Monaloca

See all our favorite Hawaii 2012 pics (two pages).

At last I’m getting around to posting about our trip to Hawaii, which we took the first week of March. And, to give this trip some context, at last we actually made it to O’ahu! We scheduled our original trip for the first week of February, but the night before – bags packed and ready at the door – Melina started vomiting. Runny noses on a plane are one thing, but the flu? Within hours we had rescheduled our trip for the soonest date we could afford.

We happened to pick the week of the crazy rain, or the worst and most persistent set of storms any locals remember having in a really long time. (Joey and his mom kept referencing the flooded room of 1989.) There were flash flood warnings for the island half our trip, a BWA (brown water advisory) when a few sewer lines busted open from heavy rains, and at one point it hailed. Golf-ball sized pieces of ice that were almost deafening – yet oddly mesmerizing – as they fell on the tin patio roof at 6am.

The rain didn’t keep us from the main point of our trip: visiting family. The kids got loads of quality Grandma Rapoza time, and Nalani had hour upon hour to completely destroy her house, starting with stripping the bottom half of her fridge of all its magnets and pictures, then the coffee table of all its framed photos and trinkets. Most ended up in Samson’s old dog food cart, which Nalani discovered rolls around the house like a toy shopping cart.

We hung out with cousins (or are they first cousins once removed?) Maya and Zeke: in Grandma’s yard (Melina finally learned how to climb the guava tree!), at Sunday dinner with the entire family at Uncle Wayne’s, at the open market at Windward Mall, and the big kids got to join them to see the Lorax one evening. Melina re-discovered Hello Kitty stores, and has the impression they only exist in Hawaii. (We went to one at Ala Moana and one at Windward with Maya). I’m not doing much to change this, as it makes for another thing to anticipate when we visit Grandma.

Thanks to a friend’s suggestion we discovered the Waikiki Aquarium, a great deal and size for a morning visit. Thanks to some online research I found an indoor (i.e., rainy day) Children’s Discovery Center in Honolulu, and we also managed our annual trek to the North Shore on our never-ending hunt for Big Waves (even with stormy weather, no luck!) followed by shave ice at Matsumoto’s in Haleiwa. This year we added a stop at Ted’s Bakery for coconut haupia pie. Yum!

And yes, we did hit the beach. We first attempted it on a gray, scattered showers day, since it was the best we’d had by half-way through the trip. Lathered everyone in sunblock, packed up sand toys and towels, and drove 10 minutes to Lanikai Beach. Walked five minutes down the beach path and onto the wind-blown sand, and it started to sprinkle. “Maaaamaaa! I’m cooooold!” Melina screamed, shivering. Back to the car for a drive, well, somewhere. We ended up at a little-known beach in Waimanalo for close to an hour, just playing on the sand with no sand toys, ready to run back to the car as soon as the downpour came. (It did.)

But, two days before we left, the sun came out and we got to have a real beach day (sand castles, wave jumping, and wet towels) at Lanikai. Hooray! Ironically, if you ask Kai and Melina their favorite things in Hawaii, the beach barely makes the list. Cousins and near-daily shave ice from Island Snow stand at the top. And those are fun no matter the weather.

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Last week Melina started ballet class with friends Lily and Emma. She last took ballet nearly two years ago with Kendall, but was so little she pulled me onto the dance floor each week and thought it was a mommy-and-me class, even though I was the only mommy out there.

Luckily this time she’s taken to dancing all on her own, and she loves it!

In this video the girls practice for an upcoming performance. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

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