I came downstairs this morning to change Daniel’s diaper and found a box of cereal, a gallon of milk, and a mostly-eaten bowl of cereal on the table. The kids were all in the playroom jumping on the bean bag couch.
As I took Daniel over to the changing table, I called out an observation: “I see milk and cereal on the table.” I heard Carter accuse Logan*, who denied the accusation. Carter is not a very reliable witness, but I was still pretty sure that Logan was the culprit. He’s the most likely kid to have served himself cereal for breakfast plus I had seen him leave out the milk and cereal several times yesterday.
As I continued with the diaper change, I said, “I don’t want the milk to go bad. I don’t want Daniel to dump out the cereal.” The kids continued to jump and play in the playroom with no indication that they’d heard me.
After I finished the diaper change, I went into the playroom and quietly looked at Logan until I caught his eye. Then in a firm voice, I said, “There’s milk and cereal on the table.”
He immediately walked over to clean it up, commenting, “I didn’t do it.” I followed him as he put everything away and said, “Thank you for fixing the problem. You are a problem buster!”
There were a few drops of milk and cereal on the table so I got a wipe and said, “I’ll wipe the table. We are a good team.” He agreed and went back to play.
I love that I was able to have Logan take responsibility (in actions if not in words) for a problem without any yelling, blaming, or arguing. Just neutral observations, physical presence and teamwork. This is how I want to parent so I’m always happy when I do it!
*Names of foster kids have been changed to protect their privacy.
When I asked Luke to make me a Zero Monster problem, I assumed it would be similar to the ones I had just been showing him. I was expecting to have to add and subtract various numbers of caps and cups. Instead, he showed me the below paper, which had a 0, 1 and 8. The 0 was being eaten by the Zero Monster, which he depicted as a circular mouth full of zig-zag teeth. There were no caps or cups in sight.
It took a few rounds of questions and explanations before I was able to figure out what he had drawn and what I was supposed to do with it. Barely visible on the page were the outlines of eight empty boxes from a worksheet on the reverse side. Luke had drawn numbers in three of the boxes and my objective was to identify which of the remaining boxes contained zeros. To guess a box, I had to draw a loop around it, like the loop he had drawn around the box with the zero.
My first guess was a big success because the box I chose had five zeros in it! My second guess was not so good, as the box turned out to have a one in it, not a zero. My third guess was the worst: it revealed the word “End” and that was the end of the game.
Playing this game gives me a lot of empathy for what it can be like to be a kid learning math from an adult. When Luke first showed me his paper, I had no idea what the drawings meant or what the goal was supposed to be.
I can see how Luke might feel the same way when I am showing him something new. Just because it makes sense to me doesn’t mean it will make sense to him, especially not right away. Unfamiliar notation in particular can be an intimidating barrier to understanding. (Trying to teach myself the lambda calculus via a “short and painless introduction” gave me a very visceral experience of this barrier.)
I wanted to win Luke’s game, once I understood the objective, but it felt like my success was completely in his hands. He was the one who knew the right answers; I just had to guess and see what happened. From my perspective, the game seemed completely arbitrary. Was there any internal logic to it? Were there pre-determined answers or was Luke making it up as he went along? I still don’t know!
Does Luke feel the same way when I challenge him to solve a problem that he’s never seen before? If Luke is not able to see the underlying logic in what I’m doing with him, it will feel just as arbitrary to him as if there were no logic.
Luke’s game reminded me that it’s not much fun to make choices when the outcome feels unpredictable. I don’t like making guesses at random that mostly turn out to be wrong, especially when the results don’t give me anything new to go on when making my next choice. It’s much more fun to feel like I know what I’m doing, or at least that I’m making progress in figuring something out.
My conclusion from all this is that I want to be careful not to go too far beyond Luke’s current level of understanding. I want to remember that some concepts and symbols are so familiar to me that they seem obvious, but they can be completely novel and perplexing to Luke.
Luke has a lot going for him: he has a strong natural interest in math, he picks up on new ideas quickly, and he’s got plenty of confidence in his own ideas and in his ability to figure things out. We also have a strong foundation of trust in our relationship, both in general and specifically with math. All this combines to make it pretty easy for me to course-correct when I accidentally overshoot what he’s ready for.
It can be a lot harder with my foster kids, who don’t necessarily have these advantages and who definitely don’t have that established relationship of trust. I have to step a lot more carefully to keep them engaged and avoid triggering frustration. This added challenge makes it tempting for me to do less with them, because the teaching does not feel as easy and natural as it does with Luke. But I know that the my efforts will bear fruit, both for the kids and for myself as I gain experience and skill.
