Visit to the Orphanage

Molly and I went back to the orphanage this afternoon for a visit. It was so nice for me to see everyone again, but others had lukewarm reactions for me!

Molly suddenly was whiny and clung to me. She didn't want to be held by her nannies, and I couldn't put her down without her screaming. I guess she thought that I might leave her there again. It took a little while, but eventually she gave them some cuddles, and I was free to play with the other kids a little bit.

The older toddlers used to run towards me with smiles and excitement when we arrived in the mornings. Today - lukewarm. It took a couple of balloons and a couple of swings upside down before they liked me again.

Thankfully, the younger kids aren't quite as fussy. I got smiles, a wiggle and even a short cuddle from the little peanut I love so much. I had brought a pocketful of balloons with me, so some of the others were chasing them across the mat. I noticed that some of those kids have grown in the last 2 weeks! It was really nice to sit and play with them again. I took lots of pictures to send to waiting parents.

So, there is a bit of news from the baby room. There were two wooden bed frames in the room that have been replaced with these 2 huge crib/beds. They have high sides and a gate on them, and sit off the ground, so when the 3 toddlers are put inside, they can't climb out! Man, do they hate that! It looks like they are in prison and it probably feels that way too. But I'm sure the nannies love them. The three little boys created a lot of havoc, and it was a challenge to keep all six little hands out of trouble at times.

It was nice to see the nannies and the teachers again. I brought a watermelon to share with them, and we were back to our usually gestures, Vietnamese/English dictionaries, and making do with whatever words we knew, in order to communicate.

We plan to go back again next week.

Good News!

I just got a call from Loan - my file is signed off, and the next step is to schedule the adoption ceremony date! Yayyy!

Chances are it will be next week.

Yayy, I'm so happy I sat down with Molly and cried.

It's All About Molly

• When Molly sees a tree swaying in the breeze, she waves back at it
• She loves the washing machine we have here in Vung Tau. She sits and watches the clothes spin in circles and laughs
• She can make the sign for 'more'. She hasn't learned the sign for 'milk' or 'all done', but we are working on those
• She clearly said 'Bow-wow' one day, playing with a toy dog. She is also trying to say 'Cock-a-doodle-do' to the toy rooster
• When I sing to her, she hums along
• When she wakes up in the morning, she lays in bed for a long time talking and cooing. She giggles at me when I wake up and look at her
• She prefers to play with the plastic lid from the formula can, rather than all the organic, all-natural, educational/developmental toys I brought from Canada
• She is happiest sitting on my lap on the floor, playing with the plastic lid
• She loves to dance. It makes her giggle
• She likes to eat ice cubes
• She smiles at me and takes my breath away

We have been singing the Rubber Ducky song at bath-time. In honor of Mother's Day, I changed the words:

Molly baby, you're the one. You make my life so much fun. Molly baby, I'm awfully fond of you.

Molly baby, you're so fine. I'm so lucky that you're mine. Molly baby, I'd like a whole life time. Molly baby, I'm awfully fond of you!

Happy Mother's Day!

I am happy and proud to celebrate my first Mother's Day! We are in Vietnam where there is no Mother's Day, but I took us out for brunch to a local cafe called the Blue Note, where there is good Vietnamese coffee. Later, I treated myself to a mani-pedi. Molly's gift to me today was to be absolutely angelic and patient both at brunch and while I was getting my nails done. She's so sweet!

The hotel where we are staying is owned by the Director of the Vung Tau orphanages, so many the families that come into this area end up staying here with their children until the travel documents are ready. Right now, all the families that were here are from France, but a couple of them spoke English, so I have had a bit of a social life! Sadly, they all left this morning. So Mother's Day was celebrated by just Molly and myself, 14 hours earlier than the rest of you.

So Happy Mother's Day, Mom! Happy Mother's Day to all my friends and family who have children. And a very special Happy Mother's Day to all the first-time Moms who have brought their adopted children home in the last year.

Molly or Minh Sanh?

