Another Month Down

Which makes

months since we were added to The List. Only 14 more to go!! Yayyy....

Learning Amharic

One of our projects while waiting is to learn a bit of Amharic, as we have bumped up the requested age of a child of our adoption. Since our future kiddo may have some language when coming home with us, it would be in everyone's best interest for us to be able to communicate a little bit, but I have also learned that the best way to learn Amharic is to be born an Ethiopian baby in an Ethiopian family in Ethiopia--it's pretty different and pretty darned hard.

So we got this book/CD combo this week:

(Simple Amharic for Adoptive Families)



This is an excellent resource for us, and exactly what we were looking for.

And it broke our hearts.

Here are the first few phrases:

I am your mommy.
I am your daddy.
You are going to live with us.
We will take good care of you.
We are so happy to be your family.
Don't be afraid.
We are going to ride on an airplane!

This long-distant future, elusive, theoretical experience of going to Africa, meeting our child and bringing them home to live with us just slammed us upside the head in a major way. The loss, the fear, the confusion our child will face...I think I just actually, truly started processing this. We are doing our homework, reading the books, taking the classes. But attempting to explain to a child just how much their life is changing, for better or worse, is just...I don't know. Inconceivable. Understanding from their point of view...also inconceivable. But we will try. And try. And try.

Honestly, I could write a novel or a completely incomprehensible blog post, so I think I'll stop while I'm ahead. And I will slowly, and I'm sure incompletely, attempt to wrap my head around this aspect of adoption.

Ethiopia Adoption Program Update

We were just informed by our agency that the Ethiopian government is going ahead with plans to close specific orphanages over the next few months; these institutions are being closed for a variety of reasons. One orphanage is connected to our agency, although the relationship is extremely new and (to my knowledge) few, if any, referrals have come out of this particular program. Instead, the relationship has involved the creation of humanitarian programs, which will continue to build with the hope that the orphanage can apply to be licensed again in the future.

The closure of orphanages was discussed back in March when the slowdown happened, so this is not particularly surprising. I'm glad that our agency will, at this time, not be overly affected by these decisions, and they strongly support efforts to ensure ethical adoptions. We hope the institutions they work with will not be affected in the future.

Referrals will likely be extremely slow in the coming months as court closes in Addis for the monsoon season.

Fourth in the Mountains

For the Americans out there, happy 4th of July! Without much to talk about regarding our adoption (other than 4 referrals last week--not too shabby!), we did have a really fun weekend hanging with my parents in the booming metropolis of Mineral, California. Population 90.

Booming. Metropolis.

Maggie was an angel on the long drive down...

Mineral is located in Lassen Volcanic National Park (ignore my Seattle-white legs, btw--they just may blind you)

The lovely cabin...

We did nada, zip and zero. Just mainly read, slept and yakked. (beware the picture below. it may traumatize you)

We also drank many, many lattes topped with whipped cream and crushed-up Heath bars. Again, not too shabby!

A lovely weekend! Hope everyone had a safe and fun 4th of July!

**Oh, and it was H-O-T!!!