More Birthday Pictures

Tess keeps watch as Ariana opens a present...
gently placing the Oreo's on the roof......
Ryder couldn't wait.......
"happy birthday to you".....
Baba made it home just in time.......

Ariana's Fourth Birthday or The Day I Went Insane

It actually began a few days before when I decided to make gingerbread houses for Ariana and her friends to decorate. It took me two days to make the gingerbread and another to put them together into what could only generously called houses - they were actually more like tenement houses or more realistically - outhouses.

The recipe itself was easy - the mixing wore me out as the batter is really hard and with only a hand mixer, very tiring. The putting together was frustrating as the walls kept coming down, which required an enormous amount of icing glue to make stick.


They all stood up on the day of decorating though which made me very happy. A thin film of flour is still on the counters after many scrubbings and I am still finding bits of gingerbread batter stuck to everything with a 10 foot range of the mixer. And Ariana's creation is on the counter waiting to be eaten.

Then, in an additional fit of "creativity" in the wake of the "no sugar" policy at her school (don't even get me started on this one!!) I decided to make a "fruit" cake. While at the store to buy a piece of Styrofoam to stick the fruit on, my friend Darla encouraged me to get creative and actually make something. The something turned into a truck, since Ariana is big into Bob the Builder these days, shouting with excitement every time we see a truck, or a mixer, or actually anything resembling anything Bob the Builderish.



At school, the kids liked the truck and the fruit, but were still disappointed there was no cake (I found out that morning at the mom's meeting that I could have made a cake with honey or another "natural" sweetener, but really, that just gets me more irate- sugar is sugar!!!)

At home, the kids arrived and were having a fine time......

The Bob the Builder Lego Crane Set went over well...........
and Ariana had fun showing everyone how the elevator worked in her new doll house..



running laps around the apartment was fun for everyone............
.....here is Ariana showing Darla how old she is now........4!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And Now, A Brief Pause From This Blog For A Political Announcement

During my time in Japan, I have learned to enjoy living in peace. Peace from fear, anger and just plain nastiness. These things being absent in my life lead me to be drawn to a candidate who proposed real change, who spoke of hope. For a long time, these words were absent from politics and to hear them again was refreshing. I have been away long enough to believe real change is possible and to understand how much US citizens live in an environment of “fear” without even knowing it.

What I have seen the past few days reminded me that sometimes we have to fight for a change in the way people look at things. Rather than offer real plans, Mr. McCain, Ms. Palin and their supporters offered sarcasm, insults and fear – yet again.

How can someone with more homes he remembers call a couple who recently paid off their student loans elitist?

How can someone rail against government in peoples lives while trying to ban books in the library in her hometown for being “controversial”.

How can you uphold a Bill of Rights that talks about separation of church and state and then propose teaching creationism in the public schools?

How can the most prosperous country in the world be one holdout for providing healthcare to all of it’s’ citizens? This is the question I am asked about the most when I am talking to people from other countries and it is frankly, embarrassing to have to answer. We are on the Japanese healthcare system and it works for me just fine.

Yes, I agree, families and especially children should be off limits in politics, but what about the policies involved. Ms. Palin is for abstinence education and against any sort of comprehensive sex education when study after study (not to mention her own personal experience) shows that abstinence education alone just does not work.

For those interested in the economy, read this article from the Washington Monthly www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_05/006282.php. If you don’t want to read it, just ask yourself if you are better now than you were eight years ago? Are we better off? Eight years ago we had billion of dollars in surplus; now we have a deficit even larger.

All of the anger, the sarcasm, and the insults mask the fact that just a few weeks ago, the Republicans were mocking Obama’s call for change – now they have co-opted the message as their own. But so far, I have heard no details about what they will do different, but more importantly seen anything in their methods and behavior to believe they are sincere.

for more on ms. palin - http://my2bucks.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/a-letter-from-someone-who-has-known-sarah-palin-since-1992/