Maui Ocean Center

We spent half a day at the aquarium seeing all of the underwater life and learning some things about Hawaiian agriculture.

Favorites were the sea turtles, the jelly fish and the tunnel.

Pirate Ship

The girls really loved the Westin's kid's pool with a pirate ship and water slide. Sydney would cry everytime we had to leave it.

Hula Girl

We had lunch at the bar & grill after the parade and Sydney was our little celebrity. Even after Halloween was over, people would see us at the swimming pool and ask us if she was the "Hula Girl".

Halloween on Maui

We spent Halloween on Maui enjoying the nice weather and the Westin's kids' parade. I couldn't resist the opportunity to dress at least one of my kids up in a hula girl outfit. I wanted to have both the girls in grass skirts, but Lauryn wouldn't go for it at all. Only our little Sydney complied.

Amazingly Sydney did a little hula dance for us!
Lauryn didn't want to be outdone, so she did her ballerina twirl.

Atlantis Submarine in Maui

Like I mentioned earlier, we spent quite a few days in Maui at the end of October/early November. It was my chance to get a ton of really great pictures with my new Nikon D80, right? Nope! I took about 2000 pictures on our trip. But now I KNOW that it's not the camera. It's user error that makes my pictures not great.

I'm outdoors in the bright sunlight on a beach and taking pictures galore, but what do you know...I had set the ISO to Auto and thought it was really on auto, adjusting to my environment. But NO! I had turned a dial here and pushed a button there, and now my ISO was like at 800. So all of my outdoor pictures were noisy! Why does it let you change the ISO when I really wanted it to be on Auto? So I got a few pictures that were decent, but not what I expected.

We took a Submarine ride to the bottom of the ocean to a depth of about 130 feet. So here's what the bottom of the ocean looks like off the coast of Maui: There was also a sunken ship at the bottom.It would've been a great experience had it not been Sydney's nap time and for her crying the entire time.

I hate beans

This is what I walked into one day after leaving Sydney to play for a few minutes.

See how she's sitting there innocently as if nothing is wrong?

What life would be like if we had an Ah-yi fulltime

I took on a 6-week project for Visa at the end of the summer so we hired our friend's nanny to watch the kids. She only spoke Chinese so I had to really brush up on my Mandarin to get us through. The best part was that she would bring groceries in the morning and make dumplings from scratch for the kids. She even taught Lauryn how to make them. Ah-yi made full-sized dumplings for us and mini dumplings for the kids.
One day Lauryn made and packed lunch for me and John to take to work. Here's a picture of what she made:Notice that John got a Superman picture and I got a pink jewel. And my package of gummies were Hello Kitty, while John's was Toy Story.

So the whole working thing itself was a lot of fun for me while it lasted. It was weird to see John at work everyday. He didn't want to show any preferential treatment, but I would sometimes find a yogurt parfait on my desk in the morning and a Diet Coke here or there. But then again, I noticed that my plums and bananas were always being swiped.