Posts

Speech Contest

Image
 Last year, Keane and Holland got...sortta...roped into...doing a speech competition.  The competition consists of native Japanese speakers giving a speech in English, and native English speakers giving a speech in Japanese. While we tried to get them ready for it, all of us were WILDLY unprepared for what the expectation actually was.   For starters, the night before the competition, I received an email stating that the speeches were to be under one minute long.  I, for some reason, thought they were supposed to be 3 minutes long.  So we spent the evening frantically chopping their notes into pieces and putting them back together again so they wouldn't be too long.  Then, the first thing that we realized upon arrival was that Keane and Holland were the only ones that hadn't memorized their presentations.  Immediately they were panicking. I told them they were to just do their best, and that's all we could ask for. And they did.   And th...
2 comments
Read more

Where America's Day Begins

Image
I grew up on the island of Guam.  Lots of people know that.  Lots of people don't.  We moved there towards the end of elementary school, and I graduated high school from Guam High School (because...what else would it be called?). I left Guam in August of 2004 to go to college, and the last time I was there was Christmas 2004 of my freshman year.  The following summer, 2005, my parents moved back to their home state of Arizona to be closer to their aging parents.  And I never went back. Not for a lack of wanting to, though.  Do you know where Guam is?   It's basically out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, almost directly south of Japan and directly north of Australia.  It's a 7 hour flight to Hawaii.  A 4 hour flight to Japan. So it's not close to anything other than islands even smaller than it is (which is only about 30 miles long and 8 miles wide).  It's "remote" to say the least.  As you can imagine, getting there is not o...
1 comment
Read more
Image
 Here we are, 1/4 of the way through 2022 and keep finding myself thinking, "by golly WHERE IS THE TIME GOING!?" (A sure sign you are entering the latter part of your 30's) The kids have finished their school year, we've all contracted and recovered from COVID (0/10 do not recommend), had a lengthy spring break, and are now ready for the new school year! (Japanese school years run on a "year round" type school system, and begins mid-April, and end mid-end March) and I keep wondering if they know enough to move on to the next grade because this past year went by so dang fast!  (No worries, their report cards show they are prepped to move on up). So now Cache is in his 2nd year of Yochien, Holland is in 2nd grade and Keane is in 4th grade (In American school they would be going into Kindergarten, 3rd and 5th grade in the fall). The growth we've seen in the kids this year has been immense.  Everything from language ability, to managing stress and anxiety, t...
Post a Comment
Read more