Grooooaaaaan. Too Much Thanksgiving Food.


Romper and dress by Dinkee Couture.

What I'm Thankful For This Year

As we head into the holiday season, I'm just thinking back and feeling utterly amazed and grateful that we live in a time when four people who needed a family could find each other, despite being thousands of miles apart. About this time last year, I was in Hawaii with Xander eating pineapple until my mouth went numb and getting ripped up by lava rock in the ocean*:


Which was great and all, but this year we're sitting around listening to giggles and squeals and enjoying scenes like this:



*I am extremely thankful for my husband, who when he realized I was getting pounded into the rock by the waves and that my skin was being ripped from my body, wrapped his arm around my stomach, kicked off from the rock, and swam with me on his chest for several yards until I was safe. And then, when faced with the choice between going to urgent care or drinking a Bucket of Fire at the Fish Hopper, he supported my decision to go for the obscenely large cocktail instead of stitches. Xander is a total superhero.

Incidentally, that cut took months to heal. I probably should have gone for the stitches, but the Bucket of Fire provided happier memories.

Opting Out of Cancer and Into Molestation

If you don't fly, then great. Your protest options are simple. You can just continue not flying as a form of dissent with the new airport security screening procedures. Easy peasy.

If you have to fly, and if you can possibly stomach it, please consider requesting a pat down when you go through security vs. being scanned by the machine. The official word is that they are supposed to pat your legs up to your crotch, or as they say, "Until they meet resistance." (By "resistance," I don't think they mean the traveler's loud objections.) And for women this will include touching the breasts. (This does little more than remind me of my visits to Madison Square Garden for performances, something I quickly stopped doing because of the obnoxious security screening, but that's another gripe for another day.) You are allowed to request that the screening be done in private, but personally I feel much safer having my fellow travelers there as witnesses. I'm sure there are and will continue to be some jerk TSA people out there who handle this in a less-than-professional manner, which worries me, but I still consider this the safer alternative to radiation. Yes, they say the amount of radiation is tiny, but the thing for me is that scientists still aren't sure if the effects of radiation are cumulative. And no reasonable doctor I've heard of believes there is a truly "safe" amount of radiation. They recommend against pregnant women being scanned, so how can I possibly be expected to send my children through that machine? Anyway, I'm hoping the presence of adorable twins at least gains me some sympathy in the pat-down line. Although I wonder how the TSA feels about cloth diapers?

Moving on, the reason the pat down is being considered a means of protest is that TSA is not very well equipped to handle large numbers of people requesting pat downs. One official openly expressed concern about the planned November 24th Opt Out protest. You can also call or write your senators. There will be a Senate hearing on this topic tomorrow.

If you are able to rearrange your life accordingly, then you can definitely protest by not flying at all. Or if you have some extra money to spend on the problem, you can show up for a flight and then make a scene at the airport security checkpoint, although due to regulations I consider to be pretty fucking stupid, you can be fined for entering the security zone and then failing to complete the security check. Given that the TSA has not been particularly forthcoming with the details of the various screening options, I find this rule to be pretty sleazy. Hell, I find the whole thing to be sleazy.

For me, while I'm annoyed about this and plan to express my displeasure about these procedures, I do find the whole airport security frenzy to be a joke. I'm not convinced these increased measures do much to deter terrorists. Maybe they'll keep future shoe bombers and the like off planes, but the serious fellows will always find a way, won't they? I get so tired of being treated like a criminal every time I want to fly or cross a border. But even this is not as bad as the triple-screening we got in Dubai or this one time in France. And it's certainly not as scary as some of the border crossings we've done, when you know you can be snatched out of the world in a second just for wearing the wrong expression on your face. But perhaps I should reserve judgment until I've had my first pat down.

In Which We Hoodwink the Fabertids

Up until about a month ago, the twins were taking naps in the morning and in the afternoon. Their morning nap lasted about an hour to an hour and a half. Their afternoon nap lasted about two-and-a-half to three hours. Awesome, right? But of course they eventually stopped sleeping during their morning nap. This was a bit of a bummer, because it was really nice having that hour in the morning to read the news, drink some coffee, and get ready for the day. So when they stopped sleeping in the morning, we decided we'd try to convert that hour to independent playtime. I was skeptical that they'd go for it. But it worked! It worked! It was amazing!

What we did was we hyped morning playtime like some kind of exclusive party. They could pick out whatever toys they wanted to play with and do whatever they wanted for an hour. (A person with developed reasoning skills would say, "Wait, we get to do whatever we want all day anyway." But these guys are babies. Babies! Which means that fooling them is like taking candy...Okay, no. I'm not really gonna say that.) They particularly dig toys that make noise, like drums and rattles and stuff. We put on some fun music for them and got them to dance to it a little bit in their cribs. Basically, we did whatever we could think of to get them really amped up about morning playtime. Playing alone? In their cribs? It was going to be THE MOST FUN THING EVER!

