Finally found some winter!

 We are still running around in shorts over here. It is still in the mid to high 70's with is not quite Christmas weather!  The YM planned an ice skating trip and invited the YW to join.  My YW jumped at that offer and I managed to weasel out of having to drive and sent them off.  The lovely leaders thoughtfully sent some phots and now you can enjoy them as well!

Marian, in case you didn't recognize her in her sweet hat.

Callie in the middle of the crowd. 

Delaney getting a ride from her friend, "Bob". 

This time, I knew to send them off with cup-o-soup to feed and warm them.  Delaney took advantage. 

Marian was great on the ice.  I heard she was a natural.

Drama, Drama, Drama!

 Josh started something with his discovery of his acting talent.  Callie started with the Drama Club at the high school, and she prepared a monolog and dialog and tried out for Far East Drama.  Spoiler:  She made it!  So Callie is going to perform in Iwakuni in February with Far East Drama, and we are incredibly proud of her for pushing herself and trying something difficult for her.

Rylee also joined the drama club, at the elementary school.  She practiced for weeks for her little play.  The group put on a 30 minute version of "A Christmas Carol" and Rylee was The Ghost of Christmas Present.  She was cute!  And did a great job.  She worked very hard to learn her lines and it paid off.

Let the festivities begin

Rylee with her friends at the Branch Christmas party.  This was the only photo I took that night. 

My friend Amy asked if I would hang out with her puppy for a bit while she was at work.  I sent a her this picture of her sweet baby.  Zoe was spayed the day before and her cone made her so pathetic.

Some of the girls decorated cookies at YW.

Delaney had a marvelous time.

I made stockings for our missionaries.  I loved this kimono fabric! 

Since our stockings all smelled so gross and mildewy, I made us new ones too. This is what I made for us.  I had just enough of the red kimono fabric to make 7 stockings.  And each kid picked a different backing- Marian wanted another kimono fabric backing, while Callie picked a super cute Japanese print.  Delaney and Rylee chose Christmas patterns and Josh got Japanese cranes.  Dan and I also did Christmas prints.  They came out very cute.

Marian participated in the school's Spirit Week, and wore her jammies to school. I kind of love her! 

We went to Dan's work party.  It was pretty lame.So I didn't really take any pictures.

 But they did have an awesome photo booth that we utilized and had a blast with.

 Yes, we went through it several times and had fun with it.

And then Christmas could finally come, because Josh came home!  He had a fabulous first semester of college and managed to have a smooth trip back to Okinawa.  The girls were delighted to leave church a little early to pick him up.  I wish I had gotten a picture of them as they flung the car doors open and leapt out at him with open arms.  It was awesome.  

Never Again!!!

Rylee had a field trip to the Aquarium. Everyone raves about the aquarium, but we went last Spring Break and I was kind of unimpressed.  But everyone says how amazing it is, and I thought maybe I needed to give it another chance. My preference would NOT have been giving it another chance on a 4th grade field trip, but I didn't really want to drive the 90 minutes out there myself.  So, field trip it was.

Well, the day was ugly.  Cold and rainy. And since the weather hadn't really dipped below 70 yet, the cold was unexpected.

The drive was long, but not horrible.  After all, I got to sit next to Rylee!  However, we did have to walk a ways in the rain to get to the aquarium.  And it was windy rain, so umbrellas were no help.  And then we had to wait in the wind for a really long time.  (Longer for the poor kid who really really had to pee!)  It took over 30 minutes to get our tickets sorted out so we could go in.  I had a cute group of 4 girls, and once inside, we promptly lost all the other groups.

They wanted to go to the dolphin show, but I had no idea where that was and it started in 20 minutes. So I didn't bother to even try.  We spent the next 90 minutes wandering through a very dark, very packed aquarium.  Why does it have to be so DARK?!!  And why are there always tons and tons of tourists there? I had a few worried moments when I thought I might have misplaced one of my kids, but fortunately, they were never far away.

The whale shark is the pride of the aquarium.  While it is impressive, it is not worth everything else just to be impressed by it.

It was so dark, photos didn't show the bright colors of the fish at all.

But the sharks were still pretty cool. And I do think Rylee is pretty awesome!

Posing at the end.

And utilizing the giant shark mouth.

We made it through the aquarium and were on time to meet up for lunch.  After lunch we walked probably over half a mile in the rain and wind back to the bus.  It was not pleasant.  And even less pleasant was the hour and a half long bus ride home (cold and wet with the AC blasting), listening to thirty  4th graders screaming the entire song "99 Bottles of MILK on the wall".  And one kid screeched "MILK" at the top of his lungs every time and I couldn't even punch him because his mom was one of the other chaperones and she just thought he was so cute.  

So I'm done.  No more field trips for me.  I can't even.

Prepping for Christmas

 Setting up for Christmas requires  a lot of work.  We have to clean out the shed to make space to put the treadmill in the shed so we can put the tree where the treadmill goes.  It is a process.  And the shed is gross.  And smelly. Marian and Callie helped to empty it out though.  They pulled out everything! It was awesome. We then sorted stuff we really might need, and threw away everything else.  It was rather glorious.

What was NOT glorious was all the black mold in the shed.  This is it AFTER I had spent a while cleaning it.  This is the stuff that would not come up.  And look closely- those are toadstools growing in the corner!!  Eewwwww.  I hacked it up and utilized much bleach and it was vast improved.

Unfortunately, a lot of our Christmas stuff was smelly and moldy.  Many things were covered with this white mold.  I sprayed a lot of vinegar and wiped down everything I could.  It was so sad.

I washed what I could.  I vinegar-ed what I could.  And I set a lot of stuff in the grass in the yard so the sun could help as well.  And mostly it worked.  The tree..... the tree, however, is rusty on one side.  I shall have to work on replacing it.  But for now, the rusty side is in the back and you can't even tell the lights that won't go on. So it is working out for now.  The girls won't let us decorate it till Josh gets home though!