Slideshow of photos taken between October and December.  

Sledding videos    

 It’s 11 am on Christmas Eve and the girls have been playing for hours, quietly, in the other room. Dad is in the basement wrapping presents and getting the tree ready. These are still milestones for us, as minute as they seem – when they don’t follow us every step of the way, when we can be out of sight for a few minutes, when they are playing with each other without direct supervision. Beti put her shoes on by herself twice within the last two days! This is significant – it’s not been for lack of skill but they love being treated as babies, getting all the attention.  Overall, they continue to do really well – there is so much laughing and giggling and cuddling and loving going on, it’s great.

The Advent and Christmas season brought back much of the magic, and I am very grateful for it. It also showed off just how much greater their emotional independence is these days. Around Thanksgiving, I was still concerned that without a pretty carefully planned schedule we’d all go crazy inside the house. This time around, we were able to hang loose for several days and were content reading books and playing games, even doing homework. We also took them sledding, and they loved their first encounter with the snow!!! Bamu in particular is fearless, going down face first on her belly without prompting (this after she declared “Me faster” in the car without having the slightest idea what this was all about).

Since our local swimming pool closed for maintenance in mid November, we experimented with tumbling classes for a bit but they didn’t take to those quite like the water or the snow. I had forgotten how much fun it was to be in the water with them until we took them back just recently and neither of us could stop smiling. No sign at all of having “forgotten” anything they learned in the fall, if anything, they were even more excited. Another favorite pastime now is story time at the local library, with a “teacher” who does a tremendous job, and also happens to be an incredibly beautiful black woman just like Bamu’s daycare provider.

After I had started working, I soon realized that with less time around the girls my ability to tune into the little things significantly diminished. All of a sudden my focus was entirely on logistics and rules. I felt I missed out on so much, and things became at the same time easier and harder. Easier because much of the guiding and correcting came from Ted who has been picking them up after school. By the time I’d get home for dinner, things usually had calmed down, and I got to enjoy their excitement and enthusiasm. Harder because I didn’t have the same emotional connection. This can’t be it, I keep telling myself – there must be a way to still get a regular, albeit shorter, work day in while maintaining the awareness, the softness and the openness in the heart to see each moment as it is, fresh, unique, precious.

It helped that I was re-living much of the early days of raw emotion after we came home with them in the summer recently. For one, adoptions from Ethiopia have gotten much harder now, with lots of unknowns and delays, in an effort to curb corruption and ensure “due process”. It literally feels like we snuck in under the curtain! To think that at this time last year we got to see their pictures for the first time, and were “pregnant” with all the anxiety and anticipation of our future family, is beyond grasp for me still. And as our love for them grows daily, I keep looking at them and shaking my head in amazement at all the blessings, and what a perfect match they are for us.

The other thing of course is that there has been another outpouring of love and support from friends and family near and far this holiday season, and many more people asking how our little family came about. It was also incredibly moving to be singing music in our winter concert series that highlighted this particular mix of emotions. This is especially touching as the girls are quite used to me singing now, and often ask about it. They love listening to the recordings, they quote pieces, and they sing themselves – I am continually amazed at their ability to repeat what they hear. Bamu was even whispering “Alleluja, Alleluja” into my ear at night!

For weeks now, everything has been “Why, Mama?”, in particular coming from Bamu. It’s an endless litany of questions, not just about things we say or do but about objects, a way to order the world with limited words. I chuckled when my sister-in-law, who spent 2 weeks with us in December, finally ended the conversation one day with “because I said so”. The other thing Bamu does consistently lately is “Name, Mama?”, pointing to this and that – and not only an object like a door, but the door handle, the hinge, the molding… She’s also taken to calling me “Mother”, as in “I love you, Mother”. Melting my heart.

They did really well through the transitions associated with Ted’s trip to Greece in December. Gigi took his place, and they absolutely adored her. As an experienced mum, she not only spoiled us with scrumptuous dinners and Greek cookies, but I also enjoyed watching how situations might be handled, with creative answers and ways to redirect that might not have come to me that way. Plus, when they got up in the morning, always a little too early for my taste, they were perfectly content snuggling in bed with her for a bit while I got to hit the snooze button a few more times.

They have started growing and gaining weight, overnight it seems. Once I realized it, I couldn’t stop commenting on it. Bamu has taken to wanting to be picked up a lot and somewhere along the way I “gave in” too much so now I am paying the price… I’m starting to feel it in my back! Then again, it’s all valuable snuggle time, just as when she wants to sit in my lap for dinner – so to heck with the rules and teaching them how to eat like a civilized human being! At night, we had a phase when she was crawling on our chest to fall asleep, and these were divine moments. Of course that couldn’t last forever, so now we just hold hands, equally tender in some ways. Best of all, she seems to have found a new state of calm and is sleeping through on most nights now J

Beti, too, has mellowed out considerably. She still struggles a bit more than her sister, and quickly gets frustrated. But she is learning to deal with these frustrations in new ways, and we trust that she has figured out that we are standing by her no matter what. She smiles more often and is blossoming in her own way, her face turning radiant and her eyes lighting up when she relaxes. She loves to be goofy and cracks herself up, just like dad. She continues to amaze us with her ability to observe, remember, and put things together in her mind that we would never expect. My most frequent expression these days must be “How did you know that?!?”.

She has taken to talking about Ethiopia, instead of the name of her home town. She started praying at the dinner table all on her own, and has been teaching us to make the cross Ethiopian style. At night, it is very moving to hear her say “Thank you for my family”. But she does get confused, her memories blending with recent experiences, and new tales being spun every day. Her cousins Peter and Sam, so far the most present in her life here, now exist in Ethiopia as well, although as “different cousins”. Then again, there is also clarity – she pointed to a picture of an African American gentleman the other day, stating “Baba”. When I told her this wasn’t Baba, she said “My Baba”. Upon querying for her Baba’s name she correctly stated it. She also declared he was a good cook. What I would give for a larger window into her mind to see how she sorts all this out.

The possessive is a frequent recurrence in their language these days. It started a while ago with Bamu declaring “It’s my friend” when looking at a picture. Next was “It’s mine” and frequent admonishments about sharing books and toys. We now have progressed to “It’s my turn” and are working on the correct personal pronoun. “Me no crying”, “Me bathroom”, “Me do it”… it’s all there but the “I” thing seems harder to grasp. Then again, their way of expressing things is so much simpler – one grammatical structure, that’s it. No need for tenses, conditional, and in some cases even verbs.

Animals are still a favorite part of our day. As early as 4 weeks after coming home, the tiger had become a well known member of our household. It started with Bamu waking up one day with a cold sore on the corner of her mouth – it took forever to heal, and we kept up the story of the tiger that she had chosen to use as an explanation – to the point where “tiger bit you” became a proper noun for all sorts of other pains and hurts. Soon after I realized her footed PJ’s were too small when she pointed to her toes in the morning and complained that the tiger had been here, she declared that he would come and sit in the chair at night… These days, the tiger (or sometimes the lion) accounts for anything unexplainable, or inadmissible: who cut the hole in the pants? The tiger!

Well, I knew it would take me longer to write the next update after going back to work. It was just a taste of how “dry” things might get, quickly, if we let them. I don’t know how other people do this – all I can hope for is continued flexibility in the schedule and the ability to take it all in despite other pressures. In January, Ted goes back to work, so our little home routine will need to be adjusted once again. Par for the course, I realize that – I’m still open to advice J

Best wishes from all of us for a blessed year 2012. Beti, Bamu, Ted & Maria.