Just Another day at our House!

I am so blessed to have such amazing children! Kiara and Maka love each other so much and are always watching out for each other. Maka loves to follow her around and do whatever she's doing. One of their favorite things to do is sneak into the bathroom while I'm making dinner and play in the sink. Kiara likes to wash Maka's head with whatever is handy, usually mine or Sanoe's toothbrush! Kiara washes away and Maka just giggles and laughs.

We borrowed this little car game from the Brown's and Maka loved it. He loved "driving" and honking the horn.

Kiara and her Daddy. They sure do love each other. Kiara can't wait for Sanoe to come home each day and give her "Daddy" attention. She even reminds him in the morning before he goes to work; she says, "Daddy don't forget to come home and play with me later."

Kiara and Maka love reading books and coloring. As you can see they decided to camp out on the pillows in the bedroom. Kiara is reading and Maka is eating the crayon that he was coloring with! I don't understand how those crayons taste so good:)

This is Maka's most recent smile. He loves to scrunch up his face whenever a camera is around and especially when we say, "Say Cheese". It cracks me up because his smile looks so much like mine, eyes all scrunched up and the chubby cheeks! He definitely has some of my facial features and mannerisms.

We have a few crawling tunnels, but as you can see we don't just use them to crawl through. Kiara likes to stand up and hide in them, pull it down, and then let it pop up again. Maka just loves to crawl through them and play peekaboo.

Maka got this great toy from Jasmine, a wonderful friend of ours, for his birthday. It took him a while to get into it, but now he loves it and pushes it around everywhere, especially when Kiara is pushing her stroller around.

Sanoe and Kiara showing off their silly faces. Kiara loves to come up with silly faces for the camera.

What's Happening Lately?

Well, I've been terrible about posting lately, but since I actually got both Kiara and Maka down for their naps at the same time, which doesn't happen very often, I thought I would take advantage of the "me" time and catch up. The weather here has been pretty mild this winter, but from what I hear it's never really extreme. We've only had two snow falls, and they were pretty much gone the next day. We have had some pretty cold weather though, and on those days we stayed in and played or went on a few adventures. One of our adventures was to the National Building Museum. It has a kids area called the building zone that has huge squishy stacking blocks, giant legos, puzzles, lincoln logs, a life size playhouse, reading corner, and dress up clothes. Kiara and Maka love it!

Maka with the stacking blocks.




Kiara with her best friend Lizzy, measuring everything in site! They had so much fun pretending to be builders.






The three pictures above our with our close friends, the Brown's. They are here for a year just like us. We do tons together and love hanging out. Rachelle is an amazing mom, and does great sock puppets!


My little builder!

Maka the Greenbean Monster

This video was taken at dinner. Maka really loves greenbeans as evidenced by his mad rush to eat them as fast as he can...which is probably faster than Kaelene can eat. =) Well enjoy the movie of our quaint family dinner.
Love,
Sanoe

Happy 1st Birthday Maka!

Daniel Makakoa turned a year old on January 5th, a month ago. I can't believe he's already so "grown" up. Time has flown by and he just keeps getting faster and faster. He is such an amazing blessing to our family. We've had a lot of great experiences and firsts, like first move, he's our first son, rolling over, crawling, walking, those painful first teeth, first words, and lot's and lot's of cuddles. He continues to amaze me every day with the love he shares with everyone, the adoration he has for his big sister, and the adorable "flirty" smile that he gives everyone. Right now he loves playing with his big sister and doing absolutely everything she does, like the aquadoodle, babydolls, playing catch, playing duplos, and brushing teeth while on the stool together. For his first birthday we threw a little party for him and invited some of our closest friends over. We invited the Brown's (Aaron, Rachelle, Lizzy, Andrew), the Auna's (Aaron, Jackie, Elise, Elijah), the Steward-Tharpe's (Scott, Heather, Pavlina), and Gregg (a co-worker of Sanoe's and favorite of the kids). We made mini english muffin pizzas, Gregg made balloon animals for all the kids, and then we had cake and ice cream for dessert. I made a cookie monster cake for Maka because he is our little cookie monster in the family, and because his first word was actually cookie. It sounds terrible, but believe me, we really don't eat cookies very often! Unfortunately, by the time everyone was ready for cake, Maka was to full to eat any and wouldn't even play in it. So the picture above was taken a couple days after when he was really ready to demolish it! The kids had a blast getting out all the toys and running around like there was no tomorrow. It was so much fun! A special thanks to all of our wonderful friends that shared this special day with us. We love you all!

Maka with Greg, and the "Amazing Birthday hat". This hat was so cool that everybody at the party had to try it on, even the adults. Thanks Greg, for being so cool and fun!


Right- Lizzy with her turtle bracelet! Left-Elise the movie star & maka playing with her flower.


Maka opening birthday presents from all his friends!


Maka taking his first lick of, soon to be inhaled, birthday cake. He loved it! And we love him! Happy Birthday Daniel Makakoa!

This is the courtyard of our building. We love this area and especially when it is filled with snow!















Kaelene says I'm the one horse and Kiara is on her open sleigh. She sure loved the sledding!




















This is an artificial snowstorm created by Kiara and Sanoe shaking the tree. Kiara loved it. Kaelene was too quick for Sanoe to get her, unfortunately!





















This is Kaelene's creation, snowman #1, with Kiara showing her height next to it. Kaelene's snowgal is hapy as evidenced by her very nice twiggy smile.












This is Snowman #2, made by Sanoe with Kiara's help. I used rocks for the eyes, a stick for the mouth, and snow for its santa hat.

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Kiara, with her best friend Lizzy, at their slumber party last night. This is Kiara's third official slumber party, and she loves it. They had hot chocolate and macaroni and cheese for dinner, played aquadoodle, had a tea party on the kitchen floor, and played with their baby dolls. They even had time to watch Cinderella, before I got too tired to stay up any more. They were so cute playing together, and they definitely weren't ready to go to bed as early as I was. Even though, it was already 9:45! I'm such a party pooper! Ha, ha, ha! So we turned on the night light and crashed on the hide-a-bed. Lizzy and Maka woke up around 7:30, so we played with a set of stacking cups in my room while Kiara snoozed a little longer. After stacking the cups, "timbering" them over, and giggling like crazy about 30 times, Kiara woke up and we had breakfast and got ready to go to the Building Museum with Rachelle (Lizzie's mom) and Andrew (Lizzie's brother). We are so blessed to have such wonderful friends in our lives. They are an amazing family, and such great examples to us. It's so wonderful to be able to talk to Rachelle about frustrating and struggling moments and know that she understands, and she always has such great suggestions and solutions. We have had so much fun with them the past six months, I don't know what we're going to do without them when we both head back home for our husbands to finish medical school. We love them so much!