Archive for March, 2011

Babies


2011
03.20

Dillon feeding Rocco

Dillon loves him some babies.   Pretty much since he was a little guy himself, if he saw a baby he had to play with it or sing it a song or something.  I feel that he gets this behavior directly from his grandpa Tim, who some call “the baby whisperer,” and who also displays strange behaviors around babies.  I remember being mortified as a teenager that my dad was playing peek-a-boo with some stranger’s baby in the line behind us in McDonald’s.   (I don’t know what dates that sentence more – that I was a teenager or that my parents used to go to McDonald’s…)

Anyway, today at Family Dinner, D was playing with the twins.  And he told me very solemnly, “I really appreciate how Rocco is in his own little world.  He’s really thoughtful.”  I am sure this says more about Dillon than about Rocco at this point, but I found it adorable.

Of course, later he told me that he was pretty sure Henry was going to be a magician when he grows up.  Who knows, the kid might have some insight into some aspect of baby psychology that the rest of us haven’t keyed into yet…

Science Fair


2011
03.08

Being a mom can be pretty darn hard work.  Yesterday, I spent pretty much the entire day (less working six hours) receiving and counting and accounting for girl scout cookie money.  Today, as soon as I got off work, Dillon and I started work on his Science Fair project display.

Thanks to a set of weekly deadlines from his awesome teacher, we didn’t have a lot to do, just assemble the final display board.  I was glad to see that he was taking it very seriously, being as type-A as I tend to be about trying to line everything up properly.  We laid everything out on the board in the required format for projects, and adjusted, and adjusted again.  Then a dog ran across it and we had to adjust one more time before we glued everything down.  Doh.  Here is his final effort, though:

Vampire Power Project

At one point, I had a bit of a flashback to when he was a little guy who didn’t particularly like to fingerpaint.  He inadvertently grabbed the cold, gluey part of the paper when he was going to affix a title, and dropped it immediately.  He told me, “Some people might not have been born with the reflex to drop something cold and wet and gross when they pick it up.  That is not me.”

He’s pretty much always been a kid who didn’t really like to be wet and dirty.  Which I am generally okay with, but I still like to fingerpaint.

Return


2011
03.02

When we traveled to Ethiopia to adopt Rose, I thought about the decision we made not to bring Dillon with us, and I know that was absolutely the right decision for many reasons.  But while we were there, I thought about when I would want to bring the kids back to Ethiopia, because there was a thirteen-year-old adoptee in the group we traveled with when we adopted Rose.  And in my mind and heart, I have felt like the appropriate time to go would be when Rose was 9 or 10.

So that is two or three years from now.  Really, right around the corner when you think about it.  Time to start saving, researching, and thinking about what we would want to do.  I am thinking a two-week trip with a week in Italy and a week in Ethiopia (most flights have to stop in Rome anyway, and it would give a nice break on the way out or back rather than the 30-hour stretch of travel we did both ways last time).   Also, then we could see a little of my heritage.

So think about if you want to join us for the Ethiopian Tour during the summer of 2014.  And let me know.  Italian or Amharic speakers very welcome.

For a great article about visiting a birth country, check out Adoptive Families’ Complete Guide to Heritage Travel.