The bike crazy madwomen!

The girls are bike crazy this spring and we have only had a handful of days which we could ride our bikes. Julia got it, you know what I mean within a couple days of nice weather this spring she officially understands how to pedal a bike. I remember when Sydney got it February 2007 when we returned from a trip to the US. It is so much fun to do a lap around our neighborhood and Julia be able to ride her bike with only a little help, she does get worn out after one lap but it is a quarter of a mile so I will give her little 2 year old legs a break. Sydney just enjoys going down the hill as fast as possible.
I hope to get my bike ready soon and put a seat on it so we can all ride this summer. Sydney is quite the little roller skater also. She got them for Christmas and has been skating in the basement for months, Julia really wants to skate too so she may be getting some for Easter or something. Anything to be like her big sister.

The things we learn at Church!

Since we arrived in Japan we have been attending church every weekend. It has become a way of life, which it should be but wasn't. While in Japan Harry converted to Cathothism and Julia also was baptized. Now we are all Catholic and enjoying our church. Sydney has started at St. Thomas the Apostle grade school last August and she really enjoys the school. We are enjoying meeting people there and getting to know other families. Last Sunday at church Sydney said to me "the people with grey or silver hair will be going to heaven soon." She has been learning about heaven a lot at school and talks about how we should all go there soon.
We like that she is teaching us prayers that we didn't know like Angel of God, which is now one of my favorite prayers and I even caught her hoola hooping and praying.

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.