bodhi tree swaying

PT Sullivan, a photographer I know from New Hampshire Media Maker meet-ups sent me a link to this video he worked on. It’s another “Empire State of Mind” mashup, but much, much better than the famous “Granite State of Mind” video.

I cried watching this. Partly it was sheer joy and partly it was just having the experience of dad-hood recognized.

Enjoy:

Just a couple of days ago Malkias (who just turned one) started saying “daddy.” He totally skipped the “da” and “dada” stages and went straight for the full word. He pronounces it with a very long first A, so it’s “daaaady.” I find this utterly adorable, and I’m experiencing a new surge of love for the wee fellow. (In other news, Maia was today heard calling him “Little baby fella.”)

I recorded a brief snippet of us having a “conversation.” Here it is.

Do you think it’s as cute as I do?

(Apologies for the loud crackle a few seconds in. Malkias goes wild when he sees m iPhone and I was having to maneuver it rapidly to keep it out of his line of sight.)

I’m at an Ethiopian adoptive family picnic at UNH’s recreational facility at Mendum’s Pond, Barrington. It’s a very nice little spot – quiet and beautiful.

This is the window of Malkias’ aunt’s house in Aleta Chuko, south of Awassa. She had a lovely, spacious house, with a bamboo floor and a large garden to the rear.

In Oromia province, south of Addis, I saw a lot of men plowing with oxen. It was hard to get pictures because by the time I’d spotted them we’d have zoomed past.

There are loads of these storks at the fish market at Awassa. It’s hard to get decent pictures of them; every time I would point a camera at one, some “helpful” young boy would throw fish at it, hoping for a tip. It’s hard to photograph a stork when it’s running to get a piece of fish….

I’m typing in an internet cafe on Bole Road in Addis on one of the world’s oldest and most rickety keyboards, so please excuse any typogaphical anomalies.

We moved in to Horizon house on Friday and took charge of malkias on Saturday. BY that time he knew us quite well since we’d been visiting him every day for two weeks, and we’ve had no problems with him accepting us. in fact he’s very calm and happy with us. By the time we moved in he was smiling broadly when he saw us.

He’s well, but is cutting a tooth (top left) and the excess salivation is causing him to cough, especially at night. This has caused some lack of sleep, but we’re all doing fine.

Maia’s showing some signs of jealousy, but she also loves him. She’s learning which way his body doesn’t bend.

We had our trip to the US Embassy yesterday (monday) …

We’re at the end of the stay at our funky guest-house, which means we’re moving to a lovely suite at the orphanage guest-house and won’t have to schlepp across town anymore. Hurray!

Yesterday we went to visit a shop that sells goods made by former women wood-carriers, who have very hard lives lugging wood from the countryside into the city to make pitifully small amounts of money. We also visited Entoto market. So we’re now well stocked on souvenirs. We took Maia to the Ghion hotel, where there was a fairground. And then we walked over to Horizon House to spend some time with Malkias.

Maia’s getting very good at football.

She loves holding her little brother.

So do I….

Here’s a picture of me, Maia, and Malkias.

We had a great trip down to Awassa (actually Boracha, just outside the city) to see Maia’s aunt Manjitu, and then down to Aleta Chuko, another hour south, to see Malkias’s aunt, Yeshi. Here’s Maia and Manjitu.

We found out that Malkias is probably only 9 1/2 months old, and not 13 1/2 months old, as we’d been led to believe. That makes a lot of sense when you take his cognitive development into account.

The days after the visits we went to the fish market (much more interesting than it sounds and fed the monkeys. We got some really great pictures. Here’s a colobus monkey.

We’re going to start spending more time with Malkias this week. We’ll probably …

So tomorrow we’re off to Boracha, which is just outside Awassa, and to Aletachuko, which is about 90 minutes further south, to see Maia’s and Milkias’s birth families. We’ll be back sunday.

The stay here is going well. We’ve been doing a lot of walking around town, and everyone comes up to talk to Maia, who is “konjo” (beautiful).

There are rolling power blackouts that seem to come about every three days and last for just under a day. We dine by candle-light. I love Addis and could easily live here. For a while at least.

It’s nice to have some simplicity, and I’m finding that being offline is very good for my writing. I’ve finally tightened up the thesis of my book on the six elements, which is a relief. I think I needed to get away from the distraction of daily life in order for new ideas to percolate through.

Maia’s …

Yesterday (Tuesday) I spent the morning catching up on emails and then managed to get some writing done. In the afternoon we walked the four kilometers from our guest-house to Horizon house. Given that I was carrying Maia in a front-carrier it was a fairly long walk, but much more interesting than taking the car. We were able to notice things like boys beside the road, roasting corn on hot charcoals, and women selling candy by the roadside. My trouser cuffs were covered in mud by the time we got to HH, because of all the construction sites we passed. We tried to find out the names of the streets we passed, but many of them had no street signs. Maia slept almost all the way.

We spent more time playing with Malkias. Hopefully he’s becoming more familiar with us. Did I mention before that he’s babbling? He often says …

We arrived in Addis two days ago after a relatively comfortable journey. We all managed to get some sleep on the 12 hour flight from JFK to Dubai, and then we got some more solid sleep in the Millennium Hotel there, although we had to be up at 5:30 after getting to sleep at 11:00. The hop from Dubai to Addis is only three hours, and was also pleasant.

A driver from our guest house picked us up. The place we’re in is clean and bigger than I’d expected. The people that run it are very friendly and welcoming, and take good care of us.

