Fairy Princesses

One afternoon, Sydney suited up in her sparkly shoes and fairy wings and asked if she could go knock on our neighbor Claire's door. Claire was excited to come out and play, and put on her sparkly shoes and fairy wings to match. They pretended like they were getting married (Sydney's fiancee of choice is always Peter Pan), and decided to collect clover flowers for their wedding bouquets.

That kept them occupied for a good hour! They sure were cute little fairy princesses.

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

A few weeks ago, we pulled into the gate on base and saw kids flying kites on the nearby soccer field. Sydney immediately wanted to fly her kite too, so Spencer grabbed it when we got home and took the kids outside while I got dinner ready. About 10 minutes later, he came back to tell me Sydney really wanted to show me something. I walked out the door, and this is what I saw:

Sydney's kite flying success.

And then I ran in and grabbed the camera so I could capture it!

Pretty soon we were joined by some like minded neighbors. It was so cute to watch these kids fly their kites!

Sydney's Toy Story kite flying high next to Hailey's Ariel kite.

While Sydney took care of business, Spencer and Shawn hung out it the ditch and played with Stella.

After dinner, snapped a picture of the sun going down. It looked huge and had the coolest stripes of color across it.

Sunflower Festival

I spent the rest of the week after we got home in "vacation recovery" mode, doing lots of laundry and cleaning. By Saturday I was itchin' to do something different, and the nearby Sunflower Festival was the perfect venue. Spencer and Sydney weren't too excited about it, so it ended up being a mommy-son date.

It was a quick visit, but Shawn had fun running around and I enjoyed looking at the flowers. After a quick trip to the BX afterwards, I looked down and noticed that the necklace I had been wearing- one of my new ones from Thailand- was gone! So, a few days later our whole family went back to try to recover it, but to no avail. Too bad too, it was a cute one. But on the upside, the owner of the sunflower field was cutting flowers and gave us a huge bunch!

And then I left them in the back of the van and totally forgot about them. They were cooked and totally wilted when I got them out a few days later. Oops.

Valentine's Day

When Valentine's Day came, we were still in "vacation recovery" mode and therefore didn't do much to prep for the holiday. The night before I pretty much just found a bunch of pink stuff I had around our house to do some festive decorations, then pulled out the kids' mailboxes from previous years. Since I hadn't really bought any Valentine's goodies, I just put lame stuff inside... a pink ballon, a sucker, and a bird whistle. Lucky for me, they are still little and even thought that was pretty cool. 

I must have done something to make Sydney mad, because she refused to let me take her picture.

I attempted to make pink heart pancakes, but they ended up being a little more dense than they were supposed to. It ended up just being easier to make a heart in the middle of them with a cookie cutter. We also plopped some (Pinterest inspired) pink heart milk cubes into our milk, a touch that only I appreciated.

Syd ate like three bites of her pancake, and had no qualms telling me that, "Daddy's whole wheat pancakes are way yummier than yours." It's true though- his are deliciously perfect every time.

Shawn didn't seem to mind my "less yummy" version.

It was just enough to set the day apart. Sydney had preschool that afternoon and love, love, loved the whole Valentine exchange process. And since the new thing is for Valentine's cards to come with temporary tattoos, she pretty much went to bed that night with tattoo sleeves on her arms. 

Doi Suthep & Coming Home

We spent our last day in Chiang Mai relishing in the fact that we really did all of this cool stuff! It seemed hard to believe it was already coming to an end. 

Lobby of our resort.

As our last hurrah, we decided to visit Doi Suthep, a famous temple in the mountains just outside of Chiang Mai. It was about a 40 minute taxi ride, and of all the potentially life-theatening things we did on this trip, that ride was possibly the most dangerous. The lady driving pretty much flew up the mountain, crossing waaayyyyy over into the other lane every time we went around a curve. It was kind of terrifying, but we made it to the top in one piece.

Even after all the shopping at the night markets, I loved checking out the goods at this new location too. I talked down a few ladies and bought some cute necklaces.

Can you find me?

After shopping for a bit, we were ready to make our way up the stairs to Doi Suthep!

Holy bright Batman! This one was by far the shiniest temple we'd been to.

It's golden color was quite impressive against the blue sky.

Amid all the tourists, there were lots of people worshipping- some walking around the main structure carrying flowers, others burning incense and praying.

After getting our fill of pictures, we walked over to check out the views of the city below. On our way there, we passed this awesomely huge wood carving.

The view was lame- it was too hazy to really see anything.

Holly & Me being nerds after coming back down from the temple.

We were not looking forward to the death trip back down the mountain. Although she didn't speak much English, I think our driver sensed our anxiety about her driving and she took it a little slower. But there were still moments of sheer terror. I looked back once and laughed when I saw Stacey's reaction to one of her risky driving maneuvers:

This was a re-enactment, but the original expression was equally as awesome.

Then it was on to some final suit fittings and lunch at a cool open air Morrocan restaurant.

Spencer, Adam, & Hollie

We played it safe and left a decent time cushion for traffic on our way to the airport... and then it only took us like 15 minutes to get there. China Eastern Air had pretty much the worst customer service ever, and we waited in line for what felt like a hundred years to check in. I did, however, love these giant warrior statues in the airport.

It was a quick flight back to Bangkok, then an overnight flight to Shianghai. The Chinese kind of rubbed us the wrong way, just being rude and pushy in most of our encounters. When we did an international transfer and had to pass through security again, we encountered the "Security Nazi" (the airport equivalent of Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi"). She was yelling at everyone and was totally condescending. Then we all found empty seats and snoozed for a while since we had a super long layover. When we woke up, the seats started filling up a bit more. And we quickly learned that if you repositioned yourself for like two seconds, you were going to lose a seat. Justin left his backpack on a chair when we went to grab some food, and there was a lady sitting on it when he got back. He told her it was his chair, and she just leaned forward for him to grab his bag. He was like, "No, this is my seat," so she got up and sat in an empty chair just across the aisle. It was totally weird. The whole seat-stealing thing (slash pushy Chinese people) became one of the jokes of the trip.

Spencer, saving seats for Adam and Hollie up to the second before they sat down.

Thank goodness there were no flight delays on our way home! I breathed a sigh of relief when we finally touched down in Okinawa. We were both really excited to see our kids and give them the presents we picked up for them. We called the Perrins, our friends watching Sydney and Shawn, to let them know we were heading to our car. Then about 20 minutes later, we got a phone call telling us that Syd was so excited that we were coming home, and she was jumping around and slipped. She knocked her head on their ottoman, and sliced it open just above her eyebrow. Kathy told us Seth had taken her to the ER for stitches. I dropped Spencer off at the ER to be with Syd while she got seven stitches (two inside, five outside), and I went over to get Shawn. When I first picked him up, he cried and reached for Kathy. Then he calmed down and just started staring at me, totally confused. I took him home and got him ready for bed. When I stripped him down for a tub, I laughed when I saw this awesome tattoo on his little bicep.

It said "foodie." Totally appropriate, ha ha!

Syd came home in good spirits, and Spencer said she was very brave. After eating some pizza, she was "so exciting" to see her presents. It was nice to be able to give my kids lots of squeezes that night! I was just glad we all survived this experience, so a few stitches didn't seem like such a big deal.

Syd's bandaged wound and bloody hair.