Blitzen’s latest invention

Blitzen really hates going up the stairs in our very narrow, very tall house.  Yesterday, she invented a dumb-waiter of sorts.  Using her easter basket and some purple sparkly yarn, she now raises and lowers things from the second floor landing  into the living room.  Things that were airlifted this morning in one direction or the other:

1) tupperware of guinea pig treats (left over strawberry tops with leaves attached and celery)

2) ipod

3) deodorant

4) stuffed puppy dog

Her favorite part of this invention is getting Andrew and I to watch the action.  “Watch it float down, are you looking?!?”

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When my guineas die, can we get a dog?

Carrie — Blitzen, your guineas are going to live for a long time.

Blitzen — But I really want a dog.

Carrie — Yes, I know.  But dogs are a lot of work.  You have to walk them at least 3 times a day.  You have to pay someone to come walk them while you are school and work, you have to pick up their poop.  And dogs are very expensive.

Blitzen — I’ll use all my money to buy a dog and get it shots.

Carrie — We’re not getting a dog any time soon but if we ever do, we’ll adopt it from the ASPCA.  We’ll get a dog that needs a home and some love.  But we’re really not getting a dog any time soon.  Dogs can’t live here, it is in our apartment lease.

Blitzen — What kind of dog do you want?

Carrie — I don’t want a dog but if we had to have a dog, a small dog.  I would want a small one.

Blitzen — NO Carrie, what KIND?  Would you want another beetle?  (and by beetle, she means beagle).  I want a yorkie.

Carrie — I probably wouldn’t want a beagle again.  They are not very good listeners – they kind of insist on doing their own thing all the time.  (Carrie to herself — and we already got plenty of that going on around here).  But of course they are very loving and they sure do like to be around their humans.  (Hmmm).  But we’re not getting a dog.

 

 

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National Guinea Pig Day

Celebrate y’all!

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Independence Day

Blitzen has been calling her birthday independence day.  As we began preparation for the big 10, we spent a lot time talking about independence and what that means.  It means having the freedom to make some of your own choices, it means doing some stuff on your own and taking more responsibility for yourself.

Blitzen is careful to remind us that just because a girl is independent, it doesn’t mean she wouldn’t like a little company while she is being independent (say like having me sit on the lid of the toilet and chat about mermaids while she is showering, that kind of thing).  But we’re examining the schedule to see what she can do for herself, on her own and we have told Blitzen that as long as she does her work first (guineas, homework, reading practice), she can spend the rest of her evenings as she wishes, pretty much.  We are still trying to limit her screen time but truthfully, she would much rather play than watch tv.  So on at least a couple of occasions, she has turned on the television but then commenced imaginary play. It is amazing how much kids (everyone!!!) want something more when they think it is limited.  She thinks she wants to watch tv all the time but in reality, she would really rather play baby dolls with Andrew or have a story read to her and talk about mermaids.

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Guinea Pigs, an update

Someone asked so I am sharing.  The guinea pigs are doing well.  We had a very scary moment — Lucy got pneumonia, of all things.  When I got home from my trip in November, I noticed that she just wasn’t herself.  We all watched her pretty closely for a couple of days and noted that she seemed to be really struggling.  So we made an emergency appointment at the vet.  And Lucy had pneumonia.  The vet was wonderful and sad as she told us it was quite likely that little Lucy wouldn’t make it.  GP pneumonia is a big deal.

The vet gave us medicine (we administered shots and pills crunched up in applesauce and spread on a lettuce leaf).  We kept Lucy warm and quiet.  Irene was there the whole time, cutely snuggling with her sister and hiding out in the igloo hut, sharing guinea pig love and body heat.  The vet advised taking Lucy into the bathroom during shower time for a little steam treatment.

You will be delighted to know that Lucy recovered.  Blitzen was such a champ — following the vet’s instructions to the letter.  Checking diligently on her pet and being very brave about the possible outcomes and even planned what we’d do with Lucy if she died.  And now Lucy and Irene are getting spunky again, squeaking like mad the moment they hear our footsteps, squealing in guinea pig – gimme some lettuce!

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Halloween

We had one heck of a Halloween celebration on Saturday before I left town.

