Matteo Update: 3.5 Years

With his super stylish glasses and a personality that makes an impression upon everyone he meets, Matteo elicits adoring comments from just about everyone. His can-do attitude and eagerness to please is just so darn endearing.

In the coming weeks we need to make a decision about preschool for next year.  Matteo's September birthday means that he's not eligible for Pre-K along with Soren and Kiera, but he likes learning and we want something that will be challenging enough for him and fun all at the same time.

We're super impressed by how many letters Matteo knows and he likes to point them out to us, especially the letter M!  Chris took Matteo and Soren to the boat show and while Soren's main interest was climbing aboard every boat, Matteo's favorite activity was to look for the license number decaled on each boat and pointed out if he saw any M's or 3's.  (He's very proud of being 3, so of course that's his favorite number.)

My only nervousness about schooling of any kind, even preschool, is that Matteo's speech is still very difficult to understand, if you can understand him at all. We're hoping that this is the reason he doesn't try to talk much unless we actively engage him.

We hit a milestone recently when Matteo tattled on his brother.  I was downstairs getting ready for work when I heard Kiera crying.  I ran upstairs and found her sitting on her bed crying, but she was unable to tell me what had happened.  Matteo, however, was very eager to speak up for her.  His speech was still very difficult to understand, but Matteo was able to communicate, "Oliver hit back" and pointed to Kiera's back. Yup, when you have a child with such a profound speech delay, you get excited about any form of verbal communication, even in the form of tattling.  

Matteo loves swimming and was fearless jumping in the water at the Y. He didn't even plug his nose like his mom still needs to do.  He's a pro at his tricycle, and is now just barely big enough for one of his brother's hand-me-down bikes, which he immediately got the hang of and cruised down our block. 

The one thing he has feared has been dogs, but slowly (very slowly), Matteo is warming up to them.  My brother-in-law and sister-in-law's exuberant Goldendoodle, Watson, is still a bit much for Matteo, but Celina is having luck helping Matteo grow to like dogs by hanging out with her friend's Great Pyrenees puppy, Gustav.  Although Gustav will quickly outgrow Watson and seems like a odd choice to bring around a kid terrified of dogs, Great Pyrenees are pretty chill dogs. He's clearly growing more comfortable because when I asked a guy at the park walking two Great Pyrenees if I could pet his dogs, Matteo ran right up and voluntarily gave each dog a quick pat on the back. One turned and licked him in the face and while he wasn't thrilled about that, he didn't shriek in terror. 

Between preschool, speech therapy sessions and all the things Celina keeps him busy with, Matteo is tired by the end of the day. He doesn't nap anymore, but if we drive anywhere farther than Target, he falls asleep in the car.  Because he so desperately needs at least a catnap, we sometimes plan a post-lunch drive to give him a chance to sleep.  The only problem is that Matteo is GRUMPY when he wakes up.  

I'm not sure what's fueling that little body of his because he's getting a little pickier with food and for the most part won't touch vegetables.  However, he'll still eat vegetables if they're chopped up and mixed in a dish.  He's not the type of kid to refuse to try something new and if there's nothing else for dinner he likes, he'll eventually eat what's being served.

Whatever Matteo is eating, he's still growing.  He very recently moved up from 2t pants to 3T, but is in 3T shirts for the time-being.  I can see him being in 4T shirts by mid-summer.

Oliver Update: 6.5 Years

We recently met with Oliver's teachers for the spring parent-teacher conferences and every teacher had nothing but glowing compliments. His drama teacher even referred to him as his rock in a class that's gotten a reputation for being quite rambunctious. But that's his personality - he likes structure and rules and he thrives in environments where there are rules. His kindergarten teacher talked about how well he's doing academically, but also about how well he behaves.  He's the calm child who helps his classmates and participates.  She was shocked when I shared some stories of the Oliver we see at home.

Because at home we see a kid with energy to burn.  It's a continual challenge to help Oliver constructively channel that energy and with a good attitude while he's at it. I'm glad he's super well-behaved in school, but I wish Chris and I could experience more of the inquisitive, friendly, excited-about-life, curious, artistic and helpful boy his teachers get to see for hours every school day. 

