Going’s on – 12/20 Sunday

Most Diddly readers probably already know but I’ll mention it anyways. We (Reena, Josie and I) are going to China to get Clara Rose. We have our tickets – leaving New Year’s Day and returning on the 15th. We’ll go to Beijing for a night, then travel by train to Tianjin where the orphanage is. It is only an hour or two from Beijing, on the coast.  We’ll be there about a week and then go to Guangzhou where the adoption will be finalized. Tianjin will be cold but Guangzhou is warm. This trip will be totally different from the first as we will have Josie and be in a cold climate much of the time. With Josie we were in a warm climate while we had her so we could comfortably do more touristy stuff. We’ll see how it goes. We are all excited and hope you follow our blog:  http://overthemoontohome.blogspot.com

Snow still accumulating here in RI. We went out briefly with Josie, she was all giggly but didn’t last long. The dog seems to love running around in it. I shoveled some pathways to the cars but I’ll hold off with more shoveling until it slows down some.

I am pretty much finished wrapping Christmas presents. We went to Wal-Mart and got some stuff for our trip and final Christmas stuff.

So now like most we are kind of stuck but at least we are not having to sweat being behind on shopping, although I need to grocery shop for the week.

We are going to visit my Grandmother at the nursing home with all the kids on Tuesday. We were told she would not likely be well enough to leave the nursing home. I haven’t seen her since July 4th.

So I think I’ll do some vacuuming since I am housebound anyways. I also have to tend to the toilet – it needs a new wax ring underneath. Hopefully once I replace it there will be less clogging. It is hard to unclog so I sometimes get calls when I am on the road to come and do some man strength plunging.

I am supposed to play basketball at 1 pm today but it may be cancelled. We’ll see. Last game before the playoffs. I’ll miss the playoffs, of course.

Gabrielle’s Holiday Concert

 

 I saw Gabrielle’s concert last night. 8th graders are a little more polished than 6th graders. G had a substitute chorus teacher, Mr. Reynolds,  who really has most of his experience with band, so she was missing her regular chorus teacher who everyone loves. G’s chorus won awards last year.  Nonetheless, Mr. Reynolds must know something because they sounded great.

Song list:

Christmas Medley

Al Shlo Sha  (Hebrew

Carol of the Bells

Circle of Life – all the songs from the movie with soloists

G’s favorite is Carol of the Bells. She said, “It’s dark, not really dark, but not so la la like other Christmas songs. It’s different. We sound good all together.”

Saturday Night Live did a spoof of this song on a dysfunctional family Christmas and I’d sing it to Mom when she was getting frantic trying to make our holiday PERFECT.

Leave me a alone /I’m doing fine/ Get away from me

DING  DONG DING DONG 

Here are the actual lyrics followed by some history of the song:

Carol Of The Bells

Hark! how the bells
Sweet silver bells
All seem to say,
“Throw cares away.”
Christmas is here
Bringing good cheer
To young and old
Meek and the bold

Ding, dong, ding, dong
That is their song
With joyful ring
All caroling
One seems to hear
Words of good cheer
From ev’rywhere
Filling the air

Oh how they pound,
Raising the sound,
O’er hill and dale,
Telling their tale,
Gaily they ring
While people sing
Songs of good cheer
Christmas is here
Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas
Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas

On, on they send
On without end
Their joyful tone
To ev’ry home

Ding, dong, ding, dong.

Composed by Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych (1877-1921) in 1916. Originally titled Shchedryk, this Ukranian folk song is about a sparrow and the bountiful year that awaits a family. It was first performed in the Ukraine on the night of January 13, 1916, on the Julian calendar this is considered New Year’s Eve. In the United States the song was first performed on October 5, 1921 at Carnegie Hall.

Carol of the Bells, also known as the Ukrainian Carol, was adapted from Shchedryk by Mykola Leontovych (1877-1921), which was first performed in December 1916 by students at Kiev University. The original Ukrainian song is based on an old Slavic legend that every bell in the world rang in honour of Jesus on the night of his birth.

For anyone who has been a parent, or had them

I think this is a remarkable post from one of my favorite bloggers  – the Anchoress. She is conservative and Roman Catholic and even though many associate those two groupings with intolerance and judgement, her words are full of mercy and promise. Beginning with a quote from Pope Benedict that more than a little surprised me with its simple eloquence,  it spoke to my heart as a man who is father to two children who have to live with my divorce from their mother, and also as a man who has become a father to more children through adoption. Her words touched both my grief and heartfelt gratitude for the many blessings I have received in this life, and the urgent need for mercy in this world. Mercy is not pity ….. it is loving and valuing . Mercy serves. Mercy glorifies.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/theanchoress/2009/12/16/benedict-and-obama-and-i-and-you/

Xavier’s percussion debut

I was really proud of my son Tuesday night watching him at his holiday concert. He played bass drum on 3 songs, tympani  on the 4th and crash cymbals on the 5th. He was the man!

He played sax last year so this was his first time playing percussion in a concert. He seems to have  trust in himself and that of his teacher.

He lost his drumsticks ‘awhile ago Dad – i forgot about it’, so he didn’t play snare drum at all, but it seems to have opened up other options for him.

I was impressed.

Gabrielle’s concert is tonight.

Goings on

Christmas party at the office today.

