Month: November 2011

One morning, I thought it would be good for me to go out and take a walk and take some additional photos of the city of Addis Ababa. It turned out that I probably had more pictures of the city than I did of our child, but when we were together, we were watching him and trying to be parents for the first time.

So onto the streets I walk and as mentioned the last time, the store fronts all are painted with bright colors, most likely to draw attention to each particular store. Also, every morning, the store owners take off the metal doors covering their shops for the night and they also most the walk-way. The streets really aren’t paved like you and I know streets to be paved so you see quite a bit of dirt and dust on the sidewalks and Ethiopian people want the entry to their store to be as clean as possible.

There are a ton of convenience stores in Ethiopia. This is an example of a convenience store. It’s really just a small booth, sells water, drinks, and other sundry items.

In the stores that sell clothes, they all have mannequins out front and I’m guessing that most store owners don’t own stands that stay up, due to the sometimes rough sidewalk and so the owners hold the mannequins up by the neck, which is strange.

This would be a typical thoroughfare through Ethiopia. And this is pretty early in the morning, maybe around 8:00 or so. The blue cars with the white tops are taxi cabs.

You sometimes see these ladies cleaning streets.

I would have thought that there is no food in Ethiopia, but sometimes it is plentiful.

These are also cabs, these vans, and they’re more common. It’s more or less like a bus system where people get on and off.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s also common for people to get their shoes shined, so this set-up is pretty standard.

This is also pretty common, which is a set-up for coffee or tea and I think that people will just stop and have a drink.

Dog.

I’m not sure, but Teddy Afro must be a pretty big deal.

Either you can look at this as if the journey is finally over, or has just begun. For me, I am thankful that the adoption process is complete. I hate to speak for Sweet Sweet, but I have no doubt that she felt the same way. It was good to get the news that we were to go pick up Fitsum, a relief. Now, the party starts.

Because I’ve done such an awful job of keeping things relatively up to date, here’s what happened since the last update: Sweet Sweet and I put our house on the market, sold the house in a month, moved in with my parents, made an offer on a new house, bought that house, partially moved into the new house, go to Ethiopia to pick up Fitsum, come home from Ethiopia, moved in the rest of our stuff to new house, Olive got sick and passed away, Blue attacked Zoey, dislocated Zoey’s hip requiring her to have major surgery and requiring me to give Blue to my brother, Ryan, we are now down to one dog, Zoey, we are happily ever after.

Never did we think that by the time that we were settled in coming back from Ethiopia did we think that we would lose two dogs and be left with one. It will sound strange, but our dogs were our family for the first six years of our marriage. We loved our dogs with all of our heart and it has saddened me to no end to know that Olive has passed away and that most likely, due to Olive not being around, Blue has attempted to assert some dominance over Zoey by attacking her. Leaving her relatively bloodied, bruised and broken. Zoey is getting better, although she’s still not putting a lot of weight onto her dislocated leg. My brother will take excellent care of Blue and I’m not worried about that, but the loss of Blue is significant in my life because she replaced Rage and she’s also the name-sake of this blog.

It just hurts.

But to counter all of that, we get to bring our son home.

That has been absolutely joyful. That’s not to say that he’s not part toddler and also part honey-badger, but he’s been a revelation and God-send in our lives.

Before I forget , I wanted to relay the story of going to Ethiopia to pick up Fitsum. This was a much shorter trip, one where we left on Saturday for D.C. and staying the night there, while leaving for Ethiopia on Sunday morning around 11 a.m. We arrive in Addis Ababa on Monday morning and as you might expect when we get to see Fitsum, he becomes ours forever. Here’s Sweet Sweet and I seeing Fitsum for the first time since our last trip:

As an aside, I wore the same shirt Saturday, Sunday and now Monday. That’s how I roll.

He fell asleep in my arms at the transition home and even was asleep at the restaurant:

We hung out our first night as a family and as you can see, Fitsum wasn’t sure about all of this: