After 16 months of waiting, a trip to our MP’s office, and 18 days in which our kids had no health care at all, Benjamin and Abigail are finally official Canadian citizens.
Apparently, we were supposed to have filed their paperwork with the Canadian embassy in the States — even though we did file it with them and they mailed it back to us saying we had to file in Canada. This mix-up (can you really call staggering incompetence a “mix-up”?) was what caused the delay. A harsh phone call and a fax from our Member of Parliament seemed to resolve it fairly quickly. If only we’d tried that earlier…
Both our kids also retain their U.S. citizenship. While the U.S. requires dual-citizens to renounce their alternate citizenship (even though that renouncing is rarely officially recognized by the other country and dual-citizenship can be retained anyway), Canada does not. Our kids will be able to have both U.S. and Canadian passports (the combination allowing them to travel virtually anywhere in the world), go to school, and get a job anywhere in Canada or the U.S without hassle. It was a lot of work for their parents (mostly Nicole, who navigated the bureaucracies of both governments to get this done) but it will give them a level of freedom with their future that few people enjoy. We will raise our children with pride for both their nationalities, but with a broader world view than each would dictate individually.
In other news, our oldest dual-citizen pooped on the potty yesterday. He announced that he needed to pee (“Ben pee potty!”) so Nic helped him into the bathroom, then left while he did his business. After a few minutes she opened the door to check on him and he says “Leave Ben ‘lone!” A few more minutes later he steps out the door and announces: “I POOP!”
Apparently we’ve reached that point in life where people are more interested in our kids than us. I guess we’ve gotten so boring that we now exist only as a function of our children. Perhaps we’ll rename the site www.benandabisparents.com.
Since I’ve been told that I need to blog about the kids more, I figured at least a brief update is in order.
Ben remains a bit behind on his speaking, but he’s really improved in the past month. He’s way more confident about trying new words, and does a pretty good job verbalizing what he wants/needs. He’ll often confuse his word order so “Ben’s blue car” becomes “Blue car Ben” but we get the idea, and we’re glad he’s using words. He usually refers to himself in the third person, but its awful cute and first person pronouns are tricky to teach.
Nic and Ben are going to a Kids Ability class on Monday mornings to give them some tips on how to help him.
His fine motor skills, and his problem solving skills, however, lack for nothing. If you don’t bring him a pickle when he asks, he’s perfectly OK with opening the fridge and getting the pickle jar out for you.
He also drove his first car this past weekend — an early, but surely not the last, flirtation with the joys of motorized speed.
Abi is fairly advanced, we think, on her talking. She’ll mimic most things that Ben says, although she probably only understands the meaning behind her own repertoire of words and phrases. Its safe to say she’s firmly ensconced in toddler territory, and definitely not a baby any more.
She’s getting a little bit better at holding her own against Ben when he steals toys away from her, and recently added “MINE!” to her vocabulary — which is fine, because until now, Ben was sure that everything in the house belonged to him. We’re working on the concept of sharing, and taking turns, but that’s slow going.
It might be wrong to think it, but we wish Abi was a little more into TV. We don’t let either of them stare at the idiot box for too long, but there are moments when its nice to have them distracted for a bit while the floor gets swept, or a meal gets made or cleaned up. Ben calls it TT, and as soon as it goes on, he becomes immobile. Abi occasionally checks it out, but fairly promptly resumes pulling kitchen utensils out of drawers faster than you can clean up behind her.
Fortunately both of them like books — reading to them is great, but its adorable when they “read” to themselves.
Unfortunately, this has been about the grayest summer I remember, so they haven’t been outside as much as we’d like. But they love their sandbox, and they love the water, so whenever we get a chance, we find ways to enjoy those things with them. They continue to be beautiful, and generally well-behaved little monsters, and we’re lucky to have them both.
I think I must be having a delayed reaction to events of today, because I’m laying in bed and I can’t for the life of me fall asleep. I’m hoping that maybe writing it down will help me process it and go to sleep.
Abi could have died today.
