A Hundred-Million Googles

This week at breakfast Ethan declared that an older brother of his friend L. had “a hundred-million Googles”. Translation: he had a lot of stuffed platypuses. How’s that? Well, Ethan named his Webkinz stuffed platypus Google (I don’t know why), and “a hundred-million” means a lot, so this boy has a lot of stuffed platypuses (go figure). I thought this was especially funny because the word google, before it became the name of an internet company, was coined (by a father who asked his child for a name – really) to mean the number one followed by a hundred zeros. So a hundred million googles is really just a one with a hundred and eight zeros after it. But the humor was lost when I tried to explain it to Ethan. He was far more interested in discussing the tooth fairy.

Ethan is a remarkably observant kid. His teacher mentioned last fall that he noticed if she changed a pair of earrings during the day, for example. Or the other day we were looking at a photo of some fencers in the local paper, and I said I thought they were high school students. “No,” he said, “See this one has a beard”. Sure enough, the caption said they were college students. Then, when we were trying to guess who was competing against whom, he noticed that two had their head gear on, and postulated they were the combatants – something I failed to notice.

Sometimes these powers of observation are a challenge for surprises. This week at breakfast he was speculating that the tooth fairy bought some of the cars she left for him at the local toy store (I took him to the store for the very first time a week ago – purposely avoiding it up until then as potential source of constant temptation – which has turned out to be). Anyway, I thought it was especially funny because the tooth fairy had indeed bought them there! Trying to stay one step ahead, however, I pointed out that the tooth fairy could have found them at another store too.

Ethan loves to speculate about the tooth fairy, Easter bunny, and Santa, and how they accomplish what they do. So far we can get away with Magic as the answer, but considering we’ve also told him on separate occasions that magic is pretend, it’s only a matter of time before he makes that inevitable cognitive leap. In the meantime, he makes guesses as to how fast the Easter bunny must move, how the tooth fairy gets into the house, and the other day he wanted to buy a plane ticket to go visit the North Pole to see Santa’s toys. When I told him no one had ever seen Santa’s toys there, we had a long discussion about why Santa would keep hidden: so no one would take the toys, so they’d be a surprise, because he’s shy, etc…

Whose Tummy?

This morning at 7:15 am, I was trying to get Ethan up and going before work. Mark’s out of town, so it was a bit more difficult than normal anyway. Rushing a bit, I had just pulled some clothes onto him, and was heading him out to the kitchen for breakfast, when completely out of the blue he demands to know, “Why didn't you have a baby in your tummy!”

My first thought was fear that I was somehow deficient because I was never pregnant. That went away fast since I never really wanted to be pregnant. So I answered with something to affirm our relationship -- "Because I have you." I meanwhile was trying to usher a tired, fairly floppy boy from his room into the kitchen.

"Why wasn't I in your tummy" he threw back immediately. Panic struck. More questions I wasn't prepared for. He hasn’t asked any adoption related questions in months. I knew this question would come at some point, and I’ve heard that it comes at unexpected moments – but this was an especially unexpected moment, and my mind was both groggy, and focused on getting food into a resistant five year old.

I stalled for time, settling him into his chair, and handing him a banana and cereal, and trying to be as nonchalant as possible. “Because you weren’t” was the best thing I could come up with on the fly. Hoping it might evade the question nicely, I handed him his vitamin. “No, why wasn’t I in your tummy!” he demanded again, pursing his lips, crossing his arms, and refusing to eat the vitamin until he had an answer.

Oof The first thoughts that came to mind were, well, we couldn’t? But that wasn’t really right, and not the message I wanted to convey anyway. I tried to rack my brain for what the books said to say, but of course, I couldn’t remember a thing. Focusing on the vitamin, I said, “Please eat your vitamin. You were in someone else’s tummy, not mine.”

“But everyone was in their mommy’s tummy” he insisted. I kept focusing on breakfast, pushing in his chair, handing him his milk.

