Random pieces of daily life

My girls :)

Lydia's new pose.

Keeping Lydia and James busy when the big kids are at the temple:

Zoom in to find my friendly crab. He kept peeking at me and then disappearing back into the sand!

James was standing right where the wave would break and practicing his new Jiu Jitsu blocking. The wave still won :)

The above picture is a super small sample of the kind of junk we are cleaning out of the house. Lest y'all think we are on vacation or something. 😏

It's really hard to show you just how steep our hill is. I walk up and down it almost every day. Woot!

The Temple

I don't know how or why, but somehow my kids have a very strong testimony of the spiritual power that comes from going to the temple. One of their biggest concerns with the move to Hawaii was whether we would be able to attend the temple regularly just like we did in Provo.

I'm 100% certain I wasn't concerned about the temple when I was their age. Good thing their mom and grandparents are influences on them.

Tonight Isaac, Maile, Angela and I went to the temple to do temple baptisms. It was a special evening since our former stake president, John Bell, was working the temple tonight and was there to greet us in the baptistry! And then I saw another familiar face, Herbert Mahelona, who I remember was a seminary teacher when I was in high school, and who is the father of my friend Herbie Mahelona who is an amazing musician.

And we had the baptistry all to ourselves tonight. It was just the Chocks. Pretty cool.

What a pleasant evening. Grateful.

Sometimes we just go to the beach

I mean, hey, we're in Hawaii now. Go to the beach when we can, right? Especially on Labor Day.

And make sure to catch beautiful sunsets while we're at it.

This time we tried Haleiwa. Beautiful sunset, not the best beach for swimming (pretty rocky).

1) Rebecca never knows where the camera lens is on my phone, 2) Isaac's photobombing skills are middling at best.

Isaac opens his mission call

Onipa'a: Celebrating a Queen's birthday

This past Sunday was quite the eventful day.

First, we went to church. We're really enjoying the Lanakila Ward. Talk about "aloha," these folks have welcomed us warmly. Sorry, no pics.

Then, we left church a little bit early to participate in the Onipa'a celebration at Iolani Palace. Some well-placed Facebook messages got us the chance to sing with the choir, directed by Aunty Nola Nahulu. First time for Isaac to sing Hawaiian choral music, and to get to do so with Aunty Nola? Pretty cool. No, I cannot use the "mouth the words" technique in this choir like I did in MoTab. Fortunately, unfortunately, I'll let others be the judge of that.

We got to be a part of the celebration of Queen Liliuokalani's birthday. BTW, in case anyone was wondering, our Lydia was named with the queen in mind, since her given Christian name was Lydia. Bit of Chock family trivia for you...



Then Isaac opened his mission call. I'll post that in a separate post.

Finally, we ended the day with dinner at the Ishikawas' house. They are like my second (third? fourth?) mom and dad here in Hawaii. As usual, they had quite the spread.

Unfortunately, I was too busy eating and talking story to bother taking pictures of the food. Although I'm sure you can imagine, it was great. Love the Ishikawas. They're going to visit Charlie, one of my best friends from high school, for the next month and a half. Charlie lives in Boston with his family.

Busy Sunday!

Getting windy up here...what do the kids do?

So, there's a couple hurricanes in the neighborhood this week. The kids don't really have any experience with anything like this, except maybe that microburst from Utah Lake a few years back?

Anyhow, the wind up here at Alewa Heights is getting pretty gusty. The poor old plumeria tree in the yard lost a big branch today, and last night one of the coconut tree branches came down.

Well, since we got some of our stuff from our shipping container earlier this week (we got a storage unit in Kapolei for most of the stuff, we just grabbed the important stuff: the harp, the cello, the ukuleles, stuff like that...), we had some of our blankets.

And what do the Chock kids do when the wind is blowing outside?

 

They just make me feel brave.

Yellow gloves. They give you magical powers to clean stuff like this

ewwww

And this

And…

Garbage created:

Proof that once upon a time, someone lived here who actually cleaned.

It may have been long ago…

Toilet covers anyone?

AFTER!

Thomas and I worked together for 2 hours and then I spent another couple hours finishing up. Also did the linen closet.

And filled some more bags - this time donate. Lotsa mustard and avacado.

One cockroach. Dying. Muahahaha ha. I took a short video of it wiggling its legs but don't know how to put that on the blog. :)

I'm hoping the shower (broken water heater) will feel less cold now. Oh wait, no, I actually just decided I love cold showers. So refreshing. ;)