On togetherness, projections, and never-ending poop talk.

There’s a lot of poop talk in this house. And talk about butts and buttholes and all sorts of variations that are probably much more inappropriate than I realize because they’re smart enough to keep it in Norwegian. I mean, honestly. Is it really necessary to throw in some anatomical slang when asking your brother to pass the cereal? At breakfast? Before we’re even really awake?

It seems that, once again, we are entering a new phase. Those teenage hormones haven’t had an effect on his height yet, but the signs are there that they are beginning to infiltrate the firstborn’s brain. Mood swings, anger, sadness, wanting to be alone but not alone at the same time….gah. I know i should be sympathetic — hello, monthly cycle of hormonal upheaval — but it’s caught me a bit off guard. Especially with my kind hearted pacifist.

 

Projecting again, folks. I remembered yesterday that I’d written a post when the boys were smaller about how I was hoping they’d behave someday. Still waiting to find out, but when they are at their most unguarded I sometimes get a peek. Like seeing a bright light shine from behind a curtain.

CR was tense and nervous about playing in a soccer tournament yesterday. He fell in the second game and hurt his arm, but stiff-upper-lipped it and didn’t make a sound until he came out and folded himself into me. Afterwards he ran off to find his brothers, and when I went off to find him, they were sitting together in a heap per usual. CRs head leaned against K’s shoulder, K stroking his CRs hair, disappointed he’d forgotten his wallet because he’d liked to have bought something from the concession stand to help CR feel better.

Two things went through my head: 1) Thank you, God, for giving them each other. They will be able to deal with anything the world throws at them as long as this God-brother-love bond remains.  

2) I relax a bit about the unrelenting, near constant, totally maddening references to below-the-waist body parts (WHY??? WHY MUST WE WORK ‘BUTTHOLE’ INTO EVERY SENTENCE??? AND WHO TAUGHT THEM TO MOON??). In this case the words are, thankfully, only skin deep.

Fast forward a few hours, and we’re home again. CR scored a goal in the final game, and his confidence switched on like a hundred watt light bulb as the muscles around my heart simultaneously relaxed. That beautiful moment when your child realizes what you’ve known all along: he IS good enough. He CAN. Send a silent shout-out to God, rejoicing with Him in all the moments like that He’s surely shared with us, nodding and fistpumping in the heavenly realm.

 

Now I’d promised them that I’d go out of my own comfort zone and join them — digitally — in Minecraft. (Is not being physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually present for them enough? Honestly.) So they set me up and there we are, all of our little block-headed avatars frolicking in the cubic mountains of some Minecraft realm.

I understand the game’s appeal. I mean, the landscapes are quite lovely. So many flowers! And random animals! And look over there, is that a mushroom the size of a tree? A lava waterfall? What IS over this next mountain? Does it really go on forever?

And just like that, Mama was lost. No clue how to get back to the house we’d been building.  A sigh from the couch, ‘Mom, where are you?’ And then the curtain parted again, and my 8 year old was suddenly the adult. ‘Don’t move, okay? I’m going to come to you. Do you see me? Now just follow me. Stay close. Look, this is how you fly.’

I meekly did as I was told, and returned to togetherness.  

We’re all going to be fine.

Whattup, 2018.

We are just crashing into this year doing all kinds of things we don’t know how to do! Here are the things we DID do in 2017:

• Bjørn got a job that no longer involves weekly travel! Yay!
• See how long we can manage with one car! (3 months)
• See how long we can manage with Kim working (almost) full time! (2 months, and went surprisingly well.)
• Kim got her nursing license!
• The boys (+parents) drove to Legoland in Denmark!
• Our guestroom becomes a permanent bedroom for our ‘new’ 16 year old big brother (A)!
• Kim and Bjørn struggle to understand middle school homework! (‘we are just going to do this long division the old school American way.’)

So far this year, the things we tried for the first time that will certainly only improve with further practice:

• Handball (Emilian)
• Making injera (Kim and A)
• Confronting strong kids doing mean things at school

Blessings and strength as we move into another year!

2016 part two, or The Tale of Emil and the Snake.

Seeing as I’ve filed an extension for my already extended tax deadline, which reminded me of how I carried my tax returns around Italy last year in order to send them WITHOUT the extension, it would seem that an entire 12 months has passed since last year’s summer vacay.

