On The Fly – A Parenting Blog

Man it’s been a hard week; it’s short on commentary, but the same quality reads none the less:

• Play April fools pranks on your kids.
• Kids science fair project results in huge fines against a company due to lack of Vitamin C in their drink.
• Not as good as the refrigerator that threw beers to you, but certainly an upside for those that live in the snow.
• 5 tips for taking better photos of your kids.
• Couple gets divorced in order to adopt a kid. Bureaucracy at it’s finest.

It seems like we have Madagascar fever around our house.  Estifanos watches Madagascar daily.  He knows every character by name, but still watches the movie with the same excitement as the first time he saw it.  Meron knows all the song lyrics to every song in the movie.  She will bust out singing at the dinner table.   Yordie is even in on it.  She sits in her Tickle Me Elmo Chair, and watches for at least 3 minutes, which is her attention span.  She has Madagascar shoes with lights that were handy down from Estifanos.  Every morning she points to the shoes and says, “Shoes on.”  She will wear no other shoes.  I think it is good that I bought them some new DVDS for Easter.  At least we finished watching the Cailou Holiday Movie daily.  We watched that until March.   I am now off to move it move it. 

We went to Arizona last weekend. The trip, told mostly in pictures is under the fold. (Apologies in advance for the lack of cropping, it’s a tough week, only working 4 days, so with this many pictures to upload, something has got to be sacrificed.) (more…)

Just when I was loosing my faith in the internet with a lack of good content to share with you the last couple of weeks, I’ve got 5 good pieces for you (all parenting related).

• Another hair dad, although he’s got a slightly larger audience than me (hat tip: a bunch of people and Erin at Transracial Adoptions blogged about it).
• Be a Good Dad has a good post about why Dad’s should read to their kids, something I should do a little more of.
• Anne realizes what it’s like to be the person ASKING the insensitive adoption question. She makes a good argument for not being so mean since it’s obviously easy to slip up.
• A quick search of Google news didn’t come up with anything to confirm this, but apparently there’s a 23 month old baby in China that can climb 26 stories in 26 minutes. Yordie likes to walk, but I think she needs to pick up the pace a little. (hat tip: Be a Good Dad)
• Have access to some cardboard boxes? Make some furniture for/with your kids.

Have a good weekend.

Here are some things I love about each member of  my family.  I know there are a million more.

1. I love my husband’s sense of humor,  his loyality, his knowledge, his sense of adventure, his desire to learn, and that he is the most amazing father and husband a gal could ask for.

2.  I love Meron’s zest for life, her laugh, her resilience, and the fact that she is an amazing sister and daughter.   I also love that she always teaches me about pop culture in the 5 year old world, and always has stories to brighten my day.  She is the greatest daughter I could have asked for. 

3. I love Estifanos’s smile, that he is an amazing friend, that he cares for others and animals, and that he is always interested in learning more. He always has good ideas, and he is so athletic.  He is an amazing older and younger brother, and the best son I could ask for.

4.  Yordie is amazing. I love her laugh, her talking, her energy, and her love.  She is a great sister, daughter, and is learning to be a great friend.  Her love keeps me strong.

5. My oldest pet is my cat Hana.  Hana is so loyal, and always there to sit on your lap when you have had a hard day.  She loves to cuddle.  She is named after Hana in Hawaii, and she reminds me each day to relax.

6.  Kona my younger cat.  She is timid and shy around most.  She tolerates me the best. She is sweet and has learned to love Meron who she sleeps with nightly. She doesn’t  like to be around people much, but loves to talk to us from the next room.  I love to hear her when I come home.  She also reminds me of Brian’s and my youth when we brought her home as a kitten.

7. Maui my older dog.  The most loyal pet.  She thinks she is a human and sleeps in the bed right next to me. She is caring and sweet to people.  She has welcomed the kids with open arms into her world, and she loves to sleep, play,  and cuddle with them even though she is twice their size.  I am so grateful for how patient she is with them.

8.  Dylan my 100 pound puppy.  He is the happiest dog I know.  He loves life, and reminds me to enjoy it.  He is always happy and loving.  He has been great with the kids.  He always wants to play in their games.   He sleeps with us every night,  and still eats things off the sink like he did as a puppy. He is the funniest dog I know. I love him.

These are just a few things about our clan.  Everyone in our family except Brian and I are adopted.  We come from many walks of  life, but have a ton of love for each other.

…put up a post about how real life is getting in the way of blogging.  I’ve been more busy at work than normal, I need to go back to doing experiments that have long incubation times, which gives me time to write posts.  Of course, starting a new blog doesn’t help much.  You’d be amazed at how much harder running a self-hosted blog is than a blog on wordpress.com (most of it is self inflicted because you can change so much more).

Next week at On The Fly: How come my kids never do anything funny enough to put up on my blog?

Inspired by Blaine and Julie (picture was actually on our agency yahoo group which I can’t link to…well I could, but you’d all have to join the group to see it), and perhaps someone else that I’m forgetting, I decided to try piggyback ponytails on Yordie.

Slightly out of focus, but you get the picture (oh, man that’s a pun in so many different ways):

A little better although she’s not actually looking at the camera:

Have you ever tried to take a picture of the top of an 22 month olds head?  They naturally look up at the camera.  This is the best I can do for a close up (the bottom crop isn’t mine, it’s the edge of the picture):

I think you get the idea.  You can do it with much shorter hair than you could with piggyback braids; it might be a good style for an older child with short hair (due to the orphanage shave).  You have to use a lot of rubber bands in the hair, so I do worry that it’s damaging her hair.  But it looks really good.

