Sofia and her Blue "Brella"

We bought Sofia a blue parasol at the dollar store last week, she calls it her "brella" and carries it around with her where ever she goes, her brothers really like it also :) We went for a walk to the beach the other day and I brought my camera, I was hoping to get a cute shot of her with her "brella", but she had decided that there was NO way she was going to let me take pictures of her! She wouldn't look at me and when she did she just gave me nasty faces, so I gave up! I thought I'd post a few to give you a glimpse into the life of Sofia... She just wanted to relax and enjoy her walk and not worry about posing for pictures

If she saw the camera come out she would hide behind her "brella"
or give me some attitude...She's collecting tiny shells... Oops, she noticed I got the camera out again... "I'm still not gonna look at you!" We went to meet her Daddy and Brothers at the Turtle Bay Pool after our walk...She was very upset because she couldn't wear her blue dress in the pool...

Then she enjoyed watching the beautiful sunset with her mommy...

Sweet Matti

I haven't taken any pictures in a while so I don't have anything to post, I thought I'd write about my Matti, it's almost his birthday...

Matti is the most sensitive sweetest little boy. He has a special intuition about him, he always knows when his mommy needs her "cuddles." He really loves people and you can see it and feel it from him so easily. He is also very cleaver at getting his way, he has already learned that the best way to get what you want isn't from crying or throwing fits (although he does do that) but rather through sweetness, here are a few examples....

I was yelling at Matti for not obeying me and he looks at me with his big brown eyes and says, "but mommy, I just love you too much. You're hurting my feelings."

Matti is potty trained but prefers for me to wipe him when he's done, so he always has to yell for me from the bathroom at the top of his lungs when he's ready for me. So I sent Gabe in instead of me and when he's ready he comes to find me and says, "mommy! I wanted you to wipe me and I said,why can't daddy do it every once in a while and he says, "because, I love you too much!" I'm SO lucky!

Matti is having a time out and through his tears he says, "mommy, you're breaking my heart, my heart (pause) is BROKEN!"

Matti was trying to talk to me and I wasn't paying attention and so he says very seriously and authoritatively, "look at me, I love you!" then he continued to tell me about his pirate ship.

Matti has a best friend, her name is Destiny, she's five and lives at turtle bay with us, he likes to play with her when she gets home from kindergarten. The other day he says to her "Do you want to be my girlfriend?" and she says, okay, and he says, "okay, here's a kiss", and he kisses her on the forehead and then says, "whew, I'm glad I got that over with!" (I wasn't actually there to witness this, it was retold to me by one of the big kids that was there with them)

He's not always such a sweetheart though, here are a few other quotes from him:

Matti is running with scissors and Gabe tells him, stop you're going to get hurt! and Matti says, "I'm not! I just want to cut Luca in Half!"

He was busy telling me a story about his church class in San Diego, this had happened probably 6 months before he told me about it. So he says, "When I was at school (church) at San Diego this lady took me in the girls bathroom (he is distraught as he tells the story) and I wanted to go into the boys bathroom!!! It was SO freaky!!" I guess it really made an impression on him.

Halloween

We had a fun Halloween week! We started our week out by shopping for Halloween costumes, getting candy, and decorations. The kids had a lot of fun doing that, then on Wednesday night we went to the trunk or treating activity at church. Friday night we went to the haunted barn Halloween party at the horse stables at Turtle Bay. Then on Halloween, Luca had his last soccer game of the season in the morning followed by a BBQ party for his soccer team. Then at night we went trick or treating on Moana street in Laie. What ever happened to Halloween just being a one day thing? It was like it was Halloween ALL week! I had so many costume changes/cleanings, make-up applications, hair do's, candy bags, etc. It's pretty exhausting once you get to the end of it all! But of course it's all worth it when you get to steal all your kids candy, I mean, see how happy your kids are....and how adorable they look in their costumes!

Above: before the party at Turtle Bay.

