Ballet Claire Knows Her Letters

The kids are back in school!

The kids are back in school!

After I dig out of the messy house (No, really...I'm going to get it better!) and keep up with my work stuff (conference call last night from 9:00 - 10:45!) I'm going to try and slowly blog about our fun summer! I told the girls on Sunday night that being a working Mom in the summer is ALWAYS hard, but this was the easiest summer yet! We had a ton of fun stuff for them to be involved in here on the base and, of course, my Mom and Dad being here for a month was both a tremendous help and super fun! It really flew by! However....glad to have a routine again!!!

I'm going to start with the most recent event!  Sweet Claire had her first ballet class yesterday. She was on a "basketball team" last year, but this is her first activity other than that. My friend Danielle Caceres offered to take Claire along with her daughter Lala. Having four kids has taught me to say "Yes, thank you so much" when people offer to help!  THANK YOU DANIELLE!

Danielle is a professional photographer, so that is an added benefit of having her as Claire's taxi driver! :)

Striking a pose!

Cute girls, ready for their first class!!!

I also took Claire to her four year "well child" visit yesterday ("just" 3 months late) and the doctor asked her to draw a picture of herself. Dr Perry was quite amazed at the detail and said that with all of the detail (hands, mouth, hair, ears, eyelashes, etc) she would have thought a six year old drew it. Way to go Claire! 

I love her people that she draws (Taught at Yochien) and asked her to draw me a few this morning to share with you because the one she drew at the doctor's office was on the sheet covering the table. :)

The bottom right is an alien. She asked me, while she was drawing it, "Do aliens have three legs?" How does she know what an alien is anyway? Then she drew me and then Gigi. ("Does this look like baby hair?") She then drew a capital "G" and a small "i" and then was quite distressed because she couldn't remember how to draw a small "g". I told her to go ahead and draw a big one, but she didn't want to, so I showed her how on another sheet of paper and she quite happily made a c and then the line and the loop. :) 

I started doing a "Hooked on Phonics" workbook with her because we're planning on keeping her at Yochien through kindergarten. She will "graduate" from Japanese kindergarten in March 2013 and we'll enroll her in American kindergarten for the last two months of the school year. I can't very well expect her to learn EVERYTHING from Nick Jr and she is such a joy to spend time with, so it's a win-win! She loves the one on one attention and asks "Mommy, can we go and learn how to read?" almost every day. She's such a sponge.  (At the well visit, the doctor asked if she could count to 10 and I said, "Yes, in three languages." Thank you Nick Jr and Yochien for two of the three!)

We're a big fan of Kumon (where Olivia took Math and Japanese this summer and Audrey has been and is continuing to take Japanese since May), so I looked online to see if they had any Kumon workbooks. I ordered a few of those, but our favorite purchase from that order were the Kumon Dry Erase Flash Cards (Uppercase Letters). Claire asks for these almost every day as well and will sit and trace each letter of the alphabet from A to Z and then will carefully erase them from Z to A. It's good quiet time and as long as she enjoys it, we'll keep doing it. I just ordered some number ones and shape ones too. I like having her at the kitchen table doing that while I'm cooking dinner.

So, that's way more detail than anyone but a Grand (pa/ma/aunt) is probably interested in, but I wanted to get it down "on paper" to tell my sweet Claire in the future that we knew when you were four that you were so smart and were going to be a great student!

Love you Claire!!!!!!

Our Magical Mystery Tour of Huis Ten Bosch

I really had NO IDEA what we were doing when we headed to Huis Ten Bosch for the day on our first full day in Sasebo. I, honestly, thought it was a Dutch settlement with a few brick buildings, some windmills and tulips in the springtime.

 

 

Imagine my surprise when we park and walk up and I see the ticket booth.

 

 

Sue: "How much were our tickets?"

Mick: "Don't ask."

