Hawaii: Christmas Break, 2010

Katie and I went to Hawaii to visit her parents. And hey, it's Hawaii... Who can turn that opportunity down?

We justified the trip for a few reasons:

• This is the last time we would be able to go on a trip without having to juggle a kid.
• We wanted to visit Katie's parents anyway.
• It's Hawaii.
• Katie was off of school for the Christmas break, and Katie's parents didn't have a whole lot to do that week too because their students were also off for the Christmas break.
• No housing/car costs for while we were there. As Katie says, everyone needs to have parents who live in a tropical paradise to go visit.
• We wanted to.

Because I know I usually ignore/skim everyone's excessively wordy blog posts, I'm going to let pictures and captions do most of the describing here.

12.25.2010

Departure.

Christmas day was extended 3 hours because of the change in time zones. The Borens gave us some nice Christmas gifts, the most memorable of which was probably the pink girly Hawaii baby clothes, telling us that we are in fact having a girl (We mailed them the ultrasound telling the gender without seeing it ourselves beforehand).

12.26.2010

I worked Christmas eve night for a 12-hour night shift. After staying awake for most of that day on airplanes, I had the best night of sleep in the world that night.

Church in the AM. The branch was severely depleted in numbers for the Christmas break. Katie was nominated piano player.

The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, or "Punchbowl national cemetery." I missed the origins of that name/nickname. Regardless, it's a memorial cemetery for military personnel, notably those involved in the Pearl Harbor bombings. Sobering.

We took a drive up in the mountains and jungle around Honolulu. Fun plants. I want a yard with a jungle in it. And not just because you don't have to mow it...

Phil and Reesa Boren's apartment, where we were, is in the building at the end of the arrow here, on the other side.

We went for a walk along the beach.

And yes, they decorate for Christmas, complete with "let it snow" signs, snowmen figurines, and snowflakes. I didn't see a bit of the actual stuff there.

12.27.2010

We went to Pearl Harbor. I'll let the pictures (see slide show above) tell the story.

That night, we did Family Home Evening with the Boren's institute group. We made home-made pizza.

12.28.2010

Up to the North side of the island. We went to the Laie temple, and then to the Polynesian Cultural Center. Tasty food. Good show.

This was kind of fun:  There were shops and such set up for people to walk through to get to the show.  Katie grabbed one of these shells and blew in to it.  There was a near immediate swarm of kids to both tables with these shells on them as people tried to figure out how to blow in them to make it make a sound.

Earlier at the PCC, we tried our hands at something called "Poi balls."  I'm posting the videos here of our attempts, and of people there who actually knew what they were doing.

Example one:  What it should be like:

Example two:  Finally a bit of success when we were able to accomplish one little move:

12.29.2010

We went to the "Swap meet" in Honolulu: Essentially a tourist trap place where vendors set up stands outside of a stadium, and sell you touristish things. I thought this was kind of fun actually.

We then went back to the PCC.

12.30.2010

We had planned on going to Hanauma Bay. When we got there, they had closed it because it was full, so we drove on and decided to do a nice lil' hike we had read about. We were under the impression that this was going to be a simple walk down a 1 1/4 mile path to see a pretty waterfall and walk back, and that's it. Wow. We were so, so wrong. Katie is the only one of us who even thought to bring a water-bottle. The hike took 4 hours because it was incredibly muddy, slippery, and obstacle-ish. I didn't bring my cell phone because, again, I thought it was a simple walk in the park. There we were: a type 1 diabetic, a pregnant lady, a man with two hips and a knee replacement (with the other knee in very bad shape) and his actually very healthy wife. I was worried that we were going to have to leave via medical helicopter, but then again, I didn't even have a cell phone to call one... It's a hike that was actually a very pretty and interesting jungle type hike. The plant life was great! The waterfall at the end was fun, with people jumping from both sides of the canyon into the waterfall pool. I was even swinging from large tree vines at one point. Would I ever do that again in our circumstances? Absolutely not. Besides mom and dad Boren, the people who were down there were almost all young, healthy mid twenties type people. I'm glad we made it out of there with little to report or repair.

We relaxed that evening.

