Glittergirl cried more times than I can count because she wanted to go get her little sister. When we got started I added four months onto the wait and two months longer than I thought it would take to complete our dossier and found a milestone close to that and said we’d be home by then. I put a six month cushion in there, but as we all now know, that wasn’t enough.

We had very few problems with jealousy in China. Glittergirl saw how shut down her little sister was, saw where she had come from, and saw her slowly come out of her shell. She got to help her learn lots of new things.

There were some meltdowns that probably stemmed from having to deal with sharing mommy and daddy, but there was no pushing her away from us or trying to block her from coming to us. That came after we were home, though really still isn’t all that bad.

There have been some other jealousy issues since we arrived home, though. Mainly just in wanting whatever parent is helping her sister. So, if RK is putting TwinkleToes in her carseat and I’m buckling GlitterGirl in hers, she wants daddy and mommy will not do. But, when we get to the restaurant if we decide based on this to put GlitterGirl by Daddy and Twinkletoes by Mommy, then, well, daddy won’t do and she only wants mommy. In that case we just told her we were not going to play musical chairs, that she could come get a hug from mommy and then go back to her seat, and that she’d get plenty of mommy time later.

There has been a little bit of regression. She is talking baby talk, which really gets on my nerves. She wants me to help her get dressed when she’s been doing that by herself for a while now. She holds her forks and spoons funny, too. I’ve been informed she did not do the baby talk or the fork/spoon stuff at school though, so I’m hoping it goes away at home soon.

But the biggest problem is with her friends. She doesn’t want her friends playing with her sister. I hear “she doesn’t love YOU, she loves ME”, and “you can’t help her do that, you aren’t her mommy”. We have talked about this a great deal, but she still just goes into fits of jealousy if her friends pay any attention at all to her little sister.

Most of her friends have a smaller sibling, so it’s now the four of them for a playdate. I’ve tried to point out that she has always played with her friends’ little sister or little brother, but she refuses to see the correlation in why that means it is okay for them to play with her little sister.

I’ve been finding activities that separates the big kids and little kids to try to keep that to a minimum. At some point she’ll have to be okay with her friends playing with her sister, but I’m trying to give her some time to get to that point.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 7:28 am and is filed under Sibling Rivalry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.