Festival of the Autumn Moon

JieJie and MeiMei had a great day, playing with visitors and family, riding the plasma car and scooter around the new, empty house, and eating mac and cheese well past bedtime after spurning the wonderful Chinese dishes Ping cooked for the holiday.

Last year, when the September moon was full, and MeiMei had been with us about a week and was just a year old, we celebrated moon festival in Guangzhou, carrying lanterns from 7-11 illuminated by birthday candles down to the Pear River, to watch the boats full of lanterns pass by.

This year, we did not go outside to gaze at the moon. We scrunched down by the bedroom window to see it. JieJie said we should each make a wish. An adoption wish, she said. Hmmm. OK.

Her wish was a secret. Mine was not. I told the girls that on Moon festival day, when families come together, that their father and I were thankful for the tummy ladies who had given birth to our daughters, and that I hoped as they looked at the moon they would know that we were taking good care of their babies. JieJie didn't say anything, but I'm sure what went in will percolate up to the surface in a few days. MeiMei just wanted to have her toes tickled. "Booove!" she said, to get me to move over. "Booove!"

Later, when the girls were asleep in the bright moonlight, I said to their father, "On nights like this, I really wish we had another.''

He said, "You read my mind."

To be continued.

MeiMei Turns 2

And what a vision she is in her taffy-green party dress, celebrating.

Headlines

JieJie Publishes Newspaper: The Horrible Cat News in which a burglar steals Mama Cat's book while she is putting the kittens to sleep.

MeiMei Hones Gymnastics Skills. Well, OK, One Trick

JieJie Gives Ping a Grammar Test; Ping Scores 100

JieJie and MeiMei Pee in Potties Across the Midwest;
Undie-Clad JieJie's First Public Toilet Visit, at Cleveland Airport, Ends Tense Flight for Mom

Mom Longs for Day She Can Write a Paragraph Without the Word "Potty"

MeiMei Gets First Haircut

The Girls, Visiting Friends

Is JieJie really aiming the ray gun at her little sister's head? Has sibling rivalry taken on a cosmic dimension? Stay tuned for the latest developments.

The Naked House

Toilet training in our house has become something like a dissertation. We work on it for hours every day, and every day we make a teensy bit of progress. It's also as expensive as an advanced degree. To help JieJie over the rough patches we have invested in a staggering array of potty accessories, including the travel "potette," the Kandoo deluxe toilet training kit complete with frog toilet flusher) and the tissue paper cutouts called Toilet Targets.

Then there is sibling rivalry, the great unharnessed natural resource that keeps JieJie on track for kindergarten. Every time JieJie wants to pee in a pull-up, I cruelly trot out MeiMei and lead her to the potty, which is a sure-fire way to send her older sister racing to beat her to it.

MeiMei has been toilet trained somewhat miraculously by Ping, our au pair from China who deserves her own headline. At 22 months, she is a potty chair pro, although she is frightened of the grownup potty, even when it has the kandoo frog throne on it.

JieJie does not think undies are comfortable, no matter how they appeal to her fashion sense. I know some day she will fall victim to elegant lingerie, but at this point panties don't feel right, so she pads them with a panty liner. She found these in the cabinet and when she asked about them, I told her ladies wear them sometimes in their panties. She immediately latched on tot his idea. After all, they make her undies feel more like diapers. ) Which brings us to Pods, another brilliant marketing scheme and major expenditure. A pod is essentially a very thick (think futon) sanitary napkin created for the purpose of -- you guessed it -- making undies feel like diapers.

Mostly, though, JieJie prefers to wear a diaper or nothing at all, and so the default uniform has been a top with no bottoms. The girls spend a lot of time with no pants on, and all of us have gotten used to bare bottoms.

All of us except the repairman who came to fix the icemaker. He managed to politely inquire as to the girls' ages without comment on their state of undress.

