Space to Sleep

I haven’t slept through the night since the baby died. In the last year I’ve gone from up several times in the night with nursing/toddler waking, to a few months of asleep-when-my-head-hits-the-pillow, to periodically awake from pregnancy aches and pains, to just awake. I’ve become a tosser and turner. I have weird semi-realistic dreams. I lay in bed listening to my dog (and sometimes my partner) snore, song lyrics running through my head on endless repeat. Lately, the music has been Wyclef Jean (he’s an adoptive parent of a daughter from Haiti, too).

My brother gave me Wyclef’s CD Ecleftic right before we left Florida. Although the guitar part on 911 is awesome, what I’ve most been into is Wyclef’s version of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. My partner knew the song from the first notes of the guitar (we thought he was just sampling Pink Floyd), but he sings all the lyrics:

so you think you can tell
heaven from hell
blue skies from pain
can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail
a smile from a veil
do you think you can tell
did they get you to trade
your heroes for ghosts
hot ashes for trees
hot air for a cool breeze
cold comfort for change
did you exchange
a walk on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage
how I wish, how I wish you were here
we’re just two lost souls
swimming in a fish bowl
year after year
running over the same old ground
what have you found
the same old fears
wish you were here

My insomnia is not helped by two of our kids–the wiggly ones–regularly arriving in our bed around three a.m. In Florida we had a king-sized bed. When everyone had migrated into our bed each morning (we’re usually all in the same bed by six or so) there was enough room for us all to stay put. At home, when child number four (whoever that happens to be) arrives in our very-small-feeling queen-sized bed, even if my partner is already in the shower, I have to get out of the bed–there’s no room for me.

Multiracial in America

Check out this new msnbc website: Multiracial in America. (Although it is not explicitly stated, it appears to be a ‘news’ site discussing the role race will play in the upcoming presidential election, specifically related to Obama’s candidacy.)

• More than 60 readers in multiracial families share their photos and stories
• Six multiracial families speak on film (I can’t get the first video story to work, but I’ll keep trying.)
• An interactive map of the United States, showing the racial make-up of each state including multiracial individuals
• An historical timeline of race in the United States, with links and articles

The series appears of have done a good job representing most different mixed race families (Black/White, Latino/Asian, Latino/White, Black/Asian, to name a few). However, I did not see any Native Americans included in any of the multiracial families. There were also blended/step families, but no featured non-relative adoptive families (I saw one in the reader-posted photo area).

This is some of the best mainstream coverage I’ve seen of multiracial families and multiracial individuals. Let me know what you think.

44 Hours in the Car

We just returned from a much needed getaway: a family trip to Florida. This was the first beach trip for us with the kids; my partner and I both road-tripped to Florida with our families when we were children. As you probably guessed from the title of this post, we drove. It was 22+ hours in the car each way, with four kids ages 2, 3, 5, and 6.

The road trip of today is quite different than those I experienced as a child in the 70s and 80s. Most striking is the carseat factor. My brother and I used to set up in the back of our Oldsmobile station wagon. We had our own portable tape player back there. We’d sit and play cards, build with legos, and create fully furnished houses with paper and scissors and glue. We could lay down and read or nap. When we were crabby with each other, we’d climb over the seat and take turns sitting in the front of the car, chatting with whichever parent was driving. Not so today. My two youngest kids are in 5-point restraint carseats, my two oldest in 3-point seatbelts and full-back boosters. They can never sit in the front seat because of the air bags. They are stuck in their same in-car positions, staring at the same view, kicking the backs of the same seats, sharing (or arguing) with the same sibling.

Even with four virtually motionless children (ha!) here’s what made the trip doable:

• Coloring books: a pile of cheap $1 coloring/maze/connect the dot books (some sports and fairy ones, although none that are licensed). These worked for a while, although Gretel and Teri lost their crayon privileges on the way home for writing on many things that were NOT the coloring books.
• Small erasable magnetic writings boards
• Mini Etch-a-Sketchs
• Sticker activity books (I bought a new one for Gretel in Florida because her original one had very thin stickers that kept tearing when she’d try to peel them back.)
• Playmobile people with wheeled accessories (1 skateboarder, 1 biker, 1 motorcycler, and 1 roller-blader)
• Matchbox cars
• Recycled (we already had 2) and redressed dolls (pictured above)
• Magnetic activity boards: The ones I thought were going to be great (building houses and flowers) were terrible because the magnets weren’t very strong and kept slipping to the floor. But one of the hits of the entire trip was a Brown Bear magnet set I purchased for Teri, with magnets to match the illustrations from her favorite book. That bought us hours.
• Portable DVD players, and favorite DVDs from home (Cars, Happy Feet, Mary Poppins, Cheaper by the Dozen) and some new ones from friends (Kiki’s Delivery Service). We borrowed a friend’s old player, and at the last minute my husband bought us another new one ($90), which turned out to be good. We set up the first movie between the front two seats, made sure all the kids could see, and then found out that even with the volume all the way up Jaja and Rico in the third row seats couldn’t hear the movie. So we let them be in charge of their own DVD player with a different movie.
• Lap desks: 1 left over from college and 2 homemade (stiff cardboard, 2 squares cut from an old t-shirt, pillow stuffing, and duct-tape)
• A bag full of books: old favorites, a few library books, and our brand new collection of fairy tales featuring Black characters

