Monday, January 19, 2009

More Catch Up




Dancing Baby Girl is at that wonderful age where she can begin to do real projects with multiple steps.  Above she is working on one of our gingerbread creations.  She stayed engaged all the way through and was able to wait for icing to dry and whatnot.  She was so thrilled with her creation she didn't even want to eat it right away!

We are getting the pre-reading questions, "what does that sign say?" and "how do you spell....?"  In addition she is displaying quite the humor.  She got fascinated by the new T*co B*ll commercial about Black tacos and was cracking joke after joke about it.  We would be out driving and she would start in on saying the commercial but since she didn't know it verbatim she would throw in other things, like black road, black hair, black sky (it was at night).  She is a screech.

We are still getting some worrisome behaviors from her, they seem to be very balanced out by her wonderful caring side, but boy I get nervous when she starts her manipulative, selfish, self-centered, mean stuff.  Our new behavior policy of not tolerating the nasty talk backs and sending her to her room has seemed to help.  I just need to stop feeding into it all and take that emotional step back.  She is often doing these behaviors when I am at my worst, think she knows that?

Things with Lani, DBG's mother seem to be going well, or at least better.  She weathered the Christmas visit from DBG's Dad and did not waver in her determination to hold him to sobriety before he can come back into their lives.  Imiki's heart surgery (catheterizing to fix a hole) went very well and Lani did great with that also.  Lani's dad, Pawpaw, who had heart and kidney trouble before Christmas is back home and seems to be coming to terms with his disability.  And the good news, CPS closed the protective case on DBG and Lani is just feeling on top of the world with getting that last worry off her back.  It was good for her to have that oversight, especially to keep her strong in her decision to kick out druggie dad, but she seems to have internalized a lot of what she needs to do as a Mom and she is doing a good enough job of it.

People seem to have a hard time understanding Lani's and my relationship, they assume that there must be jealousy and repressed resentment.  But there is not.  We have worked past a lot of stuff and now we trust one another to love and raise our precious DBG.  It works well for Lani to have a break every two to three weeks and we love to have DBG visit.  We also have Lani visit, she was with us Christmas morning and stayed for Christmas dinner.  Sometimes she hangs out when she drops DBG off.  The best way I can describe it is, it's like she is my daughter-in-law and I think that is kind of how she might feel about the relationship.  She calls me her second mother.  All in all we have stepped through the minefield of reunification and come out the other side an extended family.

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