One Year Anniversary

 Today is the one year anniversary of landing in Ethiopia for Embassy to bring Selah and Bella home. Alei and Alyssa, 18 and 13, traveled with us to meet their new sisters for the first time. We landed late and slept a few hours before morning and heading out to the courtyard to get the girls. Selah, however, somehow knew something was going on and headed in to the living room to meet us. She was quite pleased to meet her sisters that she only recognized in pictures. 

After a few minutes with Selah, we headed out and found Bella. She ran as fast as her little legs could go to get to us when she saw us.

We discovered that first breakfast their love of peanut butter!

Since we had Brooke with us later that week, it is amazing to look back and realize that I had five of my daughters all together in Ethiopia that week. I never dreamed that Brooke wouldn't be home at this point!

This picture was the taken on the way to Embassy. Selah seemed very nervous and kind of shut down. We fed her the rolls that the nannies packed to help ease her nervousness. While we were all focused on Selah, Bella threw up all over Alei without any warning. I would like to say this was a one of a kind incident, but she has gotten car sick several times in America as well and thrown up with no warning.

Alei gathered a bit of a crowd as our driver attempted to clean the vomit off her skirt with a rag that was in the van. Good times! Ironically, I picked Julia up from school early today because her stomach hurt; she finally threw up this evening and is currently asleep on my couch with a big vomit bowl. October 29th 2012 - vomit in Ethiopia...Oct. 29, 2013 - vomit in America. Some people may have just had cake!

Here are some recent pictures of my happy, happy girls well settled into their lives in America. I have to say that my experience of adopting them together has been amazing. I really think the transition has been so much easier for them having a little friend, turned sister, along for the journey!

Alyssa in South Africa Pictures

This is part 2 of Alyssa's pictures; she actually took about 1,000 pictures, so these and the Zambia pictures are just a sampling. This first picture is of Global Expedition's partner - Impact Africa; they have several schools in different squatter camps around the Johannesburg area. This specific school is in a community called Diepsloot, it has about 250,000 people living in a 2 mile radius. Impact Africa has many different groups that minister there, including church groups.

This is showing the back part of the same squatter camp; the front is about twice that width. Interestingly, if any of you have seen the movie District 9, that movie was actually filmed in this squatter camp.

This is a dump area in a squatter camp called Kya Sands. Trash is piled up in all the squatter camps that Alyssa visited, resulting in them not smelling too great. It was common to see dead (and living) rats all around them!

While they were doing one of the kids programs in Kya Sands, Alyssa shot this picture. At first she didn't realize what the man was carrying, until it started making a lot of unnecessary noise.

Half way through the South Africa part of the trip, the group got to visit a place called "The Lion Park." They were driven through five different exhibits of lions, then an exhibit of wild dogs, hyenas, cheetahs and other animals. Alyssa was anxious to get to the enclosure with "baby" lions! That's what South African's call cubs, but in all actuality some of these lions were almost Alyssa's size. This one shown was one of the very mean ones that bit her hand, and scratched her wrist, which she is still sporting marks from.

This lion a lot friendlier, she said that when she leaned down to take a picture with it, and it got up and sat in her lap!

After the lion park, they got back into ministry. This is in the squatter camp Msawawa; it was one of the smaller communities, but the kids were ecstatic to participate in the kids program called Jabalani kids. Jabalani in Zulu means happy. In the squatter camps, Alyssa and her team did shack-to-shack ministry, which is where they'd go around and talk to people, tell them about Jesus, and get to help in practical ways. With Jabalani kids, the missionaries did skits, told Bible stories and led worship for the kids. From the pictures and videos view, it looks like the team and the missionaries loved their time together!

Each color of the South African flag means something, but in each lesson they had a biblical meaning for the colors.

These are the toilets throughout every squatter camp, they're basically port-a-potties, but if you can believe it, are actually a lot worse.

While there Alyssa "got" to eat a mopani worm! Go figure, since she is one of my children very afraid of bugs! They're very similar to an American caterpillar, is what they they told her.

After shack-to-shack ministry was over, the team moved into Muslim ministry. Alyssa sadly couldn't take any pictures during it because it'd be considered rude. But there's a mall called the Oriental Plaza, which hosts a lot of middle eastern Muslim shop owners. The picture below is actually of one of the largest mosques in the southern hemisphere. After Muslim ministry, they went to this Turkish mosque that was absolutely beautiful (and cost $280,000,000 dollars to build).

At the very end of the trip they got to visit another safari, which had tons of wild animals. They also had a "Bush Braii" similar to a barbeque, except they ate things like Kudu, which is a large deer like animal. Only in Africa would they show you the animals, then feed you the same specie!

This picture is showing the end of their trip when they landed back in American soil. We are proud of the work she helped with in Africa.

Alyssa in Zambia Pictures

Since I finally got Gabriel and Alayna's wedding pictures posted, I am going to show what Alyssa was up to while she was in Africa. Her first stop was 2.5 weeks in Zambia. They ran a program called Camp Hope that was hosted at a family style orphanage. The kids that lived there did not actually attend, but it was open to the children in the community - many of them orphans that live in the nearby slums. See how they divided their teams by bandana color? Smart idea!

