Chinese school

Saturday was our first day of Chinese school. I had told Zhao Lei we were going to Chinese school earlier and she was clearly not happy about it. I think she said something like,"No." When it was time to go leave, she didn't want to get off the electric jeep. She finally got in and we headed off. I had planned to get there early, but it took so long to get her in the car that we arrived only a couple of minutes early. When we arrived I got out and went around and stood by her side of the car, planning to hold her hand and walk with her. I had thought she would be nervous but happy to finally hear people speak Mandarin. And she would get to be with kids who spoke Mandarin. She wouldn't get out of the car. I told her we had to go and she said, "No," with a stormy look on her face. Uh oh. I had thought that she might only like Chinese school for a couple of years until she figured out that not everyone had to go to school on the weekends or when she got sick of doing the homework on top of her regular school homework. I knew that she needed to go because there was no way I could let her forget her language simply because she hadn't felt like going when she was nine. But looking at me and saying no and not getting out of the car? I hadn't thought of that. I tried to get her out for a couple of minutes by talking to her. Of course, I was doing It with very few words and a lot of facial expressions and gesturing. It was really, really hot that day, which didn't help. And I was hungry. After about five minutes, I turned and started looking for reinforcements. I asked a dad who was walking by my car to talk to her. He halfheartedly told her to go to school then gave up. The lady I asked next said she only spoke Korean. Lucky for me, the next lady spoke Mandarin. She had her three year old daughter with her. She talked to Zhao Lei for about fifteen minutes until she finally got her out of the car. She walked with us to Zhao Lei's class's before she left. Really, really nice of her and she was very kind to Zhao Lei. Class had started by this time, but everyone stopped when we walked in the room. I explained the situation to the etcher who was very nice and talked to Zhao Lei for a couple of minutes. The room parent spoke to her as well. She sat down at a desk and I sat down at a table in the back of the room. I settled down to relax, feeling badly about how it had not gone the way I had planned and feeling badly that Zhao Lei was upset by it. She had just opened her textbook when a really loud noise came over the loudspeaker. It was an earthquake drill. Really? Today? Not tow minutes after arriving In the clasdrool and there was an earthquake drill? So we all got under the desks and held on as they blared the alarm sound and told alerted us it was a drill. After a few minutes we all had to go outside and line up. Zhao Lei wasnt very happy with me or the situation, but went along with it. We finally went back in and I read on my iPad to escape for a while. There was a break after a while and she told the teacher it was okay if I sat downstairs with the other parents. I took that as my cue. I pretty much just paced for the next two hours hoping she at least liked it a little bit and wanted to come back.
I signed Brookelyn, Sasha and I up for mommy and me Mandarin classes for the next four Saturdays while I waited. When class was over she came out and told me she was hungry. I handed her a small snack and we headed out for lunch. She wasn't mad at me at all anymore and we had a nice lunch. Since then I found tutor through the school who is going to meet with Brookelyn and Brayden once a week to teach them Mandarin. I think it will help if she sees she is not the only one having to go to class there. And I want all of them to learn how to speak Mandarin. Might as well start now so they can communicate better with Zhao Lei.

