*This post and most of the Wait and Listen series is now found in Oh My Soul: Encountering God in Honest, Unconventional (and Sometimes Messy) Prayer and is available for purchase at Amazon and anywhere books are sold.
Category Archives: food
Act 3. The curtain rises. It is months later.
It is a hard day, and I’m holding a fighting boy who is mad at the world.
He’s mad at his choices, mad at his consequences, and especially mad at his mama for not letting him drive through the fence. (see part 1 here)
I look into dark eyes and tell him not to fight me because I am on his side, and when he fights me, he fights against himself…and he is the one that loses. (see part 2 here)
RAD is so bizarre and parenting them is so backward in many ways. It really is an experience where you learn about God’s love for us though, because it is often years of loving them with no love in return. If other adults give them attention, it only makes it worse and prevents them from attaching to the parents longer. So many parents, though, feel so judged as they try to parent these kids.
In order to parent them effectively you have to quit caring about what others may think and care only about what is best for the child. Hard to do as a first time RAD parent and I think why so many disrupt. Hard enough to have your child not love you, but then to have others judging you too is just too much for many. I try to remind people that if the child is “reacting” then it is because they are “attaching” even if you aren’t seeing it and feeling it. If they didn’t feel themselves wanting to get close to you then there wouldn’t be so many behaviors.
– Amanda, adoptive mom
We make it to lunchtime.
It’s a treat for most of us on this day because we have veggie sushi. I know Andrey and Reagan don’t like it, though, and there’s just enough cucumber in the fridge to make an alternate meal for them – tarator, a traditional Bulgarian cold soup that they love. I don’t usually accommodate with options, but we need to use the ingredients up anyway and it sounds good to me. Perfect.
I’m grating cucumber. “I don’t like sushi,” Andrey announces from the table, amid cheers from the other kids who love it.
“I know. I’m making tarator for you and me and Reagan.”
I finish grating the cucumber and start chopping mint leaves (not sure if these are traditional, but I like them).
“I don’t like soup. I want sushi.” I mix in yogurt, drizzle in olive oil.
“I want sushi.” Sprinkle salt and pepper. I’m getting tired of these announcements and make one of my own.
“Today I’m not going to feed you food that you complain about. If you complain about something, you will not get it, whether you change your mind or not.”
Silence. I can hear him coming to a realization. The wheels are turning.
I arrange seven dishes. Sushi for four kids, tarator for Reagan and myself. Bread and apples for everyone.
Bread and apples for Andrey. And he says nothing, but his mind is learning. Those wheels are still turning, and he’s trying to decide if he wants to steer down the straight and narrow, or try driving through the fence.
Someone asks for tea, and I start pouring.
“I don’t like tea,” he announces.
“That’s okay, you have a water bottle.”
A few minutes pass. We have prayed and we are eating. We are happy…six of us, at least.
“May I pwease have tea?” he asks aloud. But what he is really asking is, Did you mean what you said when you said I couldn’t have something I complain about? Or can I get you to let me get away with pushing the rules?
Can I set a moving target?
And the answer is no. No, no, and no. “You have a water bottle,” I remind him. Remember to smile, mama.
“I don’t like my water bottle.” And then he gets a look on his face that clearly says, Oh, crap.
And he is learning what I want to teach him, instead of the other way around. We have set a boundary and he is learning to respect it. To respect others. To respect himself.
We know there’s progress. There has to be. If they didn’t feel themselves wanting to get close to you, there wouldn’t be so many behaviors. But it doesn’t feel like it when we’ve hit our one-year anniversary and both kiddos seem to be regressing in one form or another.
What we’re doing must be working to some degree because they are rejecting it. Sincerity pushes them out of their comfort zone, and a year into this, suddenly basic routines are out the window and met with defiance.
Not asking to be excused at meals. Not asking to have a chore checked. Not flushing the toilet (so help me) without being reminded.
It’s a game that’s not fun for anyone. The reminder isn’t necessary.
Patience is. Also, liquor.
Just kidding.
The lunch scene replays itself shortly after our one year anniversary. Sushi for some of the kids, tarator for others.
“Oh! Yummy sushi! I wike sushi! I wike soup, too!”
Well. You don’t say.
We don’t want to over-prune, and neither can we under-prune. We must prune with a purpose, working toward the vision of a thriving life that will bear much fruit.
It’s hard to walk the line every day. We’re not heroes. We continue to covet your prayers…and your occasional gifts of coffee and chocolate.
May adoptive families find encouragement, healing, and grace as they walk the line throughout their community, in all of their days. The victory is here.
End of Act 3. Curtain closes.
I love bread dough. There is something instinctively comforting about warm, rising dough that is as fluffy as toddler cheeks. I love the ppfffffff sound of punching the dough down after the first rise and then dividing it into little loaf portions and tucking them into their pans. I love folding in mozzarella and sauteed onions and so many herbs that they fall out when you lift the dough into the big loaf pan.