Luckily, since he's always over at our neighbor Paloma's house, we don't actually have to parent him that often.  Just kidding! But he does spend a lot of time over there.  Whenever we get home after being out, I haven't even turned the ignition off in the car before he's asking if he can go play with Paloma.  If it's right after school, Oliver wants to meet Paloma at her bus stop, so I joke that Paloma's mom could outsource bus stop pick-up to Oliver.  Paloma just might be the first person he thinks of when he wakes up because he immediately wants to run next door.  Unfortunately, our family wakes up early and Paloma's does not, so we make Oliver wait until what we consider a reasonable hour. A couple of times he's been turned away.

Anyway, those two get along so well and share a similar sense of humor.  They love to play Legos, Star Wars and video games, like Lego Dimensions. They're very creative together and come up with elaborate games of super heroes. 

For all the energy Oliver has, one quiet activity he can partake in is drawing.  Chris finally bought him his own set of markers and crayons and a sketch pad that he doesn't  have to share with his siblings.  I had hoped the sketch pad would cut down on the pieces of paper with various states of completed artwork that are lying around his room. Every couple of days I do a clean sweep and recycle most of it, but I'm waiting for the day I accidentally recycle something he considered a masterpiece. 

Oliver recently re-learned to ride his bike without training wheels.  He had barely mastered this new skill at the end of last summer, so by this spring rolled around, he had forgotten. So he wanted nothing to do with his training-wheel-less bike and instead tried riding his siblings' bikes, including Kiera's balance bike that is really too small for him. This of course caused lots of fights, most of which Celina was left trying to mediate since they occurred right after school as the kids took advantage of a last chance to play outside before dinner.  

Chris, the parent in this duo with the most patience, took Oliver out to reteach him how to ride without training wheels and surprising to us all, it took Oliver all of 10 minutes to get the hang of it and feel confident enough to bike a couple of laps around the block.  Later on Oliver, Soren and I took their bikes to the path down by the river where they biked and I jogged.  Oliver was happy as could be to pedal on ahead as I plodded along at my own pace. 

Oliver shows no signs yet of losing any teeth.  His baby teeth were late to come in (he had only a half a tooth by his first birthday) and I didn't lose my first tooth until I was in first grade, so maybe he's just destined to lose that first tooth late. Honestly, that's fine with me. He's got such a cute smile I've been admiring for a few years now and I'm not quite ready to have that change with the loss of teeth.  

Oliver weights not much more than 40 pounds and he's currently in 6T tops and 5T pants. However, just the other day I looked over at him and noticed that his pants are suddenly looking a little short on him. 

Easter Full of Egg Hunts

Our Easter can be summed up with one word - chocolate.  Lots of it.  With three days in a row of egg hunts and visits from both the American and German Easter bunnies, the quantity of chocolate the kids received rivaled Halloween. I've got to find a non-candy tradition for next year.

Soren, Kiera and Matteo had their first egg hunt at preschool on Friday, where each child was designated a color and searched the classroom and hallways for four eggs of that color. I actually thought that was a nice variation on the usual free-for-all. Because that's what they got on Saturday. 

The Germanic-American Institute puts on an egg hunt to raise money for their preschool program.  They actually have two egg hunts, one for the little kids in the fenced-in playground and the other out on the main lawn of the property.  The kids waited semi-patiently on the walkways surrounding the lawn as volunteers like Celina and Alina kept a watchful eye. Then the organizer blew her whistle and kids went scrambling. Some eggs were filled with candy, others with tokens the kids could exchange for small toys and a few with "golden tickets" good for specialty chocolates or German baked goods.  We ended up with one golden ticket, lots of tokens the kids enjoyed exchanging and of course, loads of chocolate. 

We spent Easter at Chris' parent's house where the final egg hunt took place.  Those Easter bunnies made our kids work for those eggs they were hidden so well!

Matteo got so into this egg hunt and yelled with delight upon each egg he found.

The "German Easter Bunny" (aka, our au pair, Celina) even left Chris and me a surprise.

 

We also enjoyed a wonderful brunch at the grandparents' with pancakes, an egg bake and Celina's homemade Hefezopf, a bread baked at holidays. Between that and the chocolate, we were practically in a food coma by mid-afternoon.  

