What You've All Been Waiting For

We had an incredible Ari Day. The pictures will speak our emotions, but I'll try to recap the highlights.

He is the happiest baby we've ever seen. Truly happy and content with such a sweet disposition. We already have him smiling and laughing and we only have to work for it a little bit! He loves to blow bubbles, rock on his hands and knees, and is not much into sleeping so as not to miss anything new. He is sleeping as I write this, but it is only 9:30 and I'm expecting a few middle of the night wakeup calls. The nannies are amazing. Ari is so blessed to have had such wonderful caretakers for the first six months of his life. All of the infants receive so much attention and interaction. It really is like a daycare you'd see in the United States and nothing like the orphanages people tend to think of when they think of international adoption. It was hard to take him from them today, even though we'll be back multiple times throughout the week for paperwork and to deliver donations. We had the privilege of going to a medical appointment with Ari, another adoptive couple and their baby boy, and two of the nannies. This was unexpected, but it was a neat experience and we are grateful to have been a part of it. It was a pretty generic checkup, but he got a clean bill of health and is developmentally right on track. We have a wonderful private driver, Melke. He is basically at our beck and call 24 hours a day and is a great asset and blessing to us. The Ethiopian people are so friendly and sweet, just like we've heard. We ate dinner at a restaurant in our hotel tonight (very good!) and Ari had two of the female employees holding him and cooing over him, commenting on how beautiful he is. And he really is. He is not as big as we thought he might be and how he appeared in his pictures, although he is definitely not on the small side either. His six month clothes fit him perfectly and he will turn six months tomorrow, January 9th. Okay, I think that about covers the main highlights. We think he is just perfect and sooooo much fun. I think the rest of our week will be pretty low key, just giving Ari a chance to figure out who we are.