December Randoms

Searching for our Christmas Tree

The past two years, we've gone to Helemano Farms in Wahiawa in search of the perfect tree.  We picked out a Norfolk Pine again.  The maze of trees is lots of fun too!

got it!

Elise:  Mom, if I am awake when Santa comes, do you think he'd let me ride on one of his reindeer?  I mean, just one.  I've always wanted a pet reindeer.

Kaneohe Christmas parade - 50th Anniversary

Sadly, the Kaneohe Parade kinda lacked this year.  We really missed the PCC dancers.  However, the kids got lots of stickers, flyers, and tons of candy at the end.  Cole especially enjoyed waving to the crowds, dancing, passing the flyers back to us.

------------------------

I attended a tour of the historic homes on Pearl Harbor with the ladies from George's work.  It was fun to see the houses all decorated for Christmas time - no inside photography though.  Boo!  Most houses were 1914-1919 era and remodeled so beautifully.

--------------------

The Relief Society (church group of ladies) asked me to teach a little holiday baking/pie making class at my house.  I showed four basic holiday recipes then talked about the "cheater" way to make it easier and the "over-achiever" way to dress it up.  Then everyone made their own pie-in-a-jar.  The only bad thing was that I forgot to take pictures of any of it.  :(  It was a lot of fun but added to a really busy week.  I didn't record some things on the right date on my calendar so the week ended up being pretty jam packed with teaching preschool, Austin's birthday party, the desert class, the historic tour, Santa at the beach and the church party.  Whew!  (and not so smart... I was exhausted!)

some favorite Christmas decor

--------------------

For the Christmas story hour at library time, they had a puppet lady come in.  She was pretty good, I thought.  Lacey and baby Jax went with us.  One of the things she did was the Hawaiian 12 days of Christmas.  The items were glued on to a t-shirt looking thing.  A different child wore a "shirt" for each day.  About a week later, we were trying to remember the words and Austin definitely showed us up!  Lacey and I were laughing pretty hard.  He got most of it right, but had his own version of things:  "my tulip (tutu) gave to me", "four flower laces (leis)", "nine bags of dirt balls (pounds of poi)".

--------------------

The kids got automatic toothbrushes from Grandma Liz.  Of course, they love them!  Austin was standing by me (shaking with mouth open) watching it spin and said, "I think I will make one of this.  And when I grab it, it will spin so fast like a helicpoter.  And then I will go island to island.  And I will visit a lot of islands."  Imaginative child.  :)

artwork by Elise

--------------------

This year, we used this nativity advent for nightly scripture reading.  Each day we learned a bit about different parts of the nativity.  Sometimes we watched the Bible video that went along with the scripture.  We hardly ever did the activity suggestion.  We weren't perfect, but I think its one I want to do again.  Usually we unwrap a book every day and this year we just decide to leave them all in the book bucket.  I liked that we re-read favorites often, but some got missed and I think the unwrapping is fun.  Not sure what we'll do next year...

new nativities this year:
"Samoa" (from PCC :) - made from Tapa cloth, coconut husks, and shells
Peru from Benji - love the llamas!
footprint tile from Lucy - so sweet

--------------------

The favorite book of the year was definitely the Grinch!  Here's Austin's favorite picture:  "the Hawaiian Grinch doing the double shaka" :)  He can pretty much recite the whole book from memory.

--------------------

Elise and I after church

While listening to the Hallelujah chorus in the van, Elise yells from the back, "Hey!  I thought they were going to start singing Rudolph!"

donut snowmen

Austin has obviously had the animated Rudolph show on his brain.  At random times, he'd find me and say:

"Did you know Rudolph and Herme will just never fit in?"
"Mom, I would never want a Charlie-in-the-box"
"Everybody loves silver and gold."

---------------------------
We enjoyed having Greg and Lindsay's fam with us few days after Christmas.  Here are some fun things we did:

 dinner at Little Noodle House in China town - YUM!

Honolulu Hale

I always love the variety of Christmas trees displayed.  Its also fun to see the creativity of people in "holiday wreath hall".  An obvious crowd favorite was a peacock wreath made from broken CD pieces.  And one of my favorites was "Leftover Cookies" - cookies covered by cockroaches.  ha!  

Laie Hawaii Temple Visitors Center

followed by

 Kahuku Grill, Hukilau Beach for some great boogie boarding and shave ice!  So fun to hang out with cousins!

What a month!

Christmas Day in (mostly) Pictures

lots of pictures = saving 1000's of words

New tradition (thanks to Uncle Mark) - Christmas cereal Jenga.  We laughed so hard when Cannon just walked up, grabbed one from the middle and nothing happened (except a big smile :).

 Not the most reverent Nativity we've ever done, but Christmas Day excitement is hard to contain

Benji, Geo and I were over Christmas breakfast.  We had egg & sausage sandwiches, fruit, and Benji had the idea was to add in a Christmas strudel thing that he remembered me making a long time ago.  YUM!

afternoon hike to Maunawili Falls to work off breakfast

Merry Christmas Cole's!!!

 Goodbye to CMM 7 (with lots of wonderful memories)!!!

Christmas Eve at the Beach

For the boys, Christmas Eve started off with snorkeling at Electric beach and then snorkeling with the sharks on the north shore.  I much preferred cleaning the house to being that close to sharks!  Geo said he had a great time and thought it was even better than the manta ray dive on the Big I.  Here's Geo's favorite pics:

Spidey in the cage

Then... off to Bellows AFB Beach for more fun... Austin was definitely happy to be there!

One of my top 5 memories of this trip was boogie boarding with the sibs.  We'd been rotating boards around, helping the kids, building sandmen, etc.  And then we realized that happened to be just the 5 of us out there.  (Gav joined in later).  We rearranged in birth order and then yelled to Lindsay to snap a pic.

We caught quite a few waves together (and teased Greg because he wasn't catching any... til he switched boards).  I laughed and laughed as I watched Chris and Lacey give each other "high fives" in the middle of one run and award themselves style points.  It was a ton of fun and something I will remember for a long, long time.  Love ya, sibs!

More fun pics of the beach...

We stayed so long at the beach that it was dark by the time we got back to camp.  Dad, Mom, Lacey and Mark did Christmas Eve dinner and it was fabulous!  Dutch oven potatoes, grilled shrimp and teriyaki chicken, garlic bread, veggies... yum!

We still had more food to stuff in so we ended the night at our house with the brownies, peppermint ice cream treat.  Fabulous!  

Time to open grandma Cindy's gift... wonder what it could be?  :)

Here's all the grandkids modeling new PJ's with grandma (just missing baby Jax.  He was in bed and as you can tell, Cole was soon to follow)  The rest of us stayed up and sang Christmas carols.  Austin was particularly emphatic that we sing "Picture a Christmas" with the 2nd verse (and him singing the "kind and gentle Joseph" part).  It wasn't a grand production of any of the songs, but I felt the Spirit of Christmas.  And then it was off to bed... for most of us.