The Big Reveal

I recently came across a custom calendar that my dad had made for me and my siblings for Christmas last year. Each month featured a picture of us kids at different vacation destinations throughout our childhood. I started thumbing through it again when I came across the most mortifying picture of me. Believe me it is mortifying! In fact my son Grant was standing by the computer as I scanned it in and said "EEOOOOO!!!" (with disgust) And then he added with sweet compassion, "Don't worry mom, at least you're pretty now."


So I'm sure you all want to see the picture and I won't disappoint. But I do have to give a little background before you see it.


This photo was taken in Hawaii when I was 13 years old. My paternal grandparents lived on the island of Kaui for several years when I was growing up and my whole family went to visit them one summer. My family stayed a week, during which, this photo was taken. It's a picture of me and my siblings with my grandparents. I was lucky enough to get to stay a full extra month with my grandparents and my best cousin Stacey. Sounds like paradise, and it really was, except for one thing. My hair.


You see, about a month before going on vacation my mom decided I would look really cute with a chin length haircut. Being the obedient thirteen year old daughter that I was (I can hear you laughing dad), I followed my mom into the hair salon and let the hairdresser chop off my hair. The results were horriffic. It was a bad cut to begin with, then add to the fact that my hair curled up so tight it shrunk another couple inches! The hairdresser tried to weigh down the curl with some gel, but it was no use. Also consider that right about this time my nice soft curled locks were going through a puberty-driven transformation into coarse, tight curls which were extremely frizzy and dry. To make matters worse, soon after the haircut my little sister came home with head lice which she contracted from one of her classmates. By the time we found out she had lice, it was too late. When three sisters share the same bathroom, brushes, and hair supplies, it is inevitable. All three of us had lice. Because my hair was becoming so thick and wiry, it took two treatments of the dreaded lice shampoo and my mom nightly combing out the nits. Luckily I was ridded of lice before we left for Hawaii, but the two doses of lice shampoo took a heavy toll on my hair. It became extremely dry and even more unmanageable. One last thing to factor in. When we got to Hawaii I realized that the warm, humid, salty breeze in Hawaii didn't allow gel to keep a hold very well. Without gel I was toast.


Let's look at the equation:

bad haircut+hair changes due to puberty+2 doses of lice shampoo damage+Hawaiian breeze=









Count down with me now (drum roll please)...........

Three.....................



















Two.........................





















One.........................

(click picture to enlarge)

Now you all know why I have such long hair now. I was so traumatized by this haircut that I will never cut my hair shorter than my ability to pull it back safely into a bun or ponytail.

After you are all done chuckling, feel free to leave a comment. Don't worry, I can take it.

Hawaii by Joe

Hawaii for me was absolutely awesome. I've heard people talk about the beautiful beaches and breathtaking scenery, but was unable to really understand what they meant, until I actually arrived. The beaches are beautiful, the water is blue, the mountains are majestic, and its green everywhere. Plus, the rice is sticky, just like I like. I was pretty busy at the conference the whole time, but had fun eating local food, going to the beach, driving straight up a mountain on Like Like, and seeing the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. If you ever go to Waikiki, the Aqua Marina was only $85 a night, and close to the beach. Walmart is a 10 minute drive and had the best prices on souvenirs and even has a great teriyaki place called L&L. Here is a video I put together for my trip report at work.

Hawaii: Part 3

Here's the recap of the remainder of the Hawaii trip.

Tuesday, Joe was at the trade show all day. I bummed around at the beach and took a long nap at the hotel while he was there. That evening we went out to dinner with Judy's mom (Judy is one of Joe's friends from law school) who lives on Oahu. She took us to a Japanese buffet restaurant and there was TONS to eat. The food was really fresh and very good. I ate tons of tempura vegetables which are my favorite, as well as lots of other yummy things.

Here we are with Judy's mom at the mall by the Aloha Tower.

