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Dog HollowThe story of our family built through adoption as a first choice. |
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June 12 Free birdJust an update that what we assumed to be a mortal wound isn't slowing down our (still unnamed, because, you know, she's alive) chicken. After spending 5 days in the intensive care unit of the Lang household (read: a dog crate in the garage), we deemed the chicken ready to re-enter the free world. The first day or so was not good, she seemed to be in shock, but nothing a little neosporin and bandages can't repair I guess. While still looking fairly brutalized, she is in good spirits and as a bonus has become quite docile and will perch easily on my arm.
In other big news, Phoebe is making great strides on the potty. Falling in the category of gross things that will always excite parents, she did her first #2 in the potty this week! Twice! We're doing the naked training method, so we have her in diapers as little as possible. Summer is a handy time to potty train that way.
Sidenote: Betsy just mosied up to the house carrying an egg in her mouth from our chicken who free roams in the pasture. She carried it quite a distance without breaking it...classic Betsy. And now I'm off to clean up a mess equalling the above in grossness but much less exciting...during a car ride today Milo projective vomited on the console of my car, coating the radio and temperature controls in whatever random food item he got into today while I was working. Life on the farm, always interesting? June 06 Chicken FeverAbout 2 weeks ago, we added 4 more hens* (*all are "unsexed", meaning we don't know if they are male or female, but are imposing our positive thinking on them in hopes we get no roosters) to our little chicken brood. That brings us to total of 8 hens and 1 rooster. Prior to today, these chickens had kept to themselves in the chicken run (with the exception of Mystery Chick, an unknown breed with feathery legs who was small enough to squeeze through the fencing out to the pasture). Unfortunately, as I was talking on the phone to my parents explaining how our Australian Shepherd puppy never does anything to harm the chickens, I stumbled across a clump of feathers. With part of a body attached to it. We then noticed one of the chicks was missing…we spent the next half hour searching for it, finally resigning ourselves to the fact that Milo had made a hasty meal out of it. Apparently they have started flying up and over an open area of the chicken run (since closed). A little later, Zoe, Phoebe and I trekked back to our newly tilled 30’x100' garden area to plant some corn, tomatoes, basil and beans. Suddenly the missing chick sprung out from behind some weeds, apparently unharmed. After catching her we realized if she is unharmed, where did the clump of feathers come from? Ah, on closer inspection one of the other chicks inside the run was indeed injured and at this point the lovely chicken tradition of pecking to death a sick chicken had begun. She had apparently had a close encounter with Milo that left her with a large gaping wound on her side. After separating her out from the group, we decided we’d try some minor wound cleaning and see what happens. So she’s resting comfortably in the dog crate in our garage, Neosporin + bandaged; we’re guessing she has slim odds to recuperate, but I did have to try. We learned 2 things today: apparently Milo cannot be trusted with the chicks (although he has cornered one of our adults on several occasions and leaves it unharmed) and Zoe thinks we only name chickens when they die. It seem she does recall our visit to the vet last fall with Cathy, the chicken who died of unknown causes. As soon as we told her we thought Milo had killed a chick, she responded, “what should we name her?!”. p.s. What? I know this post is light on kid info and that I haven’t posted for 6 weeks. Work busy, kids good, trying to potty train Phoebe, Zoe graduated preschool, we have done *a lot* of work getting our little farm ready for growing season, Milo is getting big. There, you’re all caught up! April 22 Happy Birthday Zoe! Today, Zoe Mei turned 5. In so many ways, she is such a big girl. With increasing frequency, Zoe says things that sound so grown-up. It used to be she'd throw out the odd phrasing here or there that struck us as cute or funny, but now it happens so often I have to acknowledge that she just is getting to be a big girl. These days Zoe's interests still include anything related to drawing, she also spends a lot of time sounding out words ("mmmmilk, hey mom, milk starts with M!"), and she loves her gymnastics and swim lessons. Swimming deserves special attention...we have had Zoe in various group swim classes in the past with decent results. However, she never could get past an aversion to getting her face wet or putting her head under water, so she was kind of stuck with how far she could go. We decided to try a pool closeby that teaches private, 1 on 1 lessons. They're just 15 minutes long, and then they get to play in the pool for 15 minutes after their lesson. So she started out getting stiff as a board when it came time to put her face in; she dipped in up to her lips and called it good. In the week between classes, there was a lot of talk about being afraid to get water up her nose, so I broke down and bought a set of noseplugs. Now, I grew up swimming and teaching swim lessons, and I know a lot of teachers really frown on noseplugs, but as far as we were concerned, it was either get noseplugs or risk her not wanting to get back in the pool. Well, ever since getting those she has slowly built up her confidence in the water, and a week ago she was brave enough to start going all the way under water in our hot tub and getting things off the bottom. In her class Monday, for the first time in her life she swam with her face in the water, arms pulling and legs kicking, for a length of about 5 feet. We are so proud of how she has stuck with it, overcome her fears, and kept being brave every week until she became confident enough to put her face in and swim. A lesson many of us grown-ups could benefit from...
