Welcome to Chase family planet! | home

Week 12: 6/19/05

Hello Weary Wanderers,

We are just a week away from the halfway point but by the time we finished this week, it felt like our time in Hong Kong should be over! Isn't it typical how when one thing goes wrong, it seems like everything does? Whether things are actually going wrong or your ability to handle what normally wouldn't faze you is subjective when you are stuck in the middle of a week like ours.

Toss me a Lifeline

The hardest thing about being here, is not being there... Meaning that when someone you know and love is going through a hard time, you can't pop over to their house with homemade cookies, spend all afternoon on the phone with them while they cry, or take care of their kids so they can have a break from their life for a few hours. To just wrap your arms around someone who desperately needs it entails spending a lot of money on a long flight with screaming children. And the same thing goes this way too. When I'm at my worst because I haven't seen my husband all week and neither have my kids and so they are behaving horrendously and instead of acting like an adult and being a good parent I resort to joining in with their yelling and end up feeling horrible and powerless over our situation, I wish there was someone from there who could come here and give me a big hug and homemade cookies and watch my kids so that my grip on our situation returns to normal instead of the white knuckle, nail breaking, death grip from seventeen stories up currently going on.

For those of you who know Nathan well and have spent some one on one time with him, you inevitably have fallen in love with him. He's got so much gusto it's hard not to be sucked into his magnetic persona. He is a child of extremes. Have you heard that poem about the little girl with a little curl right in the middle of her forehead... when she was good, she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid? You know the one? He's not a girl, and like myself has stick straight hair, but you get the idea that with Nathan there is no middle ground, only manic happiness or black-hole force sorrow and despair. Fortunately, he doesn't go between these extremes in a single day, he moves from one to the other over the course of a couple of weeks or a month. But for that week or month when Nathan is at his most, shall we say, difficult, it is very tiring to be his parent. In spite of all we've asked of Nathan in the past three months, he's done pretty admirably considering he's only four. But like the proverbial straw that snapped that camel's back, this week was when everything broke loose. Not just for Nathan, but for me, Benjamin, Michael, and several friends back home who decided this week would also be the one that they would choose to forget if they had the chance.

Daddy who?

Up until this week, Mike was getting home at about 8:00 p.m., so most of the time I'd keep the kids up to either meet Mike at a restaurant near the train station, or feed them here and let Mike do his normal bedtime routine of baths, books, and bedtime prayers. So even though they saw him for only one hour at best, they at least saw him. All that changed this week, as Mike didn't make it home before 11:00 p.m. a single night until Saturday, when he came home "early" at 7:00 p.m. It was one of the most difficult weeks of my entire life, as night after night the boys would fight me on giving them a bath, clearly not doing it the same as Daddy does it (I know since they so emphatically alerted me to this), then fight me on reading a story, (telling me I'm not going slow enough, or making the correct animal sounds), and then they'd lay their little heads on their little pillows and cry themselves to sleep, Nathan climbing out of bed in the middle of the night to ask me if Daddy would be there in the morning, and my reply was the truth, no, which would start him off with fresh tears.

While I can deal with comforting my kids who are crying since they miss their father, what is much harder to deal with is having them take it out on me during the day. This week, I have had some of the absolute worst insults hurled at me in the meanest most hateful manner a person can muster... all by my four year old child. And I know, I know, I'M the adult here, I'm supposed to cheerfully send him off for a time out, keeping a calm demeanor to set a good example, but I suspect that the child rearing experts who say to stay calm and even-tempered have never had their own flesh and blood lash out with all the fury forty-five pounds can muster directed towards them, day after day, hour after hour. I think the hardest part is not that Nathan is acting out, but that like the boys, I also miss their father... good, even-tempered Michael who generally thinks before he acts, and keeps us all in balance, especially me. So I'm already starting off not on my best foot, so to speak, when all this with Nathan is thrust on me. And I know that it's not me he's angry with, it's just this rotten situation of sharing a house with someone you love and smelling the toast they had for breakfast when you finally stumble out of bed, but not actually ever seeing them. But knowing it's not me Nathan is angry with, and not getting upset when he's aiming that anger right at me are two different things.

We had our first ever parent-teacher conference at the end of the week with Nathan's teachers, Miss Ruth and Miss Catherine. We were both utterly amazed to hear them talking about this totally different child... one that liked to share, enjoys singing, and is a huge help. I held up a photo of our firstborn, "We're here to talk about this child, the tall blond boy?". Then they mentioned that he does tend to overreact sometimes when he gets upset, which is when we recognized who they were talking about. All in all, it was a good visit, but left us still in the dark as to whether we should put Nathan in kindergarten in the U.S. when we return (which thanks to his birthdate being about two weeks before the cut-off, he's allowed to do) or delay it a year to give him time to iron out those over-reaction wrinkles. On those lovely "kindergarten readiness" checklists, he's more than ready. Being as bright as he is, it's hard to tell him he has to do another year of learning his letters when right now he's beginning to read. It also doesn't help that although he's the youngest child in his class, he's also the tallest, by a good four to five inches over the next-tallest student. Hold him back a year and he's gonna look like he should be teaching the class... I was hoping by this point to have a firm plan of whether we would or would not be enrolling him in kindergarten, but no, we're clueless. Is every new stage going to be this hard? Wait, don't answer that. Seriously, don't. I'm already struggling up the mountainside with the boulder on my shoulder over and over again as it is.

