Home at Last, and the Name

We made it home, as the pictures below show. Somewhere over Chicago I nearly freaked out thinking I could not stand one more minute on an airplane. And this was with a sleeping, angelic child on my lap. The San Francisco to Dulles leg was way better. Loc ran around SFO so much that he crashed right after his take-off bottle and didn't wake up until we were taxi-ing to the gate at Dulles.

We were met at the airport by my parents and niece, Renee, and nephew, Scott. It was so great to see them and to be home.

The first few minutes of the ride home were rough. Poor Loc has never been in a car seat and has gotten quite used to sitting on Mommy's lap during the many long car rides in Vietnam. We strapped him in and had hysterics all down the Dulles expressway. He couldn't understand why he was being restrained and kept screaming to get out to sit on my lap. We finally distracted him enough that he calmed down.

He's been in a great mood all day. He's been exploring his new home, playing with his toys, playing in the backyard, and generally being charming with his delighted grandparents. Ray and I are barely sleepwalking through the day -- the jet lag coming back is MUCH worse than going over. Loc shows no signs of fading, although right now he's on his second nap. He just has too much to do and see and experience.

(Speaking of which, last night in the airport we had a pre-flight beer and ordered him a glass of water. It came with ice, which we believe he had never seen before. He kept putting his hands in the glass and fishing out cubes and crowing with fascination, to the point where his whole body was shaking, he was so cold. But he couldn't get over these cool things floating his his water.)

So...his name. While in Vietnam we settled on Owen Loc. Owen was one of our choices because it retains some of the sounds of his last name, Nguyen (pronounced n'win), and had he stayed in Vietnam, he would have been called Nguyen Loc, as the custom is to do last name first. After meeting him, we decided Owen fit him.

He knows his name now and responds to it. We started calling him Owen in Vietnam because try as we might, we simply cannot pronounce Loc in a way that he understands. You'd think it would be easy, but it's not. We'd call him Loc, and he'd never even turn his head. When Vietnamese people we met there asked us his name, and we'd say, "Loc," they'd look at us blankly, and we'd have to spell it. "Oh, Loc," they'd say. To our Western ears, we could never hear the subtle distinction in pronunciation. I can't figure out how to do the diacritical marks in Blogger, but the o has two -- the little hat on top and a dot underneath. This means, we've been told, your voice has to go up and down on the o, but in a lower register.

English is obviously not a tonal language like Vietnamese, because we tried really hard to learn how to get that o right, but we're hopeless. We're not going to give up, because we're retaining Loc as his middle name and we want to pronounce it correctly.

Luckily, he seems to like "Owen" just fine.

It's so good to be home finally. Words just can't express it, but I'll write more when I'm more awake.