In other exciting news, we got an Australian shepherd puppy about 2 weeks ago. His mom was picked up by Animal Control when she was pregnant, and he was born and raised with a foster family outside of Portland. I drove down a couple weeks ago and brought him home, and haven't had a solid night of sleep since then! We got to vote as a family on the name, and it was unanimously agreed to name him Milo. Overall, things are going pretty well; he's pretty well adjusted to our routine and has started to feel right at home around our house and yard. We have challenges with play biting and him harassing the girls and our old husky Betsy, but we're working on it. We've got a trainer coming over tomorrow to help all of us learn some techniques. For those not familiar with the Aussie, they are herding dogs, and while they can be really great family dogs, they have an intense drive to herd which includes nipping at the heels of whatever they're chasing. Today I witnessed Milo finding his inner-herder when he accompanied me out to let the goats out of the barn this morning...although he's no bigger than a cat, he had our youngest goat Maggie tearing around the pasture, bobbing and weaving to stay away from him. Lots of training in our future.
 March 31 MilestonesBetween my last blog post and today, we've cruised through a bunch of milestones. First and foremost, today we celebrate Zoe's gotcha day; 4 years ago today we met our big girl. Who knew what an adventure we'd have? I am having issues accessing our photo drive right now, so can't give the whole "that was then, this is now" thing, but amazingly, Zoe has grown up! A couple weeks ago we signed Zoe up for kindergarten...talk about milestones. I can hardly imagine we're embarking on the beginning of her school career. The program at our local public school is 4 days per week which I think will work out nicely for Zoe. On that same day, we had our final meeting with the social worker from our adoption agency for Phoebe's adoption. While there is no legal requirement attached to it, China likes to get updates on the children at 6 months and 12 months post-adoption. So our social worker comes over, asks how things are going, goes over some developmental stuff, and that's about it. But as she was leaving she made mention of "it was great to work with you all these years", and I realized we've been seeing this same social worker every 6-9 months for the last 5 years. From the time we started Zoe's adoption, the post-adoption follow ups, starting Phoebe's adoption, and on from there, we have had plenty of inspection into our parenting abilities. It's nice to have that era behind us...
It's with great sadness and a very heavy heart that I share another milestone, the news of our lab Blue...we put him to sleep early this afternoon after a brief and brutal fight with hemangiosarcoma (a nasty and aggressive cancer of the blood vessels that is basically incurable). It started with seizures on Phoebe's gotcha day, evolved into a bleeding tumor in his mouth which moved to his sinus cavity and brain, and ended with his passing on Zoe's gotcha day; without going in to the (literally) gory details, I'll just say the last 3 weeks have been filled with a lot of blood and a lot of tears. We wouldn't have chosen to do it on Zoe's day, but last night he took a sharp turn for the worse. We chose to intervene before the disease itself killed him, an unpleasant scenario where a tumor ruptures and they bleed to death. While Blue wasn't always a model dog, he was 100% loyal and we loved him so much. I'm sad, so it's hard to get motivated to write anything clever here; the house is quiet, so I am off to remember the best times with our friend and be thankful for having his love in my life. March 09 Our first year with PhoebeToday we celebrate the 1 year anniversary of Phoebe joining our family. In the last year, Phoebe has learned to run and jump, gotten over her fear of walking on grass, learned to speak English (a work in progress!), discovered her great love Diego, received 8 stitches in her forehead, learned how to ride a tricycle, became her sister's best friend, mastered the rock wall and can climb it in 8 seconds flat, moved into a big girl bed, became obsessed with horses, honed her slapstick comedy chops, and generally made our lives fantastic. She was a sweetheart when we first met her, and she has continued to blossom into a happy, funny girl who loves to make people smile. In the meantime, Zoe has really grown into a superb big sister; granted, Phoebe has learned a trick or two from Zoe that she might not know (yet) on her own, but it's sweet and fun and special to watch their relationship develop. They are great friends, which feeds into my deep-seeded desire for them to be there to support each other as they get older.
