Holy Heat Wave...

So it's "fall break" here on Kauai.... Tagen Train started pre-school in August and the schools run year-round here so there's a bunch of random 'breaks' through-out the whole year. He's LOVE-ing school so far and we're super impressed with the place and the teachers. Aveda and I have been able to join him on all the field trips and drop in whenever to hang out. The only thing I would change is somehow figuring a way to terminate all misquitos. Nightmare! Poor guy comes home with welts almost daily. grrrr. Aside from this, all is good.

Since ... Sunday there's been the craziest heat-wave here. (yeah so today is only Wednesday but we feel like we've been living in this for a month alreadY!) Kona winds (meaning NO WIND), muggy, HOT. Can't complain though because we have the privilege of pretty much living at the beach. This evening it was literally too hot to even be in our house so we packed up the kiekis and headed off to PK's - a beach where Kyle likes to surf. The beach itself is sorta sandy, sorta rocky. The kids and I don't typically hang out at this one because of how the waves crash on the shore and the reef under the water. But today - I didn't even care where we went as long as it involved us out of the house and in some form of cool water. Tagen has been, since about July, on an unusually brave streak which is pretty fun (oK, sometimes heart palpatating - is that a word? - for mama to watch)... Dada's been taking him out to the big waves to surf and duck-dive those big waves. And this evening I buckled on his life-vest and he didn't even wait for me but just charged right into the shore-break and out into the ocean. Aveda, on the other hand, has been having an unusually timid streak lately. So she sat, fully content, on the sand and watch and I went out to swim with Tagen. (For anyone reading this thinking I am a crazy mama who leaves her 3 year-old on the beach to fend for herself, it's just not case! This is a SUPER mellow place where she's not gonna get stolen and my eyes are stuck on her like glue. Besides, I'm really only like 20 or 30 feet from her....) I then decided I was was gonna break this girl of her timid fear of the waves. (Who knows why... maybe it was the heat) So I swam back to shore, popped the neon orange floaties on her arms and carried her (screaming) to the water. She screamed "I WANNA GO BACK DERRR (pointing to the shore) as we swam all the way out to where Tagen. This continued for about 3 minutes and then... she realized... it was JUST. LIKE. THE. POOL! (that she is in love with right now) and she stopped crying and had the HUGEST grin on her face and I couldn't even get the girl OUT of the ocean for a good hour! success. So we had such a blast swimming and playing out in the water. And it was the first time Tagen's really been swimming far out and at a place where there is TONS of reef fishies so I put his goggles on him and how i WISH i had video of him because I don't think words could possibly do justice to how excited he was over all the fish he was seeing right beneath him. He'd hold his breath and stick his head down under water and then pop up so excited and talking so fast I really couldn't understand what he was saying about those fish and then he'd throw is head back down before he even finished talking. And on and on it went like this for quite some time. So now, as you might imagine, they are sleeping soundly in the next room over with the ceiling fan on high because it's STILL so hot. And a side note - I don't know how this got started but every night before I leave the room I tell the kids "I'll see ya when the sun comes up" and Tagen replies "I'll see you when da sun come up!" and for some odd reason Aveda always replies "I'll see ya wen da moon come up mama!" It's been a good, hot, day.


ps - Dada's been teaching Tagen how to ride bike... hopefully this video works oK

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time there was a mama who took her two young kids to the doctor because kid B got kid A sick. They went to this same doctor for Kid B a week ago but now it was Kid A's turn because his fever and cough were just getting worse & worse. So there they were in the doctor's office waiting... and waiting... and waiting. They waited so long you see because Friday is not a good day to go to the doctor as a walk-in patient... everyone's trying to get in before the weekend and then there's all those people who already had appointments and so on. So they waited.
Finally doctor called em in and thought Kid A's lungs sounded pretty yucky in there... a lot like asthma in fact. He went on to show mama with his handy-dandy flashlight thingy that Kid A had broken a whole bunch of capillaries on the soft pallet of the roof of his mouth from coughing so hard! ouch. So doctor thought it best to send mama and Kid A and Kid B over to get Kid A an x.ray.... There they went and there they played the waiting game... again.
As they waited Kid B thought it was a good idea to lick the hospital chair which made mama gag and nurse lady run over promptly with paper and crayons to keep Kidlings a little busier than licking hospital chairs. Kid A was soon called in... x-ray done and back they went to doctor. As he and mama looked at the x-ray it was concluded that at the least Kid A had bronchitis and that he could possibly have asthma too which is not unlikely seeing that whenever Kid A gets sick it immediately turns respiratory.
So off they went to get a nebulizer and antibiotics and finally mama, Kid A and B made it home. Breathing treatment done. Medicine taken but there's a new twist to this lil' fairytale... Kid A tells mama he just swallowed a marble! Naturally she responds with "Why didn't you do that BEFORE we had the x-ray?!" okay maybe not but she's been diggin' through his poops ever since looking for some sign of it coming out the other end. What a day. What a day.




And to dada of Kid A and B - what a good dada you are. We love you to the moon and back!

scroll down...

so i realized there was an old post i wrote but never posted... scroll down a lil' and you can see it... besides that i'll just post some pictures. enjoy!

bye-bye binkie...

incredible. it's official. we have two kids who do not need binkies. i never thought this day would come. no that's not true. i knew it would come, i just can't believe it is here. It has been over a week and lil' miss A. has taken both naps (or at least stayed in the room) and gone nigh-nigh withOUT her beloved binkie!!! For how incredible this is she really didn't put up much of a fight about it either which in an of itself amazes me knowing her strong lil' personality. I guess she was more ready than I was. I mean it really feels like the last bit of her babyhood I'm having to say goodbye to and so yes, it's true, I was more attached to that binkie than SHE was! HA, go figure.

