Jin Family

Although most of our visitors prefer to come during the summer time, we had some very loving friends who were willing to make the trek at the end of December this year! First

Some of my expat friends told me they had a serious Christmas candy itch, and since I have the biggest oven, they wanted me to host a baking party. It's hard to say

Is putting up the tree together more fun? Or Christmas morning? It's a real toss up. Maybe it's just us, but I just LOVE the afternoon we spend every year getting the house

Well, it's that time of year. Around Thanksgiving, we always start to get a little tired of being here. First of all, Thanksgiving is kind of a hard time to be away from

It's late for a first snow here, but it snowed for three days straight, which means it actually stuck! It's so dry here that although it's cold enough to snow, it only does

Since H was gone this past weekend for a wedding, I took the opportunity to hang out with some single friends! Now, there's a cultural difference here. Because my single friends here are

Well, it's been a while since I talked about the art and learning we've been doing this semester, so I thought it was time for an update! First of all, I somehow miraculously

We've been experimenting with our not-so-new pizza stone lately, and our latest thing is to have people over to make their own personal size pizzas! We brought the pizza stone (it's actually a

We had a successful birthday party for M this weekend! The whole kid-birthday-party thing has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I mean, I think we had a few (mostly)

After getting back from the States, we had a half week of what would have been normal life, except that a three day water outage (yes, three days) resulted in school being cancelled.

On the last day of the second week of school, we got word that my grandmother in the States unexpectedly passed away. So the kids and I bought flights and went back for

Right after we got back from Thailand, it was straight into the new semester. This is E's first year to go to school. She's at the same school as M, and we didn't

Namely: beach, pool and curry. So, the rest of the trip can be pretty much summarized by saying that we ate Thai food and went swimming. I've realized that Thai food is my

Well, actually they're gibbons, which is a type of ape. Although our main purpose in Thailand was to rest and enjoy the sun, I did convince our group to do one small hike

Well, so far we have succeeded at having E's birthday in a different country every year! Although we needed to leave the country anyway for our visas, the ostensible reason was to celebrate

Okay, so I realize that by titling this post "the perfect vacation," I'm giving myself some pressure here. But really, it was amazing. First of all, I think our experience would've

We leave for our vacation in just a few days! We have been loving the time off, and the kids have been doing lots of English work, violin practice and M's new choice:

We just made a quick trip to a nearby city to visit one of our local friends who is from there. It was a blast! This was our first time to travel to

We're all officially on summer break! The downside of having such a long winter break is that we have a pretty short summer break. Which is fine, but it always feels like a

The one day we went out with my parents was to the top of South Mountain for a picnic and to play at the playground. We've been there lots of times, but it's

We just enjoyed a week with my parents! The kids were beside themselves waiting for Honey and Pops to arrive. And since this was their third time here, we've already done all the

Lately I've realized that I need to be better about pacing myself so that I'm not so tired all the time. So, I've been trying to find ways to relax and not work

As promised, pictures of the father-daughter dance! M was beside herself with excitement when we told her we had bought tickets to the Father-Daughter Dance. She still remembers doing one when she was

Usually we do a lot for Mother's Day, but not very much for Father's Day. Well, this year, we finally changed that! Since we've been eating less sugar, H has been talking about

We're almost done with Ramadan (life goes back to normal here) and almost done with the semester! In the meantime, we've just been enjoying normal life: going to school, having our regular family