Valentines, Family Fun, and Birthdays....

We've had a busy week at school this week, new student,Kounosuke had a birthday, Valentine's Day, and Family Fun Day at the park. Sorry the pictures are in reverse order :)

Family Fun Day was on Friday - we were supposed to be at the park by 9, so we left at 8:30 which should have been plenty of time...we got officially lost for the first time though! We finally pulled over and used a pay phone to call Pastor - he told us we were on the right track so we were praying for a car we recognized or a sign we could read - thankfully we saw a car we recognized and did a u-turn to follow it into the OTHER side of the park - this place was huge, we never would have found it on our own! Each teacher was paired up to do field games - Rachel and I did Beetle Bug (a SGCS favorite of mine!), the T-shirt game (you put a shirt on the first person and they hold hands with the 2nd person and the rest of the team pulls the shirt off the first person and onto the 2nd person...all the way down the line), and Spoon Zoom with cotton balls and eggs - all in all fun times :) I even got to watch Adrienne do the chicken dance with her class - made me laugh!

The day ended with a tug of war teachers vs students...we didn't stand a chance!


My class watching the other events
Caterpillar race - HILARIOUS!
Beetle Bug - it took them awhile to get the hang of it but they finally got it!
Kristopher, Kounosuke, and Dennis hanging out
Kyle doing the Spoon Zoom...cotton balls are willy little things!

The T-shirt game was hard work!
Kiana, Ayaka, and Serina waiting for the games to begin.


Valentine's Day was fun all decked out in our pink and read - we delivered our Valentines out in the hall, decorated cookies, and ate our yummy snacks - good day!

My goofy class - Samuel's our newest addition on the bottom left,
Delivering Valentines

My kids took decorating cookies VERY seriously - they had never done it before so we had to have frosting lessons...we might have to do it again they were so cute about it.

Mana might be my favorite (I know, breaking teacher code) - watching her giggle about who knows what we were talking about made me happy
Banri took it VERY seriously - he must have held up the sprinkles choosing what went together best for at least 2 minutes!


Kounosuke had a birthday on Wednesday - pretty good cake, every time I turned around his mom had added another piece to my plate to take home - she was cracking me up!
That covers the kids this week - I'll post the rest of the week later :) Love and miss you all!

WWII Peace Park Memorial

On Saturday Adrienne and I headed south on a beautiful day :) to go to the Peace Park the commemorates the Battle of Okinawa during WWII. It's been perfect weather lately, but everyone says that if it stays warm it could get HOT sooner...not good, but I'll enjoy the pleasant weather for now! We walked around a bit outside before going into the museum. When we got inside we got the little headsets that explained things in English which was extremely helpful! As we were walking through my heart just felt heavy thinking about how awful the war was for everyone and as I've been researching Japan/Okinawa to correlate with our History lessons it amazes me how shameful the general population finds their involvement in the war. Most people didn't want to be in the war and don't like the Japanese flag due to the fact that it began as a military symbol. Bird walk...anyway, the pictures of the war were much more graphic than anything you would see in the states and there was a replica cave of where people hid from the US soldiers - I had chills standing there in the cold and damp looking at the "people" huddled together and the mother covering the baby's mouth. Every so often a "military vehicle" would rumble overhead and I think I jumped at each explosion. As shocking as the museum was, it painted an interesting picture of the island's history - as well as it's future. The US took this place over for so long and has since made their economy dependent upon the military...it's strange thinking that the US and Japan were enemies, but I've been welcomed so wonderfully into this place. I know there are pockets of people that are resentful that the US is still here, but that isn't a general consensus. The peace park makes so much sense for this place - I've never been to a place that really seems as content as the people here are.

The view from where the Peace Bell is (there was a museum too that has the largest lacquered Buddha in the world...but we passed on that)
The peace bell - Adrienne asked if we were allowed to ring it, we figured it would be bad to get kicked out of the peace park though...

I thought this world map was really cool with all the kids pictures representing each country.

We saw this and realized that we're about 15,000 miles from home and got in this whole discussion if we could be any farther from CA...I looked it up - if we lived in northern New Zealand, we could be farther from home, I'll pass on more distance
You all are out that window - I waved...it will get there eventually :)
The back side of the museum
The Pacific Ocean :)
There were 4 groups of 7 rows of plaques that looked like this for the Japanese and 1 group of 4 of Americans - it was commemorating people that had either died in Okinawa during the battle and/or the Okinawans who died during the Pacific War - some were more recent though so I'm not sure about those people.