Not Special Like Twins

My call to the St. Paul School District's Student Placement Office started out innocently enough.  Friends with twins had told me that if one twin gets into a school in the lottery, the other twin automatically receives a spot too.  However, when I filled out the application to register Kiera and Soren for Pre-K, there was no way to indicate that the child had a sibling applying for the same grade. You could only write in the name of an older sibling already attending the school. So I called and asked what to do.

The first person I spoke to explained that the computer system knows when children are twins because they have the same birth date and home address.  I took a deep breath, and told our family's makeup, which is so normal to us, but certainly new to everyone else - Soren and Kiera are five months apart in age.  For the purposes of the school lottery, I wanted to know, how does the district know that my two are siblings?  According to the person I was talking to, the district didn't need to know because there is no preference for "similar-age" siblings, just twins.

A somewhat heated, but still rather civil, discussion ensued in my attempt to figure out why the St. Paul School District wouldn't apply the twins preference to my children.  The man I was speaking to quickly gave up though and offered to have me speak with his supervisor.  She hopped on the phone and started off with a cheerful "hello". I was hopeful. Surely there had been a misunderstanding and so I repeated our family's situation.  She actually seemed more confused than her subordinate. She told me the preference is only for twins because parents try to push a sibling ahead a grade or hold one back so that the two children are in the same grade. Growing even angrier, I explained that wasn't our situation as my children have October and March birthdays, so they fall squarely in the age range for Pre-K. I asked her why they have a policy to not separate twins, but she could give no reason that wouldn't also apply to Kiera and Matteo. 

After a lot of unproductive arguing back and forth, she offered to have the Placement Director give me a call. If I was fuming after the first two conversations, I was enraged at the point that he told me that if Kiera and Soren had coincidentally had the same birthday, they still wouldn't get the twin preference because they're not actually twins.  He was fixated on the idea that a "twins" preference couldn't possibly apply to children who are not twins. 

This mama bear had completed flipped her lid and a co-worker who had overhead my conversation commented to another coworker that he felt sorry for the person on the other end of line because this guy had knowingly stepped between mama bear and her cubs.

I get that our situation is unique, but I'm tired of dealing with people who can't think objectively. This not the first time in the short year since my children have been home that they've been treated differently than families with only biological children.  It was a nightmare to get my American children social security cards and put on my health insurance.  Someone at the Social Security Administration office told my husband Matteo's name was too long and we needed to shorten it.  (A call to Senator Franken's office had that issue fixed in 24 hours, because as his staff said, SSA isn't Twitter - your name isn't limited to 140 characters.) Even when I told a friend (who's coincidentally a twin) the story about my confrontation with the Placement Office he looked at me and said, "But twins are special."

More is at stake than the principle of being treated fairly. Without Kiera and Soren receiving preference if the other gets in, they will be separated.  St. Paul schools do not offer universal Pre-K and the limited classrooms they have are over-subscribed.  The district reserves the majority of the available Pre-K spots for children who are English language learners or have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), among other criteria.  Kiera has an IEP because of her speech delay, which means she pretty much guaranteed a spot. Soren does not have an IEP.  

There's a happy resolution - Soren and Kiera will be given the "twins preference". After talking ourselves in circles, the director suddenly agreed to granting them the same preference as biological twins and I got it in writing later. 

Shuffling Wardrobes

Every spring and fall we engage in the great wardrobe migration.  Oliver's clothes go to Soren, Soren's clothes go to Matteo and Matteo's clothes, well, they often go straight into the trash.  The poor guy came to me one morning clutching his clothes and wanting help getting dressed.  He pulled on his pants and I saw three huge holes in one knee and told him he needed to find a pair of pants without holes. He came back with another pair of pants with no holes, but when he tried to put on his socks, he pushed the first foot through and three of his five toes poked out the other end! Since we're coming to the end of the winter, I'm determined to finish out the season with the remaining clothes without rips, holes or stains, but I did spring for new underwear for Matteo. For a kid who rarely gets any new clothing, it was the least I could do. 

The wardrobe migration is particularly hard on Soren.  One day he was wearing his favorite Wild jersey and then next day it was in Matteo's drawer with an "M" etched in the collar with a Sharpie. There are certain times of year when Soren and Matteo wear the same size clothing and while it would be easier if we simply divided the clothes and put half in Soren's drawer and half in Matteo's, we discovered that we eliminate Soren's meltdowns over thinking Matteo is wearing his clothes if we write an "M" on the all the clothes designated for Matteo. Even if Matteo is third in line for the clothes, he can at least make it clear that they belong to him. 

