The boy has been talking about this day for weeks, now.  He pronounces the event itself as sort of a marriage between “graduation” and “congratulation”:  gladulation.  The hand-written invitation came home.  The songs were practiced.  The request for a donation of Hawaiian Punch and/or 7-Up arrived, but I turned both of those down because we have neither in the house and I didn’t really want to make a run to the store.  Besides, I figured none of us would be partaking in the punch, as ZZ and I hate Hawaiian Punch (does anyone else get an instant headache from the stuff?) and ZZ won’t drink anything carbonated.  He doesn’t like the bubbles.

Man, this year flew by.  It seems like just weeks ago that I was stressing out over sending him off on the bus for the very first time.  We spent a very intense year getting to know each other before he started Kindergarten; in a flash I went from being at his side for nearly everything to being absent from his day for 6 hours.  And that was hard at first – much harder than I thought it would be.  Hard for me, that it.  ZZ had his days were he sunk into me as he got of the bus, but all told he transitioned well to school.

I confess to having my doubts about the school.  We are still butting heads with the bureaucracy in attaining adequate services for some issues.  More than once I thought of switching to homeschooling (this mostly after he would come home talking non-stop about boogers, or after that note came home saying so-and-so poked him in the eye with a pencil).

The truth, though, is that he has flourished in school.  He is so much more social, so much more confident in himself and in his ability to communicate with others.  I see it on the playground when he walks up to unknown kids asking them to play, instead of sitting with me on the bench and watching.  I saw it today as he said a confident “hi” to the vendors we visit regularly at the farmers market.  I saw it most strikingly as I watched him talk to the dad of a little boy whose birthday party we were attending.  ZZ had never spoken to the dad before, however he had quite a conversation with him during cake time.  I used to do much of the talking & translating for ZZ, but here the dad understood him – no small thing for a child with a cleft palate.  I don’t think he would have made that kind of social progress being at home with me.  I think we still have some hurdles in some cognitive areas, but opening up the communication skills is a huge step forward for ZZ.

In the last nine months, ZZ has gotten taller, his feet have grown, and his weight has ever so slightly increased.  He looks older to me, although not quite as remarkably so as when I saw the picture from today before looking at the picture from last August.  His best grades were in math, but his biggest improvement came in communication – and most of that was in this last quarter.  He rocks the motor skills portion of his report card, but never really made any gains in listening, following direction, or paying attention.  He’ll stay in the English Second Language program next year, and for that I am eternally grateful as that means his class size will be at least 25% smaller than it would be in a main-stream classroom.

In short, it’s been a good year.

Oh, and the new mohawk hairdo?  ZZ had been asking for a mohawk for a while, and so we told him he could have one the last week of school.  But wouldn’t you know it?  The cap covered up the hawk for the ceremony.  Ah, well.  He was pretty excited that he got to take the cap home.

A rundown of last night:

• 8:00 p.m.  Laid down with ZZ, as I do almost every night that I’m home.
• 9:00 p.m.  Woke up still in ZZ’s bed, stumbled over to my room* in a daze and fell back asleep.
• 12:00 a.m.  Woke up with a massive headache, stumbled around to medicate, fell back asleep.
• 2:00 a.m.  Dogs woke me up to go outside.  Woke Mr. T up so that he could let them out since my head still felt like a lead weight.
• 3:00 a.m.  ZZ woke up to pee and crawled into bed with me**.
• 3:10 a.m.  ZZ clocked me in the head while moving his pillow.
• 3:30 a.m.  ZZ essentially was pushing me off the bed.  I stumbled over to the other side of the bed.
• 3:35 a.m.  Realized that the covers were all off the bed (damn hot flashes) as ZZ was crying he was cold.  Got up and remade the bed.
• 4:00 a.m.  ZZ woke me up laughing in his sleep.
• 5:00 a.m.  Alarm went off.  Stumbled over to turn it off and got back in bed.
• 5:30 a.m.  Abbey woke me up wanting to go out.
• 6:00 a.m.  Resigned to being up for the day.

That is how almost every night goes, except for the headache part.  I hate going to bed so early because I feel like I’m not getting any personal time.  But I’m having a hell of time staying up past 9:00 because I’m not sleeping worth a damn for a good part of the night.  It’s a vicious cycle, and I don’t see a way to break it.

* I’ve been sleeping in our spare bedroom because the bed is firmer and has helped eased my headaches.  Obviously, it didn’t work last night, but I’ve gone from waking every single morning with a bad headache to only once or twice a week.   Three rear-end accidents within a 5 year time span has messed my upper spine up but good.

** ZZ needs another body with him to fall asleep.  If he wakes up at night, he will crawl into bed with Mr. T or I.  I could carry him back to his bed after he falls asleep, but the closer we get to morning, the more likely it is that he will just wake up again.  The good part of this is that he is waking up to use the bathroom – he hasn’t had a nighttime accident in quite a while.  The physical contact he needs to fall asleep can be rough, though.

My first girl.

She is slowing down.

I’ve started laying the groundwork for the boy.  He notices that she shakes, sometimes.  He pats her head gently.  She’s his favorite.

She shows her spirit.  5:00 p.m. comes around and she makes it known that food had better be on it’s way.  Once in a while she’ll allow Jazz a play fight.

