Another day in paradise (heck, I needed a title)

I haven’t posted in a bit and it is a little different posting without any huge events of late.  Geta and Tamene are hardly the new adopted children anymore, they are just two of our children.  The biggest event in my life of late is the ND loss to Michigan, but I am not going to post or even speak of that again.  It hurt, but I am over it, mostly.

 

We celebrated the Ethiopian New Year on Friday.  It gives us a great reason to enjoy and celebrate on such a tragic date for America, September 11^th.  We celebrated with Sagawat (it doesn’t get any better than that).  We are also contemplating a trip to visit with Tumiso and his parents, Jim and Elizabeth Langemo.  It should be fun, but amazingly, our next free weekend is in 2014.  But we are going to pencil them in for early 2015.  We also got back into the very important things in life, yep, tailgating.  It was Geta and Tamene’s first tailgate and they loved it.  What kid wouldn’t love an all you can eat affair with a little extra freedom.  Heck, I claim not to be a kid, but tailgating should be my middle name.  Not great for my waistline, but I am learning to live with being “under tall.”

 

As for other events in our life, Courtney is enjoying soccer, with her father as the assistant coach.  Luckily, the head coach is excellent, so I can just hide in the shadows and put an ill timed joke whenever possible.  Patrick is in football full swing and loves it.  He also is getting good at guitar (acoustic thank goodness) and not getting in as much trouble, knock on wood.  Emily is enjoying life and the full house and Joshua is doing well.  He continues to tell me very elaborate detailed stories.  He loves to have an adult give him time to express himself.  It can occasionally be a long process but worth the wait.  Geta is loving school, and at church, she loves seeing her friends.  On the way to kids church today, she grabbed a friends hand and led her down to church.  Tamene probably knows a couple hundred words, but uses mostly 10-20.  Yet, he talks non-stop with the same words over and over.  Actually recently, the other kids were talking on the phone to Grandma Carlson and Tamene somehow ended up with the second phone.  He yipped and yapped for a good 10 minutes (no one else could get a word in edge-wise) before anyone let me know he had commandeered a phone and I put a painful end to his phone time.

 

Anyway, things are well but busy.  The kids are growing up but we have gotten into a routine.  There is still plenty of excitement, but today, I can’t report of any kids left at church or anything of that sort.  Stayed tuned, if I need to, I will leave one somewhere, just for the laughs that will ensue in my future story-telling.  T-6 until the next ND game.  Go IRISH.  Mike