Happy Birthday Shawn!

On the morning of Aug. 10, Sydney came into my bedroom and said, "Mom, is today Shawn's birthday?" She'd been asking me about it all week, and was so excited that he was turning one! The morning was actually a little rough on me since he's been teething and sleeping like crap. I've been up by 6:30am every day for the past few weeks, if not earlier. Despite waking up at the crack of dawn, he was seriously fighting a morning nap. But since I had a million things to do (make and decorate his cake, wrap presents, blow up balloons), I was persistent and eventually got him to sleep. It paid off- he slept for like three hours! With Sydney's help, I was able to do everything on my list. Wohoo!

After Spencer got home, we decided to let Shawn open a present before we went out to dinner. I had told Sydney while I wrapped them that Shawn didn't really know what presents were, so maybe she could help him open them. She really took that to heart and was all up in his business to "help" him open up his Lightening McQueen car. 

For dinner, we went to a Ramen place that we've been wanting to try for a while. The food ended up being mediocre, but at least the place had a good atmosphere.

Sydney really like the origami birds that decorated the window behind our booth.

Spencer gave one to Shawn, then took it back after he tried to eat it.

I don't think I've mentioned how much this boy loves water! Yet another thing for him to growl at us for when we're eating dinner...

My favorite drinking position- head all the way back, cup held vertically in the air while he chug, chug, chugs. I think it's so cute.

Once we were back at home, it was time for more presents! Sydney was VERY excited.

My big girl, making even a double chin look cute :)

Shawn, on the other hand, had no interest in presents as he was busy taking all of the diapers out of the basket by the couch. Awesome. But after a brief clean-up and a little redirection (i.e. Sydney shoving presents in his lap), it was back to birthday celebration.

Brainwashing through birthday gifts- Go Cougars!

All BYU paraphernalia was courtesy of Spencer. I teased him that buying all of this marked his official entry into the club of Dad's Who Give Their Kids Presents They Want to Play With, which may or may not have been founded by my Dad. (As a side note: For one Christmas, my sister got an electronic race car track and I got something similar to a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em but with karate guys. Total Dad purchases!) Shawn was also spoiled with packages from generous grandparents and aunts.

Happy 1st Birthday to our sweet boy! We couldn't imagine life without him!

Tropical Storm Haikui

Last week we knew that a tropical storm was heading our way, but I didn't get my hopes up that it would hit since most of the other ones projected to hit us always seemed to change direction and don't even end up coming close. But when I got home from a girl's night movie late on Saturday night we were in TCCOR-2, and Spencer had an email from our church leaders saying that if we were in TCCOR-1 by 8am on Sunday, church would be cancelled.

Well, Shawn has been waking up between 5:45 and 7am pretty much every morning for the past week and a half, so when he was up at 6:30am, Spencer ran down and saw that we were in TCCOR-1. I was especially excited because I was in charge of Sharing Time that day, so I was off the hook :) 

It was pretty much the laziest day ever. While it was windy and rainy outside, we stayed in our pj's all day relaxed. The storm couldn't have been timed any better- we finally got to watch a decent amount of the Olympics! We usually miss all the good stuff during the day, and then when we turn it on at night they're showing something lame like fencing or badminton. So we were excited to see some good stuff, like swimming and track and field.

Spencer and Sydney whipped up some brownies, then when Shawn took his afternoon nap we made a fort in the living room. I thought Syd would love making it, but she did a puzzle while Spencer designed and executed it.

Then we laid under it while watching a movie and eating treats. Talk about L-A-Z-Y!

After the movie, we redesigned the fort and played under it with the kids until dinner time. I'm pretty sure we had every toy out of the toy boxes under that thing. It was quite the mess, but we had a good time.

We thought for sure the storm would be over by Monday morning, but we lucked out again! We were in TCCOR-1C Monday morning, which meant all nonessential personnel were supposed to go home to their quarters... so Spencer didn't have to go to work. Wohoo!! The funniest thing to me about all of this is that it was pretty much a repeat of last year- a typhoon hit about a week before Shawn was born. I'm just glad that I got to be home with my family this time instead of being stuck in the hospital!

Dr. Bjarnason (Jr.)

On Friday afternoon while Shawn napped, Sydney and I decided to do some Play-doh. It's always a toss up between a breakfast kit and a dentist one cleverly called "Dr. Drill 'N Fill," and she ultimately decided on dentist. 

She assigned me to make all the teeth while she worked on the braces, so I started calling myself Dr. Bjarnason and her Miss Uehara (Spencer's assistant). That didn't last long, as she insisted that she was the dentist and I was the assistant.