March 2008
 March 2009
 I have been looking forward to this day for many weeks because we were going to go out to dinner with our awesome guide from China. We are in the unique position to be living in the same city as our guide; the guides used for adoptive families are Chinese guides who live there and fly around China to escort adoptive families through the process. In our case, our guide happened to be moving over to Seattle to open a business right after we adopted Phoebe, and we recently reconnected with her. So we had plans to meet up with her and her 9 year old daughter for some Chinese food, but for the 7000th time this winter, our plans were changed because of SNOW(!!!!!). This is our 11th winter in Seattle, and I can't remember ever having more than a few brushes with snow each year; like much of the rest of the country, we are experiencing a hellacious winter that does not want to end. And while most times it melts soon after it falls, today we had a torrential downpour of tiny snowballs (more often than not, our snow seems to be of the hail/pellet variety), and what with the general inability to deal with snow around here, we decided to reschedule our dinner since we were going to drive about 20 minutes south to meet her. By dinner time, the skies had cleared and the roads weren't bad, so we ended up having a family dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant. As the dinner proceded and the girls attention spans drifted, I reflected back to a dinner we had almost a year ago today with some friends we made in China...our two families thought we coud possibly pull off an actual dinner at a Thai restaurant in Guangzhou and instead took turns dealing with crying children (Lori, you know what I'm talking about here. Special shout out to Mac and Max...happy gotcha day!).
We appreciate each day with our girls, they are different as night and day...it's unbelievable how much they have taught us about life. March 02 Once Upon a TimeThe story of how we became a family, as told by Zoe (note: this is not the version we tell her, but one she has cobbled together on her own). She is not sitting in front of me saying this, so it's in "grown-up speak" and probably not as kid-cute as if she was reciting it to me.
"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful lady named Queen Mommy and her husband King Daddy. They decided they wanted to adopt a baby and searched all over the world. They finally found their perfect baby in China and flew there to get her. They loved her and took her to a hotel, then they flew home. They named her Princess Zoe. One day Princess Zoe wanted a little sister, so Queen Mommy and King Daddy flew over to China again. They found the perfect little sister and brought her home. Her name was Princess Phoebe. Princess Zoe and Princess Phoebe played every day and had a lot of fun. Then one day they decided they wanted 6 more brothers and sisters, so Queen Mommy and King Daddy adopted 6 more babies. The End."
Zoe was trying to figure out what was so funny as she finished her story and I broke into a fit of laughter. February 18 Still here!I've lapsed a bit with the blog because I've been heads-down with my job; if anyone's interested, we just launched the first part of the project I'm working on and can learn about it here. We had a sunny day in the 50's, so we paid a visit to the Puget Sound for some beach walking and picking through the rocks. Zoe's taken to labeling her experiences lately and will repeatedly tell me when she's having fun (or not). Today was deemed "really fun!". I'm really starting to feel like she's almost a full-blown kid vs. the toddler/pre-school period, which is fitting since kindergarten enrollment is in a few weeks...
 January 20 Inauguration DayThis morning I turned on the inauguration ceremony with Zoe seated beside me. As we watched the dignitaries file in, I took a stab at answering her questions about the job of the president, why all these people are there to watch the ceremony, why people are crying, etc. The beauty of explaining things to a preschooler is that it forces you to strip away all the editorializing and complicated emotions we have about so many things in life, and just give the bare-bones description. One of the commentators said something about this being our first African American president, and Zoe asked what African American was. As we were discussing the concept of different skin colors and heritages, I could hear in her voice her total incomprehension for why it could possibly matter at all what color skin he has and why there hasn't been other people with different colors of skin as our president. We didn't go too far down that path, but it gave me the opportunity to imagine explaining the gross and appalling mistakes of our country's past, thinking of how you would explain this to someone who has no comprehension of racism, of the misplaced and ignorant hatred some people are capable of, why in fact the inauguration of President Obama (sorry McCain supporters, but it feels good to type that!) is such a powerful moment for so many people. We sat there watching for a few minutes and Zoe turned to me and said, "I guess I'll be president when I'm a grown up", and as I looked at my Chinese daughter, it felt pretty great to mean it when I replied, "Yep, you could do that if you want to". January 12 I dew eetAlthough the road Jamie takes to catch his bus to work is still flooded (and was basically the only way we were impacted by any fooding), the skies are apparently drying up, the temperatures are mild, and life in the Pacific Northwest is slowly returning to normal. We have many, many, many large tree limbs to chip, but fortunately our chicken pen and goat feeding station really need some new wood chips!
So in kid news, we've reached a new milestone with Phoebe...toddler bed! Yes, last week in an effort to address some nighttime behavior issues Phoebe was exibiting, we decided to give the toddler bed a try. Her crib converted to the bed, so it wasn't really too big of a physical shift other than now there's a little opening for her to get herself in and out of. Which is kind of a big deal.
