I see that I am almost a month behind on my blog as we approach the end of June so I have a bit of catching up to do. A lot has happened.
We left for vacation on May 4th to visit my Mom and Dad in Kauai. We are always excited to go on a family vacation but the circumstances of this one made it bitter-sweet. We knew Chris's Mom was fighting cancer and we knew she was struggling a lot. After the first surgery to remove the brain tumor, and over the following weeks, she became very weak and struggled with infection, low sodium levels, and dehydration. These things put her in and out of the hospital and we were very anxious about her condition. We were able to get updates very easily with Chris's blackberry so we were not out of the loop but we worried and we prayed a lot on this vacation.
As always, we stayed up late packing and were up before 6am for our flight to Honolulu. Emily is usually the most excited one in our family to go on vacation but this year David came very close to matching her enthusiasm. I heard Emily's alarm clock go off. Then I heard her run to David's room and say, "David... get up! We're going to Hawaii today." On normal mornings, David does not move very fast in the morning but on this day they were both dressed and downstairs in under ten minutes. The whole process of getting up early, packing their bags, going to the airport and riding the shuttle is just fascinating to them. I love their big wide eyes and how excited they get to see the "international flag sticks" at the airport. Chris always makes a big deal about these and now we always look forward to seeing them.
I also have to reflect that at ages 7, 5 and 3... our kids are fairly self sufficient. David and Emily not only pull their own suitcases, but they also carry their booster seats. Lia follows their lead and takes care of pulling her princess rolling suitcase... most of the time. ;-) Thank you Peg for passing that along to us. It was very handy this trip. Thank goodness, nobody was afraid of the toilets on the airplane this trip and everything went really smooth on the 8 hour flight to Honolulu. Our secret this year was having the kids pick out activity books well in advance. Emily chose a Little House on the Prairie paper doll book and one of Usborne's sticker dolly dressing books. David also got the Usborne sticker books. He chose one about the airport and one about world travel. They occupied themselves the whole time. Lia had picked a Hello Kitty sticker book and it would have been great except she couldn't quite peel the stickers off the pages so I had to help her with that... for about 3 hours! Some sticker books are much higher quality than others and when dealing with a 3 year old the easy to peel off stickers are a must!
So anyway, we made it and were very happy to see my Mom and have our traditional pizza from the Kilauea Piazza and Bakery and then were very glad to go to bed!
More updates to come. Thank you so much to Mom and Dad for storing back-up copies of my photos.... since I managed to delete all my vacation pictures! (Good grief)
Wailua Falls usually looks like this picture I pulled from the internet with the twin falls.
Because of all the rain... we got to see it looking like this! There was a tremendous amount of water pouring off that cliff. It was loud and very impressive.
Further, the beautiful mountains surrounding Princeville and Hanalei usually have a few waterfalls you can pick out if you look carefully. But because of the tremendous amount of rain, there were waterfalls all over these mountains. We sat and counted over twenty at one location. These pictures don't quite capture the beauty but they certainly can give you an idea. I think the waterfalls are usually hard to capture on film because they are so small. But not this day!
Amazing!
David likes to name these mountains by their personality... misty mountains, green mountains, cloudy mountains, and of course, waterfall mountains!
Borden Anthony
Born at 7:48 am
And meanwhile, at the homefront... Daddy and the kiddos indulged in some mighty large ice cream cones. Must be nice to get rid of Mommy every now and then. I always make them get the kiddie cones! :-) And true to her personality, Emily has her nose in a book. I hope she didn't get chocolate ice cream on the pages.
