How could I have ever been opposed to ruffles? Next, I’ll be dressing her in leg o’ mutton sleeves.

Happily, Ms. Bee chose today of all days to sleep beautifully so we are just about packed and ready to leave for Taiwan. Uh, that’s because six weeks is the PEAK of fussiness and it just gets better from here, right? Right? Anyone? Bueller? Graduation ceremony tonight, last day of school tomorrow, and we are off on our adventure (if consider visiting a bunch of grandmothers and great-grandparents an adventure). You’ll be hearing from us, though. We’ll have lots of free time on our hands, and we’ll want to keep F updated on our mischief, as he is staying home. Anybody want to tell us about their summer adventures?

It took so long for me to get into the swing of making these collages, and for them to feel right. And it was so disappointingly easy for me to get out of practice. Lately, the collages feel so labored that I always step back and feel disappointed by the results and compounded by the, uh, distractions in my life lately, make it so that it takes forever to finish each one. But I suppose the discipline and the frustration are just part of the process of becoming an artist (and I carefully choose the word becoming). Slowly, slowly, I’m trying to remind myself. Slowly.

First, an update about swimming. Thank you for all your concern and relief about Otis. I thought you would like to know what happened when we went back to the pool.

I went with Otis to class on Wednesday, ready to hold his hand if need be. During my rather alarming conversation with the 19-year old “supervisor,” when I kept wondering if I should let him know that my husband was a lawyer and that he shouldn’t say things like, “Yeah! It’s really a problem how understaffed we are! We have no control over it at all!” I suddenly realized that my dramatic and emphatic claims that my traumatized child might never go back into the water were undermined by the fact that he was, in fact, sitting by the pool, kicking his feet in the water. I stayed close to him during the rest of class and encouraged him, but I think he would’ve done well even if I hadn’t been there. He jumped in and out of the water as he debated whether to be scared or not, but eventually went several rounds in the pool. He did well yesterday too, which was the last day of class, and I’m relieved that we finished up on a positive note. Happily, Otis has shown himself to be quite resilient.

Second, I have a confession to make.

These last two nights I have snuck into Otis’s room and cried into his hair. Isn’t that horrible? It seems like one of those selfish things that parents do that force kids to grow up too fast. I have just generally been feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, mixed in with a tiny dose of resentful and angry. It’s not just the baby; it doesn’t feel like I have control of anything in my life right now, and that’s hard for a control freak like me. Aren’t there times when you just need to cry to feel better?

Last night, he was fast asleep and stayed asleep, so I had the steady rhythm of his breathing and the smell of his hair to console me. Tonight, he was still awake and threw his arms around my neck as soon as I crawled into his bed. When he discovered how sad I was, he patted my back comfortingly, stroked my hair, and gave me tiny kisses on my forehead, nose and cheek while saying, “Don’t cry, Mama.” He was so gentle and seemed so grown up. It felt good to be snuggled up close to him and to listen to him drift off to sleep, particularly because I feel like I’ve been losing my grip on him in recent months. When did he learn such empathy and kindness? Tonight I feel like I saw the sweet boy that I have known but perhaps also caught a glimpse of the man that Otis is to become.

Otis has been going to swim lessons with his classmates at the community swimming pool this past week and a half. He’s gone “swimming” before, at my grandmother’s condo and when we’ve gone on vacation, but this was a little different. Imagine a big group of pre-schoolers in their swim suits, marching off on their own, throw in a big pinch of too much adorableness, and there you have it. The parents are supposed to sit in a separate area on the side so the kids can have their independence, and we’ve been rather surprised to see Otis, for the most part, sitting on the edge of the pool and sucking his thumb, and only occasionally kicking his feet in the water or venturing in. Which is fine, since for me point of these lessons is for him to have fun with his friends and to start feeling comfortable around the water.

Yesterday I did not go to the pool with Otis. I was running errands in preparation for our trip so he went with my parents. And by all accounts, things were going well. He went into the water, and did several rounds around the pool while holding onto the teacher. There was no thumb sucking, and he was having fun playing in the water. It just so happened to be that my mom was standing close to the pool yesterday, chatting with Emmett’s grandmother, and she was watching when she saw Otis walk down the stairs right into the shallow end. It’s only 2.5 feet of water, but he was completely submerged and couldn’t get out. And the teacher had turned her back and was helping another kid, so no one saw him go under until my mother started yelling and the teacher pulled him out of the water.

He’s OK, but pretty badly shaken. He did not want to get near the water after that, and has been talking about how scared he is, and how he does not want to go back. Understandably. We’ve spent a lot of time today, talking about what happened and how he feels. I spoke with his teacher, and we agreed that it’s important that he finishes these lessons feeling positive about the water and about swimming so I’ve been trying to talk with him about his fear, yet encourage him to go back, if only to sit with me and see his friends from afar. We looked at some pictures that I took last week, and have also talked about how much fun it was to spend time with his friends.