Tired of making lunches

We have had a couple of good days. Really good days. All four little kids are getting up, getting dresses, eating breakfast, going to school, eating a snack, playing after school, spending a half hour reading or working on language skills, playing, eating dinner, playing, eating a snack, showering, and going to bed. The way it works is for me to be really organized and one or two steps ahead of them. I haven't been getting much sleep at night, but that is my doing. The kids are sleeping through the night. I just love my alone time, even if I spend it watching tv shows of no value. I dont mind doing errands, shopping, unloading the dishwasher, doing laundry, doing bills, cleaning...but I am so tired of making lunches and dinner! At dinnertime, everyone eats what I make or they eat fruit and yogurt. The only one I will make anything different for is Zhao Lei, otherwise I'd be making four different meals each evening. My rule is that everyone has to try eating whatever I made and if they don't like I will get them yogurt and fruit. I am willing to make them eat something they want so they aren't hungry at school. I make lunches every night after I put the kids to bed and straighten up. Sometimes it is 11:00 pm before I start on lunches. I usually make Zhao Lei some kind of noodle soup, fruit and a drink she likes from our local Chinese store. It's what she chooses and the container is always empty when she gets home. The other three are the problem. I'd buy hot lunch of it didnt cost $5 per child. I am way too cheap for that. Yes, I realize how good my life is if making my kids lunch and dinner is the worst part of my day.
Zhao Lei is doing really well. A friend of mine who speaks Mandarin called last night to see how she was doing. I said everything was going great except Zhao Lei never wanted to work on ESL apps othe iPad. They are pretty fun, but she lasts for about a minute then starts playing a game. I have to sit down and watch her do it. Sounds easy, but within seconds I get distracted with somethig else and she stops. I showed her that she can only fill I that she did her homework if she actually does it. Her teacher has said that doing ESL games is fine to cow t as her readi g every night. Valerie told Zhao Lei that she had to go to school Monday through Friday and do her homework. Zhao Lei asked Valerie if her kids had homework and seemed surprised when Valerie said they did. I'm sure she had homework at her school. I have a feeling no one made her do it. She told Valerie that I had signed her up at a Chinese school. Valerie said her kids took classes there too. Poor Zhao Lei! No sympathy there. Valerie was very nice to her and told me that Zhao Lei was a lot more talkative than most kids in China. She said Zhao Lei had called her auntie, which was good, it is a sign of respect. The little talk didnt really help the homework situation.tonight I pushed the issue and said she could only stay up later if she worked on the apps. And whenever I say i said something, I mean I acted it out. We are very good at communicating almost everything. It somehow works and is rarely uncomfortable for any of us. I wish I had learned some Mandarin. I was so caught up in the details of the adoption and traveling that I never got around to it. It is a big regret of mine.
Zhao Lei wanted me to help her get dressed in the morning and help her get ready for bed when we were in China. Clearly someone had told her that is one of the things moms do. Now that we are home she sees that my kids all get dressed by themselves. Sasha, my four year old, is the most independent. She gets up, gets dressed and Goes downstairs before the rest of them. At night she takes a shower and gets her pajamas on before we say a word. Amazing. Zhao Lei watched the other kids and now gets dressed on her own ithe morning. She still wants me to help her take a shower and needs me to be ithe room with her when she goes to sleep. Both things that I am fine with doing. I am around her every moment she is not in school. I know she needs the consistency and will need me to be the constant in Nuer life for months or years. Another things she learned by watching...last night she told said, "mom, I love you," before she fell asleep. Sweet. I tell all of the kids that quite often during the day, and then say it right before they go to sleep. It was really sweet to hear.
As I have sat here typing this, all three girls fell asleep. Brayden, who has been really well behaved since we got home, is being HARD. He ate dinner, ate a snack of a bowl of noodles before bed, and now wants to go downstairs to eat. My answer? No. I explained after the millionth time he asked to go downstairs that he can do whatever he wants to do, but if he chose to go downstairs he will go to bed early to Oreos night. The deal is that every minute he stays up past his bedtime one night gets subtracted off his time for the next night. He cannot be backed up against a wall, it always needs to be his decision or he will turn it I to a power struggle. Staying up late is a big deal to him. So, the threat of an earlier bedtime and me telling him I had to work on somethiing for a minute on the computer so he needed to wait a minute before telling me his decision seems to have done the trick. He has been silent for almost five minutes. Now I have to wait until he is OUT before I sneak out of here. Bummer, he's not quite out yet. I still have laundry to finish and lunches to make. Any volunteers?

"No School!"

Yesterday Zhao Lei didn't want to get out of bed and go to school. I convinced her that she couldn't stay home and had to go with me. I got all of the kids ready and headed out, not knowing what my plan was going to be. I just knew that I had to get my son to school on time or he would miss math. His teacher starts every day with math, which is great because there is no way I am going to have him miss math, so I get him there on time. Also, Zhao Lei needs to be there on time. I do whatever it takes to get us there by 8:30 am every morning. Anyway, I dropped off all of the other kids and drove to a local Chinese supermarket. I had a couple of phone numbers for people who could speak Mandarin to Zhao Lei, but I didn't want to call anyone while they were getting their kids to school. I left a couple of messages and then started my errands. I had planned to do a bunch of errands and knew that worst case scenario I would bring Zhao Lei with me all day. She hates shopping, so I wanted her to see that staying home was not an option. When I had bought the things I wanted to buy for Zhao Lei's lunches and snacks, I asked one of the employees if she would explain to Zhao Lei that we would now be going to school. I explained the situation to her and asked her to also tell Zhao Lei that it wasn't a choice, school or no school. She had to go. I have a feeling that if she didn't want to go to school when she lived in China, that she was allowed to stay at home. Not happening here. I only let my kids stay home if they are sick. Not like little sniffle sick, but sick. The lady told her and Zhao Lei listened and didn't say anything. When we got into the car, we go a phone call from the woman I had left a message with earlier. She also told Zhao Lei that she had to go to school. I drove to the school and Zhao Lei acted like she wasn't going to get out and go in. I wasn't about to drag her in, so this had to be done in a way that she actually walked in on her own. So I called my oldest daughter, who was back at college, and she again told her she had to go to school. Zhao Lei got out of the car and went in to class. I was so relieved! It had been a hard morning! I knew that I couldn't let her have one day off or we would be having that battle constantly. Anyway, I picked her up right after school and brought all the kids to the mall and bought them each a pair of shoes. Zhao Lei needed a new pair and so did two of the others. They all wore their new shoes on our way out, which is always fun. We had dinner at the food court at the mall and then headed home. After showers, reading books (picture books) and jewelry making, it was time for bed. It was a really good end to a challenging day.

