Dec 24, 2009

Christmas Eve Fever

This Christmas Eve Santa brought a fever to Hannah.  Now while you might say, "Ahh,"  Stop yourself and say, "Oh, you must have all had a restful Christmas."  haha that sounds mean.  The girls are having a blast though.  Allison is "pertinding" sick and they both are enjoying the DVDs Auntie Cheri sent from America.

Christmas at our house in the Water Village




Daddy Daughter Trip

Overnight on the train = FUN
Two nights in a hill tribe accommodation = MUDDY FUN
Hikes in the mud +  water buffalos +  new rain boots  = MORE FUN
No mommies wanting us to eat well or be careful = FREE FUN
Another overnight on the train =  ENOUGH FUN....

Three dads, six kids, Sapa!



Hiking way ahead of the dads.  Maybe a mommy would call them back.  So much fun without mommies.

Dec 5, 2009

Organized Chaos

A lot of people who come to Vietnam remark about the electrical wires. Hannah at one point thought they were webs for monster size spiders. They are super tangled and often hang so low I have to remind the kids to step over them and be sure not to touch them. This week however, the city is cleaning them up by gathering them up into tidy bundles using those awesome plastic ties. I love plastic ties!

This is the street we live off of.

BEFORE


AFTER

Dec 2, 2009

Our Vietnamese Preschool

The girls have returned to Hannah' s old preschool called, O'hana.  We love the teachers there.  It's a dual language school and really helped Hannah gained a pretty good grasp of Vietnamese.  Though now that we've spent a year in Texas, the girls have forgotten all their Vietnamese.  They have returned to O'hana two mornings a week.  They're teachers say it's just not enough and they haven't bonded with the teachers or their classmates.  We are thinking of increasing to four mornings a week (9 - 12pm) and see if that helps.  That means we'll have to push English homeschool to the afternoons.  When I take them to the store with me I tell them what to say and they are always willing to try repeating me.  They've made good progress but it's a bit slow.  It's really important to us that they learn to communicate here and feel comfortable interacting with either foreigners or Vietnamese.  We'll see how the new plan works out  beginning in January.



The silly faced kid with the Harvard sweatshirt is Danny, Hannah''s main buddy.  (He's the only one who speaks English haha)



This is Allison's little class.  It only has 8 kiddos and they are hilariously silly and cute!



Auntie Cheri, don't look cause, yes, Allison is painting while wearing the white Ralph Lauren dress you bought.



These kids have cute nick names like Mui, Bip, Mit, Coung.  I don't know what these particular names mean but parents give their kids a proper name like Khanh Linh and then give them a nick name or a 'house name'  like Pig, Potato, Jackfruit.

To the Circus School!

Today our homeschool group went to the Circus School which is a few minutes walk from our village.


We got there a bit early and watched the performers doing some practice. Soon kids from some elementary schools arrived and the show began!




This next act was pretty scary because once he took the snake off himself, the snakes just slithered around.  I was grateful to be on the second floor!




We were all mesmerized during the entire show.









The music was insanely loud so most of us were wiped out from the noise by the end of the show.  It was a fantastic show!  These were circus students so they sometimes made mistakes and then all the children would shout, "Co len! Co len!" to cheer the performers on.



When we got home we had lunch and did some math.