A Brush With Fear

A drunken driver clipped our car on Saturday night.
We were each taking a sleeping child out of a car seat when the head light beams swept around the corner of our quiet street.
When the lights kept coming with no sign of the car slowing down, I squished myself between the car door and the car just before the loud crack of metal on metal. My head bumped the frame, the door dug into my back, but I was fine. MeiMei was still sleeping peacefully in her seat, although already unbuckled. JieJie began to whimper, less from the impact than from the string of forbidden
words I hurled at the receding taillights.
Since then she has been afraid to let Mommy and Daddy get in the car without her, and when Dad wanted to clean his car, she begged to be allowed to help him. Her help was as a self-appointed sentry, calling out to him to be careful each time a car turned down the street.
The driver came back. He turned out to be an attorney, a neighbor we had not met before. He was quite affable, apologizing and offering to exchange information in the morning if we preferred. But the Mama Lion adrenalin was pumping. It was Daddy who had the presence of mind to notice the driver was drunk, and so I retreated to the house to call the police. The driver retreated to his house to park his car and returned with a big plastic goblet that appeared to contain wine. I found the glass later at my feet. The driver told the police he had gone home for a (very short) half hour before they arrived and had a couple of glasses of wine. When they shined a flashlight on him, they noted that his white shirt was spattered with red wine.
They conducted a road sobriety test quite loudly in the middle of the street, which brought the neighbors out. He failed in what surely must have been humiliation, unless perhaps he was so anesthetized he did not feel it.

Mommy in the Middle

MeiMei does not seem to be acquiring spoken language terribly quickly, but she gets her point across. The other night she sat up in bed, pointed at me cuddling JieJie and shook her head angrily while miming rocking a baby. She is not getting enough cuddles from mommy in the "family bed," itself a concept that I considered completely misguided when I first encountered it on "Six Feet Under." Once there was a scared and lonely first child in our lives, the family bed seemed imperative and the quote marks fell away.

JieJie craved physical closeness and still does. We called her the heat-seeking missile when she was a baby. When MeiMei came home, we tried briefly to keep her in the crib, inches from the bed, but it did not seem fair to put her behind the bars with JieJie snuggled between us.

JieJie won't budge from her spot. MeiMei bonded with Daddy first, and she remains a Daddy's girl, but she will dive away from his embrace in a heartbeat to engage in a kicking and poking fight over the prime space next to mommy. MeiMei's message is loud and clear. Time for mommy to sleep in the middle.

Mommy Moment: I found the Netflix that have been missing for what must be a few weeks. They are on my desk. I checked the Netflix site. They seem to have been mailed here in December. Time to quit Netflix?

Briefs

MeiMei said "Bob-Bob" while pointing at SpongeBob
(Well, I said TV was good for learning English. Is that English?)

***

JieJie was elated at a trip to the nail salon because her private mommy time has been limited to potty visits since Mommy went back to work. She said, "When I grow up, I don't want my own house. I want to stay with you and Daddy."

My eyes welled up. "That would be wonderful, baby."

"I want to stay for a hundred years. Can I stay for a hundred years?"

"Of course. You can stay forever."

***

Mommy is up late thinking about a colleague who has recently left this world and another trapped inside himself by traumatic brain injury. Time to go upstairs and hug those babies while they sleep.

Headlines

JieJie Makes Debut on Big-Girl Toilet; Calls Mom on Deadline With Report

MeiMei Says "Baby" and "Ball," "Meow" and "Woof! Woof!"

Ping, Au Pair from China, Gets Visa; Dumplings Promised

Daddy Dreams of Sleep

Downward Facing Mom

MeiMei and I made our debut at a Mommy and Me class this week -- yoga. MeiMei was a little uncertain. Mommy was a bit abashed among the lithe, 30ish moms who wore the right clothes and could perform all the moves.

MeiMei was the tiniest, and probably the youngest, little yogini in the sunny room.

She didn't cry, but she seemed a little stressed, and I wondered if I was doing the right thing by bringing her to a group class. She loved it when stringy Dayglo balls came out for one stretch and red balloons for another. When I asked her to take the balloon back to the teacher for cleanup, she stepped right up.

When the moms climbed up the wall backwards, feet first, I busied myself trying to position MeiMei, who shook her head vigorously until we moved to the next pose. Neither of us tried to step sideways through the hula hoop.

She liked the music, but looked askance at the kids who let their moms roll them up in the mat and then unroll them, but she made a stab at rolling up a mat on her own and then tried to carry it across to the teacher. It was such a joy to watch her opening up that I was able to forget my own performance anxiety -- pretty much.

And when we got home, we talked to JieJie, who gleefully volunteered to show MeiMei tree pose and bridge and to climb up the wall with her feet. And when JieJie effortlessly moved into the poses, MeiMei followed, with excellent form.

I guess we'll go back next week.

