Ethan’s big challenge right now is having to train two new, sometimes clueless, parents!

Think about it, Ethan had invested six months (of his 8-month-old life) in training a foster mother (an experienced mother of three grown children) to read his signals and meet his needs. Now he has to start all over with two newbies.

To help with the transition, we were supplied information by the foster mother about sleep schedule, eating habits, and things like that. Of course, now that we’re home, in a different time zone, where the food is different, we’re really having to learn everything new anyway, it seems.

Ethan has developed some signals to indicate different things and we’re in the process of learning what they mean. Sometimes when he’s hungry, he smacks his lips. Yesterday, when he wanted a bottle, apparently, he started crawling toward the kitchen. When he’s getting sleepy (but doesn’t really *ever* want to go to sleep) he rubs his eyes with his hands or on a blanket.

But this training process that we’re involved in is a two-way street. As we build a stronger relationship with Ethan, and as we become more confident about what we’re doing, our challenge will become ‘being trained by Ethan’ to ‘training Ethan.’

We’ve been pretty lenient in our first week together, mainly because our first priority has been survival. But now that we’re getting to know each other (and getting well), it’s time to start our own training program.

Part of this training will involve working on Ethan’s sleeping schedule as well as his diet. We will take Ethan to his first doctor’s appointment here on Wednesday, where we’ll probably try to get some help with these two areas.

The training continues …