Another tooth down, another $2; Tunes

Well we had another tooth fairy visit, her seventh to the house! After Hayley’s antics over five of the six teeth she lost, this one was a breeze. She told it was loose one day and came home from school having pushing & poked it out. The tooth fairy increased the money from $1 to $2 and was smart enough to know Hayley was in Mom & Dad’s bed not her own. Fhew, smart tooth fairy.

She is back to being gap toothed some which always cracks me up. She’s so cute. She’s got a braid and beads in her hair that she won’t take out, eventho it has been over 10 days. I’m not going to fight her.

Soccer starts this evening and she is all excited, really pumped up. She actually RAN today to get used to the heat. It was her own suggestion. She has been eating so well and being so active, she’s ready for the season.

The big excitement is I’m taking her and a friend to Walnut Creek (the local big amphitheater) for a concert on the 22nd - from High School Musical and star of Jump In Corbin Bleu , Drake Bell from Drake & Josh and Ally & AJ from Disney. If you know young kids, High School Musical is so insanely popular it blows your mind. And they all love Drake and Josh on Nick, the two mismatched step-brothers who get into all sorts of antics. Personally I’m more of a Josh fan but they all love the dreamy musician Drake.

They don’t care much for Ally & AJ so we’ll leave when they go on - it is a school night. But we’ve got premier parking access so we can get in and out quick and her friend is spending the night, so we’ll come right home and put the kids to bed.

I cleared it with her friend’s mom first - I hate to put parents in positions they don’t want to be in and when Hayley called her friend to tell them about it, they were screaming for Corbin and Drake. I love taking her to concerts, this will be her third but the first I’ve been completely sure will be appropriate from the music to the fans (meaning no doobie smokers like at Steely Dan). These acts are good clean Disney/Nickelodeon stars who happen to be pretty good singers and actors. I actually enjoy some of these songs.

Opening the final door

I had good talks with Hayley’s birthmom G and birthgrandmother Nana on Sunday. I wish there were better words then “birth” for that designation. I only use them so people understand what I’m saying but part of me wishes there was a way to do that and make it seem less of a big deal. I know some people use ‘first’ mom and I do sometimes. But Hayley tends towards just calling her birthmom by her given name, Mom or Momma G.

Regardless of all of that, I’ve made the decision to let G see Hayley in the fall. G wanted to do it sooner but I wanted it to be when Hayley is tracked out of school and can really decompress from it all. Hayley usually is fine on the way back from visiting birthfamily but eventually her confusion, anger or whatever seeps out.

G has done all the things I asked of her. She has observed the boundaries, she has communicated regularly along the guidelines I set up and been respectful of our family. I’ve tried to be respectful of her role in Hayley’s life, which is always going to be there. Considering G and I weren’t even talking last year, this has been a really solid development. We can actually have pleasant conversations about the kids and life. This chat she even put her youngest (Hayley’s half-sister F) on the phone with me since I met her on a visit.

I really hope that is how things can be. I know at times G will not agree with how we are raising Hayley and I know she knows I didn’t agree with some things that happened in the past. But since those are both given in the equation, I’m hoping we can just avoid those pitfalls. I think it would benefit Hayley to see both of her moms get along. I’m not looking for a new best pal or anything but I don’t want Hayley to feel any tension.

However I have to admit I’m scared. I’m scared of Hayley feeling cheated, I’m scared of Hayley comparing us and me coming up short. I’m scared of sharing her. Being scared never stopped me from doing anything but I’m not very comfortable admitting vulnerability. After all my solution to that anxiety is to over worry and be a control freak. I suppose this is something like wedding or a college, a tradition that implies the changing of a relationship, the sharing of your child with someone or some thing else.

Jinxed

Well I jinxed myself with that post. We’ve had two combustible days. I am not an unreasonable person and I feel like I have very fair expectations of her but at some point I do have to draw the line. Children need boundaries and boy, this kid hates them.

Today it started with her sassing me repeatedly. We’ve been trying to let some of that go because she is trying so hard not to hit and we definitely had seen progress. May seem silly to just focus on the hitting first but you have to do things in small steps with some kids.

