Risa's Pieces

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Picture created by Caitlin

Some of My Favorites

I've been wanting to share some of my favorite blogs for a long time. 

Ones I like to check into whenever I'm on the computer.  These fantastic ladies motivate me to see more, do more, try more and keep trucking on with their words.  Some amaze me with their awesome photographer skills (nope, I'm not afraid to still use the word awesome).  Then there are the ones who I go to for a good laugh.  And they're all mommies, so they understand the struggles/giggles/stress/fun that comes with a kid.

I put the links over to the side, hope you enjoy them too!

Our November

I'm slowly coming out of my hibernation and I'm working on becoming friends with my computer again.  Things here have been either extremely nutty with so many things going on or calm, smooth and relaxing with no outside pressures making us extremely too comfortable were we don't want to do anything but bolt the doors and stay held up in our house.

So far in November....

• We've reached our one year mark here on the island.  Only three more to go.
• Marcus and I attended an Award Ceremony at the kid's school to see our successful Chloe-Meister receive the prestigious all A's award.  Less than 10 of the fifth graders at her school earned the all A's award, a huge difference from last year where all of her 4th grade class received at least an Honor Roll award for A's and B's.

 

• Caitlin's grades were more like CD (consistently displayed) and P (developing/progressing).  Her teacher broke it down on her own handmade report card.  Instead of the DoDDS report card using terms like Displays A Sense of Story Development and Connects Concepts to Mathematical Operations, she used the terms they use in the classroom like Reading Unit Test & Workbook and Math 2. Using the teacher's grading method, Caitlin's lowest grade she received was a 91%.  They are doing well.  Very, very well.  Harvard, here they come (get those scholarships ready).
• I read the Twilight Series. I ordered the first two, Twilight and New Moon, from one of Chloe's Scholastic Book Orders forms.  Since I had heard how fabulous these books were, I wanted to check them out to see if they were age appropriate for her.  Yeah, ahem, I got them for Chloe.  But she wouldn't be reading them any time soon. Never thought I'd be reading books about Vampires and definitely never thought I'd flip over wild about them.  But then, it's so much more than just a Vampire book, isn't it?  I've read so, so many books in my life and Stephenie Meyer's books have turned into, by far, my cherished books now!  Really, you should read them!
• After driving by it almost everyday we've been on the island, we made it to Marcus' beloved culinary paradise, home of square shaped meat, and ate at Wendy's.  It seems unnatural to see the 99¢ converted to the ¥99 menu.  That's so much more peculiar than eating a square slab of meat.

 

• One of the hardships of being in the military is saying goodbye to your friends when they PCS.  It's possibly the worst part of being in the military, at least the part I dislike the most, always saying goodbye to the ones you love.  Chloe had to say so long to her Best Friend Kylen.  The friend who "got" Chloe, the first person to talk to her on her first day at Zukeran, the one who came up with the best ideas to play and had an imagination as massive as Chloe's. Even when we moved over to Kadena, they managed to stay close with hours of conversation over the phone and many sleepless sleep overs.

• Kylen's little sister was in Caitlin's class last year and they quickly became buds.  I'm going to miss their Mom.  She was super, easy to chat with, genuinely a nice person and reminded me of my sweet sister (it seems like those type of people are few and far between).  Wahhh!  I know there family is destined for great things.

Halloween Fun

After two hours of straining our eyes searching for an in-stock costume on the Internet of what Chloe had to have for Halloween, we were able to order the magical outfit that would transform her into Lucy of Narnia.  Caitlin was rather easy, they didn't have the Pikchu costume in her size, but she quickly found a Barbie Mariposa Fairy costume that suited her needs.  I've learned if I try to order costumes on-line a month before Halloween, the ones my kids want will always be out of stock.  Next year I'll order in May.  The costumes made it here on time and looked fabulous on them.