The crowning glory of the vacation presents were these floofy little zip-up bags (okay, my girls AND my husband call them purses, sigh) that came with a matching fairy/dancer inside (pink, green, blue). If the store had sold four different colors, I would have purchased one for Rico as well. Instead, I found him this great little finger puppet person the same size as the girls’ dancers. Rico’s person has a mop of spiky blue hair and is playing a tiny electric guitar (he calls it his punk rocker). I found a small drawstring bag we had here at home, sewed a piece of an old woven belt of mine around the bottom, and Rico now had a fancy bag for his guy.

We’re in the not-buying mode around here, especially cheap plastic. But before we left on vacation, I was caving. I had lined up a sitter for the kids so I could go to a doctor’s appointment, and I planned to do a bit of car activity shopping at the same time. I confessed to a couple people I was planning to go on a junk run to Toys-R-Us. I haven’t been there in years. (Can I now just say what a horrible store this is? The lighting, the maze set-up, everything needing batteries, plastic that never ends, boys’ toys in black with guns, girls’ toys in pink with mini-skirts and make-up, AAK!) Anyway, on my 45-minute drive to my appointment, I had second thoughts. I didn’t want to waste money on toys that we’d give away when we arrived home, and I (still) didn’t want to support the companies that make those toys with our money. (Toys-R-Us was basically useless, even if I had gone in wanting to fill my basket with stuff I thought would entertain our kids in the car.)

Here’s the decision I had to make: was I going to buy my kids healthy toys? Or was I going to buy them racially diverse toys? Now, our existing home toy collection is heavy on PoC, more than half (by design, because every time I find something great, I buy it–even if I have to hold it for a year before giving it to the kids. We have this awesome zip-up space shuttle with two astronauts–1 Black and 1 White–that I bought when Jaja was 3 months old, and kept in a box for years). So I went with healthy, and pulled toys from home to balance out my new purchases. Those fairies and the blue-haired rocker in the little bags? All White. But they each had another little doll tucked inside the bag with them; the four dolls I added from our home collection were Black (Gretel had quite a story going about the two ’sisters’ living in her blue-feathered purse/house).

Racial balancing is something I think about every time I purchase an item that has a person in/on it. I skimmed all those sticker books to make sure there was a mix of people in them. I looked through the entire ‘natural’ toy store for something comparable to the fairies in their purses, something that had a little brown face to balance out the three little tan faces I was about to buy. (I just looked up the fairy/purse dolls online to add the photo link above; the company makes the dolls in six different coordinating colors–all six of the dolls are White.) Dolls and toys representing PoC are massively underrepresented in natural material and Waldorf-style toys, which I discovered while trying to buy a natural or organic brown-skinned doll for Jaja when she was an infant. There was nothing. Things have improved a bit in the past six years, but the fact remains that many of the organic toy companies are based in Europe (primarily Germany), and dolls of color in their collections are rare. This dearth of variety is what inspired me to make the kids’ winter-holiday gifts last year, and to start my neglected Etsy store.

Was every minute of the car ride all fun family sing-a-longs, cheerful parents, and four cooperative kids? Absolutely not. There were some hours when the kids slept, several hours of movie watching, and many many hours of activities, eating, fussing, negotiating, and the sometimes hysterically funny stereotypical parental warning, “Keep your hands, feet, and toys to yourself, or . . .” and there’s where it ended, and often when my partner and I would start to laugh. Because what exactly was the passenger seat parent going to do? Driving down I-95, we were just as trapped in our car seats as the kids were.

