First Thanksgiving

Ethan loves playing games. We’ll be driving down the road, and he’ll want to play “I spy”. Or, at the dinner table recently he wanted to play a game where we had to go around in a circle, each of us saying an animal that people keep in their houses (a surprising number, I discovered from his game). Or, one of us will say a letter, and the others will have to think of words that start with that letter.

It’s also gotten to the point where I can play actual board games with him. The first one was a Zingo game my friend Trish gave us, which is a type of picture bingo. Ethan understands the concept of taking turns, and who wins, etc. I also bought Ethan a memory matching dinosaur card game. I’m really terrible at finding the matching cards, so he usually wins. I was doing so badly the other day that he started giving me cards, or making me take extra turns so he wasn’t getting all of the cards (very typical of Ethan to want to share things).

Recently we’ve been hiring a 9-year old boy who lives next door to come over and be a ‘mother’s helper’ and play with Ethan. He’s really wonderful, and Ethan adores him. Ethan spends most of him time with any of his babysitters asking them to “pretend this” or “pretend that” with him. The other day I overhead Ethan telling the boy, “I’ll be Wonder Woman, and you be Super Girl.” Or, they’ll pretend some of the cars are good cars, and some are bad cars. Or, they’ll pretend to go on an adventure. At one point I saw them pretending to be skating in the hallway, slipping along in their socks, their hands held high, humming along.

Yesterday we had our first Thanksgiving with Ethan. He was a bit nervous beforehand, which has taken me a while to understand – even though we told him it was just a meal and eating turkey, he didn’t know exactly what to expect. Why should he? He’d never observed it before, and didn’t know if there was something else involved too that we hadn’t told him about.

It’s hard to fathom, but this time last year we were here in the U.S. preparing for our second trip back to Kazakhstan, and Ethan was waiting at the baby house for us to return, asking the translator if she would take us if we didn’t come back.