don't click on my previous email

Hi all,
Our email account was hacked today. I'm so sorry. Don't open it or click on anything please!
 
Laci and Sergio

 

 

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Almost a month

Beza has been home for almost one month already! We have been so busy I've totally neglected this blog...sorry. I thought I should post the pics. My mom and older sister also came to the airport that day so there were 13 of us there to greet her as she came up the escalator from the customs area. I think she was a bit overwhelmed but very happy too! Of course, Isabella took her right under her wing and now rarely lets her go anywhere alone, which has been such a blessing. Isabel is really great at making people feel comfortable.
However, Beza is really really shy with Sergio and I.... kind of a nervous shy. The first few days she was home, we would hug her and have to coach her to hug us back. But now she comes to find me when I'm leaving the house, or at bed time and gives me a hug and kiss and tells me she loves me. She just started this week feeling comfortable to approach me with questions like, "Can I have a piece of my candy?" or "Can you correct my math?" so we are definitely making progress. She plays really well with all the kids and laughs and jokes around with them and although she is tiny for her age, she has no problem helping to keep the boys in line! We took the kids to Ethiopian dancing last month and Beza floored me when she got up to dance! Here I thought she would be too shy to dance, but she proved me wrong. She was doing the whole shoulder thing so well that an Ethiopian woman who's daughter was also at class commented to me what a great dancer she was! She has very little English so it is hard to communicate sometimes. She seems to feel uncomfortable when I say something she doesn't understand and I don't like making her feel uncomfortable so I have found myself only trying to say things I know she'll get. Just in the past few days I'm sensing that she's feeling a little more comfortable with us having to struggle to get our points across. One thing that has helped us bond is cooking. Every evening as I'm getting dinner ready Beza comes into the kitchen to help. And for those of you who know me, YES I said every evening as I get dinner ready, Sergio is down to just one employee and with the summer days being longer he is rarely home to cook anymore so the kids are stuck with me doing it!
Nati and Ahbel are also doing really well. They have calmed WAY down to a point where I can function without needing to sneak into my room for a handful of M&M's every few hours! All the kids are just absolutely wonderful. I want to do individual posts on them so I won't take time to go into any further details now, but I will post a few pics.

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!