Christopher's 5th Birthday Party

We celebrated Christopher's birthday a few days early with a glow party at Pump It Up! It was super fun and if you are wondering what the glow part is... the second room we went into had all black lights and a lot of the kids wore white so their shirts looked really cool. As the guest of honor, Chris got to hold a flashing glow stick and he really had fun playing, jumping, and dancing with all his friends!

It was wonderful to have all of Christopher's friends there to help us celebrate!

Pump it Up is an inflatable place and one of the most fun things (according to the kids in attendance) was the super fast slide. Here are some of the kids coming down the slide!

After all the jumping and fun, it was time for pizza and cake! Chris chose to have a lion cake this year.

And of course, we are so happy to have shared Christopher's birthday with new friends and old. Olivia (and Tristan) has now been at every one of Chris' parties!

When we got home, Chris opened his presents. He got a lot of fun things. Here he is training to be Darth Vader...

Daddy was practicing too...

One of our favorite things was watching Chris "read" through a book that his friend Nico gave him:

We are so grateful to all our friends (and Grammy!) for helping to make Christopher's 5th birthday very special!

Bye Bye Hawaii (sniff sniff)

I guess good things must come to an end and we did need to leave paradise to come back home. But even at the airport, Maui gave us one more rainbow to look at. This one lasted about an hour!

Our plane was a bit late so someone was very excited when it finally arrived and was all fueled up to go home.

And being that we had an overnight flight, Chris slept the whole flight! I actually had to wake him up as we were landing. We are very lucky to have such a great traveler!

This was truly an amazing, perspective-changing trip and we are so lucky both to have gone and to have shared it with our little man. And now that we know Chris can handle an 8 1/2 hour flight the question is... where to next?

Out and About in Maui

During the last few days we had in Maui, we spent a lot of time at the beach and pool, but we also checked out a few sights and cool places. First, we went to the Maui Ocean Center which was an aquarium that specialized in sea life native to Hawaii. We saw some really cool fish there! Some were a little unusual...

Ha! No but seriously, we saw some beautiful fish and they had a huge shark tank with rays and multiple types of sharks. The tropical fish they had there were beautiful too!

The aquarium also had a number of sea turtles which were great to see up close. We saw some of them at the beaches in Maui. One swam right past me at Napili Bay Beach and we saw two others in the waves at the beach right in front of our hotel. Since they're endangered though, you are not supposed to get too close to them.

After our visit, Chris found some dolphins and whales to "swim" with!

Another thing we did during our second Maui visit was check out the town of Lahaina. It's an old whaling town which is now a cute little spot to shop and walk around. There are many art galleries there and we ended up getting a few pieces for our house that will remind us of the beauty of Hawaii!

And on our final day (actually on the way to the airport) we stopped at Maui Tropical Plantation, a beautiful collection of flowers, plants and produce. They also had zip lining but Chris was only three pounds short of being big enough for it. He told me he wanted to do it so maybe next time we will try it out. A lot of the pictures from the plantation I included in the flower section so here are just a few more...

Oh and I don't want to forget another overly friendly duck who paid me a very close visit!

Other Random Fun

The more entries I add to this blog about our trip, the more little stories I remember! I believe in an earlier post I mentioned Christopher's new love of shave ice. We did have shave ice numerous times and there certainly was not a lack of this yummy treat, especially throughout Kauai. Our favorite, though, was The Wishing Well, a little truck by the roadside in Hanalei. They claim to be the original shave ice stop in Kauai and were even featured in the New York Times back in the mid-90s. Here it is as well as Christopher enjoying his half coconut, half mango ice over vanilla ice cream and topped with a gummy worm...

And in case Aunt Dabney happens to be checking the blog, this one is for you! At the condo, there was a Rummikub game which Chris proceeded to play in his own way. It's not a beach vacation unless there's a little Rummikub involved!

Back to Maui

On Friday, June 14th, we returned to Ka'anapali, Maui to finish out our Hawaiian vacation. Our second hotel was the Hyatt Regency which was very nice. Upon our arrival, they greeted us with our first floral leis!

Perhaps the biggest highlight for Christopher was the fact that the lobby of the Hyatt had a little pond which eight penguins called their home. As you can imagine, this was one of Chris' favorite parts of this whole Hawaii trip. They were endangered black footed penguins and, of course, we visited them every single time we went down to the pool, to eat, to the beach, to the car, etc.

If you happened to be around the penguins at 9:30 in the morning, you could watch them being fed their daily ration of fish! The hotel was great and we used the rest of our vacation time to relax and be in the water. Here is the view from our hotel room:

There was a tree directly in front of our deck that had a pair of birds nesting in it. (Not sure what the birds were; something black and native to Hawaii). When we had some down time, we would just watch out the window and check out the pair taking turns finding food, building their nest and sleeping... In the first picture you might notice a white boat in the water. The first full day at this hotel, there was a rowing rigatta in Lahaina Bay. It was cool to watch the boats line up and take off! Another view from our room was of the hotel's nightly luau called "Drums of the Pacific." It would start right around Christopher's bedtime but our little man-who-will-sleep-anywhere drifted off to sleep with the sound of said drums dancing in his head! Here is kind of what we could see of the luau:

On our last night at the hotel we got all dressed up and had a nice dinner at Sonz, a semi-outdoor restaurant with a view of a pond filled with swans, ducks, and flamingos.

And speaking of ducks, Christopher insisted that I tell you all this story... As we were enjoying a luxurious meal in such a beautiful setting, there was an overly-friendly duck who decided that he wanted to see who was in a generous mood this particular evening. After having enough of being harassed by a swan, the duck hopped out of the water and proceeded to visit each of the tables in the restaurant. It was very reminiscent of a dog looking for table scraps because he would walk up to a table (literally a foot away from each person) and look directly up as if to ask, "Um, so what do you have to share with me today?" He was so cute. We watched him for awhile and as he was walking away from our table, he proceeded to poop on the nice carpeted floor. Chris, of course, thought this was utterly hilarious (as did we)! When we told our waiter about it, he said, "Oh, he has done that the past three nights."