Tour Break

We are officially on a break from touring, as Bev and Dick have now boarded a seven night island cruise. But let me back up a few days to catch you up. First, I will start with Friday night. I forgot to post this picture in my last entry, so here is a shot of Zander eating some spaghetti noodles with sauce, all on his own for the first time. Needless to say, we went straight from dinner to the bathtub.



On Saturday we headed down to one of our favorite beach areas on the island, the Ko Olina Resort, which is only about ten minutes from our house. Ko Olina is part of the Marriott family, and the resort is a mixture of condos, time-shares, and a hotel. When the resort was built, four lagoons were also built on the property. In order to have these lagoons, Marriott is required to keep the lagoons open to public use, but in order to keep the numbers down to a minimum, they built tiny parking lots for each lagoon. Lagoon 2 is our favorite lagoon, and I would guess that there are only about 16 parking spaces for this lagoon (Lagoons 1 and 3 similarly have tiny parking lots, while Lagoon 4 is a bit bigger but is still limited). As a result, you have to get there pretty early, so on Saturday we were there by about 8:30 a.m. and there were only a couple spots left. The upside of this, however, is that there were no more than forty people or so at the entire lagoon. Here are a couple pictures from our favorite spot.







While we were there, we had some visitors. Here is a bird that is fairly common around here, although I have no idea what kind it is. Do you know?



And here are a couple mongooses (they look like weasels). These little creatures were pretty brave and got fairly close to us, but I guess this isn't too surprising considering that they are known to attack large snakes. Fortunately there are no snakes in Hawaii. :)



As you can see, we wore Zander out, so he decided to take a nap right on our beach mat.



After a fun day at the beach, we spent the remainder of Saturday relaxing at home. On Sunday, Heather threw a birthday party for her son, Lane, at a local kids' gym. Here is Charley sitting with the birthday pirate, who is turning four years old.



And here are my boys enjoying themselves at the party.


After the party, Zander thoroughly enjoyed a Tootsie Pop.



On the way home we grabbed a Boston's pizza, which is definitely the best pizza we have found here. Their pizzas only come in one size . . . HUGE!! Actually, it's a 19" pizza, which is the largest I've ever seen, and boy are they good! Everyone enjoyed.

So I guess that brings us to today. Brian and the kids took Bev and Dick to the port right before noon, which gave me a little while to clean my floors (which were disgusting) and start working on the four loads of laundry that I had ahead of me. Around 1:00 Brian brought the kids home and then headed to Starbucks to get some studying done for some testing he has at work this week. So, I spent the rest of the day working on my laundry, catching up on email, and I even spent some time working in the back yard, cleaning out our plant beds while the kids played in our new beautiful yard.

I guess that about covers our happenings the past couple days. I plan on spending the week getting caught up on stuff and just hanging out with the kids, while Brian will be extremely busy at work with the Standardization Team in town (from Clearwater, Florida) for their annual check of the Air Station.

So that is what is new with us . . . what is new with you?