(Left: Faith holds our little bird, Chim--pronounced "cheem"--which means "bird" in Vietnamese) Now...about the bedrooms. None are particularly large, but they are not tiny, either. Most have a bathroom attached--something I have seen in every "western style" house I have been in either here or China or Cambodia. Unless they are at the very front or rear of the house, there are no windows, to the outside, anyway. Anna Mei and Elizabeth's room has a window that opens to the staircase and you can see down the living room. All of our bedrooms have a double bed in them. The mattresses are quite firm (ahem, yes, that's the word--not "hard as a brick bat"). The bedrooms have a small AC unit at the top of one wall. It is controlled by a remote. We try not to set the AC too low for several reasons. One is that we don't need a lot of blankets if it's not too cold. Everybody has one. We just fold them up in the morning and voila! The bed is made. There are no built-in closets. We each have a small armoire--two double doors, one side with shelves, the other to hang clothes. Two small compartments at the top and one small drawer at the bottom. The bedrooms also each have a student-size desk (although we confiscated two from the bedrooms to put in our office). We added a large basket to each room to hold folded clothes. That's about it.
Oh, the big news today. A small bird somehow fell on our back patio on the 3rd floor--which is really the laundry room. It's wing was injured, so the girls are doing their best to nurse it back to health. I think it is a sparrow. Our friend Duc asked me if I knew the English song about God watching the sparrow. Of course, that song has now been on my mind the rest of the day. The funny thing is, just before we found the bird, the girls were asking Tony and me if they could have a pet bird. It wasn't five minutes until we found the poor little thing. Tony told the girls that God had heard their request before they asked. (He also joked with them that if they didn't take care of it and clean the cage, etc. that he would give it to Bee to fix for supper--he was JOKING!) Any way, the bird is the ruler of the house right now--it commands the attention of our household.
