3/5 of the Atkins family's last full day in Hanoi

Hi all -

This is Doug and I will be taking Thomas and Helen with me tomorrow (Sunday) to the airport to leave for home. We leave the hotel 9 am Sunday Vietnam time (8 pm Saturday night) and we will hopefully arrive at the Minneapolis airport around 11:45 pm Sunday night. We will travel from Hanoi to Taipei to LA to Minneapolis. The trip back is somewhat shorter due the the wind direction, so that is a good thing. We will miss the other 40% of our family and want them to come back as soon as they can.

This morning Mr. Hien called us and said that although he couldn't get a good price on the hotel that the other families were staying at (the Sunny hotel), he could get a good rate at a hotel a couple of blocks down the road from the Sunny (the Anise Hotel). The rate was basically the same as the smaller room that Barbie was planning to move into at the woman hotel, and it was closer to the other families, so we decided to go give it a look. It was really nice. The room was nice and quiet, there was better satellite TV channels, the breakfast was good (better than at the woman hotel), the restaurant was on the 12th floor and offered an INCREDIBLE view of hanoi on 3 sides of the building. There is a business center that had 3 newer computers and the internet situation was MUCH improved from the woman hotel, so Barbie decided that she would move there. The business center usually charges $3 per hour for internet, but for adoptive families, it's free. I think that it will be a good change of pace for her. We met and briefly talked with a hotel manager, and the lady seemed very nice and accomodating. She told me that she would take good care of Barbie and Julia, and that meant a lot to me. We are happy for her new arangement. I think that blogging will be easier for her there. She will be leaving the woman hotel about the same time that we go to the airport and she will spend the day getting settled and figuring out her new environs.

Hey, the tooth fairy left Thomas a 10,000 Dong bill! Sometime during the morning, we realized that Thomas' other lower front tooth (the one that was still in his mouth) was loose--even looser than the tooth that I had pulled the day before. He really didn't want to pull the tooth, but I had a secret weapon up my sleeve. My mom (you know...the one who is travelling 600 miles to come up and take care of Thomas and Helen indefinitely...that one) has an issue (or at least she did when I was a kid). She loves pulling teeth. When I was a kid, if I told her that I had a loose tooth, she would ask to see how loose it was, and then she would pull it! After the first time, I would make her swear that she wouldn't pull the tooth (and she would promise!) and then as soon as I would let her wiggle the tooth--SNAP!! She would pull it out of my head!

Well, I told Thomas these stories and then reminded him that Grandma Atkins was coming up to see him. Well, Thomas decided it was better to decide for the tooth to come out on his own terms than to be ambushed by a well-meaning, but agressive granny. (Note to mom...sorry, I may have embellished the stories about you a little bit, but you have to respect the spirit in which I told the stories. After all, I was trying to get to pull Thomas' tooth out!) He came up to me bravely and asked for me to pull the next tooth, which I did in about 3 tries (I didn't have any pliers). Well, this one bled more, but he was glad to have it out and is glad that it is not corn-on-the cob season. Also, it is probably good that he won't be subsisting on hard baguettes for the next six weeks like he has the past six weeks.

Thomas hopes that he Vietnamese tooth fairy brings a 100,000 dong bill tonight. Something tells me that 10,000 is the going rate for a lower front.

For lunch we went to a coffee shop to celebrate Thomas first tooth (I think that his second came out after lunch...but I can't remember). We spent the afternoon deciding how to pack (who was taking what and what we were abandoning in Vietnam). I also gave Barbie all the address cards for Hanoi and the money. Now she can handle it all on her own (with a little help from Mr. Hien.)

After packing we headed to the nearest KFC for our last supper. FLG.

Now the kids should be about asleep and Barbie and I will watch a little more of the DVDs we brought. I'm pretty sad about leaving, but all is well--not perfect, but well.

You may notice that there is not a lot being said about how Julia is doing lately. That probably is a good thing. I think that benefit of all of us being thrown in a hotel room together for 6 weeks is that Julia has really got a chance to know us and to become more comfortable as a member of the family. She really seems like one of us now. She picks stuff up like a sponge. She says a few words, she can point to a few body parts when asked, and she knows 3-4 sign language words (we're not exactly sure how she learned one of them, but she uses is correctly in context.) She is a great little toddler (not really a baby), and we feel overjoyed that she has been entrusted to our family's care.

Thanks for reading this while we were in Vietnam. It has been a good exercise for us to digest what has happened during our trip and has made a more complete diary of our trip than I would have committed to paper. Your reading this has encouraged us to put it in the computer, and our family (especially Julia) will be the beneficiary for having this record to keep and remember. I'm sure not going to blog my regular life (no one would read--including myself), but this has been great for us.

One last thing I'll add. My friend, Marshall, gave me a list of several ideas of subjects to talk about when I ran out of material (as I alluded to earlier). They were very good ideas, but I haven't been lacking for material since then. In honor of Marshall, I will address one of his ideas here. His idea number 4 was to address the following question: What elements of Viet Nam would you like to participate in if you didn't have three kids under the age of 6 tagging along?

That's a good question, Marshall. First, I would try a lot of different restaurants. We are always on the lookout for kid friendly. That means not too fancy and for our kids it means, "Is there any western food on the menu?" Our kids don't really do rice or noodles and that eliminates about 95% of typical vietnamese fare. We are luck to be in Vietnam where the french brought bread, so that is what our kids have subsisted on. Also, we have found 2 restaurants that have a high chair. At least one time we made a decision to go to one of those restaurants based on the fact that it had a high chair for Julia.

Another thing that we would do is go more on more short trips. It is difficult to take Julia anywhere different from what she is used to, and travelling with the kids on buses, slow moving vans, and other transportation is difficult. Tomorrow a group of famlies is going on a trip to a place called the Perfume Pagoda. It's supposed to be pretty neat, but it takes a 2 hour van ride, an 1 hour boat ride (small boat rowed by a woman) and then a 4-kilometer cable car trip to get to the pagoda. Barbie didn't think she could do it with Julia. There is also a neat area of Vietnam in the north near China called Sapa. It has neatly terraced mountains and a number of indigenous people groups that are interesting to visit. To get there requires sleeping on a night train (leaving 10 pm arriving 7 am) sleeping one night in Sapa and then taking another night train back to Hanoi. The pictures look incredible...but not with kids.

One last thing that would be good to do (although I could talk on this topic of what to do without kids for a long time, Marshall), is that there are thes places that have signs that read, "Bia Hoi", which is pronounced "Beer Ahoy". Bia hoi is vietnamese for draught beer. These are places where people sit on stools drinking draught beer and just shooting the breeze on the sidewalk. Our guidebook says that $10 would by about 100 beers and a lot of new friends. That would be a fun thing to do at night and meet the locals. As it is, even if Barbie turned me loose, at night after blogging, I'm pretty much spent.

Oh, and one last thing. The answer to Marshall's question #6. We gave the little christmas tree to the hotel this afternoon and told them they could use it to decorate for next christmas. They gladly accepted the gift.

Take care,

Doug for the Atkins clan