St. Patrick's Day

The kids know St. Patrick's Day as the day they wear green, but we also remind them it's the day their dad and I met.  In trying to explain to Soren the significance of the day, I told him that if it hadn't been for St. Patrick's Day, Dad and I wouldn't have met and he wouldn't be here.  He paused to briefly ponder the explanation of his existence and responded, "Would I be at Grandma and Grandpa's then?"

Happy Birthday Kiera!

With a March birthday, what kind of weather you have on your big day is a huge wild card here in Minnesota.  Amazingly, two years in a row Kiera has gotten sunny and unseasonably warm weather on her birthday.  And this year was even more amazing than last with temperatures that rose to the high 60s.

Grandma Nan and Grandpa Dan hosted Kiera's party this year and because her birthday was on a Saturday, we spent the whole afternoon there.  We started with lunch, had some cake, played outside, opened some presents and then played some more. It was a glorious way to celebrate our beautiful little girl.

The birthday girl is four!

Kiera and Celina

There are times when I worry Kiera could feel left out having a March birthday when her brothers and dad have fall birthdays, but if there's any advantage, it's that she gets tons of presents and none that she's sharing with a sibling. Her gifts really celebrated her interests and her style.  She got a book, hair bows, clothes, Legos and a giant dollhouse with Caucasian and Asian dolls.  

Only recently has it struck me how much Kiera has grown in this past year. She still looked much like a toddler last year and now she looks so grown up. I look at her picture and think that if I blink she'll be asking for the car keys or packing to move out on her own. 

Two pictures taken exactly a year apart: Kiera on her third birthday (left) and her fourth birthday (right)

Our Kiera has changed a lot.  She's a lot more confident and all us adults in her life work hard to make sure she feels safe and secure enough to let her personality shine.  One outward sign that she's more confident is that she smiles for photographs.  Until just a couple of months ago, the most we could usually get out of her was a smirk or a half smile. Now she will happily smile when she sees me with the camera, and often without me even asking.

She's also making some strides with talking.  Although she's still incredibly difficult to understand due to the multiple articulation errors at play, we're thrilled to hear her initiate speech more often.  If we ask her what she wants, we might, just might, get a (one-word) answer.  A few times she'll even tell us something without us asking first.  We clearly have a long, long way to go, but we've all noticed an uptick in her speech and it gives me hope that we're starting to make some progress.

Like most kids, Kiera loves being outside. Her favorite activity at the park is still the swings.  She's finally too big for the baby swing, but hasn't learned how to pump yet.  She also loves riding her bike.  She tools around on her strider bike like she owns the street.

Like her big brother Oliver, Kiera likes to paint and draw. However, you have to keep an eye on her though or she and Matteo will empty the entire art cabinet in our dining room onto the floor. And let's just say that she hasn't developed an interest in cleaning up after herself. 

She's also following in her brothers' footsteps with an interest in Legos and loves sitting at the Lego table Chris built for the kids and stacking Legos on top of each other.  Oliver had wanted to help Kiera so badly to put together the set she had gotten for her birthday, but we were afraid he would take over and she would end up in tears. He made us so proud with how so very sweet and patient he was with her. The only time he showed frustration was when they finished and Kiera prompted destroyed the whole creation they had built.  Sigh, she is only four and hasn't learned to appreciate the final product.

Despite her destructiveness with Legos, Kiera shows a maturity beyond her four years of age.  I can bring her so many places that most people cringe at the thought of bringing a four-year-old.  She doesn't whine or complain about going to Target or accompanying me on other errands.  She sticks by my side and mostly entertains herself without getting bored.

Kiera's best buddy at the moment is her brother Matteo.  They share a room, go to preschool together and generally spend a lot of time with each other since they're on the same page developmentally. They spend so much time together that their speech pathologist thinks they've developed their own language, or "twin speak".  It really does sound like they speak gibberish to each other. 

Meal Exchange Reinvented

Since our meal exchange had lasted five years, I felt like it would go on forever, but with larger families and the increasing demands of school-age children, the families in our group simply got busier, or priorities changed, and it gradually fizzled out. 

