Two pickles and a plain pancake please...

Two pickles and a plain pancake please...I guess it's what our little girl wanted. She's been craving lots of apples and pears, tomatoes (fresh and canned...she can't get enough of them!), potatoes (this is a new one), and green olives (this helps keep the nausea feelings away). She loves drinking milk, and thankfully doesn't have much of a taste for sugary things.

The little girl I'm talking about is growing and kicking and due in the middle of March! Emma couldn't be more thrilled to have a new baby sister on the way. Xander is still trying to figure out if he has a baby in his tummy too?!? We had a 4D ultrasound last week and to be honest it takes a little getting used to. I'm so used to seeing the regular 2D print outs.

We're so excited for our baby girl to join our family. The plan is that Xander and Jennie will fly to Utah at the end of January and return to Hanoi in May with our new little girl. Emma and Christian will come for the month of March and then get back to Hanoi for work and school.

Trip to Sa Pa

Aaaaaaah, Sa Pa. We just got back from 5 days in the mountainous North of Vietnam on the border with China. Sa Pa is where many different minorities live. The main groups are the Black Hmong, Flower Hmong, Giay (pronounced "zai") and the Red Dao (pronounced "zao"). All the minority women colorfully embroider their traditional clothing and wear it proudly. The Black Hmong weave fabric and dye it with indigo. Then they embroider the trim with lots of color. The Giay are more reserved in their dress but all the women wear colored scarves on their heads. We noticed that the Hmong men are the only ones who wear traditional dress.

The older Dao women wear big beautiful head wraps with beads, etc. The younger women wear more simple scarves and one woman told me it is because the beautiful head wraps are heavy and hard to work in. The younger women work hard and therefore need more simple, light-weight head wraps. The woman on the left is younger and wearing a simple head wrap.


Here are some other minorities we saw at the market. On the left are the Flower Hmong with their beautiful bright clothes. On the rights are some Thai minority women.

We loved interacting with the people and seeing the incredible terraced rice fields, animals and mountains. Amazingly, it didn't rain the entire time we were there. We had cold nights and mornings and cool days with a bright sun. We visited 8 separate villages, including Sa Pa, and loved interacting with the people. We hiked all over the place and Emma kept up with us step for step - she is such a trooper! The Hoang Lien National Park had stunning terraced rice fields that covered the entire mountains on both sides - even up to the top. It was a beautiful example of man's coexistance with nature and harvesting every last resource.

Emma's and Xander's favorite parts were seeing all the animals. Everywhere we went, Christian and I were pointing out ducks, baby chicks, pigs, water buffaloes, goats, dragonflies, butterflies and anything else that moved or made noise. Xander had a particular interest in the machines used for road construction "Scoop!" "Dump Truck!" "Big Truck!" etc. We saw lots of water buffaloes, but not many people riding them.


We met a Giay minority woman (bottom right) and her family as we were exploring one village. We went off the beaten path and it was worth it. She was the grandmother and brought out all her family. She and Christian had a nice chat. She has 12 children - she doesn't look like it, does she? She was very nice and Emma loved running around the pathways in front of the house with the other little children. Neat family, good memory.

We rented motorbikes with drivers for a few of our trips out of town and I was able to catch this photo of Christian and Xander on the road. We would have tried to drive ourselves but the roads weren't remotely marked and we were traveling deep in the countryside. Our last day, we took a trip up to the Silver Waterfall.

The only trip we regretted was out to the Bac Ha market. We spent 4 hours on a bumpy dirt road squished in the back of a bus. Amazingly, the kids did really well. The trip should have taken 2 1/2 hours each way, but the entire road was under construction and there was even a landslide that wiped out part of the road and some busses were stuck deep in the mud. It was quite a site to see heavy-duty road equipment towing the busses out. We finally made it to Bac Ha and were told we had only one hour to spend at the market - what...that's all!!??! Afterward, we went inside a few people's homes. Then back on the bus for a 3 1/2 hour drive back to Sa Pa. This was our least-favorite trek. The market was good, however and we got to see many more Flower Hmong women shopping and living life. These women are carefully inspecting and buying thread to ebmroider with.

Back in Sa Pa many people sell their wares and textiles all day long. This is a family eating dinner as they oversee their blanket of goods for sale.

Others just walk the streets selling trinkets of all kinds. We were surprised to see so many Black Hmong children out selling on the streets, when they should have been in school. We didn't see many Red Dao children, but the Red Dao women were more tenatious and persistent with their selling methods...to the point of being obnoxious!

We loved our trip. We hope you enjoy the photos too : ) Here are some of our kids at some church ruins and our family at the Silver Waterfall on our last day.

Shopping in flooded Hanoi

This morning I needed some groceries for a dinner I am preparing tonight. Some friends from the Australian Embassy are coming over and it's just not like America when you plan a menu. I have to make several contingency plans depending on what I can find at the store. Things happen to be worse right now because the outlying areas of Hanoi are completely flooded! So, nothing fresh from the countryside is coming in. I noticed this on Saturday morning as the selection in the alley market next to our house was really picked over. I extra-bleached everything when I came home : )

So, I just drove for 2 hours through flooded streets trying to get to the "Costco-type" stores of Hanoi. There are two. I went to "Metro" first only to find the parking lot was a lake, literally. There were about 5 people wading through the water that was up to the top of their legs. Crazy!

So I headed off to "Big C" only to find that my one-way road was flooded and there was only one way to get through...drive. Today I am very grateful that we have a SUV. I got to Big C only to find that their parking lot was a lake too, and the road that leads back to my house was totally closed off. I finally found another street to take me home, which was fine except for one part had the deepest water I've ever driven through. I pulled over to watch other brave SUVs drive through it. I also saw many turn around to find an alternate route. After watching a truck stall in the middle of the water, I made sure a few more SUVs made it through before going myself.

I am happy to say that I'm home, I'm dry and I was able to go to 2 small grocery stores and our local alley way to get enough ingredients to pull a somewhat okay dinner together for tonight. Want to come? We're having carrot soup, homemade pasta with creamy tomato sauce, and steamed zuccini for our veggie. The zuccini was plan D, but it looked fresh, so I guess we can be glad for that. Random thought, but let me say that the first thing I am buying when I get back to America is a bag of frozen chicken breasts at Costco! Oh the joy of that!

Rain is falling all around...

We are recovering from a typhoon that has been hitting Hanoi since Thursday night last week. Friday was unbelievable! I sat through my language class and could hardly believe gigantic black clouds that rolled in and made the sky even darker. This was seriously "curl up in pajamas and drink hot chocolate" weather. I love a good storm and this was fun to watch and made me really grateful to be dry in my home. I'm glad we weren't having to be tourists during this storm! Here are some cool photos Christian downloaded over the weekend... The worst-hit area was right in front of the embassy. The papers called it "the river of Lang Ha." They ended up shutting down the embassy at 3:30 and sending everyone home last Friday.


Our balcony has been leaking water in the middle of our living room through the fire alarm. Crazy huh! This has been happening for months whenever we get a good rainstorm. Well, last week they removed all the tiles and have begun the month-long process of re-tiling the balcony. With the lack of tiles and the abundance of rain, we've had our very own private waterfall inside our house: ) We're choosing to laugh about it rather than cry. We've upgraded from buckets to our American-sized trash can which seems to catch all the drips for a few hours.

One more thing...we have five de-humidifiers in our home. I've been meaning to blog about this fora while because it is so baffling to me, but I empty them every morning and night, which means we remove about 10 gallons of water out of our household air per day.