There was great celebration at our house tonight - just in time for the opening weekend of Christmas celebrations and it started to snow!! Shkuri was especially excited about her first glimpses. She has been asking about snow for several weeks now - she somehow knows that snow and Christmas just go together. Today we made and decorated Christmas cookies and tomorrow we are going to go get our tree and bring out the Playmobil Advent Calender I bought in Berlin last year. The kids watched Home Alone for the first time this evening, while I caught up with some much needed studying.
Ariel went on his annual Christmas shopping trip with his Dad and Brother. He is spending the evening with them and Isaac watching the best of The Banff Mountain Film Festival. A bunch of his Mountain Biking friends got him to go last year and he was very impressed.
I read something the other day that was hysterical - Ben Harper (the singer) was being interviewed in Outside magazine. When asked about what sports he does, he said "I have four kids. Having four kids IS an extreme sport".
In that vein...Ar and I have been dealing with a new bump on the adoption road. We knew going into this what the girls had been through....they come from a war torn region of Somalia called the Ogaden Desert, their Mother died in childbirth with a third child, and their father brought them to an orphanage, telling the social workers "he didn't know if he would make it". We also knew that young, adopted children often deal with their grief and anger in not so obvious ways. Over the last few weeks Shkuri has been expressing some rather scary rage; she completely flies off the handle at the smallest incidences. In a house with three siblings who like to annoy each other - there are a lot of small incidences. I basically deal with it by holding her in her bed until she is calm enough to talk to, which sometime takes up to a half hour. I suppose that in some ways it is progress - she does not do anything like this anywhere else, so I know she must be feeling fairly safe with us to act out like that. It is really, really hard and exhausting, however. I do feel like I am learning something from it - I think I may emerge from all this completely Zenned out. I am learning how to not get upset and react when she lashes out, but wait it out. Somedays, Ar and I feel like we are in way over our heads.
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2 comments:
Oh Mary Ellen, I think you're doing a rock star of a job as a mother! It's way harder than what I do everyday, that much I know.
I really admire the way you're dealing with Shkuri's outbursts. I think witnessing rage like is really tough for some people to handle without losing it (including me).
On a lighter note, Happy Snow Time!
:)
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