A long time ago I wrote about how Caucasian Warren is. We knew that before we began adopting We knew we needed to be very intentional about how we connect our kids with the world.
A couple months ago a lady in our church talked to us about a friend of hers who's kids were adopting. We instantly felt that even though we've been pretty good at connectivity...we needed to do better.
As soon as we got home from church I instantly started doing some random Google searches. The first thing I came up with was a family from Erie who had adopted from Ethiopia. We e-mailed and are still planning to meet up at some point. The very next week they were on Good Morning America. Their son was named the cutest kid in American. I'm biased I know, but no way is he cuter than my two.
The next thing I found was an Ethiopian Restaurant in Pittsburgh! We're down that way often because of family and friends. Then we found out that on the last Saturday of every month they have an Ethiopian adoption lunch. SUPER COOL. So we've been planning for a couple months to get down there for it.
Well Thanksgiving falls at the end of November. We planned on being at my parents....so we
thought maybe we'd be able to go!The lunch is at a restaurant called Tana Ethiopian Cuisine. I've got to be honest....I was nervous. We were eating food that we've tried before, but haven't eaten a lot of. We were meeting people we'd never met. We were in a weird restaurant.
It was amazing. We went out on a limb and tried some new things as well as some things that we knew were safe. AWESOME. The picture above was taken after most of the food was gone....I was so busy eating I forgot to take more pictures. Ethiopian food is very intimate in that you eat with your hands. You rip up some Injera Bread off and use it to scoop stuff up. So good.
The kids had a blast. Someone brought big bag of toys. The kids just played like they had known each other forever. Both C and T are pretty social little guys, so once they got warmed up to the environment, they had a blast.
This is going to sound weird.....but for an afternoon.....we were normal. Our church, our friends, etc love our kids. Even strangers have been relatively accepting of our kids. But for this one afternoon we were surrounded by families that were exactly the same as us. We didn't stand out. I just talked with another dad for quite awhile about just life.
As the afternoon was winding down (2 hours later) the owner (who's Ethiopian) put on some videos of some Ethiopian dance music and some of the older kids started dancing. Well Tobiah is a dancer. He loves music and unlike his two left footed parents, he likes to shake his bum. So Tobiah and the owner danced for awhile.
We're planning on going back in January!
