Highway Robbery

There’s this cute little store I’ve seen around Japan called, what I assume is, Franc…but since they always have it Francfrancfranc, I call it that. They have random things, mainly house stuff. When I was there this last time I came across some mighty expensive, shouldn’t be expensive, stuffy.

Exhibit A. Body Fantasies. Isn’t that the Wal-Mart brand???? They are selling normal sized bottles for 1,575 yen which would be $20.41. Crazy. Robbery.

Exhibit B. Normal sized Febreze. They are selling it for 1,000yen or $12.96. Robbery.

Exhibit C. A small package of 40 Downy fabric softener sheets. They are selling it for 900 yen or $11.66. Robbery.

Moving

With baby number 2 on the way we get to move into a bigger house! Yay!!! We re going from a 1 story, 2 bedroom, 1 bath to a 2 story, 3 bedroom, 3 bath. We have so much more room I hardly know what to do with it all! Moving is always a little exciting and a lot exhausting. It starts today!! Wish us luck!

Chinese Acrobats

At the Nagasaki Lantern Festival we saw a dancing dragon show and the Chinese acrobats which were amazing. We took lots of videos. I need to get better about getting those on here as well because video is much better than picture with things like this!!

One of the three dancing dragons.

A shot of the crowd and some lanterns.

This was a magic show of sorts. She could change the color of her mask right in front of your eyes.

This guy would throw the pots around and catch them on his head, back, and feet. Very neat.

These girls danced and had these huge yo-yo things they manipulated.

These kids were just amazing. Contortionist. Pure strength. Awesome.

This pretty girl did everything. She stacked chairs and then did balancing acts on them.

This was the entire group doing different things together.

Another lantern.

McDonald’s

If Americans weren’t made out to look like the fattest people in the world already, look what is popping up in foreign McDonald’s.

Yay.

Breastfeeding

I have officially stopped breastfeeding. Cora and I did a full 25 months together and it was great. So much more than I had ever imagined. I’m so glad I never gave up. I know she is too. All things come to an end and with baby #2 on the way the end had to come soon.

No denying it, she is our child.

Potty Training

We decided to take a relaxed approach to potty training. We keep Cora in a dress with no panties. We have the potty in the living room (we are slowly moving it back to the bathroom). We started by asking her if she needed to go but we always just got a “no”. So we stopped pestering her and now she just goes whenever she wants. She’s done beautifully. It’s only been a few days so I’m not brave enough to go out in public without undies but soon enough it’ll be fine. She makes me so proud how independent and smart she is.

Krispy Kreme

On our way back from Sasebo we took a “small” detour to Fukuoka to get some Krispy Kreme donuts for our church (by small detour I mean a 4 hour trip turned into 11). Imagine this… take a detour in a foreign country, without a map, without a clue where you are going…. that happened. About the time we were going to give up we happened to come upon a mall. We got 10 free minutes of wifi which was just enough to get a Google map pulled up. No directions, just a map. Olivia (a friend of ours) gave us an idea of what area we were looking for and we just got lucky basically. We found an Eddie Bauer which is Peter’s favorite store. So we had to stop. The lady inside helping us spoke a little English and told us that we were very close to Krispy Kreme…we just had to go down the stairs right outside of Eddie Bauer and we found it in an underground shopping center.  Thanks Eddie Bauer.

I love big cities…they make me feel more at home. I mean seriously, from this post you wouldn’t think these pictures were all taken in Japan.