Christmas fun

I got a new lens for my camera today

Christmas LEGO work to be done!

Racing cars in the street

Christmas Colors - Ben, Nicholas, Nicky and Samuel

Christmas Day

Christmas Morning before the chaos began...

Here’s Leo figuring out that the scary stocking he’s been walking wide around for the last few weeks actually has something wonderful in it:

The stocking!

Something yummy from the stocking!

And, LEGOS from Grandpa Hassan!

London Tower Bridge for Nicky

LEGO Mindstorm for Ben!

Christmas Eve

It was lots of fun to have the Marines come for dinner.

Ready for the Marines!

Here’s Jordan who is the son of one of Dave’s partners. These guys came into Singapore on some kind of big boat a few days ago and they are getting ready to head out to the Bay of Aden where they will sit on the boat for 4 months.

Marine Jordan

Our tradition now is to open our Hess Trucks from Grandpa Conrad and Andrea on Christmas Eve.

The boys open their Hess Trucks from Grandpa Conrad while Mike Marine looks on.

Then it was time to say our goodbyes…and we could only get a blurry picture at the end of the night:

Adam, Jordan and Mike - our Marine visitors. All the best to them!

And just before bed we had to leave out the cookies for Santa. Here’s how you do it when you live on the equator:

"Sory, the milk is in the fridge"

Preparing for Christmas….

This year we’re having three US Marines come to our house for Christmas Eve dinner. So, I ordered a turkey from the SAS school cafeteria in order to have enough food for these fellows.

Dave came with me to pick up the bird:

The ladies help Dave with our order...

Desaru!

Well, the great news is the E22 highway is OPEN!! At long last! This highway cuts the drive to Desaru in half. Once you are over the causeway and thru the city of Johor Bahru, the drive to Desaru is as short as a half hour. But, getting over the Causeway is still quite time consuming.

The bad news is our hotel – the Golden Sands – in Desaru is GONE!! Competely demolished!!!! We loved our times there and we loved being able to get a day pass to use their beach. Now we can get to Desaru quite quickly but we don’t have any place to go!

For this trip we took this weekend, it was too rainy and cold (yes, COLD!) to care too much about going to the Beach. Also, we think we are too deep into the monsoon season. The water was quite murkey and very wavey. I think it’s better to visit the east coast of Malaysia before the Monsoon has been going on too long. End of October is a good time.

We checked out a new hotel with a nice beach but they don’t do day passes. We enjoyed a warm drink there:

The Pulai Beach Resort - Desaru

The good ole fruit farm. No Desaru trip is complete without a stop here!

Here’s a view of the bridge over the inlet that makes this shorter ride all possible:

the E22 Bridge

Basketball Shoot Out

Ben made it into the top three of the Third Grade Basketball Shoot Out!! We’re all so proud! The problem developed when we learned that the shoot out between the top three got scheduled for Friday – and Ben was SICK! We had him go to the shoot out anyway. He had to dig deep and ride the Tylenol. He did fantastic and completed the event. He placed 2nd runner up.

Ben shooting!

Leo’s World!

The Field! The Filipinos! The Friends!