- Starvation and Deep Destitute Poverty (and Haiti Week)
- Meera’s Necklaces (and new shoes)
- A Woman’s Work: Dear Meera, Guide to Mothers with Careers, Mommy Back to Work, and Notes on the Balancing Act
- On Trips, Travels, and Needing Breaks — Mexico; Chesapeake Bay; Singer Island, Florida; Adoption Day in NYC; Annual Haiti Reunion; NH Summer 2009; Christmas in NH; K & O’s First Trip Alone — to MorMor & MorFar’s House; Easter at Bement Camp; Skydiving in the Poconos
- Food Week: Especially The Stuff of Life & Kyle and Owen’s School Lunches
- On Raising Black Boys: Especially Cute Little Black Boys Do Grow Up To Be Black Men; White Christmas for Black Boys
- K & O’s Quotes and Conversations: Especially Gender, Overheard Today, and Choice Quotes
- On Adoption: Especially Thinking About Adoption, What If?, and In Union There is Power
- Barack-O’s Election and Inauguration: BARACK-O Elected!; Baracko’s Inauguration; Celebration Inauguration
- Boys Look Up to Men (and Real Men Clean, Mow, Swim, and Make (perfect!) Coffee)
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(to see all
of the Honorable Mentions, read the ‘comments’ on
this post)
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And tomorrow… we will embark on our 4th year of blogging!
Thanks for reading y’all!
Dear Readers,
Please chime in! (below) Pretty please,
with sugar on top?!
We’ve been keeping this blog for three years now! Crazy. But true.
So, as has become tradition…
please dear readers, dig way back into the archives of this past year and tell us…
What was your favorite post from this old blog this past year?
Anything from Oct 2008 – Nov 2009 is fair game.
We’ll take what you say and then, about a week from now, we’ll post the Top 10 List from our Third Year of Blogging. (I’ve even turned anonymous commenting back on so that everyone can “vote”).
Our 1st Blogiversary, 2007 – click
here and
here.
Our 2nd Blogiversary, 2008 – click
here and
here.
When we started this blog, in October of 2006, K & O were tiny two-year olds and Meera was not even on the radar; I did not have tenure and Braydon was still working at his big-time corporate job; we were beginning our blogging without having any idea what would come of it. We’ve posted a lot of blog posts since then. What a long strange trip this blog thing has been. In the beginning I could never have anticipated that hundreds of people would come to find our little on-going story interesting enough to read it everyday. More than anything, over the past three years I’ve been humbled at the concept that people want to read “us.” Sometimes we get comments or emails that just stun me in their sweetness and graciousness. And I’ve been so gratified in knowing that our little blogging habit has turned out to be of value to some people out there in the blogosphere. But the blogosphere has also stunned us in its cruelty too. Cruelty of any kind never ceases to perplex me. Over the course of the past three years of blogging, people have said (well, written) some terrible, nasty, hateful, hurtful things to us in comments and emails. We’ve tried not to let it get us down. There are, after all, about 100 “nice” comments for every “not nice” one. But still, if truth be told, the words and sentiments and general-spirit-of-hurtfulness succeed in what they set out to do: they hurt us. And sometimes the blog has been used against us in ways we never could have anticipated, even by people ‘close’ to us in real life. And as time goes on we continue to question the issues of privacy and vulnerability and transparency that our blog raises for us and our kids. But, despite our questioning of it, and despite many deep conversations pondering the stopping of it, we keep on doing it. We keep on blogging it. Why? Well, mostly, to be honest, at this point, for ourselves and our kids. We have come to see this blog as — among many other things — a way to preserve these moments in our life. It is a record of where we’ve been along this journey. And we feel compelled to make that record. Having it out there for others to see is a blessing and a curse. A curse in the sense that we have to deal with all the nuanced ramifications of our blog’s public face. A blessing because it keeps us honest, it keeps us going (if nobody was counting on reading it there would surely be many a night/week/month that we’d just not do it), and it keeps us reminded of some of the important things in which we believe in this world. I’m so glad that other adoptive families (or those considering adoption), who so often feel isolated, can find us here; I’m so glad that female PhD students, who are struggling to make their own way in the academic world, can find us here; I’m so glad that our friends and family can see pictures of our gorgeous growing kids here. Etcetera. For the time being, the positives still outweigh the negatives for us, so we keep at it. At least for now, we keep on blogging. With real gratitude, from us to you, thank you to all of you out there who read us.