I love watching it rise.
And…I really love eating it. Hello, my name is Shannon, and I love, I adore, I highly esteem, I less-than-three carbs and gluten. Don’t tell our naturopath.
Baking bread used to be so intimidating to me. Silly, hmm? It was unfamiliar territory and seemed like a big process. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to tackle it.
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
– Philippians 4:6
So tackle it I did, and then got a little braver. I learned to play.
I learned to make new things, and discovered the love of stretching strips of pizza dough over calzone filling, rolling long thin triangles into crescent rolls, and layering other strips of dough together with a ridiculous amount of cinnamon sugar in between. Nothing fancy, just comfort food…but I’m harboring a longing to try homemade hotdog buns soon. We’ll see.
Recently we learned to make doughnuts, and I loved cutting out floury circles, and – the best part – little floury doughnut holes. Oh, joy! Oh, bliss!
Oh, dentist!
Just kidding. No cavities so far.
Playing is messy but so necessary. We need it from the earliest of ages. When we are little and don’t have enough play and touch and interaction, many things that should just be routine are anxiety-provoking, unfamiliar territory.
Fear comes into play. Literally.
We learned a little – just a tiny bit – about this during some adoption trainings. We’ve learned quite a bit more, as usually happens, through actual experience.
Our first experience was during our first trip to Spaghettia in March of last year. We gave Reagan some playdoh – all kids like play-doh, right? – and when she squeezed it, she cried. She was scared of it.
We thought, Hmm, that’s weird, and found different toys to play with.
We’ve been home together for almost a year now, and we’re learning more and more. It’s tricky; there don’t seem to be any hard and fast rules about sensory issues. Not all symptoms or characteristics may be present. A child can be both hypersensitive and hyposensitive. And – I just love this – “Inconsistency is a hallmark of every neurological dysfunction.”
Well. Thanks so much. That’s just great.
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Anyway, we’re doing lots of play. So many things are new and intimidating, and we focus on making new things familiar so they lose their fear. Messy play, creative play, textures, temperatures, movement, sound…sensory play. Of course, we never called it that before. We just called it…play. The only difference is that we don’t take it for granted anymore.
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…My object is to show that the chief function of a child – his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life – is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses; that he has an insatiable appetite for knowledge got in this way; and that, therefore, the endeavor of his parents should be to put him in the way of making acquaintance freely with Nature and natural objects.
– Charlotte Mason, Home Education
She loves playdoh now. And not just for eating.
(Kidding. She’s only eaten it twice…I think…)
Tonight after bedtime, Chamberlain came downstairs with a splinter in her fingertip that, while certainly painful, somehow magically did not become so until after we tucked her in. Vince and I took turns poking with the tweezers amid her shrieks and tears, but to no avail…we can’t pinch the splinter out, the tweezers can’t grasp it, and it’s unavoidable…the dreaded implement must be used.
You know the one.
The fearsome sewing needle. (gasp!)
Say it ain’t so!
Actually, I’m not saying it at all. I’m handing her a stuffed doggie that happens to be within arm’s reach and what I do find myself saying is, “I think Pup has a splinter, too. How about you check him with the tweezers -” putting those useless things into her right hand, “while I look at your splinter a little more?”
It was a stroke of divine genius that didn’t come from me at all. And it worked.
She is engrossed in Pup’s right paw while I am holding her left paw and poking it with the needle. She has no idea I’m even holding a needle. She hardly notices that I have exposed the end of the splinter and she is jabbering to Pup about how he must be more careful in the woods around the rosebushes…
I ask her if we can trade. She looks at me with surprise and hands me the tweezers and takes the needle that she didn’t even know I had and continues Pup’s surgery. One more pinch on her rosy fingertip and the tweezers grasp the splinter…and it’s out.We look at it together. Out in the open, it’s just a tiny little thing.
Cham toddles back to bed. I toddle back to the kitchen, thinking about what just happened…and He tells me:
You are the one holding Pup.
I almost dropped the tweezers. What?
He explains. He says that as we learn about these kids…all six of them…and we look for their owies that need healed and the things they need to learn, and we kiss them and cry over them and are engrossed in their need for restoration and growth…He is holding the needle. He is working on us.
There are owies and impurities inside me, and He is calmly, carefully, quietly pulling them out as I jabber on and on to Him about the pups that I’m holding. Things that used to intimidate me are almost normal now, and I don’t even cry over other things that used to scare me, and I’ve hardly noticed because my attention has been focused on these pups.
As we teach and comfort our kids, He is pulling fears out – these little bitty things that cause so much pain – and brings them out to the open so we can look at it together.He sends us toddling off, free, showing us new ways to play so we can be anxious for nothing…because He loves to watch us rise.