books-and-kids - Tumblr blog

[books-and-kids]

hey man i see ur busy walking on your knees a hundred miles through the desert but if you’re bored with that me and my friends were thinking about getting together and letting the soft animals of our bodies love what they love. lmk

[books-and-kids]

Wedding present advice

My coworker (small team, we talk almost daily) is getting married. When I started hosting with Safe Families she sent me a giant care package — very expensive considering our salaries, with lots of thoughtful and lovely toys/kid stuff. I was suuuuper touched so I want to get her something nice before her wedding. Has to be something that can be delivered, since we work remotely and don’t see each other in person. I also don’t know her future wife at all and have no idea what she might like. 

My cousin suggested nice champagne. Any other ideas? Things you have given or received that people liked?

[books-and-kids]

My friends did one of those parties a few years ago. Here was mine:

Powerpoint topics I would use if my friend's did one of those parties:

Car seat safety (including why having the fire dept install them at one of those events is a bad idea)

Rating various fruits

Rating types of macaroni and cheese

How Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's biological child

A complete list about how I personally feel about every individual state

A cause/effect tree of everything Reagan fucked up

Pictures of cats and what I would name them

A timeline of everything that's gone wrong since Harambe

A ranking of late 90s/early 2000's disaster movies

[books-and-kids]

Lunch

Today the children enjoyed a healthy meal of pasta, peanut butter sandwich, peas, carrots, and chickpeas.

I ate two Trader Joe’s cinnamon rolls slathered in syrup.

[books-and-kids]

Baby was born yesterday afternoon -- safe and healthy! Charlie is very excited and, looking at the pictures, pronounced his new brother "cute" and "beautiful." Mom is doing ok too, still in the hospital until tomorrow.

Thank goodness for all of it.

[books-and-kids]

In other news

Coco and Charlie's mom just texted me. Still no baby. She was induced around noon yesterday and it is a high-risk pregnancy. I know nothing about pregnancy or childbirth but I feel like I should be worried?

I'm pretty sure she's all by herself in the hospital and that breaks my heart. (I offered to be there with her but she understandably wanted me to take the kids rather than have them hosted by strangers.) So many hours with nobody to hold your hand.

[books-and-kids]

Two good things which combine to create a bad thing

#1: I braided Charlie's hair this morning. It was my first time braiding (most of the other Black kids I've hosted have had short hair or came with protective styles already in that I just had to maintain) and it's ugly as all get out, but practice makes perfect and at least now his hair is protected.

#2: The park nearest my house is very diverse (White, Black, Asian). Coco and Charlie have racial mirrors in both the kids they play with and the parents of those kids.

... which, combined, creates a problem. I (generic-looking White lady) cannot bring this Black child to the park to parade his awful hair in front of the Black parents!

We're going around 4pm today anyways (I have something tonight and want to tire them out before the Safe Families "babysitter" arrives). Hopefully no one else will be there? 😂 😬

[books-and-kids]

Their mom is in the delivery room and the baby turned so no need for a c section!! Thank goodness, because nobody wanted her to have to recover from major abdominal sirgery (including me who scheduled a bunch of stuff this week, thinking I would have the kids next week, and does not want to have to keep them for too long and reschedule everything). They are super easy kids, but working a full day while supervising even a super easy 5yo and 2yo is hard.

Cross your fingers for a smooth delivery and healthy baby and mom!!

I spend summers with family out of state. Today was the 11 hour drive home. Partway through the drive I get a call from coco and Charlie’s mom. She was due with her third baby next week so I was going to take the older kids for that. Surprise! Her doctor wants her in the hospital tomorrow to get the baby out sooner.

drove home, unpacked 5 weeks worth of stuff and the cat from my car. Bought groceries. Picked up kids. Now trying to get them to sleep. All I wanted to do tonight was lay on the couch. Sigh.

the good news is soon there will be a new baby for me to snuggle!!

