Parties and Birds

A lot has happened, as it usually does, but I thought it was time to not have the foot post be the first thing people see on our blog. We had a really fun Thanksgiving with Uncle and Tia.

Who needs a little black dress when you have a black apron with pearls? How about that turkey? That's the first bird in this post.

Talk about biting off more than you can chew.

 Then we took everybody up north for a fun day of Pineapple Park, Butterfly Garden and Aquarium

 My brother watched our kids so we could see the whale shark feeding. It was something we had never had a chance to see as the kids are not that patient.

The next few pics are the kids playing while Mom does Christmas shopping. These Winter activities are quite the contrast from the Forks.

Good times for the fearless kids.

We next went to an international festival they called it, out the gate on the road we take to church. There were parades, Eisa dancers and a huge tug of war

 Now that's a tug of war rope

When we first got here we really thought these guys were cool, but as they live right behind us and practice all summer with the drums and the endlessly repetitive few note guitar, we are not as fond of the music as we were when we arrived. The dancing is still impressive.

 This has been a tradition of ours for many years, making a prefab gingerbread house for family night.

Skilled artisans at work...she's even got her artsy hat.

 Then it was our eldest boy's birthday!

 We, of course, took him for dinner to his favorite place in the world...Chili's. This is when they sang to him and brought his chocolate shake.

Life is good.

 The proud parents under the dangling Captain Jack and Will Turner.

 Spiderman candles, Pirate decor and orange letters all made to order.

Little brother is more than willing to help eat the cake.

 Uncle and Tia delivered a b-day doughnut to complete the sugaring up :)

 And now the other bird of the post. We got a pet. This is the first one since our fish when we were newly married. We almost bought a dog, but luckily we came to our senses.

His name is Julian (because he's "already a pretty good whistler, actually"--King Julian). He's an orange canary that has a beautiful song.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Halloween and Scary Things

It was a very happy Halloween at our house, as the Mom was out of the hospital and able to be with us and hand out candy

Every year there has been an excellent costume that I have had to get a picture of to put on this blog, this year it was Bane

Now to the scary things. These are the time lapse pictures of the dreaded spider bite.

 My wife didn't feel the bite when it happened. It was on our back porch cleaning up after the last big typhoon on October 2nd. This picture was 12 hours after the bite, and it made this blister and started to hurt at this point. She went to the ER while I had to go crawl through the jungle for survival training. The irony that I was fine low crawling in the jungle for 8 hours and she got bit on our back porch.

This was after the first two doctor visits. The ink outlines are the perimeter of the swelling and subsequent infection. Look how bad the bite is. On the first visit she was given a tetanus shot and antibiotics.

She got bit on Tuesday and this was on Saturday. She failed outpatient procedures, was unable to keep anything down and was actually going into renal failure as the venom was shutting down her kidneys.

She spent the next eight days in the hospital with IVs flushing her kidneys and the foot getting worse. This is her zombie impression.

Always in good spirits. 

The docs decided that she needed surgery, and this is the post op pic. They did debridement to remove the dead tissue and were surprised how deep the actual bite was.

This was one of our two surgeons. She was very good and looks twenty years younger than she is. Of the two surgeons one was a "poker" and one was a "peeler", she was the poker.

This is actually getting better. 

All the while, life went on.

 Shopping with Dad and the comissary.

 Our daughters friend's baptism at the beach.

 Our baby flirting with one of the young women during her visit.

 My wife's counselor came by and helped our daughter with her homework and did makeup for her for fun.

 There was a Japanese food night at the Club, this is the kids eating tempura and yakitori 

(aka meat on a stick)

 Skyping with the grandparents.

 Beautiful flying on occasion 

 

 

  

A million times better, but my wife still calls it "Franken-foot"

Some couple-of-month-old birthday photos

Its been a while since our Bali post, and we'll explain why in the next post, but here are some birthday pics from the baby and our daughter's big days.

 How cool is this guy?

 Crazy hair day: he wanted monster hair and she wanted princess hair

This is our daughter getting her toe nails done at Coco's with her mom for her birthday. She adjusted to being pampered quickly and with surprising ease.

 Time for presents

 Great times with Uncle and Tia

One year old

 Pizza for dinner

 Birthday cupcake

 Then it was our daughter's birthday a week later

 This was her first real birthday party. Here they made party dresses out of TP and party favors.

 A mermaid cake, of course

 Again, time for presents.

Breaking the piñata

Since her party was during the week we got a deal on the large bouncy castle...she loved it. The only downside was that it weighed about 200 lbs. That was no big deal when Uncle was there to help, but he had to go fly so Dad got to roll it up a put it away by himself. Our daughter's worth it, though. Our oldest son is now looking forward to his b-day.