8am, 22yrs old, and size 3

Ethan finally will now often sleep until 8am. It’s hard to describe just what a luxury it is not to be woken up early (before 7am) every morning, and to actually get up before him some days.

Ethan has a mad crush on one of the teachers at his after school program. He blushes, and admits he loves her (she is very pretty, plus Ethan likes that she wears a lot of make up). I’ve pointed out to him that not only has this teacher recently gotten married, so he’d have to wait until they got divorced, but that she’s also more than three times his age. The other day we were talking about magic, and he wistfully said that if he could wish for anything, “I’d wish if I were 22”.

Ethan’s feet recently catapulted up to size 3, spending about a week at size 1, and seemingly skipping size 2 altogether.

Three years!

This year, Ethan has another boy in his class, B., who was also internationally adopted. I'm really grateful for this, because Ethan relates to him (they have similar personalities in many ways), and it makes his experience seem more normal.

The other Ethan was playing with stuffed animals with another friend when I overhead him saying: "Let's pretend that some of the animals are adopted -- do you know what that means? It means that they did not come out of their mother's tummy. Let's pretend that these two are adopted, and that this one came out of the mom's tummy." How cool is that!

As Ethan and I were driving by the hospital in our town a couple of days ago, Ethan asked if some kids were born at the hospital, to which I said yes. Then he asked, "How did that happen?" I explained that the woman had a baby in her tummy, and that she went to the hospital where it came out. "No!" he protested. "No -- they came from the hospital!" I had to assure him that every baby came out of a woman's tummy -- that they could not actually be formed another way at a hospital, despite all the fancy machines.

Today it is officially three years since we met Ethan! It's amazing how much he has grown in that time, in all dimensions -- emotionally, size, language, etc. As I was writing this blog entry, I received an email saying that one of the coordinators we worked with in Kazakhstan died in a flood while traveling in India recently. Very strange.