June, 2016

A week before school gets out we pack up the kids and board a plane. I imagine everything went smoothly. *cough cough* Destination: Italy, more specifically Tuscany, even more specifically Ciciana. Our kind and gracious hosts were Ivar and Lil Torunn, who organized everything so we could celebrate Torunn’s 60th birthday. The concept that my kids saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa and learned to say ‘gelato’ before hitting their first decade of life was a total trip for my Midwestern brain.  Who are we, royals?

Anyway, we did lots of fun things on that trip, but a vacation isn’t a vacation unless someone ends up in the emergency room. In childrens bedtime story form, I give you:

Emil and the Snake

Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Emil. Actually, his name was Emilian Birk, but his mom called him Emil and his brother called him Mimi and his dad called him Emilian.  The little boy was very clever, however, and answered to all of these names, plus a couple more.

Emil had a big brother, whose favorite thing was to be buried in books, and a little brother, whose favorite thing was bouncing off walls. Emil’s favorite thing — indeed, his calming, happy place — was to sit in the sun, overturning stones and examining the creatures that lived underneath. He found ladybugs and ants, beetles of all sizes, centipedes, spiders, worms; anything the moved in the grass or through the soil, Emil would see it, catch it, and delight in it. In the early years the insects where markedly less delighted than their captor and weren’t always released unscathed. The learning curve was… not flat.

One day Emil and his family drove to the airport and boarded a plane for Italy! It turned out to be a magical place with the most delicious ice cream, and the most delicious pasta, and — most importantly — a myriad of bugs and butterflies and other many legged friends that Emil had never seen before.

Hummingbird moth!

The hummingbird moth, for example, and rhinoceros beetles. But the most exciting of all were the lizards. They sunned themselves on the stone walls and swished into the grass or flashed into the cracks the second they heard Emil or his family walk by.

 

If you knew Emil, you’d know he is a determined and patient little boy. So when he decided that he wanted to catch a lizard, he set out to do just that. He crept quietly around the grounds of the house, inspecting the walls and watching where those lightning fast lizards darted off to.

After several days of tracking, one afternoon Emil came running to his mom excitedly whispering, ”Mama! I found a lizard and I saw where it went! It’s still there and I can catch it! Do you want to see?” Of course his mom wanted to see! She’s deathly afraid of things with eight or more legs, but lizards only have four so it was totally okay. Emil ran ahead to the corner of a low stone wall. There was a small hole underneath, with large loose rock partially covering the opening. He was too excited to wait for his mom (she was walking quite slowly anyway) and plunged his little hand into hole.

”Ow!!! ow!!!” shouted little Emil, and jumped back several feet. ”It bit me!” Two fat tears of shock and surprise rolled down his crestfallen little face. ”What?” said his mom, ”What kind of lizard BITES?” By now the rest of the family had gathered around. There are many nurses in Emil’s family, and just as many brave dads. Sure enough, there were two small scrapes on his fourth finger on the right. The nurses rinsed and washed and bandaged, and the dads went to examine what this creature was that would bite a little boy.

That creature, it turned out, had a tail like a lizard but no legs at all. Coiled up in his hiding hole was a very frightened snake. Our courageous little hero had tried to wrangle a snake!

Snakes, as you know, are mostly harmless little guys just trying to get by, but there are a few that are poisonous. Who knows about poisonous snakes in Italy? Google. Google knows. Some of the grown ups googled, and some of the grown ups decided to try to catch this snake so they could see if it was dangerous or not.

Emil’s dad was also very brave (perhaps that’s where Emil gets it from?) and took a barbecue tongs and reached right into that little snake cave and pulled that little snake out. Except it wasn’t a little snake. It was a very long, very grown up snake. A rather frightened snake that did NOT want to be contained in a bucket. But the bucket had a lid, so the snake had no choice.

But back to Emil and his bitten finger.

What do you do when a Norwegian boy is bitten by an Italian snake? Google told the moms and dads and grandparents about a couple of poisonous (though rare) snakes that live in Tuscany. A grown up called the lady who owns the house and told her the story, and that kind lady (who is also a mom to little curious little boys) decided to call the hospital and talk to a doctor. And the hospital decided that they should take a look at Emil’s finger, and the best way for him to get to hospital without getting lost was to pick him up in an ambulance. (!)

