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fatherhood

Lazy or Brilliant

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daddy's diaryandy and kiko odaibaIt’s been……a long time since you’ve heard from me. I know that this been has been a terrible drought for your souls.

But……here’s what’s been up on this end. Kiko continues on as usual generally which is another way of saying she’s been boring. Not boring in a bad sense but just as she gets older me stones spread out. Months pass without major jumps. But they still come. Recently she has been expressing an increased self awareness and interest in self expression. I recognized this as she became increasingly bitchy. Having recognized the bitchiness I finally realized she was begging for 1) more beatings (which have been lacking recently) and 2) a desire to express herself and be allowed to do more activities independently. Having made this great discovery I then thought about how to facilitate both more beatings and Kiko’s independence.

With regards to independence I have a particular bent toward training children to complete life tasks so I figured let’s teach her to do some useful stuff like the dishes or sweeping or the laundry. So over the past couple of weeks Chie and I have been working with her on all the above chores plus dome others like scrubbing the toilets. Now, you could say that either I am lazy or I am abusive. And you may be right but it is an indisputable fact that young children are more capable than we give them credit got and they are more excited to participate in these mundane tasks than we realize. The proof is in the pudding….check out my slave errr my daughter doing the dishes. This is part of her daily chore schedule. Every morning I tell her “daddy needs coffee” this is code for get to work. After saying these magic words Kiko gets the dishes done, separates the laundry and cleans the table. Lazy father? Maybe. Enjoying watching my two year old do the chores that I don’t have to do…..most definitely!

FYI I have a background in behavioral therapy and training am a big fan of Montessori (not the weird culty parts but the general training pattern). So there is some method to my madness 🙂andy signaturePrevious daddy’s diary here.

 

Daddy’s Diary 9: Letting Them Struggle

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They say (I don’t know who exactly, but let’ss assume for the sake if this post that “they” do) that baby chicks need the struggle of breaking through the egg to be able to survive. I don’t know if the baby chick struggle cliche is true but it makes for an appropriate opening in to daddy’s recent thoughts.

Kiko, the young one of the house, has been maturing…a lot. She walks, runs, babbles incoherent nonsense in an attempt to communicate, all kinds of new and exciting aspects of her growth have been bubbling up to the surface. As a proud dad I must say she is doing quite well. She is growing in body, mind and spirit. She is mature beyond her 16 months. But, at the same time, as I watch her grow and accomplish new things I am forced to spend an equal amount of my time watching and allowing her to go into places and situations that I know will cause her pain. Why? It is the only way she can learn.

We all know this don’t we? As people we know that the only way to learn is to work through the process of failure so that we can figure out what to do and what not to do. Certainly not everything requires failure and in a perfect world failure would enter into the equation but as it stands now, a lot of learning comes on building off of past failures, making little steps of progress forward to our goal. That knowledge is fine….for us. We ourselves know that if you fall of the horse you just get back on and keep riding. But, to have watch your kids do it, sucks!

I’ll give you recent scenario:
Andy: Kiko, hold daddies hand here or you’ll fall over.
Kiko: Nya Nya Nya Ba Ba pffffffft = “No, I don’t need to”
Andy: Please sweetie hold daddies hand.
Kiko: Screw that! I’m going to run…….I fell over and smashed my face on the cement……WAHHHHH!!!!

It’s terrible to watch your kids put themselves in physical danger and we all know that scenario as parents. The more frightening ones happen on stairs or on busy roads or other such places of danger. As parents, disciples teachers and Instructors we have to allow for our children to learn (within reason at this age) how actions have consequences. The more you put them in situations like this the quicker they start to learn. When you are lucky they heed your instructions before putting themselves in harms way.

I’ve had nightmares about Kiko on the stairs or Kiko diving skull first off the couch while I’m not paying attention. I, probably for the rest of life, worry about Kiko’s capacity to calculate risk and and choose actions accordingly. But as a father, an extremely limited father, I have to make a conscious effort to allow my child to go through the physical and emotional struggles that come with this life so that she may be better prepared and better Abe to handle the life she is given and the world she encounters.

Soon, the emotional dangers and the dangers posed by other people will become a necessary topic of Daddy-Daughter training time, but for now I’ll just try and keep her from knocking herself unconscious jumping off the loft in my bedroom.

Related posts:
Daddy’s Diary 8: Go Screw
Daddy’s Diary 7: The More The Merrier!?!?
Daddy’s Diary 6: A Year That Felt Like a Day
Mommy’s Diary 32 (Daddy’s Diary 5)
Mommy’s Diary 29 (Daddy’s Diary 4)
Mommy’s Diary 22 (Daddy’s Diary 3)
Mommy’s Diary (Daddy’s Diary 2) 14
Mommy’s (Daddy’s) diary 7

Daddy’s Diary 7: The More The Merrier!?!?

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Hello VV internet confidantes. I should have had an update recently about my sewing progress but……there is none and there has been no sewing as of late. Ooops!

