Ironic

Well, my happy, take-on-the-world (or son) attitude that I had when I wrote the last post quickly dissipated.

Like five seconds after seeing/dealing with BoyTwo.

He is such. a. handful.

We had a four day weekend and I took the girls and went down south (not to the south, but the southern part of our state) to visit my sister and go to a friend's baptism. The boys plan was to stay here for soccer games and practice and skiing and male bonding. I'm 99% certain that no dishes were done while I was gone or any laundry, but they had a good time and so did we. Somehow, though, while I was the one away from the house, I still managed to do three loads of laundry and make meals. Hmmm... A mother's work really IS never done:)

Last night BoyTwo had a meltdown because I asked him to put his shoes on. I know. I am such a mean, mean mom. After twenty minutes of him not listening or allowing me to help him, I told him we were leaving. You know, the old trick you play with your toddler. Well, even though he is almost 8, and he thinks he's 15, he's really still a toddler. I keep trying to tell myself this and to be patient, but some days it definitely works better than other days.

Long, drawn out, ridiculous story short, he said that he hated me and America and wanted to go back to Ukraine. So, I made him take off all his clothes and gave him back his rags that he came out of the orphanage in. I asked him if he wanted to give his toys to his sisters or brother, which he did. We all then told him good-bye and that we'd miss him. He finally started to cry a little, but only because he was going to miss his brother. BoyOne tried to reason with him, but he's not capable of being reasoned with. I asked him why he was crying and he said that he was going to miss his brother. I asked if he was certain he wanted to go back to Ukraine. He shrugged his shoulders. I told him we wanted him to stay and that we all loved him very much and that we would miss him, but that he could go back to Ukraine if he wanted. I told him that I would ask Larissa to be really nice to him. In the end he decided to stay.

What this showed me was:

1) he still doesn't understand that he's here to stay,

2) he has no attachment to anyone other than his brother (I'm glad he has his brother. It gives me hope that someday he'll attach to others),

3) he really needs more sleep.

**side note. one of my fears growing up, and I'll be honest, now, was that for some reason I would have to quit eating dairy. Then the unthinkable happened. By doctor's order over half of our family has been put on a dairy free diet. Luckily it's only for a couple of weeks while we figure out if this is the reason for some of the symptoms we are experiencing. When I told my girls that were being affected by this, they started to cry. lol. My feelings exactly. I'm happy to say that on day one I have already found and made a dairy free chocolate chip cookie recipe.

**side note 2, yesterday, for fifteen minutes, we had a weather advisory warning us that we would have severe snow storms in which we would accumulate two to three feet of snow. We were ecstatic! Then they cancelled it. But, now it's snowing, so hopefully they were wrong:) We need some snow in a bad way up here.