My daughters are adopted. We met both of them in China. One thing we will probably never do is meet their birthparents. I write about this today because our little one, who is only 4, asked about her birthparents.

It started out like this:

LO: Is Yogi’s birth-mom alive? (Yogi is our 15 year old dying cat)

Mama: Well considering he is over 15 years old, probably not.

LO: Oh! Will I ever meet my birth-mom?

Mama: Ah, uh, um… truthfully? Probably not! Would I like too? Yes!

LO: I would like to too!

Sometimes even 4 year olds can have a completely perfect and logical conversation and seem that they are well beyond their years.

4 year olds are not supposed to think of these things. They should be thinking about starting to read, learning their numbers, coloring pretty pictures. What I really like is that she IS thinking about things like this. It means she is a little person and learning and growing. I will say that I want her to grow up as slowly as she can. Fast enough to be normal, and smart enough to become the woman I know she will become.

This past week or so has been, well, one of the worst in recent history.

It all started with my wife going on a business trip. She left on Saturday and was to return on Tuesday. No problem there! Except when people hear that your wife goes away the first thing out of their mouths is, “Who’s is going to take care of the kids?”

HEY! I’m right here!!! What about Dad? Yes people… Dads can handle their children!

The weekend goes pretty good! We have some fun and the house is totaled. The clothes dryer stops drying and all is well. So we go on a hunt for a new dryer. No one has one in stock, not one appliance store anywhere, even the one that said they had one! Oh well!

Monday rolls around and I go to work and the kids to school. Pick up the little one for dance class and she doesn’t even want to move let alone go to dance class. Instead we go home.

The next morning the older one wakes up with a 102 degree fever and the little one has a 101 degree. No problem I have the next two days off from work. I end up getting what they have. Great, Now I Have the 102 degree fever. So now we have three sick puppies in the house.

Tuesday night my wife comes home to the sick house.

She is a 4th grade teacher and can’t easily get days off without having to jump through hoops. So it is me and the kids, coughing, wheezing, sneezing, and the rest of the fun that goes with it.

The next Monday rolls around and I finally decide that it is time for me and the older one to check out the doctors office. The little is now a happy camper.

After double doses of antibiotics and breathing treatments we are on our way to complete health. YEAH! Just don’t make me laugh or I will spend the next 10 minutes coughing my lungs off!

Just remember, Dads CAN handle their children, even with a fever! Moms are better at it, but we can take care of our own too! Darn it!!!

Anxiety is an unpleasant, emotional state that involves a complex combination of emotions that include fear, apprehension, and worry. It is often accompanied by physical sensations such as heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath, or tension headache.

The definition above is from wikipedia.com.

It is also is what my six year old sometimes has at nighttime.

She was adopted from China at 9 months old. So we are not even remotely sure if this has something to do with her very early months. What we do know is that she is terrified of a fire in our home.

We have tried calming her before bedtime.

We have tried talking to her about the causes of fires in the home.

We have tried the “Plan” approach. (What to do if there is a fire.)

We have added smoke alarms to all of the rooms in the house.

We have added two extra fire extinguishers to the upstairs.

Now with the help of a school counselor we are working toward her inner dragon!

This is really helping quite a bit. She gave us a book entitled Anxiety Cure: An Eight-Step Program for Getting Well and it seems to be working, little by little. In one of the first steps it talks about addressing the issue and to write in a journal. When our daughter gets ready for bed we ask her to “rate” the size of her dragon. Then depending on the size we start a wizard approach. Meaning that we get her to dream about the wizard getting the dragon to stop being mean. Tell the dragon to stop making her scared of things. If the dragon starts taunting her she is supposed to ask the dragon to not talk to her or she will leave the room. If the dragon keeps being mean then she is supposed to spell the dragon to a time out. This seems to work the best! Since her dragon is over 100 years old then the dragon gets a time out for 100 minutes! By the time the time out is over she is fast asleep. Sometimes the dragon will wake her up, but not too often.

We started this whole thing at the beginning of the year and she has been writing in her journal most nights. There are nights where she doesn’t “share” that the dragon is bugging her and that is very nice. The book also talks about the dragon always being there and that it is okay for it to be there, but it shouldn’t keep trying to “eat” your fears, which is it’s food. So if you have fears it will come up and start it’s feeding process. Meaning that the more it taunts you the more fear you will release and the more the dragon will grow. If we can cut some of that process down then she will become stronger and stronger. Now this is not to say that all fears are bad, it just means that the when they come up at night it is a way to help deal with the control part of it. Hopefully she will be able to control this dragon and become a stronger person overall. We both know this will not be an easy road and it will probably involve professionals in the future. We have just started the whole thing, just the tip of a very big iceberg sitting just above the water line.

