International Adoption Clinic

Hello from the Land of "Long-Time-No-Post!"

Dave and I took Bereket to the International Adoption Clinic at Children's Hospital in Denver this week. What a fantastic experience! What a blessing to have our son evaluated by a whole team of specialists. Here are the major things we learned:

* Bereket is not four years, four months, even though that is the birth date on his birth certificate. He might even be older than FIVE years, four months....but we are going to go ahead and move his birthday UP exactly one year. So, our son is five, not four years old! (On testing, Bereket flew through every item through the five year category. The inventories are substantially different for six years and older, so they didn't test further.)

* The team highly recommended Bereket start kindergarten next year. They said he will be very fluent in conversational English, but he should still have ESL services, because a conceptual grasp of language is very different.

* They also highly recommended we form a short-term relationship with an Amharic speaker, who could work as a translator for us. They believe Bereket is attaching and adjusting sooooo well, and he is extremely resilient. But at the same time, he has suffered a tremendous loss. And it's a loss we know next-to-nothing about. If we can gain an understanding of his history before he forgets it, it will likely help us parent him in the future. And I think it will be a gift to him, too.

* Regarding his size: He would be an average-size four year-old. He would be a slightly small five year-old. If he is six, he is pretty small. But he will catch up, much as Amelia has.

* They determined Bereket is extremely smart (yup), completely darling (absolutely) and super busy (ditto).

Everything else is coming along just fine. I think the most difficult aspects of our life as a family of six aren't necessarily related to Bereket's adoption. Rather, it's the fact that he's a boy, and a busy/curious one at that. We seem to be on the move more than ever now. Our life was super-busy before Bereket came home. Now we live at warp speed!