Our house!

We purchased a house in Dunlap Illinois on July 28th, 2009! It is located at
11602 Ballymore Avenue in Waterford Place. We have 4 bedrooms upstairs and 2 full bathrooms. The middle level has a large family room, kitchen with granite countertops and formal dining room. The basement is unfinshed but perfect for the girls toys, roller skating and riding our cars in during the winter. We have a TV set up and the treadmill also.
The neighbors are all so nice and there are so many kids for the girls to play with. During the summer months we spent many evenings outside playing with all our neighbors and enjoying the warm weather. Now that we have lived here for over 6months I am finally getting to organizing the basement and making piles for trash and sell. There is a neighborhood garage sale every spring so we hope to get rid of some things there. In march I am going to paint Sydney's room and she would like purple and pink so that is what it will be. I hope to paint the whole house because it was painted using flat paint originally and over time the girls have destroyed it.

Leaving Japan

We finally received our orders, May 12th, with the help of Congressman Schock's office to get things expedited. The following day we went to the out processing place on base to set up our household goods move and express shipment. They needed 10 business days from the time we filled out the paper work so we counted 10 business days and we were in business. The time it took for us to receive our orders and to actually leave the country was almost exactly one month. We arrived home to the Short's house after 24 hours of travel. The final jet lag we would experience was difficult but we made it through with lots of dvd's at 2am and lots of naps. Harry joined us the following Friday and it was nice to have the family back together. We started looking for houses that weekend and had good babysitters to help us out. Kelsey McCarthy was home from college so she was so helpful in those months to watch the girls.

Marinos Soccer Game

We went on an adventure with the O'Connor Family to a Marinos soccer game. We looked it up as best we could on the internet to figure out where there stadium was and how we were going to get there by train. We were doing well on time and made it to the stadium right as the game was to start only to find not many people at the stadium. We finally found some nice people that explained to Jen(she speaks Japanese) that the game was being played at a local park 2 train stops back. I guess Japanese teams do this and play at a smaller field from time to time. We arrived at the game at half time and still had plenty of time to enjoy ourselves. We bought many souvineurs,enjoyed Japanese stadium food, and the adults enjoyed a dollar a minute worth of beer for the half. The kids had a great time and enjoyed cheering on the teams and hopefully have great memories of our time at the soccer game.

Rakutan Eagles!

In April we were lucky enough to get tickets to a professional baseball game given to us by our good friend and professional baseball player, Rick Short. We had never met Rick but I had talked to his wife often on facebook and though we didn't know each other well in high school we had the bond of living in Japan. Rick left us tickets at the Japanese version of a will call window which we were escorted to once someone understood we had tickets saved for us by a player. We went and watched the Rakuten Eagles play the ....... We were joined by our friends the Bryants and the highlight for Kim and I was getting our picture taken with Sumo wrestlers. Unfortunately the Eagles lost but we enjoyed the roller coaster at the Tokyo Dome and a nice evening of adult dinner before heading back home on the train.

Happy 5th Birthday Sydney!

We celebrated Sydney's 5th birthday on June 14th because with jet lag June 13th was a blur. We joined all the family minus Daddy unfortunately for a party at the farm. Sydney had a great time surrounded by all her cousins though we were all still jet lagged.
This of course was Sydney's second birthday party. We celebrated in Japan at the bowling alley with many of her friends, it was also the last time she was able to see many of them.

Back in the USA!

We traveled back to the United States on June 12th 2009. We left Japan at 5:20 June 12th and arrived in Peoria like 5:30 that same day. Harry unfortunately had to travel to Seattle to process out of the Navy so we were on different flights back to the US and he stayed in Seattle for about 6 days, then joined us in Peoria. The girls did well on the trip and we had 4 seats for the 3 of us which was awesome. I did end up bringing Julia's car seat and it came in handy for her to sleep but it was great to have it in a spare seat. In all my travels back and fourth to Japan to take or not to take the car seat has occupied many hours of my preparation for the trip. The 11 hour flight went well with me watching one movie while the girls slept and the rest of the time watching the in flight monitor on the TV to see how much longer we would be on the plane. We arrived in Chicago and I had to claim all our bags, go through customs, with one tired almost 5 year old in tow and one 18 month old sleeping in her car seat in a stroller. Stating that going through customs was horrible would have been an understatement. We then traveled though the airport and finally found our way to the other terminal (there are better directions in English at Narita than at O hare). By the way this all took place with only 1 hour until our next flight was to take off. We made our difficult way through security ran towards our gate only to find out half way there that the gate had changed and we needed to run back the other way. We were the last ones on the plane and I couldn't have been happier when the doors closed the wheels were up and we were on the final leg of our journey.
We were welcomed home by Grandpa and Margie, enjoyed a nice dinner at Aggitucci's and then went home to our new place, the Short house. The Short family was kind enough to offer up there house to us to stay while we where house hunting and they remained in Japan for the baseball season. We lived there for 6 weeks and it was the greatest thing anyone did for us when we were coming back. We can never thank them enough for the kindness of opening up their house to us.