Weekend in Bach Ma

We had a special connection from WWF who organised for us to go on a trip up the hill to Bach Ma National Park. The park is currently closed to visitors because they are 'fixing the road'. What we had imagined was a short section of roadworks, but no. The entire ten kilometres of road up to the top of the hill is currently being worked on simultaneously by multiple workgroups. Our ride up the hill was the park fire truck, and the driver some sort of ex army guy who made light work of driving over huge piles of sand and being-mixed cement. This pic is the one time we actually had to stop to remove a couple of piles of rocks from our way. When we got to the top, we found we didn't have the place to ourselves. A large party from the US Air Force were taking advantage of the closure to look for persons missing in action. They told us they could not divulge much at this stage.


Testing the water at a stream

A handsome lady frog

Bernard was pretty tired after all the travelling. Here he relaxes against the pane of a cabinet selling kewpie dolls (is that what those are called?) at Danang Airport.

in 700 characters or fewer...

Blog has suffered first from husband's presence, then from his absence....
I have been Told I should get into Twitter.  But first I need a BlackBerry don't I?

Anyway...  the baby walked and talked.  Two steps, and 'doggy' mainly.   Then he forgot how.

I have a piccie or two. 

I am in recovery from being over-concise - the limit for our reports is 700 characters!   I've just ticked complete on the last one.

buti- ful babble

Today was such a day.  Bernard's language is developing rapidly at the moment.  Though he still hasn't said any intelligible words, he is starting to imitate sounds.  His imitations do not bear much resemblance to the sounds he's aiming for, but they often share common elements.  Sometimes he says "Ba" for bye-bye, or "tata".  It's confusing for me, however, because his babble often sounds like real words.  Each day brings us a new set of syllables for experimentation and improvisation; today was brought to us largely by the word "Buti", which means "suck breast" in Vietnamese!  (you can imagine my confusion.)  Whenever he sees something he likes, however, he says something like "Diddy" or "ditty" or "daddy".  Especially animals.  Today he pointed to a cat in the book "Peepo" and said "Diddy" very loudly.  The monkey in Linh's room is definitely called "diddy".
But he is suddenly so much more communicative, bossing me around by moving my hand to do things, asking for things, initiating games.  This evening I was rather surprised as he was in his bath;  I had forgotten to put the non-slip mat in the bath and was holding his thighs as he was kneeling; I was afraid he would slip.  He pulled off my hands and pointed to the bathmat on the wall, then stood up to let me stick it to the bottom of the bath so he could frolic around in non-slip comfort.

the hungry caterpillar

Bernard's Menu:
breakfast:  a few cereal flakes and a miniscule bite of apple 
lunch: about 4 pasta spirals with pureed red pepper-tomato sauce
tea: a third of a square of chocolate sponge and a cube of watermelon
dinner:   a tablespoon of rice,  a piece of fried fish, a small cube of paneer and a teeny bite of tomato


Yesterday about 2pm I was so hungry - so much cooking for the baby I totally forgot to make myself anything to eat.  And he wasn't really eating anyway.  In desperation I ordered greedily from Foodshop 45:  a paneer tikka kebab, dal, a fish curry, rice and a paratha.   As I sat in the easy chair in the kitchen, stuffing my face, a little head popped up beside me and looked very interested in what I was doing.  So I popped some rice in his mouth, thinking it would come straight out again.  It didn't.  That little head popped up again and again with a cheeky grin, opening its mouth for more each time, and was also quite happy to try little cubes of paneer.

See menu for today's efforts.  What an amazing day of transformation.

I'm hoping tonight he lets me have just a little bit of sleep!