we wanted to give you all an update of how things are going. Abrham is adjusting to home life very well. We think this is mainly because he wanted this so bad. He wants to be here and he wants to be with us. This helps a lot! He is learning English already. It's fun trying to communicate with him and watching him learn the language. He likes to ask us questions..."Mommy, you like food?" "Hannah, you like food?" "Daddy, you like food?" and then just laughs as we answer him. We are learning two more languages from him - both Bench (his first language) and Amharic (his second language that he learned at the orphanage). The other night he counted to 10 in Bench, Amharic, and English as I frantically wrote down everything he said. When he sees that we are interested in his first two languages, he tries to teach us more. We are keeping a notebook...full of mis-spellings I'm sure, but I am spelling things out using my Spanish spelling. Pretty funny, but in the end we think it will be great for him to have as much written down as possible about his past. The other night he told us a story (some English, some acting) about the monkeys in Bench Maji and how they used to pull the bananas off of the trees, then other monkeys would come down out of the trees and fight for the bananas. We asked him how big the monkeys were and he said, "like Opa's dog" (which is a Rottweiler). We can't wait to learn more and more from him. Yesterday was Ted's first 24 hour shift back to work...and it was really hard on Abrham. He wanted Daddy home, especially at the end of the day. Lots of alligator tears yesterday!!! Keep that in your prayers. He is much different with me when Ted isn't there. Just sad and whining a lot. Today is happy again (for me too!!!), Ted is home. I am putting together a powerpoint of our Ethiopia trip to share with the World Geography classes at school. It's going to be really fun to give those presentations. Making the presenation is making me "homesick" for Ethiopia and all of the people we met there. Abrham loves to look at the pictures but they do not seem to make him sad. He just seems really happy and grateful to be here. Yesterday when we were leaving a store, he looked at me and said, "Mommy, do you like God? Abrham likes God." Pretty cool.
