at one point the older of the two girls asked me what kind of new year traditions we had. i stumbled. our last two or three kids were disrespectful to our traditions to the point that we gave up trying to instill a strong sense of family tradition by doing things together. in the old days, we'd watch back to the future, all three of them, or just one or two, or whatever. and we threw in a bunch of clint eastwood and good bad & ugly, just so we'd be all movied up during the cold season. but these days i don't even want to sit by a movie. i might get one out for them, or find it, but i was eager to go back upstairs and do my writing projects.

some cultures have a tradition that making a lot of noise is good luck. lots of the traditions come to what they think is good luck: jumping from a chair, not eating chicken, etc. if so we'll be very lucky. having a nine-year-old and eight-year-old in the house has made a lot of shrieking, running, shouting, that kind of thing. and i actually like it, as long as it's innocent, which most of the time, it is. kids are cooped up, indoors. it's been a long winter, already. they have lots of energy and we'll be glad when school takes them off our hands.

it reminds me that, really, we have a clean slate. they are supposed to be with us only five months or less. nevertheless i strongly suspect that we'll see them a lot if not just keep them our last hard ten years of life while we go steadily downhill and become less mobile, less able to get around. we're already wearing out. social services can see that. yet these kids need stability and hopefully to stay in galesburg to give their dad time to be ready for them. they need to set him up and ensure he stays away from their mom who is apparently all that bad stuff.

my point is, they're kids. they're innocent. they don't know from a new-year tradition and if i give them one, they'll keep it and always have something. they are already truly loving the stability, the good cooking, the dad who is gentle but somewhat deaf - and of course they adore the dogs who seem willing to take infinite abuse just for the ability to hang around them and absorb their boundless energy. it seems good all around. the house is alive again.

toward the end of raising our adopted kids, last of ten, we got tired. they absolutely couldn't tolerate school in a way that none of our biological kids had experienced. it was either that, or it was so well worth it to us to pretend that way that that became their entire life, and they won: we let them drop out. all three of them. it was kind of over my dead body but there wasn't much i could do. i couldn't make them go to school, and couldn't set up homeschooling myself without support. i let it happen. in the dead silence aftermath i think all are sorry they didn't finish. they'll have a lifetime of explaining why they just couldn't make it through high school and all their explanations will sound hollow after a few years given the fact that they could have made it through school, except possibly the youngest one, but just didn't. they have no one to blame but themselves. and now we have to stand here biting our tongues and hoping they make it anyway. they might. it will be a miracle if they find actual jobs. but it can be done.

with these younger ones, i'm afraid our benevolent spoiling might ruin them, too, if we carry on long enough. after all it's only a matter of time before school becomes a chore and in our kids' case it's their only chore. if they beat us, they cruise. and we're easy. that's my hostility speaking. deep down i don't think we did the older ones any favor.

we have a seventeen-year-old, their older brother, who is very casual about school. in the last week he only actually went two days out of five, and whether the ride was impossible given his staying with his girlfriend, or not, didn't matter, because he just wasn't there. he is having trouble with motivation at this late stage of the game; he only has to finish two classes in his senior year but just getting there is an issue. it's obvious that having everyone: me, my wife, the social worker, his birth mother and father, and his girlfriend, all pressuring him, isn't working. the more pressure, the harder it is for him to just finish. we try to make it clear to him that being so poor in the attendance department is a red flag for the social worker and that she may have to move him to some place with better security, or at least a better track record for getting their kids to school. we tell her, if he's not home, we can't get him to school, and if he doesn't come home, there isn't much we can do about it. it's agony watching a kid go through what our kids did, knowing full well the sentence of years of explaining why you just couldn't make it looms over you, thus it could be the most important choice he makes. he's pretty good about going to work. he's not a behavior problem.

but i have doubts how long that social worker can watch him slowly drop out more and more, to the point that, well, he's 17, and he's her responsibility, and she could put him some place that actually makes sure he gets to school. away from the girlfriend of course. hoping he doesn't just run away, come back around, refuse to attend altogether. all of which could happen.

so i watch the moods of my wife and the social worker, wondering at which point they'll just say "enough."

lots of friends and family members. are critical that we could let our three just drop out as they did, ruining their own lives, etc. everybody has their own line before they cave in, give up, and say, ok if it's that torturous, you can't go, absolutely can't, then you can't. you win. you stay home.

i know our own line is pretty high, and we didn't want to do that to any of them, let them drop out. if what they were doing was acting, it was pretty slick. they were in deep pain. it'll take a few years before any of them can even revisit it.

with that kind of trauma behind us, it's hard to believe we'd take on an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old, but yes, it's time to start over, and make sure at least these two follow through and finish what they've started. so far, not so hard. galesburg schools aren't that impossible for a kid to do.