Beach day #2

It was Caleb's birthday on Saturday and we celebrated by going to the beach!  I will do a separate post for his birthday...but wanted to post the pictures from the beach and the Halona Blowhole.  The blowhole wasn't doing much in the way of blowing, but there were lots of whales out...so we watched them!  Very cool!  The picture is from my phone, so the whale spout is tiny...but they were very awesome to watch!

The turtle and the shrimp trucks

Today we drove to the North Shore to see if we could see a sunning green sea turtle and have lunch at the "famous" shrimp trucks.  We had good luck!  Brutus was just coming out of the water when we drove up!

After picking up a hamburger for Marcia at Ted's Bakery (which has DELICIOUS rolls...well actually all their food is good...), we drove up to the shrimp trucks.  Dar and I got the fried shrimp (the were in a spring roll type wrapper and then fried) and Dar's dad got the garlic shrimp.  He let us try some and his was very good, but also VERY messy!  I'm glad we got the fried kind.  It was already peeled and ready to eat.  The garlic kind was in a sauce and you had to peel each one before eating it.

Dad enjoying his garlic shrimp

After eating we went to a cool antique shop and a roadside farmer's market.  It was a fun afternoon.

Meeting old friends...and a huge turtle

We drove to Laie today to meet up with a friend of mine from high school and her husband.  I met Jennifer when we were 11 years old.  Her birthday is the day before mine and we had a double slumber party together at my house when we both turned 12.  I don't really know when I met TJ, but we went to high school together too. =)  TJ served his mission here in Hawaii, and this was the first time he had been back to visit.  They were staying with Jennifer's sister Tara, who's husband is stationed here in Oahu with the Navy.  I love being able to see so many people who come here to visit Hawaii.

Jennifer and I in the visitors center at the Laie Temple

Jennifer and TJ

Laie Temple

The family.

After visiting with Jenn and TJ, we drove to Laniakea beach on the north shore of Oahu to see if any turtles were out basking in the sun.  We were luck enough to see one big turtle!  There are volunteers who keep watch over the turtles so people don't bother them.  They put a red rope around the turtles as a kind of safety zone for the sun-bathing turtles.

Some Stuff

I am still just barely keeping up with my homework, but I have to take a break from it.  (24 photography assignments, 7 economics assignments, and 2 accounting assignments).  This picture was for my photography class.  We have to take one picture of each color in the color wheel (light, not paint wheel)...so that would be red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, and magenta.  This is for my magenta photo.

Anyhow, in way more exciting news...WE PAID OFF OUR VAN!!!!  I had to get our taxes done asap (so I could file for the FAFSA and some scholarships before Feb 15th)...and we ended up getting a nice return.  We decided to pay off my van and buy a new mattress for our bed (we are both having our arms/legs/hips go numb during the night...getting old is fun).  We had about a year left to pay on the van, but it was so exciting to just get it done early!  I got the title for it on Saturday!  We are going to apply the money we were paying for the van towards our boat now...I think it is called a snowball payment or something...anyway, so we will be able to pay that off faster now (especially since the van payment is more than twice what we are paying monthly for the boat)!  I am super excited to be actually paying off debt in a productive way.  It is a great feeling!  When the boat is done, we are going to put the van and boat payments into the truck payment and see if that can go away as well!  I'm hoping to have those paid off in the next two and a half to three years.

All the kids are doing good...Darwin is good.  London's gerbil had six more babies on the 8th!  We gave three gerbils to the Pierces on the 6th (Saturday) and I took the dad and the one baby boy out of the tank then too (since Toto was looking really fat again and they mate as soon as the female gives birth).  I thought I would have at least a week before she gave birth, but two days later Brooklin was trying to pet Toto, and I heard her yelled, "EWWW!  There are babies in here!"  The first set of babies were only 37 days old!  Anyway, we gave another two away on Monday of this week, so now we have one baby girl and the dad left to find homes for, for now...and then six more babies in four and a half weeks.  Isaiah is keeping one of the first babies (a tan girl) to replace his boy gerbil.  The factory has been turned off! thank goodness!  I think he named his new baby gerbil Peanut Butter...but he isn't sure he wants that name for her...lol.

Well, that is all I can think of.  I love school, but it is sure harder this semester than I thought it was going to be!

Raven, Pumpkin, Owl, Bear.

We went up to the glacier visitor's center on Jan 2nd. My camera ran out of battery half way through our trek back from visiting the waterfall. I had my phone with me, and took these pictures of the kids up at the visitor's center. I just pulled all the pictures off my phone, so I will make a few posts with pictures from my phone.

Toto-chaos

So...are you all tired of hearing about our gerbils?? haha! They are like the new TV in our home. All the kids gather around their cage and just watch them. The babies are now 15 days old and have decided that they don't have to stay in their nest anymore. Toto (the mommy) doesn't know what to do. For the past two days they have been escaping out of the nest and Toto will chase them down and drag them back...the only problem is that when there are seven of them escaping at the same time it is kind of a loosing battle. The little buggers don't even have their eyes open yet, and they just come rocketing out of their nest at full speed and run willy-nilly all over the place. We were all laughing so hard this evening at them! The kids have coined the term "Toto chaos"...for when Toto was trying to round up her babies and they weren't having any of it.

