More Birthday Pics

Happy Birthday Nati

We celebrated Nati's 9th birthday today! We really have no idea when his actual birthday is or how old he is but I've always liked the date May 27. I actually picked it out for Hana but we ended up not using it because she knew her real birthday. Legally on paper Nati should be turning 8 next month but we are sure he is older than that, in fact if you ask him how old he is he will tell you 9 so we gave him the choice of either turning 9 today or turning 10 later in the year. He chose to turn 9 today which I think is pretty accurate. When we do the readoption we'll make this his legal birthday.
He picked donuts for breakfast, pasta with berbere for lunch and turkey burgers for dinner! He was just thrilled all day long! Right when we were about to eat this morning, he ran upstairs to get his "Happy Birthday Hat" as he called it. It is the yellow crown in the picture you see below. After lunch we went to the park for awhile then to Costco to pick out his cake. As soon as he saw the cake with an American flag on it he said, "Oh mommy, America, America, I love! Me this mommy, me this!" It was too cute.
Nati went to work the other day with Sergio and earned a little money with which he bought himself a HUGE bag of candy. (Obviously I was not the one who took him to the store to spend his money!) When it was time for cake tonight Nati gave every body a lollipop from his bag and stuck it in their cake. He is such a generous kid, he wanted to make sure that he did something special for other people on the day we were doing special things for him.
We got him 3 gifts. Walkie Talkies, a wet/dry habitat thing where you can keep a frog (the kind you send away for the tadpole and get to watch it grow), because he LOVES anything that's alive: frogs, ants, flys, anything, and a cheap MP3 player because Nati loves music and dancing. Oh and the kids bought him a woopie cushion, which of course just cracked him up!
Tomorrow we'll wake up and have just one more day until Beza comes home!

First Hugs With The Boys

Here are the pics from me meeting the boys at the airport! Sorry they are in backwards order, I don't get why they ended up that way. The boys are doing so well I can hardly believe it. They are such wonderful kids. We are very blessed to have them in our family.

First few weeks in pics

The last pics are of the kids at the Ethiopian dance classes we attend in Seattle. I think they must have done lots of dancing at Kidane because Nati is familiar with all the different types, even "heep hope", as he calls it! I have lots I want to say about how things are going around here, but don't have the time so I'm cheating with pictures and video!

Hana and Beza Reunited!

For those of you who don't do Facebook, here's a video of when Hana and Beza were firt reunited in Ethiopia! We are counting down the days til May 29 when Beza will be home for good!

Telephoning Jesus!

Here is a video of the boys singing one of their favorite songs. It has been so fun to hear them sing. There's been a few songs I thought they were singing in Amharic only to find out after paying closer attention they were actually singing in "English"!