12.31.2010

We woke up early this day to do Hanauma bay so that we wouldn't get turned away again. We saved about $30 by going early too. Nobody was asking us for money, and we found out that if you go there before 7 am, you don't have to pay.

The pictures pretty much tell this story too. We saw hundreds of colorful tropical fish, and sea-turtle sightings too. I had 4 sea-turtle sightings. I'm not sure how many of those were the same one, but it was fun. We couldn't touch it, but it wasn't really afraid of people looking at it as it ate algae off of the rocks.

Afterward, the group appeased me as I went body-surfing for a while. Fun stuff! I could spend hours upon hours doing that. It also reminds you of how weak you are when the ocean is throwing you around underneath a wave, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

We ate at Duke's restaurant in Waikiki with the Boren's missionary people. If there's tasty food, count me in.

1.1.2010

We drove to the West side of the island to do some whale watching. We saw one whale out there, and a couple of "maybe" whales. Katie saw one that none of us saw, so it doesn't count :).

We left this night on an overnight flight from Honolulu.  We didn't get much sleep on the airplane, but Katie got a bit in Las Vegas on the floor of the airport.

Very fun trip.  A huge thanks to the Borens for letting us come hang out with them for a week.

Alien Baby Pictures

Actually, the baby looks a lot more like a baby than it has before - nothing too incredibly alien about it.

It's a... 

Actually we're not absolutely certain if it's a boy or a girl yet. The first thing I said to the ultrasound tech was, "We want to know, but we don't want to know right now..." The plan was to have the tech write the gender on one of the pictures without us watching and then we'd send it off to Hawaii. Since my mom isn't going to be here for the birth, I thought it would be a fun to have her find out first and then buy me something pink/blue to open when we go see them on Christmas Day.

So that's what we did. I pre-stamped and addressed an envelope to my parents the night before and had it waiting in the car to put into the mailbox ASAP. We have a pretty good guess what it is from being there for the whole thing, but we won't know for sure until Christmas. Since we're going to Hawaii, we decided not buy presents, so this will be the perfect thing to open!

Here are a few more pictures of the alien... baby. And one of "the bump" since that's what prego people are supposed to do these days.

I just thought this one was so cute with the crossed legs (knees to feet - left to right)

Cute little finters (fingers, for you non-Boren folk)

What cool technology we have these days - 3D ultrasound! I love how the baby put its hands in front of its face. "Hey! I'm sleeping in here!"

The PUs are in Hawaii

For those of you who don't use PUs as an acronym for Parental Units... now is the time to start.

My parents are off in Hawaii serving a CES mission and Brett and I are living in their house to make sure it doesn't blow away. They were also concerned about the dog and about the yard. So here are some photos (mostly for their benefit), in order to convince them that we have it all under control.

First, pictures of the yard and miscellaneous Halloween stuff. (To view the slide show at your own pace, click the pause button then use the arrows).



Then some shots of the dog doing what he does best - eating bread.

Fire in Herriman!

We may not have school tomorrow because of a fire started by machine gun testing at Camp Williams. The original plan was to have the people evacuated coming to Fort Herriman Middle School, but now it is in the fire danger zone. The main problem is air quality. They don't want people coming to school if the air is unbreathable. As far as I know, no houses have been burnt yet... but hundreds of people have been evacuated to the new Herriman High School.
Crazy!

Too my friend and firefighter, Wendy - go get 'em and save my school!

Here's the official news story.

I'm blogging about a grey blob.

I told Katie she should blog it.  She told me that I should blog it "...from a man's perspective."


Okay.  I will.


Last time we did this, Katie had an ultrasound that showed a gestational sac with nothing inside.  This time it had a grey blob.  And yeah, just one of them (we were worried there might be two).  The blob had a heart rate of a hundred fifty-something and is less than 1 cm.  EDD: April 28.

The original image.
And apparently the blob is already able to form simple sentences, telepathically send them to the radiology tech, and have her write them on the screen for us.  I didn't know Radiology techs got that kind of training...

Enhanced to show detail.
...You know, using that same "enhancement" technology they use on macho hero-man shows when the surveillance camera footage is absurdly blurry, but it magically gets "enhanced" to a crisp, clean image of the perpetrator.

Warning:  Objects in ultrasound arrive sooner than they appear.

