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--Tonight I put Binyam to bed. The 3 bigs are at baseball practice and he always gets really nervous when everyone isn't home when it's bedtime. "Mommy, will the boys come home when I'm asleep?" That question is asked ad nauseom. The truth of the matter is, he doesn't actually go to bed until they come home. I hate that. Not because he's not going to bed when his little body needs him to but because he's so concerned about everyone making it back ok. So concerned about loss and death and and and...these are things a 5-yr-old shouldn't be thinking. Shoot, these are things that don't typically even cross my mind as a woman of multiple decades. It is really hard to watch him look into my eyes to see if I'm just pretending that they're coming back. To try to read through my smile and prepare his heart for more loss.

--You know that moment when your child first reads to you? And they are smiling the whole time and you start this weird giggle/hiccup thing. And they make it through their first sentence and then paragraph and then page. And then it's done and you look at each other and you know that they get it. That in that moment you know they realize what a wondrous place books can be. Dailah's there. I just came from her room and I'm still smiling.

--Ethiopia. Ethics. Adoption. What to do with family left there. How much support to the country? To the people? Blurg. It's a freaking mess and it occupies too much space in my mind.

--I was talking to a friend the other day about why I haven't been blogging as much. I think to a large extent is because I've been parenting. I've been preoccupied with throwing my energies into improving myself as a wife, mom, human and it takes it all up. I know blogs that somehow manage to (seemingly, I don't know a lot of these people personally so I can only go based on their online image) both blog and parent successfully. I wonder if I'm one of them. These days instead of parenting in a way that would be applicable to this blog I'm just parenting. Crazy, I know.

I used to chase my kids around with the camera to document every moment of their lives to put down here. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I've started to realize I was missing out on some parts of life when the focus was on documenting as opposed to experiencing.

So if I'm gone for awhile that's where I am. Experiencing. Enjoying. Loving.

--That said I still obsessively read your blogs so commence to documenting please. :)