Category: Family

Our typical plan for Memorial Day’s weekend is to go to my wife’s sisters place in Wappinger’s Falls near Poughkeepsie. They have a big backyard and we grill and it’s all good.

But this year my wife’s younger nephew had something like 57 soccer games over the holiday weekend (I exaggerate perhaps, but not by much) so since we would be able to just hang out in the backyard, we decided to just stay in Brooklyn.

The nice thing about the city on a holiday weekend is that it’s unusually quiet. But what to do with the kids for three days?

Saturday: 

Danielle normally has a swim class on Saturday, but obviously it was cancelled. Victoria suffers from classic second child syndrome. She wants to go with Danny for swimming, but she’s too young (except to watch – we want to put her in classes in the fall).

The previous Saturday, Danielle had a birthday party with her best friend that included a sleepover, so I had quality time with Tori. So I took her swimming at our local YMCA, which has a nice pool and family swim on Saturdays. So Danielle decided she wanted to swim with Tori this Saturday. For the record, Danielle is mostly a very good big sister.

So Saturday was a busy day. Swimming, McDonald’s, then our favorite park. That was with me solo while my wife did other errands. Then she met us and we went to the new Shrek movie.

This is kind of funny because Tori loves Shrek. Danielle does not. This is a source of conflict when Tori wants to watch Shrek, which is pretty much always. So Danielle begrudgingly agreed to see this movie (largely because she’s get popcorn, candy and Diet Coke).

If you haven’t seen the latest Shrek, it is not really a movie for 3 year olds. It’s a bit scary at first. The premise is that Shrek is now married with kids and starting to get tired of no longer being a scary ogre. So he’s tricked by Rumpletilskin to give away one day of his life in the past to get one day where everyone is afraid of him in exchange for a random day from his past. Of course Rumplestilskin tricks him and the random day is the day that Shrek was born.

So it turns out that Shrek was never born so he never saved Fiona and apparently that causes her parents to sign over their kingdom to Rumpletilskin (because he tricks them). So you end up with the kingdom gone, Rumplestilskin in charge with witches helping him, rounding up ogres and overall a very scary place. Again, this is not a young kids movie. At the beginning Danielle wanted to go home (but for the record, she hates conflict in pretty much all movies).

So the movie is amusing in that Shrek meets Donkey who has never met him before in a world that is totally messed up. But this is not amusing to a three year old. Of course everything works out at the end, but at the end I had Danielle liking Shrek and Tori not liking Shrek. So if you have young kids, be careful with this movie.

After that we went out to an early dinner at my wife’s favorite Brooklyn sushi joint (my wife eats the best Manhattan sushi, so this means something).

Sunday:

Sunday, we wanted to mix it up a bit. The forecast was for hot so we looked for Manhattan parks with sprinklers. Not that the Brooklyn parks aren’t good, but we go there all the time. So online I found the #2 most recommended "park to travel to" in Timeout New York. This turned out great. It was a very nice park. Danielle made a friend and played with her all day. Tori is so crazy independent that she just went out and played and had a great time. We followed it up with a trip to our favorite local Mexican joint for dinner.

Monday:

Monday the girls weren’t pushing to get out of the apartment but as they got a bit snippy with each other I grabbed them and took them back to our favorite Brooklyn park in the morning. Sometimes you just have to get outside. We always have fun at the park.

There’s a New Orleans style restaurant two doors down from us that just remodeled and changed their name so we’d been thinking about going there. So my wife grabbed the ideal widow table and I brought the gang to meet her. We all ate, my wife and I drank and a very good time was had.

Then the girls wanted to swim again, so again we went to  the YMCA. After that we finally ate a dinner at home and the weekend was done.

Frankly, I was exhausted, but it was a good weekend.

It’s that time of year. The circus is in town. Going to the circus has been an annual tradition with Danielle and this year Victoria was old enough to appreciate it. So today was Tori’s first circus.

There is still something magic about watching the circus through a three year old’s eyes. When you’ve seen the circus a bunch of times, you get numb to the spectacle of it all. But if you take a three year old, you just watch the mesmerized look on their face.

Tori was mainly enthralled by the elephants, but she loved the whole thing.  And of course there were the obligatory treats. First she shared a snow cone with Danielle.

Ringling Brothers always sells the cotton candy with the big hat so they can charge $12.

What Tori looked like for most of the show.

And of course, a good time was had by all at the Greatest Show on Earth…

It’s time to think about pre-schools for Victoria. The challenges are a bit different this time around, but no less daunting.