My hope is that it will all work out and the fear of the fire slows down just a bit!

I am taking a moment from the Dad side of me this month and giving to the husband side...just this month!

My lovely wife is a fourth grade teacher at a lower income area school. She has been having a hard time getting started in this her third year of teaching.

This week is conference week. You know, the week we all dreaded when we were in elementary school! She has been working late all week and today she came home REALLY excited and happy. WOW! Late nights talking to parents about how their child is or isn’t doing in school, and she came home happy.
Two reasons for the change today. The first was a note from one of her struggling students. It reads like this:

Dear Mis S you are the best teacher I have ever had. Plus you teach relley well. And you are nice to everybody. And When you are mad I Know how you feel. Bacauce Because when you get I get mad I feel frustrated too. I am happy that you were my teacher today this year. And I wish you could always be my teacher. But I know you can’t
Love your student,
(name)
P.S. Say Hello to Jeff and your too two daughters for me.

AWESOME stuff for any teacher.

All of the strike outs were the students and so are the misspellings.

She does try but just can’t get it some times. So this student excelled in the latest bench mark tests. She gained over 30 words per minute in fluency and went from Basic to Advanced in the standings. She doesn’t speak English at home. Her parents are Portuguese. She has been reading out-loud for 20 minutes a night at home. Which goes to show how important reading out-loud is.

The second thing that she was bouncing off the walls over was the bench mark tests. Last test there wasn’t anyone who really passed the test. That stinks!
This time she had over half of her class pass the bench mark! 80 percent or better! WOW! Only four of her students received a failing “grade” this time. Which means under a 60 percent on the test. Far below basic. These are the very hard students. Her class standings went from a low end to a pretty high standing. To go from no one getting a proficient to having half the class proficient is great! She is feeling that she is finally getting through to the students and they are listening and being engaged. I say well done!

Teachers teach for days like this one. A note from the heart, from a student you wouldn’t expect. To top it off, great news from a test where you would have been happy to get 5 proficient, then you get the news that you have 3 times that many. Nice day!

That is why teachers teach. It sure isn’t the short days and the piles of money!!

My wife is starting to get her school things ready. I had to work the San Jose Grand Prix, which made for a long weekend. The girls have started to take Mandarin Classes which they love. They have also started swim class again. So it has been a little bit busy. I still had to go to work too!

Last week my wife and I went to see Rush at Shoreline Amphitheater and had a blast. It is amazing that these guys still have it. New stuff and old, the show was pretty good. I was watching the lighting guy do his thing and even with all of the high tech stuff they used he was fun to watch. Every time I see Rush and I am sitting around or near the sound & light boards I tend to geek out just a bit. He also happens to be the lighting designer and manager for the tour. This guy has been around for a long time. Almost as long as the band itself. His name is Howard Ungerleider, and I am a fan of his almost as much as I am of the band. It is just really neat watching him and seeing what he is doing with the stage. Cool stuff...Like I said, I geek out!!

Here is the start of that night.

When I get home after work I normally get a resounding “BABA!!!!” (Yes with that many quotation marks!) Hugs and kisses abound. Well the other night I did not get that greeting. Why? Well the girls were going to spend the evening at Nanas House, since we were going to the show. (Don’t get me wrong they love Nana & Grandpa’s they just don’t like spending a night away from their own beds without us. If one gets this way then they both do, so it becomes a double problem.)

After I get the cold shoulder from my kids I go upstairs and change then head to their room where they are playing really well together. I lay on the floor and ask my oldest (6) how her day went. She tells me, basically, that all was well with the world and she was fine. Um Okay! So I ask her if she is okay, since she really said that with NO emotion, and she tells me that she doesn’t want to spend the night at Nana’s. Okay, so it’s a “leaving the house for a night” thing. Excellent! Not really!!

We left the girls at Nana and Grandpas. My oldest still wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of staying the night at Nanas. Not really sure what is going on with her in regards to this, but she likes going and she has fun. My wife and I think that, well we know that, she doesn’t like change. We know this, so we tend to make sure that we can expose her to different things. In the end we assured her that we would be picking her up after the show and that she would wake up in her own bed in the morning. Which was the plan from the beginning! After that she was fine...oh and the new Playmobile Farm that Nana had just purchased helped a tad bit too.

All in all the start of the school year is upon us and we now have to start thinking about it.

Now that I am over 40 I still dread the “Back To School” banners. Urg!!

Back To School...Still not fun!