On Being Spoiled

So this might be the First World Problem to top them all, but it's really proving kind of difficult to raise a kid who's not spoiled. And this is a kid who came from a really messed up life, for crying out loud. Like, literally-didn't-have-anything-to-eat-sometimes kind of messed up. (As heartbreaking as that sounds, she's pretty matter-of-fact about it at this point and it doesn't seem to have hit home yet. Maybe by the time that would really bum her out....she won't remember.)

Well, it's Easter. And while I'm very religious and of course I believe and am deeply thankful that Jesus was resurrected and it's because of Him that I have salvation, I don't celebrate Easter in that way. We celebrate Easter like all the other secular holidays - with the trappings of the Target dollar spot, and with lots of food (dinner at Nonna's is seriously never going to get old), and with...presents! You can't have a holiday without presents, right?!

Wait. Wait a sec. We FOR SURE had holidays without presents when I was a kid. There were presents at Christmas, and presents at birthdays, and my grandparents always sent us candy for Valentine's Day (which was so great, especially that one time when Grandad got sent to do the candy pickup and he didn't know the rules so he bought us $100 Godiva chocolate boxes...). But there weren't presents for, like...All The Holidays. 

Now, don't get me wrong. I super love presents. Both giving and receiving them. I just worry that buying presents for my kid for every occasion ever is possibly spoiling her. And, from a sociology perspective, I wonder how it got like this, with every holiday being an Occasion with Presents and Surprises. (And as a marketer, I wholeheartedly applaud Corporate America for its subtle, but effective, ploy to convince the The Consumer to buy into it. Literally.)

Let's not get crazy, though - I'm not going to bail on making Ruby's life fun or anything nuts like that. When this lady said she wasn't going to make her kids' childhood magical anymore, I agreed with the central point that childhood is inherently magical, and doesn't need to be Pinterest-ed. But then I mulled it over some more and decided that her version of childhood sounded kind of like a bummer....with Mom welcoming the kids home from school only to shoo them out the door for the evening moments later. So I'm not completely on board with her whole idea of removing all the parent-added magic (read: involvement).

But man, there has to be a balance. Not only does the insanity of handmade/home-cooked/organic/original/DSLR-photographed holidays wear on the parents....it also overstimulates the kids, as far as I can tell. To wit: 

Today Ruby woke up and was thrilled to find her Easter basket with 5 things in it: a water bottle ("Just like Auntie's!"), a car-cup of gum (no kid loves gum more), a package of the cutest teeny tiny chocolate bunnies you have ever seen, a package of Jelly Bellys, and a Hello Kitty plush wearing the obligatory bunny ears.

"Why does Hello Kitty doesn't got a mouf, Auntie?"

Oh, and the basket was my Longaberger one, on loan, because I didn't want to buy another one and then have to figure out what to do with it afterward (see it there behind Hello Kitty?). So that was gratifying, because a) I kind of forgot about Easter baskets until yesterday afternoon at the grocery store, when I was doing other shopping I had procrastinated on....and therefore I bought all of the gifts at the grocery store, and b) she was perfectly happy to be sent away from my sleep-heavy face (where she was chattering). She took her very loud crinkly package of bunnies and went to the kitchen, where she filled her unwashed (but BPA free!) water bottle, and proceeded to eat the breakfast of champions. When I eventually dragged myself out of bed to make these scones for Sunday lunch, we proceeded to have a lovely conversation wherein I cut the butter into the flour mixture and she did all the talking, about All The Things.

So yeah, good morning. But by the time 2pm rolled around and she had gotten a surprise gift from a friend from church, and eaten a boatload of chocolate bunnies (all sizes), and gotten a gift from Nonna and Pops, and eaten some sort of Easter dessert, and skipped her nap, and done the egg hunt....she totally lost it when she was prevented from further egg-gathering because she needed to share with her cousin. (She apparently turbo-hunted, probably because she was on Mini Bunny Speed.) There was yell-crying, and there was Nonna-blaming (Nonna is probably one of her top 2 favorite people ever), and there was snot everywhere, and man...it was just NOT pretty. 

I guess my point is that you really can have too much of a good thing, and I have to remember to be careful not to overdo it. (In good news, that's actually kind of a relief since I tend to feel like a perpetual slacker in the mommy department; see above paragraph re: Easter shopping at the grocery store on Easter Eve.) But then, that's not really an answer either, since....am I really going to turn away presents for her? Or NOT dye eggs? No. My smart sister reminded me, though, that holidays and birthdays put a lot of pressure on kids....which makes sense, since we pressure ourselves to make the holidays and birthdays perfect. So I just have to be mindful of that.

Egg dyeing with the homies

To summarize: I'm still going to do a little bit of magic-making for the holidays and for childhood in general, with these lessons learned from Easter 2014:

a) I am not going to beat myself up for not doing the marble effect that comes in the egg dye kit. Ruby can't even 100% read! And she doesn't know what marble is! How could she possibly be disappointed? Her eggs are RAINBOW COLORED AND THAT IS AWESOME.

b) I am going to talk to my kid prior to holidays, and remind her that holidays are fun, but also a little insane, and we have to remember to be regular humans who are nice to their families even when we have too much sugar.

c) I'm going to understand when she still has a freakout and isn't nice to her family because she had too much sugar and SHARING IS STUPID.

d) I'm not going to spend so much time worrying about how boring and routine the rest of her life is. Her life is full; she is warm and safe and fed; she thinks our house is The Best Place Ever; and anyway, her boring routine is what keeps her - and us - sane.

All in all, it was a good day, with candy comas and learning experiences all around. And mini bunnies.

What, I love tiny food. I can't help it.

Here's Ruby being super excited about something so not that exciting. It's a good reminder that kids don't even know what Pinterest is.

First Post

This kid. This is Ruby.

Ruby, age 5, eating a salad...by choice.

She's biologically my husband's sister's kid. My husband, Dustin, and I have been parenting her at least part-time since she was two-and-a-half. It's been a mad roller coaster of fostering, co-parenting, and most recently, legal guardianship. 

In 2011, we didn't have any kids of our own, and we were considering the idea that maybe we just didn't want kids after all. Then, suddenly, heart-wrenchingly, Ruby and her little sister Victoria were removed from the care of their mother and placed in foster care. We were then faced with the huge decision of whether to take them into our home. Honestly, though, it didn't feel like that much of a decision - more like a choice that had been made already, and we just needed to get on board with it. We went to court and told the judge we'd be their foster parents via a "kinship" foster arrangement....and we never looked back. That was in June 2011.

3 years later, what seemed like a tough situation has gotten infinitely more messy and complicated. We really, really love Ruby, but that's much too simple a phrase for what we experience with her. The love of a parent, I've discovered, is so many-faceted. It's a haphazard mishmash of affection and concern and nurturing and doing-the-right-thing and selflessness and courage and empathy. It's not tidy.

It's hard to even know where to start, but I want to tell people. I don't even know why, really, except that it feels like it might help. It might help me to be a better mother, and to better understand our Ruby. It might help other people to see beyond the traditional scope of what parenting is. It might help other adoptive/foster/guardianship/etc parents who wonder what it's like for others in similar situations. 

I've been thinking about blogging for a long time, so I decided to just dive in. Here goes!

The three of us last fall at a pumpkin patch.