Halloween - a couple months late

OK, I will just cease to apologize for putting things up that have long since been forgotten. You should just be glad they're finally up. :) These are some pictures from the English class party we had at my fellow teacher's house. I took the girls and they had fun making some new friends. The Japanese kids come to our church "basement" room every Saturday morning to do some English lessons with us. I've had lots of fun doing it, and it's satisfying my urge to teach. The kids are ages 6-10, I think. It's great that their moms all speak very good English too, so we've been able to communicate more because of that. Oooh, I almost forgot. . the pictures you won't see of this party are my fan-TAS-tic parking job in my friend's garage. They live out in town and are actually fortunate enough to have a little open garage to park in. Now picture your two American cars. Two of them would fit in their garage, and maybe a third if you blocked your other two. Well, we ended up getting SEVEN of our Japanese cars all wedged in there. I stopped traffic on the main road for a few good minutes while another gal switched cars around. A. had to crawl under our car just to get out because we were in there so tight. Just kidding. I am pretty proud of how my parking in reverse has significantly improved since we've been here. 

The moms said they don't really do trick-or-treating here, but some people might have a little party just because. I heard and saw a few funny things. . one, I heard that people will take their kids on Halloween to knock on the doors of the Americans out in town to get candy, which I thought was pretty awesome. (We're all identified with a special "Y" on our licence plates - stands for "Yankee" and "Your Fault".) Also, probably a third of the kids that were trick-or-treating in the base neighborhood where we were were Japanese, so the people with base privileges definitely hit up that day for their kids to get some candy. 

A. and a new friend 

Some of the littler kids, not sure who they all belonged to

The four big kids are our main students - Liliko, Allen, Kaia and Loy

Of course this is one of the few nights that they both fell asleep in the car, with Daddy on duty, so I was left to get them upstairs alone. Did I mention I counted steps the other day and it's about 150 from our car to the front door (and that's taking the elevator)! I stood A. up and she almost fell over she was so sleepy, it was pretty cute. 

The wonderful 17-year old costume made by Great-Grandma B. of Little Bo Peep. Found the sheep ears at the 100 yen store for D. and dressed her all in white, so that was pretty easy. :)

I neglected to look at my receipt, so I can't tell you the exact amount I dished out for this pumpkin, but I'm pretty sure it was in the $11-13 range. Someone brought a pumpkin in for our pastor to carve Luther's seal on, because they don't sell pumpkins out in town. And to top it all off, that week was so random that we never actually carved anything into the pumpkin. So that's IT! No more pumpkin for these kids until 2014. :)

The only pumpkins they get are these wooden ones that A. and I made. I'm pretty proud of doing a craft project all by myself! Motivation was up there!