Shop, Shop, and Shop

First let me tell you about our flight from HCMC to Hanoi. The Vietnamese Prime Minister was on our flight as were 6 Miss Vietnam beauty queens. It was pretty cool. Good thing Lucy didn't embarass us on the flight with poor behavior!!!!

Well, the shopping in Hanoi has not let us down. I got a great silk jacket and dress. We got some amazing stuff for our house. Justin is getting a suit made. I love the shopping here. What would cost several hundred dollars in the states costs a fraction of the price here. It's awesome and Lucy loves the shopping too. We have to buy one more enormous suit case to get everything home.

Hanoi is so different from HCMC. We like it here a lot. The pollution is really bad though. I almost forgot to tell you all this, but we got in a wreck on the way to the airport in HCMC. For those of you who don't know, the traffic in Vietnam is insane. Most of the people are on motorbikes and there are essentially no rules of the road. From what I can tell, if you are bigger, than you win. People drive the wrong way into oncoming traffic, the traffic lights mean nothing, and you use your horn constantly. So, we are in a van on the way to the airport and a girl on a motorbike wrecks into the curb. The car in front of us slammed on their brakes to try and not hit her. He still hit her bike, but not her. So, we slammed on our brakes as well, but there was no way we were not going to hit the other car. So we rear ended them. Also, car seats are nonexistent here. Justin was holding Lucy. I saw it coming. Luckily, we were not going fast enough for anyone to get hurt. But it was still scary.

We are scheduled for our final visa interview tomorrow. Please pray that we can get our Visa on Wednesday and head home that night. We have our travel agent looking into available flights. We are ready to come home and get settled in our own routine. Vietnatm has been wonderful, but we are ready to see our family and friends and sleep in our own bed and eat Mexican food.

Made it to Hanoi

We are in Hanoi. We got here yesterday afternoon, but the internet was not cooperating. Lucy did great on the 2 hour flight. She was very bored by the end, but so was I. This is going to be short because we have very limited time here and we have got some shopping to do. I will write more this evening. Just wanted to let everyone know that we are here.

Life is Wonderful

Sorry about not writing in yesterday. I worked so hard to get this adorable video of Lucy laughing uploaded and I just can't do it. I have no idea why, but I can't. I have been really annoyed by this and kept thinking yesterday that I could get it uploaded so I wanted to wait until then to post. Anyway, I will continue to work on it.

Life with Lucy has been so wonderful for the past several days. She is doing so well and adjusting more and more each day. She really enjoys us now. She smiles at us constantly and is just a joy to be around. She still gets herself all worked up at bedtime, but that is no biggie. She LOVES being in the sling. I just figured it out the other day and now for the past two days, anytime we go anywhere, she rides in the sling. She usually falls right asleep while we are out and about. I love having her so close.

We were told by many people that the stuff is cheaper in HCMC, so we decided to go ahead and shop. And boy did we shop. We have gotten tons of gifts for our family and lots of goodies for Lucy. I love all of the hand embroidered stuff. We got Lucy several dresses and pjs that are hand embroidered. The stuff is CRAZY cheap. We got ourselves the most gorgeous hand embroidered sheets and a set for Lucy when she gets much older. They are a very special gift for her and I can't wait to give them to her some day. I love all of the laquerware. We got some coasters, wine bottle holders, photo albums, etc. I have no idea how we are going to get all of this stuff to Hanoi, let alone home. We will figure it out. The other thing that we have gone completely nuts over is the art. You can get the most amazing oil paintings for $35. Any knock off you can think of and they are so gorgeous. We have gotten 13 pieces. Hopefully some day we will have wall space for all of it. Oh, I am so pumped about the art.

Something funny about Vietnam is that no matter what Lucy is wearing, including all pink, everyone always asks if she is a boy or a girl. Even today with a barette in, they still asked. Why is that?? Okay, she is totally bored right now and needs to be entertained, so I am off. I put new pictures up, so check em out. Oh my goodness, I almost forgot the most important news. We leave for Hanoi in the morning. Our Visa appointment is scheduled for Tuesday at 1:30 - so we can most likely leave on Wednesday night!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think we may be home on Thursday if we can get the flights changed. We are so pumped to get Lucy home to meet everyone. Love to you all from Vietnam!!

Water Baby!!