 

Halloween has always been a favorite of mine, I love the candy, the pumpkins, the colors, smells, beaming smiles on kids and a little bit of spooky.  As much as I like seeing everyone dressed up in their costumes, I have never really liked donning a costume.  I know, how strange am I?  This was our first Halloween in Okinawa and due to our new location, I had to change some of our Halloween traditions around.  Like our annual trek to Mark's Pumpkin Patch in Sasser, Georgia, we somehow couldn't do that this year.  The closest we got to a pumpkin patch was the pumpkin display at the commissary.  Instead of a pumpkin patch, we tried out a haunted house.  We loaded three excited kids (we had Chloe's friend with us) and headed out to the "Kid" friendly haunted house we had seen advertised around base.  After passing the slaughter (haunted) house (no way I could have dragged the kids into there) we found the haunted house we were looking for.  We got out of the car, prepared for a fun little scare and suddenly a crazed lunatic started chasing after us with a chain saw.  There was no chain on the chain saw since they really didn't want to kill us or anything, no, they just wanted to scare us to death. The kids were d.o.n.e., that was enough of a scare.  After some sweet talking and bribing, we managed to make it into the haunted house (obviously it wasn't the kid friendly place we were looking for, they had closed that one down).  The kids covered their eyes and ears, maybe even their noses and mouths, but they made it through the terrifying haunted house.

Besides our new tradition of visiting a haunted house, there's the usual stuff like the pumpkin pizza (also known as Mexican pizza if you don't add the cute pumpkin faces). I make it every year for Halloween dinner from a small Bisquick cookbook I picked up in 1999.

 

And it wouldn't be Halloween without the annual ghost hunt. Can you find the ghost here?

Once the calendar flips over to October, the kids start asking if we're going to do the ghost hunt this year.  Knowing how much they enjoy it gives me some Mommy leverage and I'll start saying "if you don't start behaving, we're not doing the ghost hunt this year!". The ghost hunt is little Kleenex tissue ghost I hide in the living room that they search for with their flash lights.  After they find their twelve ghost (they're color coded by the ribbon), they start taking them apart to find the pieces of their picture puzzle.  Once they put the picture together, it'll show them where their surprise is.

 

I hid Caitlin's ghost hunt surprise in between some towels in the kid's bathroom.  After she put her puzzle together and figured out where her surprise was, I snuck up stairs to their shower so I could capture the shear delight on her face as she retrieved her surprise.  I guess it's pretty freaky seeing a big, black camera lens poking out of the shower even though she hasn't seen Bate's Motel, she was traumatized and that's the moment I captured instead.  Yikes!

 

The tears leaked out only for a few seconds, she quickly remembered she had a special treat waiting in the bathroom closet.

 

To add to my Halloween festivities, I went on a Haunted Sites on Okinawa bus tour through Foster ITT with some pals I volunteer with at school.  The tour took us to Bolo Point (Camp Zanpa) and told us about the four military guys who haunted the place since 1978 after partying it up, jumping in the water to cool down then drowning - one guy tried to save the other guy, then the other dude tried to say the others...  Earlier in the day, Marcus and I had taken the girls to Camp Zanpa to check out the tide pools.  It's so nice and relaxing during the day, but once the sun goes down... scary.  The only light out there is going round and round on the light house. Next we checked out the haunted house on Kadena.  Our last stop was Yada Park.  Our tour group of 60 was getting the spiel of why the park was haunted when, right on que, all the lights in the park went out.  Spooky.

Back To That Place Again

We're still here.

And can you guess where I had to go again for the third time in less than a year?  The peeing cave, more commonly known as Gyokusendo Caves in Okinawa World Park.  This time it was for Caitlin's 2nd grade field trip.  The first time was for Chloe's field trip when she was in 4th grade and a family trip to show Caitlin the cave during the summer.  Those second graders were speeding through the cave so I managed to make it through the cave without too many pee drips dotting my shirt this time.  This was the first visit to Okinawa World that I got to go into the snake exhibit.  Snakes aren't my favorite thing and I couldn't understand a thing the snake handler was saying, but it was still interesting.  We figured out some things, like when the speaker asked the audience which would win an underwater swim contest, the snake or the mongoose, and we were able to make our bets, but if the snake handler told us to run for our lives and deadly snakes were slithering loose, we would have just sat there with a blank grin on our face

Caitlin made friends with the little mongoose.  At least until it took a nib at her with it's teeth.  Then she started re-evaluating their friendship.

 

I'm amazed by what Caitlin is learning in second grade.  Recently, Caitlin's class had to research a country, Caitlin picked Egypt.  When I attended a United Nation lunch in her class (with foods served from countries around the world) she treated me to a Power Point presentation she made.  Power Point.  In second grade.  Wow.  Chloe's learning typing, something she started in fourth and is still doing in fifth.  Years and years and years ago, I remember taking typing in high school and now kids these days are doing it in elementary.  Wow again.