Seriously?? Always a beautiful view here!
Rows and rows of memorials


Afterwards we went to the Ryukyu glass factory - I LOVE that place! If you want to see the glass they make here you can see it at: http://www.wonder-okinawa.jp/009/english/

Good weekend - busy week, Valentine's Day party, Family Fun Day at school this Friday...a new student...hmmmm :)

Kids 100 days later!

OH MY OH MY...it's been a busy week of kids :) Wednesday was Alyssa's last day of school here so I had helped the class make a book for her and baked a cake in the toaster oven and we had a little Sayonara of our own - I hope she enjoys being back in the States!


Alyssa eating her Funfetti cake - my class was fascinated by the little dots of color...took multiple explanations for them to understand how I had done that!
This was the silly picture...my little hooligans!
Friday was the 100th day of school and I had built it up for the last couple of weeks so we were REALLY excited that day...but I think it was one of our better days so that made it nice all around. Our morning was pretty normal until after our spelling test and then we started making our 100's snack - I put everything out that they had brought in...the Japanese don't quite get trail mix, so we had some interesting choices, but the kids liked it and we had a good time! I tried some new yummy snacks too! They all worked on their 100's day books while the others made the snack.

Kai and Mana
Nathan and Kyle
Kiana and Kristopher...serious business!
Mai and Shuan (Shuan had to examine the Snickers VERY carefully...my kids didn't know what they were!)
Dennis and Ayaka
Ryuki and Lauren


Banri and Serina - this was their 2nd picture, I had to make silly noises and faces to get Serina to smile and that's the best I got out of Banri :)

Kounosuke and Milena
At recess we took 100 small steps, 100 giant steps, and jumped 100 times...we ended the afternoon with the goal of reading 100 books (didn't quite make it, but we had fun anyway!
Seriously, how cute is she?
Kounosuke sits like this often, it seems to help him think!

Milena's reading has improved so much this year!

That night we went over to Kim's house to kid sit...OH MY, the apartment is lovely and has the BEST view ever...thing 300 degree ocean - not quite 360 but close! We ate pizza (yum) tried the new root beer float in a bottle (interesting) watched (I use this term loosely) Prince Caspian. Then the move ended and the escapades began! There was MUCH picture taking, dancing, running, hokey pokeying, and who knows what else - but we had a really good time!

Matthew has a floating head

We were getting worn out - had to rest before the craziness continued!

I'm not sure what's happening here really
Matthew and Emma with Adrienne
Samuel cut Emma's head off...might have been on purpose, but he said we all looked beautiful, so who's to argue?!?
It's a hat I guess :)

Sayonara Dinner

Monday night Adrienne and I went to our first Sayonara dinner...not for us...the church goes to Kitakisen (I'm sure I spelled that wrong, Adrienne corrects me often, but I'm ok with it!) Anyway, it's this Japanese restaurant that has some of EVERYTHING you can think of from sushi to yakitori to pizza (japan style). Anyway, we didn't know what to expect - 2 families were leaving this week, one being the Delacruz family (Alyssa is in my class) so I felt it was important to go :) We get there and pull up chairs next to Rocky and Gina (yea!) and start looking at this massive menu - we picked out beef kabobs, yakitori and rice, and shrimp tempura - YUM YUM! In typical fashion, Gina insisted on sharing their food too - the seafood salad was yummy, so were these cheese things, the fried rice with chicken, and they had a Kitakisen roll....totally a California roll :) Everything was really yummy - but after we ordered it got SUPER crowded...at least 80 people jammed in this room. Everybody is laughing and talking and wandering around trying everyone's food - so fun! In Japan every food place you go to gives you wet wipes to use before dinner (and after too!). I think these are the best things ever, Adrienne laughs at me! Anyway, some places give you disposable ones, and some places give you wash clothes. This was a wash cloth restaurant. Well, at some point someone decides to throw the wash cloth across the room - it nearly landed on Adrienne's head! So instead of a food fight there was an instant wash cloth fight...I laughed hysterically and later when I went to get into my purse I discovered one had landed in there too! Good food, good company, and LOTS of laughter!


Adrienne with Alyssa and Sage (we're still waiting to go to Toys R Us and find our husbands)




Gina is the official cake maker and I, who am not a huge cake fan, like her cake. So Rocky says, you have to sit down, or you don't get cake...since the room was so crowded Robert sat on the floor so that they couldn't deny him his cake!
Gina and Adrienne - Rocky threw the tomato in the picture just as I snapped it - Talent!

Rocky in his loud shirt...there were a million pictures taken because Gina was trying to get the tomato in the picture... her timing wasn't as good so Rocky started making faces after awhile

Wordless Wednesday

Alyssa is going back to the States - Bye silly girl!

For more Wordless Wednesdays
http://www.5minutesformom.com/5472/ww-discovery-cov/