Then it went into homework. I’ll help her with homework but only after she has made a good faith effort to work it out on her own. She did the first part halfway and then just randomly put down the final big answer. She easily could have done it. She asked calmly for help and I gently reminded her some of techniques to decipher math word problems. It went from bad to worse. She was demanding I help her more - which at that point, anymore would have been doing the problem.

Everything in this house has become our fault. It is my fault she didn’t do her homework she would scream. Grabbing, throwing herself across me, smacking my laptop turned into kicking me as hard as she could in the foot, twice in the same spot. It was hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.

She called Jeff three times at the office and he told her the same things each time - calm down, stop hitting your mother and you have to take responsibility. She wanted to call my mother to get me in trouble she says but it is sorta funny because when she does that, my mother always gets irked with her. So she called Jeff’s mom and tried to just chat. Of course she ended up telling she got in trouble and Jeff’s mom wasn’t too pleased anyway. Both mothers have seen the terrible emotional toll this can take on us when she gets out of control.

She went upstairs and yelled down she was ready to go to the pool. Of course, you don’t get pool privileges when you kick, curse, scream and don’t do your homework. So she went nuts over that and kept screaming at me that I was breaking a promise, which I make a point to never do and she knows that. Of course, Jeff was in class until 10pm so I took the brunt of her anger while trying to do a redesign for a site.

What do you do? I can’t sit on her. She’s 70 pounds, I can’t pick her up and put her upstairs easily. Even if I could, I can’t make her stay there. I can defend myself from her blows, I can take things away and try to help her use her coping skills to handle the situation. There is just nothing like a child who is mad as a hornet at you but still wants to sit ON YOU and beat you.

We’ve been trying to explain cause and effect to her - because you do this, you don’t get that. Because you act up, we are not inclined to do special fun things. Because you break the rules about playing outside one street over, you can’t play over there. And if you get lightly scratched or your arm hurts when we have to remove or restrain you when you are beating on us, that is your fault. When you are mad and you move towards us aggressively, if you do something you didn’t mean to do it is still your fault because you started the mess. NONE OF THOSE have sunk in her mind.

A few weeks ago when she was mad she walked to me when I was in front of the stove cooking and hit me in the arm with a hard ice pack. She really swung it hard and it made a horrible red mark. I didn’t see it coming because I was cooking and it was really painful. Jeff swooped in, picked her up and took her out of the kitchen. She said he grabbed her arm when he picked her up and was pissed at that. Somehow it is ok to have me crying in the kitchen but she gets indignant that her arm was grabbed - and mind you grabbed didn’t result in any marks. He just picked her up to move her four feet.

Saddest thing is that she is always very remorseful later on and does her best to make it up to us. I have a stack of love notes from her apologizing. So I know she feels bad after but this raging is too much. How the heck to I get her to accept some responsibility and not blame everyone else for the situations she creates?

We have never hit her, we may have to push her off of us when she gets wild but we don’t spank because it will just escalate the violence. However one of my worries is that she is going to run into someone at some point who doesn’t share our philosophy. She’ll mouth off and push them too far and they might just knock her block off.

I love her and we are here for the long haul. I can’t fix everything that is broken in her but I can love her, keep her safe and try help her heal. I pray that all that and treatment is enough.

Once she calmed down, I made her clean up the mess she made downstairs and pick up all her stuff. I had her clean up the floor on her room. I also refused to sign off on her daily homework log for school. She didn’t try enough for me to sign it and the work is still halfway done. She knows she’ll have to lose five more webkinz for another week (so nine are in ‘jail’ until next Thursday evening now). And she has to write an apology essay. But I don’t know what else to do to make an impact. I know some of this is an adjustment to school starting back but beating on me is not acceptable.

It’s 1am and I’m going to bed. I’m hoping to sleep without her tonight, so I can get some really good rest and decompress. I love holding her at night but I’m drained right now. I’m feeling like nothing I do makes much of a difference. That all my time, love and efforts haven’t changed her from being a child that is so angry at the world. In my head, I know that isn’t true but my batteries and faith are running on low right now. Hopefully we’ll all be in a better mood in the morning.