I decided a long time ago that I would name my daughter Molly. Before I knew who she was, and before I got her proposal, I decided on Molly. Any other parent gets to name their child, and I decided that if the orphanage Director named her, then I could choose my own name, and keep her Vietnamese name as her middle names.

So then I came to Vietnam and unexpectedly spent 7 weeks at the orphange with her, where she was Minh Sanh. The Vietnamese pronounce the two names quickly, with the emphasis on the last syllable. They also pronounce an 'S' as the 'sh' sound, but in this case, it's almost a 'ch'. So it sounds like 'Min CHAN'.

So in the early days, I was sitting on the mat with a nanny and a bunch of kids, and Molly was nearby, and getting into something she shouldn't. I cried out "Minh Sanh!" and she ignored me. The nanny called out THE SAME THING, and Molly turned around to look at her with a guilty look on her face. I did it again when Molly turned away - no response. I couldn't pronounce her name properly, and she didn't recongnize it as her name. The nanny and I had a good laugh about it.

But after many weeks at the orphanage, I started calling her Minh Sanh instinctively. That was/is her name. Is it right to change it? She's almost a year old.

Now that we are no longer there everyday, I am calling her both names. Minh Sanh is instinctive and Molly is deliberate. I have decided that it's OK to use Molly as her first name. Changing the pronounciation of Minh Sanh is just about the same thing as changing the name completely, to her. So, Molly she will be.

Memories of Ba Ria

I haven't posted much about our 7 weeks in Ba Ria, because I didn't have internet access at the hotel or the orphanage. I'll post some stories in the next few weeks.

Our days in Ba Ria took on a regular routine. I'd get up at 5:30am to shower, eat and dress before Molly woke up. I had to wake her up about 6:15am to get her ready to go. We would catch a taxi to be at the orphanage by 7am.

Molly was fed cereal as soon as we arrived, as she was usually starving by then. The other kids were waking up and getting fed, and we all played on the floor. 10am was bathtime. It was quite an event! The two nannies would take one child after another, strip them, hose them down, soap them up, rinse them off, then dry them off, dress them, put them in their cribs with a bottle for a nap. I always offered to help, but all I did was dry, dress and lay them down for a nap. By the time all 20 kids were bathed and napping, I had only helped out with 3 or 4 of them - the nannies are fast and efficient. I'm not!

Most of the kids don't wear diapers - just the older ones with messier poops. The kids pee their pants, and we just wipe up the puddle and put clean clothes on them. Baby pee is supposed to be pretty clean, but it took me a little time to get used to it. There is a lot less diaper rash, and a lot less disposable diapers going into the garbage too. So when I say we play on the floor, the 3 toddlers that can walk, will run around creating havoc. The kids Molly's age 'commando' crawl all over the room, and the younger babies lay on a reed mat in the middle, and learn to roll over. So when I see wet pants, or I sit in a puddle, or the baby I'm holding pees on me, I deal with it and put clean pants on the kid. However, when a kid poops, for the longest time, the nannies didn't let me clean it up. Nice huh? Not even Molly's poop. They take the baby - clothes, poop and all into the washing room, and hose them down under a tap. So play time did consist of playing, but a lot of it was just a constant changing of pants, feeding of bottles and rocking of cribs.

Molly's schedule was always off, because I woke her up at 6am, instead of her usual 8am mornings, so when she slept, the nannies always made sure I laid down for a nap too. I grabbed a pee-stained pillow and layed on a bedframe covered by a pee-stained reed mat. This is where the scabies, ants and mosquitos ate me. I always woke up scratching.

Lunch was about 11am. The nannies would bring me the same food that was served to the older kids at the orphanage. It was always a bowl of rice, with a serving of meat and a serving of vegetables in pork broth. This was the best Vietnamese food I have eaten here. I loved the chicken curry, and there was often a vegetable dish that had bean sprouts, okra, shrimp and onion stewed in broth. These were my favorites.

