Waiting for Hari

weeknd after mommy is back to work

Another week has gone by and Julia now sounds like she is speaking some kind of English. What I mean is that even though we cannot understand most of what she says, and even if it still is Chinese words, the inflections and intonations sound like English. I didn’t notice this until I spoke with her on the phone this last week while I was away at work. She is not speak baby talk but it is very much like when kids pretend talk before they are actually saying words. I think that Julia is saying some kinds of words – some mix of English and Chinese, but it no longer sounds Chinese.

She is also using more and more words. She is interested in colors and counting and singing her ABCs. Julia has learned to ask for "help" and says she is hungry. Please and thank you are also coming along. There are time when I feel like Annie Sullivan! Tonight, David took the baked potatoes out of the oven. Julia touched one quickly with her finger and said "hot." I reached over to the Word Wammer on the frig and got the letters H -O-T and showed them to her and pronounced them for her and touched the potato again. Sometimes every thing is a teaching time.

She is learning to spell her name at school and can say the letters out loud and not quite write them. Today, I bought a big wooden J at Michaels, and she traced it on newspaper with crayons and then painted it. Julia loves tracing anything, especially her body parts. This started at the chiropractors when they had rolls of paper that they let Julia play with. Julia's painting is very young – she layered on the colors one after another, trying to cover the letter again and again. She was able to do some texturing with the brush and she seems to like that but she doesn't seem to have a sense of putting a color on and then decorating over it.

I started back to work this week – spending Wednesday through Friday up in Chicago. I was hoping that I could go two days a week in Chicago and three at home, but for the time being it will be the three days. It was good to get back to work – I haven’t enjoyed organizing cases and writing memos so much in years, but I did so miss Julia and David. It has been hard for David and I to be apart part of each week, Julia puts a new wrinkle into the mix.

We worried about how Julia would do without me. David is starting his family leave – he will be at home three days a week when I am in Chicago. Julia was fine the first day, but her behavior deteriorated during the second and third days. She also did a lot of testing of me when I got home, although she was happy to see me. We had a very hard weekend and getting her off to school this morning was a challenge. We will have to work at this and figure out new ways to deal with our being apart.

We started a "star chart" in the beginning of the week – a way to modify Julia’s behavior. We need to work on hitting. Julia does far too much of it and no form of discipline seems to be working. We started too ambitiously – telling her that she had to get 10 stars to get a prize – the prize being pretty hair clips. Between my starting back to work and David being a bit overwhelmed with Julia’s care, we could not be consistent enough for her to understand what was going on. I re-grouped today – making the prize smaller and the starts fewer. Now, she only needs three stars to win some ribbon for her dolls. She can’t wait to get her hands on the ribbon and hopefully she will tomorrow!

An annoying habit that Julia has is to ignore us when we call to her. She never answers to any name. There was a time when I thought it was her hearing, and we will have that checked, but I think she is just used to not answering. I have to try extra hard to be patient about this. We will work it out when we have more language between us.

We also found someone to help us with Julia. Dottie is a retired teacher who was Julia’s aid when she started school. She will be giving us two afternoons a week, and during the course of each afternoon, she will tutor Julia for about an hour. Dottie likes Julia and brings lots of materials for them to work with. Julia likes the work time, and I am trying to mirror some of that when Julia and I have long stretches of time together. She has so much to learn, but I don’t want to make every minute into school. Julia also needs time to play, to dress and undress her dolls, to put together her train tracks and see how many cars her battery driven engines can pull. I don’t know if we are hitting the right balance, and sometimes we are too tired to even think about balances. We do one day at a time.

I still worry some about Julia’s behavior. She has an aggressive streak and a demanding nature that make caring for her difficult. I hope she can mellow out in time – loosen up and let her guard down. I hope that it comes with time and our patience and love. We are getting to three months together and I can see how far we have come, but she is still a full time challenge every day. At times it does feel like too much. We love her so much but I had not counted on her being such a challenge for so long. I also cannot shake the fear that she has lived through too much to overcome. This is not a declaration of giving in or up, but a note.

Julia’s new love is dinosaurs which she calls "bones." There is a great bones exhibit at our kids’ museum and now every time we leave the house, we hear "bones, bones." David took her twice last week and I am sure she'll get there twice more this week. I am very willing to indulge this interest -- she is enjoying dinosaur books as well -- but her behavior at the museum is not always good. If it is over-stimulation, I don't know how to balance her interest with her reactions to the museum.

Another challenge this week will be the Thanksgiving holiday. Julia will be meeting a lot of new people this week. Robin and her kids will be out for the week, and we hope to see some of them. And on Wednesday, Lisa and family come out. I can’t wait for them all to meet Julia. I have been showing Julia pictures of who is she going to meet and trying to explain a bit about Thanksgiving. I hope that some of it is sinking in. I am sure this too will mean behavior changes. I have read and heard about the best thing for a new child in the family is a stable and almost boring home. I've always thought of our lives as stable and pretty boring -- I mean, no to us, but generally one could set their watch by our salad, broiled fish, or Indian take-out nights. Suddenly, I see so much variation, such lack of everyday same-ness. It is almost baffling. I can understand Julia's need for a regular day-to-day live, but how does a family provide it?

posted by Suz @ 8:57 AM