As I listened to the story, and as I thought about it throughout the day, I felt chills down my spine. What if my mother had not been standing close by, watching? There’s supposed to be a lifeguard keeping an eye on the kids, since there are a lot of kids for the couple of young instructors to oversee, but for some reason, the lifeguard had not been paying attention. Our teacher is as upset as we are, and she called the pool to talk about our concerns, which I will do as well when we (hopefully) go this afternoon. They were apologetic and will give Otis a one-on-one lesson today, to help him start to feel safe again. I can’t really blame anyone since I do feel that it was an unlucky confluence of events, but I do feel rather alarmed. I generally think it’s important to give Otis his space and foster his independence, but I think I’ll have to do that while pretending not to watch closely from now on.

I always start out planning our parties with the best of intentions (for my own sanity, that is). Nothing fancy, just food and friends, although usually I end up feeling a little stressed at some point during the preparation process. I’m pretty sure that when I was preparing for Otis’s man yue (1-month) party that I cried at least once, but then again, I was sleeping much less back then. This time, I was smart: an easy menu with lots of food that would be grilled outside on our brand new, craigslist BBQ (do I have to tell you again how much I lurve craigslist?) and most of the other food prepared in advance, so that by party time, I was relaxed and ready.

See how happy?

Ms. Bee was bathed and dressed in her special outfit, a gift from our friend, Elizabeth, that so suit my taste that she did a better job of picking it out than I would’ve. You can’t really see from the picture, but her eyes are still blue-grey, and her hair has these crazy blond highlights.

(And, yes, Chinese mafia, her face is bumpy and red, and yes, I’m pretty sure that it’s bad case of baby acne and not 1. a rash, 2. allergies, 3. caused by the heat, or 4. the plague, but I will ask next time we visit the pediatrician.)

Friends started arriving and socializing. It was fun to see friends and chat, but I am just about always a nervous hostess, distracted and worrying whether everyone has enough food and drinks. I love it but I hate it, you know? Add to that mix a posse of noisy, excited kids and a tired baby, and by the end of the day, I felt a little like this:

I guess this just reconfirms how poor my social skills are (and I think they’re just getting worse as I get older, unfortunately). But I think that people had fun. We have the empty beer bottles and almost complete lack of leftovers to prove it. It was great to celebrate with friends and family (my father even arrived about a week ago so he was able to join in on the fun) and our guests were sent home with red-dyed eggs, as is Chinese tradition. Thankfully, I don’t have to think about another party for another 9 months.

Oh my goodness, four weeks? Surprisingly enough, I found myself alone with the kids for the very first time earlier this week and I lived to tell the tale. The logistics of taking care of more than one kid seem tricky, to laughingly understate it, and I’m not looking forward to doing it by myself. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a LOT of wonderful help - between my mom, Fifth Aunt Grandma K and Grandma R, the transition has been tiring but totally doable. Without them, I think I would have been overwhelmed by both the kids and my hormones. What would we do without family?

We are slowly adjusting to the new rhythms of life as a foursome. Bee has been doing well, and has been generally agreeable. With so much sleeping and so few opportunities to exhibit or develop any personality, newborns are just so un-formed. I had forgotten. It becomes all the more obvious in contrast to Otis, with all his singing and performing, his love of charming others, and, of course, his exuberance. I catch fleeting glimpses of him in all his Otis glory, and I ache with how much I miss him.

This weekend will be Bee’s one month birthday. It’s a big event for Chinese families, to celebrate the “full month” or “man yue” and we will be having a little celebration. Pictures and stories to come.

The time between dinner/kids’ bath and dark is about the only time I can occasionally steal away and try to do a couple of things in the garden (remind me next time to make sure I buy determinate tomatoes - our cherry tomato plants have totally taken over the vegetable bed, making it necessary to move the remaining vegetables that I can still find). Tonight, I was enjoying the quiet and pruning back those tomatoes when I heard some talking. When I looked up, I nearly passed out from fright because two of my neighbors had poked their heads over our back fence to see the work we had done on our backyard. I’m all for close neighborhood relations, but this is a little excessive, don’t you think? All night long, I’ve been dreaming up scenarios where they’re doing regular, everyday things like washing dishes or folding their laundry and they look up, and I’m standing right outside their window, staring at them.

I hate to brag, but we’ve been receiving the greatest presents lately. We really have a wonderful group of friends, and I can’t wait to brag some more and share the pictures with you, but first, I wanted to show you a present that Otis received recently:

It’s a handmade sticker book, with a pocket full of animal stickers, made by my friend, Carey.

Can you imagine how excited Otis was to get his hands on this? Just as I was handing the present to Otis and we were admiring the stickers together, Miss Bee started fussing so I went to go check on her. When I returned a short while later, I was surprised to see that EVERY SINGLE STICKER had been peeled off and stuck in his book. He didn’t save a single one. Hmm, I think this is a kid that would definitely eat his dessert first. Well, that’s it for that activity, I thought. But as we looked through his sticker book together, I realized that Otis had actually created little vignettes with his stickers. His animal play has expanded to include elaborate narratives lately, so this was really perfect for him.

Here’s a farm, with the horses climbing up a hill:

Here, the dinosaurs are afraid and running from the flying dinosaur:

One clever thing about the sticker book is that the pages are made of wax paper, so we can actually move the stickers around and create different stories (although I doubt that Otis will let me). I hate to advocate stealing Carey’s idea, but this is such a great, handmade kids’ present that I think that everyone should make one of these. What do you think, Ms. Carey, can we write a tutorial for this great project?