Cautious calm

I don’t want to jinx myself but Hayley has been doing so well. I think the core thing to remember is that her chronological age is not her emotional age. She is nine in terms of birthdays but she is really about eight based on maturity. That’s no crime in any child but when you consider all the chaos it isn’t a big deal.

She has been great about going to school since it started Monday. Very polite and well-spoken - a lot of thank yous these days. Most important only ONE hit in ten days and it was pretty much inadvertent elbow screaming. She may yell and backtalk but we are just focusing on one thing at a time, the hitting. We even praise her for yelling and not hitting. She is soaking in the positive reinforcement and it is really making a difference. Don’t underestimate how hard walking away can be.

Third grade seems a good fit for her emotionally. She is already doing math that they don’t even do in third grade. She got some flak from one kid about repeating the year but this kid has been giving her crap since 1st grade.

She even had a classmate we didn’t know about come down to say hey yesterday. He lives right around the corner basically. So that’s three kids in her class already that are in our neighborhood.

Recharging

Inspiration can come from such unusual sources. We went to the beach to stay with my old college roommate last week. Mind you, we’d spoken some on the phone but hadn’t seen each other in almost 17 years. We were both quirky and blunt college kids when we were young; we met rushing a sorority together and became friends during the pledge and initiation periods.

We had a wonderful time and she is a great host. Her son is just adorable and smart as a whip. We went to the beach, the pool and the latest opened N.C. Aquarium (June 06). It was really fun to be with another parent who enjoys the learning process with their kids and it was neat to feel that friendship come back so easily.

When we talked over the phone before the visit, we’d talked a lot about adoption. She was adopted when she was very young and while the kids played, she was able to really give me a sense of things Hayley will face. Things I never imagined she would have to deal with came up and I’m grateful to have heard them. She even opened up some to Hayley, who was really astonished to her what she had to say. I know it gave Hayley some comfort that others have been through adoption issues. And I think my friend was pleased to hear a child talk so openly about adoption and her birth family. My friend praised us on how we were handling adoption issues - which was nice to hear because I know she never bothers to BS people.

Our webkinz blog has taken off. It started climbing over the past few weeks, hitting about 600-800 page views a day. Then the past week has been a new high almost every day. Friday - 1,300 page views… Saturday - 1,800 page views and then today a whopping 4,733 page views and one post with 350 comments alone. Hayley is so excited by it all, she predicts page count totals each day.

Evidently parents are cool with their kids on the blog b/c it is overseen by a mother and the kids like to trade object through the blog, not to mention get hints, etc. I’ve had so many nice posts from parents. One told me that their kid had read more of our blog than the combination of all the books he cracked - and the parent thought it was awesome because the kid was happy to read it, looking for tips and such. At this rate, Hayley might be near the same levels in terms of how much she has written or work on this summer.

Hayley loves posting on it. She is now comfortable with taking a screenshot, cropping and saving it in photoshop, then ftping it to our server and posting it in the blog with some text. I helped her but she typed her first line of straight html on Friday. She can now copy an img src line and edit it to call a different image. How cool is that??

I’ve even got some of the regular kids to start their own blogs and helped them with some basic html stuff. I like interacting with them all this way.

I fear Hayley will never be the kind of kid who likes schoolwork. So far, she doesn’t have the focus of Jeff or the curiousity about things that I had but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things and ways of learning that she won’t excel in. She could be a late bloomer anyway but knowing she can do something - something most kids can’t - is really good for her self-esteem and her academic skills. Perhaps she is a graphic learner and will use visual things to illustrate her work. She might be a photographer, a graphic designer, a fashion designer, an architect, who knows. But as Jeff said tonight, we just need to play to her strengths and go from there. And right now, her unabashed love of webkinz tops the list.

Calm after the very mild storm

I was jarred from my sleep this morning by a petulant child who was mad her father was making her eat some strawberries with breakfast. She knows better than to wake me up on a weekend morning, I like to sleep and Jeff gets up early anyway. So he is in charge and I won’t override him.

