A Little Update - Five Weeks as a Family of Six

Amazingly, I've had a request to update the blog! I must say, it gave me just the motivational boost I evidently needed. Thanks, GUC! Well, we've been home for just over 5 weeks now, and it's still snowing. :D In two days, it will be the one year anniversary of when we sent in our first piece of paper to America World to begin this whole process. It really was a whirlwind, a divine whirlwind, of a year. Here are a few highlights (and lowlights?) from our time all together in the good ol' USA.

We've begun to use Eyasu's new name, Ezekiel, more and more over the past 2-3 weeks, but I have to say that the habit of using Eyasu is dying hard for most of my family. He doesn't show any resistence to his new name, though, and is responding to it now. Ezekiel (which may soon morph to Zeke for me, at least) and his siblings are totally in love with each other. I could not be more proud of how the big kids have taken in their new brother and helped Ben and me with his care. They have made his adjustment 10 times easier, I know. They all play together at any opportunity. Maren, however, is known to really annoy the new baby of the family at times because she can't resist playing with his earlobes, which are very big, soft and floppy. E's language acquisition is picking up in speed daily now. He has lots of new words and understands much of what we say of the things we repeat often. He does have some speech difficulties with not being able to readily make certain sounds, primarily his fricatives, /s/, /z/, /sh/, /v/, /th/, etc. Jammies = Jammie-t. Sylvia is more like Tilvian. Yeah, he closes off words that are vowel-final with an /n/ sometimes.

Our first weeks home, I really tried to not go out too much, to help him feel secure in his new home and just focus on our immediate family. Now, we're venturing out to the store and other places. We've been to church three times now, and we've made it a little longer each time. He went into his class for 2 year olds this week and did really well. He occasionally got a little clingy, but not for long. He acted really well when he heard the words "snack" and "playtime." :D

Ezekiel has gotten into a phenomenal sleep routine. He really only had a couple weeks that he had screaming fits at bedtime and naptime. I guess he still cries usually for a few minutes at naptime, but he sleeps from about 2-3 pm. Then goes to bed at 8pm and is up at 7am. You can't imagine how grateful we are to the Lord for this blessing of peace at night! His eating is coming along. That first week, we thought we'd pull our hair out with his fits over everything. He would shovel huge amounts of food in at the speed of light, not attempt to chew it, and swallow it all whole. That's what it seemed like, anyway. He would dissolve into a tantrum when we stopped the flow of food eventually. But, he's not nearly so obsessive now and he's definitely learning the meanings of CHEW and SLOW and SMALL BITES as all of us remind him hundreds of times at each meal. It's really quite funny sometimes.

Healthwise, all is well. He had a round of vaccinations last week which left his poor little legs so sore that he didn't want to walk after his afternoon nap. It really was a bad reaction and I could tell he was in a lot of pain for quite a while. But, he was fine. He just finished his second round of treatment for giardia, an intestinal parasite, and I'm hoping that that will "take" this time.

Well, I've got to run. In the photos, there is one with our phenomenal Baby Fold caseworker and friend, Jennifer, who did a great job in training us and doing our homestudy. There's also a photo of us at the Miller Park Zoo, which is just down the street from us. That was about our first family outing. The animals are always more active in the colder weather, so we try to do that every winter once. The family photo was taken yesterday on Valentines Day at church. It was the first one we've had taken since our second day home. Time to make dinner. I should say that we had many friends bring dinner to us over the first 4 weeks home and that was the biggest blessing ever!!! Thanks, friends, for all your support of ALL KINDS! Love you! s~
ps- was this ok, Great Uncle Charlie? :D