Mathias turned 5 last October and is desperately wanting to attend kindergarten. (He starts in the fall.) He is still doing gymnastics and swimming weekly, and still spends lots of his time building things with blocks and Legos. He did a baseball clinic last spring where he learned the fundamentals of baseball and he seemed interested in continuing again this spring. Mathias loves to listen to music, to sing, and be silly with his toys. He is starting to read (!!!) and can sound out lots of words in addition to knowing some sight words. (Makes his teacher mama proud!) Last fall he decided he wanted to learn to ride a bike without training wheels, so after Mario and I both tried helping him for an hour and he couldn't do it, we went back to working in the yard. He proceeded to keep trying for another 2 hours until he could do it, and he hasn't looked back since! We had a new family move in next door with a boy Mathias's age, so they often ride bikes and play outside together. It is fun to have friends in our neighborhood.
Miriam will turn 8 in March and is in 2nd grade this year! She still attends the Japanese immersion school and she is excelling at both English and Japanese. She is frequently the first to memorize their weekly phrases/speeches and has become more comfortable responding in Japanese when people speak to her. Miriam also does gymnastics and swimming each week, and will play softball again this spring as she did last spring. She is quite scared of the ball and often ran away from it rather than towards it, but she had a lot of fun and luckily the weather was gorgeous, so we didn't mind sitting outside for the games! Miriam also really loves Legos and can be found building or rebuilding Legos most afternoons. She also loves to play outside so whenever the weather is nice we head out front to play and ride bikes.
Last fall was an extremely busy time for us. Mario and I both started new jobs and we hosted two college interns from Japan for 3 weeks. We traveled to Crater Lake, which was beautiful, and did some other day trips around our area. One of the things they wanted to try was different kinds of pizza, which we were more than happy to do with them! We have another intern living with us now (as of yesterday) and she'll be living with us until the end of the school year. She works at Miriam's school every day and we are very excited to have her here! She spent the first half of the school year riding to school with us (her first host family lives near us) so we know her fairly well, which is nice.
Mario is doing well! He started a new job (still with Weyerhaeuser) last August and that has kept him very busy. He is now the Operations Manager for the TJI department at the mill, overseeing 80+ employees and 3 shifts that run around the clock. He is on his feet, walking around and talking with people most of the day, which is a huge change from his finance job where he mostly worked on the computer! His schedule can be erratic at times (emergency calls in the middle of the night) but he is really enjoying it. He spent most of last year splitting his work time between Eugene and Vancouver, BC in his finance role, so we enjoy having him home full time now!
As for my new job, I got hired last spring to teach at Miriam's school, and I started back to work full-time in the fall. I am teaching 1st grade English, so I teach two different classes (they alternate back and forth throughout the day) with a total of 50 students. I teach cooperatively with the 1st grade Japanese teacher, who is wonderful. It has been a busy time getting adjusted to a new school and being back at work full time, but I am loving working there. My teaching partner is fantastic and we clicked right away, so there hasn't been much of an adjustment to working with someone new. It is wonderful to be working at Miriam's school and drastically cuts down on the amount of time I used to spend driving to 3 different schools during the day! I haven't had time for much else besides work (I'm putting in a lot of hours to create things from scratch this year that I can use for years to come), but I am still playing volleyball and baking when I have time. Katie (my sister) and I traveled to Vegas a few weekends ago to see a Celine Dion concert, so that was an amazing girls weekend and a fun time!
Last year we did a few trips to WA during the school year and spent much of the summer here in Eugene. We did do a long trip to MN where we had a family reunion with my mom's side of the family, and it was so amazing to see everyone and spend such precious time together! As the kids get older it gets easier to travel with them, so besides sprinting through airports to make close connections, traveling goes well. We stayed here for Christmas this past year and my parents and sister came to spend Christmas with us, which was a lot of fun! No snow, sadly, but the kids and Mario and I did head up to the mountains just after the new year to enjoy a day of sledding.
In other exciting news, we bought a camping trailer and have already been planning lots of camping trips this year! We've been looking at trailers for 1-2 years and finally took the plunge and bought one right after Thanksgiving. It is fairly small, but has bunk beds for the kids, a tiny kitchen and space for us all to sit around a table. We've already camped in it once (at a local campground) and have 4 more trips planned between now and the end of the school year, with more to be planned. We are considering taking the camper down to CA and camping in the Redwoods in August, but haven't made any firm plans yet.
I hope the start of 2019 finds you all healthy and happy! Here are a few pictures so you can see how big the kids have gotten. Mathias was at school with me last week and, no kidding, he is taller than half of the first graders in my class. He has shot up in both height and weight!
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