Two days a month it is obento day at Sean’s school, which means I need to send a lunch box with him. In Japan, there is a whole art form that goes with making lunch boxes. They are not only functional, but they are supposed to be creative and cute and show how much you care. So I’ve decided to move in that direction. Last week I got little nori punches to make shapes out of nori to decorate with (nori is the seaweed ‘paper’ that is used in wrapping sushi rolls) I got a sandwich cutter, since Sean is very attached to his grilled ham and cheese for lunch. Thursday morning I cooked his sandwich, cooled it on a rack so the bread would stay crispy, carefully cut it, and made little eyes, for the animals, doors for the car and a fin for the fish. As soon as Sean saw them he got very upset and took them off the sandwich. So much for showing him that I care, I think it will be a very slow move to traditional bento.

And how do these mashed potatoes look?

this is the beni-imo potato, which the Okinawans often survived on. I don’t know how they did, it is very fibrous, we’ve tried baking them without success, this is my first try at mashed potatoes. I boiled the heck out of them, with the water turning so purple it was black, and then mashing. The fibers are much smaller this way. Dinner plans were changed last minute last night, so we won’t actually eat them until tonight. We’ll have to see how they go over with the kids.
We were playing around last night. Here’s a picture of Catie in her ’school hat’ that I picked up at the schools bazaar back in December.

She likes to wear Sean’s hat, but he doesn’t always like to share, so I pulled her own out. She wore it today for our stroller strides class too. And here’s a picture of Sean

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So this post is really just for my dad. We were talking flowers the other day, so when I picked up Sean this afternoon from school (yes, he had school on MLK day) we walked down the street and picked up some flowers. Outside a building there are 3 or 4 buckets of flowers depending on the day, and a large PVC pipe sticking out the building with a slot cut in the cap. The bunches of flowers are 300 yen each, or 2 for 500 yen so roughly $3.00 each or 2 for 5.00. We bought a bunch of chrysanthemums and a bunch of glads and then the owner threw in a bunch of sunflowers. For Sean, the best part is putting the money in and hearing it slide down the pipe.

So that’s about 10 glads for $3.00. And we need another vase, we only packed one when we moved here.

Just a post to put up some pictures. Sean is recovering. He still has an occasional productive cough, but is able to sleep at night and his appetite is returning. He’s still a little tired, so taking naps (hurray!) It is usally a fight to get him to take his antibiotics. Fortunately it’s only twice a day, but it has involved some wrestling matches. It’s bubblegum flavored! And mixing or washing down with chocolate milk hasn’t helped either. Of course, Dad is back and Sean took it no problem this morning.

So today, once Jeff emerged from his travel fog, we headed over to the beach on Camp Courtney. We spent about 15 minutes on the beach, then went up to a picnic area overlooking the beach for lunch. Then we took the above pictures. Looking at them whe I got home, I realized there was a huge smudge across the lens, but they still look cute, and Jeff even managed to get a picture of me.

Remember that post on the groove? Well Jeff’s gone again. He has 2-3 TAD’s this month alone. And to top it off, Sean has somehow manage to pick up pneumonia. He started abruptly with a cough and fever last Wednesday, with fevers on and off since and a worsening cough. Not that it’s keeping him down, but it is keeping him out of school. We went to the clinic today, and the doctor agreed that he would probably benefit from antibiotics at this point since he’s getting worse, not better. Of course, Sean doesn’t understand why I want him to rest rather than running around outside.
We actually have been pretty busy the past few days. There was a family day at school with rice pounding and making mochi dango. Basically you take a steamed rice patty/cake

and pound it until it turns into this sticky mass, like a thick dough.

We all got to take turns, even Sean and Jeff. I’ll try to post a video clip of them later.Then it’s made into small balls.

At school they cooked it over a fire and dipped in various toppings, and put it into vegetable soup that we had for lunch. And the dishes that we made in December appeared!

Remember that I mentioned earlier that there is a different sense of aethetics here. This is one of the signs for local bridge construction work.

The next day we went to Araha beach, over on the other side of the island, also known as Pirate ship park.

I told Jeff that if we were to get stationed in Okinawa again, I want to live on the other side of the island , there is just so much cool stuff, parks and restaurants compared to where we live.

Catie is two! It’s hard to believe. In some ways she is such a big girl that it seems she been a two year old for awhile, and the day that she was born seems soooo long ago. And she was very excited about the cake that Daddy picked out for her. She spent the evening alternately roaring for the lion and pretending to blow out candles.

She definitely did a better job of getting the cake in her rather than on her this year.
And her favorite word right now is two! So that’s the answer for most everything.

Kitten finally got her first kill. It took two days, but she got it. Two nights ago she brought it in, at first we thought she had an unfortunate gecko, but then Jeff saw a mouse run across the room. We chased it along the wall, behind the entertainment center and then behind the hutch. We finally got it out from behind the hutch with a broom, it ran straight at kitten and she leaped up out of the way of it. We lost sight of it and hoped it had gone out the dog door after searching for about 20 min. Well then this morning she’s poking around the shoes by the door, and there is the little mouse, appearing alive and well. I looked around for something to catch it in, but kitten got it in her mouth, so I picked her up and they both went out the front door. Then I went to the back of the house and kept her from bringing it back in through the dog door. So she happily played with it in the backyard.

So, it took two days, but she finally got her first kill. We won’t count the worms that she was bringing in two weeks ago when it was raining.