lots of both).  The rest of the family grooves on percussion, with more noise than talent.

But we got down tonight.  We rocked the house to "She'll be comin' round the Christmas Tree".  Next week we'll probably go for an encore with "Go tell the Magi".  I might have to break out the ear plugs.

Yeah, baby!

I hit my children . . .

I hit my children . . . but I missed them more often.  J-son says my aim is miserable.

J-son came home from the Dyslexia Center late last night and called to his brother to come out and have an after-dark snow ball fight with him.  While the two boys suited up, their wily mother dressed quickly and took up an offensive position in the tree house.  When the unsuspecting boys came outside, I had my ambush all ready.

The best thing about a snowball fight is, even if you miss, it's a hit.  I can't aim worth beans, I discovered, but that didn't keep the boys from yelling with glee and running around as I did my best to pelt them both.  J-son responded by making snow balls the size of cannon balls and trying to lob them up at me.

My husband is out of town for two days, so he didn't get to try his arm.  Instead, we had some Mommy-son time, and it was surprisingly like summer camp.  (Or winter camp?)

After the snow ball rout with lots of trash-talking, we wrote letters to our sponsored World Vision kids [and total score! --- I discovered we could send email, instead of snail mail.  That was a blast!].  And we wound down the evening by having a slumber party of sorts in my bedroom, with both boys and the dog sleeping on my floor.

The slumber party was an odd sort of off-shoot from this past fall's problems.  At one point in October, J-son's behavior had gotten so bad at night (this was after we'd tried removing his bedroom door, but before we put an alarm on his door) that I made him sleep on my bedroom floor just so I would know where he was.  To my surprise, he found this comforting and comfortable.  Then N-son got jealous, and wanted to sleep on my floor, too.   So now, every once in a while, as a special treat I let my teenaged boys come slumber in my room.  

I guess you never know what's going to be a hit until you try it.

Adoption update

So, where are we on the plans to adopt a 15-year old kid from Haiti?

I think our last real update on the blog was that we'd heard in May that our paperwork had been submitted to the IBESR (the Haitian governmental agency dealing with adoptions).  Huzzah!

After that, things started getting hinky.   X-son ran away from the orphanage he'd been staying in --- and for good reason: the adults who ran the place were not feeding the kids, and occasionally tying the kids to trees and beating them as "discipline".  Through some little miracle, one of my friends happened to be visiting Haiti, discovered he was gone, figured out where he'd gone to (!), and arranged to have him move to an orphanage run by an amazingly energetic woman, Ann Hume.  

So now he's safe.  Phew!  Here's a picture of X-son and some of his friends all dressed up and ready to go to school on the school bus . . . or rather, on the school motorcycle.  (X-son's in the back).

But there's more turmoil.  The agency we're dealing with in Haiti has been embroiled in scandal and no longer has a license.  The main problem this group has, seems to be telling grand lies, so we've spent much of this year not knowing whether our paperwork has really been submitted or not.  Lots of unanswered emails and telephone calls.   We think now we have confirmation that we're good . . . and we're also switching lawyers down there so that we don't have to deal with that first agency anymore.

When X-son moved in, Ann told the other children living there,
"This boy is different.  He has all his arms and legs".
Ann is an amazing woman with a bunch of wonderful kids.

In the midst of this, we got an email saying that it was time to submit our form i600a (with the US government; it's immigration paperwork).  This form costs about $1K and has a bunch of auxiliary paperwork involved, including a home study.  In November, we got a note back from the Department of Homeland Security saying our home study was out of date; we had until December 10 (tomorrow) to redo it.  And so I've gotten a chance to prove my paperwork prowess.

 As part of redoing the home study we've now . . . 

• fingerprinted all 5 people in the house for FBI background checks,
• run criminal background checks on the 5 of us,
• run child abuse clearances on the 5 of us,
• had medical tests (including updating our TB tests),
• been interviewed by our local social worker,
• bugged a few friends for letters of reference, and
• provided financial earning information for the past 10 years.

Fortunately, all the paperwork came back quickly, and I mailed out the updated home study out last Friday.  Once that gets over to the immigration folks, then the three oldest of us will get fingerprinted again, this time by the Department of Homeland Security.  

All for this kid.

IBESR usually takes a year or two to process their paperwork.  Once they approve the adoption, there will still be 6 months of work on the US end clearing immigration (the i600a is paving the way for that to happen, we hope).   So we're really in this for the long haul . . . urgent paperwork goes hand-in-hand with patience here. 