That's not to say we no longer needed help with meals.  My family has been in a bad dinner rut since January in which we were cycling through a particularly bleak rotation of quick meals like canned soup, pasta or quesadillas. As Chris' travel schedule increased, my motivation to plan, cook and clean up after dinner sank.

It was during this state of dinner desperation that my friend floated an idea by me - getting together as a group to cook meals to freeze. It would be like meal exchange except more social.  We'd cook together and not in isolation in our own kitchens.  The only problem is that St. Paul homes are not large and no one has a big enough kitchen to handle large-scale cooking.  My house was eventually nominated because my kitchen is the biggest one of all of our otherwise small kitchens and it's not dead-end, galley-style kitchen. With the location, participants and menu set, our meal exchange was reborn.

The ironic part of my participation in this new version of meal exchange is that I had no idea what was going on.  One of my friends picked the menu, another wrote out the extensive grocery list and the friend with the Costco membership did all the grocery shopping. All I really understood was that everyone was showing up at my house at noon and that Chris was going to get the kids out of the house for me.

When everyone arrived, they came with crates and crates of food, a folding card table for additional work space and extra culinary tools and set up shop in my kitchen and dining room.  One friend taped a menu in our dining room with who was assigned to each meal so that we could stay on track.  

For many of the seven hours of cooking, Baby Sam was snuggled on his mom's back.

One onion into chopping 30, Anna went hunting for my kids' swim goggles.

The completion of each set of meals was reason for celebration!

My unheated porch became the cooling-off area.  You can see my porch windows all steamed up!

Seven hours later it was a crazy scene at my house.  My four children had been home for hours by that point because Chris couldn't keep them away all day and they were joined by my friend's two kids, because her 12-year-old babysitter couldn't be trusted to watch two young children for that long.  All were parked in front of a movie on my laptop and nibbling on crackers and granola bars and whatever else we were calling dinner. I hauled out at least 10 bags of recyclables to the porch while Chris took bags of trash out to the alley.  My kitchen floor was filthy after seven hours of all matters of food being dropped and mushed on the floor.  Us moms were exhausted and hungry.  Despite being someone tries to be physically active, I had no idea that cooking could leave me with as many muscle aches as a soccer game. 

But...we were (mostly) finished with 15 meals ready to go into the freezers of each family. That's a half-month's worth of meals!  When you factor in the occasional nights that we won't eat at home and the fact that some of the meals we made were so large that there'd be leftovers, we will be able to easily fill in the rest of the month's dinner nights with grilled cheese, pancakes and canned soup. 

One-Year Post-Adoption Visit

Anniversaries of bringing a new child home is not only marked by photos popping up from prior years on your Facebook wall, but by visits from your social worker.  Ours came to our house last week for our one-year post-adoption visit. I spent much of the hour listing out all the procedures, surgeries and evaluations Kiera and Matteo have had in the six months since our last post-adoption visit as Ava, our social worker, tried to keep up jotting everything down in her notes. I talked about the challenges we've had and the unknowns we're still trying to sort out.  Since we had last seen Ava six months ago and before that, shortly after we came home, she was able to remind me of how far we have come.  Yes, we still have a longs ways to go, but look at what has changed in the last year.  I received a huge compliment when Ava said she listened to me describe a challenge, but before she could offer some suggestions, I described how we were handling it and it was exactly as she would have advised. 

I've enjoyed our post-adoption visits and was sad to learn that we won't be seeing Ava again.  Due to a change by China in post-adoption reporting, the one-year post-adoption report is the last one that must be written by our social worker and we will be allowed to write the two-year-, three-year and five-year post-adoption reports ourselves. 

Since our work with our home study agency is coming to a close, I would like to give International Adoption Services, and particularly, Ava, our social worker, a shout-out. If you live in the Twin Cities and need a home study, they're the ones to call.

Matching Time Again

I'm a planner, so when it comes to matching with an au pair, I buck standard practice and start looking early. Since au pairs are such an integral part of our family, I need to know who the person who is going to be living in my home, taking care of my children and being a member of my family is going to be. Having that person chosen puts my mind at ease and helps me enjoy the rest of the year with my current au pair.

