Are We Going to do Anything Fun Today? (Let's Do Something Flippin' Awesome!) : We're Baaaaaaack! Part One

November 12, 2014

So it’s been a while since we’ve added anything to our blog. I hadn’t anticipated the amount of work and time it takes to get 4 kids to write something up and pick pictures and then get it all posted. With our unreliable internet speed sometimes the posting of the blog was the worst part…so, we’re aiming for a once a month report. Approximately. If we have something really interesting to report, it might be less than a month. Who knows! How ever we do it in the future, this blog post is long enough, I'm splitting it in two. So this is Part One of our October Adventures, and Part Two will posted as quickly as the internet will allow. Cross your fingers!

Life at the Hicken International Academy is busy: school, school, school. We knock it out of the park some days at school and others, well, feel like sacrifice bunts that keep us in the game, but get us out for the inning. I keep having requests for a school holiday. And sometimes I would dearly love to declare Winter Break has started early. And then I hear the voice of Rex from Toy Story in my head, “Great! Now I have guilt!” So, no holidays. Yet.

I am looking forward to a Thanksgiving Break though. And yes! No guilt over that one! We just started looking at frozen turkeys in the grocery stores this week in anticipation. We’re trying not to choke on the $40-50 price tags we’re seeing. Yikes! It’s going to be interesting to see what we can put together of our traditional Thanksgiving Dinner. One of the biggest problems is just having enough pots and pans to bake and serve everything in. I’ll have to figure out what order to cook everything in so I can wash and reuse the pans without food getting too cold. It will be like a giant food puzzle.

So what have we been doing since we posted last? Our October went by so fast it’s hard to remember everything we did. Some of us (Mom, Laura, and Nathan) took a trip to Manila, Philippines to attend the Manila Temple. A couple of us (Dad and Nathan) took a trip to Singapore for a conference. There were birthday parties and Halloween parties. There was one field trip in there to Wat Saket and a museum. Homeschool co-op for Emma and Rachel, choir practice for Allen and Alisa, piano lessons for all the kids, and trying to have clean clothes, food on the table, and Sunday School lessons ready on Sunday took up all the rest of the available time. It’s amazing how little time is left at the end of the day by the time I’ve helped 3 girls through lessons, made and cleaned up from dinner, and then made school assignments for the next day. I look at that and it doesn’t sound like we do hardly anything all day, but that’s a pretty accurate description of every day at the Hicken International Academy. (Okay, there’s also checking Facebook at all different times of the day because of the awesome time difference. So not missing the below freezing temperatures in the Midwest right now, by the way!) Anyhoo… without further adieu, let’s hear what the kids thought was Flippin’ Awesome about the last month.

Family Field Trip to Wat Saket on the Golden Mount. Here we are ready to start our hike.

And we're on our way up...

A Photo Op on the way up.

Just before heading into the museum of the king who reigned in the 1930s during the switch from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. We went here right after our visit to the Golden Mount.

RACHEL

For Halloween this year I was an Earth Fairy. I wore my white Sunday dress that has pink and green ribbon flowers on it. We went shopping for stuff for my Halloween costume We bought a really expensive-looking necklace [Editor’s note: It was only $5] that had lots of green and light green gems on it that looked like fake leaves. We also got a wand and fairy wings. And we found a tiara so I could be a fairy princess. The day Dad and Nathan came home from Singapore, Emma and I went to the church Halloween party. They had a not-at-all haunted house. It was not scary at all. They had a mini blow up ghost that was smiling and happy. There were the Young Men hiding under the chairs going, “Oooooooooooooo!” I was laughing the whole way. At the Halloween party there were multiple games. One of them was Bowling which was easy to get a Strike on. Another one was the Mummy Wrap came where you competed against two other people to wrap someone in toilet paper first. Me and Emma lost. There was another game where you had to take chopsticks and take as many pieces of candy out of a bowl as you can. I was actually pretty good at it. But I had the beginner chopsticks, so I guess that was kind of cheaty. I got 4 pieces of candy out in 30 seconds. There was a cookie decorating area where you could decorate a cookie any way you wanted. I think there were some kids who just decorated it with everything without thinking about how it would taste. I didn’t want to do that. I just frosted my cookie and ate it. They also ha d a bean bag toss. After we did the activities they did trick-or-treating. Everyone would line up and you go to the doors and knock and the Young Men would just throw the candy at you. It was pretty annoying because then you had to pick up the candy. After the party it had rained and was still raining a bit when we were walking home. Me and Emma’s feet hurt and so Mom let us take off our shoes and walk home barefoot. It was nice.