I kept cracking up because she would call me Miss Uehara pretty much every single time she said anything to me, like, "Will you get me the scaler Miss Uehara?" or "Miss Uehara, please make me some more teeth," or "Could you please open this Miss Uehara?" and "Great job Miss Uehara!" 

It also made me laugh that I was the assistant but I was doing all the hard stuff! Ha ha, it was a fun morning playing with my girl.

Room Redo

When we first moved into our house, I knew I wanted to paint our gigantic living/dining room. I was about 8 months pregnant when I did it, but I knew it would be much easier to do before I had Shawn than after. Eagle Hardware on base offered free paint, but since they didn't have color cards that I could bring home and put on my wall to see what really looked best, I took in one of our couch pillows and matched it to a beige color on their color wheel.  

Our living/dining area before we moved in.

Spencer thought my color choice was silly since it wasn't that different from the original cream color throughout the house, but I liked having at least a little more color on our walls. At least I liked it until we got both of our shipments and realized that all of our stuff was pretty much the same color... the walls, the rug, the couch, the pillows, the small decorative items... it all seemed to match way too much.  

Then we had the vertical blinds that come standard in all base housing. I wasn't really a fan. Within a few months I knew I wanted to change things around, so I never really finished anything decor wise. Since I didn't really love the room, I never took many pictures of it. In fact, the best ones I have to show off how it looked before I painted were all the way from Christmas!

 London showing his sharpshooter skills near the vertical blinds.

Notice the pictures in the frames on our "gallery wall" in the dining room were from when Sydney was a baby up to around 18 months. How lazy am I?

One of the things I hated the most was how the color looked when it was dark outside and we just had our overheads lights on. I felt like it looked like vomit on my walls.

 I realize the lighting in this picture is terrible, but I actually feel like it's a pretty good representation of how I felt in the room at night. Yuck.

Much to my dismay, Eagle Hardware stopped providing free paint after some government funding cuts.  I'm not sure why they couldn't have just still provided the supplies for us and just had us pay for it, but a lot of the things they do don't make sense to me. Anyway, that meant we had to get paint off base. After seeing some cute pictures of rooms on Pinterest, I decided I wanted to paint the walls gray. I took in a poster that had the color I liked since I knew the Japanese paint store just had a color wheel that stayed in the store. I found the color I liked, and then the lady helping us at the front desk had a guy came from the back and told him our color choice. He told us it would be about 20 minutes, which I was excited for since our neighbors said they had to come back the next day when they bought theirs! I can only assume that he was hand mixing the color, then came and showed us how it came out and to see if we liked it. It looked good enough to me, but after drying it actually looked nothing like the color I was trying to match it to. Of course Spencer teased me that I would hate it because he said I've hated almost every color I've put on the walls. But I didn't want our 3,900 yen investment (about $45 for one gallon) go to waste, so I decided to just go for it. And what do you know, I really like it!

I have to mention that I went in expecting to buy 2 gallons of paint, but the cheap skate in me decided to just go for 1. Big mistake! And it's not like I could just go back into the store and have Mr. Mix-the-paint-colors-by-hand whip up the exact same color again. So I had to make do with one gallon, mainly by doing only one coat of trim and not painting behind our giant entertainment center. And let me tell you, never before has a girl gotten her money's worth on a gallon of paint like I did! The inside of that can (and even the bottom of the lid!) was dry as a bone by the time I was done with it.

To spruce things up a bit more, we also got a new rug, and I bought fabric and recovered all the pillows. I chose blue and green to be accent colors because I love the blue color of the ocean out my kitchen window on a sunny morning and how it contrasts with the green trees. That red star will be replaced with a clock, I just needed something to fill the space for the picture.

 We got white curtains to replace the brown ones, and roll up bamboo shades to take the place of the vertical blinds. I think it looks a billion times better.

 This blue piece of furniture from China was another reason for my accent color choice. I replaced the artwork in the frames on the walls with pictures of scenery we (and my former neighbor Louise) have taken in Okinawa.

 I moved our gallery wall to the wall above our other furniture purchase we made here- a red buffet, also from China- and updated the pictures to include the fact that we have another member in our family. Ha!

 View of the dining room from the living room.

We are still in the market for a cool piece of furniture to replace that short bookcase in the living room. It's government furniture they loaned to us when we first moved in. I've attempted to buy a few things that I've seen in pictures of shipment previews for the Navy Fleet Gift Shop, but they usually get single pieces of lots of different furniture rather than several of the same big item. And it's all on a first come first served basis, and I usually can't get down there fast enough to get what I want :) 

Overall, I'm really happy with the change. Some of the items (blinds, clock) have been pretty expensive to get here since we've had to pay for a service to ship them to our FPO address, plus the cost of shipping. But you do what you can in a foreign country, right? The icing on the cake will be when I can talk Spencer into replacing our couch!