Kyle and Owen have got to be two of the most wild-crazy-rambunctious-off-the-wall boys you’ll ever meet. Seriously… they are a match for Skippyjon himself! We’ve had the original Skippyjon Jones book for awhile now, and K & O love it (so does Margie, because she loves the bi-lingual nature of the text and the fun plays-on-words). But just last week, from the “Candy Witch,” K & O received Skippyjon Jones Lost in Spice. The CD that was included quickly became one of their most beloved possessions. Tonight, before bed, less than one week after this book hit our house, Kyle and Owen — in unison — “read” me (i.e., they aren’t actually reading it, they have it memorized) the ENTIRE BOOK. All 30 pages, every word of every page! I was literally in utter shock to witness this! If you know this book, you know how unbelievable this is. This book is definitely their #1 fav right now.
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What I Be, by Michael Franti, illustrations by Ben Hodson
All five of us love Michael Franti, and all five of us love this book-CD-set!
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Music by Nathaniel Stookey, Illustrations by Carson Ellis
Never forget: Kyle, Owen, and Meera’s Papi has a doctorate in music composition. This book is a little over the bambinos’ heads right now, but looking at the book and listening to the CD with Papi makes it totally lovable. Any classical music lover (and children thereof!) will deeply appreciate this book. If you read it you’ll understand why.
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What can I say? This is just awesome. I wish every household could have a copy.
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A classic. This version
has incredible illustrations. I remember Braydon and I talking, long before we ever had children of our own, about wanting to make sure our kids would know well this “musical fairy tale in which each character is played by a different instrument of the orchestra”… and now they do! K & O have been listening to this/reading this for years already. And now Meera is just as mesmerized by it as her brothers are.
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Note, for the record: I have absolutely no affiliation whatsoever with any of the producers of any of these books. Nobody is giving me anything to write this.
These two have a really sweet, quiet way about them together. It is precious and loving and the epitome of a sort of best-case-“big brother and little sister”-scenario. Kyle is extraordinarily protective of Meera and is always incredibly concerned about her well-being. He looks out for her to the 9th degree. And Meera, well, Meera just absolutely adores Kyle beyond beyond. She and he give quiet kisses to each other multiple times each day– not for show or because they think we’ll think it is “cute,” but rather, it seems, just because. It is a blessing for us to watch them together in their sweet, quiet way.
When Kyle and Owen were Meera’s age they loved this “game” that I invented for them: pushing wooden popsicle sticks through the slight slit of an old Clorox Wipes container. I can remember spending what seemed like hours upon hours sitting on the floor with K & O, watching them — with full concentration — working hard to carefully push popsicle stick after popsicle stick into that plastic container. A couple of weekends ago, while digging for “new toys” for Meera in the big bin of hand-me-downs in the basement, I found that old baby game. I had forgotten all about it, but I knew immediately that Meera would love it. She sat on my lap while Owen taught her how to do it. Since then I have spent hours upon hours sitting on the floor with Meera, watching her — with full concentration — working hard to carefully push popsicle stick after popsicle stick into that plastic container.
Today we went with the Petsch family to an annual Apple Festival. Despite the crazy-huge crowds of people, we had a great time. Lori posted about it here. All five of us J-M’s really, really love the Petsch’s!
Today was the most perfect football day. We have loved football games at Lehigh this fall and this was probably our last one of the season. Kyle is totally into it. He is right in the middle of the ruckus of kids who all “play football” (i.e., tackle each other while chasing a ball) on the grass where we sit on the side of the field. Whenever a field goal is kicked Kyle is right in the middle of the mega-tackle pile-up to try to catch it from the sideline. While we’re at these games Kyle is a football player (he is not a bystander). He brings his football to the game and has no problem making instant friends with any kid who will “play football” with him. Owen and Meera, on the other hand, take after their parents. They are much more into the socializing (for the two of them this equates to flirting, big-time, with everyone who will flirt back) and partaking of football-stadium-food-and-drink (today Owen had, amongst other things, hot chocolate, which was an especially special treat!). While Owen chatted up a whole bunch of very cute college girls, and Kyle tackled a slew of ten-year-old boys, and Meera played cutesie peek-a-boo with a family sitting behind us, a football game was actually being played on the field. Lehigh lost, again, but it barely even mattered — today was the most perfect football day.
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