Homeschool ~ March/April 2008

• Ice Skating, hockey (both) & figure skating (Jaja): back deck rink, 2 college rinks, rec center rinks, frozen lake
• Downhill Ski Lessons: 90 minutes x four
• Downhill Lift skiing: with friends, with Dad
• Attend friends’ birthday parties: 4
• Talk about birth and pregnancy; tell the pregnancy, birth, and adoption stories of all four kids
• Watch the movie “Arctic Story”
• At least ten (each) 60-300 piece puzzles
• Count out loud from 1-100 by 10s (Rico)
• Tell time on a digital clock
• Set the table for dinner
• Put away own laundry
• Vote with Mom/Dad in the presidential primary
• Help cook dinner
• Fill in Sudoku with Dad
• Compare and contrast the definitions of biracial and multiracial
• Discuss how you might know what color skin a baby will have before it is born
• Talk about ultrasounds and look at ultrasound photos of Jaja and Rico
• Watercolor paintings
• Start new math workbook (Jaja completed all 150 pages; Rico at page 142)
• Play in the snow & sled in the backyard
• Talk about why it is important to brush your teeth
• Help Dad dismantle back deck skating rink
• Watch women’s college hockey game
• Knit with Grandma (Jaja)
• Build with Legos
• Write numbers 1-100
• Play memory with 24 cards
• Visit with friends
• Ride on a zipline
• Play soccer in the yard
• Practice money/coins: names and values
• Scavenger hunt
• Rock climbing
• Ride bikes and scooters
• Dress up (more times than can be counted)
• Dance to music
• Go to a maple sugar house
• Work on general workbook (Jaja: 150+ pages; Rico: 125+ pages)
• Play with playdough
• Spend an afternoon at the playground
• Draw and cutout birds for a friend’s birthday party
• Cut out and assemble a bird/birdhouse mobile from Ladybug magazine
• Watch a college track & field meet
• Trip to Boston
• Visit the New England Aquarium; watch 3D dolphins & whales movie
• Swim in the hotel pool
• Visit the Boston Children’s Museum
• Play a harp and a grand piano
• Read words off the wall menu at restaurant while waiting for our lunch (Jaja)
• Read books out loud: I can read with my eyes shut tight (Jaja), I am a Tiger (Rico)
• Jaja loses second tooth and writes second self-spelled letter to tooth fairy
• Visit the midwife with Mama
• Talk about growing babies; look at the books It’s NOT the Stork & It’s So Amazing
• Visit the local Science Center
• Talk about what a ‘secret’ is and is not
• Draw and write on little chalkboards
• Dig in the garden
• Help Dad put up the new swing set; play and swing
• Attend downtown Earth Day gathering
• Play lacrosse
• Addition & Subtraction cards
• Build a sentence cards
• Jump on our babysitter’s trampoline
• Play baseball
• Play new board game (gift from friends)
• Talk about miscarriage, death, & grief

First Blogiversary

One year ago today, I began My Sky ~ Multiracial Family Life with the post Kindergarten, documenting the beginning of our search for a school (a community, really) where our multiracial children could blossom. We are now nearing the end of our first year of homeschooling, and preparing to being our second.

I began writing this blog with the idea it would have laser beam focus on one corner of my (and my family’s) life: living in the United States as a member of a multiracial family, and being a multiracial person raising four very different multiracial children. In the beginning the writing came easily: I had a lot to say specific to these issues that I had been storing up for quite a while. After a few months had passed, I found my prolific output waning. I’d start posts and stop them, usually for the same reason–mission creep. I’d start writing about transracial adoption but it would turn into a post about open adoption, birthparent rights, or adoption ethics (which can each be related to transracial adoption, but are also connected to all adoptions). I’d start writing about one of my White-appearing multiracial children and it would turn into a post on tribal rights or the diversity of Native American tribal cultures and the way in which we have clumped them together into one falsely-monolithic group (the Cherokee and the Shawnee are about as culturally alike as the French and the Germans). I’d start to write about racial passing and I’d censor myself because I wasn’t ready to talk about all the other ways I was also passing.

During the unplanned blog break I took over the past month, I thought a lot about the blogs I love to read, the ones I check nearly daily. The narrative blogs that draw me in are mostly focused on an issue or two of importance to me (multiracial families, multiracial people, antiracism, transracial adoption, adoption as a first choice, adoption from foster care, adoption reform) but there are also other pieces of the blogger’s life that I connect with (homeschooling, multiple young children, gardening, writer-mom) and also places where our lives are very different (religion, where we live, mom working-outside-the-home). It means a lot to me to read about Los Angelista’s family member who committed suicide, to know that Baggage has her own complicated personal history and is still a successful mom and foster mom. I know these bloggers only through the stories they chose to share with me (and you) online, but I am interested in what they’re reading, what they’re eating, and the funny things their kids said at dinner last night.

So, I am taking this blogiversary opportunity to tweak my blog. All the essays and reflections on multiracial family life will continue (I don’t know that I could stop thinking and writing about this if I wanted to), as well as the bi-monthly multicultural homeschooling updates (I know, I’m overdue), and periodic Life Links.  I will also be folding in Sky Family Adventures, stories and kid quotes that were temporarily housed in a separate blog. I plan to write more often, including what I’m reading (White Like Me, by Time Wise), what we’re eating (just joined up with a local CSA again), what we’re watching (my kids have been loudly throwing their bodies around since I showed them the dance portions of How She Move), and more about race, adoption, school, family expansion, and other plans for the upcoming years. I haven’t forgotten about the adoption series or the long overdue post on cultural appropriation. I’m just taking it as it comes, which today–since I have the house to myself for a rare few quiet hours–completed thoughts and writing are coming fast and clear. Tomorrow, however, may be a different story.

Peace, blessings, and looking forward to another year.