So Glad to Be Home!

We are home!  We left for the airport in Addis at 7:00 p.m. Sunday evening or 10:00 a.m. CST.  Get this... we arrived home at our house at 5:00 a.m. Tuesday morning.  Just in case you are wondering, YES, IT WAS HORRIBLE!  Our flight was late leaving Addis and our refueling stop in Rome took an extra hour.  We arrived late in D.C. and so we missed our second flight.  We sat in D.C. for over seven hours and finally caught our second flight.   Our third and final flight was not to our original destination.   Because our third flight did not get us to our original destination, we had an additional three hour drive home.  Coffemom and her family were in Addis last week also, and I was so glad I had her to share in the long trip home.  Her Marta is so very sweet and was beaming each time I saw her.  

We finally arrived in our house at 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning.  Over 40 hours of traveling.  H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E!

Yesterday was tough.  We read to have just a few toys for the kids and I thought we had limited the toys in their rooms.  No, we didn't.  I guess one toy per room would have been better because we spent the entire day yesterday hearing two little girls determining each toy as MINE.  By last night, I was so tired of being a referee.  

We all slept between 12 and 15 hours last night, which was great for everyone.   Madison and I got up at 5:30 this morning and put away a bunch of toys, so today has been better.  The kids English is so much better than we were expecting and that is a huge blessing.  The most common words said at home so far are:  mine, come, play, swing, eat, drink, juice, doll, glasses.

The kids have asked for bananas, peanut butter on bread, juice, milk, apples and grapes.  They eat about every two hours.  Travis told us in ET to keep plenty of food available as it would help with emotions (always helps with mine!)  We've carried the advice through to here also.  The other advice we received in ET was to be flexible.  And being flexible here at home has been a life saver for my sanity.

The very best thing that we took with us to ET were little, cheapy picture albums filled with all the pictures we had of the kids from Gladney and other APs.  Then we also put in photos of family, house, dogs and their school.  They poured over the albums.  They loved telling us their friends who were in the background of their pictures and they loved naming all of our family, "Grandmuzzer, Grandfazzer, Kusin, Sister, etc."

I kept a journal while in Addis.  I hope to take excerpts and post them here in the next few days.  Haven't looked at our pictures yet, and hope time allows for that soon.

This morning we pulled up a few blogs of the kids' friends that now live in "A-merr-i-ka."  They loved seeing them.  They are playing on the swing set right now, where it is a mere 108 degrees outside.  Dustin's parents gave us a great swing set with Madison and Sage were smaller.  It has a few swings, slide, stairs, climbing ropes and two "tree houses" mounted at the top.  I turned my back for a few minutes and one of the girls was on top of the roof of a treehouse!  Oh my!

Not to give the idea that all is a bed of roses at our home, we experience fits often, sometimes egged on by a sibling and sometimes for reasons we do not understand.  We hold them close and hug them through it, even when they try to push us away.  We know it is a part of the process and I tell myself often that it certainly not personal.  It's just kids trying to cope the best they can.  Sometimes we see beautiful smiles with unprompted 'thank you's' and sometimes we see some one of them take a toy and throw it across the room away from their sibling.  Sweetness and goodness mixed with hurt, confusion and grieving.

Sorry for the scattered thoughts, but wanted to post something just to let everyone know we were home and alive!