Night 1: Door open, immediately running into the hall, door closed, crying, screaming, extra nightlight on, extra nightlight off, Zoe sleeping on the floor, Zoe out of the room, door open, Phoebe in our bed, Phoebe on the floor of our room. The night ended with us putting her in a pack & play to finally go to sleep. DON'T JUDGE ME!
Night 2: Tuck Phoebe in, close door, hear pitter patter to door, crying, pitter patter back to bed, minor crying, sleep.
Night 3: Tuck in, Phoebe quietly resisting "no night night", quiet, sleep.
Night 4, 5, 6: SLEEP!
While I relexively ordered 3 parenting books after the first night of transition (which, by the way, were scheduled for 2 day shipping but took 7 days to get here, which UPS chalked up to "natural disaster"), Phoebe has adjusted nicely to her toddler bed. One step closer to Zoe's dream scenario: bunk beds. She really, really, really wants them to share a bedroom. We have the space for them to have separate rooms, but will continue to contemplate whether they should share a room.
Phoebe is in her wildly independent phase where she attempts to do every possible thing that is completely impossible for her to do on her own. Regardless of the task at hand, her first comment is "I dew eet", followed by forceful maneuvers where she tries to wrestle whatever item I'm using from my hands so she can do it herself. Zipping a zipper, brushing her teeth, combing hair, getting the dogfood ready, whatever. Of course, this is wonderfully age appropriate behavior, but seriously, that doesn't make it any less annoying. Toddlers and speed to not mix; the extra 15 minute buffer built into our schedule to accomote Phoebe's independence is standard. As an aside, can I just say that after almost a month off, it is seemingly impossible for us to get to pre-school by 8:55. Was that a parallel universe where I was making that happen? Sometime before The Weather in Seattle Went to Hell? December 28 The thaw continuesWe live on a "private road", meaning, there is no city or county maintenance to be had, and anything that happens is for the residents of the neighborhood to take care of. There's 10 of us back here, but as we have come to learn, our wonderful neighbor who moved away a couple years ago was basically the sole caretaker of all things maintenance (when it snowed, he plowed, when weeds grew on the side of the road, he pulled them), and when he moved away, no one really stepped in to fill that void. Where that leaves us is after our record-breaking 16 inches of snow on the ground, our road is nearly impassible. It has been completely impassible off and on over the last 2 weeks, and while we are thawing out up here, as of this morning the road was basically covered with deep ruts in about 10 inches of slush, and anyone not driving an SUV didn't have the clearance to drive on the road. So, Jamie and I got seriously motivated and decided to shovel the road. I had called around to see about hiring someone to plow the road, but at $250 minimum, we decided to give it a go ourselves. Now, our whole road is about 1/4 mile long, but we were primarily concerned with a really bad stretch that we kept getting stuck in. After about an hour of shoveling, we made it up to a neighbor's house whose family joined in the fun. After a few hours, we had cleared about 2/3 of the road which allowed our bobcat-owning neighbor to do a little more clearning and set us all free. Since our garbage hasn't been collected for 2.5 weeks and we haven't gotten any mail, newspaper or UPS deliveries in over a week, we are seriously looking forward to some bare pavement. And slowly, the melthing continues.
Another milestone: we moved the chickens back to their coop today after moving them into the barn about 10 days ago due to the cold and snow. They slowed down their egg laying considerably while in the barn, and after I woke up last night to hear the rooster doing his thing at 2am, I thought it best to give some peace to the goats and donkey once again.
Since I can count on one hand the number of times we've left the house in the last 2 weeks due to being snow-bound, Zoe is showing signs that she no longer "needs" the outside world. Over the last few days when I have suggested we try to make a trip into town in an effort to return to normal life, Zoe usually responds with something like, "No, why? We don't need to leave the house anymore." I wonder how long it would take to turn a 4 year old into a recluse? As it is, she greatly prefers to stay in her pajamas all day; I will keep a close eye to ensure she doesn't start using tissue boxes as shoes... December 25 40 degrees tomorrow?!?!Hooray! We got our power back around 7pm tonight, though after a brief tease of it going on for 5 minutes this afternoon then promptly going back out we are cautiously optimistic it will stay on. While it's not as though we'd freeze to death without any heat, can I just say that I'm really pleased we bought a generator a few years back? Anyway, I am completely psyched that it's supposed to be around 40 tomorrow, followed by low 40's the next few days, which means we are within sight of once again being the Emerald City...
