Sunday in Hanoi

Exhaustion has set in officially. We are bushed! Jeff is asleep and I'll follow shortly. We took a five hour nap today and Sabian did too. Now, his schedule may be totally thrown off, but what can ya do? It's hard to get any sleep because the entire city of Hanoi has been partying like it's the end of the world all over the streets in front of our hotel. Even though we're 15 stories up, the noise, honking, cheering, and fireworks, are still extremely loud. They're celebrating a big soccer victory over Thailand. It's been going on for over five hours now and may not end til we wake up, at this rate. I briefly saw the Vietnamese team holding up a trophy on ESPN news on our tv. Never a dull moment here in Vietnam!

We met our agency's Vietnam facilitator this morning at breakfast. She collected a bunch of our official papers and told us that our VISA interview at the embassy is Tuesday. We can fly home after that is complete. We may get an earlier flight itinerary and come home Wednesday. We're seeing if our travel guy can arrange the same flights, layovers and seats on Wed. instead of Saturday.

Tomorrow we're going to an Vietnamese water puppet show and probably Temple of Literature or Museum of Ethnology.

We began to see all sorts of other adoptive families like us. One couple from Ireland, one from North Carolina, and one from Washington DC. There's even more here that we haven't talked too yet. They all had about two weeks time in country before they adopted their babies. We had less than a day. It just means they were able to sight see longer than we were before they got their babies at their various orphanages. They were also shocked how little time we had to get to get Vietnam after we recieved I-600 pre-approval (we had 3 days and they all had a couple weeks). We're all in Hanoi together because it's the last step in our adoption
processes (getting our Visa's from the embassy) before we can all go back to our homes.

I had to dip into the prescriptions we had filled from the travel medicine clinic back home. It seems I may have gotten a bug or had some of the water on accident? Who knows. It's not bad.

Happy Belated Birthday to Grandpa M! Sorry I missed it but I did think of you on Saturday when it was your birthday. We were traveling that day.
*I forgot to mention we had our first little squirter incident with baby boy S. Mommy didn't cover him up on the bed when I was changing him and didn't have the changing pad under him either. Oooopsie daisy!

Look who loves cords, computers, plugs and outlets already. Uh-oh! He's keeping us busy and reminds me of how active Nicholas was at this age. Very curious!

Standing up by himself and looking out our hotel room window with his droopy size 3 month drawers

Just too cute . It's funny because I would normally crop and retouch the photos but we're so tired and short on time, we're just uploading whatever.

streets of Hanoi

at the entrance to the Buddhist Temple at Hoam Kien (sp?) lake

more Hanoi on our walk back to the hotel trying to dodge beggars

Jeff inside the Buddhist temple-It was really interesting and smelled all smoky and filled with incense in the foggy cool weather.

the bridge to the temple over Hoam Kien Lake