Category: Adoption

Continuing in reverse age order, our second blessing is Aidan Samuel Getahun Gowin.  He and his sister came home with us one year and 4 months ago. God gave me his Bible name a long time ago and then reiterated it the same summer that he gave me Eva’s name Ruth.  Hannah prayed for a son and God promised her Samuel, who was eventually not raised by his biological family.  He was used by God in mighty ways, but one funny way that Aidan Samuel has already lived out his name is that he often comes running when we call anyone’s name, thinking we called him!  Remember the story in the Old Testament when God was calling young Samuel in the night, but he kept running to the priest Eli because he thought Eli was calling him?  Hopefully as he matures, he will hear God’s voice loud and clear. 🙂

Aidan turned six today and was so excited about it!  He is actually more likely 8 years old, but April 16, 2006 is the date they made up on his birth certificate and so he doesn’t know any differently.  In most rural villages in Ethiopia, birthdays are not celebrated.  They don’t have a calendar on the wall of their hut.  Each of their days looks pretty much the same—the focus is mostly on finding work and food for the day and cooking it.

So when Aidan came here, he didn’t know about birthday celebrations.  He had one last year, but there wasn’t a way to explain it to him with his limited English understanding at the time, so it just happened.  Now that he knows what to expect and understands the concept of a year, there has been much anticipation for his birthday this year!  His teacher at school says he has almost daily pointed out his birthday on the calendar!  He had a party with some friends on Thursday over Spring Break, and this morning we celebrated him with our family, brought Oreo frog treats to school, and went out to eat Culver’s tonight.  I’m sure Michael will post pictures soon.

We are celebrating what a joy he is and celebrating how God brought him to our home.  Just the other day, Aidan saw me looking at a post by a Facebook friend who was recently in Uganda.  He saw the woman and remarked that she was like me (and pointed to my skin) and that the kids were like him (meaning brown).  Then he asked me: “Mom, how you pick me?  You do eny-meeny-miny-mo?”  It was the perfect time to sit him on my lap and explain how much God loves him!  “God saw you and Eva in Ethiopia and He told your daddy and me [using my big God voice], ‘Michael and Suzanne, there is a four year old boy and his baby sister in Ethiopia, and I want YOU to go to Africa and get them and take care of them forever!'”  Aidan asked incredulously, “He really said dat??”  I laughed, “No, but he did tell us in our hearts.”  Aidan curled up in my lap and gave me lots of kisses.  I asked him what that was for, just to hear what he’d say, and he said, “You’re my mom!”

Aidan is one of the happiest kids you will meet.  Almost everything is fun or funny to him.  He has a beautiful big smile that is contagious and eyes that just light up!  And he loves life!  Of course, he has the Ethiopian loudness gene so his fun is quite big, which is what causes some of the notes home from school. 🙂  He loves to be a helper and is very good at chores.  He is very strong and athletic and will be the star on the ball team some day.  We have done a few small soccer camps and have put up a basketball hoop, but we will wait till he is a little older to really dive into athletics.  We wanted to focus on attachment, ABC’s, and social skills first.  He has done really well with his schooling and will likely be at the top of his class.  Even though he objected to all the new foods at first, we didn’t allow him to be picky, and within a few weeks he was eating EVERYTHING and asking for more!  And though his body objected to structure at first, he thrives on it now.  He is the first to follow through, without prompting, with whatever routine he is supposed to be doing (getting ready for school, etc.).  And he never forgets a rule, nor is he defiant, so when he disobeys, it is most always because the other thing simply looked more fun.

We would not be honest if we said this first year has been easy.  Aidan’s first 6 years of his life were pretty much spent in a village on his own with little supervision or correction.  So couple that with a take-charge personality and the Ethiopian happy-but-argumentative culture (yes, that sounds contradictory but it is true), and you have a little boy who tried to come in and control our family from day one.  Before he could barely speak any English, he was always (I’m not exaggerating) announcing whose turn it was or arguing about how to play a game that the other kids had just finished teaching him.  Add this to the fact that he was regularly making loud obnoxious noises to make sure he was noticed, and the other kids got tired of this really fast.  They have all had to learn patience and grace as we try to catch Aidan up on his social skills.  He loves people so much, and Michael and I are trying our best to teach him to chill out some so he won’t push away his friends before they even get a chance to know really him.

