What's with the background changes?

It has no doubt NOT escaped the notice of any of my regular readers that I did not come home from Ethiopia with babies. No, I did not. No babies here.

Sigh.

However, what I do have is approximately eight million and forty baby photos. I cant' show them to you yet, for reasons that you all already know, but boy oh boy I can sure spend a lot of time looking at them.

[You can't tell, but I just clicked away from this window for five minutes to look at them all again].

I have looked at them a lot since I came home. A lot. Even the un-favourite ones, eg where one baby is puking a little, are irresistible to me. And... there's no cool way to say this, so I'm just going to say it- I've started digitally scrapbooking some of them. Yes. I have. I have scrapbooked, and I am not ashamed.

(Okay, maybe a little ashamed).

It seems that the older I get, the less cool my hobbies become. Photography was reasonably cool. Sewing is borderline. Making my own beaded jewellery was pushing it. And scrapbooking... wow. I'm pretty sure that it is really incredibly uncool. (Sorry, scrapbookers. I'm one of you now, so I say this with love). I told my sister about this new interest, and she openly mocked me, which is never a good sign.

The one perk is that my new stash of digital papers (that's scrapbook-talk, y'all) can double as blog backgrounds! Now the text here actually contrasts with the area behind it - novel, non?

And actually, another one is that I've used my new hobby to solve a problem I've been ruminating on. I really want to tell you the babies' names, but after my last little experience with google, I've been very loath to type their names in any kind of searchable format. I've also been wanting to show you some pictures that don't break any rules (nothing that identifies the babies). So, without further ado, here they are in all their non searchable, legal, scrapbook-y glory:

[actually, in the end I decided to remove them, just to be on the ultra, uber safe side. I'll put them back up after court]

Her first name means 'precious jewel' in Amharic. Her second name was my grandmother's. And her third name is the name she had first. (When you see baby boy's name, you'll see why we didn't feel we could keep their first names!)

[same as above]

His first name (also Amharic) means 'Jehovah is Salvation'. His second name is my Father's name, and was J's uncle's name. And his third name matched his sister's a bit too closely for us to send them through school like that.

Come home soon, babies.