How’s that for a title. I’m not a tax preparer; this isn’t legal advice, yhada, yhada, yhada. But I have read more than I care to think about regarding taxes and adoption and I can point you to the right places, so lets proceed (btw, if you read Mary’s post last week about adoption taxes and my comments, you’re probably not going to learn anything new, but check out the contest under qualifying child before you leave.

Adoption Tax Credit

The adoption tax credit for tax year 2006 is $10,960 per child. Save all your receipts from the very beginning. If you’re adopting internationally and your child comes home on an IR-4, you get to take the credit in either the year that your adoption is finalized in the foreign country OR the year that it’s finalized (re-adoption) in the US. Some countries (Russia?) don’t finalize the adoption in the foreign country and make you your child’s guardian. In those cases, you have to use the year of the US finalization since you didn’t technically adopt the child in any other year. For domestic adoptions, you’re lucky and get to take the adoption credits in the year that you accrued the expenses.

Why might you want to delay the credit? You only get to use up the credit for 5 years. If you’re adopting more than one child and you can’t use all the credit in 5 years, you can essentially get 6 years to use the credit, by delaying one of the adoptions until the second year (assuming you re-adopt the following year). If you were really trying to maximize your tax credit usage, you could extend it out by waiting even longer re-adopt (although we’ve decided that being done with adoption paperwork is worth whatever benefit we might have in 6 years).

Also, the tax credit is going up in TY2007 to $11,390, so theoretically if your expenses were more than $10,960, you could get a larger tax credit by waiting until next year to take the credit.

Qualifying Child

This is less cut and dry.  Some people claim that you can claim them as a qualifying child in the year they are adopted just like you would if they were born into your family.  I read the rules as being more strict than that (see below).  If you can find an IRS ruling that says otherwise, I’ll give you $100.  My threshold for this is that I believe it enough to go back and refile our taxes claiming Yordie as a qualifying child.

The rules state that for you to have a qualifying child, your child must meet the following 5 cases:

1. Relationship – their your kid, so no problem here
2. Age – they’re probably under 18, so OK here too.
3. Residency – see below
4. Support – unless you start them off in their modeling business right away, you’re probably OK.
5. Special test for qualifying child of more than one person – Unless you divorced right after you adopted, you should be fine here too.  Maybe married filling separately would also need to look at this, but I’ve never understood why anyone would do that….seems like twice the work.

Now residency is probably the only issue that adoptive parents are going to have. If your child comes home before July 1st, then you’re set for this one. If your child was born in 2006, you’re set for this one because there’s an exception for that (also for kidnapping and going to school, but hopefully those don’t apply to adoptive parents). Under my reading there is no exception for kids joining your family in the year after July 1st (they still need to live with you half the year, just like a biological child over the age of one would).

But what if your kid comes home in July or Aug? Well, you might be able to claim them as a dependent as a “qualifying relative”. The 4 things required are:

1. Not a qualifying child test – no problem, that’s why we’re trying to go this route
2. Member of household or relationship test – their your kid right?
3. Gross income test – again, the modeling career
4. Support test – you have to provide more than 50% of the childs support for the year

Since the cost of living is lower in the country you adopted from, you’ll most likely be able to claim your child as a qualifying relative. How late you can go and still claim this, I’ll leave up to you. We were 7 months in Ethiopia and 5 months in the US. I’m pretty sure Yordie’s share of the mortgage alone is enough to make the latter more costly.

Buy qualifying relatives don’t qualify for the child tax credit or the child care tax credit, so you won’t be able to claim those in your first year home.

Claiming them as a dependent should be independent of claiming the tax credit (assuming you’re their legal parent (according to some country) and not their guardian). So you can claim them as a dependent this year and take the credit next year if you’re readopting next year (and came in under an IR-4).

That’s it. Good luck. Make sure you check out all the links; you don’t want to trust a complete stranger who’s a self-proclaimed un-expert.

Remember my review of Blue Fur to get myself a free domain name?  Well I used it to get a domain to set up a blog where I review biotech companies’ stock.  I’m trying not to associate the two blogs (obviously just from that one to this one, not vice versus) because I’m hoping to use it to land a new job.  I don’t really want potential employers to read everything about my family before I even interview.  So I linked to it in today’s web round up without identifying myself as the author.  I’ll delete this post in a few days so hopefully they won’t ever associate the two together.

And how would they be able to find out that I’ve linked to my own website?  In google you can search for link:example.com and it will give you all the places that link to a site.  Here’s the places that link to this blog.

So go have a look at my new blog, learn something about science, leave a comment or two, subscribe to the feed, or just ignore it because you’re not interested in investing in biotech stocks.

Here’s the top 5 things I found on the web that you should be reading.  Not much parenting stuff, but good reads none the less:

• Video of a sneezing panda.  You know it’s coming and it’s still funny (hat tip Jason at Dad Centric).
• Got a few hours and a photoshop like program?  You can make a picture of your car look like the characters from the movie, Cars.  Even if you’re not planning on doing it, go have a look at the pictures in the link, they’re really quite impressive (hat tip Life Hacker).
• Attention all Amazon bargain hunters.  I told you right before Christmas about a way to find only things that were on sale at Amazon, but it required some hacking of the URL.  Looks like Jungle Crazy will do all the work for you in finding stuff at Amazon that is at least 70% off (hat tip Life Hacker).
• Not sure many of you will be interested in this, but if you’re interested in investing in small biotech stocks, there’s a new blog where the author analyzes one company at a time.  Go have a read if you’re looking for investment ideas.

4 again this week.  Either I’m slacking on the reading or my standards have gone up.  Anyway, if you need more to read, check out the old versions of the web round up.