First, the agency threw a party and it was mostly great.  They had a haunted house which was not great.  I really don’t know what they were thinking – oh let’s put a bunch of traumatized kids in a room with weird noises and creepy people in costumes that jump out at you as you walk by.  Needless to say, we didn’t stay in the haunted house until the end although we attempted to do it 3 times.  I’ll say this for Blitzen, the kid is not a quitter!  There were many fun, not scary things too - pumpkin decorating (Dasher named her pumpkin Curly Shirley for reasons none of us can fathom and carried it around lovingly all day), cupcake decorating, a little costume parade, spooky stories that were not too spooky, and trick or treating.  All good.

Second, we hosted a Halloween party at our house immediately following the agency party.  I really don’t know what I was thinking.  It was scarier than the haunted house.  But in the end, it was a success.  Both of Blitzen’s sisters came over and 2 of her brothers.  Now interacting with the brothers outside of an agency supervised environment had never happened before. I think all the kids enjoyed it.  We added a couple of Blitzen’s school friends into the mix to keep things lively.  And lively it was – the neighbor came up to complain about the noise twice. Thank goodness for the backyard or he might of called the cops.

Blitzen dressed up a greek goddess (Athena, I think) and added her own accessory – a platinum blonde wig a la Lady Gaga.  It was quite the outfit.  She went around telling people that she was a professional greek goddess. As opposed to an amateur, I suppose.  Originally, she was going to be a mummy but the mummy outfit that we purchased was too itchy, she claimed.  Or perhaps too boring after 2 weeks of wearing it around the house.  So we allowed to her use her own funds to purchase costume number 2.  Andrew explained that it would take an awful lot of guinea pig cage cleaning to earn that money back but she was insistent.  She had to get  a new get-up.  Dasher created her own outfit – a gangster fairy.  Apparently she thought this up all on her own and it was really quite cute – fairy outfit with a little pink biker jacket.  And Dancer was Beyoncé, of course.  The girls all looked great and seemed to have a (mostly – only 2 bouts of crying) relaxed and fun day.

I am sad to be missing the trick or treating fun tonight.  I am glad that not-really-a-hurricane-Sandy didn’t ruin the big, candy filled day.

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Heads or Toes

We were walking in the park with friends.  Blitzen wanted to go one way, other children wanted to go another way.  I suggested that we flip a coin.  Blitzen got very excited and shouted, “Yes, let’s use my invisible coin.  Do you want heads or toes?”  I really couldn’t help it, I just cracked right up.  “Toes, please.”  You won’t believe it but the invisible coin landed on heads.

On this same trip, Blitzen got her grouch on for a few minutes, pouting and lagging behind and saying, “They didn’t come here to play with me.  They just wanted to see my guinea pigs and the park.”  While Blitzen was lamenting how she had been so terribly wronged, two adorable, excited little friends were calling and calling, “Blitzen, are you coming? Come on, let’s go this way. Blitzen! Blitzen! Blitzen!”  Yeah, clearly it was all about the guinea pigs….

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The move

Blitzen woke up on Wednesday morning, stumbled out into the living room, sleepy and nervous.  Her eyes got wide and she whispered, “OM Boxes!”  OM Boxes indeed.  About 100, if you are counting.

I’ve got some very mixed feelings about the amount of stuff we have – it is kind of obscene. Now, there is a lot of art and a ton of kitchen stuff and books, like boxes and boxes of these things.  In my pre-Blitzen life, I cooked and read a lot. And spent my money on cool art as opposed to swim lessons at the Y and let me tell you, Blitzen had plenty of boxes of her own.  2 boxes of books and a couple more filled with toys and stuff from her room.  In addition to feeling like a very unattractive American consumer, I was faced with the monumental task of packing and then unpacking all this stuff. Thank god that I consider myself way too old and way too financially fit to move all this wonderful merchandise myself — bless you, movers, well worth it at any cost.

We’re probably 3/4s of the way done with the unpacking process and hopefully, will be all set up by Monday or Tuesday.  Blitzen, in a moment of stress during our the move, cried, “It will take weeks to unpack these.  I’ll never find my stuff.”  I don’t know who that child thinks that she has been living with but the thought of living in a less than completely accessible, comfortable, ordered, decorated to my satisfaction home for more than like 3 days, is enough to make me break out in hives.  I do not like mess.  Which kinda makes you wonder why I agreed to parent in what is undoubtedly the messiest of all possible ways, but hey, I am a bit of enigma — ask Andrew.

