ever-fixed mark

Our house doesn’t have a back yard — a feature, not a bug, according to us black-thumb types — but the front does border on a beautiful park with a small pond. The park is called “the Mall,” pronounced the English way: rhymes with “pal.” Natives can always ID tourists by their faulty pronunciation. The pond looks man-made, situated right in the center of town as it is, but if my Internet source can be trusted (and, really, how often do you find inaccurate information on the Internet?), it is actually “a kettle hole formed by the melting of a huge fragment of an ancient glacier.”

Such was the scene today, when the sun broke out after a few hours of desultory snow:

The majority of my extended family has moved to Florida, and they love to complain about how cold it is “up North.” (There is an inverse ratio between the length of time the person has lived in the south and the amount of whining they do, viz., the people who just bought a second home there last winter like to pretend that their blood has permanently thinned.) They love to flaunt what they see as their good fortune and superior sense in having moved to a warmer clime by asking us, with disdain, how we can stand even a week of winter without contemplating suicide. To which I say, “Buck up, put on some Polartec, lace up your skates and enjoy the winter, you big wussies.”

Like many of you, I read the adoption boards to glean little nuggets of information about referral activity. It’s a little difficult to discern the words on the computer screen when my eyes are rolling so vigorously, but I do my best to follow the action. (Sample thread: Is it morally defensible to buy my child items from the “Baby’s First Christmas” line of ornaments when it’s his first Christmas in the US, but not his first Christmas on Earth? Discuss.)

I found a board for Korean adoptions from my agency, though, that seems a little less hysterical than the others, and a lot more relevant to my timeline, because things vary from agency to agency. The other day I saw this message:

“I talked to [program coordinator from Korea] today, and she told me that we’re Xth on the boy-or-girl list for a referral!”

Wait a minute. You’re actually allowed to talk to the program coordinator? And she’ll tell you where you are on the list?!

My first thought was this: If I were that program coordinator, there’s no way I would do that. Your position on the list could change day to day–moment to moment, even. If I had known that I could request that kind of information, I would have been calling her five times a day for the past four months.

So of course I called her. And after giving me the fine-print caveats and disclaimers—your position on the list could change at any time; families on hold may re-activate; Korea sometimes goes out of order; if you call me five times a day I’ll have your number blocked, believe me, I’ve done it before—she gave me the position:

We’re number eight. Our ordinal position is a single-digit one. Only seven families are in front of us. After months of waiting, the end is in sight.

I also asked her to confirm a rumor that the girl-only list agency was down to five families, which turned out to be true. I posted months ago that our agency stopped allowing people to choose the gender of their child as of February 1. We actually applied to the agency before then, so we were allowed to specify a girl. As our homestudy update and I600A approval dragged on and on, though, I started getting nervous about the year-long waiting time that was the current expectation for the girl list. Right after our homestudy was finally sent to Korea in September (eight months after we first applied!), I convinced Husband to switch to the girl or boy list.

Meanwhile, the girl list has gotten shorter and shorter, as all the families who made the February 1 cutoff have gone through the system and no new families have been allowed to join, and an unusual spate of girl referrals has meant that the girl list is now shorter than the boy list.

Then the coordinator said, “Do you want to switch back?”

Then my head exploded, because after going through all the angst of deciding to go with the girl list in the first place, and then all the Sturm und Drang of switching back to the boy list, then watching our waiting-child bid go kaput, I had exhausted all my German expressions and had nothing left for switching back. Plus, I am terrified of taking the Fate I don’t believe in into my own hands, and reluctant to interfere with God’s perfect plan, the existence of which I also seriously doubt.

So we’re still number eight on the “either” list. If the girl list goes quickly and the boy list goes slowly, we could be referred a girl under the new combined-list regime. (Probably not, though; the girl referral rate is still only 25 - 30%.) If the boy list goes quickly, or we’re selected out of order, we could get a referral tomorrow. Or in March.

We’re number eight.

Thanks for all the anti-hitting advice! I’ll let you know how it goes!

Aitch has been hitting and scratching. He lavishes this attention chiefly on his parents, although yesterday he beaned a little boy on the head with a book during a play date. He isn’t usually mad when he does it–sometimes, he’s frustrated, but other times he’s just playing. Husband and I are sporting matching red welts on our faces from Aitch’s nails. It’s not a good look.

We have tried every form of discipline we can think of. We have “timed out.” We have ignored the bad behavior. We have “stopped the action” when Aitch hits or scratches us by putting him down abruptly or walking out of the room. We have explained that hitting hurts people’s bodies and their feelings. We have tried judicious shows of anger. We have practiced and praised good, “gentle” behavior. Nothing has made a permanent impression on Aitch. He will usually say, “Sorry, Mommy” or “Sorry, Daddy”–sometimes spontaneously, sometimes at our urging–but he’s still hitting and scratching us.

