Our First Chinese New Year Celebration February 14, 2010

We celebrated our very first Chinese New Year and it was quite an adventure. It was the first time for us to have a WHOLE fish staring at us from the dinner table! I think overall, it was a success and Mika seemed to really enjoy it. She was very happy to eat traditional Chinese foods and we were lucky that our Guide and Translator in Taiwan have become very good friends and they were nice enough to send a few decorations and traditional snacks. The Chinese New Year is determined by the Lunar New Year calendar, and this year it happened to be on Valentines Day.

These are candied snacks from Taiwan

Mika's 9 month anniversary celebration.....and we get a new house! January 28th-February 2nd 2010

It's so hard to believe that it has already been 9 months since Mika came home. She has added so much joy to our family, it's really been such a blessing and a miracle. Some days David and I still can't believe she's really here! We've discovered she doesn't like chocolate, milk, pudding, red meat, and bread. Other than that, she's a great eater and loves all kinds of seafood, potatoes, juice and pasta. I decided to make red velvet cupcakes to celebrate our anniversary and she liked those a little. She definitely prefers vanilla and fruit flavors though. We also found out on February 2nd that we will be moving to a new house very soon. We're moving to Kadena Air Base which happens to be the same base we lived on back in 2000 when we lived in Japan the first time. It's a much better base with lots to see and do and is centrally located. We're very happy to be getting off Camp Kinser because we didn't like that base. We're especially happy because the house we're moving to is NEW! We'll be the first family to live there, so we're excited. Mika calls it the "new one house." We should be moving next week if all goes as planned.

This is a picture of the new house &

neighborhood. We really like it.

Celebrating David's Birthday-January 10, 2010

We celebrated David's birthday today with a wonderful "sushi go round" meal and a trip to Shuri Castle. We had a great day and David was happy to get a new coffee maker!