In the morning, very early, we transported our most precious cargo to the new place.  Blitzen sweetly reassured the guineas that everything would be fine.  She told Andrew and I several times that she thought that Irene and Lucy were nervous and scared.   She spent  the drive (10 blocks) whispering to them about the new apartment and how much they would like it and that it had a yard and on and on.  So we got them all set up in their cage and Blitzen got to choose her new room. This shifted the anxiety balance, a little, and seemed to begin to lighten Blitzen’s mood.

Then Blitzen went off to gymnastics camp for a half day while we loaded out of the old apartment and she was still very, very worried.  She made Andrew write down the address to our new house, twice.  Once on a piece of paper for her and once for the new babysitter.   I just know, that deep down, she was so worried that we were going to move on without her.  And then, of course, the babysitter came to our (empty!) old place instead of going to pick Blitzen up at camp and all hell broke loose.  Crying, screaming, kicking, trying to run off at camp and ‘go home alone, then’ - oy!  But the babysitter, in spite of the mix up, was a rock star - immediately figured out her mistake, jumped in a cab, called camp, called us, calmed Blitzen down – whew!  It was only a few minutes, really, but our little Blitzen likes things to go exactly as planned.  As she once told me, “I only like surprises on my birthday.”  I can relate, kid.

In the afternoon, Blitzen gave the sitter the grand tour of the new place and they began construction on the fairy house.  It is going to be quite fabulous.  They have been working on it a little bit each day and everyone is starting to get comfortable in the new place.

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back ups and babysitters and friends

Now that Andrew and I have decided that we need to spend more time together (we’re always together but we need a wee bit time together not with Blitzen), we’ve been bringing the backups and friends and babysitters more aggressively into the routine.  Here is a sample of the absurdly long email that I have sent to a few people in preparation for their alone time with Blitzen. I customize the first paragraph because I care.

Dear Village Member,

Customized greeting and confirmation of upcoming babysitting assigment.

I think that Blitzen struggles most with a few items that are linked to one another:

1)            Transition

2)            Surprise or unexpected outcomes

3)            Criticism (real or perceived)

4)            Feeling that she is not being heard/understood/listened to

On all of this, it is so important to remember that Blitzen has been conditioned over the past nine years to be on perpetual offense.  She very much operates in a world where it is better to get mad and create the chaos then to risk being surprised and hurt by the anger and chaos of others.  And much of this is about neurological response – her brain is very actively triggering the fight or flight response many times every day.  The tricky thing about that nifty evolutionary adaptation, is that once the brain triggers it, it kind of shuts down and stops thinking.  You see the lion, the brain says – oh no, lion, grab that stick to hit the lion and then RUN like hell.  Then the brain goes offline so you won’t stand there debating with yourself – maybe it is a nice lion, perhaps it wants to be friends or would prefer to chase that zebra.  By the time you think all that, you are lion dinner.  So sometimes (not always) Blitzen gets a little ‘outside herself’ in these moments and is just moving through the paces of fight / flight and it takes some time for her to come back down.

There are several tricks that we use to help Blitzen move through the day.  One, we plan carefully and reiterate what will come next several times over the course of the day.  This is why we have a schedule.  If Blitzen doesn’t want to do something (go to the library or the park or whatever) we simply reiterate that it is on the schedule so we must follow through but welcome her input on how to make it more fun and/or interesting.  An example would be if we have library and park on the schedule back to back, we could flip them – do park first, say we will be at the park for exactly 30 minutes and then we must go to the library.

Transitions are hard and we allow lots of time for them to occur.  I might ask Blitzen to clear her plate and it could take several minutes for it to happen.  I make myself wait at least 1 full minute before asking her again.  I often observe that she is doing something else, comment on it and then ask her to return to the task at hand “I see you are looking at that cool catalogue, you can look at the next page, then we’ll both look at it together during activity time.  Would you please come remove your dinner plate?”

She is also often slow to leave the house or move on to the next thing – if she wants to comb her hair or change her outfit or whatever before we go to the park, that is ok with us.  We let those things just play out – time has an all new and much more fluid meaning since we met Blitzen.  There are very few things that need to happen right this very minute.

