Highlights from December

December has been an awesome month for us. We've spent some great family time together and Shawn's 30 days of leave have gone by VERY QUICKLY!! Some of our December highlights include a trip to Ueno Zoo, German Village, Holiday parties, and of course, Christmas.

We never get tired of going to Ueno Zoo. Each trip, we find something we love more than the last time. This time it was the Vivarium which exhibits the largest salamanders Shawn and I have ever seen and a beautiful tortoises.

This great shot of the boys only took about 4 tries...

If you ask Caleb what his favorite animal at the zoo is, he'll tell you it's the elephant, but we almost had him convinced that it was the hippopotamus because it's so much fun to hear him say, "hiptamonaness".

The day that we went was cold, but beautiful.

This is Riley mimicking the Puffin Fish. I love this face!!!

By the end of the day, we were exhausted, but neither of the boys fell asleep on the 1.5 hour train ride back home.

The boys got their box of Christmas presents from Nana and PawPaw and had lots of fun pretending to be race car drivers with the empty box.

Caleb wanted to be mailed off to Nana and PawPaw's house in the box. When we asked him where he would go potty while he was in transition, he said, "just get me a bag". He was SERIOUS too!!

Our next big event was an ITT (Information, Travel and Tickets for military) trip to German Village, which is right outside of Tokyo. We took a big sightseeing bus, which Caleb always thinks is so great!

So, this place had buildings inspired by German architecture, but that was probably the only thing that made it anything like Germany. We were kinda expecting German food or German beer...but nope. It did, however, have bumper cars, archery, roller coasters, grass sledding, an arcade, riding trains, and the largest display of Christmas lights that I have ever seen.

The bumper cars and riding trains were the only fun things that Riley was old enough to do. He got extremely upset when Caleb ran off to do other things, like ride the kiddie roller coaster with mommy!

Oh my gosh, did I have fun riding the kiddie coaster.

It was bitter cold on this big hill with the wind blowing, brrrrr.

It was a lot of fun.

We had a little Christmas get together with friends and Riley helped make a gingerbread train. Ok, so he helped eat the candies off the train after his friends decorated it.

This is Christmas Eve after "Santa" dropped off toys and ate cookies and the reindeer ate carrots and left poop droppings (raisins) out on the sidewalk.

The best present Santa brought was a dual decker Radio Flyer Tricycle. Caleb pedals and Riley holds on for dear life. It's incredibly funny to watch them on it together. Riley yells, "so fast, so fast" and Caleb giggles.

It's been the best month of the year.