Protected: Password PSA

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Self-Esteem and Adoption

Excerpt from an article titled “Self-Esteem and Adoption,” by Kenneth Watson:

Children face “self-esteem crises” at times when the magnitude of failure at some particular thing either eclipses their past successes or reconfirms for them that they are “total failures.” Parents, or other caring adults, can turn such a self-esteem crisis into an opportunity to enhance a child’s self-esteem by following three steps – in order. They are:

1.  Accept the child’s feelings of worthlessness. This is the hardest step, but one that cannot be skipped. It means letting children “own” their feelings of pain and despair, even if things do not appear to us as the children see them. It means that when a child says, “I’ll never amount to anything – I’m just no good!” the adult must resist saying, “Of course you will, look at all of the things you can do.” It means that when a child says, “I’m hopeless, nobody can ever love me,” they must resist saying, “Of course they can – and do. I love you.” Children who are hurting must sense that those adults who wish to help them are not denying them the pain they are experiencing. Of course adults do not have to agree that the children’s premises are accurate, only that their pain is real. (emphasis added)

Read the rest of the article here.  (Incidentally, I think that the second step focuses too much on achievement in terms of tasks/activities, and not enough on the cultivation of relationships.  Granted this is a much more complicated arena in which to “create opportunities,” but seems especially important for the “global” kind of self-esteem issues most relevant to the adoption.)

I found this article via a Google search the other day when I was looking for something else, and liked that last sentence in bold.  It’s similar to some of the things I was trying to say in those second-choice/second-best posts a while ago, except that Kenneth Watson is an esteemed adoption professional and I’m… not.

To the Mother of Someone I Love

I know of many people who could have written this post… perhaps not so eloquently, and perhaps with different pronouns, but the exact same sentiments nonetheless.

Just read it.

Bubble Tea @ Home

I’ve been doing a bit more cooking (and yes, learning new ways to prepare frozen 만두 [mandu] does count as cooking in my book).  However, I’ve been reluctant to post pictures of everything so as not to give the impression that this is a cooking blog.  Because that it ain’t.

But I tried making home-made bubble tea for the first time tonight, and wanted to encourage anyone out there who has been thinking about it to give it a try.  I like mine very simple — just peach tea, a tiny bit of sugar, and tapioca pearls.  And given my painfully sensitive teeth these days, very little ice.  No powders, no dairy, and preferably no caffeine.

So I was at the grocery store tonight, and I picked up a box of tapioca pearls.  I got the small kind hoping that they would fit through the regular straws that I already had, and they were white since I couldn’t find the black ones that you usually see.  (I think Asian grocery stores would have the black kind, and will definitely look for them on my next trip to the not-so-local K-grocer.)

When I got home, I made a pot of caffeine-free herbal peach tea.  I cooked the tapioca pearls for 25 minutes, and then let them sit in the hot water for 25 more.  I also made a simple syrup of brown sugar and water to sweeten it.   Mix all that together, add a little ice, and this is what I got:

Okay, so it looks a little weird because the pearls are white and not black.  They were a little soft, because I don’t think you need to cook the miniature ones for as long as the larger ones, but they tasted exactly the same.  And my entire box of tapioca cost $3.99 — the same price I pay for a single drink at the Lollicup that is a 30-minute drive away.

Anyway, just wanted to share!

************************************************************

If you want to try this yourself, be sure and use plenty of water — recipes I saw on the internet suggested a minimum of 8 cups of water for every cup of tapioca pearls.  I used 4 cups of water and 1/2 cup of pearls, which seemed fine and gave me plenty of tapioca.  The next time I make it, I’ll make an even smaller batch and won’t let the pearls sit as long — maybe 15 minutes instead of 25.  And I read that if you cover the pearls with the simple syrup, they should last in the refrigerator for a few days.

Tim Wise on White Privilege and the ‘08 Election

Hat tip to Susan at ReadingWritingLiving.

White Privilege, White Entitlement and the 2008 Election

by Tim Wise

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

But don’t stop there… read the rest of the article here.

Protected: Barely

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Ten Years Ago

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Seven Years Ago

I remember.

.

.

(photo credit: unknown)

More Fortuna

I didn’t cook tonight; we just got takeout Chinese food.  Here was my fortune, exactly as it was written:

Put all your unhappiness aside, life is beautiful, be happy.

(In case you were wondering, the learn-a-Chinese-word thing on the back was cao mei, which apparently means strawberry.)

I’ve written before about being partial to fortune-cookie fortunes, and once again I was surprised by the relevance I found in the little scrap of paper tucked inside my dessert.  As written, tonight’s fortune sounds like a trite platitude (and a run-on sentence to boot).  But to me, it speaks to the more general idea of letting go. — something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Whether you call it letting go, moving on, finding peace, or putting unhappiness aside, they all seem to suggest a change from the present state of how things are right now and moving to a different state that is more positive. Sometimes, depending on the context and who is saying them, these phrases ring hollow at best and are dismissive at worst.  But when you get down to it, all are things that I would love to be able to do. I really, really would.

The question is how.

I’d love to see that in a fortune cookie.

Throw-Together 떡 만두국

This isn’t authentic 떡 만두국 (rice cake and dumpling soup), but it was good anyway.  I didn’t use a recipe; I just boiled some water with a little chicken bouillon, and threw in some frozen 떡 (rice cakes) and 만두 (dumplings).  I also added some leftovers I had in the fridge from making 잡채 –  baby spinach, a few bean sprouts, cooked beef, and dried shiitake mushrooms.  And simply because I love noodles and they were already cooked, I threw in some 녹차 메밀 국수 (soba noodles flavored with green tea) at the last minute.  I stirred in some red pepper flakes and sesame seeds, and it was done!

Here’s another pic that shows off the special spoon-and-chopstick set that I got on my first trip to Korea:

I’m not sure why I’ve been cooking so much recently. (Actually I do know why, and it involves certain other KAD bloggers who inspired me by posting pictures of their delicious food — ladies, you know who you are!)

My hobbies tend to come and go in rather unpredictable phases, and I have no idea how long this one will last.  I’m just hoping that when the next Lunar New Year rolls around, I can dispense with the Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Noodle.