6 months?!

OK, so I just counted on my fingers the number of months Beamlak and I have been home - I cannot believe that 6 months have flown by so fast. That's 6 months of being home! Not just 6 months since reunification - 6 months in the US. I seriously am in shock. Quite honestly it makes me feel horrible that I have not kept a journal of all the amazing experiences that we have had together in the last 6 months and 17 days we've been an official and united family.
Ironically, today is exactly 6 months since we arrived in the US. Today - the day that I finally decided to suck it up and join the November blog once-a-day thing called NoBloPoMo. The mission - to blog ONCE A DAY! I can do this. I need to do something to jump start my blogging (aka journaling). I have missed so much in not recording these first 6 months, in the capacity that I intended to, so here it goes. I'm sure most days will be boring to readers - if there are any :) but I will press on...

About my incomprehensibly beautiful daughter: I am still really at a loss for words in describing how much she has brought to my life. She continues to amaze me with her sincerely, beautiful, optimism; her conviction in right and wrong; her infectious understanding and wit; and her - simply her. She is simply amazing. There is no less corny way to put it :)

But on a more objective note. An update on Beamlak - she continues to do extremely well at pretty much everything she does ;) She LOVES school and has a tight group of 4 friends that she spends most of her time with. She continues to be a helper in class and continues to work hard. In the beginning of the year she was catching on quickly with spelling but she has begun to show some difficulty with it lately. She's really great while practicing at home with me and having fun while doing so, but she continues to have difficulty during her spelling tests. But no worries - if she continues to tackle this as she has with everything else she will catch up quite quickly. As all who know her, including her teachers, once she picks something up she runs with it! I'm also looking at what may have caused her to go backwards a little and it seems that it began exactly the same time that she began her Amharic lessons which due to scheduling difficulty are on Thursday nights and the spelling tests are on Friday. But she is LOVING her Ethiopian mentor/tutor!

While we're on the topic - her Amharic! When we first got home we were having a lot of scheduling difficulties with finding a tutor - mostly because most of the Ethio-American students are from the Twin Cities (2 1/2 hours away) and it was the summer. But once school started up again we were able to get into a set schedule - Thursdays from 5-7 pm. I was so afraid that though she could still understand everything in Amharic - we listen to music, videos, watch a school program, etc, she began not being able to communicate in it. She would be surprised that I knew words in Amharic and she no longer could think of it spontaneously. We regularly turned English books into Amharic "object" books, and there were days when she couldn't think of colors (even her favorite color, GREEN!) in Amharic. I thought my fear had been realized when, after her first lesson, Beamlak didn't speak any Amharic to her. However! by the second week's lesson she began to remember more and more and by the third she spoke almost the entire 2 hours in Amharic! I was BEYOND ecstatic! It's working! All the time spent listening to Amharic and making sure it was in the background of conversations and having her listen to it going to sleep paid off :) I'm SO excited for her and she's having a lot of fun with it. The only "requirement" for the lesson is that they spend the time communicating in Amharic. They can do anything while doing so, playing at the playground, cooking, reading stories, it doesn't matter, they just spend time talking. In a few years, it is my hope that she will begin to learn the Fidel but certainly not until she can be confident in English. I'm just SO happy! Yippie!

I suppose - I could now write forever, but then that would mean I would have 30 days to fill with nonsense :) I'll finish up for now with just a few...

Current Beamlak favorites:
Her little kisses in the morning as she crawls into bed to say, "good morning" and BIG kisses I get at bedtime
The kisses she never forgets as she's "running" out of the car to catch the bus
Her confidence in our daily routines
The way she still jumps into my arms when we're on our way upstairs for bedtime
How she will ask every night how many books we get to read tonight and be disappointed the one night a week it is only 1
quote: "Mom, tickl-ish me!"
quote: "Mom! You tickl-ish me!!"
quote: "Mom! tickl-ish me okay?"
I hope she always says it this way, I just can't bring myself to help her out with this one :)

6 months today...wow... amazing!