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This is a nice piece. It feels an instantiation of a discussion I often have inside my own head. What is best for society? For an individual child? Why should a person building a family be told it’d be better to donate to a charity to improve the lives of children in their country? Yet, how can you ignore that reality? Its no easy thing.

Celebrity Adoptions and the Real World - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com

Isn’t it a crazy thing when you think to yourself … I’m not sure I even have time to have PeaPod deliver this week?

:-)

From April 25th …

Hmm…

It was a good evening.  I scooted out of work early to attend Mr. C’s Mother’s Day Tea Party.  I’d intended to skip it, as I’ve been out 1 or 2 days a week recently, but he was a real pill last night and again this morning.  There are probably many reasons, including tiny naps and the fact that I took Mr. N to swim lessons on Tuesday and Miss N to gymnastics on Thursday.  He stayed home with Grandma and the alternate kids both nights.  I think I’m going to have to bring him with me on one night or the other — probably Tuesdays for Mr. N’s swim lessons as it’d make more sense to leave Miss N home alone with Grandma on Tuesday nights (splitting her and Mr. C up), than Mr. N home alone on Thursdays.  (Don’t know if this schedule will last through the fall, but Mr. C wanted to do Munchkin Sports Jam on Saturdays for the next 2 months, so we had to mix things up.)  So, it seemed right to give Mr. C some special time today.  I did his party with him and we got the kids really early.  Then we went to the park for about 1/2 an hour and then home.  NetFlix delivered Star Trek: The Motion Picture tonight, so we watched that and ate some leftovers.  Everyone was good.  Miss N took a shower and the boys skipped and we came upstairs for the routine.

It is at this point that Mr. C opens up the toilet lid to go potty and there is a some red wire caught up in toilet paper in the toilet bowl.  Hmm.  “What’s this?” I ask.  I dunno is the answer.  We went round and round for a bit and I started to get a wee bit frustrated, as I’m going to have to stick my hand in there to pull this stuff out and who knows what is hiding behind the toilet paper?  In repsonse to my question, “Who did this?” Mr. C and Miss N pointed at each other.  Then Mr. C says, “Miss N cut it off her piano.”  “No I didn’t,” she says.

Hmm … now we are getting somewhere.  Not a chance this is Mr. C’s fault as I most certainly would have heard of it if Mr. C had damaged her piano.  Then I remembered.  Mr. C and Miss N were playing loud while we were watching the movie and I shooed them away to go play loudly somewhere else.  I had heard the piano.  And at one point, Mr. C came down because Miss N needed a pair of small scissors — my little enabler.

I fished the stuff out of the toilet and threw it away and Miss N and I went and had a chat in her room.  When I told her that she needed to tell me the truth, her first response was — I don’t know what happened.  I repeated myself and she looked at me so very seriously and sat quiet for awhile.  Then she said, “I didn’t want to throw it away, because I thought you might see it in the trash can and get mad at me.”

I thought that was very brave of her.  She had one tear running down her cheek.  I explained to her that she should come and talk to me when a toy is broken and maybe I can help and that I would have been disappointed she had chosen to cut the cord off her microphone, but I would not have been mad — was I mad at Mr. C when he destroyed the rotors on his helicopter?  She said, no.  I then explained that I was quite upset that she tried to hide it and then lied about it.

To punish or not to punish?

I settled on a little punishment for the lying and hiding — she won’t get her goody bag at Mr. C’s party tomorrow.

I ended by telling her I was very proud she told me the truth.

The poor thing then cried these deep sobs for a good 5 minutes.  I cuddled with her for a bit, but then I decided it was time for recovery and I made her get up so we could go finish with her hair.  She went down to get blankie and that calmed her down.

A life lesson — guilt makes you feel like crap.  We talked about that a bit later, when she calmed down — though in the more accesible terminology of, you feel really yucky inside when you try to hide things and lie, don’t you?

We finished the evening by reading the end of the fancy pop-up Jungle Book that Auntie got for Mr. C at some point.  Miss N fell asleep while we read and Mr. C did a very good job tonight.

We’ve got a big weekend planned — Munchkin Sports Jam for Mr. C in the morning, picking up the cupcakes, lunch and Mr. C’s birthday party (a little delayed, due to the broken collar bone of January, Feburary and March.)  Kathy and the kids are going to come hang out with us after the party.  Then, on Sunday, its the Mother’s day celebration at the old folks home with Grandma and all of her kids and a good portion of her grandkids.

I’ll be ready to head back to work on Monday and relax.