beR Mom

Ethan came back from school the other day with the following on a piece of paper: “beR Mom, IlCU dCSURSNS”. If you reverse the d's and b's, add a few vowels, and have Ethan translate, it turns out to mean: “Dear Mom, I like you because you are so nice”. I also came home the other day to a note telling me there was a package waiting for me at the post office which Mark helped him write. It’s amazing to see him learning how to read and write.

Yesterday Mark and I spent several hours getting the second annual post placement report notarized and apostilled. The post placement reports are the forms that Kazakhstan wants to get once a year saying that Ethan is doing ok. They have no way to force us to send them in (since the adoption is legally finalized in both Kazakhstan and the U.S.), but if we don’t send them in, our agency gets penalized, and governments are apt to use missing reports as a way to justify cutting off future adoptions.

This year getting the forms got very complicated. My friend the social worker signed the report (which I wrote, by the way). But when I tried to get it notarized, my usual notary, who will notarize after the fact, couldn’t do it. The social worker couldn’t get to a notary, so Mark and I ended up getting a notary to lend us her book, I drove it over to the social worker, and then we drove it back to the notary.

When we went to the state office to get the papers apostilled, they told us that the forms were missing a key “acknowlegement” sentence and they weren’t going to do it. (Apparently they only recently decided to enforce a rule that’s been on the books since 2004.) We panicked. It would take us at least a couple of days of work and a lot of phone calls and driving around to fix the situation. So, I got into full beg/plead/complain/cry/promise mode, not really thinking it would work, since these were full-fledged bureaucrats. I said that we were only doing this so that future parents could adopt, and that if they didn’t apostille, we probably wouldn’t be able to take the time to get them done again. By some miracle, they bought the argument, and apostilled our reports. Whew!

Two Year Anniversary

Today is exactly two years since we met Ethan. Looking back at the October post from two years ago, I see that he still loves the following things:
--apples and bananas
--playing "house" (although instead of playing “orphanage”, he now plays “family” and “school”).
--pretending to tuck things in for the night
--playing with cars
--music and singing (he’s still got a good ear for tunes)
--strutting around with sun glasses on (or any costume)

It’s become almost impossible for me to fathom life without him. It seems strange to me that he hasn’t always been with us, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to remember that he’s adopted. I have to work tonight, and Mark and I are confused as to whether we even want to celebrate tomorrow night because it’s so hard to imagine not always knowing him. On the other hand, Ethan is always happy to get a present!

Meanwhile, Ethan continues to do well in first grade. He seems more self-assured and contented than this time last year (when he was just starting to get bombarded with the English alphabet, and was surrounded by kids who had been exposed to it for the previous three to four years.)

Magic Momma

Ethan and I were playing a game the other day where I successfully hid some stuffed animals underneath me and then claimed that I magically made them disappear. It frustrated him no end that he couldn't figure out where I had put them. Teasing him, I said that I was a magic momma. Ethan protested shaking his head. "You're not magic!" He put his hands out wide with his palms up and put on his 'duh' face. "You're not Santa Claus. You're not the tooth fairy. You're not the Easter bunny." I had to keep from bursting out laughing, so I just mumbled something about of course I didn't have long ears so couldn't be the Easter bunny.

Speaking of the tooth fairy, Ethan lost tooth #3 yesterday and she gave him some money last night. The tooth's departure from his mouth came a bit earlier than it might have had he not had a close encounter with a hockey stick held by a classmate on the slides earlier this week.

This morning I went into Ethan's classroom for family reading day. It was fun to see him and all the other kids in his class. He proudly 'read' several books which consisted of using his fine memory to recite them, and nothing at all to do with connecting letters with sounds. He can do that, it just takes more work for him than memorizing things. Some of my favorite books to read him at the moment, by the way, are the "Fly Guy" easy reader series about a kid named Buzz who has a pet fly who can say his name and likes to eat smelly food.