The Fish (baby.,, not pinata this time).

So, like Brett said in our last post - yes, we did just find out that we're having a baby. I'm not very far along yet (only 5 weeks and 2 days... yes I'm that meticulous in counting), but we're very hopeful that we'll make it to full term this go around. The baby will be due around April 24th (which is pretty much perfect since there's only 6 weeks left of the school year after that - thank heavens for maternity leave!).

If that's all you want to know... I'd stop reading at this point, because the rest of this post is going to be somewhat wordy and emotional (but I'm pregnant, I'm allowed to be emotional).

There are a couple reasons why I want to document this (although it may seem strange to do it publicly)... I want other people who may be going through or who may go through a similar experience to know that I'm definitely willing to talk to them about it. I'm also just soooo happy that it's hard to explain it without describing the opposite. And because this is our family journal, and this is a big family moment. 

If you're wondering what that "this go around" phrase was all about, that's probably because you didn't know that I miscarried last January. I was super excited because my two sisters, Anne and Sarah, were due in June (a month before me), and we just knew Ali would be getting pregnant soon too (which she did). And Cambrie was pregnant on Brett's side of the family (although that ended tragically as well, about a week after my miscarriage). A week after my first prenatal appointment, I started bleeding and was diagnosed with a blighted ovum. Basically, I was a mess. I'm not sure how Brett could stand to be so patient with me crying all the time. But he was amazing as usual, and not only put up with me, but was a huge support when I needed it most.

I thought I'd get over it pretty quickly, especially because I thought I'd be able to get pregnant again pretty quickly. Every month that passed was a disappointment, and I'd be a crazy, bawling, psycho wife for my poor husband. My sisters had their babies, and my baby's due date came and went without any celebration. I finally went to the Dr. because things just weren't normal, and he put me on Clomid... and apparently it worked! I'm a little nervous about twins though, since Clomid can increase the chances of multiples, but I'm not going to worry about that until the ultrasound.

It's amazing to me how closely our emotions are tied to our spiritual strength. I was feeling absolutely horrible... I was in the "depths of despair" (to quote a movie, but actually mean it...). I felt like my faith was at an all time low (in my little brain it made sense to me that if I had enough faith, I would have gotten the answer to my prayer - a new pregnancy - a long time ago). I figured, I just didn't have enough, therefore, no miracle. But of course, all of those scriptures about how "faith proceeds the miracle," "ye will have no sign until after the trial of your faith," "this will be but a little moment," etc. all came to my mind this last month. My awesome mother-in-law asked our family to fast and pray together this last month because there are individual things each of her children needed (and she knew what my particular trial was). I'm very grateful for my family's collective and individual faith - it truly helped to strengthen my own.

We teach primary, and yesterday the sharing time was about how Faith and Miracles come together (like peanut butter and jelly). And so, I figure... it's a miracle to me that we're having a baby - so maybe I do have enough faith after all.

There is amazing truth to the "opposition in all things" law - perhaps I needed to go through "despair" so that I could fully appreciate how incredibly happy I am right now. I told Brett I'll try not to complain about fatigue, nausea, or any other type of physical discomfort related to having a baby because that's just it - I'm having a baby!

And so - for those of you who wanted to know - that's the whole story. 

I gots me a new job!

Me, you know, in my vinyl-fence hospital
habitat, ready to totally save some life, yo.

For approaching 3 years, I've been working for Utah Valley Regional Medical Center on the 7th floor (Medical-Oncology Department).  It's a non-stop usually crazy-busy department, but my coworkers were great to work with, and the department forces you to learn a lot -- quick.  My upcoming grad school applications from what I've been reading will want me to have critical care experience, so I'm switching jobs.  Same hospital, different department.  I'll be on the 2nd floor of UVRMC ("IMC" for those of you who know the place).

It should give me some good ol' critical care experience with some good old-fashioned intubated patients, and fancy gizmos and such.  I'm excited for it.  I've been on the floor for school stuff, and they've got a good group of people down there.

I start on Monday with some training and additional certifications, and then I'll ultimately be doing night shift (again) which Katie isn't particularly keen about.  Oh well.  I do what I need to do to support my wife and child. (Oh yeah, and by the way, we just found out she's prego)