To recap, for those who haven’t read this blog for years, or those with non-elephantine memories:

We are not zoned for a great school in Brooklyn. With Danielle we worked really hard to get her into a good pre-school that feeds into a school that goes through high school. There are three such schools in our neighborhood.

1. Packer: Hyper competitive, excellent academics. When we went for a preschool interview they had third graders in blazers acting as perfect ushers. It was both impressive and a bit spooky.
2. Brooklyn Friends: A Quaker school (you don’t have to be Quaker to attend) that emphasizes community (‘cause their Quakers). Not as good academics as Packer, but very warm and good.
3. St. Ann’s: This is the more artsy, innovative one. You get some famous Manhattan folk’s kids here.

They are all hard to get into. It took two tries, but Danielle got accepted to Brooklyn Friends. Packer was my wife’s first choice, but I’ve grown really fond of Brooklyn Friends and I think it’s an excellent fit for Danielle.

Now that Victoria is ready for preschool, to some extent the pressure is off. As a sibling she can get into Brooklyn Friends.

The issue right now is whether we can afford two kids in Brooklyn Friends. Three day preschool starts at $15K, five days is $19K. Danielle in first grade costs $28K. It’s ridiculous.

It makes the suburbs look attractive. Sure, in a good Westchester suburb with nice schools we’d pay $20-25K in property taxes. But that would cover both kids in school.

We’ve just started a business so things are tight. So our decision for next fall was easy. Victoria can go to the public pre-school. It’s a pretty good pre-school, though the later grades get dicey. We know we can get Victoria in Brooklyn Friends for kindergarten or first grade so we can wait to see if we can afford it. Paying $19K for pre-school is just ridiculous.

The added complication is that our nanny, Maggie, brings her daughter, Mia, to work with her. Mia is also ready for preschool. Ideally they would go to preschool together. So public preschool makes sense there. The only tricky thing is that Maggie lives in Queens, not Brooklyn. So I had to write a letter saying that she works at our address with her daughter and needs Mia to attend school in Brooklyn. I had to have the letter notarized and sent to the Board of Education along with Mia’s preschool application. We’ll know in about a month if that worked.

In an ideal world, business picks up. Starting in fall of 2011 Victoria moves to Brooklyn Friends. My wife quits her job. Maggie no longer works for us (that will be a sad day, they are like family, but with both kids in school there’s no need for a full time nanny).

In a less than ideal world, business does not pick up. We cannot have Danielle in private school and Victoria in public school. That is wrong on so many levels. So then we have the big decision. We either move to the suburbs (we’re city people) or we play tricks to get into a better public school so Danielle and Victoria can go to the same school.

My wife’s best friend lives a block and a half away and is zoned for a different and better school. She lives in both floors of a duplex. She has offered to put my wife’s name on one of the leases and a utility bill. That would let up apply to the better school by claiming to live there. I love where we live, so that’s my preferred option right now.

These are the sorts of things you think about living in the city with kids…

Watching Victoria grow up has been fascinating on many levels, but probably the most interesting thing is how different she is from Danielle.

For the most part, Danielle and Victoria follow the classic first and second child model. As the first child, Danielle got focused attention in the early years. We were over-protective. We tried every stupid thing that claimed to help your child learn faster (remember when Baby Einstein first came out?).

As the second child, Victoria never got the same focused attention, because it wasn’t possible. We had seen the stupid things we obsessed about with Danielle and we relaxed with Victoria. But there was one area where Tori got special focus. Because she was behind developmentally when we got her, she had therapy four times a week for six months. The physical therapy was hard. At first she cried trying to do things, but by the end she would see Essy (her PT person) and come running to her. I think that made her a fighter.

And of course, there are the first seven months of Tori’s life where we have no idea how much attention she got. We suspect she spent a lot of time in the crib with the TV on, but we just don’t know.

Which brings up the other fascinating thing about watching Tori develop. With Danielle, you know the gene pool. I watch her do math problems with ease and see myself. I look at her face and see my wife. With Tori we have so little information. We know nothing about her biological father. We know that her birth mother was 5’ 0”, from Guatemala City and we’ve seen a photocopy of her identification card. That’s about it.

So I watch her develop and look for clues. Will she be smart? I think in terms of learning numbers and letters she’s a bit behind Danielle. Is that just due to our hyper focus on Danielle? Hard to say. She learned her colors very slowly (for a while we thought she might be color blind). But she figures other things out very quickly.