Thinking fast, I smoothly brought up the other adopted kids we know: “No – R. wasn’t in her mommy’s tummy, Z. wasn’t in his mommy’s tummy, and J. wasn’t in either of her two mommy’s tummies. That’s what it means to be adopted --you were in someone else’s tummy" I said as matter-of-factly as I could.

(I realize some readers might bristle here that I wasn’t calling their birth moms their “mommies”, but since it’s not a concept we’ve ever discussed, I wanted to emphasize what he understands as “mom”. )

Then I thought for a second about something more I wanted to convey to him. “I wish you had been in my tummy – it would have been a lot easier” which is true. “I looked very hard for you, and worked very hard to get you,” I said. “I had to go half way around to world to find you – if you had just been in my tummy I wouldn’t have had to look for you so hard”. This final part I was trying to echo some things the orphanage workers told him (at least how it was translated to me from Kazakh), about how we had been searching for him, and that’s why it had taken so long for us to come adopt him (they need to have some way of explaining to kids why things happen the way they do.)

Apparently satisfied, the conversation topic switched immediately, dramatically, and decisively to the ladybug flying around the room, and why we have so many ladybugs in the house this year. I know there are more tricky questions to come, but at least I got an answer out for this one that (hopefully) made us both feel better. When I dropped him off at school, he gave me a big hug, and seemed very secure. I felt very complete.

Second Easter

Last week we had our second Easter with Ethan. Can’t believe time is flying by so quickly! The Easter bunny brought him candy and a stuffed Webkinz Platypus, which he has no idea has an alter ego in the digital domain. (Webkinz are very popular in the kindergarten set, even without their connection to the web site.) Later, his big sister Julie joined us for an Easter dinner of lamb, and we ended up eating most of the chocolate bunny after he had fallen asleep (woops!).

Somewhere along the line Ethan has learned about Oxygen. He knows that you don’t get enough of it in smoke, or under water. Last night he told us that “If you’re in outer space, and you forget your astronaut suit, then you won’t be able to get oxygen.” I just love the idea of being in outer space and ‘forgetting’ your space suit.

Ethan has learned about rhyming finally. It was a tough concept for him to grasp at first, for some reason (just like he was baffled by jigsaw puzzles when he first saw them). Now he’s quite the rhyming machine. We play a game at dinner (his insistence, believe me, not ours), which is a type of “I spy” with rhyming words. Like this: I’m thinking of a color that rhymes with mellow (answer yellow). Some of my favorites that he came up with: Kevin/eleven, shark/Mark, snake/rake.

As the days are getting longer, Ethan has a lot more energy. When it was dark, he was complaining that he wanted me to pick him up at 3pm from after-K. Now, he’s telling me that he wants me to pick him up after his scheduled 5pm time because he's running around with a bunch of kids outside when the weather is nice. It's a lot less stressful for me knowing that he’s happy there!

Last weekend a girl named L. had her dad call us for a playdate with Ethan. I asked Ethan if she liked him, and he turned his head with a sweet smile. Well, he explained, she always likes to sit next to him on the bus, she does whatever he does at 'choice time', she wants to play with him outside, and she sits next to him whenever she can. I think that counts as a crush, don't you? What's interesting is that he's never really talked about her, being much more focused on what the boys think. In fact, at a party last weekend with the other parents from his kindergarten class, I got a lot of "Oh, my son/daughter is always talking about Ethan", whereas we get very little from Ethan about anything that goes on at school. Recently I volunteered in his class to help plant seeds -- a good way for me to actually meet all the kids in his class. They are so adorable! The teacher is amazing, somehow getting them to behave perfectly without raising her voice once.

Ethan’s favorite things in the world: toys, candy, dress-up pretend clothes, and playing at friends’ houses. Ethan has also taken to going up to his friends’ parents and asking if he can come over for a playdate. Sometimes it even works. Today his friend Cameron’s mom is going to pick him up and he’ll play at Cameron’s house for a couple of hours after school. He left me with instructions this morning to call Nicholas’s mom about a playdate tomorrow. This kid is not shy!