Below: Sofia fell asleep on the way to trick or treating, she fell asleep a total of three times during the night but kept waking right up, she didn't want to miss out on anything!
The next several pics were taken before we went out trick or treating, Gabe had a work thing he had to deal with and we had to wait a LONG time for him, so we took some pics to pass the time...poor kids, Luca kept saying "this isn't happening" over and over again...he was so worried he was going to miss trick or treating...
There was a big yellow light shining on the banyan tree, it made for some cool lighting, I thought it looked very Halloweeny
I have to write about his costume...we went to a store called Camouflage Inc. It is located right next to the army base in Wahiawa. It was a real army store, it was like heaven on earth for Luca. They had three different styles of kids uniforms for Luca to choose from, he picked this pattern because it is what all the army guys wear now, we always see them at Wal Mart and Costco in this exact outfit. He wears it everyday now like it's his regular clothes and if he does wear regular clothes he has to have the hat on. In fact, he's wearing the entire outfit right now as I write this posting.

Matti and sofia picked out their costumes themselves. Sofia wanted to be a princess so when we went to the store I held up all the Disney princess costumes and this is the one that she picked out. Matti REALLY wanted to be Jack Sparrow but when we were at Costco, he saw this pirate costume and couldn't wait for another one, he had to have it right then and there!


The next few photos were taken on Friday night before the Turtle Bay party. The horse stables at Turtle Bay where they set up their haunted barn is right next to the beach, it worked out perfectly that I got some photos of my little pirate on the beach!

He's drawing an X saying, "X marks the spot" as you can tell from his photos, he really gets into character.
As you can see, she is wearing a different costume on this day, she decided she wanted to wear this princess dress from her dress up clothes bin, I guess I didn't need to buy her a costume...


This is Sofia on Wednesday night at the trunk or treating, she insisted on these shoes, and she actually is really good at walking and running around in them. Luckily I talked her out of them on Halloween night.
A few of the kids that live at the Turtle Bay condos with us. They play together everyday after school, it's really nice for me to have a break while they all go play outside. The little girl on the far right is named Destiny and she is Matti's "best friend." He asks me ALL day, is Destiny home yet? over and over...they're very cute together.

Here they are once we got to our trick or treating destination, they are showing me their trick or treating bags that we decorated together earlier that day. It was actually a really fun activity for the kids and very inexpensive as well.

A lot of the houses on this street really go all out decorating their homes, it's really a lot of fun. I didn't take many pictures though.
Gabe thinks he's funny. One of the homes gave out balloons. Everyone was staring at him and I was of course embarassed! Especially when he put Luca's face in the middle of them and told Matti to squeeze them! How innappropriate! I probably shouldn't even right that on my blog! I made him remove them...
This picture sums up all of our exhaustion at the end of the night, everyone fell asleep as soon as we got home.

The Funny...The Cute...and The Naughty!

When my kids say things that I think are funny or do something cute or extremely naughty, I usually will write them down in the notes section of my phone with the intention of recording it on my blog. I used to post them on the side bar, but since I've been trying (not very successfully) to use my blog as more of a journal of my kids growing up, I am now going to write these things as posts. So here are a few things that I got a laugh or a smile out of...

Luca:

"This is how you get the boogers out, first, you stick your finger in and peel it out. Then, you either eat it or flick it, pause, but mostly, I just eat it. "

(he burps) "That means..(pause) the tank is full. "Ashley says, Luca, that's gross, he replies, "Gross is my middle name."

Ashley says, "Luca, if you don't put on sunscreen then you'll be all wrinkly when you get older!" Luca says, "Yeah, then the chicks won't dig me."

"Yipee Kai Yay Mamacita! I don't have school tomorrow!"

Luca is eating cake and out of no where he blurts out..."Sakajawea!" His Aunt Sarah asks him, "Why did you just say that" and he says, "cause I'm loco en la Cabeza!"

We were on vacation and Luca and Matti were in the bathroom, Gabe and I were being really good parents and not paying attention to what they were doing. Then I hear Luca saying, Matti is throwing up. Once I got to the bottom of what had been going on, I found out that Luca had tricked his brother into eating soap and it was so gross, that Matti ended up throwing up. Luca thought it was funny.... (later that day he gave Matti a bloody nose when he hit him in the nose with a platic bat, boys...)

Ashley says to Luca, "I need you to be good tomorrow at my friend house okay?" He says, "Hold on, let me put my angel clothes on" then he makes a halo with his hands, puts his arms out and flutters them while flashing me his most angelic smile.

Luca is changing his clothes and he goes to hide behind the couch, I say to him, "I'm just your mommy, I don't care" and he says" I'm a man, I don't like people to see my parts."