Be sure and check out the new pictures of our little swimmer. We decided to go to the hotel pool today because it is sweltering hot here and Lucy LOVED it. The water felt a little cold to us, so I was hesitant to let her get in, but the second her feet touched the water, she wanted to dive right in. It was so cute and funny. She just loves water. She got mad at us when we set her on the lounge chair with me. She was squirming around and trying to get back to the water, so Justin put her back in and she was laughing and playing away.

This morning we walked around near our hotel for a while. It is so hot, so I didn't want to keep her out for too long. She loved our stroll around. I think that she loves the hot weather. She is used to it and she seems comfortable in it, but I just didn't want to overheat her. For those of you who have been to Vietnam, you know how the people here cluck at the babies. Well, Justin has mastered the art of the cluck. She goes nuts when he does it.

I want to buy so much stuff, but we are trying to wait until we get to Hanoi. We already have so much stuff with us that we don't want to be adding to it already with another leg of our trip still to go. I did get an awesome skirt and a dress and a couple of things for Lucy. She will have to grow into them, because they are for a 1 year old, but they are so adorable and so cheap.

She is waking from her afternoon nap, so I have to be done for now. More later.

Feeling Much Better

We have had a much much better day. Thanks for all of your love and support. I don't think she is teething yet. It doesn't look like any teeth are any where near coming, but I could be wrong. The doctor said her ears look fine. He said that the reason that she is pulling on them is that they are probably itching. Okay. Who knows. I am happy to know that they look fine. My guess for yesterday is that she just had a bad day. We screwed up her schedule pretty bad the day before with the late travelling to HCMC. She has been happy and easy going today, and it has been a busy day for us.

We finally got some of our apointments done today. I feel like we actually moved ourselves closer to being able to come home. We met at 11 am to go to the US Consolate for our first appointment with the CIS. We were there for quite a while, but the interview was a piece of cake. So easy and took only a few minutes once we finally got in. Then we got back in the car to go to the hospital to have Lucy's medical appointment for her visa. It went pretty quickly. She fell asleep in the car on the wa to the hospital and slept all the way until we had to wake her up to be weighted and measured. She cried for about 2 seconds and then was fine.

After the medical, we drove to get the babies visa pictures made. Once again, she fell dead asleep in the car and we had to wake her up to have her picture made. She was fine though. We are going to try and eat at an Italian restaurant for dinner tonight, so I hope it goes okay. We are about to go to the market. Love and miss you all.

Rough Day

Good morning from Vietnam. It is almost 8 am here and miss little and her dad are still snoozing. Yesterday was an interesting day for us. It started out normal. Lucy played all morning and we went to breakfast and she was great. We came back up to our room, fed her again, and loaded her up in the stroller to go and explore in HCMC since we had no appointments yesterday. She did great for several hours. She loves to be out and about and it is fun for Justin and I to get out and see things. I bought her a couple of things and got myself a great dress and skirt.

I knew she was going to be getting hungry, so we go to Highlands Coffee in the Saigon Center. Highlands Coffee is just like a Starbucks. It was really nice to sit and have a diet Coke and they were very helpful in getting us hot water to warm her bottle up in. She scarfed down her bottle and then the fun begins. She took a huge poop. I mean HUGE. I am sitting there wondering where in the world am I going to change her. I take her to the bathroom and of course there is no changing table. The bathroom was really clean and nice, but still. Sara, you saved my butt by telling me about the Skip Hop. I would have never just laid her down somewhere. I take her into the stall, put down the toilet lid, wipe it down with anti-bacterial wipes, and put out her changing pad. She was actually quite cooperative because she needed to stay very still. Also, just so you know, the bathroom stalls in Vietnam are made for very small Vietnamese people. I could barely fit in there, let alone trying to move around to change her diaper. I felt really sorry for the others in there using the restroom. It stunk so badly. Ugh. Anyway, we lived through that.

I go back out to meet Justin and she is getting really fidgety and antsy at this point. We put her back in her stroller and figure she will be happy once we are on the go again. WRONG. She totally lost it in the Saigon Center. I still have no idea what was wrong with her. She had a clean diaper and had just eaten. She was just done. So, we head home. She ends up falling asleep on the walk home, but only for a short little nap.