Criticism / no – we try not to say ‘no’ the word very often.  So instead of  – no, you may not look at the book now.  We try to say ‘let’s look at the book at this time’  or ‘we have homework on the schedule right now but I am excited to do that with you at playtime’.  Bltizen also sees criticism where there is none.  We never bother nagging her to comb her hair or button up her coat or tie her shoes – we might observe ‘it is chilly, do you need help buttoning your coat?’ she can say yes or no or not button it all.

Blitzen is not always clear when expressing herself verbally.  We have a few tricks – we ask her to sit with us or we kneel down in front of her so that we can see her face and eyes.  We ask her to look at us directly.  If we don’t understand,  we just admit it. ‘I need a little more help, I am trying but I don’t understand exactly what you mean’.  Lastly, we try to resist the urge to argue with Blitzen when she is being irrational.  She’ll say ‘you hate me, you always hated me. You only love Andrew.’  And I might respond ‘I hear you and I am sorry you feel that way.  What would you like me to do differently?’  She will also say things like ‘get away from me’ or ‘leave me alone’ — she never means this literally but is having difficulty expressing what she really means to say like ‘I am confused, I can’t talk right now, I need to recover and I need a little bit of space to do it’ or ‘I am hungry and need to eat an orange’.  We have started making her clarify and ask her – do you really want me to leave the room or are you trying to say something else right now?

If she gets mad, she may yell, that is ok.  She may throw stuff, also ok as long it won’t hurt anyone or damage anything (her favorite item to toss around  is the mail).  She may stomp off to her room and slam the door.  She may storm out of the apartment – this is not our favorite but if we can still see her, we let it play itself out.  She generally recovers herself within 5 or 10 minutes if we don’t push her.  So we don’t chase her or argue with her crazy claims that we got a foster kid just so we could have guinea pigs or that everyone on the planet hates her because deep down she is a mermaid – we just actively listen and try really really hard not to react.

Physical activity is good – when in doubt, try expending some amount of physical energy.

All that said, self-preservation is key.  If you need to separate yourself or leave the room, then that is what you need to do.

We are really actively working with Blitzen on responsibility, respect and problem-solving.  We are trying to teach her that actions and words have serious consequences even when you are angry or upset.  We are trying to slowly and methodically unwind and rewire 9 years worth of development of pretty faulty neurological pathways.

And you thought that you were just coming over to play checkers.  Thanks for helping us out.

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Mermaids

Flipper unfortunately cut off but as Blitzen will tell you, it is the most important part

Suddenly, over the weekend, Blitzen became completely obsessed with mermaids.  As you may have noted from a few of the posts on this blog, Blitzen is an extraordinarily imaginative and creative kid.  She is also a wee bit obsessive.  So once a new object of fascination takes hold, it is usually 2 to 3 weeks (occassionally longer) of non-stop whatever (guinea pigs, fairies, ice skating, now mermaids).  Then she moves on to the next thing.  She is still interested in the old things but they no longer consume all of her mental and play energy.

Upon deciding that she really really needed to be a mermaid, Blitzen looked up mermaid tails on the internet with Andrew – you can buy them, apparently, and it is a thing.  An expensive thing, actually.  There are also many videos illustrating how to make your own mermaid tail.  We compromised, bought some bathing suit fabric online and will attempt to create our own mermaid tail.  We already traced ourselves to create a pattern.  See picture.  Now there are a couple of flaws here and I know it – 1) I don’t sew but our babysitter does and I am hoping that she will help 2) we have no where to use our mermaid tail — but we will move forward and hopefully this will be a fun project.

Because of our new interest in mermaids, we’ve been thinking and talking about them a lot.

Blitzen, to me, while she is in the shower, “If you were a mermaid living under the deep blue sea, would you get married?”  Me, “Um, yeah, I think if I met a nice merman and fell in love, I might get married.”

Blitzen, to me, during dinner, “Won’t you please, please, please just think about getting a mermaid tail too?” Me, “Um, honey, I just really don’t think I want one and we’re going to be very busy making your tail but if it is really easy and I can find some cheap fabric, I’ll think about it.”

Needless to say, Blitzen was pretty crestfallen when she learned that her mermaid tail would not be suitable attire for swim lessons at the Y.  She cheered herself up by deciding it would still be fun in the bathtub.

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