We totally get the fact that he had to survive on his own some in his old environment—which is why he has scars from fires he fell in while cooking, etc.—but we are trying to help him thrive in this environment.  He is doing so much better, but it has been a lot of work and something we still work on daily.  I will admit that last summer was one of my hardest summers ever, with them all home and SO much arguing.  I lost my patience a lot more than I care to admit, and God has done some refining of me as well.  There were times that I wondered if we were getting anywhere, but then I watched a video we had taken of him in Ethiopia, and he looked like he was high on Mountain Dew!  That same kid in the States would have been put on ritalin immediately!  Fortunately for him (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it 🙂 ), he now has two first-born parents who do their best to focus on self-discipline and consistency, paired with love.  Self-control is still an issue for him but he is doing so much better and is therefore more at peace with himself as well.

I know, without a doubt, that like Samuel in the Bible, God is going to do great things through Aidan as he matures!  One time when he was helping me wash potatoes, he said, “If I get hundred dollars, I give it to da airplane man and he take me to African so I can tell dem bout God!”  I replied, “Well, that’s not quite enough money.  But I thought a lot of people in Ethiopia already knew about God?” “Not like DIS!!  How much, two hundred?  I guess I will have to wait.”  He sees how much God loves us and is involved in saving our lives, and he wants to share that great news!  If that is not Samuel, then I don’t know what is.

Since I am awful at keeping up with baby books, I want to devote a post to each of our children for posterity.  I am going in reverse age order because their birthdays mostly fall in that order.

Our youngest child just turned two today:  Eva Ruth Mebrat Gowin.  There is richness in her name and in her personality.  All of our kids have Irish names and Bible names, and  our Ethiopian children kept their Ethiopian names.  “Eva” is the Anglicized version of the Irish name Aoife (“ee-fa”—You can understand why we didn’t used the Irish spelling!) which means “radiant, pleasant, beautiful.”  She is all of these things.  Her birth mother named her “Mebrat” (“muh-brought”—you know, like hot dogs and brats?) which is Ethiopian for “light.”  And Ruth is her Bible name.  The summer of 2005 I feel like God hit me hard with that name, knowing it would be the name of one of our adopted children.  In the Bible, Ruth and Samuel (which is Aidan’s middle name) were both ordinary people whom God used to serve Him and show His glory while not being raised by their biological families.  Ruth, a Moabitess, chose to stay with her widowed mother-in-law Naomi to take care of her and follow her God.  In the end, Ruth married Boaz (their kinsman redeemer, which means he was in Naomi’s bloodline and chose to redeem her family’s lineage by taking them into his family), and she became the great-grandmother to King David and ultimately to the Lord Jesus Himself.  She was selfless and humble and illustrated beautifully how God has redeemed each of -our lives.

Our Eva is a bright light wherever she goes.  We cannot leave a store or a doctor’s office without new friends she has made.  People who would otherwise ignore us (or even think bad thoughts about a white mom with her brown baby), can’t help but remark how beautiful she is and talk and laugh with her.  She is constantly waving at people and saying “hi,” especially if she has met you once before, and if she sees a baby she is beside herself wanting to get out of the cart to go meet him/her.  And though these actions might look as if she is not quite attached, if she is so willing to meet other people, but that is certainly not the case.  She may go give a stranger a hug and kiss, but once they pick her up, she immediately wants back to Mom.

Eva is also a joyful light in our home.  She loves to talk, sing, and dance—and is very good at them, I might add!  I wouldn’t be surprised if she is nicknamed Eva Diva someday!  She does the most hilarious things but I often cannot catch them on video because she wants to stop and see herself on the camera.  She makes us laugh, but not in a needy way to get attention.  She often could care less if we saw her doing whatever she was doing.  But she is also very sensitive—offering an empathetic pat to another sibling who might be sad or in trouble, or wanting to kiss me if I got “hurt?”  She makes you feel like a King or Queen when you are returning home—you should hear her yell “Daddy!!!” when she gets to see him after work.  She loves her daddy.