On Saturday, November 1^st, Emma and I went to a Clue themed birthday party for a girl named Amy from our Homeschool Co-Op group. She loves crafts so Emma and I got her a mosaic tile project with tiles all the colors of the rainbow and a box to decorate them with. She loved it. The crime was that someone stole a piece of cake. We went swimming at the party to find clues in the pool. They had plastic eggs in the pool with clues inside. We made bracelets at the party too after finding out that Miss Scarlet was NOT guilty. We ate pizza for dinner and then there were clues on the bottom of the plates. We solved the mystery and the dad did it and for his consequence we smeared whipped cream on his face and then the dad said, “Who wants a hug?” I thought that he wasn’t serious, so I said, “Me!” But he WAS serious and he smeared whipped cream in my hair ON PURPOSE and I had to wash it out and have help too. I thought the party was fun. It reminded me of my Clue birthday party I had when I turned 8.

Ringing Bells on the way up to Wat Saket on the Golden Mount

The Results of our Sewing Craze: Rachel's wallets are the Dark Pink one, and both Green ones.

Our Soi flooding during a Bangkok Downpour.

Earth Fairy Rachel

Gypsy Emma

LAURA

November 5, 2014

Wednesday

Hello people! Well this week was Halloween. It's not that big of a deal here. Sure you have the candy sales in stores but other than that, nothing. There was trick-or-treating in our apartment building but none of us really fancy the idea of walking around and knocking on strangers' doors. And we didn't want to just walk around the streets of Thailand. So, we went to Terminal 21 for dinner and got candy and ice cream at the store in the basement. Mom spotted one of her Relief Society BFFs so we got to stand and wait for her while she chatted. Once we got home, we watched Star Wars Return of the Jedi. It was a pretty gratifying Halloween. The day after Halloween Nathan and I went to a youth Tri-Ward dance at our church building. Even though it was three wards, it was not much bigger than just our Chelsea ward. I dressed as a Pirate. Nathan won one of the two Male Best Costume Awards even though he didn’t want to wear one. He was Clark Kent changing into Superman. We got there late because we didn’t remember what time it started. By the time we got there it was pizza time, which is the whole reason I went. So I was really glad I got there in time for pizza. After the dinner they started the dancing. There were no slow dances. They only did fast dances, but no one was dancing. The boys were popping the balloons and the girls were standing around talking. We did that for half an hour and then it was over. Before we went home Nathan and I stayed and helped clean up and set up for church the next day while other people “helped” by popping balloons. I got a Snickers bar, so Happy Halloween to me.

The week before, was Dad's birthday. I asked what cake he wanted and he said that he wanted an ice cream cake. Uh oh. I've never made an ice cream cake before. But I figured it out anyway. A lady in our ward had made an ice cream cake for dinner when came over once and she told us how she made it. So I made a chocolate cake from scratch in two square cake pans. The only problem I had was once the cakes was ready to be taken out of the pans to be frosted, one pan came out fine and the other crumbled into a gazillion pieces. Once mom saw what happened, she used her superpowers to mold the broken square of cake back into a regular cake shape and it turned out great. I used two kinds of ice cream in the middle of the cake layers: chocolate and a vanilla chocolate chip ice cream. When it was ready, I frosted it with whipping cream and then topped it with chocolate curls. It looked really pretty and tasted just as good. And now as I’m writing this, I’m very much craving ice cream cake. It doesn’t help that I’m hungry and it’s dinner time. That's all for now. BYE!!