The Day After

This was our first day with our new son.  We all stayed close to home this day, giving the kids a chance to get used to us.  Breakfast was the first big thing for Jacob.  As we had learned the day before, at 14 months, he had only had formula and some rice cereal.  As I posted earlier, our hotel served a great buffet.  Jacob thought it was pretty good as well!  He dove right into solid foods and did really well with them.  Eggs, yogurt, custard, fruit.  Fruit was a HUGE hit, especially watermelon.

After breakfast, Barry walked and found a local market in the alley a half a block from our hotel.  I wrote about it while we were there HERE.  In the afternoon, he and Jacob fell asleep together.

The "excitement" of the day had nothing to do with Vietnam though.  I had noticed that Jacob had some Mongolian spots on his back on the drive back from Lang Son, so I made sure that I pointed them out to our staff.  They assured me that was all they were.  I took pictures of his back and butt where they were prominent.  Without thinking, I uploaded them all to Photo*bucket and Snap*fish, as usual.  Later, when I went back to use the pictures for posts, I realized that the frst had removed 2 of my pictures, without explanation and without any way of getting the pictures back!  I was NOT happy.

I emailed them to explain that I took the pictures to send them back to our IA peditrican in the States to document them and to confirm it with her.  They wrote back that they understand that in private albums, people upload innocent pictures of theur children, but that their policy is NO pictures that contain any nudity.  This includes my adorable 1 year old's bum.  Luckily, I still had the pictures on my hard drive to attach to an email back to the States.

We ended the evening with a dinner out, as a group, to celebrate Zachary's 1st Birthday.  We ate at Little Hanoi and for the most part, the food was delicious.  I, on the other hand, had my worst meal of the trip.  It was a pork dish in a little crock.  The meat was good, but there wasn't much of it and there was a lot of fat on the many of the pieces.  Barry had agreed that we should get different dishes and share, but we mainly ate his sweet and sour chicken and picked through my pork.  It was amazing that we had the kids for only a day and even at this dinner, they seemed to fit with us so well.

This was also the night that Barry finally broke down and bought a lighter off a peddler.  He was a very nice and articulate guy.  It had been a joke for most of our stay that he show us his wares and ask if we wanted one.  He was never pushy, but he seemed to be EVERYWHERE we went!!  Barry would tell him that he buy something, eventually.  He saw us go into the restaurant and waited for us to come out!  Barry bought a really nice, engraved lighter.  It had a map of Vietnam on it and a saying about finding peace.  Maybe it was from the War, but regardless, it will be a great memory for Jacob someday.