AttitudeAdopt

Our Journey to Adopt a Child

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

3rd Grade, Retainer, and Webkinz

Ethan started 3rd grade yesterday. He is now older than more than half the kids in the school, and it suits him well. He continues to blossom when he is the "big kid on the block". This year there was a lot less anxiety the week before school -- not sure why, but it was a welcome relief.

Last night we watched an Arthur episode called "The Real Mr. Ratburn" which, appropriately, is about Arthur and his friends' first day of 3rd grade. Mark and I, at least, thought it was very funny, although it might have struck too close to home for Ethan (it's about how the kids compare their teacher to the others, and think he's a scary guy).

This morning, Ethan and I went to Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast. I asked Ethan if it was because he liked the food, or because he sees people there. My little social guy answered that it's because he runs into people there. Today we saw Lindsey, his after school teacher, and a work friend of mine named Dave who often works there using the internet.

In the continuing trend of odd, but mostly healthy food preferences, Ethan likes to order coffee with milk, and just the egg from the egg sandwich (or two eggs today). Apparently, Ethan is the only one to order just the egg (no bread, no cheese, etc), because the cashiers were completely baffled how to ring it up when he first started ordering them. But, also apparently, we do it so often that they've now trained their cashiers how to ring us up (ring something else up that costs 99 cents, like cream cheese side, and then go tell the guy making sandwiches to just give us the eggs).

We finally got Ethan a computer recently -- a little, inexpensive laptop. It has a learning curve, and Ethan has gotten frustrated. Meanwhile, we did go to the WebKinz site and "adopted" a pet. It was a bit strange to be sitting next to Ethan as we "adopted" an animal.

Ethan's pregnant older sister Jen came over to visit during the weekend, and it seems to bring up a bunch of adoption issues with Ethan. In the morning, he wanted to play being a baby, although he did ask before we did whether he was an adopted baby, or came out of my tummy. I asked him which he wanted to pretend, and he said 'adopted'. He then played baby, and grew up through the progression to toddler in about 5-10 minutes.

We've also gotten some, "You're not my real mom", "You're my step mom", and "I wish I had other parents". The last doesn't phase me, as I felt the same way growing up, but the first two can get me down sometimes. I realize that it's good he feels comfortable enough to tell us this, and that he doesn't feel that way most of the time, but I do wish (unrealistically) that he'd be happy all of the time.

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