Happy Valentines Day! Today I am grateful for the softness of my son's skin, the enthusiastic way my daughter tells a story, and having a good bottle of red with my husband.

It is February 2012. Time.is.fast.

The Armitage Family continues to love living in Thailand and traveling the world. Most photos are on Flickr now, as we have too many. Please email us if you want the link.

Recently, we made a list of countries our family has visited in the last few years:

USA

Thailand

Malaysia (Borneo)

New Zealand

Laos

Nepal

England

Indonesia (Bali)

India

France

Italy

Vatican

China (mainland)

Australia

Singapore

Vietnam - Jim

Philippines - Jim

Hong Kong

I would like to keep a record of other countries I have visited:

Spain

Greece

Switzerland

Fiji

Many islands in the Carribean

Mexico

Canada

Bon Aire

Guatemala

Costa Rica

Venezuela

Colombia

Brazil

Peru

Bolivia

Netherlands

Belgium

Dominican Republic

Cuba

Trinidad

Equador

I have decided to do a bit of personal blogging - really only for me.

Reading about something I have known for a long time - the power of positive thinking - I came across a recent TED talk about it. An idea to support this in an active, personal way is stating why you are grateful.

Today, I feel grateful for:

• my incredible family and the love they give to me

• the opportunity given to Isabel to be traveling in Singapore this week with AMIS

• challenge in my job - to figure out what priorities are the most important

• that I am learning how to do things because I believe they are right, not because people will be happy with me

• so many things that it is difficult to put into words

I will challenge myself, to regularly state why I am grateful - and only list 3 things at a time. Perhaps that will nudge me to be focused, concise, and varied in the realization of my state of gratitude.

All photos are now on Flickr Please email us for the link. We would love to share our adventures with you!

Hi Friends and Family - due to the slow speed of photo upload on blogger, we now send our photos to people via picassa. If you have not been receiving our photos and you would like to, please send an email and let us know! We will most likely put a few of our favorite pics here on blogger and write about them, but if you want to see more, just ask. We hope you are all having a wonderful 2010. We will go to Nepal in April with Mark and Gwen, and then to Colorado this summer for a visit. We will spend some of late July in Europe, before returning to Bangkok for a third year.

Kiwi Land

FRESH WATER EELS!

We have to post some of our amazing shots from this summer. Yes, our blog will be out of chronological order, but we will go back and fill in someday! Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy some or our summer of 2009 photos. Our trip to New Zealand was full - we traveled all around the North Island and loved the wonderful family time. It is a trip that we will always remember......

Trip to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

In February I went to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, also known as Saigon, for and Understanding by Design conference given by Jay McTyghe and hosted by Saigon South International School.  Fellow 5th grade teacher Dan D. and I created a new Fantasy unit at the conference.  Pictures that follow include street scenes in Ho Chi Minh City, including the backpackers hotel region where we stayed for $11.00 bucks American a night, street vendors, some of the 3 million motor bikes in the city, a rehabilitation center for physically impaired local that sold fine arts, pictures from the war remembrance museum, and shots from the Cu Chi tunnel area 45 minutes outside of Saigon.  Nothing like being in a pitch black tunnel, no lights, no chance to turn around, and B-52's carpet bombing ten feet above you.  OK, so the B-52's were either a singing group or were in my history books.  Pretty amazing stories of survival and sacrifice abound in this region.  The tunnel pictures shown were from the more touristic places to visit.  We went into a couple of tunnels that were much smaller, and totally dark.

CINDERELLA

Guess what Isabel was in the play, Cinderella.....After the show with our Mae Bahn (which means "House Mother" in Thai - in other words, our helper) Khun Long and our friend, Joom.