Mommy dollars -- resurrected

I thought my teenaged boys had grown too old and sophisticated for Mommy Dollars.  "Mommy Dollars" sounds like something for little kids, right?  And the boys sure loved them when they were younger.  Fun.  Educational.  But not quite up to teenaged standards of cool, or so I thought.

But the boys -- particularly J-son -- keep asking for Mommy Dollars to come back.  He wants bling to stuff in his pockets.  My magpie child wants to be able to flash cash, even if the cash is pink and purple and orange.  And N-son would be happy to go along.

One disadvantage of a weekly allowance is that -- especially when you're an ADHD kid with impulse control issues -- that a week is, like, forever.  I thought moving from daily Mommy Dollars to weekly US Dollars would provide some valuable lessons in delayed gratification.  But I was premature.  Both boys need more immediate response and reward than the weekly salary.

So, to much hullabaloo, Mommy Dollars are back.

There's a slightly new design, to thwart any attempts to subvert the new system with old Mommy Dollars. But the design of the dollars still celebrates the members of our family.  The sisters are all proud to have their faces on valuable currency.  The dog is indifferent.

The Mommy Dollar system kicks in with a new set of ways to earn moolah (and also, to keep interruptions to a minimum, when to bug me for cash):

$1 feed dog and give him water and tell Mom right away
$2 make bed & clean bedroom floor before school
$5 make dinner (Mom must approve the menu)
$1-$3 write a letter to a relative

Bed-time checks:
$1 bring home school books (CA, Social studies, science)
$1 clean out backpack and hang it up
$1 bedroom floor clean
$1 brush and floss teeth

There are also, of course, ways to spend their cash:

$5 half-hour of TV time
$8 One US dollar. Redeemable only on Saturdays 5-6 p.m.
$1 Bedtime gummy vitamin
$2 (per mile) car ride to an appointment
$1 return phone late (every 10 minutes late, another dollar)
$1 buy back shoes/clothes you leave on the first floor
$8 leave light/radio until morning

I know we'll tweak this as we go along.  But I'm excited to have this fun new project swirling around in our home now.

parenting through persistence and pharmacopias

So, what's up with my son?

J-son has had a turbulent semester, so bumpy that it's hard even to summarize.  Here are two snap shots:

• In early September, he was named captain of his squash team.  Two weeks ago, he was kicked off the team.  Forever.
• In early September, parent-teacher conferences were glowing.  Early November, the teachers huddled around my recently-returned husband to outdo each other with stories of grave concerns. 

Neither of these snapshots show the most persistent trouble that J-son had this fall, which has been with impulse-stealing things from our home.  We've been through this stealing-jag before; last time we "fixed" it with a combination of behavior modification, with locks and boundaries, and with drugs.

When the stealing resurfaced, we went back to the usual drill.  By "we", actually, I mean "I", because my husband was already off at army.  I reamed the kid out.  I required restitution.  I reinstalled locks on certain closet doors.

The stealing persisted.  

I took additional measures, each one feeling weirdly drastic.   I removed all furniture with drawers from his room -- all clothes must be hung up, not in drawers, to reduce the number of hiding places.  

When that didn't work, I turned to invasion-of-privacy.  I began daily searches of his room (uncovering daily new thefts).  I searched under his mattress, pulled purloined objects out of his pillow case, uncovered contraband from his corners.  We removed his bedroom door.

I turned to professional help.  I begged his pediatrician to increase his meds; she was dubious and kept him at his current levels.  I sent for information from military boarding schools.  We called our adoption agency, who offered to connect me support groups, but didn't have anything directly for J-son;  I declined these.  We entered the insurance/paperwork morass of finding a counsellor, and finally got him signed up.  

Through all this, I was working full time, or maybe more than full time.  So of course, I was also feeling guilty and torn.  If I were home for this kid, would that have made a difference?  Almost certainly.  And yet, I also knew the problem wasn't really me.  There was really something wonky going on with J-son.

The stealing persisted.  

His foster mom told me stories of his early life; how he had grown up hungry, and how his birth mother had hidden the food in her bedroom.  The only way he could get fed was to sneak into her room and take the food.  The habit was formed. But cursing the birth mom doesn't fix the child.

