Family Friday: Dec 6

Cameron turns 15 months old this weekend!  Next Friday I will post her 15 month photos because we didn't get them taken yet.  We had multiple days in a row of cloudy, rainy weather which is unusual for where we live.  It rains somewhere on the island every day but Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam is usually in a bubble of sunshine even if it's raining ½ a mile away. 

Cameron has been all about books, dolls, and music lately.  This girl loves to read!  She spends a lot of her play time every day looking through her books.

She is sitting on our tote of Christmas things in the photos above.  She figured out to climb up there all by herself so we left it out for a couple days.  She was so excited and proud of herself for getting up there on her own the first time!  I'm thankful that I caught her excitement on video:

Cameron has a few baby dolls and plays with all of them but there is one that she is becoming really attached to.  It's the Hasbro Baby Alive Luv N Snuggle that was a gift at her baby shower.  It's a soft doll with a rattle inside.  She carries this doll everywhere, stuffs it inside takes it for rides in her push and ride car, reads books with it, and gives it kisses.  It's super cute to watch her!

Cameron still loves taking Dulce for walks.  Dulce, on the other hand, is now more interested in lizard hunting so we have to pull her away to go on a walk.

Cameron plays the keyboard every day.  She is playing with more gusto now and is using both hands and more keys.  She even knows which buttons to push to get the demo music clips to play.  She loves to dance and will move and shake anytime she hears music, even if it's only me singing.

Two hands apparently just aren't enough!  Cameron realized this week that she can also play the piano with her feet.  I predict that she will be quite the musician someday :)

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"Childhood is the most beautiful of all life's seasons."

~Author Unknown

O Christmas Tree

This will be the 7th Christmas together for Johnnie and I and we have never had a proper Christmas tree before!  The first year (still dating) we put up a small fake one at his house.  Christmas #2, #3, and #4 we didn't bother with a tree because we were traveling.  Christmas #5 we were in Korea and didn't decorate at all.  Last year Johnnie was deployed so I only decorated a very small fake tree and it didn't feel much like Christmas.

This year we went to Helemano Farms in Wahiawa to choose and chop down a Christmas tree.  This was my first time ever going to a tree lot to choose a Christmas tree.  It was a lot of fun and I look forward to doing this every year from now on as a family!

Helemano Farms only had Norfolk Island Pines available this year but that was perfect for our first Hawaiian Christmas together as a family!  The Norfolk Island Pine is a triangular shaped tree with symmetrical circles of branches evenly spaced on a thin trunk.  It is affectionately referred to as the "Hawaiian Christmas tree" as very few actual Christmas trees are grown here.  Traditional Christmas trees have to be shipped here (like everything else), traveling almost 3,000 miles by cargo ship across the ocean from Washington and Oregon.

The neat thing about Norfolk Island Pines is that they don't need replanted every year like other Christmas trees.  Once the top of the tree is chopped off, it regrows!  It's a tree that keeps giving - perfect for Christmas :)

The needles of this tree are very pliable so it is a much softer tree than it appears to be.  The trunk has needles sticking out all over like a cactus but they bend when you touch them.  We had no problem pushing our way through thick branches wearing shorts and t-shirts.  Hahahaha... shorts and t-shirts to pick out a Christmas tree :)

The branches of this tree will not hold a lot of weight.  You can hang heavier ornaments close to the trunk but you have to hang lightweight ornaments on the rest.  I actually had to use wire to attach a chopstick to the back of the top of the tree to make it firm enough to put something very lightweight on top.  We have a tree angel and a few ornaments that we collected over the years but left most of them packed up this year because they were too heavy.

I gave Cameron a bag full of lightweight felt star ornaments that I bought in Korea.  She had a blast helping me decorate the tree!  After she piled them all on, she shook the branch to make sure they wouldn't fall off :)

We bought some small ocean-colored bulbs and used some starfish that I had in my crafting supplies.  I used crafting wire to attach a large starfish to the top of the tree, and used wire and beads to create starfish ornaments to hang from the branches.  I wrapped burlap around the tree stand in lieu of the tree skirt that I haven't made yet.

