Eli's World

Grass:  Not So Bad

I'm not going anywhere. The pace of these posts may slow down a bit now we are home and myriad projects and jobs and demands suck up my time. But I'll try to keep to a minimum of two of these a week for the foreseeable future.

I'm going to take a stab at describing Eli's personality. Many people have expressed surprise and even skepticism at all the pictures and descriptions of him as a happy, well-adjusted, dynamic kid with seemingly few issues resulting from his time in an institution. The truth is that while he really is quite happy to be with us, and tremendously affectionate and curious and mischievous and etc., of course he has typical two-year-old tantrums and gets angry and frustrated with us as well. I don't dwell on those things too much on this site, maybe because in the back of my mind I'm always wondering what he would think of these posts if he were able to read them. Which, in all likelihood, he will someday be. I'm not trying to sugarcoat the adoption experience, but I'm also sensitive to Eli's basic right to privacy, and to make his own decisions about what to share and what not to share.

But let's expand on the hints and brief comments to date. To begin with, as I said, he is quite happy with his current lot in life. On Monday I wrote how foreign something as simple as grass was to him on his first day home, and the degree of trepidation he exhibited when presented with it. A new pair of shoes and four short summer days later, and he practically begs to go outside and walk around and mess with the Big Wheel and pick flowers. That's a pretty good illustration of his personality, and also of the speed with which he's changing and adjusting to his new surroundings. He is curious, if cautious, and given the chance to ease into something new will take to it with enthusiasm. Sure, he's still unsteady and nervous on the uneven ground, and complains a bit and wants to be carried if he can manage to persuade us to pick him up, but his daily trajectory is steadily towards independence and improved physical strength and coordination.

He's also affectionate. He's lying next to me asleep at the moment, taking his mid-day nap. Every day so far it's the same routine -- he cries angrily when we go upstairs and close the door to our room, because he knows a nap is coming. After 3-4 minutes of tears and frustration, though, he realizes he really is tired, and wants to cuddle up with me. He'll reach out and ask for a hug, put his head in the crook of my arm, and look into my eyes for several minutes as he drops off to sleep. He likes us and craves our attention in a pretty healthy way, and he knows full well that we feel exactly the same way about him. He loves to be picked up and swung around, and being squeezed, and making connections with people. This is the part of his personality that probably surprises other people, and even us, the most. A lot of the extant adoption literature will warn you, correctly, about an institutionalized child's likely inability to make good eye contact or develop strong bonds with caregivers, due to insufficient physical contact or loving care at a young age. Kids need to learn how to bond with others, just like they need to learn everything else. So we really have to credit either or both of Eli's innate capacity to love, and the quality of the care it seems he received at his orphanage. It's clear to us that his caregivers must have held him close as an infant, talked to him, sang to him, shown him kindness and affection, and rewarded him for demonstrating those same characteristics. He, and we, are very lucky in that respect.

He does throw tantrums. Not violent or frightening ones, but kind of typical 2-year-old fare. He was dropping his spoon on the floor repeatedly the other day, and after trying to explain to him that it wasn't that funny of a game, I took the spoon away. He went limp and gently let himself flop onto the floor, rolled onto his back, and cried and waved his hands. Sometimes he kicks the floor a little bit with his heels. This can last anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes, but rarely longer. We comfort him when he wants it. And as with any child his age, you can often tell when he's crying just because it's what he should be doing, to express his outrage against perceived injustice, not because he's suffering any real harm or lasting injury. In other words, he cries for form's sake, even when his heart's not in it. Then gets over it pretty easily. We have about 3 or 4 of these brief protests per day.

And of course he's testing us as much as he can. Every little thing he does, at times, is shrewdly (in a 2-year-old sense) designed to see just what he can get away with and how far he can push things. He has a nice chair and table where he eats, and is perfectly capable of feeding himself with a fork and spoon. But it's more fun first, to see if daddy will let you sit on his lap while you eat, then to see if daddy will feed you, then to see if you can wander away and play with things and come back to get a bite when you feel like it, then to see if you can coax daddy into following you around so that the food is always close at hand on the off-chance you feel like eating some. Everything is like that in a way. Can I open this cabinet? Take everything out of it? Throw those things around? Break them? Where are the boundaries? He's got the cutest little mischievous smile on his face as he goes about it too, because he knows there's a line there and he's probably crossed it already, but we both know what he's doing, don't we, and isn't cute and just a little bit hilarious? And as he knows full well, it's both.

Chillaxing With Homies (And Cake)

Most new things make him a little nervous, and since most things are new, he can seem a little needy and helpless. The cat, the car and car seat, the outdoors, the stairs, foods, scary-looking toys, toys that are fun and then somehow pinch you or fall on your foot, a "snap" bracelet that practically wraps itself around you all of a sudden; all of these are first, shunned, second, grudgingly accepted with much handholding and moral support, and finally, proudly conquered. There are many demands to be picked up and held and helped, and we are mostly obliging, carefully picking moments and methods for encouraging independence or teaching new skills. For example, like many children he found it easy to climb the stairs right from the start, but terrifying to contemplate descending them. We made it a point early to teach him a safe way to come down, and insisted that he use it regularly despite requests to be carried. Now he knows how, and he's proud of showing you that he knows, even when he still asks to be picked up.

He's smart. He acquires new skills with fair speed, and he already understands a good percentage of what we're saying to him in this strange language that, as of 17 days ago, he'd never heard before in his life. He knows and uses several words appropriately.

He's musical. He likes to hum and sing nonsense tunes, or possibly songs he used to hear at the orphanage.  He has good pitch and rhythm.  He loves to sing with us, or when we echo back to him his own phrases.

He doesn't like books or movies, and seems to find both equally irritating so far.

I can't really do him justice. I think somewhere in the Judaic rabbinical tradition there's a case made that every human being is complete universe unto himself or herself -- that each person's unique perspective on the world can be neither duplicated, nor fully fathomed. We've only known Eli for 17 days, and it seems like half a year already. I'll never get to the bottom of his personality, but it's a lot of fun trying.