1 week home

So we have all been home as a family for a week. It has been such an interesting week. 

Do you remember how Ezra has trouble sleeping while we were in the States? Well, luckily, that has resolved itself and Ezra is now sleeping well at night. He started to nap in the afternoons with Shiri a few days ago. He seems a lot more regulated. He is still not really speaking, we can distinguish about 4 words (3 in Armenian, one in English) at this point. On Thursday was his appointment with the cardiologist, eye surgeon and developmental pediatrician. We got the eye surgery scheduled, (September 6), a follow up cardiology appointment in October after he turns 2, and a possible heart surgery in about 8 months time. That will be scheduled later.

The developmental ped ordered genetics to see why some of the delays Ezra has. In his paperwork from Armenia it says that he is generally delayed due to prenatal alcohol exposure, but then his twin sister is not only not delayed, but is advanced in some areas. Ezra also lacks all the facial markers (which I know is not a decisive factor), and there is no known history of maternal alcohol consumption. The developmental pediatrician thinks that it is not FASD (though it could be), but it is more connected to the heart and kidney issues Ezra has been having since birth. We are not 100% sure at this point.

Shiri is yapping away in English a lot. Noa still speaks to them in Armenian (and so does Kevin quite often), but now she is speaking her English words to the boys and me. She loves our dog and the goldfish. Unfortunately, she loves to feed the goldfish as well, which resulted in a sudden decline in the goldfish population. Luckily she cannot reach the big fishtank. She is loving the Red Sea and that she got to see dolphins yesterday!

Noa... Sweet Noa is fitting right in with the boys. Like 5 peas in a pod. She is into all mischief with them. She is actually picking up some Hungarian from them. Crazy, I know. She is also teaching them Armenian words, so now they speak an Armenian dialect of Hunglish between each other. Funny, because this way we absolutely have no idea what they are up to. I am thinking about producing a paper on their makeshift language, so maybe I can use it for a home assignment or something.

The boys are happy to be back to Israel - even P! He had a lovely time in Hungary, and he had a lovely time in Ireland, and he is having a lovely time back home now. He is loving visiting great-grandma in Eilat. Actually, he loves the fact that as he has been here once before, he is showing Noa around the place. All too cute. :)

Shabbat Shalom again!

Taking a break from baking challah with Noa while Kevin is playing cars with Ezra and Shiri is making her own challah. Or, at least, making her own mess from the dough. :)

This whole thing with Jewish living is going easier than I expected. Actually, it went easier with P than I expected. Noa asks a lot about what we do, and where Jesus comes into the picture, and at first she seemed a little baffled at the idea that we don't believe Jesus was the son of G-d. He is pretty much at the point in her life when she has some ideas for herself, but she also takes guidance from authority figures easily. Not that she brought deep religious convictions from her previous family. It will make for some interesting conversations though. 

We are actually on our second batch of challah now. The first batch I am sure we can reuse at our next BBQ... as charcoal. After all those years I had spent in the States, I could still not make a proper conversion from Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head... So yes, there was great smoke and a smoke detector going off, much to the delight of Ezra. The US should really switch to metric. Imperial measurements are so out of date - besides, with Independence, shouldn't they have adopted SI? The only TWO other countries, who haven't adopted the SI measurements are Myanmar and Liberia... What does that tell you? That said, once I heard an (of course) American preacher say that the metric system was the mark of the beast. Oh well.

Ezra can be quite a handful. With orphanage living, one would think, comes routine. It seems, however, that Ezra  has never experienced the concept of having routine. We are working hard on establishing a routine that is very much like the routine we have at home. Ezra will have none of it. Bedtime is usually a 30-minute screaming fest, and any activity involving slowing down for more than 2 minutes results in a melt down. Or rather... resulted. In the past 3 weeks we figured out that he reacts really well to soothing and happy sounds: certain songs, sounds of nature, etc. I have a nearly 20-year-old CD titled Guitar By The Sea. Ezra loves it! Depending on the tune he knows it's time for sleep, time for a nap, quiet time, story time etc. So bedtime is less of a struggle now. Unless, of course, it means being separated from his beloved TV. 

