So, Charles has recently observed that this blog has a tendency to be about D, and I am neither suprised nor motivated to change that at this point. "Expecting" another child (through pregnancy or adoption) has a tangible effect on a family, and particularly on the first child. And while we are playing this waiting game, we are working to get him ready for the arrival of his new little sister, much as my pregnant friends are working to get their first kid ready for a little biological brother or sister.
Today D and I were baking a wide variety of items for his school bake sale, including cookies, bread, and muffins, when he started to recite a recent favorite book to me. I was not particularly surprised, as he was only a little older than two the first time he did this, reciting the entire book, "Clifford the Big Red Dog" in the first person, replacing his name for "Emily Elizabeth" and his dog, Django’s name for "Clifford", so the story D told went something like: "Hi, my name is Dillon Joseph Collins, and I want to tell you the story about how I got my dog Django. When I was little I lived in the city, I didn’t have a dog…"
Of course, that wasn’t true, we had always had Django, and, as it turns out, Django has always been a small white dog and has never grown into a duplex-sized red dog, but I appreciated his retelling of the story and his personalization of the concepts all the same.
Today, the book he started to recite to me was "Is that your sister? A true story of adoption". It’s a good book for kids about interracial families, the adoption process, and having a little sister that doesn’t look exactly like you. As a bonus, it’s one of the only books on adoption we have read so far (featuring people) that has an African-American kid in it instead of a little girl from China.
Dillon didn’t start at the beginning today, so it took me a minute to catch on. He started by telling me that "Sometimes I go to school and the kids at school say, ‘is that your mother?’ because I don’t look like you… And NONE of the kids at school know what a worker at an adoption agency is called. But I do! A social worker". Which is close to a word-for-word exerpt of the book. So I asked him if he remembered our Social Worker’s name that he had met, but he didn’t, so I reminded him. And then he went back to sampling the peanut butter cookies we were making for the bake sale. "Sample" is one of his new favorite words today. He sampled the cookies, then he needed to sample some milk, too.
But it was good to hear him internalizing some of the adoption stuff we’ve been reading together. We’ve invested in quite a few books to help answer questions and start discussions about the process, and he chooses to read one of them pretty much every day, along with some of his old favorites, and his easy readers which he can read to me.