When she woke up, she was so upset. Inconsolable. This is so hard to watch when they are so upset. She decides she will take another bottle and falls deep asleep. She totally wore herself out by crying so hard. She was very upset for the rest of the night. I am pretty certain that she is fighting an ear infection. Late in the afternoon she started tugging and rubbing her ears. I have antibiotics for her, but we are scheduled for her medical appointment today and I am just going to wait and ask the doctor. She is not running a fever. She slept very restlessly again all night. I am very tired because of it. She was not up crying, she was just all over the place and not peaceful by any stretch of the word. I watched her most of the night and tried to comfort her. I am ready to go to the doctor and start medicine if we need to. We are supposed to have our first appointment with CIS today. WE are waiting on a phone call from Quoc to let us know when we are going. I am so ready to have one of our appointments and get things going.

I hope that today she is feeling better. I know she is tired because she has never stayed in bed uptil 8. I will let you all know how the doctor appointment goes.

We are in HCMC

Hello again. I have some wonderful news. We are in a hotel with an ethernet cable and there should be no internet issues while we are here. What a relief. It is expensive to use, but who really cares at this point? Not me and certainly not Lucy. She wants you guys to know more and more about her.

Yesterday was a wonderful day for little miss priss. She woke up happy and managed to stay happy throughout most of the day. We were supposed to fly out of Danang at 6 pm to head to HCMC. When we got to the airport at 4:15, we are told our flight is delayed until 8:30. YUCK. That means we are stuck in the Danang airport (which is very very small) for 4 hours. Also, we are going to be getting the babies WAY off of their normal schedules. Lucy has gone to bed around 8 every night and it has worked wonderfully.

She started to get antsy by the end of our wait. I was trying to hold out on her next bottle for take off. By the way, she is already eating a whole lot more. We even got a 4 oz. bottle down her yesterday. Anyway, we managed to make it to takeoff with only a little bit of bottle left, but she was fine. By this time it is 9, I am thinking she is going to take the bottle and pass out. Wrong. She was totally wired for the whole flight. This was fine since she was in a really great mood. She did so well the whole flight, which was only 1 hour. I was a proud momma. By the time we got the luggage and in the cab, she was out for the count. She was so tired she didn't stir a bit as we jostled her around moving our stuff and getting in and out of the car. We brought her up to the room, laid her down, and that was it.

In case you were wondering, she is sleeping with us right now. I think it is wonderful for her bonding with us and she needs it anyway. She is an extremely restless sleeper. She has been waking her self up many times in the night by kicking her legs and thrashing her arms around. With us right next to her, we just jiggle her little legs a bit and leave a hand on her and she settles right back down. She did the sweetest thing this morning, I could feel her starting to stir, so I looked over at her. Her eyes were barely open and when I looked at her she gave me a big grin and then reached out her hand for me. To some of you this might not seem like much, but she has not really reached for us at all until yesterday and this morning. It was adorable. One more cute thing about her sleeping while I am on this topic - the day we visited the orphanage, I watched the nanny closely on how she got her to sleep to see if she had any little tricks I should know about. She did this funny little forehead rub with her hair. So, I tried it one night when she was so restless. She was kicking around and I put my hand on her head and rubbed her forehead. She was sleeping, just not soundly at this point. As soon as I started rubbing, she started smiling in her sleep. It was like the good ole days to her.

Right now it is morning here. We are still really tired from last night, but she is up and at em. She is currently playing with her favorite toy, the wipes container. Figures. I just had to take a break to get her a bottle, but dad is giving it to her so I can finish writing this. She really is just a wonderful baby. What a joy.

As far as her development goes, I think she is right on track. She has wonderful head control, she rolls everywhere, she can scoot places that she thinks she needs to go, she is great on her tummy, she reaches and holds toys well, etc. She has a hard time being held sometimes. It is almost like she isn't sure about being held so much. I have found a position that she really seems to enjoy though, so we are doing better with that.

Any time we are out and about, we cause quite the commotion. Everyone wants to look at her, hold her and ask about her. I honestly don't have a problem with the people wanting to hold her. I thought that I would, but I don't. She really enjoys it and I feel like she needs to get as much of her culture as possible while we are here. The Vietnamese people LOVE babies. They all pass them around and cluck at them and she enjoys it. I know it isn't hurting her, so I just let her enjoy it. We will see how that goes when we get in the busy HCMC markets.

Okay, she is antsy and it is time for our breakfast. I will get more pictures up later today. Love to you all from Justin, Kelly, and Lucy. By the way, she is the boss of us all now. I used to get to be the boss, but now we do it all according to her!!