Fun With Dick and Jane

TJ and Jiejie often have their heads together these days, whether they are doing homework, watching "Spongebob" in Spanish for no particular reason or brushing their teeth together, sharing a stepstool. "Brusha teeth!" TJ proclaimed tonight, summoning Jiejie,  And earlier, "chicken!"  as I was preparing to roast one. When Daddy tried to give him his nasal spray, he began to whine. I suggested (yet another) reward. "He likes bubble gum or a lollipop," said Jiejie helpfully. "Lollipop, bubble gum, O.K!" said TJ, submitting to the torture.
On the way up to bed, the two older kids wanted to look out at the falling snow. "Snow! Wooo," said TJ, jumping up and down and speaking in rapid Mandarin. "He said, 'no school tomorrow!' according to his translator.

Quotes of the Weekend

Meimei, studying a bubble of toothpaste on her brush: "Even spitballs don't last forever."


TJ: "One, two, let's go!"

Meimei, playing with a disconnected phone: "Hello, Shea. I have something to tell you. Can you stand on one foot?" Shea is the young man she seeks to impress at school, whether they are playing "The Farmer in the Dell" or he is getting scolded at circle time, a frequent occurrence, Meimei reports. "He got in trouble again," she said, rolling her eyes. "He was playing with his zipper! I laughed and Jack laughed."

Hyperlocal Heroes

For Daddy's birthday, the kids made cards. Jiejie made several; T.J. copied Chinese characters onto construction paper he had decorated with a printout of another hero, Ultraman. He did this after his homework, homework from two days of school, some of which was not due until later. Homework with T.J. is great fun. We did the worksheets of addition and subtraction by counting pennies or cherry drops: "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven minus two, bye-bye one, two!" Then T.J. would count what remained aloud  in English and fill it in in his careful hand. At the end of each page I would add a red-wrapped candy to his personal pile. In English, anything over ten is a mystery to T.J., but we can switch to Chinese for those. The English homework is a bit trickier. T.J. loves to copy his vocabulary words, and repeat them. It's much easier to explain to him the concrete objects on the list: "gum," chomp, chomp; that's easy. "But," however, is harder to explain. He's learning nouns and verbs and speaks a few two-word and three-word sentences. He has also spoken sentences in Mandarin, filling in a word in English: "puzzle." His receptive language is even better. He sometimes translates back to Ping or Haley or Yuanfang something I told him in English. Tonight the kids watched cartoons in our room after a little dance party to some conga music and before bed. T.J. and Jiejie at the foot of the bed, were discussing the finer points of Spongebob, and I believe I heard Jiejie speak a few short sentences of what sounded like authentic Mandarin.

The Trouble With T.J.

Jiejie said it best. "T.J. is the star. He gets all the attention." She said it matter-of-factly, without tears or obvious malice, but it's clear that having a new brother is taking a toll on the Supersisters. I tried to explain to Jiejie that attention was not a matter of merit but of need, and that the new child, to whom the family and the language are a mystery and source of fear, needs a stronger dose, administered more often, of just about every comfort a parent can offer. Jiejie agreed that she was far more sophisticated than her slightly older brother. Meimei, I told her, was also more emotionally mature than her brother. "For real," said Jiejie with a touch of rue, perhaps over Meimei's seemingly innate compassion. But even Meimei has been flinging herself to the floor and declaring her loneliness (from about 18 inches away) as I sit beside  T.J. at the dining room table trying to demystify some aspect of family living. T.J. on the other hand is sure that we are unfair to him and that everyone is out to cheat him out of a toy, a book, a plasma car ride or a cookie. When he thinks he has won, he likes to rub it in.  He was positively gloating today at being the only one to receive the morning trophy and handshake for staying in his own room past dawn. (note to self: order more trophies; palm trees dangerously depleted.) And he likes to tattle. Relentlessly. What makes me feel bad, however, is that I am losing patience. I used to keep any anger I felt about the kids' misdeeds hidden and separate from any discipline I meted out. I vowed never to be like my parents and others of their generation: I would not "get mad." Until now. Sometimes the sheer noise is enough. Tonight it was three kids on my lap as I tried to type a note to Jiejie's teacher requesting that she be allowed to relinquish her spoken lines in favor of lip syncing with the chorus at the Martin Luther King birthday pageant at school and a note to T.J.'s teacher asking if he could be part of the after-school tutoring program in language arts and whether or not he could join the Read-a-Thon as a "listener" to stories read by others. Neither printer worked. Two little cups of water were spilled. Tears were shed. The forms are not filled out. The checks are not written for the after-school classes. But the kids are asleep and it's not quite midnight.

Snow as a Second Language

T.J. and the girls were delighted to have a snow day today, and this morning T.J. told Haley in Mandarin  that he wanted to learn some English. They got to stay up late last night and make s'mores in the fireplace when their homework was done. T.J. put up a big fight about my helping him with his ESL homework from school, matching English words with their rhyming counterparts and copying them. He also had some addition problems. He did very well counting on his fingers (just like Mom). He seemed to like the homework in spite of himself and in spite of previous protestations, but he was convinced that my intervention would not be helpful on his English work. I tried to show him that "snug" and "rug" rhymed. He moaned and kicked his feet (looking none too threatening in his red slippers and fleece robe patterned with skulls) and pointed at the word "run," indicating he had already used it. His confusing "rug" and "run" seemed quite normal and even somewhat sophisticated. Either he has picked up a lot or he knew his ABC's and was sandbagging us. I picked up a green marker and wrote on my arm: "snug" and "rug" then covered the initial consonants to show him the remaining letters were the same. T.J. was not amused as i continued to cover my arm with green words, then moved on to label a cup and  mug. I sang the Starfall.com song "Listen to the Short U Sound, Uh-Uh-Uh-Uh-Uh." Annie Sullivan I am not. At the end of the wrangle, we cemented what we had learned with a pull-the-tab book on bugs, and even shared a laugh over the dung beetle pop-up: "Bug! Poop!"
One day at a time.

