Blitzkrieg Babies

Sort of.

Mike’s mom’s best friend’s daughter Stavroula often helps Mike’s mom when we leave the girls with her overnight. (Did I mention that Mike and I went to Vegas for two nights without the girls! First time with us both out of state for the family!) Stavroula is out of school for the summer (she is 16 years old) and hasn’t found a summer job yet, so I suggested she spent a couple days a week with us helping out with the girls. She doesn’t live close to our house, so that’s a hitch, but she lives close to Mike’s mom, so she can often get a ride with her. This week she came Wednesday morning when Mike’s mom came, spent Wednesday and Thursday night with us, and then I took her home on the way to the Gay and Lesbian Center event (see previous post). 

Since she is under 18, she can’t be a certified babysitter for kids in foster care (she’d have to be 18+, tested for tuberculosis, CPR/First Aid trained, and Live Scanned) so I can’t leave her alone with the girls. And they are a lot for one person (who isn’t me!) to take care of. Not that I’m superdad or anything, but I do this full-time, so I know all their tricks and stuff. So at least for this first round of babysitting, I just used Stavroula to help us do stuff that is hard for me to do alone with them. On Wednesday the four of us went to the beach, which the girls LOVE, but is tricky (and a little dangerous) for me to try by myself. They both like to stand close to the water where the waves come in, and get lifted up when a big wave comes in. I can’t do two at once for that activity, so having Stavroula there was a huge help. We also took the girls to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. We are members there and have taken the girls there quite a few times. When I take them myself, I mostly keep them in strapped in the stroller, but this time I was able to let them out to walk (and run!) around, with Stavroula and I each following one of them around. S was a little overwhelmed with the new freedom, I think. She just wanted to go and go and go, and got frustrated when I picked her up to bring her back to where V and Stavroula were going through the aquarium at a more reasonable pace.

I’m going to have Stavroula come back next week for a couple days, but I need to figure out how to better utilize her when we are at home. It was helpful having her play with the girls while I did other things, but I don’t feel like I quite got my money’s worth out of her. Not her fault at all, but I need to give her some more specific responsibilities and get myself out of the picture more than I did the first time around.

Yesterday the girls and I drove up to the LA Gay and Lesbian Center for an (awkwardly named) weekly event: Gay Play. It is a playgroup for gay and lesbian families for kids 0-3 years of age. I was a little hesitant about it because it really is pretty far from our house, and I figured that the rest of the attendees would be from that part of LA, so I wouldn’t be able to meet anybody local to me. But we had an excuse to be in that neighborhood Friday morning anyhow, and Mike’s mom lives not too far away, so we killed several bird with one stone and went.

It was definitely a good experience. I was the only man there, but there were about 10 women and their kids there, including 2 other sets of twins. And interestingly, both of the twins’ families lived closer to me than to the Center, so we ended up with some relatively local play date possibilities! I had never been to the Center before, and was pretty impressed with it. 

It is always nicely hanging out with non-traditional families, because no one there assumes that our family is traditional. Though even in groups of that nature, it is a little awkward figuring out how much is okay to ask about. This is one unexpected reason I’m glad we got the girls as infants: we get some time to figure out how much is ok to explain to people about their background before they are old enough to understand it themselves. In this group, most of the kids were the biological children of one of their lesbian mothers.

A commenter in my previous post about networking suggested I should focus more on creating a network for my kids and less on a network for me, which I think is a good suggestion. Or at least it is good to think about their network and my network as independent networks. Of course they will overlap a lot, but it helps to think about their needs and my needs independently as we develop our networks. I do think it is important that our girls know other kids that have gay parents, both so they don’t feel unique in that regard and also to have peers to talk about the issues that inevitably come up with regards to having gay parents. But by no means do I want them to only have friends with gay parents. That would be really weird. I am going to redouble my efforts to make friends with other parents of kids our girls age at the park now, because I think finding local kids for our girls to regularly play with would be really fantastic.

Today was not the best day to be the parents of S & V. All morning was a constant battle, with them crying and yelling and us trying not to yell at them. They didn’t want to eat anything but were hungry and kept pointing at various food stuffs and then threw them on the ground when they were given them. They wanted to go to the potty, but then refused to sit there and spent all the time in the bathroom making trouble (grabbing the toilet paper, trying to open the locked cabinet, trying to get into the toilet, trying to pull the soap dispense off the counter…) So I took them outside to play. And they did all the things they aren’t allowed to do, like climb up the stairs to the neighbors’ units and pull out the succulents that one neighbor planted near our common yard area. So I got some bubbles out to distract/entertain them. That worked briefly until they started screaming because the bubbles floated away from them. On and on and on like that. 

We are trying again to transition from two naps a day to only one afternoon nap, so that may be part what is going on. Either that or demonic possession.