Thanks to Chris we have a Japan trip itinerary.  He outlined where we will be and what we will see.  He even provided links for more information on the places we will visit.  Thanks for all the hard work, Bro!  I have also added a few small pictures to provide a visual taste of the trip to come.  I hope everyone is getting excited!

11 May 2010

• Chris and Akiko arrive at Narita @ 1425
• Shawn, Shannon and Sara arrive at Narita @ 1720
• Take train to Hotel Hokke Inn Hacchobori (http://www.hokke.co.jp/1310/j_tenpo_plan.php)
• Tokyo Tower (http://www.tokyotower.co.jp/english/)
• Dinner
• Return to hotel

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Ethan is almost two and that made Christmas really exciting this  year.

Travel

This year was the Christmas of 1200 miles.  It was also Ethan’s first time to travel a greater distance than the two hours to Little Rock.  The longest leg of each trip was about six hours total.  We left in the evening hoping that Ethan would be able to sleep for a good part of the journey, but it turned out that he did not.  What was even more amazing was that he was happy for the majority of the trip.  He had a moment or two of being cranky, but that is to be expected.  I think that it helped that we took two good breaks during the long trip.  We stopped for dinner at McDonald’s and gave him the chance to run around.  We also got to stop and visit Aunt Awesome (Sara!) and play at her apartment.  We made another 2 hour trip to Springfield to visit my family and then 2 hours back that evening.  We also stopped in Stella on our way home.  Ethan definitely deserves a gold star.

Presents

Two big highlights were the bicycle and “Duck Shoes!”.  Sara was responsible for the very popular yellow slippers designed to look like ducks.  Also fun was the cardboard pot.  Nana had already bought some pans, so the Christmas gift was to pay for those.  Money in a cardboard representation of the gift was much better than money by itself… and it made a great hat!

Our Halloween pictures are up.  Ethan dressed up as Batman this year and we visited a few houses on our street to Trick or Treat.  We had a few more young families move in this year, so we had more neighbors handing out candy.

We also had candy for any costumed kids that stopped by.  However, we did not get as much traffic this year as we did before.  Maybe it is because we had so few neighbors particpate last year that they thought our street wasn’t worth the trip.

Landry is Ethan’s neighbor friend and he turned two years old.  His birthday party was two weeks ago and his parents went all out and rented an inflatable jump house.  Ethan was a little nervous at first with all the other little kids running around but his first time on the slide took care of that.  He had loads of fun sliding and was excited to learn that he could crawl back to the top on his own.

After playing on the slide, Ethan spent some time riding on Landry’s emergency vehicle.  It was great because all the other kids were distracted by the jump house and he had the ride-on toy all to himself.  And then he managed to tip it over.  And the impact with the driveway caused him to bite his lip pretty hard.  There was a fair amount of blood (lips tend to bleed well) and one slightly (maybe even very) panicked Shan.  We rushed back up the street to home so that we could rinse the cut and slow the swelling with some ice.  Once we were patched up, it was time to go back to the party.

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I just finished setting up the new website.  I am now using WordPress and Gallery2 to make life easier on me.  These are full featured publishing and gallery suites and that means the site gets all the benefits of thousands of hours of hard work and I get some sleep.

The major impetus behind redesigning the website was that Gallery2 includes a java upload management applet.  Being able to queue a batch of photos to automatically resize and upload was too cool to pass up.

And just to remember the old site, I’ve included a picture of what it once looked like.

Edit: I noticed that the website doesn’t look quite right in Internet Explorer 6 (which has troubles with some web standards).  But I really like the look of the site when displayed correctly, so I’ve decided to leave it as is.  It looks great in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox.  I highly recommend Firefox as an internet browser.  You can get it here: