Weekend Ups and Downs

We survived the weekend, but there were some serious ups and downs. We've been experiencing some attitudinal issues with Lucy. When she begins to feel frustrated or that we are being stern with her she will generally respond in one of two ways, either she will start to get mopey, close to tears and refuse to look at us OR she will get snippy and abrasive. When the latter happens and we bring it to her attention that it is unacceptable, she will immediately respond with, "sorry!" said with a heavy coating of irritation. Fortunately each episode resolves fairly quickly without much carry over, at least for Lucy. Sometimes Steve and I have more trouble just because our patience reserves start running low if it happens too often.

Usually it's little stuff that starts the slide - trying to draw information out of her to complete her homework or explaining the proper way to prepare her attendance card for kung fu class. Saturday was worse than Sunday. Steve had less patience overall this time than I did. I am looking for things to celebrate with Lucy. For example, many times her response to simple questions is, "I don't know" or "I don't care." It gets old hearing that over and over again. Sunday morning on the way home from church/Sunday School we asked the girls if they would like to stop for donuts. Lucy responded immediately with a confident, "Yes!" I laughed. Alice wanted to know what was funny. I said that I was happy to hear Lucy knowing what she wanted and saying so with enthusiasm. Lucy was all smiles.

Later Lucy needed to finish some homework. We struggled with it Friday night and Saturday. All she needed to do was construct a simple timeline (to practice negative and positive numbers) about her life - now (2013) being zero on the number line, with 3 or 4 events from her past and 3 or 4 events (real or hoped for) in her future. As soon as we started Lucy started slipping into a funk. I didn't get sucked in this time. I kept it positive. I did much of the work for her, feeding her answers, but keeping her involved. We got it finished and there were more smiles than frowns, so I consider it a success.

An interesting thing happened while we were working on this. Lucy was trying to come up with some important events from her past. We already had the day she was born, when she came to the US and started middle school (the teacher had done that much with her in class). We needed one more event. Lucy started talking about being born in the orphanage. I had to explain to her that she wasn't born there. I pulled out the newspaper "finding" notice we received from the orphanage as part of Lucy's documents. It tells about the circumstances of where and when she was found. Alice read it to her in Chinese and I gave her the translated version. From there we talked about how she probably lived with her birth family (or first family) prior to living in the orphanage. Alice had to explain birth mother to her. Then we talked about how her name and her birthdate were given to her by the orphanage. Alice knew the circumstances of her naming (based on the year she entered the orphanage and the person who found her), but she had never realized that her birthdate was someone's best guess and not the actual date. It was interesting watching the girls tackling some of these critical pieces of their pasts for the first time. I'm sure we will revisit it again many times in the future.