Babies and Puppies my two favorite things!!

We attempted to have family pictures taken last week but the weather was kind of crazy and it just didn't turn out very well. We are going to try again next week, hopefully the weather and the child cooperates this time. There were a few cute ones.

Kailie wore her headband for a whole maybe two minutes, little squirt.

The best part of the day was this super adorable puppy that was on the beach. My friend Aj who was the photographer, her husband brought him over to help get Kailie to smile it definitely worked. She loved, loved, loved the thing and he as you can tell loved her just as much.

Doesn't it make you want a puppy!! It made Jared want a puppy so you know that that was one cute puppy if Jared even admitted that he would want a puppy. Seriously can I just eat them both for dinner.
Too cute!!

The puppy just followed Kailie everywhere so cute
and she of course just laughed and loved it all.

One of the cute shots!

Help Help:I am trying to decide what we should wear for our next photo shoot. I love Kailie's little Hawaiian dress and the color matches the water so great but it is such a hard color for us too match. I am not good at putting things together so if you have any advice that would be great. I have been looking at lots of family beach photos online and it seems that all white or white with Khaki looks good. What do you think option 1: Kai and I in white dresses, Jared in white shirt with Khakis Option 2: Kai in the above dress and then me in a brown, blue, tan and Jared in probably the same shirt? Or Option 3: anything you think would look good. I don't know this things! Help

John and Sammie Visit

Jared's Brother John and his wife came out to visit the end of April. It was nice to have family out and to just relax. They stayed at Ko'Olina which is a beautiful resort.

Cuddling with Aunt Sammie, man she never cuddles with me!!

Realized I had never written Kai's name in the sand!

Getting buried by Daddy!

Very rare that we are all at the beach together.

Going to dinner at Haliewa Joe's one of our favorites. Kailie was a super stinker at dinner and then at the end she was eating all the food she dropped on the floor around a her highchair. Yeah we are the best parents.

The sunset on our way to dinner.

Hot tub time or Heaven time for Kailie!!

Playing on the rocks.
Thanks John and Sammie for helping us have such a great time.
Love you guys! I hear that Syracuse has a nice timeshare you can look into!!

Miss Mischievous

Kailie has definitely turned into a mischievous little girl. I swear every time I turn around she is either in, on or gotten into something.

She finally learned that pens right on her as well as on paper. Now I am waiting till she figures out that they work on walls too.

Water is her obsession, no matter what form, drinking, bath-tub, puddles, ponds, drinking water fountains, water fountains say like on the temple grounds, the ocean, pools, hot tubs and even dirty ponds. If there is water around you can bet that Kailie is either in it, drinking it, or trying to get into it.

She loves to climb inside things and is not scared in the slightest if you close the door and she is in the dark, she just laughs!
One day as I was loading clothes into the washer, Kailie of course was in the room with me since she is my little shadow. I opened the cabinet door to grab out the detegerent, poured it into the washer and turned back around. Kailie was gone so I assumed she left the bathroom, right as I am walking out I see the cupboard door open as much as it can with child latches on. The little squirt in like 2 seconds had climbed in and shut the door.
Anywhere that has an opening you bet she is going to climb in and check it out.

On!! Yep she can climb on to our tall kitchen table. Thankfully she hasn't learned to pull the chairs out yet. When we move we will definitely get a shorter table.

This is my favorite mischievous thing she has been doing lately. One day shortly after she was diagnosed, Jared, Carolyn(J's-Mom) and I were out in the living room and we had put Kai down for a nap. She was all quiet for almost an hour and we went to check on her and there she was sitting in her crib pulling apart all the cotton balls that we had in there for her blood checks. She shredded almost the whole bag and then threw them on the ground. Since then she has gotten into her garbage can,glucose monitor and anything else she can reach on her side table. I never know when she is quiet during nap time if she is sleeping or destroying usually it is both, destroy then sleep. Little stinker and you can see by the photo that she thinks she is so funny!

She has started to say a few more words. Before she was diagnosed Jared was all concerned about her speech and made me take her to the speech therapists at his work, she scored below average on her speech but I was nor ever really worried about it. At some point she is going to talk. The only words she said then were Mom and daddy and tick tock which she pronounced tih tah, so cute. After diagnosis she started saying more words like doggy, birdy, baby, thank you, and my favorite Uh-oh which she says the most. It will definitely be nice when she starts using words that are helpful like more or water, yes and no. Right now if you ask her any question she just shakes her head no so I never no if she actually means it or not.