In other news, Brooklin has been sick since Friday with the pukes. She woke me up at 2am Friday night and within two hours had heaved about 15 times. She ended up sleeping on the bathroom floor, and Saturday morning she tried to stand up to walk to her bed and blacked out (hitting her head on a wall when she fell)! She stayed down all of Saturday and today she stayed home from church. She hasn't thrown up anything today, so I hope the worst is past...and I really hope that no one else gets it! She was just bawling there on the bathroom floor at 4am and in between heaving, asked me to go and wake up Darwin so he could give her a priesthood blessing. She was able to get some rest after that. I am so grateful for having a priesthood holder in our home!

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so no one has school. Right now I'm not sure we have anything planned other than sleeping in...hehe. Everyone goes back to school on Tuesday. I don't have a Tuesday class, but I start my next semester on Wednesday. I am taking an Accounting class, an Economics class, and the next digital photography class...9 credits. I haven't taken any business type classes yet, so I don't know anything about how they will go. We'll see!

Everyone else is doing good. We keep praying for snow but so far whenever we get any snow, it rains on it for the next week and it is all gone. We haven't been able to go sledding once this year!

Gerbil babies

The little gerbil babies are getting cuter. There are five black ones and two tan ones...and we haven't picked them up to try and figure out if they are boys or girls yet. They have fur now, but their eyes are still closed. I read that it takes about 17 days for their eyes to open, so they should be opening around Tuesday. They are starting to get out of the nest, but the mama puts them right back in. They are constantly chirping too...it sounds like we have a bunch of birds in our house! Isaiah decided to rename his gerbil because Buttercup wasn't a very manly name, so he has decided to call him Ron Weasley!

7 days old



10 days old

Surprise (x 7)!!

so...

our black gerbil (Toto) had SEVEN babies on Saturday morning!!! It's that story where you think you have two girls, and you really don't because the teenager at the pet store just really doesn't know...and now you have a little gerbil factory going on in your house. =/

Buttercup & Toto

Hike to Boy Scout Beach

We got to rest for about an hour, and then we got back in the car and drove out to the trail head for the Boy Scout camp. The trail to the camp (where Brooklin is attending Girl's Camp) is 1.5 miles out...so we hiked another 3 miles this evening. Brooklin was in a skit with some of the other girls. She was the "star" of the skit. She was the new girl at school and was trying to figure out where she fit in. She played the part well, and it was cute. We gave her a few hugs and then hiked back out to the car.

On the way out, we got to see two porcupines. They were kind of cute. They heard me coming (bear bells again) and were scurrying up a tree. They sat still so I could take their pictures. A little further down the trail, Darwin started pointing and waving us over. He had spotted a bear out in the water catching fish. I really didn't want to see the bear, but he was a good 100 yards and a river crossing away, so I took his picture too, but it was a little nerve-racking. Then I decided that since we were close and it was 9 pm...we should try to see another bear at Eagle Beach. We drove another 2 miles down the road and parked. Within a minute we spotted a bear jumping around in the water. He was also quite a ways away, so none of the bear pictures are very close up...but I did not want to be any closer to them! I just wanted Micah and Cori to be able to see a bear.

When we got home, we were all completely wiped out. We had ice cream for dinner (since we didn't eat lunch until 4:30 pm because of the first hike) and then we all crashed.

Low tide

Today we had one of the lowest tides of the year. It was a -4 tide, which I learned was -4 feet down from sea level...not out. The water was out from the regular shoreline was like 100 yards! We went out at 8:30 this morning and got to stay out for a few hours. We had fun with our friends laughing and finding critters. I had to go home around 11:30 to work on my English homework, but Wendy said she could take the kids home later so they could stay and play longer...and I could have some quiet time to work on my paper.

Brooklin was the dirtiest of my kids. She picks up everything and had goo and mud all over herself. She is not afraid to play in the mud. Here she is pretending to eat an eel...the kids found tons of them, and then a shot of a clam she opened. She only had to think for a minute how to get it opened...the same way the birds do it! She tried to pry it open, and then decided to drop it on a rock! Smart girl! She picked off the top shell and then inspected the gooey contents with gusto!

London is a little more like me. She will touch some of the critters, but doesn't like to get herself that dirty. I don't like to touch any critters...so she is better than me, but has her limits. Isaiah has no problem getting messy either. He found this starfish and also a crab and some eels.

You can see where the normal shore line is...and it is really far out there! The first picture is from the beach, and the second one was taken with my heels in the water looking back at the beach.

This boat was left high and dry when the tide went out...two hours later when the tide was coming back in, I took another picture of it refloating.

This is a heron. He is hard to see, but while I was watching him, he snapped a fish right out of the water.

The tide was so far out, that this person's crab pot came clear out of the water! It was really funny! The buoy didn't have any identifying markings on it (which is totally illegal), so when Caleb and his friend harvested the dungonuss crab out of it, I didn't get after them too bad. They left the bait, and actually added another fish head they found to the pot, so maybe that guy was able to catch more crabs after the tide came back in.

These are sea anemones. They are everywhere. In the water they look pretty. Out of the water they look like big, slimey, colorful, boogers! (and worse) They were really interesting...I touched one (on accident) and instead of the fingers being slimy, they were like tiny velcro. It stuck to my finger and I jumped! =)

We found several tiny crabs. Caleb is yelling at his for trying to pinch him.

You will have to click on this first picture...I caught a salmon jumping out of the water. They were jumping all over! The other is a shell from an urchine.

Some starfish...some big and some really tiny! Oh, and then a picture of me...haha! I actually took it after I got home. I braided my hair for pioneer day! =)