Happy Halloween!

Our Halloween week was a lot of fun.  The girls were Ariel and Sleeping Beauty, and they enjoyed a few nights of unabashed princessing.

Thursday night was the Sentinel School Carnival, where Grandma S works.  The girls spent the night there after the carnival, while Farmboy and I drove in to Phoenix to go to the Mesa Temple and then pick up our sister in law, who was coming to town for a visit.

Sunday was the Primary program, and Pea had two speaking parts.  In the first, she told about how her scripture hero is Queen Esther (who she picked herself), and the second was about how scriptures are 'inspiring messages' written by prophets.  It was hilarious watching her.  She is a natural ham.  Strawberry had a very minor part, as she is in the nursery (not yet being 3).  The nursery kids did get to join in on one song, "I am a child of god."

Finally, today was trick-or-treating.  we drove around the neighborhood, visiting mostly houses of people we knew.  We stayed out about 45 minutes, which was plenty for us.  It's a lot slower with little ones, but they sure had a blast.  They didn't get as much candy as I anticipated, probably because of how slow they walked between houses.  We probably only made it to 8 or so houses, but it's not like they needed more candy anyway.  Everyone told them how cute they were, and they loved it.  The neighbors were "awww" inspired whenever Strawberry would tell them, "I Sweeping Beauty".

What cute girls, and a fun week.

My Trip to Hawaii

I am going to tell you about how wonderful and amazing my trip was, and then you can be jealous.  Heck, I'm even a little jealous, and I was there!  It was just so wonderfully peaceful and beautiful, and we were just feet from the ocean.  I think the best part was that we were in the non-tourist area, so it wasn't really ever crowded or loud.

First of all, our accommodations:

Sunrise, as seen from our balcony

Our condo was in the best imaginable location.  We were on the southernmost point of the island, so both sunrise and sunset were over the ocean.  Our balcony faced east, so we got to see sunrise every morning.


We did some really fun things:

Kevin and I at the Mini Golf Botanical Gardens

I wanted to go to one of the many botanical gardens, but they are fairly expensive as a rule.  We found this garden on the North Shore, and it was a garden with a twist: it's a mini golf course.  As you go from hole 1 to 18, there are plants arranged around the holes that show the botanical history of the island.  Thus, we start at hole 1 with native plants, there before anyone came here, and go through the polynesian, plantation,  asian, and current plants.   I took one picture at every hole, leaving me with a photographic history of the island.  I'll post them in a separate post.

At Kilohana Plantation

Apparently, Kauai used to be a big plantation island.  It isn't so much any more, but there are hundreds of fallow fields all over the island.  Because the island is so mountainous, the plantation owners employed terrace farming, so there are rock walls and overgrown fields in lots of hidden, out of the way places.  A few of the plantations are still open to the public for touring, and we went to Kilohana Plantation to do just that.  It has some shops and a train that goes all around the grounds, but we didn't do the train.  There is also a luau in the evening, but we didn't do that either.  Can we say expensive?  We walked around the grounds on our own, and they had some fields of sugar, papaya, and tapa root.

 Of course, we did other things, like shopping, sight-seeing, and snorkeling, but I don't really have any pictures of that.  I was too busy!

Sunset from our condo

And to top it all off, here is a picture of the sunset from some benches downstairs at our condo.  I love this picture.  It just reminds me of the waves, the cool breeze, and the smell of the ocean.  Aahhh.