I rolled back over and listened to her complaint for a minute and then said again, talk to dad. And then I went right back to sleep. I heard her half-stomp downstairs but went back to my blissfully rest for another hour.

I woke up ready to walk into the tornado. When she starts up in a bad mood that early, it can be a tough day. But I came down to a quiet Bach concerto and the duo working on their 1,000 piece Mona Lisa puzzle she picked out. They’ve been working on it for about a week. I love it when they find a nice activity to share, especially ones that can help her quiet her mind and focus.

They were charming when they grinned up at me as I came down the stairs. I smiled and went on with my morning in a relatively peaceful way. I’m still holding my breath but I’m more optimistic than I was early this morning.

Yank

I was thinking about how quickly time was going by these days. Things are taking a turn for the better in general, the new meds seem to be helping, at least in the short term. In her last swim meet, Hayley had two sixth places, two fourths, a third and then she won her heat in the butterfly!

To counter balance the good news, Hayley has some upcoming medical stuff with her toenails. When she came to us her toenails had odd striations, peeling layers and in grown in some places. Her teeth were pretty bad as well - four cavities to file and caps already on her front teeth. Somewhere along the line, a lot of things got missed. We did all the repairs on her teeth quickly but we hoped the toenails would get better with well fitting shoes, good hygiene and care with a good diet.

It helped some but not enough so we went to the doctor. She said that normally we might have had a chance to heal them with taking care of them but that they were too far gone with neglect for us to have fixed it. She thinks Hayley might have mild psoriasis which caused the striping but that the issues were too far reaching otherwise. So as soon as swim team ends, they’ll take off both toenails. It should be at a least a week before school starts and good few weeks before soccer. It’ll take six months to grow them back in but they shouldn’t hurt anymore about 3-4 days after they come out. She is taking it well - as well as a nine year old can about getting a shot in her toe and losing two nails.

I’m not interested in pointing fingers, I’m just sad for her. I’m sad she’s had to go through so many emotional and physical issues at this age that most kids never will.

Questionable clothing

I’ve had some battles with Hayley about clothes over the past few years but for the most part, I simply don’t buy her what I think is inappropriate. Don’t get me wrong, I get that she is a girl and wants to look trendy - and I accept that I’m a prep who has about 20 pairs of khaki shorts, many in stages of loving disrepair. She’s got lots of Old Navy and Justice stuff but a bunch of Lands End, Belks and Children’s Place too.

She’s at golf camp in the mornings this week and there are three girls in the group. I’d even asked if there were other girls enrolled when I signed her up to be sure but I guess I should have asked if there were any other girls who weren’t teenage hoochie girls. Mind you, this isn’t a public golf course. This is a country club with a dress code. It is definitely relaxed for the kids - some kids have tshirts on but nothing ratty, Hayley had a sleeveless polo which technically you should have sleeves.

However, I’m pretty sure they weren’t thinking two girls would show up in those shorty shorts that girls wear at swim meets, gymnastics or cheerleading. You know those soffe short shorts? Hayley has some for swimming to wear and I can even see why cheer and gymnasts wear them - they need no leg restriction for some moves. Eventhough they have like a 2 inch inseam anyway, a lot of girls roll the waistband even lower so they sit right on their hips.

You know both those girls today had them on, right along with their surly teenage girl attitudes. Clearly they were there with their brothers and did not want to be there. I’m just happy they aren’t in Hayley’s age group but I still hate that those are the models she is presented with at this camp.

Another round?

We’ve found another challenge level soccer team that has a few openings. I called them and they said they’d love to have her do one of their supplemental tryouts for the team. She wants to, Jeff wants to and I want her to as well.

But what if she doesn’t make it? Have I shattered her self-esteem completely after two rejects? At what point does giving your child opportunities they may fail become counter productive?

But what is she makes it and her confidence is restored? Is it worth the chance to do that?

Is she too emotionally frail to do all of this? She keeps practing during the day though, seeking out the better and older kids in the neighborhood to help her get better. She wants this and is working for it.