Her tail is as strong as ever, thumping against the kitchen cabinets.  She’s been getting extra treats from the table.

And when I can, when the sun is shining and the temperature is somewhere north of 25 degrees, I open the front door for her.  She’s content there, watching the world go by, listening to her people in the house.  Her ears perk up when a person walks by, and then she lets out a sigh and continues her snooze in the sun.

She’s a good dog.

For as long as I've known ZZ, Ultraman has been his favorite super hero.  Not familiar with Ultraman, you say?  Apparently, you're not alone, as my spell check keeps informing me that Ultraman is spelled wrong (it's not).  My friend Mr. Wikipedia had a description here, although curiously there aren't any pictures.  A Google search will bring up some images.

We have pictures of ZZ wearing his favorite Ultraman pants in China.  When he saw shelves full of Ultraman dolls and planes at the first store we took him to in Xi'an, his eyes nearly burst out of his head.  We wound up buying him a figure and an airplane, all the while listening to his story of Ultraman, even though we could only understand a few words.  He picked out an Ultraman watch the 2nd day; he was ecstatic that he had an a wrist accessory like ours.

Apparently, Ultraman was very big with his set in China.  More recently, he's been able to tell me that he and his brothers used to watch Ultraman in his foster Mama's bedroom, all 4 boys piled on the bed.  

Mr. T remembers seeing the TV show when he was a kid – I don't remember it at all.  So for last Christmas, he looked up all things Ultraman and found a DVD collection of the show and a bigger doll for ZZ.  He gave these to ZZ without me knowing about it – it was just as much as a surprise for me, watching ZZ's joy at getting this present.  The shows were filmed in 1966 & 1967; they remind me of Lost in Space with the cheesy dialogue and special effects.

ZZ has latched onto other characters since he's come home:  Spider-Man being one other action hero.  Last year for Halloween he had a Curious George costume.  But this year, he was adamant from the word go that he wanted to dress up as Ultraman.  That left me trying to figure out how I would put that costume together, because my sewing skills?  Non-existent. 

Luckily, I found a mask on Amazon – and really, one of the most defining things about Ultraman is the mask.  I finally settled on a red Power Ranger suit as an acceptable replica of the Ultraman suit, with one small problem.  Ultraman has a blue light on his chest that turns red as he runs out of energy.  We tossed around painting in a blue light on the suit, or attaching a blue painted ball, but neither one seemed like it would work.  Halloween morning I still didn't have a fix, until I happened to walk by a bunch of toys and spotted a blue beanbag water toy in the shape of an Octopus.  I cut off the legs, sewed the body onto the suit, an voila – a blue light for Ultraman.

Oh, was he excited to finally wear the costume!  Trick-or-treat was kind of a bust – we were at the tail end of battling the flu, and the weather was quite chilly, so we only went to a few houses close by.  But he wore the suit the rest of the night, and for most of the next day.  On that first picture, you can see his eyes smiling through the mask.  I love that.
   

It becomes quite apparent in my house, the fact that the weather has turned towards cold and ugly and damp and raw.  The boy’s favorite play is still big construction projects – he has played like this since we brought him home.  During the summer, those construction projects take place outside or in the garage, leaving the house relatively safe from being redecorated.

But in the winter, the house becomes torn apart.  The cushions from the couch, every last one of them, make castles and forts and race cars and pirate ships.  The chairs become trains and more race cars. Boxes suddenly appear on the floor; I’m told that sometimes they are sleds, and other times they’re rockets.

Today’s adventure took place under the kitchen table.

This wasn’t just a matter of arranging the chairs to give him some space under the table.  This was a complete remodel.  He found all sorts of things – paperclips, screws, pictures, to hang up on the legs of the table.  Pieces of rope are hanging from the expansion rails.

That’s his harmonica hanging up, and also a little toothpick flag.  Most of the decorating items are gone now – I needed to have him clean up the things that Jazz would likely chew off the table legs – but after peeking under the table just now, I see that the flag is still there.

He tells me that he has “a lot a lot of stuff to do” while I make dinner.  And he’s tickled pink to show me the end result.

Anyone home?

So, posting has been a little, um, sporadic.  We’ve been busy, I’ve been feeling under the weather, and all of that equals to virtually no computer time.

In the interim, the Little Guy finally had his birthday.  We met him just weeks after his 4th birthday last year, and the poor kid has had to watch everyone else have a birthday.  He was so, so ready to have a party with cake and ice cream and could barely wait for all his cousins to come over and play.  And play they did – first by decorating the cake as only little kids can do:

then by playing on the new trampoline:

followed by taking turns at the pinata:

Only when cake and ice cream were announced did the kids sit still for more than 3 seconds:

And just like that, my boy is five. 

We’ve had, I think, one day warm enough in the past two weeks to be able to play outside in the water:

Otherwise, the weather has been kind of cool and rainy and generally pretty crappy for this time of year.  Our outdoor time has really suffered.  Also, I started to come down with a cold over the 4th of July holiday, which turned into a sinus infection.  I’m very rarely sick, and this bug has completely kicked me in the butt.  Today is the first day I’ve felt like myself in over a week. 

Meanwhile, we race between summer camp and Gymboree classes and swim lessons, while I try to fit in time at work.  This week adds a weekly gymnastics class to the crazy mix. 

Kindergarten is a mere 5 weeks away.