Sam and I have had head colds all week, so I am particularly pleased that something nice came out of this week – I’ve been slowed down enough to make a necklace out of sea glass we found! I have the bizarre compulsion to clean the house and take care of odd chores when I’m sick. Yesterday I filled a backup propane tank for all those hurricanes and power outages 🙂 And today I bleached clean my laundry hamper, and scrubbed our bathroom. Maybe it’s a subconscious attempt to rid the house of germs. I have a grocery bag full of used tissues with a Lysol spray-can sitting right beside it so I can fumigate whenever necessary. Hey pregnant ladies…or those of you who remember…guess what I had to do with every sneeze???

Our friends have a neighbor in the Coast Guard who was able to get a key to Makapu’u Lighthouse, so they graciously invited us to tag along for a VIP tour inside the gated area and even up into the lighthouse! Along the way we broke out the binoculars to spot humpback whales which travel to Hawaii each spring for mating and birthing. Sam got to see a bunch of tail-slaps, but he was very keen on going to the lighthouse and up inside it. He kept asking “are we going IN?” Afterwards we went to Kona Brewing Company for lunch and a sampler (Dave, not me!). Sam was tired but such a good boy during what ended up being a long lunch due to slow service. Maybe it was the promised ice cream for dessert? He really enjoyed that since it was a hot day 🙂

This primer (a PowerPoint presentation) is funny and informative regarding how the sub-prime mess has had ripple effects on other sectors of the financial markets. Here’s what my brother says (he sent the file): the sub-prime mess has tainted commercial mortgage backed securities even though after 6 months of this the default rate on the underlying CMBS loans has barely moved at all….

Just in case I forgot how hard it is to maintain even passable attractiveness during pregnancy, I thought I would jot down a few tips. That is … in case we have a third child some day 🙂

There was one flying through the house last night! I got poked by a little arrow and turned around to find this precious little creature 🙂 HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!!!

Sammy loves his tumbling class on base! Mom took a bunch of pictures today. In the shot above he’s doing one-footed jumping and we count to see how many he can do before toppling over. I think he hit 8 today. Before class started today he waited impatiently for the clock to tick by so he could go out on the floor and do warm ups. He kept asking me in his sweet voice “are we ready to start yet?”

Dave and I have been calling this creature girebra. It has a mane like a giraffe, and the same colors, but the stripes? What is this hybrid???? We took it to my OB appt today figuring the well-educated nurses and staff might hazard a guess 🙂 One guy totally declined guessing, and the nurse guessed a giraffe but agreed the stripes were rather confusing. It was funny – I had Sam ask her what the toy was while I was weighing in. She got distracted and I stepped off the scale saying I was way lighter than the truth 🙂 hee hee! Perfect! I told her the real answer, laughing at my near-coup with the weigh-in!

We had a great morning at the beach today. Dave took Friday off work – he’d been working swings since last week and hadn’t had a day off in a while, so it was a real treat to start the weekend a day early. Sammy just started digging himself into sand yesterday and enjoyed being covered up. Today he wanted to be totally covered, up to his chin. We kept asking him when he was going to “erupt” (since he’d been building a volcano) and he said not for a while. Then he said “would you wipe off my chinny chin chin?” since it had gotten sand on it. A few minutes later he said he was in his chrysalis, so when I asked how long he would be in there he said “40 hours.” When he finally squirmed out he flew away like a butterfly. We were laughing so much at how long he wanted to stay completely immobilized and kept saying he’s not ready to come out yet!

This is “Chester” – a monk seal who has been resting on Kailua Beach since Jan 1. He is molting, a process which lasts 5-10 days or so. He just started molting on Saturday, so he’ll be returning to the water soon. He doesn’t eat while he’s ashore, so he’s lost quite a bit of weight. He’s fine, though – this is a natural process. The monk seal guardians roped off the area to keep people from trying to move or feed the seal. Hard to believe people would interfere with nature, or presume to act before getting a bit more information. Thankfully the volunteers who stand guard around the clock are very knowledgeable and nice people.