That statement is full of such hyperbole that its almost nonsensical. Any one of us are in danger of “almost dying” at any number of points during the day. Every time you load your kids into a the car, you run the risk of having them die in a car accident. So I don’t mean to add to the meaninglessness of the phrase. But, I guess it applies.
She choked on a piece of cauliflower.
And not like, “cough, cough something went down the wrong tube.” I heard a quelched yelp and turned around and her mouth was wide open and her face was turning dark red and she was trying desperately to cough.
Fortunately the situation is nothing I haven’t dealt with before — when I was like 10 — so I threw off the tray of her high chair, scooped her up, crouched down with her over my knee, swiping my finger down her throat across her airway as I did. I tried a couple smacks on the back, listening for breath before trying the heimlich maneuver. None of that worked, so I pushed her against my knee, starting at her tummy in an upward motion toward her ribs. I did that twice and she started puking — her meal from earlier that day. It seemed like if food was coming up, that was a good sign, so I stopped the heimlich and just let her vomit. Finally a snot-soaked little hunk of cauliflower came out, with some velocity, and I knew that was the culprit.
I couldn’t guess at the total duration. Time wasn’t moving normally for me. Maybe 25-40 seconds. Maybe longer. We wiped her face, and she cried for a bit, and then she was fine.
We were at some friend’s house for the afternoon, so at the time I think I was more worried about the puke on their floor. For some reason, it never for a second occured to me that it wouldn’t work — that we wouldn’t get the cauliflower out. I don’t think it even occured to me the rest of the day. I think we’ve always known that our kid’s lives are in God’s hands. And I wonder what people do without that peace. No wonder there’s so much fear in the world, when things that happen just seem like random, meaningless events.
I’m tempted to think, what if I wasn’t there? What if I’d been in the other room and no one heard her choking? But the reality — the absolute Truth of the situation — is that if it weren’t in God’s plan for our little girl to choke to death at that moment, then God would have reached down from heaven and pulled that cauliflower out of her throat Himself. For all we know, He’s done it before.
Its not that its not scary. Holding my little girl over my leg, hearing her gasp for breath, seeing the look of sheer panic and terror on her face… man, that was scary. And its good that I knew what to do. But I’m only her earthly father. I can’t be there at every moment, in every situation protecting her — I’m not even supposed to be. But her heavenly Father is. And just like, as parents, we’re ok with Ben and Abi tripping over their feet and falling on their face a few times while they learn to walk, God is going to let Ben and Abi face tough stuff, and even fall on their face, while they learn to be who He made them to be. And He’s going to teach Nic and I just as much as them through that. But even when He lets us go through those things, He’s there to make sure we come out of it OK — either here on this earth, or at Home with Him.
There’s an incredible peace in knowing that through the scary stuff, and the painful stuff, and even the happy stuff, my kids, just like their parents, are held and guided by the loving and infallible hand of God. One who loves us more than we can imagine or fathom.
All that said… I don’t think Abi will be eating any more cauliflower until she has a few more teeth. She’s only got the 4, so I guess the odds weren’t in her favor to begin with…
For I know whom we have believed, and am convinced that He is able to guard that which we’ve commited to Him for that day. – 2 Timothy 1:12
Most of this past week I’ve been on vacation from work, which means my computer has been shut off. I do have a laptop or two that I checked on occassion, but I’ve been otherwise pretty unwired all week. It was nice, but I’m a little behind on e-mails, comments, blogs, facebooks, diggs, flickrs, and other ‘net activities… I’ll probably stay that way until next week, but here’s a couple highlights:
- BBQed and ate supper (that’s dinner, if you’re from New York) on the deck last night. The sun shining, a cool breeze blowing, a little Sufjan playing. It was wonderful.
- NetFlix caught on to the massive, gaping hole in their geolocation system. I’m disappointed, but it was good while it lasted. Oh Canada, why can’t you catch up with this whole Internet thing going on?
- Saw a movie in 3D — Monsters vs. Aliens. You had to wear silly glasses, but it was still pretty neat. I’d like to see the new Terminator done in 3D.
- We had a free babysitter all week, but that’s good because I threw out my back last weekend. I’m pretty much healed up, but pursuing new avenues of resolution for this very persistent and frustrating issue. I’m hoping to get at least another 45 years or so out of this body — its too early to be hobbling around like an old man all the time!