It’s hard to play chess when you have a toddler who wants to get his hands on everything. Luke and Noah (our latest foster child) wanted to play together the other night. I managed to help them get the board set up but then I had to take Nathan into another room to keep him from grabbing all the pieces. In my absence, the game quickly devolved into cries of “You can’t move it like that; you’re wrong.” and “I just want to play the game and he’s not letting me!”
I realized that while Luke knows the rules of chess, he’s a little short on the diplomacy required to teach them. It doesn’t help that Noah gets very upset if he loses or is otherwise thwarted from his goals.
As I brushed my teeth the next morning, I pondered the problem and had an idea: what if I put the kids on the same team and had them play cooperative chess? Instead of pitting them against each other so that one of them is doomed to lose, I could be the opponent and give them enough of an advantage that they would be able to beat me reliably. The two of them would get the satisfaction of winning and I would get the satisfaction of a peaceful bedtime game.
I tried it out and it’s been working pretty well!
How to Play Cooperative Chess
Give each child a piece of the same color to control and take the opposing king for yourself. Rooks are good to start with. In later games they can graduate to two pieces, but keep it simple to start out.
Place each piece in its standard starting position. The kids take turns moving their pieces according to the regular rules of chess. Instead of taking turns in a circle (kid-kid-grownup), the grownup gets a move after each kid move (kid-grownup-kid-grownup). For the very simple game with just three pieces, the grownup wins by capturing one of the kid pieces and the kids win by capturing the grownup’s king.
(I think the concept of checkmate is a little abstract to start out with at this age. It’s hard to for them to pursue a goal if they can’t visualize it. Physically capturing the king is concrete and easy to understand.)
Our Initial Experiences
We played a couple of these basic rounds and it’s been great so far! I like how Noah gets to focus on learning one new piece at a time. It really cuts down on his frustration when he doesn’t have a constant sense of failure. He still makes the occasional illegal move but I can give him a gentle reminder and have him try again without too much drama. I also give him a warning if he moves a piece into danger so he can take a do-over if he wants to.
I think two-year-old Nathan is getting old enough to learn not to knock down the pieces and other board game etiquette, but he’ll never learn the rules if he never has occasion to break them. Instead of limiting our games to times when he’s asleep, I’ve been letting him hang out at the table with us. There are plenty of extra pieces for him to play with and when he does take a swipe at the board, it’s easy to recover since we only have a handful of pieces in play.
Since then I’ve learned that it’s important not to let the big kids talk me into adding too many pieces to the board. The sweet spot for us right now is two pieces per kid plus a king for them to defend.
Though maybe next time I will see how it goes if they each get four pawns….
Right before Christmas, we got a new foster child. I will call her Isabel on the blog because she absolutely loves hearing “The Adventures of Isabel” by Ogden Nash. She is a great kid.
Luke is three now and Isabel just turned five. They’re close enough in age that they enjoy most of the same toys and activities and Luke has fully reached the age of being able to play and interact with other kids. This makes for some really sweet moments when they are playing peacefully together.
The key word there is moments. Most of the time, they are having typical sibling conflict over who’s having a turn with what and who gets to go first where and who gets to pee in which potty and who is entitled to privacy in which room of the house.
Luke is often interested in what Isabel is doing and wants to join in (or take over). Her default reaction whenever he’s bugging her is to call out to me:
“Celeste, Luke’s pushing me!”
“Luke’s stepping on my foot!”
“Luke took the firetruck!”
“Luke’s looking at me!”
I appreciate that she’s asking for help instead of pushing or hitting Luke, but I want her to learn how to solve problems with other kids directly rather than appealing to an authority right off the bat. Plus the constant interruptions are really annoying. I can tune out the squabbling if it’s just between the two of them, but when someone’s asking me for help, I feel obligated to respond.
Of course I have choices in how to respond. I don’t want to jump straight to telling Luke to stop messing with Isabel. That would just reinforce her habit of coming to me right away. So instead, one thing I’ve been doing is coaching her in what to say to Luke:
Isabel: Celeste, Luke is in my way.
Me: You can say, ‘Excuse me, Luke.’
Isabel: Excuse me, Luke.
She’s very amenable to repeating after me when I give her these suggestions. Sometimes it works and Luke gets out of the way, though sometimes I still have to jump in and take action with him to get him to stop.
I hoped Isabel would start using my scripts on her own but she kept coming to me. Now I’ve started insisting that she go to Luke first:
Isabel: Celeste, Luke’s touching the dollhouse.
Me: First tell Luke about the problem. If that doesn’t work, then you can tell me about it.
Isabel: I want to play by myself, Luke!
She’s been doing really well at coming up with good things to say to Luke. My scripting has sunk in; she just needs the reminder to use it. And now she’s starting to remember on her own. One time she even said to me, “Celeste, I told Luke about the problem first!”
