Cousins, an aunt, Halloween, and one huge belly!

Hello, again-

October was a busy month for us, but lots of fun and adventure. Annette didn’t get any less pregnant, as you might imagine, and I made a couple of trips with long days and nights, for which I got no sympathy from the pregnant lady with three kids and a puppy at home. The boys are all in motion from waking up to falling asleep, so it’s never dull.

We had some visitors from the States in the form of my Aunt Teresa and cousins Shannon and Tamara, who were in from California as part of a wide-ranging Africa trip. We showed them around Nairobi a bit, and they also enjoyed seeing the boys’ school and what we do around town. Annette took them shopping and spared me that task, for which I’m grateful to my bride. Shannon, Tamara, the boys and I made a trip to Masai Mara. Because I’m cheap, we drove the five-hour, 200-mile route to Masai Mara. Tamara says she’ll never complain about another pothole on the interstate in California. The road to Masai Mara was ridiculous, flat and paved one moment and spanned by a hole to swallow an SUV in the next instant. We had one flat tire and one near-miss when I hit a huge, unmarked hump at highway speed, but the rest of the trip was pretty enjoyable. We saw lions, cheetahs, elephants, hippos, wildebeests, and some of the usual giraffes, zebras, and warthogs.

We all went trick-or-treating on Halloween night. Luke is still getting the hang of it and Mark was more inclined to sneaking treats from his bag, but Chris, who hadn’t celebrated Halloween before, picked it up in a hurry. Once he realized he could get candy from every house, he took off like a shot. Chris was Spiderman, Mark was a pirate (“pilate”, as the boy with the Kenyan accent says), and Luke was a train engineer.

We celebrated Little Mark’s birthday the Saturday after November 5. Annette made him a Nemo cake and he had lots of his friends over. As usual, he was very happy to have lots of folks gathered in his honor.

Annette’s girlfriends put on a baby shower for her two Saturday s ago. Everyone had a great time, and Annette was real flattered with the kindness. She says she’s officially a “waddler” now, and she’s about ready for the baby to arrive. The doctor seems to think the first week of December might be realistic, thought the due date is closer to Christmas. She’s starting to think my jokes about her mobility and constant nausea aren’t so funny, so maybe it’s time for the baby to arrive.

We had some great news and then the reality of Kenyan bureaucracy set in. We were supposed to have our first court date for Christopher's adoption today, but yesterday afternoon (5pm), the lawyer called and said his assistant was at the court checking on some papers and was told that the judge decided she didn't want to work today. So with the holidays coming up, it'll probably be another couple of months before we can start the Kenyan court process. Never a question of is it worth it, but sometimes we do wonder why they make it so difficult.

With all we’ve been doing, the boys continue to thrive and keep us on our toes. Chris and Mark are both doing well in school. Chris manages to stay out of time-out most days, though he got in time-out the other day between the time he ran away from Annette at the school gate and when Annette caught up to him in his classroom. Mark is studious as ever, but doing great. Both were selected for the Potterhouse Under-6 travel team for football (they don’t say “soccer” in these parts), and had a match at the German school the other day. They came in fourth out of sixteen teams. Luke enjoys dropping off his brothers, but doesn’t want to stay at the school just yet. He’s talking pretty well, having perfected “No!” and “Mine!” and stealing toys from his brothers. We’re making videos to show him how he’s acting, figuring the new baby will be doing this to Luke in two years’ time.

Happy Turkey Day,
Mark

Grandparents, Prayers for a Rhino, and a Wheel Bearing

Greetings, all-

It seems I last wrote in August, so I have quite a bit of activity from Casa Zimmer for updates. This will probably turn into two messages, so we can put a few more photos on the blog site.

Annette’s folks came in for a couple of weeks in early September. Annette and I went out to the airport and left the boys at home. Little Mark wasn’t real happy, and then he stayed awake until we got home. We figured out later that he equated his mom going to the airport with her being gone for six weeks (as she was with Luke’s medevac this past summer). He seemed relieved when we got home, and Grandma and Grandpa Watts got to meet Chris for the first time. He knew them right off, thanks to Annette’s tireless efforts to keep photos of the family in front of the kids during storytime and around the house in general.

After a couple of days’ recovery from the long flight, we took off for a two-night trip to Sweetwaters, a safari camp near Mount Kenya. We wrote about that, I think, shortly after we arrived here in September 2007. It’s the place with the tame rhino, Morani. The boys were excited to see Morani on this trip, but when we arrived the guard at the gate gave us a flyer and told us Morani had died just a week or two prior to our arrival. The boys seemed sad, but I didn’t think much more of it. But when we arrived at the lodge, I hopped out and opened the back door to unload the kids. Annette and the boys weren’t moving, so I started to ask about the holdup until I heard Annette saying a prayer for the rhino’s soul. She finally got out, turned to me and her folks and said, “praying for rhinos wasn’t in the job description when I signed up for motherhood.”

We took off for a game drive right after we unloaded the car, and three minutes out from the lodge came across a herd of elephants. We hadn’t seen elephants since we’d arrived, so this was a treat for us as well as the grandparents. We had a series of great game drives during the weekend, and also got to see some game around the watering hole at the camp.

We had been warned the week before the grandparents came that the wheel bearing on the car would go out in 2-3 months. A week later, coming back from a game drive at Sweetwaters, the wheel bearing went out. The mechanics told us we couldn’t make it back to Nairobi with the bad part, so we had to wait for a Good Samaritan (and garage owner) to send the part back from Nairobi and then have the hotel mechanics install it with hand tools in the parking lot. I don’t think we were much worse for the wear after two extra nights at Sweetwaters, grateful that we weren’t stuck in the middle of the bush someplace.

The second weekend, we spent a night at Lake Naivasha, which is where we go to look at hippos. I told the grandparents we would go for “a hippo ride” at Lake Naivasha. I thought this was understood to mean a boat ride where we’d look at hippos, but a few minutes into our boat ride, Annette’s mom breathed a big sigh of relief and told us she thought she was going to have to ride a hippo. She said if I was going to make my kids do it, she figured she could, too. We had a nice evening in a rented cabin at Lake Naivasha, then spent the next day at Lake Nakuru National Park. We saw another wide variety of wildlife, including thousands of flamingos and a huge black rhino by the lake. Mark and Chris claimed they were eager to eat lunch at Baboon Lookout, where the baboons stole their lunches a few months ago. We decided against it, eating instead at the “Out of Africa Lookout.”

The grandparents spent the rest of their time touring Nairobi and seeing what we do from day to day. They went to the boys’ school and also to The Nest, the orphanage from which Chris came. We ate some local food and Annette took them to some museums. I guess they enjoyed the trip.

Apart from the grandparents in September, the boys and I went on another safari to a place called “The Ark” which is a hotel built to look like…(wait for it…) an ark. We had signed up and paid a deposit before Annette’s OB told her she couldn’t travel anymore. The boys and I did well, and they seemed to enjoy the adventure. The animals are able to come right up the hotel, as the guests are restricted to the inside of the hotel after getting out of the cars. We had a big elephant walk up to the hotel as we were having hot chocolate. We had a nice bush lunch, set up in the middle of the game park. I guess I got some Dad Points, because when we got home and I asked Annette how much she missed us and if she survived okay alone with the puppy, she said, “You could have stayed gone another week.”

Enjoy the photos. Another update to follow,
Mark