I did something I thought I would never do:  I bought an alarm.  It's not a house alarm -- our dog is alarm enough for the neighborhood we live in; it's an alarm for J-son's door.  Every night I'd make sure he was okay, and then . . . I'd seal him in his room.  On would go the alarm until I wake up in the morning and let him out.  

That didn't completely stop the stealing, because sometimes he nabs things during the day, but at least it let me sleep through the night without fretting.

There is no magic wand, I know this.  Here is my current hope, though:  we finally jumped 6 months ahead in line for a psychiatrist who can prescribe meds, and she's suggested a drug that helps with impulse control.   Given how suddenly this all came on, and how the last time we had trouble it was a med-adjustment that seemed to finally fix the problem, and how every time we ask J-son, "why did you take this?" he says "I don't know" and seems to mean it -- given all that, I keep pinning my hopes on the meds.  Not as  THE answer, but as a crucial PART of the answer.

For me, how do I get through this?

Partly I think it helps to have a PhD in math, not because this is a particularly quantitative situation, but because I can think of it as a problem.  Is there a solution?  Is there a counter-example?  I'm used to spending years banging my head against the wall trying to figure out the answer to something, and I'm used to finding out that the answer is quite different from anything I expected.  It's true that I'm not used to having my math problems hide electronics in their pillowcase, but the persistence part of this whole mess, I got that down.

I also feel like this is a huge lesson in faith.  Jesus, as he was hanging on the cross, invited a thief into his heavenly home, and I follow Him in this example.  Jesus in his sermon on the mount, winds up the beatitudes by blessing those "who are persecuted for righteousness' sake", and I'm feeling peculiarly blessed right now.  Even more, the New Testament is full of descriptions of how we are all of us adopted into God's family, of how God loved us even while we were still sinning.  And so I look at this wreck of a kid, and I think about the wreck that *I* am.  I think about how hard it is to keep loving this kid, and then I think about how amazing it is that God keeps loving me.  It sounds all gooey, but J-son's troubles remind me of how much I have to be grateful for.

J-son has managed to burn a lot of bridges this year.  If we can get the impulsivity under control, there's still a lot of restitution ahead.  Several of the people living in this house don't like living here with J-son, for fairly understandable reasons, and so there needs to be a lot of reconciliation.  Fifteen year old boys aren't particularly good at apologizing or admitting culpability, and I'm guessing J-son will need a lot of help with mending fences.  

As of today, it's been 9 days since he last took something.  That's our latest record.  We'll keep slogging forward.

Drat.

Facing outward

One of my comforts of this past several months has been my "Plan B" list.

When we found out the sad (and scary) news that my former husband's illness was progressing quickly and that he'd be entering hospice soon, I knew that there would be times this semester when I would suddenly have to leave my home and job to go be with my daughter.  So in my usual rather overly-methodical way, I planned for emergencies by making a giant list of names and telephone numbers, sorted into categories.

There are comforting aspects of seeking help, I've always found.  One of these is that I realize how very many different ways I am involved in the world.   When a make a list of "things I'll need to cover", I discover in a tangible way what a lot of things I do. That's just a little bit of ego pump, really.

Even more comforting is to name out loud the many good friends and colleagues who surround me.  And I'm very much aware that asking for help draws this circle tighter, making connections stronger.  I found people who offered to step in at a moment's notice to teach my various classes, to take over some ceremonial committee duties, to feed the dog, to watch the boys.

That last bit -- someone to watch the boys -- deserves a bit of extra mention.  With my husband away at military training for three months, and with K-daughter off at college, I couldn't just dump my sons on the usual suspects.  As I thought about "who could I call if I have to leave suddenly?", I mentally rolled through my circle of parent-friends.   I also asked my sons for their ideas, and N-son came up with "Officer S.", a public safety officer on our campus.

So I sent Officer S. a note:

Your name came up in a conversation I had with the boys today . . . I was telling them that I might have to leave town for a few days suddenly, and was there anyone in particular they might want to come and stay at our home with them?  Out of the blue, [N-son] mentioned you.   Whether or not you would actually be willing and able to volunteer for N/J-duty, I thought you'd be flattered by the thought. 

The leave-town-suddenly reason is actually rather sad.  Earlier this summer, my former husband was diagnosed with renal cancer.  Unfortunately, it's spreading very fast and he entered hospice today.  My daughter has been living with her dad since she graduated from college.  She has other people helping her and her dad during this awful time (his girlfriend and his sister have been heroes in all this), but it's still very, very hard for her.   