Oh the TV! The twins love the TV! It's kind of odd for us, as we didn't watch TV at all till Justin and Matthew fell in love with books, and they still rarely watch anything on TV. Ezra and Shiri, on the other hand, just love watching... comercials. And Teleshop. 

Hopefully it will be getting better when we finally get home.

Shabbat shalom, everyone!

Jet Lag? Nah

So, for me to come away for most of the summer means that I do have to work remotely. Part of the work involves online meetings and presentations. Of course work runs on Tel Aviv time, and I would run on California time, but no. The last two nights I was up most of the night and took an extended afternoon nap. Now I could possibly be sleeping, but I can't fall back asleep. Jet lag has nothing to do with my messed up sleep schedule. 

It's also a challenge to lie low and do not do exciting activities when you are staying in a house that your family hasn't lived in for 8 years and it is in between renters... even if you have furniture, it's just not like home and all we want to do is get out. There are some great parks around, the beach is not too far, and great areas to hike and have a picnic. And then, as I mentioned in the previous post, Disneyland is close by. So is Knott's Berry Farm and Universal Studios isn't terribly far away. The San Diego Zoo is also accessible on a same day trip. There are so many things to do with the kids. And Noa is super excited about all of this. She is treating the whole thing as a vacation, so maybe I should be less concerned about all the literature I read? Of course we don't want to overload her with experiences, but... Tough choice. Especially because her life with a foster family and the twins' experiences in the orphanage were very different. She has been exposed to many different things that the twins haven't. She craves the adventures - and she is very happy to share them with her former carers at the orphanage where she stayed for a few months (she couldn't be adopted from foster care, so she went to live in an orphanage for a few months, from where her foster dad picked her up every morning to take her to her old school) and with her foster family. I like her excitement to write letters and talk to them online, because if it lasts, it should help her keep her Armenian. 

And now.... meeting!

Growing family

So. Kevin. Got. News. From. That. Unnamed. Country. In. The. Caucasian Mountains.

Actually he got news a couple days ago. This time from people who match children with prospective parents.

Yes. We knew that even though we normally don't fit requirements, we were approved for adoption (thanks to my MIL, who has really been becoming great... no, honest! She has been accepting the boundaries we set and lets us be without being controlling and the passive aggressiveness  is totally manageable).

It's boy-girl twins, who were 9 months old at registration (around 10 or 11 months now). The boy is suspected to have some hearing loss in one ear (not sure about that) and they are black. As far as MIL was able to find out, their mom is Russian / local ethnicity with possibly one Jewish parent (yes, Jew is considered an ethnicity there) and dad is Russian / Togoan. They had been offered to couples both domestic and foreign and were not accepted. You see, people don't come to this country to adopt biracial children.

Oh,  no I never mentioned that MIL is in country now and has been for the last 2 months or so with work. She has really been a tremendous help in this process, and we'd be lost without her at this point. I think getting into this adoption together really helped smooth the relationship between Kevin's family and us. I'm most grateful for that!

The twins shall be known as Ezra and Shiri from now on in our family. If all goes well, with a trip to the US to handle Israeli immigration, they should be home sometime in July the latest. Yes, we are changing their first names (their original names are long, complicated and no one ever called them that - caregivers volunteered to MIL to call them by their new names), keeping their original language nicknames as middle names and they are getting a hyphenated last name. Because of this last bit, it was kind of important that their first names are not a gazillion syllables.

Yes, we will convert them. Officially. With mikveh and all. They'll officially be Jewish. However, anyone who was converted as a child can easily "unconvert" as an adult by officially stating they do not wish to be Jews. That simple.

And now because I will no longer simply have 3 Jewish boys, the title of the blog will be changing soon. KosherKola.com already points to this blog. Please bookmark it: as soon as P is officially ours the current URL will be discontinued.