We didn’t do much on our first full day in Vietnam except acclimate to being parents and being in a foreign country. That’s a lot to take in so quickly. Neither of us slept well with Brian in between us. We were afraid we would roll over on top of him or he would fall through the crack between the two beds. So our first order of business was to find a crib. We explained our dilemma to the girls at the front desk and they solved our problem with this beautiful basket.

And it only cost us $10. We wish we could have brought it home with us, but the shipping charges would have been out of this world, so it stayed. Brian didn’t like the swinging motion, so we put it on the floor.

We explored a small part of the city. Hanoi is laid out so that each street sells something. All the shops on the same street sell the same thing. No kidding. We even passed “Kitchen Sink Street”. This day we shopped on “Copper Wire Street”. Needless to say, we didn’t come home with any souvenirs!

We discovered that Vietnam is much like Mexico in that they take a siesta every afternoon. Everything shuts down. And it makes sense because that is the hottest part of the day. No way you want to do anything then, anyway. They were doing some construction work on our hotel and even the construction workers laid in the hall and took a nap. Fun stepping over them on our way to the room!

Again, I don’t remember going out to eat at all. Jet lag does strange things to your stomach. We brought a bunch of food with us – pop tarts, peanut butter and crackers and that kind of thing – and so I believe we ate our of our suitcase again.

Through all of this, Brian was so good. He slept much later than we did in the morning, a portent of things to come! He almost never cried, never pushed us away or arched his back like we’d been warned he might do. He was so small – we figured about eleven pounds or so – that we wanted to give him some extra nutrition and tried to feed him the rice cereal we brought. No go. He wasn’t used to it and it’s too hard to feed a child for the first time in a hotel. We quickly gave that up, sacrificed one of our nipples by making a larger hole in it, added a small amount of cereal to his bottle and fed him that way.

We also gave him two baths that first day. Not that he was dirty. We were surprised at how clean he was when we got him, in fact. But he had heat boils on the back of his head. The doctor gave us an antibiotic to put in with his formula and told us to wash his hair twice a day. I did this by sitting in the tub with him (sorry, no pics of that:) He screamed when I gently rubbed the shampoo. Poor little guy, I can imagine how much that must have hurt. Especially when they burst. When they opened, we covered them with neosporin and a band-aid. We absolutely didn’t want them becoming infected.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures of the view out our hotel window.

All in all, we loved our first day as parents. It was, and continues to be, an amazing journey.