Matti:

A 3 year old friend took a toy from Sofia and she started crying. Matti quickly positions Sofia behind him, and starts yelling at his friend and says, "don't do that to my sister! That's my BABY! I'm gonna kick... your ...Butt!" (it was cute and so embarrassing at the same time)

When Matti was potty training, he went through this stage where if he had to poop, he would poop like dog outside by a bush, on the side walk etc. That was fun. He also went through a stage where he would pee in strange places, on his daddy's car windshield, on the back seat of my car (good thing I had leather seats!), on Sofia etc. Sometimes I'm really amazed at his Naughtiness!

Ashley is about to get up from the couch and I stopped and gave Matti a hug first, then as I'm getting up he says, "don't go, don't go... baby" a few minutes later I came back to sit with him and he says, "oh my precious girly" then kisses me on the nose. :)

I was upset with Matti for something and he comes to me and gives me a big hug and says, "mommy, I want you to be happy, I want you to be happy to me..."

Sofia wanted to sit with Matti, so I say to him, "can Sofia sit with you?" and he says, "no, I'm not being nice right now. I will be nice on Halloween. When you give me my costume...I will say thank you."

Sofia:

Sofia is sitting in front of the mirror and says, "I'm gonna look in the mirror mommy" and then she stands up to see herself and says "oh, it's so precious!"

Sofia puts her hand up to Luca and says "Don't talk to me, I'm a princess!"

Things I watch my kids do:

Endless stick fights, mostly Jedi fights, anything can be made into a weapon!

Wrestling matches galore!

Here's an example of a typical scene in the Chaparro household...
All three are playing "wolf pack", Sofia is the baby, Luca is the daddy and they are crawling around on the floor and Luca says to Matti, "you can be the grass and then I'll eat you!" Then Sofia starts pretend eating Matti's Bum then starts biting it. Matti is giggling cause it tickles. They are seriously always pretend eating each other...are anyone else's kids this weird?

I've made my decision...and I'm gonna do it!