Wednesday Joe only had to do a half day at the trade show and he was finished by noon and they packed everything up. We spent the afternoon at the beach. Joe went out and tried to boogie board but didn't have a lot of success. He swam way out to where the surfers were because there weren't many waves close in. But way out there the waves were too big and he ended up being pounded by the them. The two guys from work he was boarding with wanted to stay out there, so he was out there for an hour. He was tired when he swam back in. I told him he needed to go to a beach that was good for boogie boarding in order to be successful. The beach we were on was better for casual swimming. The only waves were way out there and they were huge. A couple of people spotted a small hammerhead shark where I was swimming, so I got out of the water after that. I didn't want to risk getting bit, even if it was a small one.

I zoomed in on Joe swiming to shore after his battle with the waves.

That evening we went to another Japanese restaurant called Kobe with Joe's fellow co-workers. It was a restaurant like Shogun, where you sit at a bar that wraps around a huge cooking griddle. The chef comes out and cooks your food right in front of you with lots of fancy flair and fire. The atmosphere was fun and the food was excellent. Some of the best steak I've ever had. I even tasted the shrimp which I don't like and I was able to eat it. I wouldn't choose to fill up on it, but it was edible. That's saying something for me.

At the Japanese restaurant. You can see some of the food cooking on the bottom right.

Thursday we checked out of our hotel mid-morning, and we spent the day at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. The wait for the tour was very long. Almost three hours! If you ever go, get there early as soon as they open before the tour buses get there for the day. After you pick up your passes, you can leave the site and just show up at the time your tour is ready to start. So we left and found a place to eat lunch, went into a grocery store to buy candy for our trip, and drove back to the memorial. We arrived with about ten minutes to spare before our tour started. The tour really made me think about WWII and made it so much more real than a story in a history book. The people involved were real people, just like you and I, with families, dreams, and ambitions of their own. It's sad to think of war taking that away from people and at the same time makes me so incredibly grateful that people have sacrificed all of that in order to ensure that this incredible country we live in remains safe and free. I don't know how they find the strength and the courage to make that kind of a sacrifice but I am grateful to those men and women who have.

The U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor. It hovers over the remains of the sunken ship. You can see portions of the ship under the water and it's kind of sad to think that is the exact spot where thousands of people died. It's also hard to imagine that beautiful harbor engulfed in burning flames.

Inside the memorial. A wall of all the names of our military guys who died that day.

After our tour we went on a little drive, ate some dinner, and headed to the airport. The flight was uneventful and we came home to lots of happy children who had been taken care of by the best grandmas in the world!

Hawaii: Part 2

Monday I went on a tour of the island with a wife and son of one of Joe's co-workers. Our tour guide was named Yuki. He was from Okinawa, Japan, but had lived in Hawaii for over 20 years. His daughter attends WSU so that is how we got hooked up with him.

As we drove around the whole island of Oahu, Yuki informed us what certain plants were called and pointed out locations where scenes from Jurassic Park were filmed.

Our first stop was the Byodin Temple in Kane'ohe. It's a replica of a really large old temple in Japan. It was a neat place to visit and the grounds around it were beautiful.

In front of a koi fish pond on the grounds

Next we stopped at a macadamia nut farm where we could sample some macadamia nuts and Kona Coffee. I of course skipped the coffee sampling. Apparantly Kona coffee is very good and very expensive. Yuki smashed some fresh macadamia nuts open with a rock for us. They were as tasty in their natural state as they are toasted.

Yuki, our guide, cracking open some macadamia nuts for us

Next we were headed to the North shore to go look at a beach with lots of sea turtles. On the way there I started to get really car sick which is unusual for me. Luckily Yuki stopped at a shrimp stand because the other lady in the car loves shrimp. While he was ordering the shrimp I walked around and got some fresh air and started to feel better. But once we got back in the car the shrimp smell made it worse (I hate anything fish related when I'm pregnant). I tried to sleep until we got to the turtle beach and only opened my eyes long enough to glance at the Polynesian Cultural center and the LDS temple as we drove by. The temple was beautiful. I wish I could have got out and walked around it but I was feeling so sick I didn't even think about asking. I forced myself to sleep and we finally made it to the turtle beach. I was fine once I got out of the car.

