Getting our groove

It's a beautiful day here, but I am sooooooooooooo tired. She was up from about 2-4 this morning, probably because we had let her take an overly long nap yesterday. Live and learn. Luckily, her brothers have played with her quite a bit and I did grab about 20 minutes while she napped today.



She has been quite happy to have Jonathan take care of her as long as it's day time and even though he feels as bad or worse than I, he's right in there with her. In fact as I type this, he's following her up and down the stairs to be sure she doesn't fall. She climbs until her brow is sweaty. We bought a gate for the bottom but with all this practicing we might not need it anyway. She'll be a 10,000 hour Malcolm Gladwell-style stair-safe prodigy in no time.

If you sit down, then I will sit down, big brother.
Because you are pretty much awesome.

Needing sleep infects everything. It's like moving through jello mixed with sand, but not even as fun as that might sound. Having this stupid cold on top of being sleep deprived makes me prone to ill temper and impatience. I promise I fight it, but I'm just so much more fun when I am able to sleep.

Isaac invented a game with her. He said they
ended with the exact same number of points.
Someday she'll appreciate the weight of that.  

I'm grateful that tomorrow is a holiday. One final day of our non-maternity maternity leave. The average birth doesn't take two weeks away but with adoption the hardest time is just after you get home. By then you've used up a lot of people's patience and the reasonable amount of time off. We're supposed to go to our Classical Conversations homeschool group on Tuesday, but I'm not sure we'll be ready to swing that yet. In point of fact, while I say "we" I should say I'm not sure that I'll be ready. I'm okay with being wiped out and disheveled at home, working in the things we need to do like mortar in our day. When I add outside obligations to it, things can get emotionally overwhelming. For now, I'll do what I can to give myself a bit of time to get back into the public rhythm of a new school year.

After her bedtime bath, I thought J should try getting Primrose into her jammies and maybe putting her down. She was not impressed. She loves him at the park, on our stairs, when she's eating, pretty much all day long anywhere we go. At night when she's tired, the fear and anxiety of the girl we met at the Child Welfare Institute come back out a bit. She cries when she hears his voice trying to soothe her. She covers her eyes with the back of her hand- the Scarlet O'Hara maneuver. She waves her open hand quickly in the air between J and her to say she CANnot EVen. She wails and squeaks and it's hard. It's like she realizes that, while we've had our fun, this "new family foreign country" thing is a crazy situation. Where are her people, who are these new weird-language mutants? If she must go with taking care from one of us, for whatever reason she chose me. Little does she know J is actually more patient parent by far and way more tender hearted.

It's possible our daughter (I do love saying that) won't have a problem with daddy running bedtime if I am gone from dinner time on through bedtime for a rehearsal. It's just stressful not knowing how it will go for him and for her. Frankly, from what I have seen I know that even if she cries for a while, she'll probably recover quickly. It would be so nice for her awesome dad if they could have a quiet, easy time together. Just an everyday kind of night.

Here she is reaching a foot over "helping" daddy fill out our entry cards for Hong Kong.