On a physical note, she was very sick when we brought her home a year ago last January—had to be hospitalized with pneumonia that she probably had for months before we got her.  She was in the 1st and 6th percentiles in her height and weight when we brought her home.  Now she is in the 65th percentile.  It is amazing what love and nutrition will do!  She had such a hard time napping when we first brought her home.  She fought us so much for those much needed naps.  But we were persistent.  Now she is the best sleeper.  Now that she is two, she fights me a little more about not wanting to nap, but I just hold her snugger when I rock her and she is out in less than ten minutes.  If she is late for a nap or misses it altogether, she is such a trooper.  The other kids would have melt-downs in those circumstances and had a horrible time sleeping in unknown places.  She is by far the easiest baby we have ever had.

Also, now that she is two, I expect her strength of character will challenge us at times.  She knows what she wants and is not afraid to ask for it, or just go get it.  She has gotten herself drinks of water using her toys to dip into the dog’s bowl.  If one of the kids leaves the bathroom door open, she is likely to get deodorant and put it on her face like chapstick.  She tells me to put “Bad” on the ipod so she can dance to Michael Jackson, and she knows the right moves.  She started potty training herself.  I had sat her on the potty a couple random times—one time “something happened”—and then she started telling when she needed to go.  I need to work regularly with her so she will choose to only go on the potty, but that’s amazing in my book!

I will be sad when she leaves this funny, sweet age, but I am also excited to see what God has in store for this “little light of mine”!  I just today sadly learned that Eva’s birthday, April 4, is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death.  I can only hope that she somehow someday redeems that date on the calendar.  Maybe she already has.

Michael has said on more than one occasion, with tears in his eyes, “What would we have missed if she were not part of our family?”  We implore you, if you have ever considered adoption but then “let the feeling go away” out of fear of the unknown, please consider praying about it again.  God can and will do immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine if you are only willing to take the risk and trust Him.  He will bring you to a realm of understanding of His grace and redemption that you never even knew existed before, and you will never want to go back.

A year ago today, Suzanne and I left Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in an airplane to land in snow-covered Peoria, Illinois, with Erin and our two newest children, Aidan and Eva. It was a long trip: 30+ hours, Erin getting sick on each leg of our trip, and Eva traveling with a fever and a cough that would later be diagnosed as pneumonia. The year has been full of challenges as we’ve been adapting to life as a family of seven, but we’ve been blessed beyond measure by our God and faithful friends here. Along the way, we’ve made new friends who themselves have opened their hearts and their homes to “the least of these” for whom Jesus cares so deeply.

Suzanne posted an image of Eva in facebook a while back with a quote from Katie Davis, and it’s a fitting reminder of the past year for us:

Adoption is a beautiful picture of redemption. It is the Gospel in my living room.

Our deepest thanks to those who’ve helped and prayed for us in the past year. We’re grateful to be on the journey with you all.

It’s been a long time since we’ve blogged, and I hope to do more soon, but for now I want to record words. New words from Eva and old words from Aidan that I want to cherish. This is more for my own records than anything else, but I hope you get a chuckle or two out of it as well. 🙂

Eva is 18 months old today. A week ago we attempted to write down the words she knew by now, and this is what we came up with. For the most part, they are in the order that she first spoke them, starting at about a year of age. And for the record, she signed “please” long before these words and still uses the sign today.

