Day 91

Today is the 91st day of our life with Micah in Oklahoma City (that means we've been united as a family close to one-hundred days). During that time, our lives have been altered in countless ways; however, our old lives already seem distant and surreal.

Our second trip to Addis Ababa was vastly different from our first. We stayed in a positively lovely guest house, to which we were more-or-less sequestered for the bulk of our trip. We were fortunate to share the house with another adoptive family who was adopting two siblings from our agency. We shared meals and spent afternoons talking with the house staff and begging for their recipes for doro wet and shiro wet (pronounced dora watt and sheero watt).On several occasions we shared drivers to the Monthly NGO Market and to Layla House, where Micah spent many of the first months of his life.

Micah was well cared for by all of the nannies at Layla, but two in particular took a special interest in him and were sad to see him leave. Toward the end of our week in Addis, the both said bittersweet goodbyes to him and told him they loved him in Amharic. It was truly beautiful to see and comforting to know that Micah had been loved while he was in care at Layla.

The flights home were smooth, by long. Out of Addis we flew Ethiopia Air, and were truly treated like dignitaries. We were escorted to the front of lines in the airport and other passengers cleared the aisle and sent us to the front of the line any time we took Micah to the restroom. Although we could not have been treated more graciously on the flight, 18 hours is a long time to sit in the middle seat of an airplane. The length of the flight was confounded by the fact that the delightful woman from Cameroon in the seat next to me did not seem too please to be sharing the aisle with two new parents and a very active baby.

We landed in Washington D.C. the day following the assignation of Osama Bin Laden. Needless to say, security was extremely tight and the TSA employees were even less friendly than usual. For some reason they were neither sympathetic to the fact that we had been in flight for nearly an entire day, nor to the fact that we had a new baby. Needless to say, our TSA experience was a little traumatic, in part because the ground still felt like it was moving and because we were experiencing some serious confusion about the current time zone and its implications on our lives.

Somewhere between Washington D.C. and Denver, I developed an upset stomach that I now attribute entirely to the sheer stress of knowing that we were bringing home a child, who was going to live with us, forever. My stomach was upset for about three days, at which time (either because I adjusted, or from complete exhaustion) it promptly departed. On our final flight we sat in the back of the plane across the aisle from a man who ad adopted internationally and a flight attendant who herself was adopt. It was wonderful to be surrounded by people who were not only excited, but understood the difficulty of travelling internationally with an eleven month old.

In our short time home, Micah's personality has grown and evolved. He's become more comfortable with his surroundings and his parents, he's become increasingly more affectionate, and he's napping and sleeping consistently. Most recently, he's taken to jabbering virtually non-stop. He clearly has thoughts and opinions that he is desperately trying to share with us. Once we've mastered the use of more discernible words, I'm sure we'll enjoy every bit of what he has to say.

Micah is also cruising around our furniture like a champion and he's walking holding on with only one hand. If he ever figures out that he can actually support himself and walk without our help, all home decor will be re-homed to four feet above the floor and higher. This may make for an unusual sense of fung shui in our home, but it is probably for the best.

Our lives are certainly different than they were four months ago, and I have sojourned a long way from the queasy-stomached fathered who walked off a commuter jet with a nearly year-old baby in his arms. Our evenings are quieter and our days more ordered and routine. For the most part we've enjoyed the change of pace; however, in the midst of this incredibly hot summer, I have on many occasions longed for the 8:00 p.m. ice cream runs of summers past. Micah has done outstandingly well, and we are so blessed for him to be part of our family forever.

Ryan