Long Overdue Update

I just realized it's been several months since I updated this blog.  Oops!  Time for a photo dump!  Here's the September highlight:

Mr N caught a fish bigger than Baby C!  She liked splashing it with water from the hose.

October Highlights:

Mr N caught another fish at the beginning of October.  Yay salmon!

The kids goofing around posing for pictures in some new pajamas.  

Miss E as Tinkerbell.

M as a ninja.

Baby C as a duckling.

 The night before Halloween Mr N & I went to a haunted house with our friends.  We dressed up because that is FUN.  That zombie's pretty creepy, huh.  I was a black widow and Mr N is a lumberjack.  Just in case you are especially obtuse and cannot tell.  :-)

Dining Room - Glorious After

 This is the garbage produced.

 Inspired to clean by the beautiful floor!

Dining Room - During

 Day One

Our friends EdgyK and her husband Stenny helped us.  Without their help we would have gone nutz and it would have taken a LOT longer.

 I am being useful here, it just doesn't look like it.  Haha  I was dictating measurements while EdgyK marked the laminate.  (Blogger loaded these pics all jumbled up.)  Here you can see we were nearly done with the kitchen.  The kitchen took a long time because of all those corners we had to measure around.

M discovered the advantages of a wood floor.

Here is the picture of how far we got the first day.  We finished the kitchen.  We had friends coming over that evening, and EdgyK had a family party to attend, so we stopped around 5pm.

M and E used the boxes as coffins.  My kids are so morbid.  They did a mummy exhibit and drew bodies inside the coffins.

When everything got ripped up, we discovered there was a half-inch difference between the dining room and the kitchen.  Mr N had to run to the store and get some boards to even things up.  This set us back about two hours.

 Here is E being a mummy.  Apparently mummy = zombie without a hunger for brains.

Day Two

Day 2 dawned bright and early.  It was New Years Eve and Stenny & EdgyK showed up at 8am to floor the dining room.  That's earrrrrrly in case you were wondering.

 After the kids got bored with the mummy exhibit of Day 1, they turned the boxes of Day 2 into a tepee.

 Okay so admittedly I did not work as hard as Mr N, EdgyK, or Stenny.  I was on baby duty a lot.  It's its own form of hard work!  Day 2 while the baby was napping it was me, EdgyK and Mr N on floor duty while Stenny was our cutter.

 

Mr N picked up a set of laminate installation tools on a whim during his trip to Home Depot on Day 1 and they turned out to be VERY useful.  The dining room was much faster to floor due to its large rectangular shape.  We finished laying laminate around 1pm and Stenny stayed and helped Mr N nail all the baseboards back on.  They were done around 2pm.

Dining Room - Before

 Between Christmas and New Years, Mr N had the entire week off.  At the top of a very short "Honey Do" list was ripping out the carpet of the dining room and cheap laminate of the kitchen and replacing it with the highest quality wood laminate we could afford.  Look at that nasty carpet!  Naturally we didn't bother vacuuming before snapping this pic.

I snapped this picture in case Mr N didn't feel like smiling at the end of the project.

Here's a picture of the laminate in the kitchen.  Mr N had already pulled the fridge out.  Sorry the lights in the kitchen are pretty yellow.  There was nothing major wrong with the laminate; there were several small holes and dings in it and there was discoloration in the entire center where we walk around.

Updates to the Kitchen

Our dishwasher has been dying a slow death for about a year now. We were planning to replace it with some tax refund money. About a week before Thanksgiving, our oven suddenly popped loudly. The stovetop worked, but the oven was completely out. The replacement part was nearly as costly as a new oven, so it was time to head to Lowe's. They were having a pre-Black Friday sale, and the prices were great, so we got an oven and a dishwasher! They are so pretty. And they both work. So, you know, yay!

Mommy & Miss E

Hawaii

My m-i-l asked if I wanted to go to Hawaii a few months ago. I didn't really answer since it seemed unlikely. Then Mr N volunteered to take off work and hang with the kids so I could go. Boy howdy! What a great husband! Especially since he's never been to Hawaii either. We bought our tickets, but it still seemed surreal. Sandy and I flew out to Kauai via San Fran and arrived in the early afternoon on Oct 26. The second we stepped off the plane, we looked at each other and went, "Woah." The humidity had just smacked us.

I quickly realized the map provided by the car rental company was seriously lacking, so we headed to one of the few places actually listed on the map: Wal-Mart. The parking lot of said establishment was hoppin'. Apparently it's the place to be. We saw our first wild chickens of Hawaii:
Chickens are everywhere on Kauai, I am not even kidding. We were in the middle of nowhere hiking up a canyon and I heard a rooster crowing.

Tiffany arrived later that night, which is when I discovered that 1) Kauai goes to bed very early and 2) it does not believe in street lights. I managed to get lost three times on the way back to the resort. w00t!

The next day we headed to the beach!