—“Uh-oh!” (which is usually “on purpose” after dropping her sippy off the high chair, etc)
—“Mama” (though is sadly now “Mom” after listening to older sibs say it that way)
—“Dada” (though until recently, forgotten for the last several months—Dad has been “MOM!”)
—“Ti-koo” (“Thank you”—LOVE that this was her fourth word and is still used often to give us something or with an outstretched hand if she wishes to have something)
—“der-ygo” (“There you go”—while giving us something)
—“dis” (“this”—pointing to something or asking for it)
—“doe” (“door”—usually followed by a huge push to shut the door, as she knows we are about to keep her out of the bathroom or back porch)
—“tash” (“trash”—loves to deposit her diaper in the trash, or other small things she finds on the floor….are we making her OCD??)
—“bouw” (“ball” or balloon)
—“shoosh” (“shoes”—this girl LOVES her shoes!)
—“sok-sok” (“socks”—this girl takes her socks off immediately if not tied down by the shoes)
—“daw-daw” (usually with a squeal meaning “dog”, or squirrel or anything else remotely resembling a small animal—she is SO excited by them! This is also not to be confused with “da da” though they sound an awful lot alike)
—“hi!” (mostly says “hi” with arms waving excitedly as she spots an animal or a small child)
—“hey-yo” (“hello” with hand to her cheek when she thinks someone’s phone is ringing)
—“go-way!” (sadly learned this from older sibs, though mostly only means it as a statement of her “bigness”)
—“di-po” (“diaper”)
—“eyez” (“eyes” as she pokes hers or someone else’s)
—“bye!”
—“bye-a-way!” (when she is sticking her hand through long sleeve or in a puppet, or a shoe 🙂 )
—“yes”
—“baby”
—“you” (when pointing to a picture of a family member)
—“bi-bo” (“Bible”—my personal fav! She loves her toddler room Bible but as of right now, any book might be called a “bi-bo”)

To me, the one word that is glaringly absent is “no!” which makes my heart happy, though I know I have probably just jinxed myself. She does nod her her head “no” while staring at the CD’s that she is not supposed to pull down on the floor….

Aidan’s list of words is just the opposite of Eva’s—words/phrases that he no longer says or is being phased out as he learns English. But I don’t want to forget them. Again, for the most part, they are in chronological order with the first ones being some of his first English phrases.

—“dis-a-way, no is cold”
—“hot? no, smallbite hot” (meaning it was “warm.” We were regularly telling him to take a “small bite” of his food, so to him, anything small was “smallbite”)
—“Elli boy?” ….crawls under our dog Elli…. “Oh! Elli girl!”
—“dis is no”
—“up-a-stairs”
—anything that started with a “p” he used an “f”: “fasta,” “fotty,” “fee-j’s,” “fatient,” “ficture,” “fockets”
—“no is hot”
—“Aidan no yum” (when he didn’t like something)
—“min?” (we think that is an Amharic word for “what?”)
—in a Christmas song that said “Go Santa,” he said “Hosanna”—not the Bible “hosanna” but his hero friend from the transition house in Ethiopia “Hosanna” who now lives with his new family in California
—“es-coo-bed-er” (combonation of “excuse me”/”scoot over”/”scooby do”)
—“es-cuse-a-me”
—“I no care” (didn’t mean that, he meant he didn’t “know”/”understand”)
—“all of us” (for “everything,” not just “us”)
—“salsage” (sausage)
—“may I scuse please?” (our kids say that before getting up from dinner table)
—“oh, same same” (to show two things are the same)
—“cer-e-o” (meaning “cereal” but combining it with “cheerios” that Eva always ate)
—“daddy, let’s go?” (asking if dad was leaving for work, not asking to go with)
—“zeeper” (zipper)
—“sleepery” (slippery)
—asked me on more than one occasion about God/heaven: “Jesus UP?” “EAT???” (wondering if we eat in heaven—that’s important to him!)
—letting us know he washed his hands for dinner: “my hands yes wash yer hands” or “I’m wash yer hands”
—when someone mentioned I was white, he said “Mommy no white—mommy red and green” (referring to my fair but blotchy red-headed skin and freckles)
—“ha-va-la” (when the kids played the “hot lava” game)
—“watch num-pany” (kids show Electric Company)
—“yes you can’t”
—“jumpoline”
—“I popped my chink!” (combination of chin/neck, meant neck)
—“I forgotmember” (still says this for “forgot/can’t remember”)

And here are a few Amharic words that we don’t want to forget and even the other kids still use occasionally: amaseganalo (thank you), sak/saki (“smile” for a the camera to a boy/girl), tarra-gaga (be gentle), furrus (horse), timert-bate (school), woosha (dog), ambesah (lion), malala (corn), abet? (what?/huh?)

If you’ve managed to read this far, I hope you’ve gotten a laugh or two!