By now Emil’s two fat tears had dried up, and his finger was still exactly the same size and color it was before being hit with snake teeth, so his mom and the other nurses were pretty sure he was going to be okay. The ambulance came anyway, and they heard the siren for at least 5 minutes as it drove up the swithcback road to get to the house on the top of the hill.

The ambulance team was very nice, and wanted to see the snake. The snake tried to get out of its trash can prison when the lid was lifted, which surprised/totally freaked out the ambulance driver who then whacked its head off with a stick.

Definitely the most traumatic moment of the entire ordeal, and moms and dads danced around questions of ‘what happened to the snake? Is it okay?’ for the rest of the night.

Our little hero and his dad ride down the hill in the ambulance, watch football in an Italian hospital, and arrive back to the house on the hill later that evening. While they were gone and the other two brothers were sleeping or playing, Emil’s mom sat by the swimming pool completely alone in peace and quiet for the first time since they arrived in Italy. She didn’t wish at all that her little boy had to have such a crazy afternoon… but all’s well that ends well…and poolside quiet time is never undervalued.

The end.

 

 

 

 

Apparently labor never ends.

When I reach the melt-down point boiling point with one of the kids — and one in particular — my brain starts to spin out of control. My body starts to fall into itself, the physical crash after an adrenaline rush, but my soul — because I don’t know what else it could be — swirls around like a tornado faster and faster

anger fear frustration inadequacy powerlessness

whipping around, rising

Until it stops. If I am still long enough, the emotions are stopped by that ever useful boiling-blood – brain barrier. The cyclone that tried to blast out through my arms and legs and mouth is contained in my head.

why how what why why why where have i failed?

Then my brain flings out frantic search beams into the cloud of memories, anecdotes, stories, books, advice, hearsay, logic, illogic; begging these diverse bits of information and theory to fall into some kind of semblance of direction.

It doesn’t. They don’t. I still don’t know what to do, and am too tired to search. But the whole hot mess subsides and I start to breathe again. Nothing is resolved, but we have survived another crash. We have made it one step further. We recover. I gather my strength. I know that whirlwind of negative emotions is indeed my soul, the core of my being, because there is neverending love at the collective root.

And it hits me that this whole wavelike thing feels familiar. I’ve done this before. This is labor. This is giving birth. This is maintaining and pushing through the peaks of pain of frustration. This is gathering strength in the moments between contractions. This is knowing that they are going to keep coming,

the contractions are going to keep coming,

until they stop.

They started when he was ready to leave the safe space of my womb, and they stopped when he achieved it.

Pain and doubt and anger and fear are then literally flooded out by love and pride. I can still feel the rush of that flood through my veins.

I can do this. I have to do this. No one else can do this. Each contraction pushed him farther from my womb, into my arms, always in my heart.

Where are these contractions pushing him?

2016: Another go at the year in review… in segments.

Guys. We did one Christmas letter once, when we had one kid and worked one 100% fulltime job between the both of us.

That just isn’t the case anymore.

BUT: you can have this personalized, hand-typed, digital entry instead! Yay!

Oh, 2016. It’s been a year. Not a bad year, but a…fluid one. As in, a fair amount of movement. Where to start? I heard once that the beginning is a very good place to start…

January: Iiiiiii don’t really remember January so well. But we can throw out some basic principles that held throughout the year: Bjørn and Kim are both employed. Bjørn is good at what he does, and therefore hired for a position in Oslo, even though he lives far, far away from Oslo. This means that for the past year and a half or so he travels weekly to Oslo. In January, I was still working at the nursing home in Verdal, about 25 minutes away. A couple of years ago Bjørn’s grandparents gave us their old car (which Bjørn’s dad at some point had given to them) which still runs remarkably well (as long as you can start it), and which made it possible for me to work in Verdal at all. So, so grateful for that car.

This may or may not become a recurring theme.

Anyway, I DO remember feeling like there were a lot of unknowns in January. The nursing home I was working at was being shut down. Bjørn and I had our first training-weekend to be foster parents. I finally submitted my nursing registration application. There was also an incident of lice at school that WAS NOT US.  In December we met a young Syrian brother-sister pair, and pushed our way into their lives as well. On the news everywhere, every day, there was talk about refugees and asylum seekers and politics vs. humanitariansim.

We barrelled into February. I drove to Verdal, Bjørn flew to Oslo, we picked up kids from three separate locations, we picked up our extra kids from extra locations. I spent a few weeks teaching very very extremely basic Norwegian at the reception center for asylum seekers. Then on February 23rd I got a text from Bjørn asking to be picked up at Urgent Care.