If you actually read all the way to the end of this post then I congratulate you! It’s long, but I had to give all the background details! The end is the most important part to me, so keep reading…
After weeks of agonizing over this decision, I finally made up my mind, but before I tell you let me start from the beginning… which was kindergarten. Luca had a rough start in kindergarten, he had a hard time sitting still, keeping his hands to himself, paying attention etc. He is a very typical boy and there were a few other boys in the class that were a little energetic as well. So you put that together and what you get is a little bit of a behavioral problem. We worked hard and set up rewards and punishments and by the end of the year he was very well behaved and didn’t get into trouble anymore. But the process of it really hurt his self esteem. He prayed every night that he could be a good boy and choose the right. And he would say, mom, I don’t understand, I want to be a good boy so bad but I’m just always bad. He really thought that he was a bad kid. I’ve tried to convince him otherwise but there was definitely some damage done. This summer we moved to Turtle Bay a week after school had already started in Hawaii. I wanted to give Luca a little time to adjust to his new home, not being with his grandma and grandpa anymore, etc. So I kept him home for another two weeks. Then, end of August we decide it’s time for Luca to start school (the public schools in California still wouldn’t start for three more weeks). So we find out that where we live is in the Kahuku Elementary School district. So, I looked it up on the internet and learned that more than half of the children are on welfare, their test scores in reading and math proficiency are just barely above 50% (Luca’s school in California was in the high 80%). Not like it matters much, but there are only 6 Caucasian kids in the entire school as well. So I knew right away that he wasn’t going to blend in and that he wasn’t going to have the best experience academically either. We then decided that we did not want him at that school and began exploring every other option we could think of. We tried to get geographical exceptions to send him to sunset beach elementary, (that’s where most of the kids at turtle bay go, they all got a GE) but since the kindergarten class was so large this year they cut one of their first grade classes and said they were completely full. So then we tried Laie elementary school, the principal shot us down immediately without an explanation as to why (he’s kind of a jerk). So then we decide to try to send him to Sunset Beach Christian School which is a small private school close by. I absolutely loved that school. The small class sizes were great for the kids; the teachers were loving and caring. You could tell that they really loved their jobs, took them seriously, and really wanted their students to succeed in a loving, safe, environment that could teach children to enjoy learning and school. So of course that’s where I wanted him to go. But I was worried because I just had no way to pay for it so we decided to put him at Kahuku after all (3 ½ wks after school had started). The first couple of days went okay, the kids were excited to have a new kid in their class and he was making friends quickly. Then it all went downhill. His teacher was an older Hawaiian lady that was plain old grumpy. She didn’t smile, she didn’t say hello to me, and she didn’t speak in a kind tone of voice, EVER. Her demeanor was authoritarian and intimidating. Also, she started getting Luca in trouble everyday because he wasn’t sitting perfectly still with his hands folded in his lap, and he wasn’t paying attention very well, and his handwriting is terrible, and then she says, I mean, didn’t he go to kindergarten! That statement just shows how ignorant and uninvolved with her students this lady is. If she had cared about him and paid attention to him, it would have occurred to her that he had just returned from summer vacation, he hadn’t been in school for a month like the other kids. If you actually help him with his work, he rarely gets a question wrong. He takes his time with his work but can do it! I worked with him on his handwriting after that and after only one week of working with me, his handwriting is 100 times better, perfectly legible and spaced and punctuated appropriately. But no one cared to get to know him, help him, or recognize what he really is capable of doing. So that was the first thing that went wrong, then, Luca starts coming home saying that the kids are being mean to him. I was hoping it was an isolated incident but as the days went on, it only got worse. The kids were calling him mean names like telling him that he’s ugly, saying eeeww to him if he walked by, calling him a Mahu (which a Hawaiian slang word for transvestite!) making fun of him for not finishing his work, laughing at his handwriting, pushing him from the monkey bars, etc. He was too terrified to tell his teacher because she’s just downright intimidating. We tried saying things to the kids that we would practice at home, but things didn’t get better. After telling my mom about the situation, she said that her and my dad would be happy to pay for the private school and to get Luca in there. Unfortunately, we then found out that they didn’t have a first grade class this year due to low enrollment because of the current economic situation in this country. They weren’t willing to accommodate him as a first grader, so if he wanted to go to school he would have to repeat kindergarten! Well that’s out of the question! He would be two month shy of turning 20 when he graduated from high school! And he didn’t need it anyway; he is where he should be academically as a first grader. So this was my dilemma, what do I do?!? I’d been praying all along for the answer, I was sick to my stomach over it all. It didn’t take long for me to get the answer to my prayers, I kept feeling so strongly that I should home school Luca, but I kept fighting it because the thought of doing that was really scary. I was worried about how much work it would be for an already stressed mother of three. I kept thinking if there is something else that is meant to be for him a door will open and something will happen, but every door was shut in our faces. I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn’t make the decision and fully commit to it. Then my grandpa just happened to send me a book in the mail. As I was reading it, I realized heavenly father has already told me what I need to do a few time already and now here he is telling me again through this book. Let me tell you about it…the book is called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s about successful people and what it is that makes them successful. I pretty much read almost the entire book in one day…I found it to be really interesting. The first part is about the effect of you’re birth date on how successful you are, and it’s a very convincing argument. So I thought, how does this apply to Luca? Right now because of when he was born and when I chose to put him in school, he is being handed all kinds of disadvantages, if he was in another grade, he would have easily been admitted to either of the best two schools on this side of the island, but because of something he has no control over, he is at a disadvantage academically just because of when he was born and where he lives. I’m not going to let my son become a product of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some people may argue that this isn't really have much of an effect on him, he’s young, he can recover, and he’ll have some good years and some bad. But I disagree! The disadvantages that children have now locks them “into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on for years and years.” There are some great examples of this in the book and I have seen this in the lives of some of my family members as well. If he learns to hate school now, he’s going to continue to hate it; he would cry as we would take him to school, I don’t want him associating that kind of anxiety with school. Have you ever heard of the psychological term, “self-fulfilling prophecy”? I learned about it in college while I earned my degree in psychology. I was reminded of it while reading this book; a Self-fulfilling prophecy is “a situation where a false definition in the beginning…evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.” This is what I was worried about with Luca, right now he is being perceived as a misbehaving child that’s slow at his work and not as smart as the other kids (which we all know is NOT true). So when I read that in this book, it just confirmed to me, that I can’t let that happen. These feelings that Luca is having about himself aren’t true but because he is learning to believe it, he is very likely going to become it. I’m not going to let Luca think that he is a Bad kid, I’m not going to let him stay in an environment that makes him feel like there’s nothing to like about him (his words), I’m not going to let Luca think that he isn’t smart, and I’m not going to let him become anything less that what he’s capable of! I truly believe that it’s not how smart you are, how talented you were born, what genetics you are born with, although all those factors affect you, what truly makes someone a success are the opportunities that they have been presented with in life and the way that they have prepared for those opportunities. In an ideal situation Luca would be exposed to different opportunities at school, he would have more resources available to him, he would feel good about himself, he would get more attention academically, and people would expect more of him and because of that he would perform better. That’s what I can give him at home. The sad thing is that, as the book points out, there are too many children that have the capabilities to be successful, to become something great, but because of the circumstances that they were born into end up not having the chance to live up to their full potential. I realize that there will be circumstances in Luca’s life that can’t be changed that will effect his levels of success in the future. This year I am committing to Luca that he will learn all he needs to as a first grader, he will learn that he is a good boy, and that he is smart. He will gain the confidence in himself that he will need to be successful and he’s going to enjoy school and learning. How can a child be successful in the education system if he learns to hate school and associates it with so many negative experiences? I feel strength that I can do this and confident in my abilities. I am more than willing to sacrifice my time (and sanity) for him. I want him in an environment where he feels loved, cared about, and important. He needs to have a teacher that knows his strengths, weaknesses, and cares if he succeeds. I know what he is capable of and with me he will never be expected to do less than his potential. There isn’t another environment for him that could provide for him what I can. I love my sweet little boy too much, he is so precious. He's funny, smart, silly, sweet, thoughtful, fun, caring, and loving....and he deserves to be known and loved for who he really is.

