Change

It's not that I didn't expect my life to change. There is no way for your life not to change when a twenty pound, Chinese two-year old with an attitude comes to live with you. It's just that some of the things that I thought would change are not the things that ended up changing and I didn't so much expect the changes that have occurred. For example, sleep. I am getting more sleep than I have gotten in quite some time. I shouldn't even put that out there into the universe, because there will probably be all sorts of karmic retribution for the mere thought. However, it's basically true. Nora sleeps for 11 hours at night, without so much as a peep (although I swear she travels miles circling the perimeter of her toddler bed). And she takes a two hour nap during the day. Sometimes I even nap with her. This means it is feasible for me to get approximately 13 hours of sleep every 24 hours--seems criminal, doesn't it? I never take the opportunity, but it's there. I was prepared for months of sleep deprivation, but so far, no luck.

And eating. Eating is not an issue. She eats everything and a lot of it (I know I've said this before, but it's so very true). She reminds me of me when I was a kid. And here's a story to illustrate. I have a gorgeous, leggy, dancer cousin who, very unfortunately, is the same age as I am and who, also very unfortunately, grew up in the same town as I did. We went all the way through school together. During our senior year, I won the yearbook award for "most likely to do good things for Rocky Hill" (i.e. nerds consolation prize--and I didn't even really win, I had to share the award with Julie Newman), and my cousin won "best looking" and "best smile". She should have won "best legs in five states" but they didn't have an award for that at my highschool. Ugh, such a nightmare. Anyway, not the point. When we were kids, hanging out around my grandparents fancy in-ground swimming pool, my Italian grandmother referred to my cousin as "the pretty one" and to me as "the good eater"--I think I may have posted this somewhere earlier in the blog; I was clearly so scarred by this label that I can't let it go. Back to my daughter. Nora is a good eater--a great eater, in fact. I can't cook worth a darn but she doesn't really care. She will eat any bland thing I put in front of her (so long as it's not a carrot, or a carrot disguised as or buried in something else). So here I was setting up appointments with occupational therapists, assuming that we would be dealing with all sorts of food aversions and I can barely keep her away from the peanut butter jar. Go figure.

Some things did come to pass, of course: I can't get a minute to myself in the bathroom. I now spend absurd amounts of time singing. I weigh the importance of every errand and the total number of errands per day against the effort I will have to exert taking all 20 pounds of her in and out of her carseat. There is always dried food somewhere on my person. [Oh, and yesterday, she spit food directly at me for the first time]. There have been at least two days since she's been home that I've completely forgotten to brush my teeth. All of these things were on my list of impending life changes.

But there were several unanticipated changes as well. I could never have imagined that I would read "Pat the Bunny" every night 12 times before finally having to hide the book from her while she isn't looking. She loves "Pat the Bunny." She finds "Pat the Bunny" in the dark, on a bookshelf with literally 150 other books that look remarkably similar to "Pat the Bunny." Then we read it 12 times--at night AND in the morning when we wake up. And I'll bet you didn't realize that "pat" is not even the bunny's name. It's what you do to a bunny. Over and over and over and over and over. And there are the dirty dishes--an endless pile of them. I've never washed so many dishes! I run the dishwasher every single day. Maybe everyone does this many dishes and it's just that I hardly ever eat out anymore so now we are generating more dirty dishes "in house." Who knows. It's just a lot of dishes. Also while in China I gave up coffee, not so much due to the lousy quality of the coffee in China, or the exorbitant price of coffee in China, but because on the plane ride home, I started having irregular heartbeats. This is a long story, but basically my heart started skipping beats with alarming frequency, John told me I was going to need to get a pig valve, and so I gave up coffee. It seems to have helped, so now I don't need to have my mitral valve replaced--at least not right away. But the giving up coffee thing has been a big transition. I'm going to save that discussion for another time, however, because coffee (and the letting go of it) deserves it's own post.

Of course, what I least expected was that I would really love the unexpected and that I would be relatively relaxed about things I had no intention of being relaxed about. For instance, I don't mind when I put something in her mouth and just as quickly it comes right out, all over her clothes--sometimes her perfectly clean, adorable, Gymboree clothes that I picked out especially for our trip to the office. [If anyone wants to see the perfect portrayal of a child hating food, watch the part of "Big" where Tom Hanks tries caviar for the first time. That's what Nora looks like]. I don't mind lazing around the house in my pajamas for hours (who really does, though) or taking very, VERY SLOW walks into town, or singing "Old MacDonald" repeatedly. Truth be told, I'm a little sick of "Pat the Bunny," but Nora loves it, so what choice do I have? I'm fine doing the things she likes to do instead of the things I thought I would do with my toddler. I want to play with puzzles, she wants to play with trucks, for example. She hates puzzles, in fact, and I hate trucks. She wins, though, because I hate it when she hurls puzzle pieces all over the house more than I hate trucks.

I most especially didn't expect her to be so much like me (incessantly busy, talkative, obstinate, argumentative) and so perfect for our family. She's just a great kid and a lot of fun to have around. It's a good thing, too, because we spend a lot of time together these days and, while we are still working out the kinks in our relationship--lately she has taken to "clucking" at me when she doesn't get her way--we get along pretty well most of the time.

If anyone is thinking of doing this (adopting a toddler, I mean), I would highly recommend it. It's life-changing.

Okay, your daily fix of pictures, coming up:

This series needs no explanation:




I put her in her new carseat to adjust the straps and I couldn't get her out for about 30 minutes! She loved it. She talked on her cell-phone the whole time :-)


Also, I made it easier to comment on the blog--you no longer need a Google account--so please do (no pressure though). John asks me every morning if we've gotten any comments :-)