A Glimpse of What His Delays Look Like

He thought he was supposed to eat the stick when he was eating a sucker. We were in the car and in my rear view mirror I could see him licking away at it. Bottom of the stick all the way to the top of the sucker. I told him that he didn't need to eat that part, it was just for holding onto. He said, 'oh good, I no like this one (indicating stick).' When we were in Ukraine he would literally eat the whole stick of the suckers I handed out to the kids. I thought he was just being a gross little boy, but now I see that he was THAT hungry and honestly just didn't know.

He holds his hands up and palms outward the majority of the time. Jazz hands. Picture a fifteen month old sitting in his high chair playing with cheerios, or being excited about some toy they are playing with. You know how they always have their hands up? Same thing.

When eating a popsicle, he held onto the popsicle part even as his fingers froze and it dripped down his hands. I waited to see if he would figure it out on his own, but he did not and the mess was getting bigger than I wanted, so I showed him how to hold the stick. The sticky syrup drips down his chin and hands and arms and he is totally unaware of it. To clean off his dirty or sticky hands, he rubs them in his hair. Yum.

He holds silverware in his fist at the bottom of the utensil with his face touching the plate or bowl or whatever is holding the food. This is still such a challenge for him. He still thinks that he is going to starve. Food is always all over the place and all over him. His ears. His hair. His face. His hands. His clothing.

When it is dark outside, it means it is nighttime. At nighttime we go to bed.

When there is snow on the ground we wear shoes and coats. When the stove is on and bright red, we do not touch it. If you play outside in the snow for a really long time without a coat or gloves on and even start to cry because you are so cold, it generally means you should have come in a long time ago.

We can't say 'get your pajamas on' or 'get dressed'. We have to say 'take off your pants. take off your shirt. take off your socks. open your bottom drawer. choose a pair of pajamas (and he has to ask us if they are pajamas every time). put on the new pants that you just took out of your drawer (because if we say put on the pants or put on the pajama bottoms he gets confused sometimes and will put his pants that he had been wearing back on). put on the new shirt.' etc. This is getting better and progressing. It's just taking a really long time. Okay I feel like it's taking a really long time. It's not fair to him that according to my time frame it's taking a long time. Who knows?! Maybe for him he's learning really fast. Does that make sense??

These are things that I didn't realize I would need to teach BoyTwo. Help him with? Yes. Teach from scratch? No. Pretty much thought he would know what temperatures were and time and how they both relate to our beings.

He is very indiscriminate about who he approaches. He hugs random people in the grocery store. He hugs all adults at his school when they say hi to him. Basically, if the person looks nice and happens to glance at him, he tries to hug them. Last week at the basketball game, he was climbing all over and hanging onto the legs of a man he just met. Our friend told us it was okay, meaning to be friendly and nice and accepting of his behaviors. What I wanted to say was that it was not okay. It is not appropriate for an almost eight year old to approach people he does not know and climb on them as if they were bear cubs. Instead I just made him come over to me (which he did, he knows I mean business).

He also likes to tell other people that he wants them to be his new mom or dad. This one doesn't hurt my feelings because I don't really care what he wants, it's not going to change anything. It's like when your two year old tells you that they don't love you because you won't let them have ice cream for dinner. Same concept. What it does do to me is make me realize how RAD he is. How delayed he is.

I've said before, but it is such a challenge to parent these different ages. He is just barely starting to remember how old he is (we practice every morning and night) and his birthday is around the corner and he will have to learn a new number. When I tell him to put his shoes on before he goes outside in the snow, he tantrums. He is ticked because he doesn't like that we've told him what to do. He is ticked because he doesn't understand or remember what cold feels like. He is ticked because I am telling him what to do, but I don't have to tell any of the other kids. He doesn't recognize that they already have their coats and shoes and gloves on. All he sees is that we are telling him to do something.

At church Sunday, his brother was trying to make him do a simple word search and was getting really mad because he couldn't do it. I saw what was happening pretty quick and stopped it. BoyOne was mad that he couldn't look at the letter 'A' and find it again in the midst of a bunch of other letters.

I am feeling more connected with him. I started doing this thing where I take a few minutes each day and we talk about what he is good at and what he has learned in America. He usually says skiing and I add several other things. It's good for me to have to find those good things about him. It's good for me to have to tell them to him. It's good for him to hear it, too.

As with any experience in life, life goes on and it, in retrospect, gets better. You can't look at it by the day or even the week sometimes (and occasionally not by the month either:)), but overall things progress and it's all good. It feels like each day has been a challenge and sometimes that makes me feel like things aren't going well or smoothly. I start thinking that I'm not doing a good job with all these kids as their mom, that I'm failing. (don't lie, we all feel like this sometimes. at least I hope I'm not the only one!)

Then I take myself back to that awesome apartment in Ukraine where my translator and facilitator were freaking out that my fourteen year old son had ran away, where I was seething mad and absolutely fine with the idea of him staying in Ukraine, where I was beginning to discover that BoyTwo was unable to dress himself, along with other simple tasks and literally swore every other word, where we're at right now looks pretty freakin' awesome!