Our playground

A fantastic afternoon at the park with Dessi's best friend, Aidan, his little brother, Sam, and his little sister, Juniper, newly adopted from China.

Adai loves the slide! Basically she'll thrill to anything that gets the wind blowing through her hair.

Ethiopia Reads

While in Addis we spent a morning with Alemseged, the in-country director for Ethiopia Reads.

Ethiopia Reads is great. They have a roaving library of books to reach far-flung locations (I think it's a cart pulled by a donkey) and they stock the libraries of local schools throughout Ethiopia. Without Ethiopia Reads, there would be school libraries, but no books. NONE!

We contacted him through email -- which is segedmh147@gmail.com (if you want to reach him send several emails with catchy subject lines because he will have to just happen to see it while scanning his junk mailbox) and offered to buy some Amharic books for a school. He called one of the local schools and got a wishlist from them, then we all went together to buy the books and drop them off.

We bought 35 books. The ones they picked out were a little more academic than I would have chosen myself, but I was glad we were able to do at least a little something (it worked out to about $75 plus cab fare) and that the books were printed and bought locally and written in Amharic. In retrospect, all these months later, I wish we had spent / bought more, but at the time I was going through so much every day just in hotel expenses. Now, the opportunity to do more is gone, but alas, it is what it is.

Here we are at the bookstand



Dessi helped package them all up for us



With the teachers at the school library



The local printing press

Less than two

I came across this tonight while looking for something else. I just love it. Taken at a wedding at Lake Macdonald in Glacier Park.

It was the summer before Dessi turned two, and she was a handful. Challenging, obstinate, difficult overall, flush with humiliating tantrums and snottiness. More than once I drank wine while she had an afternoon nap. Our worst few months ever as a mamma-baby team. And then moments like this, full of wonder and intimacy and not another person in the world but us.

Snowboard Girl

I do not tell her to make these faces. I just take out the camera and this is what she does.

Random moments

Dessi found these goggles in the house and spent a solid two hours swimming around the living room. It's cuter on video, but it won't upload.



Here's Adai taking a break from banging her ketchup bottle against the cabinet.



And this is Dessi, drawing . . . ME!

Sisterhood

The girls really love each other. Like, sooooo much. Dessi particularly loves to match her PJs to Adai's.



I had been having some trouble showering because every time I took even the fastest of hosedowns I would emerge with Adai crying. On this particular occasion, I heard laughing! Tons of giggles!! I smiled and poked my head out of the bedroom only to see Dessi standing at her new easel with a painbrush in hand, painting her sister. And I don't mean painting her portrait.

I feigned horror, Dessi took a time out, and then I sneaked over to Adai and took her picture.

Doesn't she look like she thinks she's in trouble?