On transracial adoption

The always-insightful Margie (aka Third Mom ) raises some great questions about transracial adoption over at Anti-Racist Parent.

Go see. (But before you go, go read Why Doesn’t White Adopt Black?).

2007 Bloggies: go vote!

I am so excited to tell you that LesbianFamilydotorg, where I am lucky enough to be a contributing writer, is a finalist for a 2007 Bloggie award!

We’re up against some big ol’ famous blogs, including Perez Hilton (purveyor of celebrity gossip, not that I’ve EVER read it), for the “Best GLBT weblog” award.

Please go vote for us!

(Oh, and um, while you’re at it, you should vote for Go Fug Yourself too, with well-deserved nominations for about 8009 different categories. Not that I’ve ever read that either.)

Let me give you some advice

I quit posting about sleeping issues a while back because I was starting even to bore myself, but the issues are on-going.

We’re in a particularly bad phase right now involving moving him into his own room and trying really hard to get him to learn to soothe himself. Worth it and also incredibly painful.

Since I haven’t been able to shut up about this in real life the way I’ve managed to here, the unsolicited advice has been pouring in.

If one more person tells us what we should do, what worked for their kid who is nothing like ours, what fit perfectly for their parenting style which is totally unrelated to ours, I just might scream.

This has been hard. For the most part, I think NSG and I have been pretty good about letting other people’s judgement about our parenting style roll off. The judgements that flies about parenting decisions are just stunning (I’m guilty of this too, of course). I think I’m having a harder time shaking it off this time because most of the things we’ve done as parents – so far – have worked for all three of us. With less success around sleep issues, my confidence is down and the assvice is just getting to me.

In the past 48 hours, we’ve been told to: let him cry it out, let him cry for a while – but not too long!, move his bed into our room, go back to co-sleeping, feed him right before bed, don’t feed him before bed, put sweet potato in his bottle at night, sleep in his room with him, sleep in our own room, use a white noise machine, swaddle him, and don’t swaddle him.

Enough!

And the worst part about this is that when you don’t sleep, everything’s harder. I stubbed my toe yesterday morning and it was like the end of the freakin’ world.

Sigh.

In the scheme of things, this is not so big. It just makes me want to stomp my feet and be kind of petulant once in a while  – lucky you this is usually where I do it, since you, unlike the people in my physical world, can’t smack me. The only advice I’ve hear that’s been at all helpful was from my co-worker, who keeps saying: This too shall pass.

My new mantra.

P*nis down

My new post, P*nis down, is up at LesbianFamilyDOTorg:

When we were just talking about having babies, talking about transracial adoption, several people asked me about raising boys without a dad – what were we going to do, they asked, about making sure our son had plenty of male role models? One of the people who asked me this question was a white woman with a white husband who lived in an almost entirely white neighborhood and had almost exclusively white friends.

Huh.

Beautiful boy

Six months today since my son has been on this planet as a human being in his own right.

Last night we went to hear Kris Delmhorst. It was Roo’s second time hearing her – we’re getting him started on good music early – and he was a champ. He sat in my lap and listened intently for a while and then fell asleep on NSG’s lap.

 Dinner was great, the music was great, it was just one of those nights when we all couldn’t get enough of each other.

When Roo was brand spanking new, our friend V. pronounced him “a really nice person.” It made me laugh, but I knew what she meant. It is funny to say such a thing about a being so new, but as I’ve learned more and more about how to be a parent to this lovely little boy what she said stuck with me.

What a pleasure it is to parent him (even on the days when it isn’t), what confidence I have that he will be – that he already is – a nice person, a mensch, someone who will do good by being in this world.

Last night at dinner I looked at him in his high chair, intently stuffing his white bunny into his mouth and charming the waitress, and I thought:

That is an utterly perfect being.

Asswipe comment of the day, part 2 in what will apparently be a very long series

I was at a welcome party recently for a new group I joined for some work-related stuff, and, since it was in the evening and partners were invited, both Roo and NSG came with me. Roo was, naturally, the life of the party, and several people were compelled to tell me the adoption stories of people they knew. For the most part they were the stories you would expect – a neighbor with a daughter from China, a schoolmate who had been adopted from Korea, and so on.

But there’s always a bombshell, and here it was, from a former high school teacher:

“A former student of mine is an adoptive parent – we just met his son, who is 16 months old. Adorable! He was adopted domestically, too, born to a syphilitic, drug-using woman… it was a miracle the baby was born healthy.”

I was so caught off guard that I might actually have drooled in front of him.

I’m embarassed to admit I said nothing, and my total inability to think on my feet has been haunting me ever since.

What could I have said? What would you have said?

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My kid the inchworm

Life has just not left a lot of space for blogging recently. There are some unbloggable stresses, but also the usual ups and downs – many more ups than downs – of a family juggling two full time jobs and an almost-6-month old.

The tooth trying so hard to bust through Roo’s gums has been wreaking havoc with our nights all week. He’s become a factory of drool and snot (sorry), but has for the most part been pretty good-natured about the whole process… the main exception being between about 3 and 4 every night. There’s nothing like sitting in the rocker with a swaddled baby in the dead of night, listening to him scream and doing everything you can think of to make him feel better, simultaneously feeling like you’d kill someone for some sleep and like you’d give up sleeping for the rest of your life if it would just make him feel good again. 

We’re also still working on getting Roo into his own room. On the advice of the sleep consultant, NSG and I are now on a mattress on the floor of his room, but to save our sanity, since he’s been up close to once an hour in addition to the regular 3 am programming, we’re switching off in the middle of the night and then again in the early morning. Half the time I wake up in bed in the morning and don’t know which room I’m in and can’t remember which room I started in.

But this too shall pass, or so we’ve been assured.

And in the meantime the kid just gets funnier and funnier, which I’m convinced is one of those built-in saving graces of a creature who keeps two adults up half the night after freakin’ night. Today he figured out how to scoot himself… holy! He’s mobile! Time to babyproof the house! He just wanted that toy badly enough and off he went. Later we put him on the bed to see if he would do it again, and, unlike on the hardwood floors, on the bed he scoots using his HEAD for extra mobility. He’s an inchworm! And he is so proud of himself. That’s the best part – watching his face as he realizes he’s done something new, and then as he reacts to our cheering and laughing.

I’m grateful for all this cuteness because life really is exhausting these days.

Tomorrow we have our final post-placement visit before we can file for finalization. I’m also grateful to be done with having social workers involved in this process. Ours has truly been a wonderful support to us, and has earned nothing but our respect and we have always felt like she’s our ally, but we’re ready to be done having our parenting come under official scrutiny every few months.

That’s all my brain can generate for tonight, so that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Scrambled

I have many things to write about – the temporary chaos that is my job, our meeting today with a sleep consultant (hallelujah!), the almost-tooth that is wreaking havoc with Roo’s days, and other things bouncing around in my head. In the meantime, all I can manage to produce as far as original content is: I am a tired girl. (See: sleep consultant).

If you’re looking for something much more exciting, please head over to A Life in Two Keys to congratulate Clementine and her partner Petunia on their adoption of the beautiful and long-awaited Ms. Hester Willa.

Congratulations, Mamas!

Have two, use none

My latest post, Have two, use none, about the negotiations around how to have a baby when your family has two uteruses, is up at Lesbian Family dot org.