First Week Home

We've been home for a little over a week and just as I felt since the moment we exited security at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, our trip to China to bring home Kiera and Matteo still feels like a dream.  I have such vivid memories of experiences that just happened and yet I still need to remind myself I didn't make any of it up.  Chris and I really did fly halfway around the world and came home with two children.  Some parts of the trip were very hard, but through it all, I was always so thankful and humbled that we were even making this trip at all, that we were adopting.  And even during the difficult, slow or boring parts, I was keenly aware of how quickly the trip was happening. We had waited so long and stressed and fretted and shed a lot of tears and now it’s over.  We’re home.  We’re a family, finally.  I may forever be processing this experience. 

Now that we're home though, there's little time to reflect on all that has happened because the hard work of becoming a family of six has begun.  Thankfully, we are doing well, all things considered, but I won’t lie that it hasn’t been hard.  You can prepare yourself as best you can, but the reality always feels different in the moment even if it’s exactly what you expected. 

The first three days were the hardest.  I can sum it up by saying there was a lot of crying and not a lot of sleeping.  Jetlag wasn’t even the problem.  I’ve never recovered so quickly from such a significant time change.  Although I was so tired by the time we landed in Minnesota that I didn’t feel safe driving home, as soon as we got the kids off to bed, that’s exactly where I was headed myself and my last thoughts as I drifted off to sleep is that my bed never felt so comfortable.  Then Matteo woke us up crying, again and again and again.  It was kind of like having a newborn again, minus the round-the-clock feedings and night sweats, and the fact that Chris was the only one who could comfort him.  I felt pretty useless, but the upside is that I ended up with more sleep than Chris did by the time morning came.  

At least we didn't have anywhere we needed to be and although the six of us were pretty darn cranky all of Friday, I used the situation as an excuse to not get out of my pajamas all day.  I haven't done something like that since, well, I guess when Soren came into our lives. Other than a lot of crying at naptime and bedtime, the rest of the weekend went reasonably well.  Chris and I made short trips away from home to grocery shop or take care of other necessities, but we kept the kids home and just let them adjust as their newly-expanded sibling unit.  It was too darn cold to bother trying to bundle up four kids and get them into car seats anyway.  

Chris went back to work the Monday after we got home and I was so nervous.  Not necessarily about taking care of four kids by myself, (I'd called in a friend to help out) but of Matteo's reaction when he realized that Chris was no longer in the house.  As I expected, he cried hard and long, but the rest of the day went beautifully.  He willingly held my hand when we went to the zoo, reached for me when my friend tried to pick him up, and hopped right into bed at naptime.  I couldn't believe it.  He glued himself back to Chris as soon as he came home, but I'd seen enough that first day to give me confidence that Matteo and I are going to do alright.  

Now if we could just tackle the issue of sleep and we'd be golden!  Things have gotten a lot better as we got closer to the one-week mark of being home, but again, those first three days were rough.  

We had co-slept in China because we didn't have any other viable alternative.  The crib the hotel set up for us in Hefei was ancient, rickety looking and pretty small, more the size of a small pack 'n' play.  There was no way I was going to try to get my child to sleep in it, so Matteo slept with us in the king-size bed.  In Guangzhou, we had a room with two beds, which when we pushed them together, were bigger than a king-size bed.  The four of us should have slept comfortably in it, but because of Matteo's acrobatic sleeping and need to have a limb pushed into Chris at all times, Chris was literally being pushed over the edge.  

Even if our bed at home were bigger, co-sleeping is not a viable for us long-term because Chris and I sleep horribly this way.  Some parents sleeper better with their kids in bed with them but Chris and I just aren't those people.  We happen to have a third crib mattress, so we put that on the floor in between Matteo's and Kiera's toddler beds and used that to make our vigil by their bedsides more comfortable as we pleaded for them to sleep.  We reasoned it was kind of like co-sleeping except that the safety bars on the toddler bed kept Matteo from kicking Chris in the face in the middle of the night.  That worked for getting them to bed, but when Chris ended up sleeping on the crib mattress after Matteo woke up in the middle of the night, that solution quickly fell  out of favor.   By Monday night, the mattress was on the floor next to our bed. When Matteo wakes up for the first time, Chris retrieves him and lays him back to sleep on the mattress.  He wakes up a final time when Chris leaves for work in the morning, so Chris puts him into bed with me.  That makes him scream, but he lets me cuddle with him nonetheless and eventually falls asleep. As long as I put earplugs in, I've gotten so used to the crying that I often can fall back asleep.  Amazingly, when he wakes up for good in the morning, he's usually pretty contently cuddled up with me.  I think this latest set-up is going to be what we end up doing for awhile.  It's not ideal for Chris or me, but it's not different than compromises my friends have made with their bio children who do not sleep all night in their own beds. 

Oliver and Soren love their new siblings and haven't shown any jealousy towards them.  Nonetheless, the adjustment to a larger family has been challenging in some respects.  Now that we have four children, life would be complete chaos without a little more structure in place.  We expect more out of them in helping to clean up or doing more for themselves.  They used to have more say if what they got for breakfast or lunch, but I simply don't have time for short-order cooking. This has led to some pretty heavy-duty tantrums and at one breakfast all four kids were crying for one reason or another.   

We also bought plastic plates, bowls, cups and utensils from Ikea and cleared out a lower-level cabinet to dedicate to kids tableware.  They're now in charge of setting the table.  But they've proven to me they can live up to our expectations.  I asked them to clean their room before watching TV and they did it, get this, without complaining.  I asked them once, they went right to work and they did a good job.   

Through the ups and downs of our first week home, Kiera and Matteo continue to amaze us.  That they are so trusting of and open to us overshadows the reality of all they have lost - familiar foods, language and the only families they have knew.  Oliver cried when Chris asked him to imagine if we put him on a plane to China to live with a new family.  (Though he might have thought for a moment we were actually sending him to a new family.)  And yet Kiera and Matteo smile when they see us, follow Oliver and Soren around excited to play whatever they're playing and eat better than their older brothers despite all the new foods.