I Smell Perfection

Tonight, spur of the moment, I took Little Bug to the local botanical gardens (it's a nationally renown one, so it's spectacular). I stopped and got some chicken and peas for a picnic dinner and we were off. The weather was perfect, not too hot and no humidity.

Little Bug and I spent the evening wandering around some of the parts of the garden we hadn't been to before. Little Bug enjoyed looking at the trees and water and birds. I spent the time watching him enjoy the beauty and thinking about how lovely life is.

And it is. Truly, I have a lovely life.

Games We Play

Little Bug has a game he loves to play with Appa and I. We don't have a name for it, but maybe we should make one. We play this game at least two or three times each day.

Little Bug loves to be picked up and held. He's going through a phase where this is his preferred mode of stasis. Usually when one of us is holding him while standing up, the other one will come and start kissing on him. Our son is not lacking smooches, that is for sure.

Lately he has started reaching for one of us, letting us grab him and hold him, and then immediately reaching back for the other one, letting that parent grab him and hold him, repeat, repeat, repeat.................

The game gets going very quickly where he is barely in our arms before wanting to go back to the other. The three of us end up standing very close to each other, like a hug without the embrace. Unlike most games, he does not squeal with delight; rather, he just gets the cutest smile on his face and clearly enjoys himself.

It's okay though. Appa and I laugh plenty for all three of us.

Can My Son Join This Conference Call?

This morning I had a business meeting with arguably the most important person I have ever met. Not to me personally, but as far as people with high power jobs in the country, yes, this man is probably the most important. He is the [insert very, very high position here] of an organization that you hear about all the time on the news and other places. Intimidating, to say the least.

I will be working with him directly on a professional journal I edit (I'm an editor in my professional life). I've been nervous and intimidated for days leading up to this one-on-one meeting. I represent my journal and a lot of people a lot more important than me.

The great news...I knocked it out of the park. I was knowledgeable, prepared, confident, engaging, and comfortable. I felt GREAT about it.

About 20 minutes later I noticed that I had a white spot on my black pants. A BIGish white spot. This professional-with-it lady had forgotten to check her black professional dress pants after her stint as an Everyday Mama whose Little Bug likes to brush his teeth and then kiss her pants to get her to pick him up.

Oops.

No Wonder I Have A Huge Ego

Today two things happened that are completely unrelated to one another and simultaneously totally belong on the same day.

Event One: When I went to pick Little Bug from daycare today, one of the teachers who doesn't usually teach Little Bug was in the room. She proceeded to loudly proclaim to me that Little Bug was "the most loved and favorite child in the whole school." She said other teachers that had no business in the "Waddler Room" would regularly pop in to see Little Bug. This obviously made me feel great, but wasn't surprising. This might sound vain, and I know every mother thinks her baby is the best, but I actually think I have an unhealthy complex where I might sorta-kinda think that MY baby actually is the very best in the whole world. Comments like this do little to bring my baby mama ego in check.

Event Two: I decided to take our family blog private. I've been so attached to that blog for years, and it serves not only as our primary daily connection to our families (who lives across the country), but as a family journal (thank you blurb.com)! It grew from a tiny little "here's what boring old us did this week" to 100+ hits-a-day adoption/family blog/soap box. Appa hated the increase in nameless, faceless readers. It freaked him out. Normally it would freak me out, too. I am, after all, the one who insisted we remain unlisted in the phone directory....you know, just in case. Yet, for some reason I clung to that open blog.

The honest reason is that I loved to brag about my kid. He's so cute and funny. I liked to brag about our family' story and how we became a family. I liked sharing our diary posts from our time in Korea.

I liked people liking us.

But, in the back of my mind, a little voice has been growing louder and louder...telling me that what I was doing, the kind of information I was providing (and I'm not talking address and SSN here, but it wouldn't have taken a savvy hacker to find that stuff based on our blog information), was not in the best interest of my family.

Geez. When I put it that way.

So today when someone who I clearly didn't know from an area of the world that I really had a hard time believing anyone who would care about us was web surfing spent 1.5 hours reading every post I have written, every comment my family and friends have written in response, my gut reaction was "take the blog private."