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Our Life in Hawaii

...A few photos to give you a glimpse into our lives in Hawaii...

The pictures below were taken at Kailua beach...

All the photos after this one were taken at Turtle Bay within a few minutes walk from our home...

Nice attempt, but not what I was looking for....someday, I will get a good photo of all three of them together from the front! I just don't know how long I will be waiting for that day...Sofia's footprints...Love the hair! He is watching the fish in the tidepoolsWe were out on a walk and it started pouring rain on us, it was actually kind of fun running through the golf coure in the rain. One of the many trails at Turtle Bay, this one leads to Kahuku point/pirates coveHe found this stick on our walk and carried it all the way to the beach and all the way home where it now sits on my patio (Yay!), he thought it looked like a horse...Still on our walk towards kahuku point, this is the view on the leftThis is the view to the right

Here we are at our own private beach, some people call it pirate's cove, (I don't know what it's really called) but it is AMAZINGsearching for crabs...they found a dead one and of course had to bring the body back home with us (Yay again!)...If no one else is at the beach, why not go naked?We love to go sit in the hamocks by the beach cottages and watch the sunset... Dancing on the way home from one of our walks, there was no music, it exists only in their minds...

So Sweet...

I'm kind of Obsessed!

I am totally obsessed with my little girl Sofia. I just can't get enough of her. She's just so adorable, and beautiful, and cute, and funny, and precious! She is my princess, my sweetheart, my love, my everything. I just love everything about her from her tiny little fingers to her big beautiful eyes. She has the sweetest little voice and is such a girly girl. She is our self proclaimed.... Princess Sofia, if you ask her what her name is she will answer (most of the time) with Princess Sofia. If I were to say to her, you're so adorable or you're (fill in an adjective), she get's a little attitude and says, no, I'm not! (hand on the hip, I kid you not) I'm a Princess! Luca is always saying that I take too many pictures of her but I just can't get enough photos of my little princess. So sorry to bore you with more photos of Sofia! By the way, I LOVE my little boys and am totally obsessed with them also, but they just aren't as much fun to photograph, probably because they won't cooperate like Sofia does....by the way, How do you like my supersized photos?! A bit much? I love the attitude, I know someday it won't be so funny though...

Here she is after church last Sunday with her hair clip still intact which is quite an accomplishment!

After a day of swimming in the ocean. While she swims she sings, I'm swimming, I'm swimming, over and over and over again, and she twirls around in her Horsey floaty over the waves, it's actually pretty funny because she goes right in by herself but because she's so small people are always looking at me like I'm crazy for letting my baby go in, but she's perfectly fine!
What a poser, I should get her into modeling or something I still can't believe that she was posing for me just as I asked her to...

Luca's 7th Birthday!