This week

This has been a pretty hectic week. I enrolled Brookelyn in a home school program, started Zhao Lei at her school on Wednesday, learned about the curriculum for new home school, purchased uniforms for new school ( some classes during the week for home school are held on campus and students wear uniforms), signed Zhao Lei up for Saturday afternoon classes at a local Chinese school so she keeps progressing with her Mandarin, signed up at our local Families with Children from Ch@na, paid all of our mortgage bills, had our one month post adoption visit (which entails papers to be filled out and new photographs of Zhao Lei), and went to two practices and two games for Brayden's baseball and soccer teams. Long week. It didn't help that I haven't slept much at night because each of the kids wakes up at night and wants me, so I have been going from room to room all night. A couple of nights Zhao Lei woke up no less than 15 times and wanted to wake everyone else up. One night I only slept for an hour. One night I was awake with two kids from 1 to 5 because Zhao Lei managed to wake up Brayden. I think we are finally back to our normal pattern of sleep though. At least, getting the kids to bed on time and them each only waking up once a night. I can handle that. I don't need a ton of sleep, six hours will work. Because of my not sleeping, I caught the cold that a couple of the kids had when we got home. The kind of itchy eyes, sneezing, awful colds. And none of these really were that bad.
The thing that has really made this week hectic is that Zhao Lei has been pushing the boundaries with us. I had read a lot of books and a lot of blogs, so I wasn't shocked by the little bit of defiance and testing that she displayed at the end of the se nod week in China. There were times when she would do things like pour salt in her drink or bang the silverware together to be annoying. Or say no when I asked her to do something. The day before we lefts to come home was hard. She got more annoying as the day went on. I actually had to leave dinner with her so everyone else could enjoy the meal and stop trying to ignore her acting out. I know she was just testing me and was probably very anxious about the next step of flying to our house and meeting all of the kids. I wasn't shocked, but it was irritating and it was hard to deal with since we were all tired of being away from home and living out of a suitcase. It doesn't compare to the changes in her life, but it was a bummer.
When we got home we realized that we had to teach her all of the rules. I knew that she would have to learn how to be part of a family, but I mean basic things like not barking in our dog's face, not jumping on our couch, not racing around the house screaming...things that every almost ten year old should know. It makes me sad and angry that no one took the time to teach her those things. It seems like she was basically allowed to do whatever she wanted and if she was told no, there was no follow through. I cannot count the number of times I have told her no this week. Nsure I could use a word besides no, but she wouldn't understand me. She understands no. I try to pant amine the reason most of the time, the dog biting her face, covering my earsnwhen she yells...she gets it. She smiles and many times does it again with a smile on her face until I say it again in a sterner voice and then she says okay. I'm going to be honest, it's harder to bond with a child who is defiant a lot of the time. I wanted to be honest with my social worker about it so she could tell other parent what behavior they could possibly expect from an older child adoption. Not to scare them off, but I do think knowledge is power and I wish I could have learned more about it. She said that it was better to have her do this than have her be timid and act right out of fear we wouldnt keep her. I don't know. I appreciate and admire Zhao Lei' s confidence. I know that it will help her a lot later in life. But I have to admit that I think it would be easier to bond with her if I felt more protective of her instead of at odds with her. Here's an example. I needed eight pictures of her and us for our post adoption report. I had a few that I had taken throughout the week of her playing with the kids. They were very cute and perfect for the report. One of the oictures needed to be of all the family members that live in the home. Ray has been getting home about 8:30 or so every night, so that one was kind od tricky. I asked my oldest daughter to take a couple of all of us. Zhao Lei made a mean, mad or crazy face in each one. It took me, Ray and Dakota being very firm before she stopped and just looked at the camera. The behavior is not from communication issues, just her wanting to do something else.
Zhao Lei is a very smart, funny, nice, caring girl and I know we will work through this. It is actually amazing how well she has handled all of the changes. And I know it may take a few months to work this out. Or longer. A lot of it will be cleared up when we speak the same language. Not because she will understand she is misbehaving, because she already does, but because she will be more aware of the consequences to her behavior. When we were in China we only saw three older children besides Lei being adopted. One family adopted two thirteen year old boys and one family adopted a seven year old boy. The rest were three years and under. I don't think that is bad, I'm just thinking that is because it can be harder to adopt an older child. They come with years if history that helped determine who they are and how they react. And they are basically who they are. It isn't the instantaneous love you feel for an infant or small child. I have heard that your affection grows as you make memories witan the older child. I believe that and Ray and I already have some nice memories with Zhao
Lei. I had gone into this expecting the best and prepared (somewhat) for the worst. I felt educated. I guess I would compare it to an expecting parent who hears about colic. Even though you had read about it and heard about it, you are still shocked and upset if your child has it. I read a lot of blogs that glossed over any troubles they had adopting older children, but really appreciated it when parents told the truth about the hard times.
I want to clarify that we are not sorry we adopted Zhao Lei, she is great and we truly believe we will work through this eventually. Tonight she, Brookelyn and Sasha made bracelets in bed before going to sleep. There are many, many things are good about Lei. Brayden and Sasha act as if she has always been in our family. It's only Brookelyn who follows her sound and wants to be sound her all of the time. And tonight, Brookelyn didn't even ask to sleep right next to Zha Lei. So, overall, we are doing pretty well as we all settle ibto our new normal.nb

