It is hard to believe that we left for our greatest adventure a year ago today - how time flies. We left our house in the care of a college aged dog sitter, left our jobs for at least five weeks (but actually it was an open ended amount of time), and flew off to Vietnam to adopt our daughter.
As I reflect on the year - we had no idea what we would feel or experience while in Vietnam.
We thought we were all packed and ready a few days before but then I stayed up all night before we got on the plane. Kurt slept for a few hours. I was on the verge of a terrible sinus infection - fortunately we had requested penicilin from our doctor (just in case). Kurt brought all kinds of technology with him for the flights and layovers - all I wanted to do was sleep and read. Fortunately the sinus meds knocked me out. I brought some work with me for the trip and never looked at it. We met some of the families traveling with us on route to Vietnam so that made us all a bit more comfortable as we went through the different custom checks and arrived in Hanoi. I am not sure if you remember but when we arrived in Vietnam we thought we were staying at a different hotel than the rest of the group. So, we got in a taxi car by ourselves to head to that hotel and they went off together to their hotel. It turned out that we had no hotel reservation and we were quite scared since we were not 100% sure where the rest of our group had gone - there are a few Hong Ngoc hotels in Hanoi. We had to work really hard at not purpetuating the stereotype of firey red heads. Fortunately it all worked out and we found our group - even with the language barriers and after being taken financially by a taxi driver. We learned our taxi lesson the first night and were sure to have our adoption agency facilitators cell phone numbers on hand from that point on.
The rest of the trip was very easy after our first 36 hours in Vietnam. We actually ended up staying at a different hotel than the rest of our group for the first night which would not have been a big deal except we learned that we were picking Ava up the next morning and would need to have her things and the variety of gifts unpacked by 6 a.m.. We also would not be able to "prep" our room to receive a baby since our luggage would be sitting in another hotel and room when we returned back to Hanoi after our trip to the orphange in Thai Ngueyen to pick up Ava. It was a very good thing that Kurt and I were as organized and prepared as we were with regard to our packing because we had organized/packed totally wrong - but at least we knew where everything was, so we could spend the night before receiving Ava re-packing.
Our trip to the orphange was surreal. Last year in the blog we focused on the positives because we had family and friends reading - and the last thing we wanted to do was worry them about something that we knew would work out in the long run. But, there were definately a few things that did not go as planned and took us by surprise.
Within 24 hours of arriving in Vietnam (January 15th in Vietnam) we had people entrusting us with a beautiful but sick baby girl. As new parents of a baby with a severe case of craddle cap (boils, open sores, and green gook) and bronchitus it was a pretty scary time. When we were at the orphanage the lady did not encourage me to take Ava's hat off - she motioned to me that she would change her hat - so I let her. In the van we took her hat off and we were instantly nervouse. When we felt comfortable showing Ava's head to the experienced parent in the van and the facilitator their faces expressed that we were not too far off base with regard to our deep concern. The fact that Ava had an appoinment with a doctor the next day, made by our facilitator before we ever got out of the van, indicated that it was o.k. to be concerned and that we were in good hands. The families that we traveled to Vietnam with adopted from another orphange so they did not receive their babies until a few days later. All the other families had other children and were not first time parents. They were also very helpful in calming our new parent fears, running to the store for us, and loaning us little cotton hats. We tucked in our new hotel room to unpack, clean our little girl from sore little head to toe (all ten of them) and then watch in awe as she began taking the whole experience in and the reality of parenthood struck us both as an amazing gift. We knew several people outside our door had us in their hearts and prayers. We felt an unexplainable and immediate love.
I still can't believe I was in Vietnam for three weeks - the time went by so quickly.
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