Kitten has been found! She was a few buildings down, and a well meaning cat lover took her in and wouldn’t let her out. Looking at the screen in the room she was kept in, she really wanted to get out. The cat lover posted flyers Sunday night and I found them Monday morning. So she’s back home, slept in Catie’s bed for part of the night until Catie was tired of being slowly pushed out of bed. She hasn’t really adventured out much, but I’m sure that will change. Her tummy looks fine and the family is back to it’s full count. She’s currently sleeping smack dab in the middle of Spooks pillow.

Well, we escaped for the morning. The gates were going to be closed for a couple of hours for the Okinawa Marathon, so we had to get out of here early. We went to White Beach, which is a Navy base about 25 minutes from here, that we hadn’t been to before. They had a nice beach with rocks for exploring, a playground area, and trailers and cabins that can be rented to stay overnight.

As you can see, Sean thoroughly enjoyed himself and wanted to stay all day and night. Catie was more interested in the playground. After a couple of hours at the beach, we went to an all hands club on the base overlooking the very small port they have there. Sean cleaned up his Macaroni and Cheese, Catie ate most of her hotdog and Jeff and I had some pretty good BBQ. I can definitely see making that another day trip or going there for camping, which Sean is anxious to do.

And here is a picture just for Uncle Billy!

Unfortunately, Kitten has gone missing. We don’t know what happened to her. She was playing in the kitchen last night during dinner, and we noticed, but she wouldn’t let us check being all teeth and claws, that her incision might have been oozing. She had been acting normal, eating and playing fine. But she didn’t show up for bathtime with the kids, or Catie going to bed, so we started looking for her. There has just been no sign of her. The easiest/most plausible explanation to give to Sean is that one of the snakes might have gotten her, but we really just don’t know….

Okay, I don’t have a picture of them, but we are all now restricted to base or traveling between bases. 2 weeks ago an idiot 38 yo Marine offered to drive a 14 yo Japanese girl home and allegedly raped her. As you can imagine, alot of people were very upset. There is a part of the population which understandably wants the military gone from here, and this only added to their reasons. Some called for locking up all the military personel on the bases, but that didn’t happen. The military was given a standdown day with reminders of ethics, standards, good behavior, basically Do Not Screw Up. Well, what happened? Last weekend one Marine was drunk driving and another was so drunk that he wandered into a house in the middle of the night and fell asleep, until the Okinawan residents woke to find him there in the morning. Way to go guys. It left those in charge no option but to discipline everyone. So no cool parks, no fruit market, no sushi, no eating out off base until the restriction is lifted. You can certainly survive here with the amenities on the bases, but just knowing that you are restricted makes it tough.

Well, okay, they don’t exactly go together well, unless you’re taking a trip to the aquarium. Which we did again today. I think this may have been our fifth trip there, I’m starting to loose count. The kids always have a great time there, so we don’t mind. We didn’t tell the kids where they were going until we were on the road. Once Catie knew where we were going she started to sign and say ‘tar’ and fish over and over. They recently opened their new net playground there and Sean and Catie loved it. Sean latched on to a Japanese boy and they played for nearly an hour together. Sean didn’t want to leave, until the Japanese family asked if he wanted to go home with them, which helped a little.

Then we got to do a quick trip through the aquarium,

lunch of course with the insistence of corndogs for Sean, which meant that we had to eat outside. A stroll through the manatees, a trip to the beach

and the ride home. We didn’t leave the aquarium until 3pm, so we figured we’d take the scenic route home so the kids could nap. Catie woke up after less than an hour and wouldn’t go back to sleep. Once home, we realized we had been stood up by the babysitter, so it was out to dinner with all of us. We went to a restaurant that was new to us, and Sean loved it. It was japanese version of Italian and not too bad. Sean said that it was his favorite and he would pick it every time that he got to pick the restaurant(which will be a nice change from hearing that he and Catie only want to go to the sushi go round, or round as Catie calls it). On the way home we were trying to teach him the name of the restaurant and he said he would call it oiyshi, we asked him what that meant and he said good. When we looked up good, it said it meant good/delicious, so he’s learning some Japanese!

Catie recieved a box of cute clothes today. In addition there was a fortune cookie. Here is the fortune inside- Your are a traveler at heart. There will be many journeys.- How appropriate! She was much more interested in cookie than the clothes, although she did say pink when she saw pink shirts.

And since the middle of January, it has been very cloudy, often windy and rainy. Here is a picture I caught yesterday between rain storms. This morning we are seeing the sun for more than 5 minutes, which will hopefully warm the house up, but it is windy.

Here is a video clip of Sean’s concert.

We had a GREAT trip to Sapporo. Both Jeff and I enjoyed it so much that we could see going again. This was our first trip to Japan and it is very different from Okinawa. There were some flight delays getting there because of snow in Tokyo, but the kids made the most of it playing in the play area. One of the nice surprises was how easy public transportation was. We took a train from the airport to Sapporo, then walked from the station to our hotel. There are extensive underground walkways/shopping malls throughout Sapporo, so it was warm getting around too. The subways stations are located in lower levels of the walkways and malls. Our first full day there we went to Odori park to see the snow sculptures.

It was the day before the festival started, so they were doing final set up, ceremonies etc, but the sculptures were finished. After naps, we went back in the evening to see them all lit up and had dinner with the food vendors.

The following day was opening day of the fesitival and we spent that at Satoland, which was a huge open area which we took a packed bus to get there. There there was a huge snowtubing slide, a smaller ice slide, a snow maze, minigolf in the snow and other smaller activities. Seans favorite was the maze, he was too scared to do any of the slides. I took Catie down the ice slide in my lap and it was fast!

The last full day we went to the Susukino area where there was a street filled with ice sculptures. We also returned after nap time to see them all lit up. It wasn’t as impressive as the snow sculptures, and if we go again, we wouldn’t visit it twice. During the day, the street is open to traffic, and in the evening they are lit up but you can see the details of the ice sculptures more easily in the daylight.

Then it was time to go home. The last day, we had a little time to kill before going to the airport, so we just took a walk around the block of our hotel. The hotel was located on the edge of the city, so we walked the suburban direction. Sean found lots of snow to play in, and of course we didn’t have him dressed in snowpants since they were packed already, so he ended up having to change since his pants were covered in snow up to his hips.
There are lots of pictures in the gallery from our trip, just look under snow festival.

Okay, so I haven’t posted in awhile. Jeff was gone and it was just the normal day to day stuff going on here. Then he came back and we left 9 hours later for Sapporo, then we had one day back and it was Sean’s concert for school. He was great!!! So onto posting.
Gosh, where to begin? Here are pictures from Seans concert and I will do a separate posting with video clips. The clips came out clearer than the pictures for some reason, and they were taken with the same camera.

So this is Sean in their chitty chitty bang bang song. If you think it’s hard to sing in English, just try Japanese! And that last picture is Sean dressed as a good rice ball for a story, there is a special name for it that I can’t think of at this time.
They did a song on their pianicas followed by a dance, change of costume into the rice ball with a little routine on stage, then another costume change for chitty chitty bang bang. And then the finally with all the classes together. All that from 3 and 4 year olds! The older classes did more elaborate song and dancing. Overall it was very impressive. Sean is really enjoying all the singing and dancing, and the teachers have nothing but praise for him. It’s definitely more demanding singing and dancing than you see in most American schools especially for kids this age.