 

 

However, at the end of our third day of entertaining our children on vacation on the Southwestern island of Japan, called Kyshu, with an hour of holding monkeys, playing catch with a dolphin after a great, up-close dolphin show, followed by a pirate cruise and asking them "What was your favorite part of our vacation?" and hearing "Riding the bike at Huis Ten Bosch"....I would have paid double of the "Don't Ask" price. :)

 

 

Here are "a few" pictures.

Gorgeous, gorgeous buildings and canals and windmills all around along with shops and stuff. This is us on a canal ride. It was SO CUTE. When we took off they had bubbles blowing out of the bow. :)

Funny "Engrish" translation. We had two grasses of red. :)

Beautiful, beautiful windmills. (Zip!) Gigi is digging for her special "blankie." Yes. I KNOW. I need to wean her.

Nico, every time we see a "Fleur" sign we take a picture. I have another one from Kyoto that I need to send. xo

We went to a "Paint a Wooden Shoe" place. The girls had a GREAT time and spent an incredibly long, leisurely time painting their wooden shoe bank.

This is classic Audrey attention to detail. ;-)

Gigi and I, and then Gigi and Mick, rode the carousel over and over and over again while her sisters were painting their shoes. Then she came in and tried on a bunch of shoes. It was SO CUTE! I took about 10 pictures of this scene, so either be disappointed or consider yourself lucky! :)

We heard the tune of "YMCA" coming from a street over and ran out and saw this dance troupe dancing and smiling like I've never seen anybody dance and smile before! Disney has nothing on the Huis Ten Bosch dancers!

Seriously. Two seasons of passes to Disneyworld and I have never seen such smiles and enthusiasm. :)  After the song was over they came after us with squirt guns. And speaking of random water fun...again...there's many, and I mean, A LOT of pictures I'm not subjecting you to viewing. Spray gardens, random baby pools, swamp coolers. Very fun, random fun!!!!

Then we went to the world tent and found, for the first time in over a year, but who's counting, a Corona LIGHT. My FAVORITE beer!

In the International Corona Light tent was this singer. He was really good! A fun tune...of course we didn't understand a word. He called himself "Unicorn" and we posed like this and are talking about how it will probably be his standard pose from here on out! (Obvious!)

Then we went into the Kids' Zone and had SUCH a FUN time!!!!!

I mean, not the safest, but still FUN! :)

We like to give each child a chance to break a limb when we're on vacation.

Don't want to play favorites! :)

It was definitely Gigi's favorite part of the trip!

And well...I had fun too. :)

How I long for the olden days without my bad back. I SO would have been doing flips on this very jumpy jumpee!

Then we went upstairs and Gigi was ridiculously happy in the ball pit. Upstairs was very Children's Museum-like.

I love this picture because I see lots of legs and heads and can't really figure which are attached to whose. :)

Claire and I put on a puppet show. :)

And then we finally rented this bike for an hour and it was the highlight of a very lit up day! :)

And Gigi was able to fall asleep sitting up in her seat.

And, the poor lamb, slumping in her seat.

As well as lounging in Claire's bigger seat that we moved her into so that she could have a longer nap.

Mick and the big girls popped into a few more "attractions." This one was an optical illusion house and believe me when I tell you that I know there are a ton of photos on this blog, but you're not getting half of them. Or a third. Perhaps note even a fourth. We took a lot of photos!!! :)

They did that while the little girls and I waited patiently outside!

And then we biked some more and took some more pictures. This is a favorite! It was a brat, as in sausage house, but I had them pose as Rock 'n' Roll "brats" as in kids who aren't sweet. ;-)

Hooray for Huis Ten Bosch!!! As Audrey said, if we lived in Sasebo, we would totally have season passes. We didn't know what to expect and we had such a fun time! I kept belting out the Beatles song "Magical Mystery Tour" because there has to be more than a few benefits of being THE ONLY AMERICANS in the entire park (The entire day! So odd.) and one of them is definitely ♪ ♫ singing ♪♫ at will.

We'll see you in the spring when you have tulips,

Huis Ten Bosch!

Hooray!!!!