Anya asks Jan to carry her upstairs to bed while he still can. He still can — barely. Going up the stairs is brutal.
Bree’s hug store now offers treats to customers.
We pick the girls up from school and drive downtown to get Santa pictures taken. After the pictures have been taken, Bree consults with Santa. She provides a detailed explanation of exactly which Squishable stuffed animals she would like.
Liya’s Drama class performs Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”. Liya plays the silly Pedant, who contributes to the overall confusion of the story by pretending to be someone he is not. The Shakespeare original already contains a bewildering number of people pretending to be other people. The play’s director compounds the confusion by flipping the gender of many of the roles, such that the titular “shrew” is actually a son, not a daughter. The cast memorized the original lines, and are only half-successful at remembering to change the gender of people mentioned in their lines.
Bree’s class performs a holiday-themed musical called, “The Grumps of Ring-a-Ding Town”. Every class member has a set of lines to sing, and Bree does a great job with her lines.
We fly to Los Angeles to spend the first half of Christmas break with Angela’s brother Johnny and his family. Angela’s parents join us there as well. The girls and their cousins Anthony and Brian are happy to reunite. Within several minute of our arrival, the kids have initiated a Nerf gun fight.
Angela’s cousin George and his family drive up from Long Beach to join us for a large family dinner at Gen, a Korean barbecue chain. Afterwards, we go back to Johnny and Zenni’s house to exchange Christmas presents.
We take Bree to visit Sophia, a friend she made this past summer at the Mandarin school in Taipei. Sophia’s mom, Samantha, meets us at Descanso Gardens north of L.A., and brings along Sophia’s sister, Haley, as well. The three girls have fun running around the gardens and climbing in trees.
We take all the kids to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The big animal dioramas are a hit.
Angela’s very happy to win a big Minion toy at one of Legoland’s midway games.
Legoland! This was the one place the girls really wanted to visit again while we are down in the L.A. area. Anthony and Brian have been here so many countless times, it’s no longer quite as magic for them, but they seem to enjoy showing their cousins around again. Everyone likes the Technic roller coaster, which has the biggest drop of any coaster in the park.
We walk with all the kids to Ryan Park near Johnny and Zenni’s house. It’s a nice sunny afternoon, and we spend a while playing various games. Jan, Angela, and Anya decide to take a long walk to the Starbucks at the Golden Cove shopping center. The walk down the hill is along a busy road that doesn’t have a proper sidewalk, so for the return trip back up the hill, we decide to take a longer route through a maze of side streets.
Christmas morning begins early, with the three girls and two boys opening their Santa presents before most of the adults are up. Bree waits by the tree for the adults to finish their breakfast so she can open more presents.
Liya gives Jan a tiny toy drone. Jan and all the kids have fun taking turns flying the thing around the house.
On Christmas afternoon, we take a walk down along the beach trail below the Terranea resort.
Liya has fun climbing around on the rocks by a large sea cave.
While Liya and the others are climbing over rocks, Bree and Brian are happy to just dig a big hole in the sand.
We fly from L.A. to the Big Island of Hawaii. It’s our first trip back to Hawaii in four years. We’re staying in the Waikoloa area on the Kona side again, but this time renting a condo in a development called Kolea. We’re lucky — our unit happens to have a nice view of Anaeho’omalu Bay. The unit’s not quite ready when we arrive, so we pass the time getting ice cream at the nearby Queens’ Shops and buying some food for breakfast.
Two other families we know are vacationing in Kona, and we get together with them for dinner. Bree enjoys reuniting with her friends Natasha (who’s on vacation from a year with her mom in Taiwan) and Serena.
We spend the morning at the pool. This activity has become much more relaxing over the past year — Bree is now a confident swimmer, and doesn’t need constant attention or accompaniment in a big, cold pool. We also walk along the beach of A-Bay a bit, and Liya and Sabriya have fun on some exercise equipment at the top of the beach.
In the afternoon, Natasha’s family and Serena’s family join us at Kolea for some more pool time.
Bree finally gets to open up an electronics kit gift she received from Jan for Christmas. As hoped, the kit has some interesting pieces that can be quickly snapped together to make interesting toys. She and Jan have a great time assembling a little remote buzzer and then a little vehicle that can be steered around. She slowly gets the hang of driving it.
Beachcombing. Liya and Jan try snorkeling in the bay, but the water’s pretty murky, and there’s not a ton to see underwater. Bree collects a bunch of pretty shells, though, and a tiny little coconut.
Foreground: a large, sleepy green sea turtle rests in the sand. Background: Liya searches for another sea turtle she saw swimming in the water.