Of course our first priority was to go see Malkias. Yonas, a taxi driver who does a lot of business with Horizon House, ran us over there. It’s a little under four miles away. It’s closer as the crow flies, but there’s no very direct route.

Malkias …

Tomorrow we set off on our journey to Ethiopia, during which time we’ll meet our adopted son, Malkias, for the first time. We’ll be there for three weeks, which we hope will be ample time for him to get used to being with us, and to let go of being cared for by the nannies at the orphanage.

It’s been a long process, and I’m glad it’s coming to fruition!

I’m also looking forward to seeing Ethiopia again. It’s a beautiful country full of kind and intelligent people.

I’ve been rather busy with other things and haven’t updated my blog recently. But here’s a great way to break the silence!

We just heard that our adoption cleared the Ethiopian courts and we are now the legal parents of Malkias (his birth name is Milkias but we’re making a slight change to accommodate his name to US pronunciations). We’ll be flying over there, with Maia, who was also born in Ethiopia, in the next few days.

We just heard this morning that we’ve been matched with a baby boy in Ethiopia. His name is Malkias, but because of Ethiopian regulations (very sensible ones) I’m not able to post his photograph. You’re just going to have to take my word for it that he’s very, very cute.

Apart from an sudden onset of paperwork, there’s nothing to do now until we get word of when we’ll be traveling to Ethiopia to meet Malkias and to bring him home. Our best guess at the moment is mid-April but it could be a little sooner or later.

We’re very happy!

OK, not entirely wordless this week. These are my great-grandparents, Edward Tragheim (1881 – 1971) and Jane Ann Waddell (1879 – 1973). They are my mother’s father’s parents.

I’ve been doing some intensive genealogical research recently and Edward was the son of Edward Tragheim (1861-1939), who was the son of Samuel Tragheim (1834 – ????), who was the son of Mendel Tragheim, from Hasenpoth (Aizpute), in Courland, Latvia, which was at that time part of Russia. Mendel and Samuel were certainly Jewish, but Samuel married in church and no one in my family had any notion of a Jewish connection until last week. They’re taking it well

I’d really like to figure out where and when Samuel died. He appears to have left his family in Scotland to move to London, where he made at least two patent applications. He then moved to …

My adoption agency sent a link the other day to this huge photoset of images of Ethiopian children, adoption agency staff, and adoptive families.

The New York Times has been running an fascinating series of first-person accounts of adoption from the point of view of adoptive parents and adopted children (so far nothing from people who have put their children up for adoption). The series is called “Relative Choices.” This is of great interest to me because my one-year-old daughter, Maia, is adopted from Ethiopia.

Adam Wolfington writes about being a black child in a white family. He writes with a sense of vulnerability and describes the confused questions (“How come that white lady’s your mother?”) and taunting he has received from other children, and describes also his doubts about his own self-worth. He was given up for adoption by his (I assume) American mother before he has even born, and yet he still wonders if she rejected him because there was something wrong with him. His mother sounds wonderfully supportive and reassuring, however. …

After two days staying at the Ghion Hotel in Addis Ababa and taking trips over to the orphanage to visit Maia, our newly adopted daughter, we went on an overnight trip down to Awassa to visit her birth family.

Maia is an orphan. We knew she had a surviving maternal aunt and two uncles, but we didn’t know whom we’d meet.

We traveled with a lovely young couple from Seattle, Stacey and Eric, who were adopting two sisters, Abebech and Adenech. Our driver was Solomon.

We left early on the Saturday morning, heading off not long after dawn, stopping once on the outskirts of Addis to pick up a few supplies for the road, and a few hours later to use the bathrooms at a roadside cafe.

The road to Awassa is long and straight, and it runs through scrubby savanna with …

After taking a taxi ride through the crowded streets of Addis — blue Lada taxis, modern buildings surrounded by crooked wooden scaffolding, and people everywhere being the most outstanding sights — we arrived at the Ghion Hotel, whose website claims that it boasts “specious” gardens.

We showered in our rather funky room, sitting in the tub rather than standing because the attachment for the shower head was broken, and dried ourselves on tiny towels the texture of Swedish crispbread.

The orphanage was kind enough to arrange for a ride over for us so that we could meet our daughter, Maia Bereket. The orphanage is tucked away at the end of an alley off a sidestreet that comes off of Ras Biru, and protected by heavy metal gates and a guard.

It turned out that we’d arrived on the morning that the staff were cleaning out the …

Flying into Addis Ababa I was reminded of Missoula, Montana — a place I lived in for several years. Like Missoula, Addis is in a relatively flat-bottomed valley high up in the mountains and surrounded by rounded hills covered in patches of trees. In both cases you get a strong impression of aridness in the countryside. And both cities are, in contrast to their surroundings, very green, with the tops of buildings showing through an abundance of trees.

One difference, however, was that on landing in Addis our plane was brought to a halt by a pack of wild dogs that were sunning themselves on a runway. Unable to proceed, we sat until a man arrived on a tractor and ran towards the dogs waving what I first thought was a rifle but which turned out to be just a stick. The dogs ran a little way …

Since I last wrote I’ve been to Ethiopia, adopted Maia, come back, spent a weekend in hospital (Maia had a chest infection and malaria to boot), caught up on the several hundred emails that had accumulated while I was away, and started learning how to be a dad.

In short, I’m too busy doing life to be able to write about it. I’m hoping that will change as I get used to my new roles.

Oh, and Maia’s a wee smasher!