The trouble with time outs, in my opinion, is that they are a good deterrent for premeditated behavior, but the memory of the humiliation is not capable of stopping Aitch in his tracks in the split second before planning and executing a slap. For example, if Aitch refuses to put away his toys when I ask him (I figure, why have three unrepentant slobs in the family? Someone’s got to be trained to clean up), I can say, “If you don’t help I’m going to give you a time out,” and then he can weigh the options and make an informed decision. In the rare event that he does choose the time out, he’s usually sufficiently chastened by the end of it to help with the clean-up, and so we all win. But if he hits me quickly, and I don’t have time to warn him of the time-out consequence, then the time out just becomes a pretty lame punishment, and not something he’s likely to remember on his own the next time he goes to hit.

What he needs is the kind of retribution that will be sudden, breathtaking, dramatic, and likely to impress itself on his little mind.

What he needs, I realize I am describing, is a slap.

I will not slap Aitch. Yes, I have swallowed the liberal mother guilt of “you don’t teach someone not to hit by hitting.” More than that, though, I just don’t want to be the kind of person who hits. I wouldn’t hit Husband, and if he ever hit me I would 1. empty his bank accounts and 2. change the locks (in that order). Do I want to be the kind of person my son would want to change the locks on? No.

Still: sudden, breathtaking, dramatic, impressive retribution (non-violent). What could it be?

Any ideas? Please comment if you’re out there. Husband says, “Tell them to speak up. We need to bring the full force of your readership to bear on this issue.” I fear the full force can be counted on one hand, but if you’re out there I’d love to hear from you.

I understand that countries in the EU sometimes have trouble harmonizing their national regulations, but this seems kind of silly:

This is a bottle of hair conditioner. The English instructions tell you to apply the conditioner to “clean, wet hair.” The Italian and French are slightly different: apply to hair that is clean and “wrung out.” But the poor Spaniards have to wash their hair, exit the shower, dry their hair “partially with a towel,” re-enter the shower, then apply conditioner and rinse.

The Germans could go either way, being instructed to apply to hair that is clean and “dabbed.” You could see a German reading the bottle and saying, “‘Dabbed?’ Oh, whatever, I’ll just wring out the excess moisture. That’s the same as ‘dabbed.’ I’m not getting out of the damn shower.” But the Spaniards can’t really get around it. Their directions are clear. No room for misinterpretation there. Dry it partially with a towel!

What happened here? Were the various translators not allowed to confer before finalization? Was the Spanish translator a hair-care expert who knows that conditioner is more effective on partially-dried hair? Or is there some kind of stereotyping going on about the hair texture of Spanish speakers?

In North America we have our cultural disconnects, as well. To wit:

My guesses:

1. Canadian toddlers are more physically mature than US toddlers (because of all the hormones in Canadian bacon).

2. Canada, like China, counts a child’s age from conception instead of from birth.

3. Canada has switched to the metric system for timekeeping.

Our family co-sleeps, and our little one likes to lie on top of the covers. When he climbs on the bed, his 70-plus-pound bulk effectively pins the comforter to the mattress, preventing Husband and me from pulling the covers far enough to the edge to cover our freeezing asses.

(I am, of course, speaking of Dog. My son doesn’t weigh half that, and there’s no room for him in our bed anyway.)

So I went to a department store last week to by a king-size comforter for our queen-size bed, hoping that the overhang would give us the extra coverage we need. While I was at the store my eye was drawn to a chocolate-brown shrug trimmed in fur on the collar and sleeves. Now, my fashdar is kind of impaired, and I have no idea whether this style would be considered fabulous or fashion victim, but “when I am old I shall wear mildly inappropriate color combinations” and all that. I don’t think anyone would be inconvenienced if I got an early start on my dotage, so I bought it.

When I got it home, unfortunately, I saw that nothing in my closet went with it. I tried various sweaters and shirts, but everything made my less-than-svelte midsection look huge. The next day, I went out to a few stores, Aitch in tow, to browse, the baby being a guarantee that I could spend no more than five minutes per shop.

To my surprise I found the same shrug in another color in a pricey boutique, for five times what I had paid. Because I am shallow, this re-affirmed the value of my purchase and made me that much more determined to find something to go with it. A saleswoman offered the opinion that the shrug would look best over a shirt in a matching color, which would avoid the midriffs-a-poppin’ look that I was getting from the light-colored shirts I had tried.

Emboldened, I ventured out again the next day while Aitch was at day care to look for a brown sweater or tank. The saleslady from the previous day remembered me and immediately asked, “Where’s your baby?” I know she was just making conversation, but her tone of voice instantly put me on the defensive, feeling that I had been branded The Mother Who Shops While Strangers Raise Her Son.

I explained where Aitch was and then segued into my mission. She found me a brown sparkly t-shirt. I tried ir on but found that the mirror was outside the dressing room, so I had to go back to the main part of the store to see how it looked.

“I think that would be perfect,” she said.

“I don’t know…I think it’s a little clingy around the middle considering the sweater on top is so short,” I said. Indicating my paunch, I said, “I’m not sixteen anymore.”

“Oh, that’s from having the baby,” she said.

“Well, the baby’s adopted, so no, that’s just me,” I responded.

Silence. Then, “Oh.”

New Year’s resolution: crunches?