Ordinary Time

It's time to do another installment of Adoption 101. This time on emotions... the parent's emotions, that is. Help moderate a group dealing with older child adoption, and as I read through some of the posts and threads, it occurs to me that there are some pretty universal experiences that never seem to be addressed in pre-adoptive education. Even me addressing these things here doesn't mean that the prospective adoptive parent will really listen, but I can still try. If you have reached adulthood, I hope you have figured out by now that emotions... how we feel about an event or a situation... are not always accurate. I'm not saying that we are wrong to feel how we feel, just that we cannot always count on our feelings to be good predictors of how something is ultimately going to work out. Sometimes this is good. When we feel deep love for someone, that feeling helps gloss over things about the recipient of our love that could irritate us. We see a person through a d...

The fact I even wrote that title as a beginning to this post cracks me up a little bit. I bet it is also making any close family members snort their beverage through their nose. This is because I am not patient. Really and true, cross my heart. My husband knows this. My children know this. My mother knows this. Heck, I am all too well aware of my lack of patience. It is an area where I am challenged. As impatient as I am, though, I am also far more patient than I used to be, and considering that just yesterday I was deciding that Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory really has nothing on me, that's saying something. I get ideas in my head and I want to do them now. I see how our little farm could look in my mind, and I want to change everything now. When I am learning to do something new, I want to master it as quickly as possible. (Yes, I have given up new pursuits if I have not begun to feel mastery soon enough. Hello tennis.) I don't like to wait. (I should nev...

Yesterday, J., P., and I drove up to Wisconsin to the Midwest Horse Welfare Foundation . We had an appointment to look at some horses who were available. The couple who runs the foundation were very nice and spent several hours with us as we met and rode several horses. By the end of the day, we had decided that Bristol was going to be the newest member of our family. She is a 20 year old mare and a registered paint horse. She is very, very sweet and will make an excellent horse for teaching the younger people to ride. She will also be an enjoyable riding horse for the more experienced riders among us as well. We've signed the papers and she is ours, but we are still working out arrangements for her to make it home. I'll know more about that in a couple of days.

From my current book: "For a good portion of any day, we are bombarded with external forms of stimulation that require directed, as opposed to undirected thinking. Directed thinking requires that we concentrate our focus on a particular task or conundrum, whereas undirected thinking is neither coherent nor goal-oriented, but allows the mind to wander, as in dreaming and daydreaming. Unfortunately, our hectic and time-pressured lives rarely provide the space for a roving mind. Modern technology and digital forms of communication call for seemingly continual directed thinking -- we are inundated with emails, texts, Snapchats; each ping on our device demanding instant attention and response. We worry about wasting time, yet pore over articles on productivity, time management and super-achievers' effectiveness tips. Perhaps, being busy all the time, not thinking too deeply or letting the mind wander, are defense mechanisms -- don't think, just keep going, block out troubli...

I'm a little bleary (okay,  more than a little). R. was up most of the night doing her all-night-long-psychotic-fun-fest. Boy, I hope she sleep tonight. I am not hopeful. So, if what I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense, that's my excuse. It seems my tongue-in-cheek blog post yesterday didn't really translate from my head to my page. Those "wild" tomatoes? They are the ones I planted in the garden in May. Those pictures are of my supposed garden. It's not good.  I did get something out of the garden, though. Yesterday, I picked (after I found them) a whole lot of kohlrabi. I used them to make a kolhrabi, coconut, and lemon soup . It was well received. One good thing about letting the garden go to pot is that some plants are making a nice lot of seeds. These are plants that you can use the seeds to grow the same plant, so that's a good thing. This afternoon, G., L., and I spent some time collecting bok choy seeds.  I asked G. to take s...