Pictures since we have been home

We are home!!!

We made it home late Friday night. We were supposed to take the train to Hong Kong right after we got our visa, spend the night, spend the next day touring Hong Kong, and then take a late night flight home. We heard there was a tsunami heading toward Hong Kong, so Wednesday night I stayed up for hours emailing back and forth with our travel agent getting our flights changed. We were able to change them to leaving for home late Thursday night. It was raining the day we left, but Ray and I ran out to the island one last time for a few gifts. We checked out and then said goodbye to a lot of the people from our travel group. We were really lucky to have so many nice people to go through such an amazing journey with. Several families headed out to get our children's visas and then got on the train to Hong Kong. I really enjoyed the train ride. Finally, there was nothing left to do but relax for a couple of hours and enjoy the ride. We were able to see Hong Kong as we got closer to the city, which was nice. Getting on and off the train was CRAZY! Everyone races to get on and get all of their luggage on as soon as they can. Meaning all at once. It was crazy, fast, furious, and pretty disorganized. Ray, Zhao Lei and I said goodbye to our friends and took a taxi to the airport. We really enjoyed the ride and I was sorry we weren't able to spend the next day touring Hong Kong. It looked really nice and I would have loved to see it. We were really homesick, sick of being tourists, and Zhao Lei had begun acting up the last few days whenever we were around other people. It was time to go home.
We had a pretty easy flight. It was thirteen hours, but it didn't seem bad. Maybe because we knew we were at the end of the trip. It took a really long time to go through customs. They had added a step since I got home with Sasha. But Zhao Lei was great and handled the wait very well. When we finally walked out my sister, Jenny, and my kids, Colton, Brayden, Brookelyn and Sasha were all waiting for us! It was great! Brookelyn ran up and hugged Zhao Lei, who was fine about it, and then all three girls held hands as we walked to the car. When we got home, the kids raced around showing Zhao Lei everything in the house. All three girls slept on the bunkbed, which was cute.
The next day Zhao Lei and I dropped the little kids off at school. They went in late since it had been such a late night. I thought it would be nice for Zhao Lei to have a few hours without the girls being all over her. That afternoon afer we picked up the kids, we headed up to Brayden's soccer practice and the girls played at the park. It was really cute watching them, they had so much fun together. It was really sweet how well they got along. Brookleyn and Sasha each had their feelings hurt if Zhao Lei paid more attention to the other one for more than a minute, but otherwise it was great. We went home and had a fun night. There doesn't seem to be a problem with communication with the kids.

Pictures from last few days in China