Jin Family

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

Anyone ever heard of Children's Day? Apparently it's an international holiday observed by many countries around the world on June 1. Including this one. And oh boy, M's teacher went all out. Beforehand,

Well, summer isn't here yet. But it's most of what we're thinking about! We are pretty pumped about our upcoming summer plans: visitors and even a trip outside of the country. But for

After all that craziness, we are very relieved to be back home! Even though we had nothing going on last week, I was still only able to study language for half the hours

After that week of only being home for three days between trips, I hope we're done travelling for now. But it was really fun! We went with some expat friends to a nearby