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"!

My apologies for taking so long to post, things are quite busy around here and I've been back to posting on FB because it's so much quicker.
Things are going well, it's just very chaotic. You would think having 7 kids in the home would have been busy but up til now our home has usually been very laid back. Nati and Ahbel are definitely keeping us all on our toes. They are good kids and we've seen lots of good things these past few days but if you can imagine having two toddlers who drink coffee all day rather than milk you will begin to imagine the energy level we have now! Both boys are just in the testing stage, testing to see how things like lights and DVD players work, testing to see what they can get away with, testing to see if they beg 500 times for the same thing if I'll finally give in and give them what they want! I've been very emotional I think just from being so tired and I almost cried today when Sergio was going to run errands and didn't want to take the boys with him. I don't feel frustruated with them I just needed some peace for awhile. Sergio ended up taking the boys and a few girls with him, I vaccumed and mopped the floors, switched the laundry and got dinner going and was so happy to see the kids when they got back.
All the kids are getting along very well, they all play together. Le'oul is doing a wonderful job of being the oldest brother. He is a natural leader and seems to be thriving with his new role. I gave him a hug today and told him "I don't think either one of us would ever imagine that you would be considered one of the calm kids, but praise God, He works everything out for good.!" We both had to laugh at the thought of it!
Nati and Ahbel are both cuddly and come to me many times during the day for affection, they have really good eye contact, and apologize on their own when they do something wrong. These are all really good signs of them having the ability to attach. Nati is also very compassionate and always gives hugs and tries to cheer people up when they are sad.
I'm too tired to write anything else but here are some pictures from the past week. I'll post pics from Ethiopia some other time hopefully.