AttitudeAdopt

Our Journey to Adopt a Child

Friday, February 27, 2009

East Hill Farm, Jokes

Ethan thinks that sprinkling bathroom and body-part words at random places in conversations is the epitome of humor. Repeated requests for him not to do it has yielded little. So, the other night, in an attempt to “re-direct” his energy, I suggested he try to come up with some other jokes that would be funny to more people (or as Ethan would say, “more humans”) than just other six year old boys.

He then preceded to tell a long string of jokes that went something like this: “Mom, why did you put the X in the cake?”, where X was anything from something actually funny, like ‘the hairy spider’, to something stupid, like ‘the boot’. After way too many of these, we tried coming up with something funny to say at the beach, but to no avail. At least it was worth a try.

A couple of weekends ago Ethan and I went to East Hill Farm with seven other moms and their internationally adopted kids, four of whom were from Kazakhstan. We had a lot of fun, including taking a sleigh ride with two big horses through the snow, and swimming in the basement pool. I liked being able to talk to other adults, Ethan having other kids to play with, and not having to cook for a couple of days.

The only downer was that Ethan woke up at 5:45am on Sunday morning, and wouldn’t go back to sleep. We got up and out of the cabin so we didn’t wake up Zack and Karen, and we wandered over in the pre-dawn to see the animals in the barn, and try to find some eggs in the chicken house to have for breakfast. When we finally went inside the inn, Ethan found another girl awake, who he proposed to as they were playing a game that involved toppling wooden blocks.

Thought I’d add a description Tom wrote in an email to me about playing with Ethan:

“He's very creative when we play one-on-one. What started out as hide and seek became a game with magic blankets that moved by themselves every time I turned around. Strangely, one of them weighed just as much as Ethan. From there, one of the magic blankets ended up on me and somehow I was then buried under a huge mound of stuff - all his bed covers, books, the bean bag chair, large stuffed animals.”

Yup, sounds like Ethan.