There were tons of turtles searching for algae to eat right off the rocks on the beach, but none came out onto the sand. Yuki said they usually come out when there aren't so many tourists crowding the area. There were lots of tourists that day. I managed to get a couple of pictures of some turtles in the water.

We left the turtle beach and Yuki took us to a hamburger place and refused to let us pay, treating us to lunch. I can't remember the name of it but it was really good food and they had some nice shoe string french fries that were fun to eat.

Our next and final destination was the Dole pineapple plantation. They had a really big pineapple maze (like cornfield mazes) but Yuki said we couldn't go in there because it would take us two hours to get out and we didn't have that much time. The coolest thing about going there was that Yuki showed me what a ripe pineapple looks like. It was completely yellow with no green or brown on it. He said if you eat them before they are totally ripe you will get sores in your mouth, which is what always happens to me. It's because I've been eating unripe pineapple all this time. I ate pineapple every day in Hawaii and I never got a sore in my mouth. Amazing.

This is how yellow a ripe, edible pineapple should be

After leaving the pineapple plantation, Yuki drove us back to the hotel and I took a nap for about an hour until Joe finished up with his tradeshow. That night Joe and I walked to the nearby mall where we window shopped and ate dinner. It was a fun day!

Stay tuned for the details of the rest of our trip in Hawaii: Part 3

Hawaii: Part 1

We got home from our trip to Hawaii on Friday. Here are some of the details.

The Preparations

A couple weeks before our trip I tried on my bathing suit. I was appalled by two things. First of all, I was blindingly white, and secondly the design of my bathing suit really made my pooching stomach poke out. (I should mention here that I'm pregnant again--13 weeks along. I will post more about that later). I solved the tummy problem by finding a great swimsuit on sale that was specifically made for "tummy hugging" and it helped A LOT! I decided to solve my pale problem by buying some sunless tanning spray. The bottle promised a "natural looking tan" that gave "complete coverage" and was "streak free". MmmHmmm. It turned me orange, I had a couple of big spots where the spray missed, and a couple of big streaks down my leg. It was not cute. Luckily I tried it out a week before we left on our trip and it wore off by the time we headed for Hawaii. I ended up going as my natural white self. My mom flew into Pullman a couple of days before we left so she could get the routine down. She watched our kids the first half of the week, and Joe's mom watched the kids the second half of the week. Both grandmas were amazing and wonderful to take on all five kids! We are so grateful and appreciative of them both.

The Trip: Part 1

We arrived in Hawaii late Saturday night. It was dark, so we didn't see much of anything. We were surprised the next morning to wake up and see beautiful beaches right before our eyes. We were on the 38th floor of our hotel, and had a stunning view of Waikiki beach and the city of Honolulu. Joe and I got ready for the day, enjoyed the complimentary continental breakfast that the hotel offered and went for a walk on the beach.

Then I stayed at the hotel while Joe went to the convention center with his co-workers to set up for the tradeshow the next day. They were hoping to finish by noon, but ended up not finishing until 4:30 because of some problems with some of their display projects. That meant our plans to attend an afternoon meeting at a nearby LDS church were nixed and we were bummed. One of the co-workers wives, who came along with her husband, planned for our group to go to a luau that evening at the sea park. When Joe came home he was really sick. We're still not sure what caused it, but we think it was a combination of milk allergy mixed with some heat stroke from our morning walk. He could hardly walk or move when he got back to the hotel. We called the co-worker to cancel, but they said that they already made a reservation and had paid and it was non-refundable. I'm really shy and awkward at making conversation with strangers (I had never met the people we were on this trip with before), so I was really apprehensive, but with Joe's encouragement I decided to go. Joe stayed home and tried to recover.

The evening was really fun. There was a dolphin show and other sea life exhibits to see before the luau. Then we were all given fresh flower leis and seated at tables outside. They served the Hawaiin food buffet style and as we ate we watched the dancers perform different polynesian dances from several islands to traditional music. The food was good, the entertainment was good, and the atmosphere was really nice.

On the way to the Sea Park with our group from Joe's work

A sea creature on display at the sea park, underwater, inside it's tank



A fire dance performed at the luau

Part 2: coming soon!