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a special opportunity

Daniel and I are excited to be hosting two international students this year! Our school has a good-sized program, bringing in 10 - 20 international students each year from all different countries. The majority of our students are from Asian countries (Japan, China, and South Korea mainly), but we have recently started attracting more students from Europe. Daniel and I volunteered to keep two boys, one from China and one from Italy. Initially, we were a little worried about them getting along. After all, two totally different ways of life are being meshed with American culture, and then having to mesh with with another culture? It was going to be a lot. So, we came up with a game plan to try to ensure that life went as smoothly as possible for each of them, as well as for us! Both boys were able to arrive in the US early enough to recover from jet lag before the start of school. In the beginning days, we did lots of shopping trips to make sure everyone had what they needed for sch...
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top 5 favorite board games

Daniel and I love to play games! It comes more from my side of the family than from his, so I had to introduce him to a few of my family's best games before he joined in my enthusiasm for them. Our collection has grown over the first year of our marriage quite a bit, and we are always on the lookout for a new one. For our first Thanksgiving together we started our special tradition of purchasing a game (or 2) to play on Thanksgiving Day. Last Thanksgiving we added Bananagrams and Dutch Blitz. We have about 15 games in our humble, ever expanding collection, most of them strategy games. Here is our top 5 list of our favorite games to play together: 1. Scotland Yard. This strategy game can be played with up to 6 people, so it's one we often take to friends houses. 5 detectives are racing around London to try to find and successfully capture Mr. X. Mr. X only pops up every few moves, so the detectives must work together to encircle and hopefully catch the criminal....

snow days, biking, and a new years resolution

Our snow days have kept us a little bored around here for the past week. We were able to have our first day of second semester, but then the winter storm hit, and the administration team decided to close until Monday. Which by the way, is going to be a packed day! Besides a regular day of school there is a 2 hour meeting to attend and 4 basketball games. Basically, we are enjoying the bit of down time before the rush of the next semester begins. The view from our back patio. So pretty! It was only about an inch and it's already melted almost completely. Before the winter storm, Daniel and I were able to give his Christmas present a try! I purchased a mountain bike for him and my parents gave us a bike rack so we can travel with our bikes. (I've had one since high school). We tried out a few trails at a park nearby and decided that we have found our new favorite hobby together.  Aren't the trails just beautiful? The weather being southern as always is goi...

the start of basketball season

Basketball season around here officially started today. As I'm typing this, I'm waiting for my husband to get home from practice and devour some of the burritos I made for him before I get the "breakdown" of the new team.  I definitely do not feel very ready for this season. Daniel and I had planned to take a weekend trip and go hiking before it started, and life got in the way, so here we are...no happy weekend memories to relive. Thanksgiving break is coming! I just keep telling myself that.... I am excited about this year's season though! We have some really talented players on the Varsity team, we have three new coaches and this is the first year we have had enough players for a Junior Varsity team. Definitely moving up in the world! The first tournament is this coming weekend, so I'll be spending all my free time in the school gym on Saturday cheering them on as usual.  I am praying for two things for this year's basketball season: 1. I am pr...

6 things I did not expect to see in Japan

Japan has been quite an exciting ride for me in so many ways! I love learning about different cultures, and experiencing it all firsthand is a privilege I honestly never really expected to have. I read about Japanese culture on a lot of blogs before we came, but they all said the same things: bowing is common, you take off your shoes inside, be prepared for the humidity, the Japanese people dress very modestly and take sun protection to an extreme, 100 yen shops are awesome, that sort of thing. Here are a few things that I did not expect to see in Japan and sort of took me by surprise. 1. Boxy cars. Everyone talks about how small Japan is and how crammed everything is, but I never thought this would include vehicles! All their cars are very new and well maintained, because if it doesn't pass inspection, you are not allowed to drive it. And inspection is pretty meticulous. I didn't see one old car on the road, and I rarely saw ones that were not shaped like little boxes! ...

Japan - week two recap

We did a lot more our second week in Japan since we were no longer battling jet lag. Plus, Daniel and I are good at cramming at lot of things into a few days! Beware: LONG post here guys! We ate lunch at a sushi place where everything was served on a conveyor belt! It was so cool! You ordered on the screen and they would send your order down the conveyor belt. Red plates meant someone's food, white place were free for the taking. And when your order came around a jingle would play so you knew it was coming.  YUM! We ate a lot of food! At the end, the waitress counted all the plates so she would know how much to charge. Sushi was 100 yen a plate, soup and special stuff on red plates was 200 yen. Our second day trip to Tokyo! We went to a huge garden in the city of Shinjuku. It was nearly 150 acres of beautifully kept up gardens. They even a French garden area and an English garden area. I was so sad when I found out I accidentally got my finger in thi...

Japan - week one recap

I have finally conquered jet lag! Those first four days were a lot tougher than I expected them to be, but I am sleeping through the night now and feeling much more rested when I wake up. For a few days, I was exhausted all the time and even shaky sometimes from needing good sleep. It's done for now and in a week and a half we will do it all over again when we return to the U.S.  We have been packing a lot in each day from helping with mom and dad's work at camp to visiting Tokyo and biking around Moroyama. This is the town of Moroyama where my in-laws live. It's not a small town by any means, but everyone is packed in so tightly, you could see the whole place on top of the bridge going across the train tracks. Mom and Dad's house is about a 10 minute walk from the train tracks, a 2 minute walk from the nearest grocery store, and 15ish minutes from their church. For some reason, I still don't have a picture of their house, but this one is a lot like it. Se...