Not many have heard of the wild tomato. Tomatoes conjure up images of neat and tidy gardens and farmer's markets. Plants grown purposefully and carefully cultivated. But few stop to think about those abandoned garden plots where no one weeds or tends to them. Past year's fruit, maybe having been missed in the picking, dropped to the ground, sowing seeds that work their way into the soil. Even without human attention, these seeds will grow and sometimes thrive, even in the midst of tall weeds and grasses. They are a tenacious plant and well worth searching for. This is our quarry. At first glance, there doesn't seem to much in this garden plot filled with waist high grass and weeds. Most people would overlook it and move on to more fruitful looking gardens, but we are intrepid searchers and know that the wild tomato grows in the most unlikely of places. It takes a practiced eye to look at a sea of green and be able to pick out the distinctive tomato leaf. In this aban...

I have discovered that in the middle of parenting a child, I am saying things that really I need to hear myself much of the time. Parenting can be a refining process like that. My children teach me things, and this is especially true of my children who have been hurt . Today was one of those times. Five of the younger half have been building with Legos pretty much non-stop the last few days. This is nothing new for K., who builds pretty much constantly, but the others run hot and cold. K. at this point is pretty much a master builder. He is working on creating out of Lego every Star Wars vehicle he can find a picture of. It is pretty extraordinary, and even M., who has some mad building skills, admits to not being able to match K.'s Lego skills. You need to know this for the rest of the story. This afternoon, I had to spend some time with R. on my lap because I had made her angry by saying she couldn't sweep. (Yes, you read that correctly.) When R. gets angry, she takes it...

Well, if you have a barn with animals, it's spelled H-A-Y. Really and truly. When we lived in a far more urban area, we gave zero thought to hay. The only time hay even entered our consciousness was when the cost of riding lessons went up due to the cost of hay. So I knew that hay could get more expensive, wished it wouldn't because of the increased cost of riding lessons, and never thought about it again. Ever since January, when we brought Emmy home, I have spent a significant portion of my life thinking about and talking about hay. I also learned I'm not alone in this singular obsession. (For those of you with hay-eating animals, you can just go about your business. You know the story I'm going to tell all too well.) You see, it hasn't been good weather for hay. First, the winter was cold... very, very cold. And horses need hay (and lots of it) to help keep them warm. This depleted people's hay supplies, which meant everyone heading into spring was alre...

I had a pretty good riding lesson today. I feel as though I'm finally getting my timing down on the jumps and managed to keep pretty darn straight as I did so. It was feeling good. And then on the last jump, my horse was rushing a bit, so I was trying what my trainer said to do and sit back in the saddle a bit to help slow her down. Just as I was sitting back, she decided to reach and go for the jump and I lost my seat. It was one of those moments where you know you are coming off and there is nothing you can do about it. I saw the pole across the jump coming at me and I knew I was going to run right into it. My hip made contact, knocked it off the standard, and I hit the dust. In my head, it was an epic fall. In reality, P., who was in the lesson with me, said it was like someone coming off a horse. Children can be so brutally honest. I'm going to stick with epic in my head, though. My reaction when I hit the ground and stopped moving was to laugh. I knew I was fine, aside f...

I find it is so much easier to cook in the cooler months than the warmer ones. In the winter, you don't mind having the kitchen warm and toasty because things are in the oven and on the stove. In the summer, this is exactly what you do not want. It makes food preparation a little more challenging because you can't grill every day. (Plus, when it is so brutally hot outside, who wants to stand over an even hotter grill?) For today's dinner, I planned a cold salad that I could do the cooking part in the morning before it got too bad and then not have to turn the oven on in the hottest part of the day. I kind of made it up, starting with what was in the pantry and refrigerator and going from there. Since it was a hit with everyone, I thought I'd share the recipe with you. (Sorry, didn't think to take a picture. Instead I was sitting with a screaming R. on my lap. That's pretty much life around here.) Cold Summer Farro Salad - served 10 people with ample leftover...

Wow, it's hot! So now we learn that we live in a place where in six months we can experience a 140 degree temperature difference. I don't need to experience this. I would be quite happy with 30 degrees in the winter to 80 degrees in the summer. But, wouldn't we all?  Because of the heat, I planned a no-cook dinner for tonight. I made hummus, both plain and red pepper, tabbouleh, and cut-up vegetables and pita bread to dip. We also had cut up cantaloupe. It was cheap, easy, cold, and no one went hungry. About that cantaloupe. At one point this afternoon, there were ten cantaloupes sitting on my counter. I am still taking advantage of the $0.88/cantaloupe sale that is going on. We've been eating 3-4 a day. I keep buying them, hoping that I can use a melon baller to scoop out some cantaloupe to freeze it for winter. As of yet, they keep getting eaten. I think I have to buy more. G., L., and Y. all had VBS this week at church. They had fun, but since we are still kick...