Terrible twos? Guess again.

And then there was Ben. Two weeks away from his second birthday and behaving like a walking temper tantrum. I always flip out when Benjamin is in a bad mood, because unlike Nathan and myself, Benjamin is a perennially happy person. If you are feeling down, you can always count on Ben to cheer you up by just looking at his meaty baby thighs and pudgy ankles or his sweet curly hair. He just glows from within, no matter the circumstances. He's overjoyed if you just look at him or say howdy. Even when he gets negative attention (like when his big bro knocks him down) he's just so darned happy that you were willing to be near him. I forget sometimes that he's also entitled to have a bad day. Of course, he's only had about six of them in his entire life, so it always throws me for a loop, like the sky is falling and the end of the world is right around the corner. This was one of days, only it stretched on all week, leaving me to conclude that he'd entered the next developmental stage typical near one's second birthday. Every little thing set him off, reducing him to tears. If I couldn't screw the lid onto his sippy cup of water fast enough, he'd then throw the cup, fall on the floor and let the tears stream down. If one speck of blueberry yogurt touched his pinky finger, it was equal to loosing all your loved ones in a boating accident.

It was maddening to be dealing with Nathan's never ending bad mood, my own longing for my husband and adult conversation, and then to deal with this completely uncharacteristic behavior coming from Benjamin. And of top of everything, every night Ben would cough and cough, and then in the morning he sounded like he was breathing water. I called the pediatrician's office, but they didn't have a single opening for the entire week that took place during the afternoon hours while Nathan was at school. Did I want to make an appointment for the morning? Yeah, right, and drag both of my incredibly grouchy, grumpy kids into the office downtown so I could spend an hour yelling at them to behave, stop fighting, stop touching each other or breathing in each other's direction? No thanks. But then late in the week, Ben seemed to get a lot worse. Poor kid, I was so grumpy and blue myself over missing Mike and Nathan's stinky attitude that I didn't realize that Benjamin's grouchiness wasn't because he's almost two, but because he was really sick. So I put Nathan on his school bus and then grabbed a taxi to the hospital down the hill where we were immediately ushered into a pediatrician's office, no appointment, no waiting. I told the doctor what was up, mentioned Ben's heart condition. He asked how long the symptom's had been present, and when I said "uh, a week?", he looked at me over his glasses and told me that I should know better than to wait so long to take this particular child of mine to the doctor when he has those particular symptoms. Ouch. The doctor trained at Stanford, which I hold in high esteem since we've got a little history with the institution and the fine physicians associated with it, so I knew he knew what he was talking about and I felt pretty chagrined for delaying our visit, even if it had meant dealing with both boys and myself quarrelling. He said Ben had severe bronchitis, a throat infection, fluid in the ears (but not yet infected), and something really ugly going on in his sinuses. He said if I'd waited another day or two, he would have had to be admitted and treated for pneumonia! I left awhile later after Benjamin got some medicine, and had to fill him up with four different types of medication round the clock for six days. After the third day on the medicine, we got our old best buddy Benjamin back, just in time to take him out for a fun day celebrating fathers, including his own.

Father's Day

When Michael and I got engaged, we pulled out our calendars and looked for the only month that did not feature any of our immediate family's birthdays or anniversaries. There seems to be a disproportionate amount of December and January birthdays between Mike's family and my own, so we chose to get married in June, the traditional wedding month, to try and stay far, far away from our birthdays and the holidays. This all worked out fine until we had Nathan, a November birthday, but with him comes two other holidays, Mother's Day and Father's Day. And when does Father's Day fall? June, generally within days of our anniversary. But that's not all. Convinced we'd be happy with just one child, we were knocked for a loop when we discovered that Benjamin was on his way and that he would be born when? June. And now that Nathan is in his school years, we are finding that the month of June is jam packed with enough activities that even if we had nothing else going on, just school-related dates on the calendar would be more than enough to make our heads spin. I can't even look far enough down the road to imagine what having two kids in school will be like. Remembering what a wonderful Mother's Day I had this year, I was determined to make sure that Mike would have an equally special Father's Day.