But in any case, Chie asked me to drop in and update you all with our parental lives. A magazine contacted recently and asked to speak with me. Apparently my skills as  a father have become well known in the community and they wanted to just come talk with me and bask in the glories of my fatherly care. Ok, that isn’t entirely true….but I do think that myself and Chie have done a respectable job raising this here piglet. So my thought on the matter is this, since #1 child is good let’s push our luck a little and try adopting.
Personally,  I have felt adoption was a good and necessary thing for years. It upsets me that it is not done more and astounds me the rarity of adoption here in Japan. I will let Chie take you through some of the cultural Japanese stuff with adoption at some point but basically in Japan adoption is weird, scary and to be avoided ( a little like me I guess). Thankfully, Chie does not fall into the standard category and is all about the adoption process. I don’t remember when we first started talking about adoption but I don’t remember her ever putting up much resistance to the idea. I would be uncomfortable with pulling the trigger on adoption if I had to force Chie kicking and screaming. It is probably a  hard enough venture without having one of the parents opposing the idea.
So, 5,6 months back, Chie and I could see that Kiko was turning out ok with no foreseeable ( as much as one can foresee such things) major physical/developmental problems we started to get that famous parental itch for more children. With Chie swearing off the idea of child birth ever again and literally crying at the mention of doing it again we figured now is the time for adoption. We had always sort of planned on the structure of our family being like this; make a baby, buy a baby, make a baby, buy a baby. 4 in total, 2 conceived and 2 acquired.
So we started contacting local agencies about adoption and foster care (I am interested in doing both but that is a little different and might require its own diary entry). In any case, we contacted 3 agencies to begin with. The first was the local governmental adoption agency. The second was a private group called ISSJ and the third was a private agency named Ai No Kesshin.
The governmental agency is hard to figure out. We first met with them a few months back. We went in for an interview, brought Kiko and were immediately told that our baby was beautiful, growing beautifully, being raised well and they had no interest in working with us for adoption/foster care. They said we had our own baby so would not want some orphan. In their opinions the other child would never be as attractive and wonderful as our child. Needless to say, I was taken aback. 1) I love my daughter but unless I’m missing something she has no angel wings and was not at the time of her birth brought into the world surrounded by a singing chorus of cherubim. She is my daughter and I love her but she is just like the other normal little baby girls born to mothers in the same hospital on the same day, nothing better nothing worse. 2)What in the @#$$%%^?!?! How could these government workers talk so flippantly and cold heatedly about orphaned children in their care? Long story short, they told us “NO”. I told Chie in my particular vernacular “Screw that and screw them who are they to tell me no!” After a few months of back and forth, we are now in the adoption/foster care classes offered by the government. They are still telling us no but in Japan I am pretty sure that “No” is the default answer to every request. Japanese people say no first and ask questions later. The easiest way to deal with this is to ignore them, say “Yes” and usually if your patient you will win the starring contest.
The other two agencies are great. Ai No Kesshin is a Christian org based in a prefecture named Shizuoka. They are not the quickest moving individuals but they are busy so I will cut them some slack. The other org, ISSJ is a Tokyo based social services agency. Both are very easy to work with. We received numerous application forms from Ai No Kesshin this week and have a meeting on Monday with ISSJ. You want to know the highlight of both these agencies? They both are English based services!!!! God bless them. My Japanese still isn’t winning any awards and sitting in the required meetings with the Japanese govt agency is a supreme stretch of my Japanese abilities.
The adoption process in general has been interesting. My parents are cool with the idea. Chie’s parents are coming around to the idea. As I said earlier, the idea of adoption for Japanese folk is weird. It is  especially weird to want to adopt when  (like Chie and I ) you are physically capable of making your own children. I forgot to mention that earlier, the other really weird comment from the Japanese govt agency people was that they told us how the adoption agency and the adoption process was “for couples who could not have their own children or for older couples who wanted to give back to society.” That’s weird, I thought adoption was for, you know, the orphan and for the love of this child here and now.
The adoption agencies keep asking us what “kind” of baby we want. That’s a weird question to answer, as though I’m at McDonald’s ordering  a #4. The questionnaire literally has racial, gender etc criteria that you can check off as  “Yes, I want” or “No, I don’t want”. What kind of ridiculous S.O.B conceives of adopting but then thinks to themselves “No, no a black kid just won’t do.” or “I want his baby to be a male child born of rich parents and genetically predisposed to towards professional athletics.” Ultimately, I am cool with whatever. Chie is also up for anything but seems to really be hoping for a Halfanese. she wants half black/half Japanese or half Filipino/half Jap. The more I think about it the more fun that would be. A few years from now, we all as a family go out to the store, me (very, very, very white), Chie (obviously Japannese), Kiko (some kind of weird mix but looks like me), and then a couple mixed kids who look nothing like Chie or me and are black, dark yellow or some other shade in the rainbow. People would be really confused.
I’m looking at the post, I’ve run a bit long. Sorry about that. I hope to fill you in more soon. What are yours guys’ thoughts on adoption? People usually have strong feeling and would be curious to know what this little global group thinks. If anyone has been through the process and/or been adopted and wants to drop their opinion I would love to hear it.