Happy Advent!
December 2 found us following our family tradition--we turned up the Christmas tunes, pulled out all the decorations, and enjoyed the first Christmas treats of the season! Usually that Christmas treat is hot chocolate and a batch of cookies, but when you live in the tropics and it's in the mid-80s on the first Sunday of Advent, you skip the cocoa and serve up homemade candy cane ice cream instead! Yummm!

The girls' tree (yes, we have two; the second is a Chrismon tree) and the play-friendly nativity sets ended up in the study this year. The girls had a blast putting up their tree--they even assembled it and put on the lights--and they've added new handmade ornaments every day. Lion's are scherenschnitted and involve copious amounts of glitter, and Bug's are origami. Monkey hasn't contributed any yet, but she's been busy with other projects. The nativity sets have gotten lots of use too, as the girls have done dramatic reenactments of Christmas stories (not just the story, the girls like to change around the PlayMobil parts and play out other Christmassy tales.

This is why we ditch formal lessons during Advent. It gives us a chance to slow down, work on craft projects, write Christmas cards, spend more time reading (including my personal favorite--Dicken's A Christmas Carol), make cookies, play games, sing Christmas carols along with our daily Advent devotional, and make or buy thoughtful gifts for each other.

We have decorations outside too! There's also a wreath on the door
and candles in the upstairs windows. Those little lanterns each feature
a silhouetted nativity scene.

For their school's Christmas recital, the girls decided to form a trio and play "Silent Night." This was their first time playing together (or with any other musicians at all). They were also the only group in their school to perform without a teacher on stage with them. We're so proud! (Hopefully, the video below loaded properly and you can watch too.)

African collar necklaces

Happy Hanukkah! Happy Kwanzaa!

Our local library sponsored a holiday storytime about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. We attended with some homeschool friends, and learned the origins of each holiday, listened to some fun stories, ate snacks, and completed several crafts. 

Paper & pipe cleaner menorahs 

Byodo-in Temple

We decided to be touristy one weekend and visit the Byodo-in Temple, a scaled down replica of a 1,000-year-old Buddhist temple in Japan. The replica here is open to visitors of all faiths. The girls and I had just finished learning about the origins of Buddhism in history, so they were very curious to see what an actual Buddhist Temple looked like. The temple and the grounds were beautiful! The temple is surrounded by streams, a tiny waterfall, and a massive koi pond that's also home to a family of gorgeous black swans. When we first entered, we walked by a small pagoda that houses a huge bell. Visitors are invited to ring the bell as a way of dispelling negative thoughts before entering the temple. (Let's be honest though, mostly it was rung by kids who thought it was great fun to make such a loud noise!)

One of our neighbors provided the perfect kid-sized banquet table.

Happy Thanksgiving!
We are thankful for awesome neighbors! Monthly potlucks have become the norm since we moved in this past summer, and we stepped it up to join forces to create a Thanksgiving feast. We had all the traditional fixings (including 4 kinds of pie) for a crowd of about 25 people. We ate lots of good food, followed by hours of kids playing and grown ups chatting in the shade of our climbing tree.

Beach Schooling!

Perks of homeschooling in Hawaii: when it's a nice day with no planned outings, we can pack a bag of books and do lessons at the beach! We went back to Dog Beach and spread a blanket under a tree for lessons (yes, shady trees on the beach; it's a game changer). After completing Bible, history, reading, and writing, we declared the last couple hours of the morning science lesson: we went exploring further out into the water, waded to a small island, and walked down the beach for a bit. Along the way, we spotted several schools of fish, a bonded snake eel, a couple sea urchin shells, a sea cucumber, several ghost crabs, a pair of cloudless sulphur butterflies, many bits of coral, and a submarine!

Makerspace

Our local library recently started a monthly Makerspace for elementary-aged kids! Makerspace is a gathering for hands-on STEM learning.) This month's event featured Squishy Circuits. The girls got to learn about electricity and circuits by completing a series of projects using LEDs, a battery pack, insulating dough, and conducting dough. The librarian walked them through the outlined steps, but let them do a lot of experimenting off-script. They were thrilled! In honor of Veteran's Day weekend, their final project was a dough American flag lit up with LEDs.

Long weekends mean epic board game battles! Daddy and the girls took over the kitchen table with a massive Magic: The Gathering board game, and pulled out some new pieces they hadn't played with yet. So much fun!

Neighborhood Luau
Our neighborhood hosted a luau recently that involved food vendors, free leis, bounce houses, a local band, hula dancers, and a fire dancer. We met up with two other families to enjoy a few hours of good food and good entertainment. The girls even got to go up and participate in a short hula lesson!

