Beauty of Motherhood

About a month and a half or so ago, one of my best girlfriends, Anita, asked me to do her maternity pictures before she gave birth.  Her beautiful baby arrived on February 1st as healthy as they come and I had a blast taking pictures of her while she was inside her incubator, mommy.  I was more than happy to do it to get some practice in with my SLR.  These are some of my faves that I took.  Enjoy.  : )

On Holiday

'Tis the time for me to catch up here. I've been doing a lot of that lately...catching up that is. Anyway, I want to share our winter events w/ anyone who cares! : )

It started around Christmas when we got ourselves a new family pet...a puppy. He's an adorable, ACTIVE, mixed breed dog that was on SALE. Yep, we've got our very own clearance puppy. Anyone who's watched Marley & Me probably understands that reference. He's very similar to Marley, too, in that he's quite a handful and just loooves tearing everything up. After keeping him in the house for a bit, we surely needed to boot him out to the garage and then to the backyard where he presently lives. Potty training has been a long and quite annoying process but I think we're finally there. He's now almost 5 months old and about the height and weight of Rieley. : ) He knocks her over all the time and we guess its because he deems her his playmate and the closest one of us to his size. Oops...I think I forgot to mention that we named him Kalikimaka...that is..."Christmas," but we call him Maka for short which means "eyes" as he will one day be our watch dog...when he learns to bark at strangers instead of charge over for a pat!

Anyway, Christmas was very nice, quiet and uneventful...just the way we wanted it this year considering J had been gone for so long. Rieley and Maka both enjoyed opening their gifts and we thank everyone for their thoughtfulness.

This is probably one of my most fav pics of Rieley and Jason.

These really were Rieley's words that she told me to write.

Yea...these gingerbread houses were really difficult to get to stand up so we went 2D.

We ended up spending New Year's on Maui with my family. That was a great time, too. We visited the strawberry farm in Kula where we all got to feed horses (the same farm that was turned into a pumpkin patch for Halloween that I posted on below). Jason, my sister, Jaimee, her fiance, Gabe, and I all took the windy drive up to Haleakala mountain 10,000 some odd ft above sea level to watch the sunrise so very early in the morning. J and I also got to have a date at the restaurant Jaimee and Gabe both work at, Mama's Fish House, where the food is to die for! We celebrated the New Year with our usual celebrations of busting fireworks in the driveway and eating ozoni, or mochi, soup. It was a great time and J and I are so happpy to be starting a new year together.


Above is Jason's dinner.  Hahaha.


In mid-January, we planned a trip to Cleveland for our new niece, Mya's, baptism where good ol' Uncle J was her Godfather. Being in the middle of winter, we Hawaiian peeps froze our tanned (well some of us are tanner than others) tooshies off. Haha. The weather ranged from about 12- 30 degrees or so. But we enjoyed the change in weather and the opportunity to play in...what's that white powdery stuff that falls from the sky?...oh yeah, snow. : )

While in Cleveland we very much enjoyed seeing family and even took a road trip over to the East Coast to Lee, Massachusetts where we met up with my girlfriend from college, Suki, and learned to snowboard a bit. Let's not forget shopping!!! Snowboarding was a great experience, but a heck of a lot harder than I expected. I knew it was going to be very different from surfing and I was close to giving up when I finally started to get the hang of it. Let me take this time to warn other Hawaiians that snow is not nearly as soft to your butt as you would think. Hahaha. My butt was bruised for several days after, but to this day J's wrist is still a bit sprained...but let's blame that on himself since he stopped wearing his splint almost as soon as we got back home!

When we got back to Cleveland, we did a bit more exploring at the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo (which we toured in the falling snow), and the Great Lakes Science Center where the kids had a great time...oh and the adults, too. Rieley had a blast with her cousin, Jaxen, and really tried to be a help with Mya. I think one of the highlights for both of us involved attending a Cavs basketball game against the Florida Raptors!  That was great!
 Snow Jaxen

These were shadows that stayed on the wall even after you walked away. So cool.

After 3 weeks of vacation, 2 of which were spent on the mainland, none of us were ready for daddy to go back to work. But as I said, I've had the opportunity to catch up on a few tasks I've put on the backburner. Our next adventures are looking to be planning and celebrating Rieley's 3rd birthday and trying to take our honeymoon (FINALLY) to Italy. Hope this gave you an interesting outlook on what we've been up to and enjoy the pictures.

God bless,
Stephanie