I am going to go visit her at some point, but neither of us knows when that will be --- as you can imagine, things are a bit of a whirlwind right now.   

BUT it gives us a chance to remember how many good friends we have around us . . . like you.

She (Officer S., that is) became a rock that I relied on.   In the past, she and I had worked together and respected one another, but now there's this additional connection, and in that way, my world is now a better place, my ties to the community stronger and more diverse.

And this story of gratitude is one I get to repeat over and over: there's the mathematician who offered to cover my Friday afternoon class, but who instead gets to hear the daily updates of family crises (latest one:  no news today!  woo-hoo!).  There's the mathematician who did actually cover a Monday morning class. There's the student who earnestly wrote to me, "It will get better; I promise".  There are the people from our church who prayed for us, who listened to me rant and rail, who helped with child care, who broke bread with me.  There's the woman in Haiti who is helping us find a new Haitian lawyer in hopes of getting X-son's adoption back on track.  There's the running buddies who kept me sane.  The vice principal who took N-son under his wing after the bad-hair day.

In spite of all the grief and tribulation and frustrations we've faced these past few months, it's a good and righteous thing to have these living, breathing reminders that there's a bigger world outside my doors.  And this world, with the wonderful people who fill it up, is a good direction to turn this face of mine.

Drowning in children

This has been a challenging fall in the Miser Mom household.

There's more to the challenge than just the week we call "The Horrible Week", but that one week (in late September) gives a sense of some of the challenge I'm talking about.  In The Horrible Week,

• LJ-daughter's dog was struck by a car.  The dog survived, but only because of surgery and lots of care.
• I-daughter's father (my former husband) passed away after a terrifying 5-month bout with renal cancer.
• LA-daughter got very scary food poisoning, laying her flat on her back for a week or so.
• K-daughter, driving to her college 80 miles away,  ran over stray pieces of metal on the highway, bursting two tires, leaving her (and five other motorists) stranded for much of the day.
• J-son was in the throes of serious behavioral problems, making me realize that I could not leave this 15-year-old son of mine at home alone, not even for 10 minutes.
• N-son got teased for about his hair in middle school, and he didn't make the football team.
• We learned that our adoption agency for our hoped-for X-son was embroiled in scandal, throwing all of our adoption paperwork into limbo.

During all this, my husband was away for a 3-month stint with the Army National Guard, and I was not only solo parenting, but also working overtime at my college, having offered to take on a bit of extra teaching, a big committee assignment, and a lot of extra advising.  

Some of the Horrible Week was merely horrible in the way distant earthquakes and typhoons are horrible to me.  LJ and LA, my step-daughters, both live so far away that I felt miserable for them but could do nothing practical.  All I could do was fret from afar.

Some of the Horrible Week seems trivial in the telling -- I'm thinking of N-son's hair, here.  But he called home sobbing, and he came home in tears, and no matter what other awful things were happening in the world and to his family, this was the Horrible Thing that had flattened him. As much as I wanted to turn my face to bigger problems, his was the problem that was right in front of me, the problem I had to face right away, the problem that needed both love and counsel.

September has come and gone.  Some of the Horrible Week has faded into mere unpleasant memory.  Now, here almost in December, my husband is home from the army.  My semester of overtime is almost over.  LA has recovered from the food poisoning.  LJ's dog is back on his feet.  N-son found a barber who gives him stylin' hair cuts, and while he's not on the football team, he's doing well at squash.

Much of The Horrible Week, though, continues to remain horrible lo these many months later.  A month after The Horrible Week, K-daughter sat at the deathbed of the grandmother who reared her. She faces her first grandmother-less Christmas, just as I-daughter now faces the first holiday season without her beloved father.  J-son spirals and slams through difficulties at school and at home.  X-son's adoption saga is a tsunami of bureaucracy -- both maddeningly, time-gobblingly urgent and also maddeningly slow at the same time.

There are so many stories hidden in this sweeping summary.  Like the day the boys called to tell me their bicycles were missing . . . and we found out later that was because they'd mislaid their bike locks, so they just left their bikes unlocked outside of school all day.   Like my daughter, at the other end of the telephone, saying through her tears,  "Mom, you are so useful."  Like N-son finding a professional barber.  Like buying an alarm that we glued to J-son's door.  Like resurrecting Mommy-dollars.  So much happening.

But not a lot of time to write about it.  Which is probably just as well.