The first day, they were a little confused and fussy. The second day a little less so. By the third day, they were starting to get into it. Now when we go into their rooms for morning playtime, they actually ask to be put into their cribs. It's awesome. As I type this, they are drumming along to Coldplay and chattering happily in their beds. I am drinking a lovely dark roast with my feet up in the living room.

Score one for Team Parents.

Mompetition!

My good friend Robin gets total credit for bringing this to my attention. I'll let you guess which mother I am.

New Sweater

This one was a long time coming. I started it--get this--during the Winter Olympics. Ages ago, right? I finally put the buttons on yesterday. Dinke's is almost done, too.

Also, it is really, really hard to get a toddler to model anything.

Two Good Adoption Reads

Yet again I find myself posting a link from Rage Against the Minivan. That lady says some useful stuff, I tell you. I don't know how she finds the time to write these long, meaningful posts. But since I don't do it, I'm glad someone does.

There are millions of children out there who do not have families, and I'm not exaggerating. I consider this to be one of the most important issues in the world, if not the most important, because I think family is the basis for everything. I don't think it much matters how a person's family is made up, but having a reliable support network is essential. A lot of children do not have this, through no fault of their own, and I think the rest of us need to be aware of this fact. I believe that providing support to struggling families and children would go a long way to solving some of the problems society faces. Just something to think about, especially as we enter the holiday spending frenzy. Think of what good some of that money and energy could really do.

Be grateful if you have the luxury of reading and then ignoring everything I have just said.

This link is for those of you out there who cannot or do not want to adopt. Adoption is not the only--or even the best--answer to the problems facing the orphans of the world. There are a lot of other things you can do.

Adoption creates a loving family for a child who has been orphaned. But it does not address the root causes of why a child has been abandoned or orphaned to begin with. It is a band-aid on a much larger problem. It is estimated that 99% of the world’s orphans will not be adopted. Adoption is an answer for some orphaned children . . . but not for most of them.

What can I do if I’m not in a position to adopt?

Could you provide support to a struggling family? Volunteer at a group home? Offer art or music lessons to a child in foster care? Mentor or adopt a child who is aging out of the system?


The second blog post I read has to do with privacy in adoption. This is, naturally, something that is very important to us. We do get a lot of questions, and sometimes it is really hard to decide which ones we should answer and how. Here is one woman's perspective regarding that challenge:

The One With All the Privacy

I find it very difficult to politely, cheerfully put down a conversational roadblock when people start asking these questions, even though I'm extremely motivated to do it....I don't want my children's friends, or even their cousins, knowing all there is to know about them. When I think about my children in a school playground, I don't want the other children to know things about them that would hurt. I feel like the bare fact of being adopted is enough to contend with. And being transracially adopted is more than enough to contend with. Personal details, the whole history, the what and when and why, the hard and scary stuff, that seems like too much...

I think that lack of respect for privacy about the babies' history stems from a lack of understanding about the losses involved in adoption. I think - okay, I hope- that if people understood what they were really asking about, they wouldn't ask.

And there you have it. Plenty of reading and thinking to keep you busy for at least a few days. Has anyone else stumbled across any good adoption reads lately? Please share.

What I Love About the Fabertids Right Now

I spend a lot of my day just managing two kids. Feeding them, diapering them, making sure they don't accidentally suffocate each other. That sort of thing. I do appreciate my kids a lot and often notice things about them that fill me with joy and make me go all sappy-like, but I always feel like I could appreciate them just a little bit more. I thought I'd take a few quiet minutes to reflect on all the things I love about them right now.

- The way Dinka's voice gets super high and squeaky when he tickles us or his sister. "Teek teek teeeek teeeeek teeeeeek!" And the fact that after he tickles one of us, he almost always tickles himself, too, just to make everything fair.

- The way Dinke declines "tickle" as though it were a Latin noun. "Ticka, tickae, tickum!"

- The way Dinke turns her head to the side and smiles at us in a coy way when we ask her to do something she has no intention of doing.

- The way Dinka pats our shoulders when he gives us hugs.

- When the twins babble something to each other that sounds incoherent to me and then go running off in unison to get into some kinda trouble.

- The look of pure joy on Dinka's face when he sees a graham cracker or even just a graham cracker box.

- That they are both obsessed with the blankets I made for them and gave to them in Ethiopia. They drag them all over the house like little Linuses.

- That Dinka rocks out every time he hears any music, including when a car goes by with the bass blasting.

- Dinke's infectious giggle.

- The way the twins chase each other around the house at toddler speed, screaming at the top of their lungs.

- That they are both crazy about the documentary Babies. It's the only video they'll actually watch.

- When Dinke says "yaaaay" and puts her arms up in the air.

- When Dinka suddenly gets the urge to climb something and completely hulks out for a minute to get the job done.

- If they get hurt and you tell them to "shake it off," they both shake their heads from side to side even if they're still crying buckets.

- The enormous grins that spread over their adorable little faces when they first see me in the morning and their competitive, stumbling little sprint to be the first to give me hugs.

- The fact that, even though they are twins, they are so different.