Christmas lights photography tip:  If you have a camera that you can set to Aperture Priority (Av) mode, set the aperture to a large number to make the lights look like little starbursts.  The aperture for the photo below was set to f/16.  You'll also want to set your camera on something steady like a piece of furniture or a tripod to get a clear photo because the shutter will be open longer.

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"Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree.

 In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall."

~Larry Wilde

Family Friday: Happy Thanksgiving!

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  This is my favorite holiday - lots of amazing food and no obligation for presents.  Here on this island, we don't have any family to spend the holiday with but we were blessed to have some great friends come celebrate with us!

I dressed the table with a neutral tablecloth and then used a strip of fabric as table runner, topped with a piece of burlap.  One of our sweet guests brought the beautiful flowers!  Everyone brought some side dishes and we ended up with quite a feast: turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls, sushi, homemade poke, pumpkin cheesecake, and bread pudding.  Everything was delicious.

Johnnie was in charge of cooking the turkey this year and he did an amazing job!  This was actually the first turkey we ever cooked ourselves.  It was a huge bird... 27 pounds of deliciousness!  We put a pretty good dent in it ourselves, sent a few meals to friends, and still have a ton of leftovers.  I hear a turkey pot pie recipe calling our name...

Cameron loved the attention of everyone in the house.  I don't think she has ever laughed that much in one day before!  She went down for an afternoon nap just before we ate - perfect timing :)

Dulce also loved the attention from everyone and loved the turkey dinner we gave her.

Johnnie was deployed last Thanksgiving so this is our first one together as a family!  It was perfect.

We did not go out shopping for the Black Friday sales.  Traffic and crowds are bad every day of the year here so this one day of sales makes that exponentially worse.  On an island of over 1 million people, there are only 5 Walmarts, 2 Targets, 2 Best Buys, 1 Toys R Us, 1 Babies R Us, etc...  you get the picture, there are limited stores and parking spaces here for that many people to all be shopping at once.

There were some fantastic deals to be found for those who got out early enough.  However, a lot of the deals weren't as great as you would think.  Normal retail prices here in Hawaii are 20-30% higher here than in the mainland so even with that great coupon you cut out of the paper, you're still basically getting things for the price you would've normally paid elsewhere.  But we're in Hawaii so that coupon makes it as good as it's going to get.  The majority of things are much cheaper on Amazon so that's where we do a lot of our shopping.

Instead of shopping Friday morning, we slept in and then Cameron played, Johnnie worked on Master's degree homework, and I made a Christmas wreath for the front door.  This is the same grapevine wreath I used for Halloween.  I attach everything with wires so that I can reuse and redecorate it for every season.  Next step... buy a Christmas tree!

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"Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast."

~William Shakespeare

Family Friday: Nov 22

The weather is cooler now that it's approaching winter.  And by cooler, I mean only 5 degrees cooler but still, that 5 degrees is a noticeable difference here.  I can go jogging with Cameron in the stroller mid-afternoon now without feeling like I'm dying of heatstroke.

This week I tossed a swimsuit and a towel in the stroller before one of our runs and we stopped by the splash park on base while we were out.  This is a great little splash park located on the Hickam side of Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam at the end of Kokomalei St (the street between the chapel and the shoppette/gas station).  The water is turned on by pressing large buttons on two orange posts in the splash park.  Cameron had a good time but tired out pretty quickly.  We'll go back again for sure!

Before packing away our Halloween costumes, I realized that Dulce's costume might fit Cameron and it does!  It's a simple apron-style dress.  This gets my creative wheels turning for making some easy dress-up clothes for Cameron someday.  These "half dresses" would be so much easier to put on than a full dress!

When we lived in Georgia, Dulce hunted the squirrels in our backyard with a fierce determination.  They teased her from the tree branches.  You would think, by the way she acted, that the squirrels were making faces and throwing nuts at her.  Here in Hawaii, she kept our yard free of birds for a while but she quickly learned that it was a futile effort and gave up on it.  She is, however, an expert at catching flies in the house!

Dulce's newest obsession that she discovered last week is hunting the lizards in the bushes in front of our house.  There are a lot of creepy crawly things here in Hawaii and there are many types of lizards and geckos.  The bushes are home to a billion a lot of giant snails and lizards... and not the cute kind.

