A-feck-a-shallow- "I love you"

A-feck-a-shallow is the Ethiopian way to say "I love you" when addressing a female...well, sort of. When we made our Ethiopian kids a DVD of our family a while back, we tried out our knowledge of Amharic (which is tinesh tinesh- "small" to say the least!). There's something to be said for effort! Anyway, when Avery was in Ethiopia, the director of the orphanage said to him, "About your DVD..." It seems that everybody in our family said "A-feck-a-shallow" to our daughter and "A-feck-a-hallow" to our son, which does mean "I love you" but it's a very romantic way of saying "I love you"....I'm amazed that they still let us adopt after that! For those of you with Amharic speaking kids, we've discovered that it's much more appropriate to say "A-wad-a-shallow/hallow"! No wonder all of the kids at the orphanage laughed when they watched our DVD! There's no telling what else we said that was completely inappropriate! It's a wonder social services didn't pay us a visit after that DVD. :)