Monaloca

We’ve been back on the mainland for several days now, adjusting to colder weather and real-world commitments. More trip photos coming soon (we took well over 500), but in the meantime, I’ll share a few of my favorites plus some highlights of the second half of our trip.

Thanks to Joey’s Auntie Yvonne we all got to attend a Christmas luau at the Mormon community center in Waimanalo. Melina even tried poi, and made a face so funny that Grandma told the story to everyone she talked to on Christmas day. Since Meli was on my lap I didn’t see the face, but I did hear the hacking, just like a cat with a furball stuck in its throat. Poor thing.

We spent one morning hiking up to Makapu’u lighthouse with Nancy, Maya, and Zeke. The walk up the hill usually takes about 30 minutes, but with four little kids took almost an hour. We all enjoyed a windy view and snacks at the top before a much quicker trek back down. A few days later we celebrated Christmas day with Joey’s brother Wayne (aka Nancy’s dad) and his extended family. Kai got to play Wii and Meli got to explore a new house while trying to escape Zeke’s incessant kisses.

Ever since my first trip with Joey to O’ahu, I’ve never felt like our vacation is complete without a drive to the North Shore. It’s a nice drive, if we’re lucky we see 13+ foot waves once we’re there, and we top off the day with renowned Matsumoto shave ice in Haleiwa. This year the waves were so small that the kids and I dipped in our toes, then full feet, and within 15 minutes Meli’s shirt was soaked (she’s so short, those “small” waves were high!) and Kai was covered in wet sand from jumping and rolling around. Note to self that I vaguely remember making last time we visited with Kai: Always bring spare clothes to the North shore, even if we swear we won’t play in the waves.

We ran into pounding rain on our drive home from Haleiwa, which didn’t seem like a big deal until we sat down to dinner in Kailua that night and the lights went out… which also didn’t seem like a huge deal until we turned on the radio and heard people from all over the island calling in to say they had no power. Yup, an island-wide power outage on O’ahu, all due to four downed power lines on the island’s center. In Kailua it lasted from 7pm until around 5:30am, but we heard stories of residents in other towns not having power for close to 24 hours.

On our last day, Joey and I had an almost-Obama sighting. We were walking to the end of Kalama beach, near his mom’s house and in the direction of the Obama vacation compound, when we hit a small crowd blocked from going further by two Aloha-shirt and sunglass-clad men. Several paparazzi had cameras – with lenses over a foot long – staked in the sand. In the distance we saw two little girls walk from a house down to the sand and sea. Perhaps the Obama daughters?

On a final, non-island note: Melina’s first molar (lower right) appeared the night before we left. Her second lower molar started to show a couple days later, and today we saw a top molar poking through, plus two top eye teeth heading down. All very good news for our little meat-eating fiend, who so far is handling all that teething pain like a champ.

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