Visitors....So Excited!

We have some special visitors on their way here right now!  Heather's Mom Ellen and stepdad Dave are coming.  If all is on time and as planned, they are making a connection in Seoul, South Korea right now.  Their trip involves four flights, and all told is about 45 hours door to door!  That is one long and tiring trip to come out and spend Christmas with us but we are so thankful they are doing it.  

Our little girl turned three last weekend.  We can't believe it!  We had a fun and special weekend for her.  We  want to put up some more pics later from her fun party.

Even though we are in Indonesia, Christmas isn't completely devoid of the good old fashioned Christmas party!  We had one at our language school the other day.  It was sort of a potluck, and "kebaktian" or Christmas service.  We sang and read verses (in Indonesian!).  That is Chris, one of our teachers who MC'ed the event.  In the background, Selemat Natal is the Indonesian equivalent of Merry Christmas.

After Elise's birthday craziness "subsided" we took a picture together with her decorations.

You can see Elise's sincere excitement about her birthday!  Let that be a teaser for Elise's birthday pictures, coming soon!

So begins the "Birthday Weekend"

There's a lot of funny little things that happen when you're trying to learn a new language. Yesterday I stopped by a local bakery to order cup-cakes for Elise to take to her school today (Friday). It is her birthday on Sunday, and we thought it would be fun for Elise and her friends at school to celebrate with some cupcakes.

When I got to the bakery yesterday, I didn't see any cupcakes. I did see muffins though, so I grabbed those and tried to describe to the employee what i was looking for using the muffin as a model. She said something like "oh yeah, with icing on top. We can make them if you want to order them. Sorry we don't have any examples for you right now!" So we went ahead and ordered twenty cup cakes to pick up the next day. No big deal right?

So today we went to pick up the cupcakes and take them to Elise's school. Here's what we got twenty of.....

Twenty of these precious little mini-cakes that all came in their own little box!  Some poor bakery employee must have been up late last night making them all.

That was a little bit more than we had in mind to give to Elise's friends, but we went ahead and brought them to school.

Elise with teacher Esther.

Elise digs in to her Thomas the Train cake.

This little boy seemed to be enjoying himself.

Im not sure he was to thrilled.  I don't think he touched his cake.

He certainly liked it!  I think this little boy was the first one done.

Elise with all her friends and teachers at pre-school

I mentioned it was the "Birthday Weekend."  So this little girl above, who lives across the back fence from us, is having a birthday party later today that we are going to.  She is turning two.  This morning she came over and she had just "licked the bowl" after her mom made her birthday cake!  

So tomorrow (Saturday) is Elise's actual birthday party.  And Sunday is her actual birthday!  So it's going to be one long celebration I think!

Recent life.....in pictures.

A pretty cool milestone happened today!  Ian just crawled!  He kind of came out of no-where and did it.  We set him on his mat after his nap.  A toy he wanted was out of reach, so he just used his arms to drag himself over to it.  Just like that!  Never did it before.  So surely our lives are about to change as Ian starts to learn how to make his way around the house!  His big sis didn't really do much moving before eleven months old.  Ian's only seven!  He's probably going to be crawling circles around big sis in no time!

Heres the cerita (story) of what we've been up to lately...in pics and captions!  I tried to include some pics from the different things we do every day....like school....the store and downtown...putting up the tree...etc!  Be forewarned, banyak foto (Indonesian for lots of pictures!).




Link to album (ipad users!)

Thanksgiving the Indonesia way!

Well there is no "Indonesian way" to celebrate Thanksgiving....there is no such thing here!  For the people in our neighborhood, it was just another day.  But not for us!
We missed being with family a lot today.  It is the first major holiday we've missed with them.  Thankfully, we had our new MAF friends and fellow Americans here in Salatiga to celebrate with!  We all got together at our friends Daniel and Joy's house.  All in all, we were 11 adults and 10 kids.  (if I am counting right.)  Of those 10 kids...5 of them were babies!  (by the way, we have like four or five more MAF families coming to join us soon.... almost all of them have babies....it's going to be baby mayhem!!)

The food was nothing short of what you would find at a Thanksgiving table back home. What an awesome treat! The food was, however, much harder to make!  There were no wal mart pumpkin pies or anything like that, but the ladies (and respective house helpers) stepped to the plate and made some awesome stuff!  And the Bizztro, one of our favorite restaraunts here, stepped to the plate by selling and cooking a turkey for us....and they cooked it to perfection!  How special.


So all of these pictures were taken at some point today.  Most of them were taken at the Thanksgiving event at our friends Daniel and Joy's house!



Link to album (ipad users?!)

While I am at it, we would like to show you a few pictures from a wedding we were invited to a few weekends ago.  It was November 13th, our 7th anniversary!  It took place in the morning, so what a fun way to start our anniversary!  A friend in the neighborhood invited us to this "pesta pernikahan" or wedding celebration.  It was set up in our neighborhood and all we had to do was walk over!  What an amazing experience.  We showed up at the time our friends recommended, and we were among the first ones there!  Oops.  So they sat us near the front right by the band and MC's.  The MC's, from what we understood, made good light-hearted fun of us quite a bit....comic relief.  Our MAF friends Daniel and Becky and their kids were invited too.  They came a bit later than us.  They and their four kids were ushered up near the front also just on the other side of the iasle from us. Apparently if you are a foreigner, you will be seated near the front at these weddings!  So we had a great view of the ceremony.  It was really neat, and the native Javanese dress and traditions were really interesting.  There was food, speakers, prayers, ceremonys, etc.  No dance floor however.  Here's some pictures we took...



Link to album (ipad users?!)

Later in the day some friends babysat for us and we enjoyed a fun date at one of our favorite places here...the Bizztro.  What a special anniversary!