Meeting with TDH

Well we are now setup in our new apartment. The move went smoothly, and we were in fact online within an hour of arriving to our apartment, but we've been busy getting setup, and the kids routine was a little out of whack causing less sleep for everyone.

Yesterday we met with the entire TDH crew. TDH (Terre Des Hommes) is our adoption agency in Canada. They have been here in Vietnam for a week, meeting with the ministry responsible for adoptions and the various orphanages. They need to renew the agreements each year with each orphanage and arrange for the charitable projects that they will work on each year.

We went to their hotel to have lunch and to let them meet Tri and Cai. The first photo is of Tri and me sitting at the table waiting for them to arrive.

The second photo is of Tri with Dorinda (the woman that runs TDH in Ontario/Quebec). He is about to cool down in the pool.

The plan was just to spend an hour to an hour and a half and have lunch. However, it turned into 3 or 4 hours. I ended up showing her how to edit video as she just bought a video camera to be able to film orphans to then show to prospective adoptive parents. We also got a glimpse into the burreacracy of adoption and some of the charity projects they are involved in. We are hoping that we might be able to follow up on this and perhaps bring a group of students from our school in Jakarta for a week to help out with this. It was also so nice to have a group of people so interested in helping with the kids. As Virginia said it was a glimpse of what it would be like to have family and friends around. The contingent from Ontario was Dorinda, her husband, Brandon, their 13 year old daughter, Rosie (also adopted from Vietnam) and Thuy and Loan from here in Vietnam. Here Rosie is holding Cai in the restaurant.

 

When we finished up at the hotel we had to rush back to our apartment to meet with our landlord. We needed to actually sign our lease, and she wanted to check to see if there was anything else we needed. She and her family are really great people. They are very accommodating and really want to help us out. She arrived with her sister, niece and mother, as she wanted them to meet our kids. The last photo is of Tri with the mother (he was getting tired and hungry and was a little fussy).

She offered to send over one of her maids or a cook to help us out. I don't know what Virginia was thinking but she declined!!

Anyway, they really are nice people.

I've got some video footage of Cai and Tri that I need to download. You'll see that Cai is becoming much more animated. Though she still will not grasp things in her hands. Tri is taking off and has started back on pablum and today for the first time, a jar of baby food (which he loved).

The kids are unfortunately still not really on the same schedule and as a result there is not much down time for us. Though what a treat, yesterday we went to bed at 8:30 and today we even took a short nap!