Every afternoon when we go outside to play, Dulce bolts straight for the bushes to hunt.  She gets so focused on finding lizards that she even ignored a huge ham bone that we gave her to chew on.  It's hard to get her away from the bushes to come inside!  Dulce pounces and hops through the bushes like a bunny while she's hunting.  Cameron and the neighborhood kids get a kick out of watching her!

So, does she actually catch any and does she kill them?  Yes, she caught seven lizards so far (that I know of).  No, she does not kill them (at least not on purpose).  When she catches one, she brings it out into the open grass and plays with it.  She puts it down and waits for it to start running so she can repeat the catch and chase again and again.  If it refuses to move, she nudges it with her nose or picks it up and tosses it.  I'll rescue the caught lizards after a minute and put them high on a ledge so they can rest and recover to battle Dulce another day.

Seriously... those eyelashes!  So jealous.

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"The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man's determination."

~Tommy Lasorda 

Family Friday: Nov 15

I got published in a magazine!!!!!!!  I'm just a little excited about that, can you tell?  Last year I submitted Cameron's birth story to Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine and it was chosen for publication on their magazine's website.  Click here to learn about submitting your own birth story!

This past summer, I was personally contacted by the magazine's Editor in Chief via email.  She said that Cameron's story was being considered for publication in their printed magazine and asked for me to send some hi-res files of some photos.  I sent them and she said she would send me a digital copy before it was published.  I never heard anything after that so I only mentioned it to a few people.

I assumed it wasn't published since I didn't hear anything, but last week I picked up a copy of the magazine anyway.  I never even opened it to check, I just set it aside... I am totally kicking myself for that now!  This morning I finally decided to browse through it while drinking my morning coffee and saw the story!  I screamed, I did a happy dance, and then I had Johnnie take some photos so that I could show the world.  This is a pretty incredible feeling :)

This has been a pretty awesome week all around.  Big news is that Johnnie got an award for the work he did during his last deployment!  He says it's no big deal but we are incredibly proud of him for this achievement and for everything else he does at work and at home!

Cameron and I went on the Hawaiian Railway Society train ride with a friend.  Cam loved it and we adults thought it was relaxing fun.  Maybe I'll get a blog post about it up soon.

Cameron decided this week that she likes to wear hats.  It started with wearing her sweatshirt as a hat-cape around the house.  Then she brought her bicycle helmet in and wore that around for a day.

Johnnie's squadron had a Thanksgiving potluck lunch.  Cameron had fun watching everyone while she ate and then she ran around exploring.

Dulce got a new bed for her daytime naps downstairs.  Cameron climbed into the bed as soon as I set it down.  I can't blame her since it was soft and just her size!  Dulce tried to nudge Cameron out of it but couldn't so she snuggled down next to her.  She didn't mind sharing her new bed for while.

Dulce was nice enough let Cameron play in the bed alone for a while after that.  Cameron got comfortable with the TV remote and a pumpkin, and then chatted away on her toy phone.  I love her developing imagination!

Once Cameron lost interest, Dulce climbed into the bed and took a nap.  We moved the new bed to where the old one was and Cameron has left it alone since then.

If you noticed in photos above, I finally decided to embrace the bangs now that they are long enough to do so.  I haven't had bangs for 18 years so I have been resisting.  When Cameron was about 4 months old, fierce postpartum hair loss set in.  I lost hair all over my head and it was most noticeable around my hairline.  My hairline receded almost a ½ inch in the front alone (first photo below)!

The new growth wasn't bad when it first started but the longer it got, the more ridiculous it looked and there wasn't anything I could do with it for a long while.  Once it started getting longer and literally sticking out all over (bottom right), I started plastering it to my head every day with an excessive amount of hairspray (bottom center).  I'm not kidding - I have not used this much hair spray since the early 90's.  My hair has been in a ponytail almost every day while it has been regrowing.  It was the only way to keep it all contained.

This week, I realized the new growth was finally long enough to look like normal bangs.  (Finally, after nine months!)  I had to trim it to even it out (the front was slightly longer than the sides) and cut a few long strands to blend it but these bangs are 99% new growth - that's a lot of new hair!  I actually kind of like the bangs so I think I'll keep them for a little while.

Cameron's hair is getting longer as well but the curls keep it up and out of the way for now :)

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"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. "

~Theodore Roosevelt