Konnichiwa!!

I don't know how coherant this will be, but here we go...

I have never had a good sense of time, but I feel like I have lost all sense of what day, week or month it is. We have been on the road since the end of August. If I have figured this right, we have driven over 3500 miles between stops and through 10 different states (Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington) in 54 days. Plus Jon had a flight to Washington and Ellie and I went to Utah. I am so over living out of a suitcase!Thank goodness for portable DVD players and “Signing Time” DVDs! It has been a long journey, but we had a wonderful time. I will post some of the pictures from our trip once we get unpacked and I can find the chord for my camera. It was really nice to spend so much time with family and friends.


We arrived in Seattle on Sunday afternoon. Monday morning Ellie woke up at 3:30 AM throwing up. She didn’t really hold anything down until 1:30 in the afternoon and when we were giving her Pedialyte a few teaspoons at a time. There was no way we were going to take her on a 10 hour flight over the Pacific if she was dehydrated, throwing up or if she had ear infections. (I was a little worried about this because she had been stuffy for a couple of weeks.) After talking to the nurse in San Antonio, we decided to take her into the Children’s Hospital in Seattle to be seen. They were wonderful. They gave her some Tylenol and anti-nausea medicine that allowed us to rehydrate her. Her fever went away and she was negative for any type of infections. At this point we were debating about what to do. On the one hand, we didn’t want to take her on the flight if she was still sick. On the other hand, it would be 24 hours since she started throwing up when we needed to get on the flight and over 12 hours since she had thrown up. We thought she might handle the flight better when she was so tired and wanting to be held, instead of crawling around everywhere. The problem was we didn’t know what our Plan B option would be. We would just have miss our flight and contact the travel office in the morning and see when they could get us on another flight. Ellie was doing so much better, so we decided to go ahead and try. If she got worse or threw up again before we were suppose to board the plane at 3ish, we would have just gone back to the hotel.

She did great on the flight. We had some head winds, so it ended up being over an 11 hour flight. That was really long for her, but she slept for a good portion of it. We ended up holding her a lot as she slept, but I am just glad that she continued to do better and was eating and drinking well. The flight crew was amazing and helpful with all the children on the flight. It may have been a coincidence, but it seemed like they seated all the families with kids together. This was good because they smiled at and entertained each other, but when one started screaming, it often set off the whole group.

I am not even sure what time we arrived. I think it was around 7:30 or 8 in the morning. It took a little while to go through customs and get our bags, but when we came through, we had smiling faces there to greet us. Our friends Chelsea and George picked us up. Luckily they borrowed a van, so we were able to get all of our stuff in one trip!

Until we get housing, we are staying at the hotel on base. It is a one bedroom suite, so we have a separate living area and kitchen. It is nice to be able to put Ellie in another room and to be able to buy groceries. When we got there, the power was out for maintenance. It was kind of a bummer to have no elevators, TV, internet or hot water! After the day and flight we had, I was so ready to take a shower. Chelsea was nice enough to drive us around for our first tour of the base. The base seems smaller than the one in Little Rock, but I am not sure how big it is. It is like a small city though, complete with grocery store and other stores, restaurants, hospital, theater, bowling alley and any other service we might need. There is only one flight line, but we haven’t seen Jon’s squadron or other official places yet because the base is in the middle of an exercise. They do these exercises about once a year where they pretend that the base is under attack and they get evaluated on how well they are prepared and how they perform. Luckily we don’t have to pretend. We can just go about our business, but a lot of the offices are closed or have shortened hours. Some roads and entrances to buildings are closed too. The exercise should be over today, so that will be nice. Jon is just glad he missed it. The squadron works really long hours and has to operate at a higher security level than normal.

After we had a quick tour of the base, we came back to our hotel to take a nap. Everyone says not to because of the jetlag, but that doesn’t really work with a one year old. Jon and I were tired enough we knew we could take a nap and still be able to sleep that night. After we had rested for a couple of hours, Chelsea picked us up and we went to the post office to make sure our mail was set up. (We already had two packages that I had mailed myself, so that was fun.) Then we went to the YCC (Yokota Community Center) to have lunch, pick up a few groceries and get information about cell phones. Ellie did great, but she was so tired, so we came back to the hotel and just ate dinner here. Two of our other friends from Little Rock (Laura and Caitlin) came by to visit. I love these ladies and it was so good to see them again. Laura has a son that is almost two and he and Ellie had a great time playing together. It is sweet to see them learning to share and he taught Ellie how to pull his toy cars backwards so that they would fly across the room. She loved it.

We went to bed pretty early and had a relatively good night. Ellie was fussy from about 12:30 to 1:30, but Jon was finally able to settle her. She woke up a few other times, but was able to go right back to sleep. I think Jon and I would have slept the whole night with no problem.

The next day, Laura came to pick us up in the morning and we went to get our IDs for this base. Usually you just have one military ID for all bases, but we had to get registered here to be able to leave and re-enter the base. They do 100% ID checks of everyone in the car, not just the driver. We also made sure we were signed up for the “Right Start” class next week that will give us our orientation to the base and class to get Japanese Driver’s Licenses. We went to lunch on base at Chili’s and then Ellie and I came back to put her down for a nap while Jon went to the medical center to update our information and ask questions about appointments and prescriptions. After Ellie’s nap, we went to see a couple of our friend’s homes so that we would have an idea of what was available before we went into the housing office. They will only show you a couple of options, so you have to kind of know what you want before going in. We tried to go to the housing office, but they had closed early. We are headed there this morning (Friday.) Since they were closed, we went back to the YCC and set up our cell phones. We were not able to use our US iPhones, so we got new iPhone 4s. They are a lot cheaper here and basically the price of the phone is just rolled into your contract. I still haven’t used it much because I need to figure out how to use my old Apple account with a Japanese phone, but at least we can make calls and not feel so disconnected!

Today, Friday, are big goals are to go to housing and to make sure Ellie has two naps. She has been doing really well considering, but she is struggling with the time change and schedule. I think she is more than ready to get back into a routine.

I am not sure it has hit me yet that we live in Japan. The base is a little different, but for the most part it feels like a base in the US. It is nice to have the comfort of home as we get adjusted to living in a new country and culture. We are really excited thought to be able to get off base and do some exploring. I’ll update more details and photos when I can, but I wanted to at least get this much down. It is a little surreal, but we are so grateful to be here. We will miss our family and friends in the States so much, but we are also grateful for friends and the supportive community here.