Back to School

T.J. got to school last Friday. It was a chore to get him out of bed, a project to to get his boots and gloves on and an odyssey to get him to the car. We were late of course, our hopes of a delayed school opening because of the falling snow and slick roads dashed. He went to the meeting with the school nurse and the interview with the principal with Mom and Dad and Yuanfang. It was determined he would be placed in first grade, not necessarily doing the same work as the others but attending their music and gym classes, library time, circle time and other activities with a daily dose of ESL. We were thrilled that his teacher would be the smart, intuitive woman who had guided Jiejie through first grade. When T.J. threw himself on the floor in front of the classroom and refused to go in, his teacher knelt and petted him, speaking to him in a gentle voice. Ultimately, we walked him down to the science center where Jiejie's class was watching a film on global warming. He sat beside her on the floor, and when the class was over, he walked with her to the first grade room.  While T.J. entered first grade, I waited in the lobby for a few hours, reading. The teacher sent down periodic reports to the office. Later, she came down and led me to the music room to see a smiling, clapping T.J. happily joining the crowd. At that point, everyone thought it was safe for me to leave and let T.J. get through the day. He did. And he went back again today, with Jiejie the second grader escorting him to class and to the school bus. The mornings are staring earlier now, and breakfast, even if it's just cereal and milk, is taking longer as the rituals change to accommodate another child. We're lucky Meimei isn't in a morning class. It's difficult getting three kids to bed, but it would be harder to get three off to school at the same time.

This Ain't No Party

But it may be a disco. When Mom was queuing up iTunes to play the Floppy Sleep Game, mainstay of the  Sleep in Your Own Room and You Get a Trophy initiative, Jiejie dived under my arm and put on some dance music. Jiejie and Meimei knew just what to do, and within seconds TJ came frog-hopping down the hall to join in. I had seen him dance at that cultural mecca of Guangzhou, The Paddy Field, an ex-pat pub with live music, Guinness pie and tolerable spaghetti, but the lad is definitely loosening up. Today he managed a pediatrician visit and a chest X-ray and asked for a banana in English. When the kids were playing school, Jiejie reported, TJ learned to write the word "cat." He also seems to have gotten a detention slip, if the piece of paper I picked up is any indication. Ah, he's his mother's son, to be sure.

Adopting the Waiting Child

The Three Bears

In China I came up with an equation: 3(kids) + 4(espressos after dinner) = no trouble sleeping. It's a formula I'm sure would still work now that we're home, but, alas, Starbucks is not around the corner and I rarely get to finish a cup of coffee. Having three children between the ages of four and eight is emotionally grueling, even when you have plenty of help. First, there is the sheer noise, which seems multiplied by four or five. Then there is the regression. Meimei, the original Princess Whose Feet Never Touch the Ground, insists on being carried even more than usual, wants to be accompanied to the bathroom and confessed yesterday that she does not like to sit in the chairs at school. "Where do you sit?" I asked her. "On the rug," she said (that's rug in the Montessori sense).
"What does the teacher say?"
"She says 'Please sit in a chair.'"
"And what do you do?"
"Nothing."

"Then what happens?"
"The teacher says, 'Get in that chair right now.'"
"And what do you say?"
"Nothing."
"Do you sit in the chair?
"I don't like the chair."

OK, on to Jiejie. She now needs me to sit beside her while she does her homework. The homework is taking longer and longer to finish. I think she just wants some mommy time, but we could have a lot more fun if we just finished the homework and moved on. I am delighted that she enjoys the timed Rocket Math drills so much that she likes to white out the answers and do them again later. But she, too, is regressing even as she takes her new older brother under her wing. T.J.'s hoarding behaviors have touched off Jiejie's, and she is becoming ultrapossessive of her things and even more clingy with me.  Tonight is the first night she has consented to sleep in her own bed (for a prize in the morning). Since Daddy was sleeping with T.J., the girls have been sleeping with me, one on each arm, pinning me to the bed crucifixion style. The other night neither girl liked the story I told. Jiejie demanded another, but she was already being shortchanged on sleep, so I refused. When she repeated her request again and again, I threatened to cancel a play date if she asked one more time. So she stopped, but continued whining loudly and wordlessly for a solid hour until I told a super-short story about Fred from "Fred: The Movie" (you don't want to know).

And then there is T.J. He's improving in so many ways, gaining more control over his temper bit by bit, making more eye contact, no longer turning his back on me when I speak to him. When we talk to him, and have our words translated, even words as simple as, "Would you like dumplings or noodles for dinner?" he often says wonderingly, endearingly: "Wo? (Me?)" But he is still grabbing toys, crying when he has to share and balking at taking turns, and although he has learned to hug us and blow us kisses, he is far from trusting us as his parents and vastly prefers his Mandarin-speaking caregivers unless Mom and Dad are bearing gifts.