Another thing you don't see in St. Louis

We went to the neighborhood park the other day (<0.5 miles from the house) and we saw this little guy. He was running around outside the fence around the park. It was one of the wild pigs that had come down from the nearby mountains looking for some food. He was the first one I had seen roaming around. I think he probably smelled the grill from some people who were just finishing up a picnic of hot dogs. I dunno, are pigs cannibals??

Fun at Home and Out & About

The kids love taking a bath in my tub instead of the other bathroom, so I had to take a couple pictures. I really wasn't trying to drown Cole, but they love floating in the big, deep tub.
A picture below of the boys actually being nice to the cat (especially rare for Cole). Their new morning routine is to give the cat a few treats for breakfast, so every morning now the cat is there waiting for them.

This past weekend we went to walk the Makapu'u lighthouse trail. It is a paved trail that goes up for about a mile. You get some fantastic views along the windward coast. Makapu'u lighthouse below

Me and the boys at the top of the trailA beautiful view looking out over Sea Life Park
We climbed up a ridge above the trail and could look back at the lighthouse and overlook platformsThis one made me very nervous! But actually, there is another plateau of ground another 20 feet below them or so. Not that it made me feel much better about this! Boys will be boys....

Recent fun

We had a slow week this week, which was kind of nice. Didn't have too many places we had to be. So one morning, we hung around for a while and I decided to take the kids down to the piers and see the Maritime Museum. We had a really nice morning, the kids enjoyed watching the boats and the huge cranes that unload them. Then we went into the museum and we must have spent an hour and a half in a fairly small museum (a miracle with two preschoolers). They really enjoyed all the models of boats and exhibits they had. They were both on their best behavior the entire time.

Adam and Cole in the park by the piers
Outside the maritime museum (above and below)
In the maritime museum, they had an observation tower that you could climb up to see some great views. The photo above shows the aloha tower and below shows one of the big gentry cranes that load and unload the big boats.
Humpback whale skeleton inside the maritime museum
Weather here has been nice, as always. It is certainly cooler now in January than it was in July when we first got here, but still very nice. It cools off at night in winter, we get down into the 60s usually and up to the mid to upper 70s during the day.

The kids are growing fast, in just a few months Adam will be starting Kindergarten already. He has grown up so much in just the last few months. He wants to show you how he can do everything himself now, which is kind of nice, but sad. My little boy is growing up. Cole is a handful, he causes more trouble than Adam ever thought of at his age. He certainly keeps me busy. Soon they'll be 5 and 3 years old already. Time flies!

It's been a while...

I see that it's been a while since I've updated the blog. I must admit, since I got my iphone, I'm really not on the computer all that much to actually update the blog (mobile e-mail sure is handy!) Things haven't been that exciting around here. But they have been warm! I keep hearing on the news about the cold weather across the midwest and I can't really say that I miss it. If it weren't for the news, I would be a bit oblivious to the passing of seasons here.
We've been doing mom-kid activities during the week and we've gone to the waterpark and the beach on the weekends. It's not quite warm enough for my tastes to go swimming, but as long as the sun is out its ok. (I know, I'm a wuss)
We drove up to the north shore of Oahu to Haleiwa (the surf capital) yesterday to see the waves. They were predicting some big waves on the news so I wanted to go and watch them for a while. The news said the waves were 20' - 25', and that's about what they looked like comparing the height of some of those waves to the size of the surfers out there. The winds are high today and I think they closed most of the beaches due to dangerous surf, so the waves must have been even bigger today. Tomorrow we are supposed to have 40mph sustained winds with gusts up to 60mph. They have closed all schools, beaches, and public offices for tomororw, so I guess this is going to be quite a storm. Hopefully we'll still have power!

I enjoyed watching the surfers and the waves and the boys were happy to play in the sand. They were digging out some huge rock pretending it was a dinosaur fossil, it kept them busy for a long time. Then Adam tried to start a fire with two sticks. I have no idea where he saw that from, I don't ever remember telling him that. I suppose he saw it on TV sometime...Well I'll have to update again soon if we haven't blown away :)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

A few days before Christmas, Cole had his inaugural ride on the tandem. So it won't be long now before he'll be up on the quad with all of us on some longer rides. If you click on the picture below, you can see the HUGE grin he has on his face. He loved it. Now he asks Dan all the time to take him out on the tandem.
We had a very nice holiday. Christmas Eve we opened presents from each other and of course the kids had a blast opening presents. Then on Christmas morning they opened presents from Santa. We spent Christmas Day over at a friends house for our Christmas dinner and had a very nice and relaxing time. The kids all played well together and the grownups got to have a nice meal and conversation. So one more Christmas holiday is behind us.