The personalities are classic first and second children. Danielle tends to be well behaved. We got to parent/teacher conferences and get to hear how wonderful she is in school. Which always makes us ask, “why isn’t she like that at home?”, but for the most part she is a very good girl. She is also very much daddy’s girl. She is shy and not that independent. She likes to have me around even when she doesn’t need me.

Tori is the complete opposite. She is anything but shy. She will go off with anyone. She is not a particularly well behaved girl. We have this ritual in the morning. I make her breakfast. She refuses to eat breakfast. I give her a timeout. She eats her breakfast.

Every. Single. Day.

Honestly, you’d think she would have this figured out. But I think it is just her way of trying to assert control. She is a stubborn girl. And very independent. Where Danielle likes to have me around, Tori wants to do things herself. She’ll go to the bathroom and I’ll go to help her (sometimes she needs the help) and she’ll say “papi, you get outta here”.

She can be a pain in the butt, but she also has a huge personality and a big laugh. That’s her endearing trait. She laughs so much. But man, does she get into trouble. With Danielle we mainly just threatened time outs. The threat was enough. Tori is very well acquainted with the time out chair.

And since she’s adopted, all of this is a big nature vs. nurture experiment. Is she like this because she’s the second child? Was her birth father stubborn and independent? Will she be short like her birth mother? Her mother was most likely poor so her height, or lack thereof, might be more based on nutrition than genetics. Tori has actually shot up, when we got her she was around the 10th percentile for height, now she’s exactly average.

There are a million things you wonder about. When Danielle sneezes in the spring, I’m pretty sure it’s tree allergies because I have tree allergies. We’re paying attention to her eyesight because both me and my wife had glasses (and later Lasik – best thing ever). With Tori, who knows?

One thing that is clear is that an adopted child feels just like a biological one. While there have been clear differences in how we raised Victoria, it’s because she was second. In some ways she gets more love than Danielle did, because Danielle loves her too.

The two of them are good together. Mostly. Tori copies her big sister in all ways (good and bad). I find myself pointing out to Danielle a minor bad habit and saying, “if you do it, Tori’s going to do it”. Danielle loves being the big sister and is turning into a very good one. That’s another thing that is fun to watch.

It’s a big roller coaster ride with an unknown destination. I think Victoria is going to be a lot of fun. And a lot of work…

A bit late, sure, but I’ve been busy.

On New Year’s Eve I was thinking about 2009 and 2010. Of course I was amused by the all the articles written in my youth expecting flying cars, etc. by 2010. But mostly I was thinking about 2009.

Was it a good year or a lousy year?

This, of course, depends on who you are. If you won the lottery in 2009, it was probably a great year. For me I tend to lump the year into four categories, world, sports, work, family.

The world is mainly stuck in a lousy economy so overall I’d have to say not a great year. Sure, the economy is improving, but pretty slowly. And nothing particularly great happened in 2009 in the world. I suppose nothing horribly bad happened either, but that’s not a glowing recommendation. We have a historic new president but it’s too early to say how that will turn out. Overall my rating here is moderately blah.

For sports it’s easy. The Yankees won the World Series. It was a great year. A+.

The work evaluation is trickier. I had a lot of fun working this year. Money was a bit tight though. I’m very happy with where our product ended up after a year. But I expected more clients by this point. But the overall reaction to our product has been very positive. I think I have to grade 2009 as an Incomplete. We’ll know if 2009 was worth it depending on how 2010 goes.

So that leaves family. A mixed bag here. I lost my mother this summer, though she had been battling Alzheimer’s so it was partly a blessing. My wife had a lousy stressful year working at Marsh and the relative uncertainty of Origami Risk didn’t help our family stress levels.

But our girls are great. Tori is a total piece of work at 3. She gets into everything. She will quietly disappear somewhere in our apartment. To the question, “Tori, what are you doing?”, she will answer, “Nothing”. It is never nothing. She can drive you crazy, totally not listening, grabbing everything that doesn’t belong to her and getting upset when you don’t let her use the screwdriver by herself. But she captures your heart with her laugh and smile. She laughs all the time. And she already has the tilt her head, bat her eyes and smile look down pat. She will clearly be dangerous.

Danielle is just  turning into a tall beautiful girl. She’s the more responsible older sister, but hugely creative, constantly drawing and building things. And totally daddy’s girl.

So was 2009 a good year? I have a great family, so every year is a good year.

and Danielle is turning into a big girl at 7.