It is the tradition of the adoption agency we used to adopt Ben from Ethiopia to have a “going away party” at the end of the week for all of the children who are going home to America with their new adoptive families.

The party is emotional…the kids know that they are leaving and the staff and other children know that they are leaving. The adoptive parents are often filled with mixed emotions…thrilled to be hours away from starting the journey home with their new child/children, sad to be taking them from the wonderful country of their birth. There are tears mixed in with lots of excitement. There is cake and soda and singing.

Throw into the middle of all this…rocket balloons. One of the families we traveled with had brought rocket balloons to play with with the children. If you haven’t seen them, rocket balloons are long balloons that attach to a small hand-held pump. Once they are blown up, you pull them off the pump and let them go, and the shoot through the air, zigging and zagging every which way, and making extremely loud and obnoxious noises for several minutes. Our friends were a bit timid when it came to actually taking out the rocket balloons, so they gave them to my hubby Josh (who isn’t timid about anything).

Josh walked out into the middle of the playground and began blowing up a balloon. Several children followed him. As soon as he let it go, he had the attention of everyone at the party. All of the kid stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed as that first balloon shot around the sky, making all sorts of noise. What ensued after the very first rocket balloon was sheer chaos. Children were laughing and screaming with wide eyes and huge smiles. Even the nannies looked like the little children and were very excited. Josh made the mistake of letting one of the children release a balloon, and then he was mobbed by children, even babies, all wanting to be the one to let the next rocket go. The air was full of laughter and rocket noises and the shouts of children demanding a turn. Kids ran after the balloons, trying to predict which way it would go and finally land, so they could be the one to retrieve it. It was chaos. Fun, but chaos none the less.

We actually did try to snap a few photos, but none of them do any real justice to the scene.

Yes, a wish I had some photos of the sheer chaos that a package of rocket balloons can cause in an Ethiopian orphanage