our holiday visit

The first night we were in Washington, my parents had a warm welcome waiting for us.. hugs for me, and fingers and knuckles to chomp on for Mont. Mont couldn't get to them fast enough! Still no teeth..

We spent loads of time on the floor, letting Mont kick and laugh, and being smothered by yours truly. This is from the same night as a few posts ago:

The next three pictures of Mont are in a sequence, taken only split seconds from the next. He is still full of funny faces, and yes! That's my mom's beautiful golden hair behind him. ha!

Tessa got snap happy one afternoon when Mont and I were just sitting around. This is the only one I have on my computer from this day. It's tricky taking only your camera with no computer... I didn't like being without it! Oh well... I obviously got used to it as you can tell by my lag in posts!

(sorry about the quality of these pictures.. I'm pulling a lot of these off of Costco Photo..)

Some of my favorite decorations for Christmas at my parents' home were silver bells on the saddles:

The week of Christmas we jet-set off to Hawaii for our Happy Party:

Here's the dreadful farmer's tan I mentioned previously. I still have it..

I miss the sun!

1/2 the day we were on the beach, then at noon we moved up by the pool so we could stop worrying about the sun on Mont. It was surprisingly nice!! We've never done that before, but we loved it! We could still see the beach, and Mont loved falling asleep to this loud waterfall:

One night my mom and I ventured out to take pictures of everything around.. it was a lot of fun to see my mom do her thang with photography. I think she loved pulling out some hat tricks; though my camera was like a foreign language to her compared to the one she used, I think she still had fun:

Doesn't this look Egyptian or something? I love it!

The morning after this, we woke up to HUGE waves on our side of the island (the WSW side, which normally doesn't get huge waves):

The waves were so huge out on the reef, that the waves in the lagoons (which were built to keep waves OUT) were normal size (compare to California) and came up and sank all these chairs into the sand:

The waves out there were 20-30 ft! While on the North Shore, they were around 40 feet. I can't even imagine! See that hotel in the background? That's the Ihilani, the hotel the girls in Blue Crush work at! The first year we came we stayed there and I was SO excited about that. Corin and I used to watch that movie sooo many times!

Then it was back to Washington... where we were all sooo tired... The sun wore us out! In a perfectly perfect sort of way:

Even though it was still cooler than Hawaii, it was perfectly warm enough for lots of walking. I'm glad this picture is blurry. ha!! My mom let me wear her cute garden shoes clogs.

Now for some "Mont Time":

While we were there, my dad rolled him around so often, he picked it up himself! So here he is on the infamous rolling-towel (to protect the bed from bites and slobber, no doubt). He had such a fun time with my parents and sister that it took him a few days to unwind from having all fun he did. Poor little guy.

My dad became his best bud while Mark wasn't able to be with us.

It was a great trip and we were sad to see it end.. I had to return to my real world of housework and other grown up things.. It was nice to be a kid again. As Tessa might say, "It was great visiting with the Parentals."