Xavier has a band concert tonight. He plays the bass drum.

Gabrielle has her chorus concert on Thursday night.

My YMCA men’s bball team won again on Sunday. We are 8-1. I had my best game.

Reena finished Clara Rose’s quilt .

Josie calls me sweety all the time now – encouraging me to stay calm. I guess I appear emotionally fragile to her.

I am pretty much done with my Christmas shopping.

Weekend happenings

We went to Providence Place Mall to get a leg up on some Christmas shopping – me , Reena, and Josie. We focused almost exclusively on Gabrielle’ s list. We went to Hollister, where we were greeted by all staff with , ” what’s up”. At Abercrombie’s, they say, “What’s going on?”. And at Delia’s, they say, “Hi, How are you?”.  We also went to Journey’s – a hip tween/teen shoe store.  Josie didn’t like the first two places.  Everywhere you turned there are headless maniqans, and they were scary. She was offered stickers at the shoe place but refused – too pissed off by then. She was a big ‘ole  fussbucket most of the time, as was Reena who has a very bad cold. But Reena did inspire this trip. I have to give her credit. Hollister tried to sell me some cologne. I didn’t want to be a dick and tell them the last thing I want is to smell like their store, so I said nothing. We got home  and everybody crashed and we ended up missing baby Grace’s birthday party.  Crap. Sorry Michelle.

But we are feeling a bit of a pinch these holidays since we don’t know when we are going to be traveling in December to get Clara Rose in China. We’ll bring Grace a friend just about exactly her age – 2 years old, and of course, a little sister for Josie. Josie sees the trip to China to get Rose as an escape from reality whenever things aren’t quite going her way. She’ll whine to us, “I wanna get Rose…..”

I don’t have the G and X this weekend. G was at a birthday slumber party that she said was fun. They went to the library with their Mom today.

I have a basketball game tomorrow at 1 pm. Our team is 5-1. We are a ‘old team’ in this league, but all our guys know how to play and we can all put it in the basket. Most of the other teams have a guy or two that may be a good athlete but really can’t make shots. i think it makes the difference. Tomorrow we are playing another 5-1 team, so we will have a battle.

More on patience and kids

I have had a few quotes on patience recently, and my last post about my kids and chores speaks to that issue also.  I think that I have assumed that patience means you stay calm while you wait for something to work out. But how do you really do that? I think you have to be decisive in order to stay calm. Decisiveness is a sign of confidence, not that things will work out, but that you are making the best and safest decision you can in the moment. If you have to make 20 decisions in a minute to really respond to something adequately, than you better do so. The feeling of impatience may be a sign that you have to make another decision, or it may be a sign that you are not following through on the decision you already made. Somewhere in this mix you have to have a mission and purpose for what you are doing. You have to decide on that and stick with it.

I tried to do that in my last post about the kids’ chores – articulate a purpose.  When I was having to hound them, I clearly was not fulfilling that mission and purpose. As a result, I became impatient. But then again, I hadn’t yet clarified my mission and purpose.

 

You must strive to be patient both with what you want and what what you do not want: for each of them will try you. Exercise both kinds of patience and deserve the human name.

Bayazid

Chores not getting done, Dad getting pissed

I am having a lot of trouble dealing with my older kids with respect to doing chores.  It is a familiar story to many I am sure. I have to lean on them to do them, and they give me so much attitude that I just want to do it myself. I also pay them $20/month which adds insult to injury. I get angry after awhile and then I have the bad attitude. 

I am thinking of renegotiating the whole thing from the ground up. Start with a clean slate.

Not sure how to do it but I am going to start slowly – very small and easily enforceable agreements.

What’s the big deal here?

 I am going insane.

I want them to see the relationship between work and hunger and food and room to move around and clothes and a house that doesn’t stink and time and money to relax and play. I want them to experience how all of it is interrelated and without one component you don’t have the other.  More of one component, as long as it doesn’t exclude the others, leads to more of the other.

Veteran’s Day

People died so we can be safe and free. Just sit for a minute and contemplate that…..starting now………. Don’t put it off. You have a minute – 60 seconds.

Did you do it? I did. It helped me to focus by thinking about how much it hurt to have people i have loved die, never mind killed. It also helped me to be concrete about what it means to be safe and free. I have these people to thank for the comfortable life I live. It also helped me to focus by holding my breath for 60 seconds. It starts to hurt and in spite of myself I get panicy once I start going past 60 seconds.

Call me crazy …but I just don’t want the meaning of Veteran’s Day to be a fucking abstraction.

Josie’s birthday today

I kept asking Josie how old she was today, and she kept answering, “my name is Josie, what’s your name?”. She likes to hear me say, “my name is  Wim.”  So after doing that for awhile, I asked her if she was ‘3′, and she said, ‘yes, I’m fwee’.  Her mom made cupcakes and she’ll have those when her Mom comes into school  later today.  She has her big party at the Kent Cty YMCA party room with family  and friends on the Saturday.

She got a little crown too wear at school as the bday girl and loved it.  She asked me if she could take it home. It is pretty nice so I don’t think so. Maybe I can try and find one on the way home from work to wear at her little family party tonight with GIGI and GEGE and Mom and Dad.

Happy bday in Mandarin :  

Shengri Kuaile!