I am in the airport at Washington DC now and thought I would give a quick update while I wait for my plane.
Christmas was great. Our big gift was a 2 month trip to Taiwan. We will do that this summer. So lately we have been doing a lot to get ready for that. The children have been donating every other allowance toward trip activities. I have been doing some extra paid presentations and things like that to make a little extra money for our trip. It has been fun exploring different ways to save money for the trip. For the flight we pretty much paid for everything with airline miles and credit card points. I had over 210,000 Alaska Airlines miles and we signed up for an Alaska Airlines credit card which gave us 30,000 more. This pretty much gave us 3 round trip trips to Taipei from San Francisco and all of our trips to San Francisco from Salt Lake City. Then the remaining 4 tickets to Taipei from San Francisco were about $650 each. My ticket I got paid for since I am going to do a presentation at a University when I am there. Then we signed up for two Chase Sapphire Preferred Cards which gave us about $1300 dollars cash back. Then we signed up for two Capital One Venture cards which gave about $1000 cash back toward travel purchases. We thought about maybe working on a farm while we are there, but I think we probably won't after all - maybe a future trip when we go to a different country. We have also been reading some books about people in Taiwan and China and listening to some Mandarin language lessons. Recently we also did the children's passport pictures and will complete their applications in about a month or so. Here are there pictures - I think they are all really cute, even though they could not smile in them.
Elliott had his birthday. He had a blast with the family party and his friend party. For his friend party he wanted to do a zombie theme like Ethan had done a couple years back. It turned out great, but those boys were pretty wild and crazy.
Julia did a big biography project at school. She was assigned Susan B. Anthony. She had fun learning all about her and creating a poster and outfit for the presentation that she did as other kids from the school walked from person to person to learn about all the people.
Julia has some other big news - she is getting braces. She has been really excited about that. A couple weeks ago she got spacers put in and this coming Thursday she actually gets the braces put on. She has been trying to enjoy some of the food that she won't be able to have for the next 1.5 to 2 years (i.e., pop and hard candy).
Other than that we have been keeping up with our regular routine. Mondays are cub scouts and activity days, Thursdays are our volunteer day at an assisted living facility and a trip to the library, and Fridays are swimming. Then of course Friday and Saturday nights are movie nights. Once a month we also go to the free faculty/staff movie at ISU. In January it was The Force Awakens and they had Star Wars characters there and make your own light sabers out of shinny duct tape and pool noodles.
No comments:
Post a Comment