Happy Valentines Day

First of all, Britain wanted to say "Holla" or and don't forget "rub my belly!"

"What are you sticking in my face?? Oh well, I need the attention!"

Here is our Valentines day present to one another. It is a soda machine. It is pretty cool. You fill a bottle up with 1 L of water and screw it onto the black machine, press the fizz button until it farts 3 times to carbonate the water, and then you add flavoring of your choice and gently mix, and vio'la--you have freshly made soda!! Pretty cool, huh?? It is pretty good, but the regular flavors taste a bit like the diet flavors. They market them on lower calories, less sodium which makes them taste a little like diet. Only 36 calories per 8 oz for regular and 0 calories and aspartame free on diet.

We have made Mt Dew imitation, Dr. Pepper imitation, diet cola, diet orange, and diet cran-raspberry. Yum, yum! If you follow this link you can watch their demo on it, it is pretty funny.

http://www.sodaclubusa.com/VideoDemo/index.htm

So we re-finished our shower last week. It was a nightmare. I hate construction, it is so messy. Here are a couple of before pics.

Yhostin tearing down the wall. It was gross. Gotta love the light green paint!

After: new tile, new tub, new paint. The best part of the whole thing is we repainted the bathroom a beige color, so no more green!!! It looks really good.

So I hate shower caddies so we put in these shelves. It was not exactly what I wanted (wanted them to be in the corner) but it works, and we don't have to deal with the nasty shower caddy.

This post was really painful due to a virus in my computer that really bogs down my computer and makes it as quick as tar. Not very exciting, this is all I have to give.

This is the only pic I have bought from our photographer. I don't want to hang it, but the bigger frames don't have the flap on the back to keep it up so right now it is chillin' against the wall.

This is the awesome clock Nichole and Mike gave us for our wedding. It looks really nice and now we can see the time when we are in the front room.

This pic is blurry, but I am not taking another. This is the bench that goes with our new kitchen table. We put it in the front room for more seating, it is also to big to fit in the tiny dining area.

Our new couches!! Now we actually have room for people to come over and sit down. Thanks to Yhostin's mom and step-dad and all the people who gave us money for our wedding for helping us get some nice new couches!!

I really like having a place for both me and Yhostin to lay when we are watching tv. (They are black leather if you can't tell, they look kinda brown in the pic.)

This is the table that my mom and dad got us for a wedding present. We got enough chairs to seat 5. I decided that we needed enough for 8 so with gift money we bought 3 more chairs. It looks really cute with the bench. We need to buy a bigger house so we can have the table extended out and have all of our chairs around it, then have a dinner party!! : ) ha, ha. By the way, everybody in the house probably hates this table because I am very particular about it. You have to use a place mat, if you spill on the table you are dead (mainly because it has grooves that the food can fall in), all cups have to be on the placemat-not on the table, push in your chair, don't color on the table, etc, etc, etc........... Kiana just loves it!!!

Wedding Pics

Here are a few pic that Yhostin's mom gave me. I scanned them in so they may not look the best.


"Just Mauied"

Cute daddy and daughter

Kiana posing with the fans and umbrellas we put out so that the guests could be comfortable in the warm Maui air.

The aisle, just enough seats for the 12 that were sitting. The other five of us were standing of course.

The cake! Coconut cake with coconut filling, white cake with passion fruit filling, and chocolate with chocolate filling. It honestly did not taste that great, but it looked cute (the most important part)!!

An awesome pic of the palm trees that were right behind us while we were getting married.

Hawai'i

Welcome to Hawai'i!!!! For your listening pleasure we have added a playlist to our blog. This playlist will always remind us of our time in Hawai'i. Every station plays these 5 songs continually. If you change the station to get away from the song, you will fail because it will just be playing on another station. I haven't gotten sick of them yet, so we will sport them in UT now. (I added "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from this Hawaiian singer to give the page the Hawaiian feel!--not of part of the Hawai'i Top 5)

Our room we stayed in was on a resort in Kapalua and it was way nice!! We loved it. This was our incredible view. We even saw whales from our room. Chris got some nice video of the whales just playing around right past those palm trees.

Another view from a different angle.

Here is the tour of our room.

This was Kiana's bed while Terra was there. It worked out good.

The cute privacy note

Kiana sporting the hula girl look.

The time change kicked our butt. They are 3 hours behind. We all got up at about 5 am and wanted to go to bed at 8 pm. We made good use of our early rise by going to the beach. We got down to the beach at about 6 am and it did not get light until about 7. Thanks to the full moon we had enough light to swim.

Kiana enjoying the water.

We did not quite get the sunrise, but we did this nice view of the palm trees.

Terra enjoyed the beach too!! The water enjoyed her camera (it fell in and broke).

Martinelli's we took to the ceremony

Gift bags for the guests!

After the ceremony, we went to the Feast at Lele lu'au. It was a block from the church and was right on the beach. They gave us a lei when we arrived, it had an open bar (a plus for some of our lushes), interesting food, and an awesome show.

Terra-the best maid of honor

Aunt Kim

Daviana and TJ. The best cousins ever. Thanks for being a bridsemaid Daviana. Thanks for coming Gloria (not pictured)!

Jane and Tim

Yhostin's mom and step-dad, Wendy and Gary

Yhostin's dad, Ervin

My mom and dad

Mary and Chris. They got their tickets the day we left to Hawai'i and flew in the next day. I am so glad they could make it.