Here’s a new tradition I really enjoyed – my boys, too! Chop up the Christmas tree and have a campfire! It’s perfect for boys – creates excitement out of a task that is otherwise a bit sad. I managed to convince Dave to let Sam and I do this – needles catch fire easily, it will be fun, have a hose nearby, and don’t load too much in at a time. It was smokey and actually smelled like the Krug family was smoking something else entirely… Sam enjoyed helping me chop up the tree with his “saw.” Dad – I taught him how to hold the saw with his other hand far from the blade 🙂 Dave and I came up with a new risk scale – 0 to 10 on the risk scale. We both provide an estimate, then depending on where the risk falls he will approve or disapprove my proposed scheme. I rated it a 3-4, he rated it a 5. I passed – we got to have a campfire. I asked at what point on the scale my proposed schemes would not be approved and he replied “that’s classified” in true Dave fashion 🙂 So just now I asked how his overall experience was (figured a debriefing was in order). On the “harebrained” scale it was a 7, on the fun scale it was a 5… I really enjoyed it and plan to build another Christmas campfire next year. Maybe we’ll have a group campsite at Bellows, invite friends to bring their trees and have a big bonfire! No, I haven’t mentioned this idea to Dave yet 🙂 We could combine that with our Burns night festivities and just bump that up a bit earlier than Jan 23 when we usually celebrate. FUN!

We had a nice weekend – no remodeling obligations and some sunshine to enjoy 🙂 We escaped the house yesterday morning for a hike up a favorite trail, and today we took the trail-a-bike out again for a ride around town. Dave picked up a mirror for my bike so I could keep an eye on Sam riding behind me. He also redid our pantry closet to provide more storage, and wired up our built-in desk/laptop garage by the bar. It is so nice to have everything within arm’s reach. Tonight Dave made Sunday family dinner – a tradition he started a few months ago and really relishes now that the kitchen is open, airy, not hot and not disgusting 🙂 He made spaghetti with homemade meatballs. Sam really devoured them! The thumbnail above opens very large if you click it – you can see Sam enjoying one of his presents from Uncle Dan and Aunt Heather, with Dave cooking in the background. The little hiker is also featured climbing over one of many boulders along the way. At the end of the hike we saw the largest moth on the planet – I think Dave was actually a little freaked out by it. He kept saying to move out of the way of some other hikers (Sam and I were intrigued by the very hairy legs on this thing) but I think he really meant was get the heck away from the prehistoric creature before it flies off with you!

For some reason Sammy really wanted to learn about bats yesterday. He mentioned it during prayers the night before, so we fired up youtube and checked out some bat footage. Then later in the day we were outside and I gave him a bunch of chalk to draw with. He came up with this completely on his own – see all the parts in the picture? I was pretty impressed by what he included with no coaching at all.

It’s New Year’s Eve here – and it’s noisy!!!! The M-80s have been going off since noon and now they’re in full force. We drove around Kailua and it seems the Kihapai/Oneawa contingent is where the action is. The streets are filled with smoke, fireworks are filling the sky overhead, and driving a car is hazardous. So is breathing, for some people. It’s our anniversary so we’re going to sift through our treasure box of little scrapbook items we’ve collected during the year, seal it up as a time capsule, then hunker down like there’s a hurricane (i.e. in the middle of the house) and try to sleep!

This was as much a present for me as it was for Sammy. Dave hooked it up to his bike first to test it out, and after a shake-down ride to the marsh we hooked it up to my mountain bike. It was pretty weird at first – the center of gravity is way different than having him ride on the handlebars like he usually does, but we had a good time. We got used to it and he enjoyed helping me pedal up hill. It’s a nice way for him to get some pedaling in as well until he can keep up on his own. He’s enjoying riding his own little mountain bike quite a bit as well. Last week he rode through some ironwood trees and down a pretty good little hill all by himself (with training wheels but without mommy helping stabilize). It was real off-roading and he was so excited to do it all by himself that I had to circle ’round with him five more times to “do it AGAIN, mommy!”