I think it was the day after Christmas that we had an island-wide power outage. They had a thunderstorm move in and it knocked out some big power lines. The power was out where we were for about 24 hours. At least it was warm...

New Year's Eve was certainly something to see here in Hawaii. People told us about it but it was pretty unbelievable. I guess that firecrackers and fireworks are supposed to chase out the bad spirits or something like that in the Chinese tradition. The Hawaiians have apparently adopted that theory too (probably from the large Chinese immigration early in the century). But anyways, from dusk until midnight the only time the constant barrage of fireworks slowed down was when it started pouring rain for a little while. I watched the neighbor for a while as he unrolled a string of firecrackers that was tied to a pole about 8 feet off the ground, the string of firecrackers went down to the ground and across the pavement maybe another 6 feet! The haze was simply unbelievable from all the fireworks all around. I couldn't even see clearly to the shed in our backyard, it was like a thick fog. I saw the neighbors in the cul-de-sac who were lighting them off were holding their shirts up over their faces so it must have been pretty bad out there.

I went to bed before midnight, but I had no problem telling when midnight was. I got up and watched for a while out our back windows. I had a 180 degree view from the back corner of the house. For at least 15-20 minutes the show in the neighborhood was non-stop with huge fireworks displays in all directions. (remember,these are all the neighbors - no municipal displays from where I was watching!) I went back to bed and the fireworks continued at a slower pace for a long time after that.

I guess I should have known it was going to be a big display, here are a couple pictures I took at Walmart a few days before New Year's. It shows all the fireworks they had stocked. There were a couple of aisles packed from floor to top with boxes of fireworks, and every cart in the checkout was loaded with fireworks.

So if you want to see a good New Year's display, come to Hawaii!

Stuff leading up to Christmas

Another week in paradise. I really haven't been bothered in the least bit that it's almost Christmas and it's 80 outside and I'm wearing shorts all the time. I am really starting to like this whole perpetual warm weather, predictable temperature sort of thing. It sure beats the temperature swings we had back in St. Louis! (which led to lots of freezing rain in the winter)

Here's the result of one of our projects over the past month. I was pulling out weeds one day and found a couple caterpillars. So we managed to keep these little guys alive and they did their little cocoon thing and came out as butterflies. I'm not so sure the boys were as intrigued as I was. But I thought it was very cool. Here is our second butterfly as he is getting ready to make his big escape.

The other day I took the boys down to Barbers Point beach. This is really not a great beach for swimming or doing any beach digging (it is several hundred yards from a garbage processing facility and the beach itself has a lot of glass, etc in it. BUT, it does have a nice rocky shoreline with lots of little tidepools. So the boys like to walk along the rocks and check in the little pools to see what fish and things are stuck in the little pools. It was a nice diversion for one morning anyways...
Last weekend our community association had their Christmas festival. There was a carnival ride, a bounce house, and santa came to actually hand out presents to the kids. They had some cookies and juice for the kids too. It was all free and the kids had a great time. There seems to be a lot more free entertainment here than I remember in St. Louis, but maybe I didn't look hard enough there.
Cole sat with Santa to get his present but he was not thrilled (again)Adam didn't actually get close enough to him to sit on his lap
Friends told us about the harbor lights tour that is put on by the Navy. They use the shuttle boats that they normally use for the Arizona memorial tours and they use them to give boat rides out into the harbor where all the huge warships and submarines are docked and the boats are all decked out with Christmas lights and inflatable decorations. They had Christmas music on the boats and lots of fun, and again it was all free. I had a great time and I think the kids thought it was pretty cool. I only had my cellphone camera, so I got a couple of poor photos...

Who'll stop the rain???

We're in the rainy season in Hawaii, and boy does it rain! Wed night into Thursday am, we got about 12" of rain in about 12 hours. Then it rained more on Friday, and Saturday, and today (Sunday) we've gotten a little rain but not a lot. A lot of areas on Oahu are flooded, apparently this is the worst flooding they've had since 2004 when it rained for 40 days and nights (I didn't realize the biblical flood was only back in 2004!). We're on high ground, so we haven't had problems so far, but I really do hope it stops raining soon. We're out of hot water (from the solar panels) and the electric heater doesn't seem to be kicking in, so I guess we'll have to have it looked at soon.

Here are a couple pictures from our yard with all the rain.

Since it was rainy, it seemed like a good day yesterday to decorate our gingerbread house. I had bought a kit at Sam's club and the kids had a really good time decorating it. Since it is so humid with all the rain, the candies started getting soggy already, so they started munching away on it before all the sugar melts :)