Keep it Sweetly Simple: Thankful and Brothers and Sisters Weeks

(Update--Our Agency is closed for Thanksgiving until Monday--so definitely no referral call until at least then.) :)

Time for some Theme Week catch-up! (Not to be mistaken with ketchup which is so not a hit to my tomato-loathing children.;)

Two weeks ago it was Thankful Week. We started our "Thankful Tree" (an awesome idea from Andrea's blog) that is now covered with leaves naming lots of things that make us thankful.

We also learned how to say "I love you" in Amharic--"ewedeshalo." That week we could say "Ewedeshalo, doro" or "I love you, chicken." Because "doro" was the only other amharic word that we knew from Turkey Week the week before.

Last week was Brothers and Sister Weeks. And we learned a few more words. Now we can say, "Ewedeshalo, ehit (sister), wundim (brother), enat (mother), abat (father) and gwedenya (friend)." That makes a lot more sense.

And what better week to visit the "City of Brotherly Love", Philadelphia. Oh, early that Sunday morning I was up working on my good old CEU's when I thought that I should take a closer look at the fine print. To my horror, I realized that I couldn't do them all online. But here's the cool part--that night I could have been doing lots of other things, but I really felt like I had to get the CEU's done. And last week was the BIG speech-language pathologist conference. Had I been doing anything else, I totally would have missed the conference. And it wasn't in California or Texas or somewhere that I had to get a plane ticket for--nope it was in Philadelphia. And J was game to take a day off to hang out in the city with the kids. And I loved it! There were seminars on language and international adoption, the relationship between poverty and literacy, and work that is being done in developing nations. Good stuff!

And I have to give a shout out to Dr. Light at Penn State. I had the privelege of doing research with her as a student. I went to one of her 2 hour seminars on working with children with Down Syndrome. It was so amazing that I had to stay for her second 2-hour lecture. She is truly one of the most beautiful people that I know.