How to make an American-Canadian-Ethiopian Family

As promised, here are some pictures from the family reunion in August.

I love this one the most! It is Jacob the youngest in the family with Jo and Rosemary, the oldest in the family. Rosemary, my great aunt who is holding Jacob, adopted 3 kids. She was so happy to meet Jacob!! He was all giggles!
The Matriarchs...
It was a very special weekend!

Happy New Year, kids!

Ethiopian New Year (Enkutatash)

Ethiopia still retains the Julian calendar, in which the year is divided into 12 months of 30 days each and a 13th month of 5 days and 6 days in leap year. The Ethiopian calendar is 8 years behind the Gregorian calendar from January to September and 7 years behind between September 11 and January 8.

Enkutatash means the "gift of jewels". When the famous Queen of Sheba returned from her expensive jaunt to visit King Solomon in Jerusalem, her chiefs welcomed her bolts by replenishing her treasury with inku or jewels. The spring festival has been celebrated since this early times and as the rains come to their abrupt end, dancing and singing can be heard at every village in the green countryside.

But Enkutatash is not exclusively a religious holiday. Today's Enkutatash is also the season for exchanging formal new year greetings and cards among the urban sophisticated - in lieu or the traditional bouquet of flowers.

Before we brought Jacob home, we were a little nervous about how our cat Echo would do with a baby in the house. Echo is a little on the anti-social side and took a LONG time to adjust to having me in the house. I couldn't quite picture her dealing well with a baby. Well, I was WRONG. Jacob and Echo are fast friends. "Cat" was one of Jacob's first words. The pictures below tell the story!

Jacob is in that scary walking stage now. He wants to do it all of the time, and he is fast, but he is not graceful. He falls down a lot. He is typically a good faller- down on his bum- no harm done! But on Friday evening, he took his first real fall. YIKES!! He managed to land face first into the cornier of the doorway. It happened SO fast. Even though JF and I were both right there by him, neither of us could catch him. The sound was terrible! We tried icing it as best we could, but he wasn't really that into the ice. The best we could get was for him to lick it, to be honest. And it was not for lack of trying. But we did the best we could and he let me kiss his boo-boo. That part was pretty cute and the first time I was able to do that with him where it meant something. Fast forward to the next morning: Jacob has two black eyes and a bruise running down from his eye to his mouth. :o( His beautiful face! I always try very hard to enjoy his present state and not say things like, "I can't wait until he has teeth" or "It will be so much more fun when he can talk", because I know how precious every moment is with him. When he is a well-coordinated walker, I know that I will sorely miss the little boy with his hand outstretched, looking to me to steady him. But I am hoping he gets just a little steadier, so we lessen the risk of a bad fall. I love his pretty face!

Pictures of our weekend, in no particular order. We had such a BLAST!!