I've spent the day dealing with food. Not cooking food because I did none of that, but planning, buying, and organizing food. There were some pretty good sales going on, so I ended up going to three grocery stores today and doing a bit of stocking up. At one point, as I was in line at the cashier, a woman gets into line behind me and asks if I am having a party. She was probably a little disappointed and a little confused when I said no, it was just my usual week's shopping (which it was... I had done the stocking up in the other stores) and left it there. I don't need to explain my large family in the grocery store . Many grocery bags later when I get home, I discover that all my stocking up groceries are going to be a little difficult to fit into the pantries. This is why, at 3:30 in the afternoon, not too long before I should really start cooking dinner, I do this: Yes, I emptied the entire contents of the food pantries into the kitchen and dining room. E...

Children in general are jagged. Some are good at some things but not others. Some struggle with little, some struggle with much. Some days a child can seem precociously mature, while other days, they seem years younger than they are. Adults are jagged, too. We all have good days when things seem easy, and not so good days where doing just the basics is barely what we can do. This is life, and we all understand this. Yet, when parents bring home an older child, often they are surprised at exactly how jagged in all areas their new child is. This is partly because past trauma can exacerbate this jaggedness. One day a child can seem as though they understand English, enjoy being in their new family, and quite capable on all levels. Then the next day, this same child doesn't seem to understand anything, nothing can make them happy, and even the simplest tasks seem beyond them. If you are not expecting it, it can be baffling and a little scary. Even if you are expecting it, it can stil...

I like our little library here in our new town, but it still feels as though we are visitors. Someone from my family is at the library at least once a week at the minimum. D. was there for a couple of hours once a week to have his French tutoring. I come both by myself and with a herd of children fairly regularly. I am used to being somewhat conspicuous, and even if someone doesn't remember my name, they at least remember I'm that woman with all the children. But instead, when I'm in there, it's as though I'm wearing an invisibility cloak. It's weird and disconcerting. That's the prelude to my two library stories I have to share. The first involves math. Today we went in because it is the week they are handing out the first round of prizes for the reading game. Most of my children had completely filled their cards with their reading stars (one star = 15 minutes of reading). [Sorry, can't help kibitzing here.. as a librarian wouldn't you want to g...

I admit it, I was pretty clueless when I was younger. I thought I had the world all figured out and I was also pretty darn sure I was correct in my assumptions. And then I adopted. I won't kid you, adoption totally rocked my world in multiple ways. One of those ways was shaking up my belief that I had things all figured out. And I did have them figured out for a white girl coming from a place of pretty significant privilege. I knew I came from a place of privilege, but I didn't fully understand the extent; how that privilege seeped into every area of my life and thought. Watching my children navigate a not-so-kind world has changed me. Caring for a young woman who the harsher voices among us would reduce to the single word 'illegal' has changed me. Seeing the world from a very different lens than the one I was used to using makes me realize how very, very wrong I was about so many things. Because it only takes one person yelling obscenities at your beloved child a...

Between vacation, getting back from vacation, and having a majorly unpleasant cold sweep through the family, blogging hasn't happened. I think that this is the longest stretch I've gone in years without posting something. It feels odd. I'll if I can't get back on my game. Let's see if I can catch you up on what has been going on. We have a new licensed driver in the house. TM got his driver's license yesterday, much to his great joy. Today, he drove Aster to the dog park and drove himself to work.  TM also learned that he was awarded Employee of the Month at work this month. I'm pretty proud of him. It is hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. I do not like super hot weather. I will be glad when it goes away, though it doesn't look as though that will be any time soon. (I do not like super cold weather, either, but you can at least put on another layer for that.) Did I tell you that M. was officially accepted into the competitive Veterinary Technician program for the...