Random bits of early summer

Thank you so much for all of your kind comments about Mr. Dimple. I so don't deserve comments and blog friends after being such a bad blogger for so many months! Please know that I read each of your comments and I am trying to get caught up on your lives too.

That fact is, while I am sad for Mr. Dimple, and it is never easy to get bad news, I also have a lot of hope for him.  Given that there is not much I can do for him until he is ours, we just continue to pray that his heart is resilient.

And life goes on...

The beauty of this time right now is that it is just us three. And we are such a close little family. Ariam is at a fun age. (Fun and frustrating and bossy and hilarious and mischevious and and and..)
Here are some of my favorite recent quotes:

"I love you with BOTH of my hearts!"

"You are my very best friend." (Said to everyone from J and I to the dogs to the drummers at a recent festival.)

"When my baby brother comes home I am going to teach him how to check his emails."

"Are you sad you aren't from Ethiopia?" (Said to us in a moment of pride in her new Ethiopian outfit.)

"We NEED to celebrate Hannukah and Kwanzaa!!" (Inspired by a new Elmo video)

She keeps us on our toes and makes us see the world differently.

We're taking advantage of having just one child who is at an increasingly flexible age. Since celebrating our family anniversary on June 1st (2 years together!) we have eaten tons of injera, danced samba, been hiking in the mountains, participated in Juneteenth celebration, danced even more, and come to Texas to visit Aya and Papa!

~A

PS. Are you all watching Downton Abbey? How did I just discover it? Staying up way too late at night catching up!!

Scared

I'm here. It's late, I can't sleep, and the usual adoption coping mechanisms of continuously hitting refresh on our creche's photo update facebook page, surfing posts in the Haiti group for tiny bits of adoption news, and chewing my lip to shreds are not working. So. Here I am.

What was I thinking with all of that zen talk? This time around is very different, but no less stressful. With Ariam I worried a lot about *us*. Would we get to be parents? When would it happen? What would it be like? What should her room look like? Would she like us? I suppose in comparison I am zen. I am not worried about us. We'll be fine.

But I am finding that with Mr. Dimple the anxiety is very high because I am so much more worried about *him*. While we enjoy summer in Colorado and our days fly by, he is living without parents. His life without parents will last much longer than Ariam's did because the process to adopt from Haiti takes so much longer than from Ethiopia. Now that I know how much a baby and toddler needs his/her parents, because I have been a parent for 2 years and seen it firsthand, my anxiety is entirely for this little guy.

Tonight we got word that Mr. Dimple is not well. He has some medical needs we knew about. But now he is pulling his hair out. And it didn't even take a g.oogle search for me to know that hair pulling is a sign of stress.

I know exactly what large group care does to children. This shouldn't surprise me. What should surprise me is how little impact institutionalization seems to have had on Ariam. I need to be more realistic that she is the exception and not the rule.

Even the best of institutional care is not natural for a baby - who yearns to be touched and looked at and deeply intimately seen and adored.

Months and months and months are what we have left. HE has so many months before he'll be part of a family. It makes me sick to think about it. Sick and scared.

~A