Time to wrap!

...a selection of gifts for my brother and his family. I am tardy getting them shipped, but it won't bother him. And I haven't lined up holiday items for my sister and her family, since she's in Addis Ababa now, meeting her two new sons for the first time. They are ages 10 and 6 or 7, orphans because both parents died of AIDS. They've been in a stable situation in an orphanage for a while here, and all reports indicate they are happy little fellows. I keep trying, as I told my sister over the phone, to put myself in their little frames: What will it be like for them to leave this little haven, and come back to Troy, Idaho, in winter? They aren't fluent in English, although the older one has been learning it. They have an instant older brother, my 11 year old nephew, who will be able to help them, as well as an Ethiopian family, father a prof at the U. of Idaho, with two boys the same ages, which is almost too providentail to expect, in a rural area of Idaho. It's not as if they were being landed in the middle of a white supremacist stronghold. My sister and her husband had wanted another child, and these two seemed an unbreakable set. It is very exciting, and also terrifying, but I have a basic feeling it will work out well.