So i had this brilliant idea of "helping" her "let go" of the binkie by asking her one night if she wanted to plant a 'binkie tree' the next morning. I told her how it would grow and grow and then lil' birdie mamas could come get binkies for their baby birdies and so on - making it sound real magical and stuff. Her reply: "no mama, i don't tink dat a veewy good ideer. i tink we sood pwant a pineappaw (pineapple) twee instead." well oookay lil' practical one. Way to burst my magical bubble (0: I'm proud of her - how easily she made this and the potty training transitions... and i am sooo thankful for her. Just can't believe how quickly she is growing up.

Dear Tagen Train....

SO i just realized there've been a few posts that I had written yet never posted. Better late than never i suppose... This one's for Tagen's 4th birthday: January 30, 2009

Today you turned 4. FOUR... i think i'll have to keep saying it until i really get it through my head that my first-born, my little guy as already FOUR! crazy. you are so proud and i can just tell you feel so OLD when you've been able to say today that you are 4! that is too cute for words. You have a very specific look for moments like these and i can't help but smile. You raise your eye-brows, close your eyes about half way, move your eyes to the side, stick your chin out some and tilt your head a lil' bit... and then you usually put your hands on your hips while you raise your eyebrows up and down nodding your head very slowly. I hope you'll do this forever and i have a feeling you will because i've been looking through old photos and videos of you since babyhood days (because our computer had 7000+ photos on them and i was in dire need of getting them off before losing them forever!) and i see some of the same faces you make now that you made even when you were tiny... the happy, the sad, the worried, the mad, ecstatic, the bored, the frustrated, the content... you are a boy of so many expressions. This is something I do so love about you because i always know what you are thinking.

So we've lived in kauai this past year of your life and you've accomplished a lot this year... your balance is getting better all the time and you're really good at standing on your 'surfboard' down at the beach, you climb your 'monkey-bar tree' (the avocado tree) all the time with Aveda, you've learned how to hop on one foot, spin in a 360 on your heel (and you've learned it's even better when you wear socks), you make insane rocket ships out your leggos, you've taken your drawings to a new level, in the past couple weeks you decided you don't need naps anymore (at this point mom panics; your guys' naps have meant more to me than you will ever know... until you become a dad), you are almost as tall as a buffalo (well that's what the picture on your growth chart is next), perhaps the biggest milestone of this year (which occured only about 3 or 4 weeks ago is that you go DO-DO in the POTTY!!!!! yes it took you nearly a year and you sure weren't givin' in for any convincing or disciplinin' we'd give you but you apparently decided it was the right thing to do and so you DID iT one day and have done it ever since. THANK YOU! thank you. did i say, thank you?

You are definitely a cautious boy - an observer - i love to watch you watching others as this is the one time i can only imagine what you must be thinking; once you see what fun someone is having you don't want to stop once you join in on the action (i actually really really appreciate this about you, i think we may have avoided a lot of painful injuries so far because of this part of your personality)... you are the silliest kid i've ever met, LOVING to make people laugh and learning much more about what a 'joke' is... you are also the sweetest kid i've ever met (ok maybe i'm a bit biased) but seriously, you have a sort of empathy in you that makes you think about others in a way i haven't seen in other kids your age. I love this about you. You are thoughtful and contemplative and are learning to be a gentlema. I have taught you that we serve girls first and I laugh out loud at how quick you are to correct me if I accidently serve YOU before Aveda. We love you bug and are so happy to share this life with you in our family!

cultivating joy

I read this recently on another blog and felt so much in agreement with it that I had to post it up

I think that when you do challenging things, you make a trade. You trade one thing for another, and you may trade something like convenience or the zoo for color and the rustle of coconut trees.... But the circumstances that you have found yourself in cannot define who you are.

Everyone has to decide what they will spend their life looking for. I learned a few years back that happiness is a shifty creature. Happiness is not easily found, or when found, is as elusive as a jellyfish. You can’t hold onto it. My emotions are all over the place, folks. Blame it on artistic temperament, genes, or maybe I’m just sulky, but I know that I cannot count on feeling a certain way for any length of time. Happiness. It’s something that happens to you and then whoops! There it goes.

No, I can’t follow after that. My life must take a more intentional path.

My tagline is Cultivating Joy. We all have many things that we can cultivate, things that don’t happen to us, but that we go out and water everyday, things that wrap their little shoots around their neighbors and need to be staked and cared for and checked for bugs. Like joy. Like love, thankfulness, kindness, honesty, choosing not to be offended, choosing to see the best in others, refraining from ill wishes or gossip.

What I mean is that I wouldn’t use the word happy to define my life. Neither would I say that I am more productive when I am happy. I know that I am the most productive when I embrace and fully receive the truth of the unfailing love of God who made me. (Because when I do, I am not telling myself the evil mantra: you’re no good, it’s your fault, you will fail, and I can shut those voices out and just have fun making stuff and loving people.) I know that the words that define my life are loved, blessed, supported, sure, steady, secure, at peace, content, broken, thankful, hopeful and waiting. There are probably many more.

The only thing I wouldn't trade for the world and anything it had to offer is my beautiful family...