EEK! It is May! Movers in 6 weeks! I am not ready!!! There are still places we need to see and things I need to buy in Japan!! But enough about that ... Let's move on to more fun things - like PROM!
Not sure why the school routinely has Prom on a SAT test weekend, but that seems to be the standard gameplay. The kids are also not able to decorate for the Prom until the "day of" so most of the students had to go straight from testing to decorating to changing over to their Prom clothes and that leaves very little time for the parents to take pictures! We were able to corral them down at the DV garden for one last round of pictures before they all rushed off. Lilly went with her friend Jayden while Lucy went with Tommy.
We later received word that Lucy and Tommy were named Prom Prince and Princess. How exciting!
Jim's Birthday is up next. It was hard to find time to celebrate it with him, he has been gone so much with tying up loose ends before he turns over his job to his replacement. Lots of his Japanese counterparts are trying to get one more meeting with him and there are lots of farewell dinners and ceremonies going on. But we did find a few minutes to have some cake and shower him with presents!
One of the farewell nights for Jim happen to coincide with the girls "end of the season" soccer banquet so I decided to attend that instead. I figured I wasn't "needed" and I wanted to be able to say my goodbyes to my fellow soccer parents/friends and this would probably be my last opportunity. It was a near perfect night for an outside picnic. We sure are going to miss playing on Bonk field!
For our last Mother's Day in Japan, we decided to go back to where it all started. Our very first trip outside the gates we went to Kamakura. We have learned quite a bit since that trip so we thought we needed to go back and see alllll the things that we didn't know we needed to see the first time. It was a rainy day, but we didn't let that stop us from checking out Kamakura-gu, a shrine where if you break a dish while throwing it a wall, you can drive negative people from your life for good. Well you know we had to do that!
We moved on to check out the famous Buddha and grabbed a quick lunch before heading over to Enoshima, which we were not able to explore the last time we were down this way. The tiny island sits just off the coast and has many cultural/religious and touristy things to do. We explored just about all of it before we headed for home.
While Jim was off having all his goodbyes with his Japanese counterparts, I got to spend one more evening with two of my favorite adventuring friends down in Shinjuku! We wandered around the neighborhood checking out the sights and ended up at a combination Mexican/Teppanyaki restaurant that while not exactly what we thought we were getting, was still pretty damn tasty! Especially the Mango ice cream sundae for dessert!
The next day before heading back to base, we made a slight detour over to Gōtokuji district which is home to the Daikeizan Gōtoku-ji, a Sōtō Zen temple that is known locally as the "cat temple" because of the millions of Maneki-neko (lucky cat) figurines all over. It was truly impressive.
The next couple of days were spent trying to keep up with the very efficient Japanese packers. That is no easy task! Before you could even blink, all of our household goods had been packed up and we are essentially camping in our house until we leave. We will miss living on board Yokota Air Base and in Tokyo in general.
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| Lucy hanging out in her room before the temporary furniture showed up. |
Even though our personal lives were full of disruptions, life in general goes on and we are staring down the end of the school year. The third week of May sees the seniors taking their exams and prepping for graduation. It is not just a sayonara for the seniors. Every year there are departures that happen and underclassmen also need to say their goodbyes. Yokota High School has a fun tradition sponsored by the PTO called Sayonara Matsuri and all the classes have fun competitions like tug of war, sack races and a good ole lip synch battle between the grade levels. It is a fantastic way to end the school year.
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| Photo finish of Ben (green shorts) for the sack race win! |
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| Freshman (Right) gave the Seniors (Left) a run for their money - but Seniors prevailed |
In the end, the Seniors were the stars of the day. It is pretty good group of kids and they were nice enough to let us gather them together in front for one last photo op and CAKE!
With Lilly graduating, I am using her as a guinea pig on all the things I need to do for the other two. One of the expectations at graduation here is to have lots of leis for after the ceremony. Lilly told me about this tradition last year so I have been slowly making them all year because I knew we were moving right when school ended and I would be too overwhelmed and stressed to make them last minute. She says I don't need to go overboard but I do want to make sure she has some to wear after the ceremony. The money lei wasn't that easy to crank out. Lessons were learned, namely, a cardstock is too thick and just regular paper works just fine😬.
Since we have broken the seal on the graduation topic, I guess I will jump on in. There was of course a flurry of graduation activities all culminating in of course the big day - GRADUATION!! The school called to let us know that she was in the running for valedictorian which meant she needed to write a speech. The decision would be made the morning of the ceremony. Talk about pressure! Lilly had also been selected to do the turning of the tassels so that meant she would be speaking twice at graduation.
Before I could really wrap my brain around the fact that she was graduating at the end of the month, it is suddenly graduation day! We held it together for the most part. She wrote a fabulous valedictorian (so proud!) speech and did a great job with her tassel turning speech as well. It wasn't until the ABBA song "Slipping through my fingers" played and the seniors came off the stage and presented the parents with flowers that we stared to tear up. Lord, we will never listen to that song again. Seriously though, she is ready. We aren't quite ready 😬. Thankfully she doesn't start school until the end of September, so we will have a long summer with her. We will need the extra help that is for sure!!
Our last holiday in Japan we decided to hit the beach with some of our favorite traveling buddies. I had been dying to find a reason to drive to Chiba so I could stop at the rest stop in the middle of Tokyo Bay and this was going to be my last chance!!! Lucky for me everyone else was on board as well. The Umihotaru PA is the world’s only toll road located on the sea! The expressway runs under the Tokyo Bay! It is pretty incredible!
We spent the weekend exploring, thrifting, collecting sea glass and sea shells and some of us enjoyed the local cuisine- which oddly enough was whale! I like sushi - but I will draw the line at whale. But seriously, it was a nice low key perfect weekend! A nice way to reset for the madness that would be the first week of June!
So that is where we end this one guys. All rested up and refreshed for our last 8 days in the country we have lived in for 4 years. Yokota ties Yuma with places we have lived the longest! Who would have thought that when we we arrived in Oki in 2019!
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