Sunday, March 29, 2009

Hawaii Adventures

This year Helaman and I celebrated his spring break week with a trip to Hawaii! Here are some highlights!

Airplane shot of Oahu

Barely made our plane to Honolulu from Dallas on March 11 after dropping off Charlotte at Play-Dough summer camp with Grandma.

Checked into the Ilikai Hotel on Waikiki Beach. My parents let us use their time share there this year. Thanks!! It was really nice to be so close to the beach.
That night we walked out to the ocean. Not too many swimmers at night! So we headed to the spa.View from the hotel's roof restaurant. This is where we went to a timeshare sales pitch in order to get some money for activities.
Next day brought Hanauma Bay snorkeling and laying around. Just what I needed.
Saturday it rained and we headed to a huge swap meet in Aloha Stadium where we bought a lot of random Hawaiian stuff. Here is Helaman drinking from a coconut.
Luckily later that night it cleared up and we went to dinner right on the beach at Duke's.

The LDS Chapel in Honolulu.
USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.
Monday bright and early we headed to the North Shore where we had a shark cage outing!
More pictures will be coming on this one when we get our underwater camera film developed. It was really fun and different from most things you can do in Hawaii. The sharks were about 10-12 feet and they came right up to the boat when the guides started throwing fish out. It was cool to see them so near to the boat, and even more amazing to see them underwater closely circling the floating cage we were in. We could have reached out and touched them - obviously that wasn't advised.
Survived! High recommend! From the boat we also saw a huge whale having some fun in the ocean breaching.
Afterward we stopped by the Hawaiian Temple in Laie which is under renovation.Here we are the next day at Valley of Temples Memorial Park, which is a huge graveyard with temples like this Byodo-In Temple, built to commemorate the first Japanese immigrants to Hawaii.Then we headed to Kualoa Ranch for an ATV tour of all the places they film movies and shows.The ranch was beautiful and we especially loved the fresh guava you could pick from the trees and eat whole! Here we are at the Jurassic Park location.
Here's the Pearl Harbor film location. I don't remember that movie so well, but LOST fans will recognize this structure as a Dharma station, specifically where Jack and Juliette kissed.
At Hurley's Golf Course.
We both climbed up this tower from the "Jughead" episode. Remember, the bomb was buried.
Last stop on our way home was to the blowhole lookout. From here you could see many humpback whales surfacing.Goodbye Hawaii - til next time!

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Birthday Mania

Birthday Numbers:

Height: 2'11"
Weight: 29 lbs.
Party attendees: 50
Free round trip plane rides to date: 11
Apple Jacks consumed: Infinite

Proudly displaying her cupcake cake
Extremely confused at the singing and flame on her cake. We forgot to prep her for this.Happy Birthday girl.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Look who's 2!

Happy Birthday Charlotte! You are growing up so fast!
March 27, 2007

1 month

3 months5 months6 months
8 months

10 months1 year!14 months16 months17 months18 months19 months21 months23.5 months