We are on our way across the country!

Our past six weeks in California have brought many, many good days with friends and family. Our days have been too full to keep up with our blog regularly, so I am going to summarize our time with some favorite photos.

Of course — Disneyland! Pictured right — Eric’s brother Mark. Favorite rides? Annie: the carousel; Eric: Buzz Lightyear (new one at California Adventure) Owen: Star Tours. Sue? Soarin’ Over California (California Adventure)…Olivia? Winnie the Pooh.

Eric and Owen went with our friend Steve K. to Owen’s first-ever professional ball game — the Dodgers! Owen now loves to sing, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and thinks Cracker Jacks are great because they’re in that song.

Many memory-making times with special friends and family…

Annie had a chance to do her four-year old dream: take ice skating lessons. It is scary that after two hours she is already better than both parents

Bobby Clinton had a baton-passing ceremony for ten mentorees, and Eric and I had the privilege of receiving one.

Our friend Gwen’s birthday party (f you look closely, you’ll see Owen’s forehead is cut. Several hours later at the emergency room he received 14 stitches! He’s fine now)…

Our trip to Colorado for a Debriefing and Renewal (DAR) conference was a highlight for our whole family.  It really was a time for renewal for Eric and me. The children also had age-relevant debriefs, and processed their experiences in more concrete ways.

Times of prayer with dear friends.

The opportunity to hang out with our Sanda friends, the Sakamotos, and participate in their 20 year anniversary vow renewal ceremony.

There’s no way to choose a favorite day or favorite event… It’s been wonderful to meet so many and have our children get to know people in the U.S. who are so special to us.

Owen and I (Eric) went to see a Dodgers game last week with our friend Steve. It was Owen’s first time to a real ball game and he was so amazed at the size of the stadium and all the people there. We got to see Hiroki Kuroda pitch an almost perfect game, retiring 21 batters in a row before a lead-off double in the 8th inning ended his streak. He received a standing ovation and then completed a one-hit victory over the Atlanta Braves.

Besides the game Owen enjoyed Dodger Dogs, cotton candy, peanuts (shelling them with Steve in photo below), ice cream, and root beer.   All in all it was a wonderful evening… almost perfect.

We have settled into Los Angeles for the next six weeks, and we finally have our computer fixxed- sorry for the delay!

On July 4th, a big holiday in the United States, we celebrated Annie’s fourth birthday.  She wanted a princess birthday, so we had a fun time with it.  The day ended with fireworks down at the beach, which Annie loved… and cried when they were all over!  Here are some photos from our barbeque and princess celebration:

We’ve been in Hawaii a week and are still getting used to American life.  We are still amazed at how big the portions are at restaurants… the drink sizes….

Two of the big highlights of our time here has been getting to hang out with friends from Sanda!  On Friday, we met Yuriko I. and her husband at the Cheesecake Factory, one of our favorite restaurants in Waikiki.  They were here for just three days on vacation.  They, too, were amazed at the sizes of all the food!

Then, today, we got to meet our friend Masao I.  We took him to our very favorite beach, Kailua.  He loved it as much as we did.  Then, we went to a hamburger restaurant that is rated one of the top ten most delicious hamburger joints in the U.S… and we all had to agree.

(Do you like their hats?)  It’s helped us with our homesickness for Japan to meet these special friends!  Of course, it doesn’t hurt that we’re in such a beautiful place.  Our kids have loved swimming in the ocean- they just go running in as soon as we start walking to the ocean.  We’ve had a chance to go swimming four times.

Tomorrow we will be leaving for the Big Island for 3 days- more fun adventures to come!

Oh… We don’t like saying goodbye! Our last few days in Sanda were really busy… we were packing, cleaning, and doing last minute projects. We realized that we could NEVER have done all this by ourselves. So many of our friends were so thoughtful by watching our children, coming over to clean, offering to help us. And in between all of our busyness were many goodbyes. I (Sue) couldn’t hold back the tears… almost every day there was a goodbye that made me cry. I was surprised that even when I said goodbye to Enchou Sensei at Fuji Yochien, she and I both had tears in our eyes!

We had a safe trip to Hawaii. Thankfully, our children enjoy the travels and the airplane trips. When we arrived in Honolulu, we had to take a shuttle bus to pick up our luggage. The bus driver let all three of our children pretend to drive the bus… Here they are happy to be in Hawaii.

We love and miss you. We will post some photos of our time in Hawaii next week.

Love,

Sue and Eric

We will be doing lots of traveling in the coming eight months, and wanted to create a blog that will allow us to share our experiences with our friends. We wish you were with us, but since you can’t be, we will help you imagine what we have been learning, seeing, and doing through our blog. We hope to post about once a week or so, so stay tuned!

Here are some photos of some friends we have been hanging out with recently in Sanda… and saying goodbye to…Thanks for all the great memories we have had the past four years… we look forward to making many more memories when we come back next February.