Taylor enjoyed the open bar as well. I think he is sucking down the Lava Flow here (minus the spirits)!!

Thanks to everyone who came. We enjoyed having you all there!! It made our day even more special to share it with ones we love!! Words can't express our thanks. We love you all!!

Hawai'i

They combined our dessert at the lu'au and wrote congrats. It was really nice!

This was probably the best looking guy up there. Kim was liking his view so we had to get a pic!

This was when we went snorkeling. Kiana would not leave Chris alone. She was trying to put sunscreen on him and he didn't want it on. She ended up slapping his arm so this was the result of the sunburn.

A view from the Trilogy IV, the boat that took us snorkeling. It had these tramps over the water that you could lay on.

All of us, except that guy in the blue (not pictured: Ervin, me)

This was our snorkeling instructor, Orin. The pic was posted because he was cute. Too bad we did not get his face.

Kiana ready to go!

Hello Scuba Steve!

sporting the lifeguard look

one of the beaches just walking distance from our room

Taylor liked the sand, but not the water. He would drop his pacifier in the sand and then put it back in his mouth. Sand was everywhere!

Mmmmmmm....it tastes so gritty!!

The waves were really strong here so we made Kiana wear a life jacket, she didn't really get to swim alot here because she probably would have been washed to sea.

We got to see this awesome rainbow over the ocean right from our room. We had the best views. It was cloudy and rained off and on while we were there. The rain did not interfere with any plans though. The temps were over 80 degrees everyday. It was so nice. (It made it really hard to come back to the snow.)

On Sunday, we went to the Maui Ocean Center, an aquarium, about 20 miles from our room. It was crazy because it was more like a desert down there.

Here is a sting ray swimming by.

The sea turtles are huge. They saw some when we went snorkeling. One even started to chase Terra.

Monday, December 15 we celebrated Kiana's 9th birthday. We went on the Atlantis submarine. This was on the boat out to the submarine. Later that day they went whale watching and she even got to drive the boat. Then everybody sang Happy Birthday to her!

The windows in the submarine are made of acrylic. This is a pic of how thick the window is. I think he said it was 3.5"

This was a sunken boat, that they sunk in 2005. It use to be an exibit, it was built in 1920, but the repairs became too much so they sunk it to the bottom and now it is providing coral to fish.

When we were at the bottom, 130 feet down, you lose a wavelength of light. This is my mom's red purse but while we were at the bottom it was purple.

This is Front Street in Lahaina. It is right on the coast and the shops on the left line the beach. It has alot of cool shops, not to mention souvenir shops (we spent lots of time and money there).

The dirt was really red, you can kind of see the red color coming through on these cliffs.

Kiana trying to look for whales through the binoculars.

My mom made her a barbie hula girl cake. Thanks mom, it turned out really cute. My mom actually made the cake before she left and froze it and wrapped it up and packed it in her luggage to Maui. It tasted really good. Yum, chocolate with coconut and chocolate chips.

(This is the huge pancake that covered my whole plate.) On Tuesday, we drove the Highway to Hana, some might call it the Highway to Hell. We stopped at Charley's for breakfast. I guess it is a favorite of Willie Nelson's. I think he may have a home their, my mom asked the waitress and he was acutally in the day before and she expected him that morning as well. We never saw him.

Not a great pic, but it was cool right here because there was all this bamboo that lined the road.

Here we are at the Lava Rock Beach. It was a really cool thing to see.

Here we are at the black sand beach. It was surrounded by lava rock caves, lava tubes, and awesome views, not to mention blow holes through the lava rock.

Wailua falls

I don't know what kind of tree this is but it has branch like things that grow off the tree branches and goes to the ground. It then roots in the ground so it is secure to the ground and the branch.

The ocean at Oheo Gulch.

The falls at Oheo Gulch

If you continue on past Hana the road is narrow, windy and feels like you are driving in the mountains. The scenery you see is awesome though. This is the mountain created from lava. You can see where the streams of lava ran.

another shot

So the island is shaped somewhat like a figure eight. On our drive back, we were higher up on the island and could see down to the lower areas. This is as the middle of the island (where the 8 would cross) and you could see the ocean on both the north and south side of the island.

The time came to leave, yucky. So, I mailed my dress to a steamer that got it ready for me. On the way back I did not want to ship it. We just rolled it up and put it in the suitcase. I was shocked at how small it was when it was all rolled up. This suitcase carried my dress, Kiana's dress, a roll of material, and a container of nuts back to Utah.

I don't have any pics of the wedding on my camera. (I will have to get someone else's camera to post.) Our flowers from the wedding did so good and they looked good I had to take a pic of them. Mine is on the right. My mom actually brought them home on her luggage and they are sitting on my table in some water.

All the leis we got. The white ones were used in the ceremony, the purple ones were from the lu'au, and the ones in the container Yhostin's mom and step-dad gave us. They did not survive the plane ride home. The smelt really gross when I took them out of the suitcase.

Taylor was pooped. He fell asleep on grandpa. We were trying to keep him awake so that he would sleep the whole time on the plane. He did pretty good, considering it was an overnight flight.

What we learned in Hawai'i was how to say the state fish. Watch the video below and you will hear Kiana pronounce it.

top: Dolphins we saw snorkeling bottom: The lava rock beach

top: Fire Dancer bottom: Hula Girls

The guys at the lu'au