Stuffing their happy little faces with classic Hawaiian fare from the food truck:
garlic shrimp, korean barbecue, mac salad, and a tuna poke bowl. 

Dog Beach
Some neighbors introduced us to an awesome new beach! It's a little unmarked beach in Mamala Bay with limited access, and we practically had it to ourselves. It's a nice stretch of beach with picnic tables under trees, no waves, and so shallow the girls could walk out into the water a hundred yards and still only be in water up to their knees. Just perfect for a picnic dinner and a little sand and water play

while watching the sunset. The girls declared this a must-visit location when little cousins decide to come visit!

Those little specks are my kids!

Zoo Day
We finally made it to the local zoo! It's a great little zoo--a fun place to spend a morning seeing animals from all over the world, admiring local plants, playing on an awesome climbing structure, and topping it all off with a stop at the cafe for Dole Whip (pineapple soft serve, an amazingly good local favorite). Good times!

Bug was an especially big fan of the petting zoo.

No zoo visit is complete without a statue to climb on!

We found a VERY friendly peacock.

This playground was probably the favorite stop. It's hard to tell
but there are bridges, swings, and hammocks inside all that.

Check out this tree! We decided those are roots growing out of the branches.

Halloween
Halloween is a major event in our neighborhood.

Kids come from all over the island! In addition to most people passing out candy, a lot of houses go all out with decorations and one even had a (very mild) haunted circus tent for the kids to walk through. We met up with half a dozen of the girls' friends and spent an hour walking through maybe half of the neighborhood until their buckets were full.

There were some great costumes out there! The girls were very excited about theirs. Lion's Jack 'o Lantern was a costume we put together in a previous year, and Monkey's (the woodland elf) and Bug's (Rey) costumes were created by raiding our closets and visiting the craft store. My favorite costume sighting was probably the van full of neighborhood maintenance workers dressed as minions that we spotted while hanging out at the pool with friends earlier in the day. (Yes, October in Hawaii is still outdoor swimming weather--it's usually in the mid-80s here.)

Monkey (left) and Bug (right) play defense
with their friend A as goalie.

Go Orange!

Monkey and Bug love playing soccer! Monkey had been hesitant to sign up, but even she admitted she was having a lot more fun than she expected. In addition to the official practices,  they've been getting in extra tips, tricks, and drills with Daddy. The rest of the players are improving too (they're not the only first-timers on the team), and their team actually tied their last game! Very exciting since they lost the last couple by a landslide. (The league doesn't officially keep score, but kids always know who won. Can't fool them!)

Perks of Homeschooling
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what history class sometimes looks like at our house! We're reading through Story of the World, and for every chapter the girls each fill out an over-sized notecard with notes on the lined side and a drawing on the blank side. This week they were assigned to put them in order and tell me the story. You can't really see their fun drawings here, but it was a great review activity!

Mmmm....Cookies!
Since Lion had stitches in her knee, we couldn't plan any of our usual adventures for a couple weeks. However, everyone agreed that meeting up with friends to make, decorate, and eat Halloween-themed sugar cookies was a great substitute!

She's not in pain here--just sad and bored.

Nobody Likes the ER
Honestly, I'm amazed we've been parenting these adventurous girls for 10 years, and this was our first visit to the ER to have somebody stitched up! (We've been to the ER previously for a potential head injury 5 years ago, but Bug was fine.) Monkey and Lion had a bike collision, and poor Lion ended up need multiple stitches in her knee. (For you medical folks, it's one regular suture with a mattress stitch on either side.) Lion was very brave! After the initial shock of having a stream of blood down her leg and learning it was serious enough to require a hospital visit, she only cried when the doctor injected the inside of her injury with pain killer 3 times. Now we get to the really hard part--making Lion take it easy for a while, so she doesn't pop her stitches! As Lion put it, "I don't DO taking it easy!"

Meanwhile...Monkey and Bug fortunately did not have sit in the ER for 3 hours. They hung out with some neighborhood friends instead, and had a lovely time playing outside, playing with Mr. E's drum sticks (our 2 ten-year-olds plus 3 preschoolers banging away on every available surface--Mr. E is a brave man), then watching old episodes of Guts, a kids game show from the 90s. The next day Lion gave them a play-by-play of what it's like to get stitches.

Before and after photos!

New Experiences!
We had some planned fun and some unplanned excitement at music lessons last week! The planned fun was that during the hour-long break between lessons we bought snack at bakery in the same building. This is not your standard case of donuts that you'd find on the mainland! The offerings were a mix of native Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Japanese inspired pastries. We each picked one item to share, and they were all scrumptious!

Clockwise from left: chocolate covered mochi ring (donut made with sweet rice),
melon pan (a sweet bread with a cookie-like crust), poi malasada (fried dough made with taro,
so the inside is a vivid purple), and koshi anpan (a bun filled with sweet bean paste). 