[books-and-kids]

Making a block tower… please ignore my disaster zone house. (And yes, the tower collapsed >10 seconds after this photo was taken, setting off a flood of tears)

[books-and-kids]

I spend summers with family out of state. Today was the 11 hour drive home. Partway through the drive I get a call from coco and Charlie’s mom. She was due with her third baby next week so I was going to take the older kids for that. Surprise! Her doctor wants her in the hospital tomorrow to get the baby out sooner.

drove home, unpacked 5 weeks worth of stuff and the cat from my car. Bought groceries. Picked up kids. Now trying to get them to sleep. All I wanted to do tonight was lay on the couch. Sigh.

the good news is soon there will be a new baby for me to snuggle!!

[books-and-kids]

[books-and-kids]

[books-and-kids]

Reading this article and thinking about

a) how the trauma of adoption/foster care/Safe Families will trickle down from the kids we care for to their kids and beyond

and

b) how their and their parents' behaviors and life outcomes are affected by the traumas their ancestors went through

Oof.

[books-and-kids]

I had Coco and Charlie with me from Monday morning through yesterday midday, and then today for half the day. (Their mom had a short-term work gig that came up, so asked me to babysit.) By yesterday, I was so ready for them to go home and was so dreading today.

But then! Another Safe Families host family lives near me, and they needed an hour of babysitting today for the two kids they're hosting. I was off work for Juneteenth, so I took Coco + Charlie + the other two kids to the park, and then afterwards went back to the other Safe Families host's house and we all had lunch. My total amount of interaction with the other adult was about 45 minutes, and nothing special. I put together sandwiches and she made mac n cheese. We've only met a few times before, so we're not even really friends. And yet that 45 minutes made the whole day with Coco and Charlie feel totally manageable. Something about that adult interaction and getting to share notes on how it's going... it felt like alchemy.

I started hosting in October, but this was my first interaction with another adult while hosting. And it was exactly what I needed to help me confirm my theory -- a key reason hosting has felt so hard is the total lack of adult interaction while doing it.

This is really, really good news. I am a person who does much better when I have a clear sense of the problem. I feel in control and can start taking steps toward a solution. And finding parents/other people taking care of kids who I can hang out with is not an impossible problem. My neighbor has a preschooler. There's this other Safe Families host family nearby. None of my friends have kids but I can figure out ways to make new friends who do.

I feel so relieved and optimistic, compared to how I felt last week when I wrote this post.

Just got a text from a Safe Families coach asking me to take two kids tonight. They haven’t texted in months because they’ve respected that I’m taking a break, so I know it’s urgent… but I still said no.

The guilt and shame and feeling of failure is strong. It’s been 3 months since I last hosted, and I only hosted for one week in March. Now, admittedly, from January to May I was driving Coco and Charlie back and forth from their new host to their mom most weekends — 2+ hour drive on both Friday and Sunday, and my car only fits 2 carseats which made it impossible to host on the weekends. And I was training for a half marathon, which required me to be able to leave my house and run long distances multiple times a week, which was also incompatible with hosting. But both of those commitments are over now, and I could have taken more kids. I’m still on the distribution list for texts, so I know there’s plenty of need. And I keep not picking up the phone to call.

It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I wan’t to and I don’t want to simultaneously. It’s that if I say yes to a kid, I have to cancel/say no to spending time with friends, say no to book club, say no to running club. It means I can’t be confident I’ll get any sleep. So far, hosting has prevented me from exercising. And basically every hosting I’ve done has dramatically affected my ability to do my job (because of sick kids staying home, lack of afterschool/daycare requiring me to drive and supervise kids during the work day, or both). When I think about my experience with prior hostings I have such a visceral sense memory of feeling trapped and lonely, of the long endless day stretching out before me and no human interaction except the children.

