The week before Christmas and all is well.

It took me a while to post for the 3rd week in December... sorry about that. We enjoyed a more laid back pace. I went to several cookie exchanges (I've really enjoyed cooking this holiday season which leaves us with way too many sweets around the house). I was in charge of the 18 CS (Com Squadron- Pete's work) spouses Christmas party. We had a fair turn out of women and a lot of fun: dinner, games and making origami crane ornaments. We also went to Arin Krin, AKA 'The Garlic House'. They had all kinds of garlic recipes. We tried the fried Garlic Cloves which I liked but no one else did. The garlic pizza was a big hit with us all. We also had Cheesy garlic potatoes, gyro soup, garlic stir-fry, garlic shrimp, and garlic chicken.

A pic of a bunch of our food.

Becca Loved the garlic Chicken.

Pete, playing around before our food arrived.

Alex was all over the stir-fry. It had pork in it. The pork here taste a lot different than the states, not my favorite but Alex enjoys it.

Lalee claimed dibbs on as much Garlic Pizza as she could get.

Orphanage

This morning the kids and I were able to go to one of the local orphanages. We've been preparing for our visit for a while. The activity girls had wanted to make up Christmas stockings to give to all the children (about 60). We asked pappa (Grandma Burger) to send us her Christmas scraps and she sent over some of the cutest fabric. Lalee and I than sewed 65 goodie bags (we tried to make Christmas stockings but we couldn't get them to look right without them being too big to fill).
For one of our activities the girls filled the bags with treats and made cards which said "Merry Christmas" and "You are so special". Several of the girls are bi-lingual and translated the cards so the children would be able to read them. We went down with the activity girls and relief society sisters.

While we were at the orphanage we tried to teach the kids some American Christmas songs but the Japanese kids were more thrilled with the bells for jingle bells. We started singing 'head, shoulders, knees and toes' and they got into that.This is our neighbor, Evan. He and his mom and siblings joined us. He was so cute when he was handing out goodie bags to the kids!

We blurred out the kids faces for privacy reasons.

We also had cookie decorating and other games. It was neat to be able to spend time with these children and it made me appreciate my own life, especially my family, so much more.

13K Wow! Lalee's in Business

Okay, so I guess I should clarify 13K refers to the length of the run Pete completed this morning and not any kind of money Lalee wishes she's made in her business. Pete twisted his ankle earlier this week and its been hurting. I tried to convince Pete to sit this run out (he has been trying to do some kind of run at least once a month (two some months). He did it, despite the sore ankle, and he even beat the time goal he had set for himself. I was really proud of him for sticking to his goals despite plenty of excuses.
For school Lalee had to come up with a business. She had to create a business plan, decide on a product, make that product (20 products per week for a month), market that product, and do the accounting for her business. She chose to create F.Y.I. cards and sell them. Basically, a business or contact card for kids. We created a set of 10 backgrounds the kids could chose from, 10 fonts, 10 font colors. They filled out a form with the information they wanted on the cards and she made them. This project ends this coming week and she has had a great time with it. She's also learned a lot about how hard it is to actually have a business.

18 CS Christmas Party 2009

Last night was Pete's Squadron's Christmas party. We had a great time. The kids were able to go and play with a bunch of other kids their age and we had a great date night, something we no longer take for granted! Part of the evening was the entertainment which I was part of. We (some of the spouses club) performed a skit we created for the 'Dinning In' back in October.

Some of the girls right after the skit.

We were pretty proud of our skit seeing as how we came up with the lyrics, props, costumes and everything. Plus we'd had a good time practicing it and performing it before. It had a couple of unexpected kinks in it last night but I think it just added to the fun. I tried to upload it for you all to watch and it's just not working... :(

This is a picture of the women associate with Pete's shop (We are missing Schwartz wife and Fletcher's Wife)

This is Pete's shop. Fletcher is getting himself a drink so he's not in the picture.

Everyone (and spouses) in Pete's shop (minus the Fletchers).

tAiKo!!!

You know the saying, "All marching to the beat of a different drummer?" Well the kids did their taiko performance yesterday and it was actually pretty good (considering half of their practices got canceled due to the overabundance of Thursdays the school had off). They were SO nervous about it. Lalee reminded us for two weeks straight about it. She had a hard time sleeping Thursday night.

Taiko is a Japanese art involving music, drumming and dancing.
Alex is closest to us, Lalee is right behind him in the back row.

The bache is the stick. They are using Tsukushime-daiko drums.

Lalee and Alex with their taiko teacher, Branden.

We took a video of their performance and we will post it as soon as I go and buy another cord. They did great!

Becca's Christmas Party

When Becca came home with a paper announcing her classes Christmas party for Dec. 11th, I thought there was a mistake. I mean, that's over two weeks before Christmas! Apparently a lot of the kids aren't around after Dec. 15th as there is a TON of traveling going on during the holidays- go figure. But more so here as a lot of people will go back to the states. SO... most of the school did their Christmas parties this past Friday. Becca was so excited that both her mom and dad came for lunch.

She had to show us her journal (pic with Pete) the stocking she made (Pic with mom) and everything else... even though it had only been a couple of weeks since our last visit. We also made gingerbread houses.

Becca is loving school. She does, however, absolutely refuse to talk while at school. Her friends always ask why she won't talk, I'm clueless! She doesn't stop talking at home!

Pictures with Santa

This past week was not very eventful although we did have a couple of fun moments. We took the kids to a Thai / Vietnamese place for lunch one day. The pineapple rice was the favorite and this citrus noodle salad was hardly touched. Too bad I didn't have a camera 'cause I don't think we'll go back. Saturday morning was the squadron Children's Christmas party. I went early to decorate and Pete was going to bring the a sound system over with Christmas music. 8:00 rolls around and everyone is arriving but Pete still wasn't there. It was then that I realized he probably hadn't read the emails the squadron sent out so he had no idea where to go. I ran home and put a sign on the door. He showed up about half n hour later. Poor Pete, he'd ran around base for about an hour looking for us! Whoops. We were also in charge of the pics with Santa, the background was super easy- we simply went outside with some palm trees. There were about 30-35 kids that came and I think they all had fun.