Williams is home!

I've put this off for long enough! The thought of trying to condense all that has happened and is happening into words has been too overwhelming for me, I just avoided it. So here I am, starting anywhere just to get started.

Williams is home, and boy is he home. Talk about life-changing! I try to imagine what it's like to be him experiencing everything that he is and missing everything that he is. I'm having a little trouble dealing with the massive changes taking place in my life and they don't even begin to compare with his changes.

I didn't realize this picture was so blurry and I don't know how to take it out so it's stuck there for now.

Tomorrow will be 2 weeks since Williams homecoming. The traveling home was hardly a piece of cake for either Williams or Scott. Williams was obviously overwhelmed and scared. He had a few temper tantrums on the plane that earned Scott the gold medal you see in the above picture around his neck. On top of that, he (Scott) became sick on their second day of travel. Apparently he wasn't as careful as he should have been in watching what he ate.

A long story short, they made it home and we are now in the process of figuring out how to live, us with a new son, him with a new family, in a new country, state, city, house, room, etc.

I know this is not a well composed post, but I wanted to force myself back into the blogosphere. It can only get better from here!

Obsession

I am officially obssessed with Williams and Scott getting home. In 17 hours they will be in New York, on American soil. (They have to spend the night there.) In 30 hours their flight will leave from JFK. In 34 1/2 hours they will be here. I constantly count ahead 5 hours to figure out what they might be doing. I wake up several times a night and I can think of nothing else.

This is where they'll be in 3 hours:

This is the bathroom they may use in 4 hours:

Kind of creepy, isn't it?!

This is the sweet pea Scott will have in tow:

And, hopefully, sweet pea will be doing a lot of this on the plane:

Mealtime Etiquette

While Scott is somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on his way to Ghana, I will look to other urgent matters that need to be addressed in our household.

Recently my 13 year old niece was eating dinner with us. When I asked her to pass the salt she passed me the salt AND pepper. She said she'd recently taken an etiquette quiz and learned that if someone asks for the salt, it is proper to pass the pepper with it. I did not know that. Interestingly enough, I wasn't familiar with the other couple of things she could remember from the quiz. This probably illustrates why there are some issues that take place at our table that need to be addressed. These are some etiquette tips that need to be followed in my home.

1. Do not hit another diner in the face with your plate. This actually happened shortly after the salt and pepper discussion. The perpetrator...my niece, the etiquette expert.
2. Do not gesture with your knife when there is a glob of soft butter on it. It WILL fly across the table...and no, it is not funny.
3. Do not throw peas or any other food objects.
4. URGENT! Do not change your underwear at the table, standing on your chair, with your butt at face level with another diner. (To be fair, Adam is the only one who breaks this rule.)
5. Do not walk up to the table at dinnertime and use any of the following expressions: Eeeewww! Yuck! Gross! I hate that!
6. If you have to throw up, do not do it on your mother's plate.
7. Do not purposely scratch your fork on your plate creating a "fingernails on a chalkboard" screech.

These are all actual incidents that have happened or do happen on a regular basis in our family. And they, the children, actually had the nerve to comment while watching video of Williams, "He chews with his mouth open!"

Scott's Ghana Bound

I guess I wont do a day-by-day version of my trip to Ghana. (You all are lucky!) I can't believe it's already time for Scott to head off to Africa. I'm hoping that I can get him to blog from there. I am anxious to get his perspective. I have so much information in my head from our AAI Yahoo group, blog reading, and research, that I can't quite bring myself "down to his level" :-) on Ghana knowledge. I'm sure there are things I should tell him to help him, but I'm not sure where to start. And, to be honest, he probably wouldn't listen much after the first couple of minutes.

A mom who's there right now had a really, really bad experience with the chop house where I ate almost every meal, so he's going to have to blaze his own trail when it comes to eating. (I can't bear to tell the gross story!) I'm sending him with protein bars and a jar of peanut butter. I could live a long time on just that.

He's going to be paranoid about getting ringworm since I have it all over my left arm. I feel pretty good that that's all I came home with...completely treatable and no big deal. He's started on his anti-malarial medication, and, as I suspected, he never went back to get the Hep. A and B shot that I told him to get.

I packed all of Williams things today and it was one of the most rewarding activities I think I've ever experienced. Why isn't packing Scott's stuff as much fun? Preparing for this trip is a piece of cake compared to the last one where I had to take all the paperwork to file our I600 and possibly the I864. I hope I'm not being too laid back about the packing process. I feel like I should be experiencing a lot more stress than I am. Maybe this is just called "being organized" which doesn't happen to me often.