First I just wanted to start out by saying that I decided to learn how to make my photos bigger on blogger today, it took a little while to figure it out, but now I can pretty much make them any size I want and it's actually really easy, I'm very excited about this!!! So now you can enjoy my photos bigger! I think my blog now looks like it's for the visually impaired though, but I like it that way! Anyway...

This is a little late, but better late than never. Luca turned 7 on August 23rd. It was only a few weeks after moving back to Hawaii, so I was worried that we wouldn't have enough kids at his Army party that he had been planning for the last year! There was no way I was getting out of throwing this party for him, no matter how overwhelmed I was with moving! So Luca got his Army party and we had a huge turn out of friends, we were very happy! I have to give a brief explanation of the party, we had a pool party because that was the easiest thing for me! Although, it did take of lot of persuasion because "army guys are on LAND not WATER, that's the navy!" Luckily I was able to come up with a pretty good argument (which I no longer remember) and he decided the army party at the pool was a good idea after all. I'm so glad we did it at the pool, it ended up being perfect to have a military water party. I bought a bunch of water guns so all the kids had one, I also filled up about 150 camo water balloons, we made an obstacle course with a rope swing over a baby pool, crawl tunnels, rope to crawl through, and a slip 'n slide at the end. I was pretty impressed with the party I was able to pull off! AND I even made a tank cake! Thanks to my friend Brittany Riesenberg for the idea! I wasn't going to do it because I thought it was going to be way to much work, but it was actually really easy and a lot of fun to make! I think it turned out pretty cool! So Luca had his party on Saturday, and his real birthday was on Sunday. Luca was lucky enough to have his Grandma Patty fly out to Hawaii just to be with Luca on his birthday. So they got a hotel room at Turtle Bay that night and Luca was able to wake up and go to one of his favorite places on earth, the breakfast buffet at turtle bay! We swam in the pool, went down the water slide, and had dinner at Daddy's "Krestaurant" (that's how matti says it) that night. Gabe had to work on Luca's birthday so Luca wanted to go to his work to eat dinner, we had a beautiful table on the sand and enjoyed dinner with Grandma, Uncle Seth and Aunt Lacey. It was one crazy weekend...what a lucky little boy!
I can't believe how grown up he is!!!



Luca with our neighbor Doneli and his "best friend in Hawaii" Asher, they have been friends since he was 4.

All of the kids were really into the army theme! This is Mikie, another old friend of ours, Luca and Mikie have been friends since they were 4 also. Gabe BBQ'd hamburgers and hotdogs for everyone
Water Balloon Fight, it wasn't just for the kids either, Gabe and his friends participated as well and then a few of them ended up in the pool with their t-shirts onBack for more ammo!My totally Awesome Tank cake!
With his Grammie!Pretending to blow out the candles that wouldn't lightAnother neighborhood friend, Conoloa and Asher again.
We also had a tank pinata and instead of hitting it with a bat (there were too many kids) everyone got a string and only one of them will open the bottom for all the candy to fall out, it was SO much easier than taking turns with the bat!
Presents!!! He got a lot of army guy stuff.On the left was Luca's Italian friend Alessandro, an Italian family was staying at turtle bay for the month of August and luca made friends with them and invited them to his party. They had a lot of fun together even though they couldn't talk to each other. Luca is so good at making friends everybody always really likes him.Sofia on her "horsy" which he cannot swim without! she is in the baby pool at the Turtle Bay Hotel.Matti in the baby pool also, we love to walk to the hotel and swim at the pool, we go a few times a week now.Luca riding the slide Wow, I'm finally finished, that post was almost as much work as his party! :)

Reunited at Last!