I hope everyone's holiday was good, rain or snow, power or darkness, with family or not...we are thankful for what we have and who we can share it with. Light Christmas? We woke up Christmas morning to find our power had gone out once again, likely from some snow laden evergreen branch snapping under the weight of the snow. It's been snowing here again all day, and to put this in perspective for those non-Pacific NW'ers, Seattle averages 3 inches of snow a year. Where we are at a higher elevation in the suburbs, I'd guess maybe we get even a couple more inches on average. Over the last 13 days, we've had about 16" of snow fall with very little melting, so all these 100' tall pine trees around our house are starting to snap their branches. The playset out back had a narrow miss when 3 large branches came down, taking out part of our pasture fence instead. While our house is pretty dark (though not cold, thanks to our generator), the girls have new Christmas toys to distract them from our second power outage this week.
We had our family Christmas last night with just the four of us, and we had a lovely time. We took a minute to recognize Phoebe's first Christmas with us, and tell the girls how lucky we are to have them here with us. By about 9:30, Zoe started to frantically get everyone into bed so as not to risk Santa possibly skipping us by, even coming down to check on Jamie and I a couple times ("Um, are you guys going to bed soon? Are you going to be asleep before midnight?"). We went downstairs by the light of a headlamp in the morning to see that Santa left behind 3 hula hoops for Zoe and a tricycle for Phoebe (don't let the camera flash deceive you, they were playing with these in the dark). So if we're lucky, maybe Santa has one last gift in store and can get our power restored before nightfall...
 December 22 Our Michigan Winter (in Seattle) We've had snow on the ground for a week now, the longest span I remember in our 10 years here. Today is our 3rd or 4th dumping; we've got a foot of snow at our house. Last night we lost power and are still waiting for it to come back on (online via our generator right now), and we awoke to the house being a cool 58 degrees. Zoe's having a good time following our dog Betsy around in the snow (although Betsy is now pushing 14 years old, her Husky ancestry kicks in everytime we see snow and she scoots around the yard like a puppy), doing some sledding and all the typical snow day fun stuff. Phoebe, on the other hand, is highly unenthusiastic about the snow. She smiles and points outside, exclaiming "snowing!", but when I ask if she wants to go outside, it's always met with a solemn expression and a firm "no", sometimes accompanied by violent head shaking and an accentuated "noooooooooo". I did bundle her up today to play, mostly re-confirming to her that she doesn't like the snow. Each time she trid to take a step, she'd trip and fall forwards or backwards, rolling around like a turtle on its back. The road conditions are leaving us somewhat housebound as the distance between our house and flat roads is a mile of snow-packed hills, so we're really looking forward to some above-freezing temps in the next few days.
While we haven't been able to do as much holiday fun stuff as we had planned because of the weather, we're looking forward to Phoebe's first Christmas with us. Although Phoebe didn't earn any points with Zoe earlier this week when she randomly just started opening one of Zoe's presents while I wasn't in the room (which was met with Zoe's typical, "Mom, Phoebe's doing SOMETHING!"), the two of them have been having a great time playing together lately. Phoebe's able to keep up with Zoe a little more, and they'll sit for a long time playing play-dough or "kitchen" with their wooden food. For her part, Zoe's improving in the whole behavior modeling thing and we're seeing more, "Phoebe, do it like this" teaching her little sister new skills...like how to climb out of her crib. December 12 Kids Book ListI've been ordering books like crazy though Zoe's pre-school Scholastic book club, and got one today I really like. It's "Unstoppable Me" by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer. It's prompted me to add a new module to the blog of kids' books that I like (located under the photos). Even if you don't have kids, I'd say most adults could learn some life lessons here. An excerpt:
I feel more secure already! Spectacular. Anywho, just thought I'd track some of my favorites there; I'll have to peruse the girls' books again to refresh my memory and beef up the list.
December 07 House Party TimeThis morning, the whole family got our dance on with our favorite all-ages entertainer, Dan Zanes. Not only did we have front row seats, but Zoe got to say hi to Dan after the show.
 Yesterday Zoe had her big gymastics show at Seattle Winterfest. I was in the 2nd day of an unpleasant flu-like virus (confirmed to *not* be the flu by an incredibly fun test where the doctor stuck a cotton swab up my nose to just about touch my brain), but dragged myself down there so as not to miss this little piece of Zoe's childhood. She did awesome, though due to technical difficulties, we do not have any (good) photos of her doing her thing.
Humorous exchange of the weekend between Zoe and daddy in the hallway while mommy was laying in virus induced sleep state in room next door:
<Zoe farts>
Dad: Was that you?
Zoe: No.
Dad: If it wasn't you, then who was it?
Zoe: It was mom, but don't tell her. |
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