Lake Yamanaka

Last weekend I (Rebecca) enjoyed a time of fun and fellowship with 50 other women from the Chapel of Hope.(our church on base) It was the first women's retreat that had ever been planned through the Chapel and we were very surprised and blessed by the enthusiasm that it generated! I was on the planning team - and though my jobs were quite small - it was still really cool to see all the plans and details come together over the last few months.


We all traveled to Lake Yamanaka, which is at the foot of Mt. Fuji. We were blessed to be able to use the Retreat Center of SEND International for the weekend. The theme for the weekend was "All Occasion Prayer" and we enjoyed a terrific speaker and great time spent in small group discussions. We brought and prepared all the food for the weekend and women signed up in teams to help take care of meal prep and clean up. On Saturday we had free time to enjoy walking around the lake and checking out the great views of Mt. Fuji.


Japan tends to be a place where many Navy spouses feel very isolated. Although it has many wonderful opportunities, it is VERY far from friends and family and many spouses are out to sea for much of the year. Child care options are very limited and women with infants and small children often feel like there is not very much support for them. All that to say, it was wonderful to be able to come together and share our hearts and to see that we're not as alone as we may sometimes feel. I will look forward to pursuing friendships with many of the women that I got to know this weekend and I will pray that we can continue to support and encourage one another!

It's a.........

BABY!!

Well, we just had our 12 week appointment and got to meet our new little one - sort of! Thought we'd send along our first pictures so you can see how cute he or she is!!!! We didn't see any distinguishing gender characteristics...but this baby has a huge brain!! (so SHE must take after me!....but Josh says HIS huge muscles take after him....who knows!?!?!)



...not sure if the baby is waving or saluting in the picture below...

(for those inexperienced in reading ultrasounds, those peaks on the bottom of the ultrasound picture are the heart beats - kind of like a little baby heart monitor - at the healthy rate of 153.85 beats per minute! - josh)

New Year's Food!

As mentioned in our previous post, there are many important parts of the New Year's celebration here in Japan. We were invited to one of my student's houses to partake in some "New Year's food" with her and her family. The foods are usually prepared on Dec. 31st and are meant to be eaten from January 1st - 3rd. I'll try to get as many details correct as I can - please note that most of this information is coming to us through friends that speak only a bit of English....so I won't guarantee that we understood everything!

We joined Midori and her family on the 2nd for a colorful array of Japanese "delicacies" made to welcome in a new year of good health and good fortune. Everything has meaning - from the colors of the foods to the way in which they are arranged and the order in which they are eaten. We sat in a tatami room on pillows around the dining room table. (which is about 2 feet high) We began the meal by taking a small sip of sake - which had been flavored with spices - from a dish that we passed around the table. Then we moved onto dried fish, beans, and seaweed...a small taste of each to promote good health, prosperity, and love (maybe?!?) in the coming year.

After that we were free to take food from any of the boxes on the table. Our friends were able to explain most of the things to us, but we kept the Japanese/English dictionary close-by just in case. It was definitely an evening of taste surprises - meaning that Josh and I tasted many things that we had probably never planned on eating!! Several of the vegetables were new to us - including lotus root, bamboo slices, and some type of sticky squash. We also tasted some varieties of shell fish (oysters, clams, and such) and even got to experience herring eggs - yikes!!! We were very glad for the large plate of sushi - because at least those things looked familiar! At the end of the meal we were served mochi (rice that is beaten with a mallet until it sticks together in a "rice cake") served in a soup. I liked the broth a lot - but the rice cake was really hard to get down!

After the meal was finished we each had a mikon orange (kind of like a Japanese version of a clementine) and we moved on to the sitting room to talk about jobs, school, and language learning. All in all it was a very interesting and enjoyable cultural experience!