Warning: The Mother-load of Pictures....

Why do I do this? I am really good about taking pictures of our comings and goings here in Japan, but I seem to be waiting longer and longer between posts which amounts to a lot of pictures to weed out and choose from. Because of my procrastination habit, I am forced to try to narrow down and summarize events with only a few pictures....which still amounts to a lot of pictures!

On to the Mother-load!

Month of January to Present:
January was a busy month! The kids returned to school from christmas vacation, we celebrated Bella's 4th Birthday, I started teaching dance classes, we went on many adventures and visited many sites in Okinawa and just overall, we have been really enjoying our time here.

We'll start with Miss Bella's 4th Birthday!

She awoke to a present on her bed to open (normally clothes to put on), and was greeted with a much-excited brother who wanted to help her open everything.


After finding and opening all her presents (yes, we hid the presents to make it more fun), we got on our shoes and headed to Round One (an incrediably awesome indoor play area...remember the message chairs for parents while you watch your kids play...yeah, that place!)


They have a cool skating ring in the center where they also do little motorcycle races. Since we were the only ones there along with our friends from playgroup(as it was a weekday and most everyone else was at school), us parents took the opportunity to have a little fun our selves.

It was fun as they turned on music and introduced us in pretty decent english of our names and had by-standers cheer for us (meaning our little kids and tots that were with us) and then we raced around the track.

Our friend Melissa won and I came in a close second....that's right, us girls SMOKED John and left him in the dust!
This was a very low-key party as we invited our play group friends to celebrate with us and have cake.




Sadly, the only person who didn't get to share in our fun that morning was Ben because he had school, but it was the only time we could try to fit in a friend party for Bella, who's friends are all still preschool age.
Anyway, Happy Birthday to my little girl, who is growing so fast because "she eats her vegitables" and is turning into a little lady right before my eyes. We love you Sweet Pea!

Parks, Playgrounds and Important Sites:
One Saturday weekend, we choose a park that looked fun from a playground guide book, and so we set off on an hour drive south to find this fun little place:





Another Fun playground that friends of ours introduced us to....by far our new favorite playground! I'm telling you, the Japanese know how to have fun!




And another awesome playground we found...I should say that we FINALLY found, as this was the playgroud that I was trying to find when we first moved here and I got lost for 3 hours, you can read about that experience HERE: This park's name is offically "Melissa's Lost Park"






Afterwards, we found this neat old castle ruins called Urasoe castle...something..anyway, very cool...dates back to 1200 A.D:


Nice view from the top:

Strange to find a buddist statue with a swastica at the bottom...don't know the story there.



Okinawa Memorial Peace Park:
We didn't get a chance to stay very long to really get a better grasp on the Battle of Okinawa that happened here in 1945 during WWII: But just being here makes you feel very sad for the effects of war. Over 200,000 people lost their lives (between american and Japanese soldiers and Okinwan civilians)


This cliff is known to American's as "suicide cliff" as thousands of Japanese soldiers and whole Okinawan families jumped to their death as they thought that surrendering to the enemy would be much worse. So sad!


We ended our day with some blue bunny ice cream....always a yummy treat and a way to lift our spirits!


One of our favorite things to do is go for sundays walks down to the beach and watch the sunset. It's fun to be off-base with the local people and enjoy the sites.








Sesame Street came to Visit us: The military put together these traveling shows for military families to talk about parents diploying and returning. I can see this would be very helpful to kids who have a parent diployed, but for us, it was just more amusing for the kids to see Elmo so close.




Chinese Gardens: Our good friends, the Kiser Family, invited us to explore these Chinese gardens in Naha last week and we had a great time walking around.











Walking Downtown Naha: Afterwards, we headed to a popular market street and saw some intereting things:
Like a Japanese talking Parrot:

Rattle snakes in a jar...what's interesting about this is that it is Beer or alcohol and costs $200 a jug...a Japanese delicacy....I guess dying from alcohol poinsoning isn't enough, you need to have Rattle snake venom too to make it that more fun!





Karaoke...a Japanese Past-time:
We went to a popular place where they have litterally dozens of private rooms where you can sing away into the night with your friends. They gave us a "phone book" size list of songs to choose from, and we just took turns being silly and singing our hearts out!


It's fun to watch the Japanese TV shows sometimes because they have several karaoke contest shows. LOL


Other random things...to make this post EVEN LONGER....
Just funny when they try to write things in english to get american business...not to mention the interesting painting...I won't tell you what they looks like to me...but it's supposed to be garlic.

I think it was supposed to say Garlic Family:


I've talked about how randomly you will see these gravesites all over the place, but it's always funny to see them where they look like little neighborhoods themselves.

Thought this was cute!


And Lastly, (I promise)....are you still with me?... The kids: The kids are doing great and love all the adventures....life will be pretty dull when we move away from here.




Thanks for hanging in there...sorry about all the spelling erros, it's too big for the blogger spelling check to fix them and I am too lazy to proff-read, so now that I am all caught up and it took me several days to get this together, I should hope this will motivate me to blog more often.

Have a great day!