2019!

It is hard to believe almost a year and half has gone by since I've done a blog post. Life has been so busy there is no way to sum it all up in one post, but I'll do my best!

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!

Mathias is 4!

Happy birthday to our sweet, busy, energetic boy, who turned 4 on Halloween.  He hasn't had his 4 year dr appt yet so I don't have his stats, but he certainly looks bigger than 4 and is definitely taller than some of my kindergartners.  :) 

Mathias is a sweet boy who wakes up early, plays hard all day and then usually collapses into bed at night.  He's constantly full of energy and is always moving, wanting to run around, climb up and jump off things.  Mathias goes to gymnastics twice a week and loves it.  He was starting to get a bit under-stimulated in the 3 year old class because many of the kids are younger and slower than he is, so he was often waiting in line for a turn.  I'm excited for him to move to the 4/5 year old class next week, which I know will be more of a challenge for him.  He's a kid who needs physical activity every day for sure, but by the end of the day he is ready to snuggle up and read books.  His favorite books right now are the "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A ...", and he's memorized some of them and takes turns reading them to us. 

When we are inside, Mathias LOVES to build things and can spend considerable amounts of time building with magna-tiles, blocks, or Legos.  He's still struggling with taking apart anything he's built, which is hard when he wants to build new things but all the blocks or tiles are used up.  He usually wants to take pictures of the things he built so he can re-create them in the future and remember what they look like, although by that time he's started building something new.  He's also recently been talking about building things when he grows up and he's told me about some of his inventions, which sound pretty funny. 

Mathias is a pretty good eater, although he rarely likes to sit down long enough to eat.  His favorite foods include avocado, shrimp tempura, seaweed, and almost any type of bread.  His fine motor skills aren't quite where Miriam's were at this age, but he can spell and write his name pretty well.  Because of his late October birthday and the school cut-off here, he won't start kindergarten until fall of 2019, so he's got some time.  He loves to sing and list rhyming words though, and we play lots of silly word and letter games that he loves. 

Two of the funniest things about him are (a) his love of pajamas and (b) his problem-solving brain.  With regards to his love of pajamas; he would stay in pajamas all day, every day if we let him.  It has only started happening in the last 2-3 months, and he tells us "pajamas are just so soft and comfy!"  As soon as we get home from school he wants to change into pajamas, and on the weekends he stays in them as long as possible.  Today, for example, he stayed in them until about 9:30 am when he changed to go to a park.  Immediately upon returning from the park, he ran upstairs and changed back into pajamas, and has been in them ever since.  And about his problem-solving brain...he just has such a funny way of thinking.  A few weeks ago he came into our room in the morning (incredibly early, as always) and Mario said "I missed you all night, little guy!" like he often does.  Mathias's immediate response was "If you'd let me sleep in you and Mommy's bed all night, you wouldn't have to miss me when I'm in my room!"  Ha.  He also never hesitates to drag stools or chairs around the house to help climb up on things to reach something he wants.

Here are some pictures from his birthday party and his actual birthday.  We had  his party at the gymnastics gym where he takes classes, and he loved having the whole place to himself (and his friends) and having free choice to play on whatever he wanted.

Fall Fun in Eugene!

Hi all - happy Fall!  It has been fall for a while now but it is just starting to feel like it here in Eugene.  We had one week of cold and rainy weather in October, but otherwise it has been beautiful and sunny and warm, so we've been enjoying as much continued outside time as we can before the rain returns long term (tomorrow, based on the forecast). 

We've had such a fun fall so far here in town!  I've been working on doing an art project/craft each weekend with the kids, and in October we made paper plate jack-o-lanterns, fall trees, and decorated pumpkin cookies.  (It is a bonus when the thing we do results in something yummy to eat!)  We've also gone to several pumpkin patches/farms, where the kids love to run around, jump off hay bales, drink apple cider, play in the leaves and corn, and usually pick out pumpkins.  Miriam also went on a field trip to a pumpkin patch with her school; they took those pumpkins back to school and had a decorating contest.  Miriam won the "most creative" pumpkin for her whole grade level; she was extremely happy and proud! 

Sadly (for the kids), we don't have any big trees in our yard that have leaves we can use for projects or decorating or making huge leaf piles.  Luckily (for us, not the neighbors), many of the neighbors DO have huge trees with lots of leaves, and the kids have been enjoying raking leaves and making piles and jumping in them, as well as using them to stuff their scarecrows.  One of our neighbor friends even asked Mathias to jump up and down on the leaves in the yard waste bin to help squish them down.  Mathias, of course, was more than eager and thought it was hilarious.  We did just get two new trees planted in the front (to replace our trees that died in the ice storm last year) and we told the kids that hopefully we'll start to get some good leaves from those as early as next year.  Miriam asked what color the leaves turn in the fall and when I told her they turn a brilliant orange/red, she ran over to Mathias excitedly and said "Mommy picked trees where THE LEAVES TURN RED!!!"  It is so fun to watch them enjoy fall.

The kids had a really fun time carving pumpkins this year.  (Mario included. :) )  Miriam loves to design and carve her own pumpkin faces, and this year she spent so much time carving her huge pumpkin!  She was really creative and carved the word "boo" for the mouth, which I thought was pretty funny.  Mathias doesn't actually like the carving part (it is still hard for him), but Mario solves that by carving everything with power tools (see the picture below) and letting Mathias scrape all the "guts" out.  Mathias loves the scraping part, so it is a win-win for both of them. 

For Halloween this year, the kids both decided they wanted to be characters from PJ Masks (a book series/TV show).  Miriam was going to be Owlette and Mathias was going to be Catboy.  Then at the last minute, Mathias decided he really wanted to be an alligator (same as last year) and luckily we still had the costume in our dress-up drawer and it still fit, so we had an owl and an alligator trick-or-treating together.  They had a lot of fun trick or treating, even though we passed some spooky houses!  Miriam said her favorite treat was "her new toothbrush" that someone handed out (I suspect he was a dentist?!? Ha!) and Mathias promptly came home and gave away more than half of his candy to my parents "for their trip home." 

Speaking of my parents, they just wrapped up a 9 day trip to Eugene, their first time visiting since we've lived here.  Luckily the weather was gorgeous so we were able to enjoy lots of time outside with them!  Our schedule was pretty full while they were here - we took them to some of our favorite restaurants (including a gorgeous brewery in the country), they went on a field trip with Miriam and volunteered at her Halloween party, and my mom made Mathias's amazing birthday cake. (More on Mathias's birthday in a different post.)  They returned home to 2-4 inches of snow in Minnesota, so I think they were happy to enjoy some sunny fall weather while they were here! 

Here are some pictures of our fall activities:
(And please ignore that Mathias is almost always in pajamas.  We make him get dressed in clothes every day but he REALLY loves pajamas and as soon as we are home for the day, he runs upstairs and changes into PJs.  And who can blame him - I'd stay in pajamas most of the time if I could too!)

Miriam and I ready to go to a U of O volleyball game 

This sequence of pictures pretty much sums up Mathias's life...run, jump, climb, repeat...

Apple cider at the pumpkin patch! 

Mario with his power tools...

Alligator! 

Owlette! 

Her "most creative" pumpkin is the one with all the googly eyes right beside her...