Here is a video of her playing the water at her friend Savannah's Birthday Party!

Dole Plantation

(Kailie right after the worker put this dole hat on her, she gave him this look like what you doing to me!!)

Kailie and I took a little trip up to the Dole Pineapple Plantation a few weeks ago. It was fun and something that I hadn't really done yet. The only sad part was we didn't have time to try a dole whip, everyone is always talking about them, so maybe we will have to make a quick stop in another time to try one.

I am still amazed even after living here for over 4 years how beautiful all the flowers and plants are here. There were many that I had never seen before such as these two crazy plants.

Then there is the common ones like this Hibiscus flower that comes in many, many different colors!

I have see lots of funky trees out here but I don't think I have ever seen this one. It almost looks as though it is growing elephant tusks.

This one is cool, if you click on it too enlarge it you can see the black, creepy, slimy bugs that are on it. There were very mean looking.


Can you find the critter hanging out on the Papaya's

I had never seen a red pineapple before but they were all over the place.
Anybody ever tried one before?

After walking through the garden and taking many Photos Kailie was ready to play. She fed the crazy fish forever.

When she got bored feeding the fish she went on to chase the birds.

Then decided it would be fun to feed the fish these big tree things

She found a whole branch of them and would pull one off then throw the big bunch on the ground, then go throw the the piece to the fish then come back and repeat the process until she got the idea to throw the big branch in to the pond and at that I stepped in, she didn't like that very much.


I actually got her to look through the hole long enough to take a picture.

Then it was off to ride the Pineapple Express.

Lets just say Kailie wasn't the best toddler as we waited in line and boarded the train.

But after a few minutes she calmed down and was pretty good during the ride.

I couldn't pass up the chance to take this picture. If you look closely at the sign it says New York 4972 miles that way. How appropriate since we will soon be living 4972 miles away!!

The day has finally arrived!!

What day you ask???

The day that Kailie turned 18 months which means she can officially go to nursery now. Wohoo!!
Not that we have been counting down the days or anything!! Although I must admit that before the Diabetes I was really looking forward to it and now I am nervous. Today I took her in and let her play while I talked with the nursery workers and found out how it all works. She of course had a blast and didn't want to leave. Next week we will put her in full time and then just maybe I will get to go to sunday school and actually be able to listen for once.

One more step in our Journey!

(A few minutes after she was diagnosed, they put in an IV, which she of course hated, they put a diaper on the other hand to keep her from playing with the IV, that lasted about 1 minute before she pulled the diaper off with her mouth!)

This is a hard post for me and I have been avoiding writing or even thinking about what I wanted to write. Ironically enough this comes right after my last post in which I talked about affliction and how we all have to experience it to get to our happily ever after. As I read over now what was our affliction then I would give anything to go back to those being our biggest problems. We spent Easter weekend in the hospital with Kailie after we discovered that she has type 1 diabetes. Her blood sugar level was 387 and will be forever ingrained in my memory for that number changed our life and especially her life forever.

(Kai pretty much stole all of the hospitals toys and brought them into her hospital room to play. Notice her wing!)
These past two weeks have been tough to say the least but each day it has gotten a little bit better. Jared and I have each taken turns having break-downs and wondering why little Kailie was given this disease. At some moments I am at peace and think that everything is fine and then I think about the future and how she will never get a break from it, every meal or snack she eats for the rest of her life will have to be counted and accounted for with insulin. Even when she is sleeping the concern for her to drop is elevated.

(Showing off her winged arm. We were amazed how quickly she adapted to it!)

Everyone keeps saying that it will get better and get easier and I think that is true to some extent but it will never be fully okay, we will always worry about her especially when she goes to school and then becomes a teenager. Everything she does from playing at the park, to going out in the cold can change her numbers and that is so scary to me. I wonder how can she live a normal life but then I see my friends who have this same disease and they live normal active life's. In the hospital I just wanted to go back to the way things were before and now I think I have finally come to terms with the fact that it will never be the same but our goal is to make it as similar as possible.

(Finally getting the IV taken out!!)