After lunch, most of the kids were napping, and the nannies also napped as best they could until about 2pm. The afternoon nap is pretty common in this country. (Vietnamese tend to start the day at 5am, sleep in the afternoon when it's hot, then head for bed about 11pm.) So Molly and I were always awake by then, and I tried to tend to all the kids so that the nannies could sleep.

The afternoon consisted of "an dua hau" which means "eat watermelon" and a Vietnamese language lesson. I found early on that watermelon was a big hit with the nannies. I often went out in the mornings to a nearby fruit stand to buy myself bananas and other fruit, and I almost always brought back a small watermelon to share with everyone. Some of the teachers would visit, and communicating with them meant bringing out the Vietnamese/English dictionaries and slowly trying to understand each other. It was a bit of a struggle, but I really enjoyed it - I have picked up a lot of Vietnamese vocabulary.

Molly was free to leave about 5:30pm, so I would put a diaper on her, grab a couple of bottles, and we would take a taxi or motorbike back to the hotel. A bath for Molly, a bottle, and I'd play with her until she fell asleep. Then I was able to eat, shower, wash dishes in the bathroom sink, handwash some clothes in a bucket, then lay down beside my baby and sleep until she woke me for the 2am feeding.

Ok, so I'm whining a little bit. It was a grueling 7 weeks, full, exhausting days covered in sweat, pee and sometimes feces. But what made it all worthwhile was Molly. I was with her everyday and it was this time in Ba Ria where we first got to know each other, and started to attach to each other. I wouldn't have done it any other way.

Freedom! (April 27th)

The investigation was done today! Molly and I are now free to live full-time together in a hotel in Vung Tau, and spend our days as we choose.

Monday morning the Director poked her head into the baby room and said: "Canh sat, hom nay" which means: "police, today". Of course, the police didn't come that day. But again, Loan got busy, tracked the investigator down, and ensured that he came out the next morning. He spent almost 2 hours going over the file. I was hiding out in a teacher's office the whole time, and the Director came in at one point to give an update. When she left, she said "truc trac" in a disgusted tone, and walked out. I asked what it meant - it translates to the word malfunction, but in context, she just meant that the investigator was being too picky and wasting her time. Anyways, I heard later that when he came into the baby room to take a picture of Molly, they had to wake her up, and her picture was of her wailing. Good girl!

So here is the whole story of this delay, as I currently understand it:

The Director of Adoptions ("DOA") in Hanoi had my file Feb 6, but Tet celebrations started that weekend, so he didn't process anything until the beginning of March. He sent the file back to the Provincial Justice Dept for further investigation, because Molly had been abandoned, not relinquished. On March 10, Miss Hue at the Justice Dept sent the request to a higher level of Provincial police for the investigation, as the local police had previous done the original report. At this stage, the request was lost in space. Loan has a good working relationship with Miss Hue, and found out the she had just recently found she had cancer. So when nothing happened with the file, at the 3 week mark, Loan asked her to send a 2nd request. But the 2nd request was simply a letter asking to trace the original letter, which was never found. Then Miss Hue was in and out of the hospital in Saigon for cancer treatements. Loan worked hard for me - she had lunch with a consultant, she spoke to the Director who runs the other 3 orphanages in the Vung Tau area, and my story got spread around. It seemed that everyone involved in adoptions knew about me and my plight. I credit the Vung Tau Director with coming up with the solution. She told Loan that the Justice Dept should send the original request out again. Simple? Yeah. Sigh. So lucky for me, Miss Hue's surgery was delayed, she was in the office working the next week, and Loan was able to convice her to send out the request as suggested. If not, there is nobody else to do her job when she's absent.

Within a week, the investigation was done. One day short of 7 weeks.

So, what's next? The investigation report has been sent back to the DOA in Hanoi. He has to sign off on it, and send it back to Miss Hue at the Provincial Justice Dept. Then she will schedule the adoption ceremony date with Loan. If all goes well, it's reasonable to expect the ceremony date in the next week or two. After the ceremony, I have another 2-3 weeks to wait until Molly's travel documents are ready, and then we can come home. I estimate 5 weeks, give or take.