For some reason, wasps love our house. And not just our house... they love to crawl on the sliding glass door right next to Gordy's play area. While Todd and I get frustrated and constantly try to shoo them out, Gordy loves them. In fact, he'd pick them up and play with them if we weren't vigilant about the not touching. So, when one of our old water polo girls invited us over to her house to see her dad's bee hives, we couldn't pass up the opportunity!
The hives were swarming with honey bees going in and out. Even more cool was when Uncle Bruce opened up one of the hives and took out a few panels to show us the bees and their queen. Gordy was doing such a good job staying mellow that Bruce picked off one of the drone (non-stinging) bees from a panel and let Gordy hold it. The bee climbed all over Gogo's arms and he couldn't have been more delighted.
Thank you Lorena and Uncle Bruce!
Our island had a bit of a scare this morning... an emergency notification was sent to many people's phones (including Todd's) saying that a ballistic missile was en route to Hawaii, this was not a drill, and that we should seek immediate shelter. The information that we've received in the past indicated that, in a situation like this, we would really only have 12-13 minutes from the moment of the notification to the moment of impact. So, for lack of a better plan, I started closing all the windows, Todd went in to go put on clean underwear (I still don't understand why that was his priority), my mom (Gordy's Nana) called and we told each other we loved each other, and then we sat and waited. While we waited, we did our best to search the internet for any news update on what was happening.
Finally, after about 20+ minutes, my mom called to let us know that she had gotten a news update that the alert was a mistake. Soon, our government officials issued a statement that the notification had, in fact, been sent accidentally. Relief and a few tears overtook us all.
Today was the first time in my life that I feared for my life and my family's life. After I closed all of the windows and told my mom that I loved her, I looked down at this beautiful little face smiling at me and thought how sorry I was that I had brought him into such a horrible world. I felt helpless and unable to protect him.
Now that we've had some time to recuperate from thinking that we may die, I think it's important to document my thoughts. So here they are:
(1) I experienced this kind of fear for 30 minutes of one day and it was horrible. There are people all over the world who live this kind of fear every day of their lives. Many of those people have fled their homes and countries to try to relocate to a place where they don't have to feel like that anymore - to try to give their kids a better and more certain future. How can anyone begrudge them this? We (and by we I mean American people) should reach out and help these people. Help them to enjoy the kind of life that most Americans enjoy where the most dangerous thing we encounter each day are cars. Instead of building walls and creating travel bans, we should open our eyes and see the people who are looking for help - looking for a safe place to raise their family.
(2) Diplomacy is better than name calling. But, as long as we are name calling... I'm even more disgusted with the orange-skinned, sexist, racist, liar who is "leading" our country. He has engaged in a pissing war with with a reckless lunatic and they are both playing with innocent people's lives. I want to make a point that we are all in this situation because of the uneducated white morons in so many "shit-hole" states who voted for such a sleazy inept idiot back on November 8th of 2016. Up until now, our little island in the pacific had sirens and emergency notifications for things like flooding and tsunamis. Now, we have them for ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs.
Really, I think that Americans take life for granted. We forget how fragile it really is and we should be more compassionate to people who are not as lucky as we are to have been born in such a great country. We should fight fire with water and not more fire. And, we should remember that that all humans are people - regardless of race, birth place, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, etc. Let's love each other.
It is crazy how much a kid changes in a month. I feel like he's grown up so much in the last 30 days...
Not only has his vocabulary grown, he has started talking to/at us. Most of what he says doesn't make any sense to us, but he does his best. His most recent and frequent talking has been at his dad. Gordy will go to the coconut pile, grab a coconut, drag it across the lawn to the grass below the front door, and will yell up to his dad a combination of "dada and then a whole bunch of gibberish indicating that he wants Todd to cut him open a coconut so that he can drain it of it's water and can eat a few handfuls of meat.
He has started taddling (mostly on Todd). Each time he goes downstairs, he goes over to a spot on the lawn that Todd sprayed with paint, points to it, and yells at whoever is nearest as though he's telling on Todd.
He still absolutely loves to color on the sidewalk with chalk and has nearly emptied his big bucket of chalk that I bought for him.
He'll eat most anything that we give him, but his most recent favorite foods are cashews and granola bars. He knows where both are kept in the pantry and will go in there, pull them out and carry them around the house begging for us to open them.
He loves for us to tell him stories - especially when he nurses. He'll look up at me and say "es" which means story, and he usually wants me to tell him the The Very Hungry Caterpillar. If I tell him one that he's not interested in, he'll shake his head and say "no" until I stop that one and try another.
One of his favorite things to do is to go to see the animals (and particularly the baby goat) down the street. Gordy loved the little goat so much that he named her/him Abby and would ask to go see her frequently. Sadly, Abby was recently moved to a new home, so we can't see her anymore. And since Gordy is so young, he doesn't understand. So, each time we go see the rest of the animals, he still goes to her cage, points and says please asking for me to get her... it's so sad!
We love you our little Gogo.
We've all been fairly exhausted lately with lots of work and busy holidays, so we decided to celebrate the arrival of 2018 with New York. We dressed for the occasion, poured champagne, and when the clocks ticked 7pm, the three of us yelled happy new year! Gordy wasn't super certain what was going on, but he was pretty happy to be a part of it.
We then closed all of our windows, turned Gordy's sound machine on, and were in bed before 10pm.
So far, 2018 has been a busy one. I've been slammed with deadlines for work, Todd has a few jobs lined up (which is why he looks like a homeless man), and Gordy has been living it up. Between beach days, toddler time at the library, and the zoo with Nana, Gordy's calendar is almost as packed as ours!
