Life with our little water buffalo: The obligatory Santa visit

Last Wednesday I received a call from our daycare provider that Van had been running and had fallen into the bottom of her stairs. She told me he had a big goose egg on his forehead and was pretty upset. She suggested we better come and get him. He in fact did have quite the goose egg but was unscathed otherwise. He calmed as soon as he was with us a had a nice long nap when he got home. When he woke up we thought we might as well take him to the mall for something to do. While there we noticed the Santa enclosure was set up and there was no line! Why not try and get him to sit through the obligatory Santa photo? Goose egg and all? So we brought him in and sat him on Santa's lap. I'll give him credit, he didn't freak out. He didn't really want to be there though. He whined and squirmed out of his lap. We put him back in and encouraged "santa" to hold on to him a bit tighter (geeze you'd think the guy had experience wrangling kids, that is his job after all. He never attempted to interact with Van at all and seemed very uncomfortable). On seeing that he couldn't squirm out of his lap he craned his head around to look at this strange man and said something along the lines of "Banga ba?" (a note about this later). When he turned back around we got a quick photo before he was back off buddy's lap again. We thought he might want to play in the enclosure but nope, as soon as his feet hit the ground he was outta there! Ran straight out of the enclosure and took off into the main part of the mall. So no big freak out but definitely not impressed lol. Here is the final product (note the bruise on his forehead):

Now, back to the "Banga ba". Lately he has been saying words similar to this a lot i.e. banga banga...banga ba...banga banga ba. His daycare provider is not sure where it came from as none of the other kids have been making similar sounds. She had the thought that it might be Vietnamese and has asked a friend of hers. We have yet to hear the consensus. After doing a lot of reading I have discovered that it is not at all uncommon for internationally adopted children to express, verbally, first words or even grammatical structures from their first language. It makes sense as they have spent 9 months in the womb hearing that language and then, in Van's case, a further 10 months listening to it. His brain is hard wired to Vietnamese. I read about a little girl who was adopted from China at 6 months old who at 2 years old began "speaking" words that her parents could not recognize at all. While in a Chinese restaurant one evening a Chinese diner recognized baby Chinese and informed her parents. Amazing eh? There is so much we don't know and so much we have to learn. So is banga banga ba rudimentary Vietnamese? I would love to know!! I hope we find out.

We returned to the experimental farm this Sunday for another run around the barn. Here are a few pictures (and yes it is the same outer wear from last week lol):