Blank. Stare.

Turns out the road up the hill wasn’t wide enough for a tractor with a plough and station wagon. You may guess which vehicle sustained the most damage, and you will most likely be correct.  Anyway, the car was totalled, but Bjørn and Cai were thankfully fine. Well, Cai was traumatized. Every time he got into a car for MONTHS afterwards, he said, ‘don’t crash into a tractor.’ He actually just said it again the other day, now that I think about it. Poor guy. But again — SO so thankful for our second car. Which now only I could drive, because for some reason or another getting hit by a speeding tractor resulted in Bjørn losing his license for three months. Get a life, Norwegian traffic regulators, is all I have to say about that. So that kind of felt like the theme of the next months. I packed the little sedan full of kids, and drove around town.

March gave us another weekend away learning about fostering, and Easter. And lice. Not necessarily in that order.

April. April gave us a three year old and a 40 year old. I flew to Wisconsin with Emil and Cai for 10 days in the beginning of April, and for anyone out there who is nervous about flying with a 5- and almost 3-year old alone…continue to be nervous. I don’t know how we made it, but we did. (oh man – it’s coming back to me now. Bjørn wasn’t even home when we left, so I sent Karel off to school — after sending explicit emails to his teachers about who to contact in case of an emergency — and loaded us and our bags in the car to drive to the train station. Then got us off the train and on the plane. Only had to threaten to turn around once. (“Get up right now or we are taking the bus back to Norway!”)  Being fed and pampered for 10 days gave me just enough energy to do it again on the way back. Lovely visit, as always. Tacos and coffee for me, dinosaurs and ice cream for Emil, birthday cake and throat cultures for Cai.  Can’t win them all.

Also, Bjørn bought a bike.

Bjørn turned 40 and I had to admit defeat. I wanted to throw a big party, I really did. Something inside me kind of freezes up when I think about planning a party here. I don’t know why. I feel like a scared rabbit. Petrified, yet twitchy. But I will get over that in time for 41, don’t tell Bjørn.

May…. In May, Bjørn found us a new car. Yay! A seven-seater, AKA minivan. It was amazing — he did the entire transaction from his office in Oslo. So one glorious evening after he got home, I took the train to Stjørdal, was picked up by the guy who owned the car, and then drove it home.  Just in time for 17 May, the big national day. We ate the traditional meal (the local delicacy of Sodd*) at our place, and packed the big car full of big and small kids to drive to the parade. STILL not enough room, so Bjørn biked in his suit, like any grown European man would do.

*I would like to take a moment to discuss sodd. Sodd is NOT a soup, no matter how closely it resembles one. Impress your Norwegian host by never, ever calling it soup. What it IS, is is lamb broth, with tiny meatballs of beef and lamb,  tiny cubes of lamb meat, served with carrots and potatoes (that you put up in the broth). Tasty? Yes. Void of pork (as was relevant to some of our guests)? Yes. The formal and traditional meal that almost all families were eating on that day, so that we weren’t weird for once? Yes.

And, friends, it comes ready made, frozen in a bucket. It’s like this huge gift from the cultural deities that on the 17th of May — when the kids have to be clean, their clothes have to be fancy (and clean), their shoes shined, the car washed, flags found, umbrellas and rain jackets in place on top of the fancy clean clothes and quite possibly woollen long underwear underneath, all the while assuring the children that yes they can eat as many ice cream cones as they want because apparently children gorging themselves on this day is half the point — the only work required for the meal that I am expected to prepare is boiling water and taking the bucket out of the freezer on time.

I just can’t even describe the gratitude I feel over this meal. It’s honestly like a divine “I see you working so hard and am going to cut you a break.” Sigh.

 

Moving on.

Bjørn also got his license back in May, so we were back to two drivers, two cars. I have to admit, though, that I had many moments of complete contentedness and happiness shuttling around town with the people I love under the same (mobile) roof. Going somewhere. Actively doing something. Driving and laughing and getting people to places on time, with constellations of Karel, Sherwan, Emilian, Mohammed, Cai Ruben, Delvin filling out the seats… Having sole transport responsibility wasn’t always as bad as it sounds.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned, though. Next month, in keeping with the vehicular theme, Emilian rides an Italian ambulance.