Despite my good intentions, when I officially kicked off the search, I felt like I was cheating on Celina!  The rules of the au pair program mean that host families only have each au pair for a year, or if we're lucky, two years.  That means we'll eventually be on the search, even if we currently have a German Mary Poppins.  As much as I worried about Celina feeling like she was being replaced, she turned out to be my biggest asset in the matching process.

When there are over 2,000 au pairs waiting to be matched, the search feels overwhelming. Where do you even start?  Well, when you have four children, that's where you start.  I wasted so much time my first two rounds of matching contacting au pairs who had no interest in caring for so many children.  Now that I'm an LCC with my agency, I'm finally privy to this information (why they won't make this information available to all host families is beyond me) and searched for au pairs who had indicated they are willing to care for four or more children. I then narrowed down the list based on a couple non-negotiables (native German-speaking, solid driving skills and available in early August).  Since I was frustrated by the lack of responses via e-mail last year, this time around I sent each candidate a short WhatsApp message.  According to Marcel, no one under the age of 25 checks e-mail, and Europeans especially, all use WhatsApp.

The search wasn't quite as frustrating as last year's, but still so time-consuming. I felt like my free time was consumed with a cycle of searching for au pairs, locking in their applications, having them reject us and then starting over again with another au pair. Most rejections came with the vague excuse about "not being a good fit," which I took to mean, "I don't want to go to Minnesota."  I didn't think anyone could reject us this time around due to our children, but there were people who didn't think they could handle four children so close in age or wanted to care for older children. 

The seven-hour time difference between Minnesota and Germany made scheduling Skype interviews challenging, but we somehow managed to interview five au pairs, sometimes more than once. I was so excited about our first interview.  The guy seemed perfect!  Before getting started, I asked him if he had any questions for me. I should have known the match was doomed when he asked me to explain more by what I meant when I described our house as "cluttered and cozy." Um, we have four children and a small house. Next question please. He then wanted to know exactly how many times I forget things. Huh?  Oh, yeah, I had written in our application about how we need an au pair who is flexible and able to go with the flow and doesn't get flustered or thrown off course by changes in the plan. As an example, if I forget to tell him that one of the kid's speech therapy appointments got changed to today, I need him to roll with it. He was very preoccupied by how many times this happens.  Let's be honest, stuff like this happens every day. Marcel and Celina hardly blinked. This guy clearly wasn't going to cut it. 

The second interview was with a wonderful young man from the same city as Marcel who even rooted for the same soccer team. After the first interview, it might not have been coincidence that I allowed all four children to run wild while I Skyped with applicant #2. The chaos didn't scare him off and I told him I needed him to speak to my current and former au pair, which he promptly did.  He wrote me back and said we were the first family he had spoken with and while he thought we were great, he had no comparison and wanted time to speak to other families.  I was completely fine with that because I really don't want to be the first and only family an au pair has spoken with.  When I texted Marcel the au pair's decision, he shot back, "He'll regret it."

We went on to interview two more who we thought we were trying to decide between. But neither one felt 100% right. Celina interviewed both and brought up the same nagging concerns Chris and i had identified. And then I stumbled upon "the one". What I've learned from round three of interviewing is that after you've narrowed down your search and read every little detail of an au pair's application and deemed the person "perfect" for your family, if he or she doesn't show the same level of enthusiasm, move on, and quickly. The woman we matched with responded instantly to my WhatsApp message and promised to follow up again as soon as she had read our profile, which she did. Her questions proved she had clearly read our profile and that her heart was in the right place.  

We ended up choosing this woman after what ended up being an expedited interview process because we liked her that much. Her extensive experience is almost identical to Celina's and her outgoing personality reminds me of Marcel. I not only had her interview with Celina, but also with Celina's best friend, who is extending with her host family and will be spending a lot of time with whoever becomes our next au pair. Celina's text message to me after the Skype call started with, "We are team Nina!" She mentioned talking to the au pair about "our family," which of course made my heart swell. 

Matching with an au pair is a stressful  process, even for an experienced host family. But through this process I got to learn that Marcel and Celina are in my corner and what a comforting feeling that was amidst all the rejection. Chris and I were no longer alone because Celina and Marcel felt the same rejection because it was their family and their kids the au pairs were rejecting.