 Alyssa and her partner, Rachel, taught the same group of children all day for a week straight. They were only allowed to take pictures on the last day, so it wouldn't be a distraction for the children. Here is Alyssa's and her little friends  - Sara and Cephas.

Alyssa and Rachel with their entire orange group; the kids got to keep their bandana and t-shirt which was very exciting for them!

We might be noticing some favoritism here - Alyssa and Sara again.
 

The kids were also blessed with a warm blanket at the end of the week -

The kids at the family style orphanage are in desperate need of sponsors. If you are interested in sponsoring one of the children at the orphanage, let us know!
 

The following pictures were taken at a safari park that the group got to visit.

Alyssa and some of her new friends -

Tomorrow I will show a few pictures from her time in South Africa.

 

Bible Club

The kids and I joined Aunt Deb at a Bible club that was held in a low-income housing complex where she works with Afghan refugees. The kids had a great time and the most exciting part for me was we met Ethiopians - both an adopted daughter that was there helping with the program and two little Ethiopian girls that live there. Tomorrow we are going back and I'm going to meet the little girls' parents. I can see why my sister enjoys working with the refugee families - they were very kind and welcoming (about four of my children had to borrow bathrooms).

Alyssa and James were trying to convince Elijah to join in the games - it takes him a while to warm up sometimes.

My sister has a big advantage with the Afghan families; she can speak their language. I spend a lot of time smiling and nodding.



I think this picture is so cute of Aunt Deb - it captures her enthusiasm.
 

                                                                                                                 Jenny

                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                              

Homecoming Sunday

We were blessed to be invited to speak at a church yesterday on adoption. Since we don't attend a church with a choir, my little guys had never seen a choir wearing robes. As they filed in and sat down, Elijah leaned over and whispered, "do they have any clothes on under those robes?" Our initial speaking was a 10 minute teaser for an afternoon homecoming service; when I sat back down from speaking, Elijah leaned over again and commented, "you didn't even sing." Since I never sing, I'm not sure why he was disappointed.


Of course I didn't take any pictures of us talking, but I did snap this one of the girls on our way home when we stopped at WalMart to pick up some cilantro. (JD and the boys were at Lowe's next door.)

 

                                                                   Jenny

 

   

Some Progress

 I feel like there is hope of catching up in life the next two weeks. While the mission trip and wedding were busy, they were enjoyable; Julia's hours of hair a day the last few weeks has just been frustrating. I am thrilled to say that we salvaged enough hair to braid and bead. At this point, she and Tori will both be due for a new "do" right before school starts, but until then, I can focus on bigger things.

My garden is starting to look rather neglected. I picked a good bit today, but need to weed and stake some plants. I think I overestimated how many grape and cherry tomatoes we can eat. I have been giving them away, but decided today to try canning them.

I added nothing and ran them through the course food processor to keep them chunky enough for pico de gallo. My three bowls made nine quarts total. (The bottoms will settle when they cool.)

I am still fighting the bills from Selah's dental surgery. We were told on two to three occasions that it would all be filed under medical due to the nature of the surgery. Shortly after we were sent a $4,800 dental bill. They were apologetic about filing it incorrectly, but we can't get anyone to actually correct it. After filing a $81,000 (That is not a typo!) medical bill that my insurance paid $31,000 on, we thought it was finally resolved. Not so - I got a new $4,800 dental bill in the mail yesterday. Want the best part of all? One of her caps has already fallen off and has to be redone! I'm going to see if my dentist will do it rather than dealing with the children's hospital dental billing mess again. Something has gone terribly wrong with our medical system considering I had a C-section for $6,000 back in 1991!

We were invited to speak on our family and adoption at a church a few hours away tomorrow, so we are all heading out bright and early.

Loc Free!

After two to three (time has blurred) weeks, Julia's locs are out. May I recommend to anyone reading this to discourage anyone you know from locing their young child's hair. I thought it would be an easier solution for Julia, who screamed her way through every hair session, but it was very painful going in and coming out! I thought we were going to have to pretty much cut them all out, but I really only had to cut about a third and then we painstakingly untangled all 500 of them! 

My house is a horrible mess and my laundry is piled sky-high, but I took out Julia's braids (that I put in as I took out the locs) and we headed out to get it trimmed and for the Chinese lunch she has been waiting for.

She was all smiley at the salon, but it had little to do with the hair cut and everything to do with the pending Chinese.

To be honest, I was concerned when it was a white woman assigned her hair, but since I don't like it when people assume I know nothing about the girl's hair, I gave her the same respect. When she asked if she could cut it dry before she washed it, my red flag went up. I told her that she can't comb it dry, so I would prefer she wash it first. She obliged and the cut went fine.

I realize you can't tell much difference in pictures, but her hair does look nice and healthy and even. Tomorrow we will be corn-rowing it, while the house finishes degrading from messy to disaster; tonight she is going to swim 
awards with a fro!

At Chinese


If you wondering what I've done on Julia's hair breaks - here's Tori -

                                                                            Jenny