Less than three weeks after Nathan was born, Claudiu and I said yes to a foster care referral call and welcomed seven-year-old Sophie and three-year-old Jackson* into our home. They were with us for exactly one month before the county decided to move them to a different foster home to be with their little brother. We were sad to say goodbye, but also relieved. Now that we’ve been through the experience of having four kids, dropping back down to just two feels like easy mode.
*I’ve chosen pseudonyms for the blog to protect our foster kids’ privacy.
My sister is right: there’s definitely a learning curve when it comes to doubling how many kids you have, especially when it’s only been three weeks since you last doubled. It was chaotic at times (okay, all the time) but it was also cool to see my parenting skills develop at a frantic pace. It all happened so quickly, with so little time for reflection, that the new skills I acquired seem to operate on a subconscious level. I call them my mom instincts.
Jumping from one kid to four required a shift in how I allocate my attention. I am naturally very good at tuning out distractions so I can focus deeply on the task at hand. This is a weakness when it comes to parenting a bunch of small children. I developed a habit of checking the location and activity of each kid every few minutes. Maintaining this ongoing awareness allowed me to nip trouble in the bud.
The Suspicious Sounds Instinct
The problem with constant vigilance was that it was not conducive for getting anything else done. On the other hand, neither was constantly cleaning up the messes of beans, dry macaroni, ketchup, poop and microbeads that developed during under-supervised play. A new instinct developed for those times when I was in the middle of cooking dinner, nursing the baby, or packing for an outing.
As various sounds bombarded my ears, including endless rounds of Jackson yelling “haa-haa” and Luke yelling “Luke!”, my brain would filter through the noise and direct my attention to any sounds that might indicate a mess in progress such as a splash of water in the bathroom, the crash of something falling off a bookcase, or an unusually long or sudden silence.
Sophie had a particular giggle that signaled mischief. I learned to drop whatever I was doing and go investigate as soon as I heard that giggle. I also learned how to get toothpaste out of the carpet.
The Head-Count Instinct
Whenever we took the kids to the playground, Claudiu and I were constantly interrupting our conversations to do a head-count. “Nathan… Luke… Sophie… – do you see Jackson? Nevermind, he’s over there on the slide.” (We always included one-month-old Nathan in the count, even though he never left my arms.)
When I was by myself my mental count was just as frequent. In spite of this, Luke still managed to get lost at the neighborhood park. I left my bench to fill up a water bottle and he wandered off in the other direction looking for me. He was only gone for five minutes before a helpful teenager brought him back to the playground, but boy was it scary. I realized I had never taught him to stay put if he got lost.
Since then I’ve discovered Kidpower – an organization with wonderful resources for teaching kids how to stay safe. I love the instructions they give in their safety comic book: “The first thing to do if you are lost is stand tall and still like the trunk of a tree. Look around to see if you can find your grown-up. The next thing to do is yell for your grown-up.” If Luke had known to use those skills, it would have saved me a lot of worry that afternoon!
The Mess-Potential Instinct
Evaluating the mess-potential of any particular item became second nature. I developed an internal heads-up display that sets its crosshairs on abandoned beverages and half-eaten applesauce pouches. “Target acquired. Initiate disposal procedure immediately.”
Some products received a permanent ban from the home. I made the mistake of buying drinkable spillable yogurt – never again. Ditto on the red jello cups. A well-meaning visitor left us a bottle of cranberry juice cocktail and I made the executive decision to pour all 64 fluid ounces down the drain. It wasn’t worth the stress, not for a measly 5% juice.
The Keep-the-Laundry-Moving Instinct
The great thing about our current place is that the washer and dryer are right in the kitchen. The downside is it’s a compact unit so the washer holds less than half of a normal-sized load and the dryer takes two or three cycles to get that mini load dry. With four kids, we were generating a minimum of four loads a day, often more. Laundry had to be running pretty much constantly so I learned to be highly aware of when the washer or dryer had stopped so I could transition a load.
At some point I realized that I didn’t have to wait until the dryer stopped to turn the knob back up to the maximum length of time. “You married a genius,” I said to Claudiu when I figured that one out. I also realized that even if the dryer was occupied and I didn’t have time yet to hang a load of wets, I could at least free up the washer for another load of dirties by stashing the wets in their own laundry basket. I could progressively fill a basket with multiple loads of wet laundry and hang it in one big batch at an opportune moment.
The Somebody’s Gunning for a Timeout Instinct
We faced a lot of sibling conflict, especially between Luke and Jackson. Lots of name-calling, poking each other, snatching toys, pushing and hitting. I started to develop a sense for when someone was about to earn themselves a timeout. (You know you’ve been dishing out a lot of timeouts when the kids make a game of one person sitting in the timeout chair while the other one counts backwards from ten and beeps.)