Lessons

Sydney started swim lessons the first week of July. I (mistakenly) thought the 8:30am time slot would be a good choice because of Shawn's napping schedule, but boy was I wrong. I had visions of us going to the pool early and staying for a little while after lessons to swim, but it just ended up being easier to take her and then leave right after it was over. Getting us all ready and lathered up with sunscreen sure does take a lot of time!

Unfortunately, she didn't ever really get into it. Her teacher, Miss Flo, always came and talked to me about her performance after the lesson, and often times referred to Sydney as "Miss I-don't-want-to." I was actually impressed with how many times she would do a bob in the water, but every time the teacher would splash them or pour water from a watering can over their heads, Syd was cowering in the corner.

Sydney at swim lessons.

I thought if water going in her eyes was the issue, goggles would do the trick. She was really excited to wear them, but that only helped for one lesson and then she was over them.

Using the kick board (her teacher said she was crying when she was doing this).

There were far too many mornings where I was trying to get on her swimsuit, and she would cry, run away, and whine that she didn't want to go. So I'd have to force her into her suit, then into the car. I told her we could just skip on the last day if she would do a swim lesson with Daddy that afternoon instead, and she was all over that idea. Overall, I felt like a terrible Mom making my child do something she didn't want to do just because it was already paid for. Maybe we'll try again next year?

Shawn climbing around by the chairs.

Gymnastics, on the other hand, is a totally opposite story. She LOVES going, and she tries to do things that even surprise me! It also helps that Coach Lynn is super nice and patient with Sydney when she's being a little more timid than the rest of the kids. 

Sydney on the balance beam.

Finishing up the balance obstacle course.

My favorite part of this video is when she does the "ta da!" arms after jumping off the balance beam. 

It is so fun to see how much more confident she is these days. I was SO impressed when she did the bear crawl on the parallel bars:

As of last Wednesday, she even mastered doing a front somersault all by herself! She has now been doing them all over the living room rug. Some other favorite new tricks are donkey kicks (her feet get like 3 inches off the floor, but she is very proud of her skills) and jumping jacks, which she does so wildly that it always makes me laugh

Lately

Last weekend we caravaned with some friends from church to a beach that was off the beaten path on Ikei island. When we arrived at the alleged spot, there was no where to park (narrow streets surrounded by jungle). We drove around and around until someone made the executive decision to go to a different beach. It was pretty ridiculous, but afterwards we joked that after an hour and a half of driving on a tiny island, we finally found a beach! And we took our camera but failed to take pictures, so here's a shot stolen from my friend's Facebook:

It was a beautiful day!

We saw several little jellyfish and did our first snorkeling since we've been here- which has been a whole year now! Where does the time go? This wasn't a "snorkeling spot" so there wasn't anything spectacular, but we did see a few cool fish. I also collected lots of sea glass on the beach, a little free decor to put in some apothecary jars in my family room. 

After several hours of swimming, we went home to clean up, then jumped back into the car to go to the Futenma Flight Line Fair. 

 We felt pretty cool driving on the tarmac to get to the parking area.

We got there at dusk, which was nice since it wasn't blazing hot. The downside was that we didn't get very many pictures before it got dark.

Big American flags and cool airplanes immediately had me thinking of my Dad.

 Sydney was so excited to actually go inside all these planes that we see flying over our house all the time.

 Spencer requested a "waist up" shot here so it would look like he was climbing the rope. Ha!

 Future pilot? She really wanted to get in one of the jets, but they were just for looking.

 My sweet boy, happy even though it was way past his bedtime.

There were lots of food booths and kid's rides in the "fair" part of the event, so we let Sydney choose one ride. She opted for this spinning one:

I felt like she was so brave to do this all by herself. Spencer asked if she wanted him to ride with her, but she said, "no."

As a totally unrelated tangent, I wanted to post this video of the kiddos. Shawn is almost 11 months (what?!?), and he's still army crawling his way around the house. He's pretty quick when he's on a mission to get something, but it's Sydney's behavior in the movie that had me giggling:

I asked Spencer if it would be bad if I just stuck a Swiffer to Shawn's belly so he could clean my floors while he scoots around :) No matter how often I sweep/Swiffer, his clothes still get dust and hair all over them. Just this week I went into his room in the morning and he was standing up in his crib! That's happened several times now, and he's pulling himself up (from his belly) to the toy boxes so he can now get all the toys I don't want him to have.