My 30th Birthday

My birthday was pretty much just a regular day, but we decided we would go out to eat that night. We attempted to go to one of our favorite places, a Thai restaurant called Sum Chai, but it ended up being closed. Instead of trying to search for a different option off base, we just jumped on over to Kadena and ate at Chili's. We totally felt obese eating so much fried food, but it was yummy. Our kids came of of the restaurant with stains of chocolate milk down the front of their shirts. Sweet.

Then we came home to enjoy some carrot cake. Sydney did the honors of placing the candles, and loved every minute of it.

Do we look excited or what?

Cake. Hooorrraaaayyyy!

The highlight of this part of celebrating was Shawn's attempt to sing "Happy Birthday." After Spencer and Sydney starting singing, he wholeheartedly chimed in with his nonsense words. I made them sing it twice so I could hear him do it again. He does the same thing when we sing songs at church, and it totally cracks us up!

I have to say, I am quite content with being 30. Aside from having more wrinkles and a few gray hairs (thank goodness for highlights that can easily cover those up!), I feel like this decade will be spent enjoying the fruits of our labors. It feels good to be in the place we only dreamed about when we were 24 and poor dental students. Now here we are on a tropical island with a good job and two cute kids. Life is good!

My Birthday Surprise

The weekend before my birthday, Spencer told me that we'd been invited to have breakfast with the Heaton's on Saturday morning. I thought that was a little odd since I knew Stacey was out of town, but didn't think much of it. When I asked what time and got the response, "7:30am," I was kind of surprised Justin would want to make breakfast that early. On my way to bed at around midnight on Friday night, I said, "Spencer are you sure you wanna do breakfast at the Heaton's so early? We could just have a good breakfast here and sleep in a little." But he said no, we would go. My response was, "Ok, but I'm going in my pj's."

Imagine my dismay the next morning when his alarm went off at 6:30am. He rolled over and said, "Ok, we're not really having breakfast at the Heaton's, but we're doing something else and you're gonna want to take a shower." So I dragged myself out of bed and jumped in the shower. We were, however, still taking the kids to the Heaton's to be babysat. And then when we got there, he said, "Actually, Justin's just watching Shawn and Syd's coming with us." I tried to guess all the different things we might be doing, but they were all wrong. Then we pulled up to the Aero Club on Kadena, and I had a slight panic attack in the car. We were going on a private plane ride.

My fear stemmed from the fact that I have known or read about too many people who have crashed in small planes, resulting in death or severe burns. After returning home safely from our trip to Thailand, I thought we were done with possibly life threatening adventures, but less than a month later we were signing away our lives again. I took comfort in the fact that should anything go wrong, we'd at least be able to land in the water.

We walked up to the little Cessna 172 we would be flying in, and a little more of my fear was swept away when I saw this picture of Snoopy on the side of it. It was similar to one of two pictures my dad regularly drew on programs in church, which we frequently used for passing notes to each other, so seeing it made me smile. And he coincidentally also loves airplanes.  

Shoutout to my Dad!

Spencer, Syd, & Me by our Cessna 172.

I'm not gonna lie, I felt totally cool wearing the flight headset. I thought Syd looked pretty darn cute in hers.

Once we were in the air, I started snapping away. The air was really calm during our entire flight- an answer to a silent prayer that I said during takeoff! The pictures were a little hazy because of yellow dust that drifts over from China every year. It didn't hold me back though, I still took like a million shots.

Kadena Marina. If you enlarge the picture, you can see a dragon boat team practicing in the shallow water near the beach.

Naval Kadena.

The lighthouse on Cape Zampa.

Manzano Point.

Our pilot, Lance, told us that President Clinton stayed at this hotel when he visited Okinawa for the G8 Summit in 2000. Most rooms cost $1,000/night, but the room he stayed now costs $3,000/night.

Crossing over Nago.

Syd got the short end of the stick when it came to seating. For most of the flight, the view out her window was just ocean, as Spencer and I had views of the coast. She got bored with it pretty quickly.

Kouri Island.

Hedo Point- the northern tip of the island.

600 ft. cliffs on the northwestern side of the island.

The vertical lines in the hillside mark the sites of landslides.

The windmill on the left lost a propeller during the last big typhoon. Yikes!

Shark's Tooth Point.

The black lines in the water are seaweed farms.

I kind of love this picture, with our airplane's wheel against the funky pattern on the ocean floor.

During the majority of the flight, Lance turned down the radio so we didn't hear air traffic control in our headsets. As we got closer to landing, he switched it back on, which was really confusing for Sydney. Since she didn't really understand what they were saying, she thought they were speaking Japanese. So she kept turning to me and saying, "Mom, I hear Japanese guys talking. Do you hear them talking?"

"Mom, do you hear the Japanese guys talking?"

Going in for a landing.

We had a great flight, it was certainly a fun surprise!

Oki Zoo

At the end of February, Spencer flew back to "the States" (I always feel kind of English referring to the US as "the States"- kind of like "the colonies" or something) to do an Endo course, which left me flying solo with the kiddos for a week. Shortly after he left for the airport, the kids and I hopped in the car and went to the zoo.

We hadn't ever been on a Saturday before, so it was fun to learn that we could do some new fun stuff that they don't offer on weekdays. The first was a petting zoo. We bought a few little 100 yen cups of animal food a Sydney found a guinea pig to feed.

A nice Okinawan lady gave Shawn this balloon, so he was content to hold it for a while and just watch Sydney feed the guinea pig.

When the novelty of holding the balloon wore off, I wheeled Shawn's stroller over to another guinea pig so he could feed it.

He thought it was pretty silly.

Sydney LOVED holding these sweet little baby chicks. They were so cute!

We also got to feed an elephant, but I didn't get any pictures of it. Sadly, we paid 200 yen per cup of food for the elephant, and it wasn't that much more food then what we got for the tiny little guinea pigs. After giving our elephant in Thailand two huge baskets of food, feeding the zoo elephant 1/4 of a banana and a few apple slices seemed pretty darn mean. That animal was hungry!

At the end of the day, Sydney chose to spend money to ride these lame rides instead of feeding the fish.

Her meltdown afterward about still wanting to feed the fish was our cue that it was time to go. We had a great time though and it made day 1 of no Spencer pass pretty painlessly. I had honestly anticipated that it would be really painful week for me, but I actually had a really great time with my little buddies. I just tried to plan some sort of outing to fill the morning each day, and that helped the time pass much more quickly.

I've found that my frustrations in marriage/parenting are all about my expectations. If I expect him to be home by 4:30pm (totally spoiled, I know), and he's not home by 5pm, then I'm like, "Where the heck are you? I need you to come home so I can make dinner!" But if I know that he's gone and it's just me, then I'm good. And it helps that dinner for a 4 year old and 18 month old can be pretty simple.

Spencer attempted to take time off to see his family after his course was done, but working out the flights was getting to be a big hassle so he just cancelled his leave and came home early. Kind of lame to do when he was so close to them, but it was nice to have him home. Another bonus was that he got back in time to attend our special Sunday meeting with Elder Nelson, which he would have missed.