Addis, Day 4 (Dec 21st)

Up to meet our girls again this morning! Yay! The Bejoe ladies cook good eggs for breakfast along with juice and coffee, then we hit the road again. Less traffic today which is good and today the plan is to stop at Bilo's for coffee and chocolate cake for the Bean. Remember how I said driving (or more specifically being a passenger in our case) was hair-raising in ET, so we'd by driving along the equivalent of a two lane highway, when everyone that's driving seems to realize the road is closed up ahead and just drives across the median into opposing traffic and keeps on going. Think swimming upstream! So as we get a little further out towards the houses and are safely back on our side of the highway and have been for awhile, we're obviously lulled into a false sense of safety. All of a sudden Solomon says"Oh, I forgot, hold on." He proceeds to hang a u-turn ON THE SAME SIDE OF THE ROAD. So we are now headed back where we came from on the same side of the road. Yikes! Coming from the States I am now hoping we survive, but not to worry, it seems that that's just done in ET!!! Anyway, after getting coffee and chocolate cake we arrived at the house to see the girls. They were out in the sun again, this time dressed. We found out that they liked being held high in the air and jiggled - it just made them chuckle, and drool! They were very cuddly, happy to be held and loved putting my hair in their mouths! Emma loved holding and playing with them but she was surprised how heavy they were. She also played a lot with the older kids outside kicking soccer balls and picking flowers. There was a sweet little girls who came up and was touching Isabel's face and kissing her hands. We tried to get the girls sitting up but they still were a little wobbly! I tried picking up both girls together and discovered that it was certainly a skill that I had to get the hang of, but oh how I loved holding both my girls at the same time. I can't wait for that to be a daily thing! The caregivers asked if we wanted to go up and feed them again and you know we weren't passing that up. The menu was smushed egg whites in formula. The Bean thought it smelled really bad and Rachel agreed with her. It might have gone in but she wasn't swallowing it. Isabel was ok with it bless her heart and had a great time being fed by John. The caregivers seemed to think we just weren't shoveling it in fast enough, but especially with raspberries being blown regularly and both thumbs going in the mouth speeding up didn't happen. We also discovered teeth. Rachel has two small ones on the bottom, and Isabel one also on the bottom. Isabel had another coming in though because she loved gumming John's finger! After we left we bought the girls a couple more things to have as they grow up - silver crosses and Amarhic bibles, followed by lunch a Top View - good grilled chicken. We met up with H/R et al at the silk factory and saw the chrysalis in the silk cocoons, silk worms, worm eggs, ladies spinning the silk, and men working on the looms. We also wanted to get the girls some ET stamps to have so Solomon took us off to the post office where we had a lot to choose from and tried to pick out some that we thought represented a variety of ET life: plants, agriculture etc., then back to Bejoe. On the way back we passed miles of roadside stalls, very basic homes, people sitting on the sides of the road, people walking, fruit stalls, deformed bodies, people begging but they weren't worrisome. There were some large apartment buildings with a lot of satellite dishes apparently for military families. Solomon has so much information on everything as we're driving around and always knows where to take us! It's so nice to see how much pride he has for driving for Gladney, and his appreciation for what it's done for his life. His english is so good and he spoke only Amharic until 3 years ago. Pretty impressive. That night was the ET Cultural dinner with Gladney families. We stayed for the food but had Solomon take us back early since we had court the next day. Have to say there was some interesting dancing before we left though. A donkey tail dance that was quite phallic, and I thought it was strange after seeing it that I'd been concerned about wearing only long sleeve shirts in case I pushed the cultural envelope!