What's Working For Us - Seeing the Forest When You're Surrounded by Trees

So Claudia over at My Fascinating Life has asked her readers to spread some positivity and write on What's Working For You. She puts together these link-ups from time to time which are quite fun to read. I've been lurking around My Fascinating Life for a while now and thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce myself. Claudia made the topic pretty open-ended; writers can write about anything that is working for them, kids or no kids. But, since this blog is about our family and since there is no me without my kids these days, I, of course will be writing about what's working for our little family of four. So here it goes.

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If I had to explain in one word the last year - the first year we became a family of four - I would use the word intense. Adoptive parenting (probably parenting of any sort, but I can't comment on that) is extremely intense. It's intensely challenging, intensely inspiring, intensely frustrating, intensely demanding, intensely rewarding, intensely loud, intensely disorienting, intensely grounding, intensely heartwarming, intensely sad, intensely joyful and, really, just intense. If you've read Our Perfect Space for any amount of time, or better yet, if you've also read a few other blogs written by parents in the early years of adoptive parenting, a common pattern emerges pretty quickly. Intense lows followed by intense highs, sprinkled with a moment from time to time where everyone can just exhale and say, "Ah, this is just about right."

In the past year the challenges and issues we have had to deal with have been many. Very few of them have been insignificant. We have dealt with issues that many parents pray they will never have to face - issues that knock you off your feet and leave you grasping for something, anything to help you regain your stability. We have, on more than one occasion, found ourselves legitimately wondering if our kids will be able to overcome the challenges their early life experiences have left them with and develop into functioning, loving, and productive adults. When you're mired in this type of intensity day in and day out, it is all too easy to find yourself so consumed by the latest issue that you can't see beyond its suffocating reach.

So what's working for us? Where's the positivity in this post? What's working for us is our growing ability to take a step back away from the intensity and soak up in the bigger picture. To take a moment and realize how far our little family, both as individuals and as a whole, has come in the past year.

Our kiddo that once had the emotional control of an 18 month old can, now, on occasion, recognize in themselves when their anxiety and emotions are getting the best of them, pause, and deliberately take deep breaths to calm themselves down and reset their spiraling emotions. With a little help from mom and dad this kid can almost always calm themselves down (at least for a little while). Our other child, who once found even answering yes or no questions when they were upset too difficult can now clearly articulate their feelings in order to process them and move on to a better place. Both kids used to literally flop on the floor (any floor) when someone spoke to them in public. Recently they have found the confidence in their abilities to not only answer a friendly stranger's questions, but to even express their needs and opinions or carry on a conversation. Brent and I are learning to make the type of parenting that works for our kids - calm, open, and always loving first - our go-to parenting style even when its the last thing we're feeling. On several recent occasions, we have received comments on how well behaved, kind, polite, and helpful Elsa and Ashagre are. As a whole, our family is finding its rhythm. We've found it enough that we're starting to recognize when it has appeared; we're learning how to sustain it for longer periods of time.

So right now, I would say the single most important thing that is working for us is our growing ability to not let the tough moments consume us. To recognize when stuff is hard, understand where the challenge is coming from (our kids have pretty predictable triggers), know that it won't last forever, take a deep breath, and parent our kids the best we can to help them get out of the intense place and back into our rhythm (or, if need be, just embrace the crazy). The more we do this, the shorter and less intense the challenges seem to become and the moments when we can just be - be ourselves and be a family - become much more frequent. By stepping away from the intensity and embracing the beautiful and amazing bigger story, we take away the intensity's power to perpetuate itself. We create more space for our family's rhythm to emerge.

So that's my long-winded, somewhat convoluted and circular explanation of what is working for us over here at Our Perfect Space these days. There are several other, more concrete things that are working for us too. With the hope that they might be useful to someone else out there, here they are in no particular order:

• Routine, and if the routine must be disrupted, lots of front-loading and deep breaths
• Deep breaths, lots of deep breaths
• Toaster waffels
• Do-overs, or as is heard in our house many times a day, "Whoa, wait a minute. You wanna try that again?"
• Repair - modeling to our kids the power of saying sorry when you messed up (yes, mommy and daddy mess up too)
• Indian food
• The Disney Savings Plan
• Baseball
• Positive reinforcement - remaining vigilant about celebrating all the good that's happening in our house
• Legos
• Buying a house with an extra bedroom and a dishwasher
• Smiles and laughter