fab fourth

I thought we needed to do something different this year. Last year we were in Sacramento for the fourth and had a great time. Every previous year we've joined in on the morning (admittedly fairly lame) community festival in our town, which two years ago they girls proclaimed as boring and wanted to leave pretty soon after it got going.

This year I thought we'd find out what goes on in what will soon be our new town and it turns out there were a few options.

So in the morning we joined a community parade that got going much later than advertised, and wasn't very interesting. Okay, noted, there's going to be a bit of a learning curve here.

Then we went on to the next activity, which is some music and food and activities at a park. This turned out to be a pretty good time. The music was much better than I expected.



The girls loved the red, white, or blue shaved ice and BBQ lunch. They got their faces painted and guessed how many red, white, and blue jelly bellies were in a huge jar, and we met up with some friends and all the kids played barefoot in a nearby creek for a while.


Before we left the girls tried out the dunk tank game, and their recent softball skills served them well.

We spent the later afternoon at Uncle Jeff's for swimming, and then met up with cousins Jake and Brayden in a park close to us to watch the great firework show from our local high school.

Happy Birthday, America!

easter saturday

Easter itself seems to involve enough stuff to do but no weekend is uneventful around here and the day before Easter, Erin and Kate volunteered to be in a local Easter parade with some of the other Highland dancers.


They first posed for some pictures with a local pipe and drum band that they would be following in the parade, and then they were off.


It was a really short parade route of about a half mile and they stopped at about mid-way to perform a dance for the crowd.





Then they came around the block and back to the beginning and did the route a second time. John and Allison passed out candies on one side of the street to kids along the parade route, and I passed out candy on the other side. And Erin and Kate got to practice their "parade wave" while walking down the street in between dances.

Later than afternoon the twins had a softball game and they had a great time. Kate made another out while playing first base again. Allison had a couple of great hits and here are some of the better pictures I managed this time:

scavenger hunt

On friday the girls colored a ton of eggs and this morning a finding they baskets they headed out to the backyard to find all kinds of plastic eggs filled with different candies. I got started turning those colored eggs into deviled eggs while they were hunting,

Later, with two desserts and the eggs finished, we headed up to Grandma's where "EB" had a whole scavenger hunt set up. Each of the girls got a decoder chart:

And after a location was revealed by the code the girls raced off to that place and there each of them had another clue to solved.

Extra goodies were hidden away along with the new clues and some more colored eggs. I think they visited 5 locations at Grandma's house in all, and by the end they had a truly impressive haul.

Jeff's dog enjoyed the easter hunt also. He found a couple of eggs before the girls did he and decided they were delicious.



And we finally got to sit down and enjoy the true meaning of easter--ham.

the easter miracle

We had a truly remarkable easter miracle on this fine easter sunday!
Here's the back story:
Late last summer I stocked up on extra summer clothes for the girls: bathing suits and cover ups and swim shirts and sandals. All these things were purchased (on clearance!) in preparation for our december trip to Hawaii, at which time finding good kids' beach clothes would be a lot tougher. The girls always wanted flip-flop sandals but I always preferred getting them a pair that doesn't slide off and has a better sole, so that they could wear them to school on hot days and to amusement parks and such where a lot of walking is involved.

But I happened to see some flip-flops which looked better-made than most and on sale very cheap. I bought them and asked the girls to only wear them to their swim lessons so that they would still be in decent enough shape by the time december came around. It turns out that they wore them a little more than just to swim lessons--they often liked wearing them around the house for some reason.

One day about two weeks before our Hawaii trip I saw one of Erin's flip-flops on her floor and I asked her to put her shoes and some other things away. After a couple of minutes she told me she couldn't find the other sandal so I told her to look under her bed and under her dresser and in her closet, but still nothing. So I began looking with her all over her room and I couldn't find the missing sandal either.

For the next two weeks I looked everywhere, and I mean, really, everywhere around the house for that sandal. I was tremendously frustrated and I wasn't going buy another pair. The other shoe was at home, certainly, somewhere. Erin thought the other sandal could be in the backyard, which I thought seemed strange since one was in her room, but we looked there too. And John looked.

So our Hawaii trip came and went and Erin wore her other sandals while we were there, and we still saw no sign of the missing sandal when we returned. I figured we'd never see it again until we packed up to move.

Then today while the kids hunted for easter eggs in the backyard, Erin found the missing sandal:



And now I know what exactly to do if we ever lose something at home again. Note to self: It's much easier to spread out some candy-filled eggs and have the kids find what you are looking for rather than spend two weeks turning the house upside down.

hawaii 2.0

We spent the first week of the kids' winter break with John's entire extended family in Kona, on the big island of Hawaii. We stayed at Kona Village, the same place we visited in 2006. John's mom and dad used to visit there at least every other year. I think Dora said this was her 11th stay there. She and Jim visited the other islands too over the years, but nothing they found compared to Kona. John and Jeff and Sue have each been there a number of times as well. I suppose it's the unofficial fergy-19's Hawaiian destination.

It's an amazing place. Each couple or family stays in an individual Hale. There are some along the beaches, some back in the forest, some near the ponds on the property. There are no locks on the doors.




The twins stayed with us in one Hale,

Erin stayed with Grandma in another. The older cousins had Hales for themselves, Sue and Derik and their 3 little girls were in a large one with two rooms.

Everyone eats breakfast and lunch outside on patios adjacent to the beach with a gigantic buffet,

and dinner is outside where we have a choice of two different patio areas also adjacent to the Kona village beach. Life is pretty rough.


We arrived at lunch time on sunday the 19th and as soon as we finished eating the girls wanted to go swimming. The kids' pool area has a large shallow wading pool with a waterfall and a deeper large swimming pool next to it.



Quite a change in attitude from their last trip to the pools there:

This entire side of the big island is covered in black lava rock and that rock was used everywhere in Kona village, from the pools to the ponds to the patios. I don't think there is any other type of plentiful stone to be found.

Cousin Lucy joined the girls in the "turtle pool", the wading pool in the kids' area.


As the kids swam we ordered the first of many pina coladas and everyone was in the Hawaiian spirit.



Right outside our Hale, on our way to dinner the first evening. The weather was nicely warm but intermittently cloudy.

As we sat at dinner we felt occasional rain drops, every now and then, which went on that way for about an hour. Then suddenly it was definitely sprinkling, and then raining hard. We were ushered into a small indoor dining room to finish dinner.

I was really caught off guard by the rain. The weather forecast said mostly sunny for that day and the entire next week, I had last looked at it just a couple of hours before dinner. But 5 minutes after it started raining the forecast changed to hard rain and thunderstorms for the next 3 days. I thought our vacation would turn into a disaster. There is literally nothing to do indoors. Kona Village is set up for exclusively outdoor living. They have very little indoor spaces of any kind and what they have isn't large enough to accommodate everyone at meals. There aren't any indoor activities. The Hales are small and have no TVs, radios, etc.

Fortunately for us, the forecast for rain was about as accurate as the forecast for sun. It did rain for a couple of hours that first evening, and it lightly sprinkled again for about an hour during our luau, but other than that we enjoyed mostly sunny skies.

Kona Village's main beach area:

Always beautiful scenery as you walk along the paths weaving around and through the property.

And we had a great time catching up with the whole family and seeing the big cousins and small cousins spend time together.



Dora with all 8 granddaughters:



Kona Village's beach is well-known for the sea turtles who frequent the waters in the area and also climb up on the beach in the afternoon to rest and snooze for the night. It was never very hard to find some sleepy turtles.

Several more posts on our trip to come...