- Continuing my new hobby of collecting obscure, obsolete media, I got a MiniDisc player. It needs a little work, but we had fun listening to some of our old mix discs from the late 90s…
- Ben is pretty much ready to use the potty — we (Nic) just needs to help him make it happen. He gets embarrassed if he wets his diaper while in bed, and takes it off and tries to get a new one on. We appreciate the gesture, but would prefer it if he waited for us to help with that!
- Abi has 4 teeth now. The bottom two are very obvious, the tops ones are only visible when she grins really wide. They’re big, but super cute. She also runs like the wind…
She’s known how to walk for weeks now, but refused to do it. Then last Thursday, she decided she was ready. The first day was a little shaky — she walked like a zombie with her arms in front of her. The next day was better. By day three she had variable speeds, could turn 360 degrees without falling, bend over and pick things up, then carry them around while she walks. She can open the sliding door to the back deck, and run out on her own. Its amazing!
Pictures are uploading, so check out the sidebar until we get around to posting something more interesting…
This weekend we celebrated Abigail’s first birthday. Nic’s family came over and we had cake, made by Nic, and slightly burnt burgers made by yours truly. Abi opened a present all the way from Malaysia, and Benjamin spent most of the time “helping” Abigail play with her gifts.
There’s lots more pictures and video on Vimeo and Flickr, via the sidebar.
Since there seems to be some confusion, I went back to video I made and double-checked. Poor kid — her dad doesn’t even know when her birthday is! Well, it’s today. On March 25 last year, our Abigail was born. Now she’s a walking, close-to-talking little princess, determined to keep up with her big brother.
“I can’t believe you don’t know when I was born, dad!”
There’s a video of her in the sidebar, pretending to wash dishes. Happy birthday, sweetheart!
In a few short weeks, Abigail will be having her first birthday — it’s hard to believe she’s been around a whole year already!
Last week she hit two pretty big milestones — on the same day…
- She’s started using her first words. OK, they’re more an intelligent grunt than articulated words, but she knows what they mean and she uses them in the right context. For awhile now she’s been grunting “uh-oh” when she drops something. We’re sure she picked that up from Benjamin, because that remains one of his favorite words. Probably his second-most common words are “What’s that?” which still sounds kind of like “Wh-wh-whatsZat?!”
Abi copies him almost exactly, and likes to be carried around the house so she can point at things and grunt “Wha-wa-waZAAAA?”
- She started walking. One day she couldn’t walk, and the next day she could… and the day after that she decided she didn’t want to. She totally blew us away when she took 3 or 4 steps on her own, so we kept at it with her — maybe even pushed her a little too far. At one point, she took 5 steps, turned left and took 3 more steps!
Unfortunately, she’s not as quick to get back up and try again after a tumble as Ben was. We got some video, but most of it is the tumbles. She’s apparently concluded that walking on her own is just not worth it, because she’ll walk around holding onto only your pinky finger, but if you take that away she’ll immediately sit down.
We also had a particularly tough week with food. We concluded after a few explosive poops that went up her back, that she must have something of an upset tummy, but until we figured that out, it was very frustrating. She’d eat a bite or two of her food, then refuse any more, shaking her head back and forth if we tried, and screaming with red-faced rage if we managed to sneak some in. She wasn’t even doing that well with the bottle. Fortunately she seems to be getting back to her normal eating habits.
Ben and Abi play together so well, we’re very blessed to have kids that get along so well. If she was big enough to chase him (which he calls “kicking”) we could just sit back and let them entertain themselves for hours…
If this video doesn’t turn you into mush, you’d better visit your doctor and make sure your heart is still beating…
Nic was making lunch, Ben was watching TV and Abi was fussing in her high chair (I was at work in the basement, and came up just as it was happening.) Suddenly Abi was quiet, so Nic turned around to make sure she was OK, and found that Ben had pushed a chair over, climbed up on it, moved Abi’s food and was spooning it into her mouth — much to her delight! It was incredible!
Now, if we could only train him to change her diapers…
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