a bit about my babies.

This afternoon, we had a family with young kids over to visit, [and their four year old girl told me the sweet tea I made tasted like lipstick... yep, that's my secret - I add lipstick to sweet tea,] and in the course of the afternoon, I heard their baby boy crying upstairs.

I ran upstairs to get him, and as I entered the dark room where he'd been napping, the cries strangely didn't stop. When I lifted him in my arms and held him close, he still sobbed and blubbered on my shoulder. "This is strange," I thought. "He's still crying!" and then, "Why is this strange?"

And that's when I realized: I've become spoiled to orphans.

I'm used to babies who know what it's like to lie in their beds unattended and unheeded for loooong stretches of time... who know what it feels like to not get their diapers changed as soon as they wake up... they're so grateful that someone with gentle hands is picking them up that they become little cooing, babbling, grinning packages of happiness as soon as I lay hands on them. (with a few exceptions, of course.)

Those babies didn't know I wasn't their mama.


But this little sucker - he knew. He knew his mama was in the house, and he knew that I sure as heck wasn't her.


And as I carried him downstairs to his own mother, (and as he stopped crying - apparently he recognized that I had a bit of The Mother Touch,) I was overwhelmed with gratitude that this baby wasn't like the ones I spent three months loving on. He is loved. He is mothered.

And then. Then, I began missing my sweet Ethiopia babies.






I'll miss them forever, I suppose. Remember their soft hands, their needy cries, their incredibly happy smiles.

I wouldn't have it any other way.