We spend the morning at the small but charming Waialea Beach, a.k.a. Beach 69. The snorkeling is great: much clearer water than at Anaeho’omalu, and many more fish to see besides. The Hawaiian reefs that are close to shore aren’t in great shape generally, but at least this one has some more marine life, including a variety of urchins. Meanwhile, Angela and Sabriya borrow boogie boards from some nice people on the beach.
After the beach, Anya and Bree want to go back to the condo and eat lunch there. Jan, Angela, and Liya drive up to Kawaihae to try out the food at Kohala Burger and Taco, which turns out to be tasty. While there, we happen to run into the Pearls, a family that lives two doors down from us in Madison Park! We invite them over to our place for a barbecue dinner. On the way back, we make a detour to upcountry Waikoloa Village, which has a better supermarket than the two closest to us, so we can pick up food for dinner.
The Pearls come over in the early evening, and we have a nice dinner on the lanai. Around 7:00 pm, Jan and Margaret walk over the Kings’ Shops for an outdoor concert. John Keawe, a Hawaiian slack key guitarist, gives a performance most Tuesday nights. Jan tried to see him play the last time we were here, but John had to cancel the show due to illness. John’s playing tonight, though, and it’s a nice show. As an added bonus, John’s wife and two granddaughters accompany him on the ukulele and performing some hulas.
We drive across the island to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. We might have made the trip anyway, but an extra incentive is that Liya recently had to do a school report on a national park. Since she knew we were going to Hawaii, she picked Volcanoes as the park to research. In previous years, we’ve driven around the north or south sides of the island, but there’s now a quicker highway that takes us over the saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.
We get to the park around 10:30 am, and make a short walk along the rim of Kilauea crater to a viewpoint. The view is really interesting — since the last time we visited the park, the smaller Halemaumau crater inside Kilauea crater became active. It now contains a lava lake (which we can’t see) and a emits a huge plume of volcanic gas (which we can see). The gas can be poisonous, so a large portion of the crater rim road has been closed
We have a lunch in the main dining room at Volcano House, where we’ve tried to eat on previous years but have never managed to get a table. This time, we do get a table — but the food turns out not to be worth it. After lunch, we stop by the Jaggar Museum. On the path leading to the museum, Jan overhears a Japanese tour guide giving a family a tour in Japanese. He points out some tiny fragments of “Pele’s Hair”, very fine hair-like fragments of volcanic glass, lying on the ground beside the path.
We almost always forget to have someone take a photo of our whole family, but a nice person takes our photo at the viewpoint at the Jaggar Museum. Behind our happy family is the poisonous volcanic plume of death.
Our last stop in the park is the Thurston Lava Tube. The tube now has lights, a debatable improvement, and a gate closing off the second half of the tube, a decidedly unfortunate change. But the walk through the rainforest to the tube and back is a treat. The vegetation is lush and dense, and the air is full of bird calls.
On the way back to the Kona side of the island, we stop in Hilo for some shave ice. Angela orders hers with POG flavor (passion, orange, guava). She’s glad she ordered the small size.
RIP Kouri the Hamster, 2014–2015. Our neighborhood friend whose son is housesitting for us gets in touch to share some sad news: when the son went over to our place today, he found our tiny but beloved hamster had passed away. She was probably close to 2 years old, which is about average for a hamster, but it’s still very sad news to hear.
Some things we remember about Kouri:
Her name was inspired by her parkour abilities, and she lived up to this name. She was often found scaling the bars of her cage, or sometimes going along the top of her cage.
One day Anya was installing some new handholds in the cage so the hamster could more easily climb up. Anya said: “I guess she likes them. I’m not even done installing these, and she’s climbing up them.”
Sometimes when someone walked by her cage, Kouri would stand up on her back legs and bounce up and down in anticipation of playtime/food.
She really liked the little seed treats we gave her.
The cage we bought came with a weird little hamster house shaped like a rodent’s head. We never used it. Instead, Anya made her a little house from cardboard and blue duct tape. Kouri slept in that house every day she was in our home.
We’d let her play on our coffee table, family room counter, and other surfaces. Her favorite place to run around seemed to be the low cabinets on which we have a large number of houseplants. She run and around the plants, sniffing each one for food possibilities.
Angela helps Bree try snorkeling in the pool for the first time. Bree likes it so much she spends the next hour swimming back and forth.
Happy New Year! We celebrate New Year’s Eve with dinner at Merriman’s in Waimea. While we’re waiting for dessert, we’re surprised to see the family of Anya’s schoolmate, Ariella, walk into the restaurant. They’re staying at a hotel not far from where we’re staying. Anya and Ariella are delighted to run into each other. It’s nice to end the evening on such a happy note.