Even Santa came to the CMIS Christmas Concert!

We got to attend our first CMIS Christmas Concert. Every time we have a new experience here it's always fun and interesting. The athletic direction (who is one of Orin's good friend's dad) made a great Santa.

Lots of yummy food before the concert. Right after I took this Micaiah spilled his entire drink on me, my purse and Sora's blanket. Ugh.

This is blurry but it's such a good representation of these boys.

Singing time! He was so INTO it. He sang loud the whole time. It was cute because I noticed one time when he messed up he got embarrassed and looked around to see if anyone noticed.

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Tree makeover

Having an artificial tree for the 2nd time in my 33 years (the first time was last year - our first Christmas in Chiang Mai) still feels strange. We were given this tree from friends last year. It's a pretty sad tree. But we were amazed how much better it looked with lights and ornaments. I truly feel like we're making over our tree. We did this about a month ago, but this month has been crazy so I'm just now getting a chance to post it. I've been working a lot as well as still taking Thai a few days a week. But a month late is better than never - gotta post it so it can go in my blog book!

The boys had fun going through our ornaments. We don't have many but it's still amazing how excited they were to find the stuff they remembered from last year.

They got out their beloved "gold boy." They've asked about him many times over the year to make sure we still had him for Christmas. :)

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Your typical Santa Letter?

For Art class Orin's teacher had them write a letter to Santa. This was Orin's first time doing it...maybe that's why he went a little crazy with his requests. Maybe it's because he knows it won't actually be going to Santa so he decide to ask for things that he knows he would never get. Either way, I had laugh when he explained it to me. 

Oh, and there has never been an Apple product in this house so I have no idea where that is coming from. And a nutcracker? Can you even get one of those? And this child is obsessed with getting gold. His career goal at this point consists of being a miner...so he can "get as much gold as he wants."

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November Random Pics

This woman wanted to take a picture with Micaiah and Ronald. Glad the kids usually are happy to accommodate when people ask.

After that they wanted to have a photo shoot.

Silly Boy.

I think Ronald tooted.

For Micaiah's birthday, we waited until Cars2 came out in Thailand and then brought two of his friends with us to watch it. So much fun! Then we went to Swensen's to eat ice cream. It was a great afternoon.

About two weeks after Chiang Mai flooded, this suddenly popped up along the river by our house. Uh, a little late. Maybe they were practicing for next year?

It's amazing the way we think differently from the culture here. Seriously, I think in the US we'd get arrested for child endangerment. Here it's just not something that enters their mind. They love their kids as much as people in the West - safety is just not something they equate with showing love to them.

"Don't make me excite." Uh, ok, I'll try not do do that.

I love all of the things people carry on motorbikes!

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I love this part of my job

I went with Orin’s class on a field trip recently. I love being able to do these kinds of things. Orin's class had just finished their study of the 5 senses. We went to a local park and the kids all walked around, each time using a different sense to observe things, and then journaling about it. It’s a nice time to get to know some of the other parents and get to know his teacher a little better as well. 

Obviously this time they were using the sense of "touch."

Then onto some other fun things. Helping the kids to follow directions.

Then time for lunch. Wow, when Thai parents send food, they REALLY send food! I couldn't believe how much food we had. It was a fun day.

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The most wonderful time of year?

Living in a country where very few people celebrate Christmas, and even less people celebrate Thanksgiving makes it tough to get into the holiday spirit. Throw in the fact that the weather is in the 90's and are away from our family makes it almost impossible. Last year Christmas was - well, just sort of depressing. So this year we really want to try to hard get into the spirit of the season. How to do this, I'm not incredibly sure. In the US, it just sort of happens. You can't really get away from it and the spirit all around you just sort of seeps in. I'm terrible at planning ahead so I knew it would really be a struggle to start early.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Orin had school, Damien went to work, and I took Sora to speech therapy. Hum, not starting off great. So I decided we were going to put up our tree. We have NEVER even come close to getting it up this early. We were given a fake tree by someone last year. Having always had real trees growing up (and always going to cut them down ourselves) having a fake tree was a little gut wrenching. It is the saddest tree I've ever seen - but once you get all of the lights on and stuff what a huge transformation. The kids had a blast. Sora, my child who freaks out if anything out of the ordinary happens in her life, was all concerned at first, but eventually got into it. We finished with the tree right when it was time to leave to go eat Thanksgiving dinner!

There are a couple of restaurants in town who do a Thanksgiving buffet. We chose one that was right down the street and a place where we love to eat. They grow all of their own fruits and veggies and even raise some animals. And we can walk there! However, on our way we saw that they had a lot down the street where people could park and they were giving Tuk-tuk rides. He sort of insisted we take a ride so we did! 

It was a great dinner. Until Micaiah had to go potty. He's been having some tummy issues the past few days. He was trying to wait for the person to get out of the indoor bathroom, but finally decided he couldn't wait anymore. About 3 minutes later I was outside getting more food and heard him crying from the bathroom. Poor kid couldn't get his pants down in time. Poor mommy had a clean up a HUGE mess and lost her appetite. Poor daddy had to walk home and get new clothes. But in the end it was just an interesting way to extend our dinner by 20 minutes. And Micaiah probably won't remember it tomorrow.

Micaiah wanted to give Sora a taste of his pie. :)

When we got home the kids wanted to turn all of the lights off and sing Christmas songs by the tree. It was so much fun. Seriously, they were all so into it - and it was so much fun. Damien and I were just talking about how much more special just having the tree up is compared to at home.

Back in October the restaurant flooded pretty badly. They have pictures up of the restaurant with all of water in it. Pretty crazy!

I love this one because it's a REAL laugh from Sora.

And we stopped by the post office today (we hadn't gone in forever) and we had a package. It was the Christmas around the World gifts for the kids!

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Umbrellas and Silk

Micaiah, Sora and I spent the morning at an umbrella and silk factory. I was sort of checking them out to see if they would be fun places to bring people to when they visit. Little did I know how much Micaiah would love it…and I’m still always surprised how much people love Micaiah.

Micaiah has the cutest Wai I’ve ever seen. And I don’t think very many people would disagree with me.

It was so cool to watch how the umbrellas are made. Each person’s job was to make a different part of the umbrella. The person who paints on it asked if Micaiah wanted a dragon on his arm…which he did of course.

Then we went to a silk factory which was also awesome. Do you know how silk is made? I didn’t, and let me tell you, it’s disgusting. And it doesn’t necessarily make me want to wear silk.  But it’s also incredibly interesting. They take the cocoons with the live worms inside, before they turn into moths, and then boil them to kill the worms to get them out. Then they unravel the the silk into a thread. In Thailand they eat the worms. Gross. You know how you can tell if you have real or fake silk? If you burn it, the real silk smells like burning hair or flesh. Fake silk will smell like burning plastic. Micaiah enjoyed it and then threw a huge fit because I woudn’t buy him a silk shirt. Ugh. It was a fun day other than that. 

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