Although I am still months behind on my blogging, I decided to post recent pictures from this week and update everyone on what's been going on in our lives lately. The last 6 months Gabe has been working for a company in California. He basically would mostly meet with home buyers that were building new homes and sell them all of their low voltage wiring, home theater systems, alarms systems, smart home technology etc. It was really exciting :), he had to commute over an hour everyday to work and as often as once a week or so he had to commute all the way out to palm desert, which was 2 1/2 hours from where we were living in La Jolla. It wasn't paying much and it wasn't what Gabe wanted to do and we weren't where we wanted to live either. But, we were just happy to have a job at all! We had accepted our circumstances of living with my parents because his job didn't pay enough money, and we accepted that Gabe had to spend an extra 2-3 hours away from us a day because of his commute and we had accepted that he was going to do a job that he didn't' really like all that much. We actually had been very blessed to have a roof over our heads and a little bit of income. There are a lot of people out there with much worse circumstances. We still had our dream in the back of our heads that we wanted to move back out to Hawaii someday, we just thought that someday was going to be in the distant future. We had no idea what was about to happen. Gabe was talking to a friend that he went to school with at BYUH and his friends was telling him all about his company that he was starting renting mopeds out of Turtle Bay resort. Gabe told him that he thought his company was such a great idea and that if he ever needed to hire anyone that he would be very interested. A few weeks later, Gabe had a job offer to move out to Hawaii to work for his friend that was starting up his company. Gabe was so excited, he was determined that he was going to make things work for us out in Hawaii one way or another. So before we knew it, he had quit his job and bought a plane ticket to Hawaii, it all happened very quickly! The kids and I stayed in San Diego with my parents with no set date as to when we would see each other again. It was very very sad saying goodbye to Gabe, we knew how much we would miss him. But at the same time we were very excited at the idea of our new future prospects! The moped business is going really well, it is called Hele Huli rentals and they are the only moped rentals on the north shore. Gabe sees a really prosperous future for the company and is very grateful and excited to be a part of it. A few weeks after Gabe arrived in Hawaii he was also able to secure a second job at the restaurant Ola which is on the beach at turtle bay. He also found us a condo that was available for rent at the resort at a great price and with a great floor plan that doesn't come available often. Everything seemed to be falling into place so perfectly. We were so blessed in so many ways, and the way that everything happened left no doubt in our minds that this was meant to be for us and that things are going to work out for us in Hawaii. We bought our plane tickets and flew out to Hawaii a week ago on August 6th. So after 5 weeks, a missed 8th wedding anniversary, and a missed 31st birthday, we were finally together again! It was hard, I hope we will never have to spend so much time apart again, but it was worth the sacrifice! I can't even begin to explain the amount of stress and anxiety I felt over making this move by myself with three little ones, it was So much work! I'm so so glad that it's all over now. Below I have posted the photos from the last week, we've had a lot of fun being all together again going to our favorite beaches and our pool, spending time with Matti's "best friend" Auntie Lacey and Uncle Seth and cousin Kelley, eating good food (with an employee discount) , and trying to make up for all the missed hugs and kisses with our daddy! Here are the kids on the airplane, it was a long 6 hours, but I've definitely been through worse! She is SO excited to see her Daddy again!Luca can't wait either!At last he can hold his babies! He missed us so much, he couldn't even really talk about it because he would start to cry, it was sad...My little sis Bryn came with me to help me with the kiddies on the airplane and while I moved into my place, she has been here for the last week and is leaving tomorrow :( WE will REALLY miss her!This is the view from our condo, I am standing on our patio taking this photo, it's so beautiful living here...She's hula dancing, she loved the leis that Daddy bought for us!At Sunset Beach, about a five minute drive from our home

At Waimea Bay

Sofia at Luca's Baseball Game

Don't tell luca, but sometimes watching his baseball games wasn't all that interesting, Sofia agreed with me, so during one of his games I followed her around with my camera...it was fun!

Sofia 2 years old plus a few months

These photos were taken 5/17/09

Baseball Season

It was Luca's first year playing baseball. The first half of the season they used a T to hit the ball and then the second half they used a pitching machine. Luca was a really great hitter, he is the only one on his team that hit the ball off of the pitching machine every single time except once on the last game (that was alittle sad) but he was really good at hitting. He showed so much improvement throughout the season, when it first started, I have to admit, I was a little worried. His skill level wasn't quiet what it should have been, but he worked so hard, and he practiced with his Dad, his uncle Henry, or his Grandpa everyday, he made sure of it. He actually would beg people to practice with him, he just couldn't get enough baseball. So by the end of the season, he was one of the best kids out there. Because he had practiced so much, he was by far the most improved on the team. So we already knew that Luca has to be the best at everything, he's very competitive, and now we know that if he's not the best, he is willing to work really hard to improve and become the best. We were so proud of him!

practice swingsReady!His facial expressions are the best!
He had to slide into home every time, and why not? It's way more fun that way!Matti mostly collected pine cones during Luca's games, played in dirt, and tormented his little sister...Sofia would watch the game a little but mostly would run away from me, it was very difficult chasing after her while trying to take photos of luca.