Month: July 2009

Balance and Floatation

/ chollaball / 1 Comment

What an amazing weekend for G!   She rode, sorta, her bike without training wheels for the first time.   And swam, sorta, on her own.   Neither endeavor was very far, or very elegant, or free of scares.   But all the right motions are coming together, and she can taste the positive effects, which inspire her onward.   I remember my first time turning on a snowboard, getting a heel and a toe turn, and saying to myself if I can just get the third turn I’ll be snowboarding.   I felt the same thing my first steep-and-deep in the crater at Snowbowl…if I can make that 3rd turn, I’ve got it.

The pool has been building building for several weeks now.   She’s been scooping ice cream and picking apples, she’s been blowing bubbles, and putting it all together while I’ve been holding her horizontal.   We started going underwater together for 3 seconds at a time.   It was working, sorta, but the ultimate benefits were not really clear to her, while the fear and discomfort abundantly were.   The breakthrough came when Beckie got in the pool with us and we 3 all went under together, combined with jumping off my shoulders and have one waterwing fall off on landing.   She found a comfort zone just beyond her comfort zone, and next time I urged\pushed her across the pool to mommy, she mostly propelled herself and kept above water on her own.   We did this 3 times.   Not enough for muscle memory, barely enough to go 10 feet, but enough to realize that 3rd turn.

Losing the training wheels was much the same pattern.   Riding on the bumpy grass in the park with knee pads and helmet and an old pair of gloves I cut down hardly seemed the stately pleasure dome of training-wheel-free riding I promised.   She could go 5, maybe 10 seconds at a time.   Every time she would get off her center just a little, the training wheels were not there to catch her, and the result was either a sharp course correction or a fall.   Even with me catching her and putting her down gently, there are only so many falls a littleGirl can make in an evening.   The inevitable owies that come from overconfidence and blasting downhill to the park did nothing to contribute to a healthy hell-bent mindset either.   She is close, but as I challenged Beckie, in need of an alternative voice for her next step.   Just my luck, Beckie will probably be the one to get all the credit.

Next up, snowboarding!

a very happy girl celebrates with all her friends
2009_0628_g_toys_blog

Jo Jo

/ chollaball / 2 Comments

One year after the adoption, I had a nice talk with Andrea.     Jo Jo (nee Jo) is doing well.   She is saying goodbye, goodnight, and apple.   Who knew that after 26 years she would improve her vocabulary?   Clear evidence she is in a better environment.   She eats well,   lots of fruit, and gets along well with the 6 other birds in Andrea’s flock.

I feel a little bit like a liar, a dysfunctional parent,   Ike Turner, acting like I care about Jo now.   I miss her a little, sometimes I recall the way she smelled, the heat of her feathers, the grip of her talons so much like Alana’s tinyHand.     Sometimes G misses her too, asks where she is and when we can see her again.   Time has dulled the bad memories of Jo for her, like it has for me.   I’ve forgotten the filth, the screaming, the tension she caused.   However bad it was, it would be far far worse now with Alana.   The stress would be unbearable, surely complicated by the fact that we have Alana’s crib and G’s bed in our bedroom.   Jo would have been relegated to the spare bedroom, which she would have filthified and destroyed while screaming and sulking non-stop, further fueling the downward spiral between us.

Life is better for us all now, and acceptance is easier, but its something with which I am still struggling.   Life is full of so much loss it is numbing, but how often do you lose someone with whom you shared 26 years? It makes no sense to still be sad when every measurable criteria shows we are all better off.   Guilt and regret are powerful forces, maybe more powerful than relief and joy.     But I am filled with those too, and in looking over some pictures of Jo I felt for the first time in months a lot of love and happiness more strongly than the sense of failure.   I want the last post I will likely make about Jo to be positive, but I can not without caveat say that this is.   The best I can say is that I saw this picture tonight and it made me smile.

2008_0630_jo_03_blog

Other posts about Jo: