The Fourth!

We celebrated the Fourth of July in Virginia with a super awesome backyard party hosted by these fine folks! There was a ball pit, a water table, a lot of fireworks, a s'mores bar, a HUGE spread of food and of course, a lot of America apparel. It was an excellent time and we stayed up ways past our bedtime.  Kian of course was in bed by eight but we were up until past midnight.  And Kian woke up. A lot. But that's another story for another blog post. 

christmas decorations are up!

Brenden made this!!

Our Christmas decor is up! We visited the Helemano Tree Farm and got an Norfolk Pine.  They didn't have the fuller, more traditional looking trees, but we wanted to support a local farm rather than buy ones shipped in from the mainland. I'm not going to lie, when we first put it up (and even a little bit now) all I could think is that it looks like a cactus.  Once we put the lights and the decorations on it grew on me.  Izzy really enjoys it so that is another plus.

We are very happy that our apartment looks so festive and we are enjoying sitting in the glow of all the lights while we continue watching our bad Christmas movies. It's going to be a fun month! We even made ourselves an advent activity calendar that I think will be very fun! We are going to try and blog about each of the activities on our Advent calender starting with the first one; watch a Christmas movie.

Thanksgiving

Look at all of our thriving plants!

Izzy's "give me more turkey now" face

THANKSGIVING!!!! It was just the two of us this year and we made even more food than last year.  What can I say, we like leftovers. Looking at the pictures it looks like we only ate things that came in various shades of yellow, but I can assure you that there was some red (cranberry sauce), green (green bean casserole), white (mashed potatoes) and turkey color.

I think what makes all the hours of cooking worth it is when you then spend an hour (or more) around the dinner table with family and friends.  While we were happy with all of our food and watching Izzy devour turkey, I think we need to be with family next year.  Four years is too long.

On to Christmas!!!!

Happy Halloween!!!!

Blending in.

"take a picture of this cool car"-Brenden

Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday! I love dressing up, seeing all the costumes, carving pumpkins, being scared, decorating, candy, everything! I love it all! Unfortunately, we didn't get to celebrate Halloween as much as I would have liked this year.  We didn't visit any haunted houses, our pumpkins went bad after three days, and we didn't plan out costumes until the day before the big Hallowballoo Festival.

I'm not totally sure why we didn't visit any haunted houses this year.  I think the main reason was there was none in downtown/Waikiki (that we heard of). Now that I drive to the other side of the island every weekday I'm not too keen on doing it during the weekends too.

The only thing we got to this year was Hallowballoo and we almost didn't even do that. We were so disappointed that we'd never be able to top our costumes from last year that we pretty much gave up.  At the very last minute I decided we should just dress as generic characters and at least go and see the other costumes.  So as you may or may not be able to tell from the pictures above, I am a witch and Brenden is brother nature.

Some of our favorite costumes from Hallowballo were, Taco (the league), a cheese grater, double dare team, and Scooby Doo(which was just a dog).

*We did not bring a real camera, so please enjoy these low quality pictures from my phone! (it's mostly of us, sorry)

carved

^Marissa's spider^

^Brenden's owl^

We carved our pumpkins and we think they turned out rather nicely.

Also, before we carved the pumpkins we had Izzy model on them. He's the best.

* These pumpkins were covered in gray fuzz after three days!! Do not buy pumpkins from Waimanalo Farms!!!! I struggled to even throw them out because they were so mushy and they left rotten pumpkin liquid all over our table.  I should of known when we saw moldy pumpkins IN THE FIELD.

star & stripes forever

^ started the day with red, white, and blue pancakes^

 ^ our most patriotic gear ^

 ^ it was insanely crowded ^

^ hunk ^

Our Fourth of July was wonderful! Brenden didn't have to work (yay!) so we both slept in.  After I woke up I decided it was time for red, white, and blue pancakes and instead of the regular recipe on the bisquik box, I used the melt in your mouth recipe on the bisquik box.  I think I tasted a difference, but Brenden did not. After breakfast we watched North America on the discovery channel and then put on our most patriotic gear which was also our only red, white, and blue, clothing.  Then headed to the beach. It was crazy crowded! We had never seen it so crowded before.  We felt like we were at the Jersey shore especially when the people a foot away ended up being from Jersey.

After the beach, we went running together, did our crunches and push-ups together and then ate burgers and finished watching North America.  We did not watch the fireworks...and we didn't miss them either. 

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!