Some friend's that we met here in Hong Kong recently had a baby boy, and they were going to have a special service at church to dedicate their baby (similar to a christening). Then, they invited everyone they knew to go out with them after the service for a big celebratory dim sum lunch. Without realizing that the day happened to be Father's Day, we happily RSVP'd that we'd love to be a part of it. A couple of weeks before, when I asked Mike what he wanted to do on his special day, he told me he wanted a really great steak. Some of his contractors here told him about Morton's of Chicago, a steakhouse that has outstanding beef. So I made a reservation there for 5:00 p.m. I figured that would give us time to let the kids take a nap, eat dinner early so as not to disturb the seven o'clock crowd, then wander around the Kowloon side before heading home. It wasn't until the day before that I fully realized that we were going to be going to the dim sum lunch at 1:00 p.m., and then had reservations for a huge steak dinner at 5:00. Not only that, but sitting on my desk were all my Father's Day cards to our dads, waiting to be mailed seven days before Father's Day so they'd get to the U.S. in time. Somehow I got it in my mind that Father's day was not until June 26, so there the cards sat until the day before Father's day. Good one. Considering we hadn't seen Mike all week long, the boys and I somehow managed to amp up the grumpiness rather than doing cartwheels of joy that the person we'd missed all week was finally with us. The kids were slow to get ready, and we were late to church, bickering in the taxi on the way there.

After church we went to the lunch as planned, I ate as light as I could, while Ben fell asleep upright in the highchair at the restaurant. There was a special chicken dish that included a chicken's head on the platter, and Nathan was very upset when we told him he couldn't eat it! When Benjamin awoke, it was time to make a hasty departure to race home, change his diaper, drop off some things and pick up some others, and then race over to the mainland to make our reservation on time. I spent the whole time apologizing to Mike over the mix-up, while the kids were testing their boundaries with their dad so much that I wished we had a grandma or two here to leave them with! Morton's of Chicago is incredibly fancy. Instead of a menu, they roll a cart up to your table with food on it and tell you what each thing is (but not the price, they don't want you to go into shock before you eat, they'd rather wait until you get the bill at the end). They do not have a child's menu, they do not have high chairs, and every single day up until our reserved day, they called to remind us of that. They do have twenty-four waiters on the clock at 5:00 p.m., even if you are the only people in the entire restaurant during that time. They do feature a head of broccoli on the menu, so we ordered that for the boys and Mike and I each got steaks. When they placed mine in front of me, I wished that I had not had a single bite at lunch! Both Mike and I agree they were the best steaks we've ever had. We had the best table, overlooking Victoria Harbour, and we had the best service, as I mentioned, twenty-four people in tuxedos with nothing to do but line the wall behind us and wait for Ben to drop his fork or one of us to take a sip of water so they could spring into action. The boys were still on edge, which was pushing me over the edge, which was making Michael get upset that we were all so high-strung. Have you ever wanted something to go so right that you tried too hard and made it all wrong? I guess it happens to me and my perfectionist ways a lot more often than I care to mention, but I was so determined that Mike should have a wonderful day to celebrate how wonderful he is. I kept asking Mike in ten minute intervals if he was having a good time, alternating with apologizing that the day wasn't more... I don't know... like what I had envisioned. I thought it would be this calm relaxing day, not this frantic, crazy time of forced frivolity and overscheduled activity. Mike said he'd be having a much better time if I would just CHILL OUT, so I got the hint and relaxed. We all took a stroll up and down Avenue of the Stars watching all the passing ships in the Harbour and letting the boys run around and get their photos taken with strangers as the sun slipped behind the Hong Kong skyline. We finally made it home, exhausted, and let Mike open his present, a new Sony digital camera to replace the one that after five years of solid performance just lay down and died a month ago.

So happy belated Father's day to all you dads out there! Especially the two dads in my life, my dad Marty, and my father in law Jim. Sorry the cards were so late...

Coming to a monitor near you...

Celebrating our anniversary... apart. Aunt Holly is in a terrible car accident, making us wonder for the 1,000th time why we are so far away from our friends and family. The weather becomes violent. A new character enters stage left... Heather's friend from her good old days at Disney arrives in Hong Kong for three months of slaving away on the Magic Kingdom, and we drag her all over town. But don't forget to look at the great photos!

Happy traveling!

Heather, Michael, Nathan, and Benjamin Chase

This is the face of a very sick baby.	The nice thing about being a little kid is that if you are tired, it's not impolite to fall right asleep during lunch!
Nathan was actually upset that we didn't allow him to eat the chicken head!	Rush hour in Victoria Harbour
The bread that ate Benjamin...	Oh wait, there he is! The gorgeous view from Morton's Steakhouse (and the background is pretty nice too!).
Inside Morton's...	The Chase Boys, full of red meat!
Happy Father's Day 2005	Mommy and Benjamin
My what handsome boys!	Hangin' out
The Chase children were tourist attractions in their own right on Avenue of Stars...	Happy Father's Day, Daddy! Here's your new camera!