I should buy a jogging stroller, or be more willing to do long walks. And buy one of those plastic gates that I could use to block off my living room and contain the children in a safe area. I’m hoping that eventually one of the kids who needs hosting will be a school-age kid whose school has afterschool care, or a kid for whom Safe Families is willing to pay for daycare. And I should also accept that I’m not going to host as often as I thought I was, and stop feeling like that indicates failure. (When I first started out I think I envisioned that I’d have a kid with me maybe half the time, and I wasn’t far off from that in the first few months, but realistically I don’t think that works while I’m single and don’t have any parent friends, because the isolation is so bad for my mental health.)

But my secret fear is that even if all those things happen, it still won't be enough. That I will still be isolated and lonely. That the early experiences of it feeling so hard will poison my brain and I won’t feel that wanting to host kids that I did when I started. That instead of imagining taking care of the kids, and loving them, and supporting their families, the only thing I’ll be able to imagine is spending two weeks with no in-person adult human interaction* outside the Trader Joe’s cashier. I know some of y’all are single and fostering… how do you keep from going insane?

*I work remotely, so "no in-person adult human interaction" really means none at all

[books-and-kids]

Just got a text from a Safe Families coach asking me to take two kids tonight. They haven’t texted in months because they’ve respected that I’m taking a break, so I know it’s urgent… but I still said no.

The guilt and shame and feeling of failure is strong. It’s been 3 months since I last hosted, and I only hosted for one week in March. Now, admittedly, from January to May I was driving Coco and Charlie back and forth from their new host to their mom most weekends — 2+ hour drive on both Friday and Sunday, and my car only fits 2 carseats which made it impossible to host on the weekends. And I was training for a half marathon, which required me to be able to leave my house and run long distances multiple times a week, which was also incompatible with hosting. But both of those commitments are over now, and I could have taken more kids. I’m still on the distribution list for texts, so I know there’s plenty of need. And I keep not picking up the phone to call.

It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I wan’t to and I don’t want to simultaneously. It’s that if I say yes to a kid, I have to cancel/say no to spending time with friends, say no to book club, say no to running club. It means I can’t be confident I’ll get any sleep. So far, hosting has prevented me from exercising. And basically every hosting I’ve done has dramatically affected my ability to do my job (because of sick kids staying home, lack of afterschool/daycare requiring me to drive and supervise kids during the work day, or both). When I think about my experience with prior hostings I have such a visceral sense memory of feeling trapped and lonely, of the long endless day stretching out before me and no human interaction except the children.

I should buy a jogging stroller, or be more willing to do long walks. And buy one of those plastic gates that I could use to block off my living room and contain the children in a safe area. I’m hoping that eventually one of the kids who needs hosting will be a school-age kid whose school has afterschool care, or a kid for whom Safe Families is willing to pay for daycare. And I should also accept that I’m not going to host as often as I thought I was, and stop feeling like that indicates failure. (When I first started out I think I envisioned that I’d have a kid with me maybe half the time, and I wasn’t far off from that in the first few months, but realistically I don’t think that works while I’m single and don’t have any parent friends, because the isolation is so bad for my mental health.)

But my secret fear is that even if all those things happen, it still won't be enough. That I will still be isolated and lonely. That the early experiences of it feeling so hard will poison my brain and I won’t feel that wanting to host kids that I did when I started. That instead of imagining taking care of the kids, and loving them, and supporting their families, the only thing I’ll be able to imagine is spending two weeks with no in-person adult human interaction* outside the Trader Joe’s cashier. I know some of y’all are single and fostering… how do you keep from going insane?

*I work remotely, so "no in-person adult human interaction" really means none at all

[books-and-kids]

One of the people I love most has made me very sad recently. Not on purpose and it’s not their fault, just unfortunate circumstances. For various reasons, I want to hide from them how sad they’re making me. I’m pretty sure I’m succeeding… but by virtue of succeeding, there’s no one to give me a gold star for how much effort I’m putting into it. *Sigh*

[books-and-kids]

@bovineblogger