This is Shipwreck Beach, very near to our resort. Soooo beautiful. It was pretty windy that day, so we just stood happily in the very warm water.



Put me in front of a camera, I do weird things.



Here is a picture of our lovely resort. This shot is taken from our patio. It didn't have an ocean view (if you stood on your tippy toes you could see the ocean through some trees) but it was a beautiful view nonetheless.



Sandy & Tiffany took a snorkeling boat tour out to the southern side of Na Pali, but I didn't go because I get seasick when I snorkel. (In fact, it was so bouncy out there that Sandy got sick, so then I was doubly glad I didn't go.) Besides, I had managed to burn that first day at the beach, so I laid around and recovered.


The next day we went up to Waimea Canyon. I think you can see why it is called The Grand Canyon of Hawaii. It was much larger than I was expecting. Probably because the Grand Canyon of the East, in Pennsylvania, is soooo underwhelming. Anyway, this was very cool. And it was also cooler, as in 10 degrees cooler. At first that felt really chilly, but once we started hiking, I was glad it was only in the 60s. It was still very humid though.


We hiked a trail called, imaginatively enough, Canyon Trail. It is between MPs 13 & 14 on the Waimea Canyon road. It was 4.8 miles round trip and it felt great to get out and stretch my legs, especially after laying around the whole morning the day before. The first 20 minutes were unpleasant, as it began to rain just as we started the hike. But then the rain pretty much stopped. I see now why western Oregon is called a temperate rain forest, because while walking through the drizzle I felt like I was in a warmer version of Oregon. Just like Oregon, Hawaii needs twenty-one names for rain.




Remember - camera + me = weird faces/poses.



Suddenly the forest opened up and we were at the peak of a very tall mountain, with precious little to prevent us from catapulting off the side. Those of us who are scared of heights (no names...but it wasn't me...or Sandy) experienced some discomfort during this part of the hike. The view was so amazing.




Those formations behind me are natural. They're pretty much inaccessible to mankind.



That night we went to a luau at the Kilohana Plantation, with an interesting dance-theater performance afterward. My favorite part was definitely the awesome fire dance. Also the kalua pork was divine! We were too cheap to buy the official pic though, so only a couple of random photos taken by Sandy commemorate the event. Unfortunately, both of them turned out lousy.




The next day (Saturday) we went ziplining. In case you are wondering it was AWESOME. We all had a blast, even Tiffany who was a little nervous starting out. There were seven ziplines, which led us gradually down a valley to a small river where we had a late lunch. It rained kind of hard for about five minutes when we first arrived, but then it cleared up and the weather was just fine for the rest of the tour.




This is when we learned that a gecko can be used as an earring. Yeah, that thing is alive.





Self portrait.


What can I say? Waiting for other people to zipline could get a little boring.


Luckily for my dear blog readers, someone volunteered to get a shot of us in our fab harnesses and helmets. The helmets were NOT to prevent injury should we fall to the valley floor. They were to protect our heads from banging into the cables, which I think all of us did at least once.


Sandy looking sassy and happy!

Sunday we went to church at the Kalaheo Ward, which was about thirty minutes away (even though it's only like 16 miles) (25 mph zones are de rigeur on Kauai. bleh) Apparently Hawaiians all say, "Aloha," when they get to the pulpit, and everyone Alohas them back. I thought that was just a weird quirk of people visiting the mainland. Ha ha Also church there seemed a lot more casual. Perhaps it is the awesome island vibe. I'm not sure. All I know is, the bulletin read like a chatty newsletter, the main speaker wore sunglasses on top of his head the whole meeting and freely admitted that he wrote his talk the night before. The other thing I know is church was the coldest place on the island. We were all freezing.

The rest of the day we enjoyed PERFECT weather and we lounged by the pool. Tiffany walked along the coast for a while.


Monday was our last full day, so we spent a fair amount of it at the beach. First we stopped by Spouting Horn, where we bought most of our souvenirs. Especially Sandy, who might have doubled her jewelry collection in forty minutes. Ha ha Tiffany rented a boogie board and rocked it! That's her in the picture above, coming in perfectly on a wave at Brennecke Beach. Sandy stuck to body surfing. The water knocked her around a little bit, but they both had a blast. I could feel myself burning, so I went home after a couple of hours to shower & reapply sunscreen.





Tuesday before our flights we went to Wailua Falls, which as you can see is very beautiful. Tuesday also brought some bad news - Sandy's & my flight was seriously delayed, which would have made us miss our connection. We ended up having to fly to LA on the red eye. SOOO unpleasant. Especially since I slept not a wink. I got about an hour & a half of (interrupted by a screaming child) sleep in the airport between flights. Ugh. We got in to PDX at 9:30 am and were home before 11. It was great to see my family again! I really missed them in Hawaii. Mr N had put up banners and balloons to welcome us, so it was a party! The kids ran around like headless chickens.

Thanks to Sandy and Tiffany! It was such an awesome vacation and I had a lot of fun!