February Highlights!

Sorry the blog has been so dead lately. Our camera was broken and I made the decision to switch to blogger so I just wasn’t motivated to post anything. So, here are just a few of the highlights from the month of February:

Valentine’s day was fantastic this year. On Friday I surprised Tom with an hour long couples massage down at the gym, it was fantastic. On Saturday we got a babysitter and he blind folded me and put me in the car to take me on our date. After parking he led me, with my eyes closed (I took off the blind fold so people wouldn’t think we looked too crazy) to a bench. I sat down and after a minute he said I could open my eyes and I found a beautiful picnic spot on the beach! We enjoyed a nice dinner and a romantic stroll on the beach. It was awesome! He even brought the tripod to catch a picture of the the two of us but the clip was missing so we had to take pictures of each other!




On February 16th Tom turned 31!!! We had a fun birthday breakfast and opened presents. He had the day off work for Presidents day and we had planned to go to cool park but then it was too rainy. He thought that was the end of his birthday celebrations but Hayden and I had planned him a surprise party! At 4:00 he left to go TV shopping with his buddy who was pretending he didn’t even know it was Tom’s birthday. While they were gone all his friends arrived. We totally surprised Tom when he got home and we all jumped up to yell "surprise". We enjoyed a BBQ and fun night of Rock Band. I was amazed I actually pulled off the surprise!



On the 21st I went out with a bunch of my friends for a ladies night out. We went to Cocoks for an awesome foot massage and beautiful nail art! The Japanese have amazing skill in this department!


Then we went to Yoshi’s, a little sushi place that is very famous. Supposedly Yoshi is the original Iron Chef and the restaurant is plastered with pictures of him and the famous people who have come to eat there. I must admit I don’t do the sushi thing yet (I’m sure I will before we leave here) but I thoroughly enjoyed my Katsuban.

Tribute to Okinawa Parks!

The parks here are amazing! They are by far the best thing about this island...well, that's not completely true because I would probably say the same thing about the snorkeling, the aquarium and a few other things. But for the purpose of this tribute, we'll focus on parks. The parks are characterized by lots of amazing slides, teeter totters and climbing areas that all way too dangerous to exist in the states. Our favorites are the roller slides, they are tall and long and instead of a flat sliding surface it's little rollers that you sit on, we usually sit on cardboard because you go faster and it's more comfortable. Alyssa LOVES roller slides and goes all by herself!

On Wednesday we went to one of our favorites, it's called Dolphin Park because the play structure resembles a Dolphin. It has a zipline, rollerslide and these fun horses that you peddle in a circle. It is also right on the beach. The weather was so warm we took our beach gear and walked through the tide pools and played in the sand! It's been a little too warm lately and it making nervous for summer!!!






Our friends the Balls took us to the most amazing park ever, we can't decide what to call it but based on the picture we should probably call it The Slide Park. Amazing slides all built into the hill.

On the red bumpy one you actually catch air.

The HUGE cement one is great for the kids unless they sit on a board or something because then it becomes insanely fast. Tom slid down it on a board and went so fast I had to literally jump out of the way and watched as he blasted into the net of the playground and was luckily stopped. He ripped open the seam on the rear of his favorite shorts, too bad I didn't notice until we got home because we could have had a good time teasing him there!

There is another park we love, the Civic Center Park and it has a huge roller slide, a nice playground with unusual spinning things and The Drop Slide. I don't know if you can tell but, yes, it does go straight down and I had to watch several people do it before I concluded it was actually possible.

This is not the first entry dedicated to park and certainly not the last. Play on!

Welcome to our Blog!

Well, I am still a Mac Wife at heart but had to admit that Mac is GREAT at a lot of things but Blogger is great at Blogs. I held out for a long time but it was killing me knowing that I could do sooo much more with my .mac site but when I did it made the page impossible for viewers to load! Plus, with the switch to mobile-me there are constant problems with the commenting feature and such... so here I am... a blogger. So thanks for visiting this site, I'll try to update a few times a month and will try to add in something fun so it's not always a travelog.