I know I still owe several entries... I don't think the Tu B'shvat one will happen the way I wanted to write it. Neither will I write the post about Kevin and my anniversary/Valentine's day, but there will be the award post, eventually.
Right now our whole family is super busy with adoption related planning. We received confirmation that the twins' older sister, whom we'll re-name Noa (her original firs name is almost the same as Noa, with an extra letter, resulting in it meaning something in Hebrew you don't want to name your child,) will be able to join our family as well. This was a real special surprise, as the situation was hopeful that she'd be domestically adopted. The potential parents, however, when they learned that she has siblings who are getting adopted internationally, stepped back, so the siblings could be reunited.
Now this information pretty much freaked Matthew out, when he figured out that he will be a middle child! Three younger, three older! As my friend Basia said, we are ready for a new sitcom, Matthew in the Middle! He is demanding we get him another sibling like right now, so he won't be THE middle child.
In the mean time, the whole family is trying to learn whatever we can of the first language of the kidlets. Which happens not to be Russian. (The other day a mother who adopted from the same country shared that they were told by their agency to learn as much Russian as they could. Upon arriving in the country after two years of Russian lessons they found that only people over 30 spoke Russian well in the city of their child, and their 10-year-old was about as clueless about Russian as English.) It's a language Kevin grew up hearing a lot (from grandparents) and MIL is fluent in. My kids are doing a lot better job picking it up than I do. But then, after almost two years, I still can't put a whole, grammatically correct sentence together in Hebrew. Justin's newest complete sentence in the target language is "Phil Collins sings a lot better than Peter Gabriel." While I do agree with Justin, I have no idea where he got that information. Unless it was from my super Genesis crazy cousin Chalin.
At the same time, I am going through somewhat of an identity crisis. This adoption, quite franky, requires that we never mention some things. We don't talk about the country, the city (though I can reveal that it does have a synagogue, where a Chabad rabbi occasionally leads services), the chidren's original names, our family dynamics. I have to explain this to my kids - why they can't all go with Kevin to see the new brother and sisters, why I can't go with him to the country.
Basically, I'm trying to redefine who I am based on what I am not. I have been letting the labels that I have been carrying through the years define me more and more and that I can't accept. My sexuality, disability, nationality, religion, age, occupation, political views are all representations of small pieces of who I am, but none of them describe me exclusively.
Time to go and get the boys from school. Have a lovely week, everyone!