JieJie Floats the Cheerios

JieJie is a great big sophisticated girl, newly turned 5. She was brave at her dental checkup, enduring X-rays, knowing cooperation would speed her return to the playhouse (with slide) in the waiting room. On the way out, she saw a sign on a door and said, "Mommy, what's a lavatory?" -- which brings us to today's topic.

At last, and after making deals with the poopy doctor, reading affirmations to herself, and holding me tight, JieJie used the potty chair -- once a day, every day for a week. She is petrified of putting her little bottom on any of the cushy seats we bought to make the toilet seat fit her. Instead, she sits sideways on the seat of the potty, clinging to me, crying a little, holding herself rigidly, a fraction of an inch above the seat, until she pees.

She knows how to go and when to go, and thanks to the baby steps we have taken with the help of the poopy doctor, now she CAN go.

The first time, we were supposed to toss some cheerios into the big toilet and let her try to sink them. At the last second, she leapt off the toilet and we swung over to the potty chair.

"Now I can't sink the cheerios!'' she cried. "But you can float them,'' I said, having a moment of poopy doc wisdom. And she did. "Nothing bad or scary will happen to me if I pee or poop in the toilet," she says, holding the card the therapist made her.

Something bad or scary DID happen a long time ago, at least that is what the PD has deduced. We probably will never know what it was, and dwelling on the possibilities is, well, not helpful and too chilling.

What matters is, my #1 big girl is peeing in the potty and even dancing on top of the toilet. If she could overcome this fear, there are no limits to what she can do.

Daily(?) Headlines: Snacktime for Sisters

JieJie has been enjoying helping with her little sister, trying to change diapers and t-shirts, wresting the spoon from her spirited sister to feed her, and fetching her snacks and drinks.

Yesterday's treat was prunes. Lots of prunes. I left the room for a minute and when i returned they had made baseballs of prunes and were munching away. JieJie did not understand why i said they had eaten enough prunes. After all, PawPaw Dave had told her they were good for your tummy!

So far no ill effects.

MeiMei And Me

What a singular spirit is MeiMei! She is both beauty and clown, imminently patient with bumbling grownups, yet imperious about toys and snacks. In the last few weeks she has chosen walking as her favored means of locomotion, chasing cats, balls and the odd rolling grape. At 16 months she tries to dress and undress herself with whatever is handy -- JieJie's fanciest dress or dad's underwear. She has little patience for books, so we abridge the stories and do a lot of pointing at pictures. She is embracing TV, so we are using that perhaps too much to reinforce the sounds of English. She has fallen in love with Kipper the Dog, JieJie's first favorite, and will watch anything with music. Most of all, she loves animals. I can't wait to take her to the zoo. And as her foster mother wrote in answer to our questions, MeiMei's favorite animal is indeed the chicken and when she sees one she goes wild with excitement. She is quite the independent girl. We had planned on no introducing juice until later and then diluted with a lot of water, but she unearthed her first juice box from a low shelf, and presented it to me. I popped it and gave it back to her. She drained it in 15 minutes.
MeiMei can speak only a few words, and her babbling features only a few consonants, so we are seeking an evaluation by the Early Intervention program to see if she needs some speech therapy. She is, however, a great communicator. She points and waves, shakes her head yes and no with great vehemence, and makes perfect noisy, sloppy kisses. She has a mean throwing arm, especially with inappropriate objects.

MeiMei cemented her bond with mommy when we traveled to the Midwest for the holidays. Daddy came back to work and the ladies stayed on the road. By the time we got home, MeiMei was a mommy's girl.

JieJie and the Tummy Lady

JieJie has been noticing pregnant women these days and possibly asking people with big tummies if they are pregnant. When she told me about her most recent discovery, that her music teacher is expecting, she made it clear that she found it hard to believe that she was ever a tiny baby in someone's tummy.

She has known for a while that I am not her tummy mommy, but rather her "take care of you forever" mommy, but it all seemed to come together for her last night after several very emotional days of playing "new baby" while she was home sick with a fever.

Last night she decided to write a letter. She dictated it to me.:

Dear Tummy Lady,

What is your name?

Then she took the paper and wrote on her own: I (heart) you, Clare, 4, then had me add "almost 5."

She decorated it with hearts and added a drawing of herself as a baby in a crib in the "baby house." I told her we would put it away in her box of China things and someday perhaps we could take it to China.

JieJie and MeiMei Resolve

...that in 2008 mommy will post more often
get camera, charger, batteries and cable all in one place
and buy a new, mod video camera that holds a charge, so we can be a multi-media blog.