Two hours later we walked out to our car to discover it was on the other side of caution tape, orange cones, and what appeared to be a small river running through the parking lot! We quickly noticed the source of the water--a water main had burst at the far end of the parking, and water was now gushing out and down the street! The building security guard was on the phone with the police when we arrived (turns out the water maintenance team was stuck in rush hour traffic). Once he hung up, he determined I could safely drive out if I went carefully, escorted me across the stream, and guided me out to avoid the worst areas and arrive at a spot where another employee was waiting to help the girls into the car. We all got home safe and sound with a pretty good story to tell!

standing on top of the the Damon mansion lanai
(Sadly, my pics of the grand staircase leading
to it didn't turn out)

Kamananui Road Trail

Our most recent outing with our homeschooling friends was an easy 3-mile hike through the Moanalua Valley. The shaded trail itself is what's left of a 150-year-old carriage road that crosses the Moanalua Stream seven times. Along the way we took an offshoot trail to visit the ruins of the Damon mansion, built in the 1880s. A grand staircase leads to the lanai and a fireplace (all that's left of the mansion). We spotted some additional stairs and followed them through the woods to discover the filled in walls of the swimming pool.

Our real destination though was the Pohakukaluahine Stone, a boulder featuring petroglyphs from long before any Europeans arrived on the island (a more exact date is unknown). Along the way, we named as many plants as we could, noticed a few birds we'd never heard before, and played around in the stream crossings. It was a great way to spend a morning with friends!

You can cross the bridges, but we decided it was more fun to walk
through the stream and admire the bridges from the side instead.

"Look, Mom! It's the perfect rock for a river mermaid!"

Most of the petroglyphs are extremely eroded,
but I got a decent shot of this figure.

Let's Play Soccer!

We decided to try a new thing this fall, and took advantage of an inexpensive MWR opportunity to put the girls on the wait list for rec league soccer (we moved here too late to sign up outright). A week into the season, we got a call around lunchtime saying they had spots open up for Monkey and Bug and did they want to show up for practice that afternoon? Yes, please! Daddy rushed them out to buy the necessary equipment that afternoon, and they had just enough time to walk out the door again for practice! Much to Lion's disappointment they didn't have a spot open up in her age bracket, but Monkey and Bug's coach said she was welcome to join in on their practices. She's been loving it!

Since this is a completely new thing for them, Daddy's been spending time on non-practice days teaching them new skills and running them through drills, so they can go onto the field with a little more confidence. They had their first game today! Their team lost pretty badly, but both girls had fun and got to make contact with the ball with a few times.

Look who finished fourth grade math this week! Hooray!

'Ehukai Pillbox Hike

Daddy had a day off of work, so we headed for the North Shore to try out another hike! It was supposed to be a 3-mile loop; however, there were a lot of trails in this area, none of which were labeled or marked in any way. Fortunately, a knowledgeable trail runner kept us from heading off onto a trail that apparently goes for miles into the mountains. She pointed us back onto the right trail, but we think we actually made a 2-mile loop, and we somehow missed one of the pillboxes. Anyway, the scenery was gorgeous as usual, and we all made it back safely!

Since we were in the area we decided to try another must-have Hawaiian food--Matsumoto's shave ice. A syrupy frozen treat is always nice after a hot morning on the trail!

After the steep incline (above), we found a conveniently
placed picnic table for a rest and a great view (below).

on top of the pillbox

inside the pillbox

We spotted this fun little cave on the way back down.

Mmmmm....tropical flavored shave ice!

Look at the cute little shave ices!

It was the perfect finale: They invited the kids on-stage
to sing and dance to "Gangnam Style"along with
the ROK service members!

Republic of Korea Show
We had a fun opportunity to experience a little South Korean culture recently, when a visiting military group hosted a free buffet and show at a neighborhood community center. The food was fantastic! Favorite food moment: an older gentleman behind Lion skeptically asked her to identify what she was scooping onto her plate. She cheerfully responded, "I don't know, but I'm trying it anyway!"

The show involved a military orchestra made up of US and ROK service members playing classical Korean music, a taekwondo demonstration, a musical slapstick comedy skit, K-pop music and Korean break dancers, as well as traditional Korean percussionists and dancers.

Traveling Journal 
A fun social studies/language arts project landed in our laps recently! Nana and Papa Bear passed us a traveling journal begun by a fifth grader from Ohio who's trying to see how many states it can visit by April. We had fun reading through the few entries already created, then spent a couple of hours making our own entry about Hawaii--with fun facts about its history, geography, language, and plants and animals.  Then we passed it along to another military homeschooling family back on the mainland.