The hardest thing for me personally besides the fact that I don't want my child to have any illness or hardship is that I feel as though I don't get to just be a mom anymore. I have so much enjoyed being a mom to Kailie, something that I didn't really expect before I had her. All the worries I had before as a mom have just gone out the window and I feel as though I have to spend all my time and energy worrying about how many carbs she is eating, if she is drinking enough, if I gave her too much insulin or not enough. It just comes down to the fact that I don't want to be a doctor and have to figure out how much insulin to give her and I don't want to be a nurse and have to give her shots, and I don't want to be a dietitian and have to count her carbs constantly I just want to be her mom and worry about all the normal things you worry about with your kids. I guess in time things will get easier and will become second nature for us.

Kailie has been pretty unaffected by everything thus far except the IV that had to be put in her at the hospital she is happy and seems to be feeling so much better than the few weeks before her diagnosis. One thing that I noticed then was that the house was staying really clean everyday which is not like Kailie at all, usually within the first 1/2 hour of the day she has managed to get into everything. Now she is back to her usual getting into everything self. She is happy and carefree and has no idea that she has anything wrong at all. She has done so great with the blood pricks and only whines a little when we give her shots. Her reaction to it all has been such a blessing for us, she always has been a great kid and I pray that she will continue to not be bothered with it all. I love and cherish these years that she will not know that she has this disease and will just be able to be a normal toddler for the most part. I wish she could stay innocent to this forever but our hope is that it will just be apart of who she is and she won't mind too much.

(Still our happy Kai, one week after Diagnosis at the ward camp out)

We are so grateful for the new technologies of today that make living with this disease easier and more comfortable and we pray and hope and will do all we can do to assist in the developments of new things that will make it even easier and better and perhaps even someday find a cure or at least a way to prevent others from getting it.

We have come to the realization that this is our life now and are so thankful for all the love and support from everybody. We know we have a long road a head of us and are so blessed to have everyone in our lives. We are especially grateful to Jared's mom Carolyn who came out here to help us with this big adjustment and even stayed longer than she planned to help me learn how to take care of Kailie.

We know that if we rely on the Lord he will help us through this new adjustment. We have already felt his love and peace and comfort and are so glad that we have his love and guidance in our lives.

So here's to another step in our journey!!

Once upon a time

This past weekend was the Young Women General Conference session. I, as a YW leader was supposed to go. I really didn't want to, I was tired and just wanted to hang out with Jared and Kailie but I ended up going and am so glad I did. The talks were amazing, especially the last two.

The last speaker was President Uchtdorf and his talk was funny, spiritual and kept you listening. As he finished and started to walk away the young woman next to me quietly said "no don't go, keep talking" When is the last time you heard a teenager beg for a speaker to keep speaking, that is how great it was.

He started his talk with how in every language that he knows there is always one common phrase and that is "Once upon a Time." He then talked about how don't we all want to live happily ever after and to get there we have to understand who we are and what we must become. He mentioned how in all the fairytale stories the main character has to go through adversity and affliction before they can have their happily ever after.

The week prior to this was a rough one for us, actually the past three months that Jared has been Bishop has been rough. Not necessarily from the new Bishop responsibilities but more of the repercussion from his work due to his accepting of the calling. It is not cool in the life of residency to put anything before your work!
Wednesday last week we both were just so frustrated with it all. Jared who hadn't had a single day off since December, who never gets to eat or just have time with us was exhausted from it all and I was just tired of everything. As I was driving to pick Jared up from work and rush him to the church for some interviews I couldn't help but think why if the church is so family oriented would the Lord ask Jared to be Bishop in a time when he already hardly gets to see his family? I thought about this question the whole week and as I was reading in 1 Nephi, I realized that the Lord has always asked his people to sacrifice their time. Then Pres. Uchtdorf's talk just really gave me the answer, which is for some reason though neither of us knows why, that the Lord called Jared to this calling. I guess this is just one step to our Happily Ever After.

One particular thing he said really stuck out to me, "How you react to adversity and affliction is most important." I know that they are many people out there going through much harder afflictions than us and I am grateful for the small time we do have together. I know that we could do better and I will try.

After hearing this conference all of the us including the young women were so excited for this coming Easter weekend where we get to hear from all of our leaders!

And hopefully we will all find answer to our questions and take one step closer to Happily Ever After!

P.S. The Picture above is Kailie taking her first steps towards the Temple, with a boy no less.