On the ground

We're here and we have him! We got in Wednesday night local time, which equated to about 24 hrs for us door-to-door. After getting situated at our hotel, we actually got a good night's sleep before our big day on Thursday.

There are 3 other families here with our adoption agency at the same time so we all trekked together to the agency care center yesterday morning and picked up our babies, just like that! Every family is a little different--one's a single woman with her mom adopting her first child, a 4-mo old girl. Another is a family of 5 adopting their 4th child, a 10-yr old boy named Ismael. The third family has a 4-yr old and is adopting an 18-mo old girl.

Reece is quite an easygoing fellow, it seems--my worst fears of his being freaked out by our big white faces did not materialize. He takes to about anyone who will hold him, so he likes us pretty well. He's a chubby little guy, too! The caregivers told us they were feeding him two bottles at night in addition to his daily gruel. This information meant nothing to me, but those in the know (females) agreed that 2 bottles a night for a 9-month old wasn't necessary. I guess they were right, because our little guy slept 11 hrs straight last night! He's been a little more fussy today. I suspect that may be because we haven't fed him any solids, only formula (that's all we brought). My next stop after this internet cafe is the grocery store...He's also fighting a cold--one of our first pictures with him shows his lower face covered in snot he sneezed up when we first met.

I've really enjoyed Ethiopia and the people. Admittedly, we're having a pretty cush experience because we have drivers who shuttle us effortlessly from place to place. There's an agenda of suggested activities from the agency and plenty of hand-picked restaurants that cater to western tastes, so a lot is done for us. I did get my first taste of Ethiopian food in Ethiopia and liked it a lot. It is a bit spicy, but I'm enjoying the sensation of spongy injera (their "bread") and the new mix of spices in their food.

The city itself is pretty chaotic, with goats, pedestrians, bikes, cars, and diesel-spewing trucks sharing the roadways and a helter skelter jumble of commerce (primitive shacks hawking local wares in the shadows of glitzy 1st-world businesses) lining the roads. I think it's a fairly typical developing world big city, with these distinctions: lots of beggars who are pretty insistent but not aggressive. This means that they come to the car door and beg (or hawk goods), but don't go away when I say "no"--they just continue hovering or repeating the same sales pitch. But they don't get in my face or try to step it up. The other distinction is the people--very friendly, very hospitable, very gracious.

Ethiopians are VERY baby friendly. All kinds of people have trotted Reece around already, including random elderly women in the orphanages we visited and the waiter at the restaurant last night. It's really cool and really safe. In fact, at the orphanage we left him with an older woman (a cook) who insisted on holding him, toured the rest of the orphanage, then came back. On the one hand, it seemed strange to leave him with a stranger 6 hrs after getting him, but you get the sense that that's just how it's done here! Plus, Reece really is easygoing, so he doesn't mind--rather fancies the attention, I gather.

Something else we've enjoyed is riding with him in the back seat of the car with no car seat. Traffic is crazy but slow--I have yet to see even a fender bender, but if you saw the traffic you think there'd be wrecks everywhere. It's fun playing with him and watching him observe the world go by through the windows. We know this is not an option at home, and thought we might anxious about the safety issue, but it's worked out great.

I'd like to attach some pics, but it took a full minute for my e-mail inbox to load, so that doesn't bode well for uploading pics. Perhaps I can get some internet time at the Sheraton, although I've heard that "broadband" doesn't mean the same here.

We're just so happy to be holding baby Reece. The rest is gravy. Ok, hope to post more soon--