If I was paying attention to the warning signs, I could sometimes intervene to prevent the offense either by redirecting, coaching or physically blocking. If I was not quite on the ball or too far away, at least I could see with my own eyes who did what.
I had to counteract my natural tendency to ignore the unpleasant behavior and bad feelings. I guess when I was a kid, tuning out was my main coping strategy when my younger siblings fought with each other. But now that I’m the grown-up, I’m responsible! I had to learn to pay attention.
It’s a work in progress. I have a lot more to learn about how best to handle constant conflict between siblings. I often compromised my own values, letting behavior slide or defaulting to punishment because I didn’t have the energy or the wisdom to give a more productive response.
Gratuitous baby picture
Now that I actually have time in my life for reflection, I want to write more about the ways I responded to all the sibling conflict – both what worked and what didn’t. We could get another placement at any time and I want to be prepared. There’s a lot of work I can do now that will help to improve my instincts for the next time around.
I was finding it really awkward to write about the kids because I wanted to avoid using their real names but didn’t know what else to call them.
Claudiu and I talked about it over dinner and we decided we’re comfortable using Luke’s real name on the blog. We’ll think carefully about what we post in order to avoid anything that could embarrass or reflect poorly on him in the future. As our son gets older, we’ll include him in our decisions about what to disclose.
With foster kids, however, the standards for privacy are higher. Being in foster care is itself a situation that could impact someone’s reputation and we want to respect the privacy of both the kids and their families. Claudiu came up with the idea to pick a blog nickname based on the most common baby names from the child’s birth year.
As I reflect back on our first foster placement, therefore, I’ll be referring to our foster daughter as Emily. And since we’re on the topic of baby names, I’ll leave you with this classic: How to Name a Baby.
We said goodbye to our foster daughter last week. Now we’re back to just one little buddy and our house has a lot fewer toys, since I packed up all the generous gifts we received and sent them along with her.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel. Mostly it’s been pretty easy to adjust — she was only with us for a few months and we knew early on that she was likely to go home with family after the September court hearing. We’re planning to take a month off from fostering and then have our agency put our names back on the referral list sometime in October.
I’ve been feeling aimless lately, with all this new-found free time on my hands. How do I choose among all the exciting things that I finally feel able to do? With Claudiu’s help, I’ve decided to devote this week to blogging about our first placement experience. I think it will be good to do some reflection and it will help us prepare for next time.
In some ways we had a more gradual transition into foster parenting than most. We were scheduled to spend a long weekend at the beach with Claudiu’s parents when we got the call: “We have a three-and-a-half-year-old girl in the hospital. She has type 1 diabetes so you’ll need to get some training before she can come home with you. Are you up for that?” We decided that the beach could wait.
The experience was actually pretty familiar: show up at the hospital one night, meet an awesome kid, spend a few days learning the ropes with support from a team of wonderful nurses, and pull out of the hospital parking lot with a new kid buckled into the car seat and a nagging feeling of “Wait, they’re just letting us leave?”
It was really nice that Claudiu had scheduled a few days off in preparation for our beach trip because I came down with a stomach bug the night we came home from the hospital. For the next two days, he did most of the buddy care and daily nurture while I recuperated on the couch. A bunch of people from church brought us dinner that first week and my boss was super flexible, allowing me to put my work on hold for a couple of weeks until things started to feel “normal” again.
It was pretty overwhelming at first, especially after Claudiu went back to work. The demands of two toddlers left me feeling like I had a 24/7 job with tyrannical managers yelling at me no matter what I did. I didn’t know how I’d manage cooking once the meal train ended, let alone start working again. My days felt like an endless series of potty visits.
Gradually, however, we started to figure things out. It’s been a slow process of trouble-shooting, skill-building, equipment-buying and habit-forming, but I’ve been able to add cooking back into my days, along with foster care paperwork, part-time bookkeeping work, general housework, and now blogging. We’ve been having people over for dinner. We’ve made trips to Grandma’s house. We’re hosting family reunions. I cleaned the grimy windowsill behind the stove. Life is good 🙂
It’s hard to believe our foster daughter has been with us for over a month now. It’s been a crazy adjustment (hence the lack of blogging) but when I step back and look at the big picture, I have so much to be thankful for. She’s a great kid and it’s been a joy to get to know her. We’ve also been blessed by tons of support and love from our church and extended family.
For the sake of our foster daughter’s privacy, I’ll be very careful about what I share, but I do have a list of topics I’ve been meaning to blog about. Things are starting to feel a bit less hectic around here, so hopefully in the coming weeks I’ll be able to share more about this adventure of parenting a three-and-a-half-year-old.
The Daily Nurture 