Unsinkable

Only two days until we leave!  Finishing packing right now, aside from a few toiletry items.  Thank you all so much for the wonderful donations!  We managed to get most of them in our suitcases, with the exception of a few boxes of used clothes and shoes, which we'll ship up to Minneapolis to our adoption agency for other families to bring with them.

I am so excited…  The one thing I'm apprehensive about is that we received confirmation that Rose speaks neither English nor Amharic, which means she speaks one of the other eighty-four languages they speak in Ethiopia.  So the language barrier will hopefully be overcome quickly…

 But everything else is promising and exciting!  Too tired right now to form coherent thoughts, though, so I'll check in later. 

As you can imagine, I have a bit of work to do before leaving Saturday to go to Ethiopia.  There's the packing, cleaning, and house prep.  There's the finishing six weeks of work so I can take off on maternity leave with a clear conscience and a clean slate.  And then there's a bunch of moonlighting I need to do, which is basically how we're paying for this adoption.  

So I sort of had big plans this afternoon when I left work and went to pick up D from Anna.  I was hoping to get at least a few things done during the course of the afternoon.  But D had other plans.  First, we had to go play air hockey with Aunt Kate, which had been on Dillon's to do list for, like, a week, and he's brought it up every day to me.  So we played for a while, ate some pie, then Kate and Dillon played and I fell asleep on Kate's pillow fort. 

After I awoke from that short nap, Dillon decided we were going to play some cards, so he beat me at Uno a few times, then at Alphabet Go Fish.  I flopped into an office chair that has recently made its way into our living room and he decided to spin me around in circles until I was dizzy and then push me around the living room and down the hallway in the chair.  Dharma hopped up for a spin, too.   

At some point I looked up and it was 4:15 and I had to leave to go to a meeting.  But I can't help thinking that laughing and playing with D all afternoon was as important as any of the other things I could have done today.

Thanks to Amy L. for sending me this link:

http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/FOOD_IS_ART/mideast/ethiopia_yemen.html

Which has very accessible writing about typical foods, etc., in Ethiopia, in case we're going to try to do some Ethiopian cooking when we get back to make Rose feel welcome and at home.  Of course, we could just order out from Lula's , which is awesome too!