Logical leap? Perhaps not. However, almost 11 months ago Appa and I were faced with the biggest decision of our lives, and it wasn't an easy one. Literally days before we were to get on the plane to go get Little Bug we got some news that was, in both our American agency and the Korean agency's eyes, a deal-breaker for most soon-to-be parents. With our bags half packed and our hearts full of desperate love and numbing fear, we had to decide whether or not to follow through with our intention to adopt Little Bug. We had little information and a lot of unknowns.

My gut told me then to get on that plane and get my baby.

So maybe my gut telling me today to take my blog private was nothing more than one too many Diet Dr. Peppers before 11 am, or maybe it was something more divine. Either way, when my gut talks now, I listen.

So, back to Event One and Event Two. I think my vanity highlighted in event one is feeding into the sadness I feel over losing the public blogging of event two. Perhaps this private blog will be good for my family in more ways than one.

But seriously, Little Bug is so freaking awesome.

Omma

Little Bug has been calling me Omma for a long time now, but lately it's become much less of a babble and much more of a deliberate communication. He looks me in the eye when he says it, and I know that he mean me.

Just thinking about it makes my chest constrict a little. Mama, Mommy, Mother, Omma.....it all means the same thing to me.

He needs me. He wants me. I need him. I want him.

Motherhood is like growing up. You don't realize the changes within yourself until you stop and reflect on them. When Little Bug calls me Omma, it reminds me that yes, I am a mother. A pretty good one. Finally.

And that makes me happy.

Gold Star

My son has special needs, and sometimes I have a hard time dealing with that. We didn't request to adopt a child with special needs...in fact, we sort of requested the opposite, but God knew that our son and my husband and I needed to be together, so he pulled his own "paperwork strings," and I am now the mother of the most perfect child in the world, and he just happens to have some special needs.

However, the fallout from this "twist of fate" is that I was not able to prepare intellectually or emotionally to be the mother of a child with special needs. Sometimes I have to stop myself from justifying my son's limitations to strangers, or justify my own limitations as a mother. That's not fair to anyway. Little Bug is Little Bug and I am his mother. We are no one else.

I worry that I don't give Little Bug or Appa and I enough credit. Sure, I toot our horns when something big happens milestone wise, but I am always consciously doing it, like we have something to prove.

Tonight we had dinner with some friends who know our family's whole story, and I waxed poetic about Little Bug's latest accomplishments, namely holding a phone up to his ear to pretend to talk on it and picking a star out of a box on command. To most these would be unremarkable for a 20-month-old, but to me, they are huge accomplishments for my little guy. What struck me later was the fact that there was nothing running through my head at that moment other than excitement for my little boy and a huge amount of pride....no tempering with what he still working on or where is limitations are and how they can be overcome. I wasn't talking about these accomplishments as part of a bigger goal, rather I was just celebrating Little Bug for who he is, right now, in this moment.

It's not acceptance that I am still looking for regarding Little Bug's needs, but it is just a comfort level. I'm slowly getting to the point where his needs don't frame the way I think of him. That's a very good thing.

Gold Star for Everyday Mama!

All We Are, We Are

Tonight I went to a Matt Nathanson concert with two of my very good friends (I'm a HUGE fan of Matt Nathanson and of my friends, so I have been anticipating this for a while now). The three of us left our husbands and kids home and made a night of it....a front-and-center-in-front-of-the-stage night of it.

It's funny, in those moments I feel so much like "me." I'm the fan who loves the music, who will camp out in line and run to the venue to get the best seat (truly, I r-a-n), but I'm also the one who was watching out for these two young girls who were getting pushing out of their rightful view, I'm the one checking my phone every so often to see if my babysitter had called, and I'm the one who was missing her kid and husband during "All We Are, We Are."

It's nice to see my lives blending into each other more now. I feel so much less of two halves balancing against each other and more like two halves blending into one "able-to-navigate-the-mom-with-the-me whole."

And the concert--OH, it was A-MAZ-ING.