Best birthday present

This weekend my sweet, wonderful husband chartered a helicopter to fly our family over our beautiful island in honor of my birthday! It is an amazing experience, not only to see the mountains and waterfalls up close and personal, but also for us to see the parts of the island we have never seen before because they are inaccessible by car, and the hiking trails are too dangerous to take the kids on. It was a great way for us to see the island really well before we have to say goodbye to it. The ride was a magical experience for all of us…here are some images from the tour.

{I got to sit up front, with windows all around!}

{inside the canyon}

{coastline riddled with sea caves and waterfalls tumbling straight into the ocean}

{one of our favorite beaches as seen from the air: the wave pattern is cause by the coral reef}

{more waterfalls than you can image!}

Book inspired projects

I am sitting here, with my laptop on my lap, in the car, in the garage of our home, while Damian sleeps in his car seat. He fell asleep on the way home and my hubby brought my computer down to the car so I could at least blog while Damian naps. And yes, naps really are that important to me, they make the rest of the day a happy one!

Now on to what I was going to write…a friend commented on my last post, asking me which book started Rylan’s fascination with dinosaurs, and answering it kind of took me down memory lane a little! “Dinosaurumpus!” was the book that started it all.
I innocently took it out of the library, never imagining where it would lead us! We eventually bought the book, and read it many, many times. I had read it a couple of times to Damian, but it is only in the last few weeks that his interest in dinosaurs has blossomed, so after Chelsea’s question, I pulled it out again and read it to him, and he is in love! I think I will be reading it a whole lot, a second time around! :) That’s okay, it is a fun book and I read it so many times with Rylan I started to develop a rhythm and now it is almost like a fun song. Rylan loved this book so much around his second birthday, we even had a Dinosaurumpus birthday party for him.

{I made this out of construction paper and it took up almost the whole wall of the dining room in our then apartment.}

Thinking about the boy’s favourite books, led to “My Big Brother”, only Damian’s favourite book for about 6 months around the age of 12 to 18 months. There were days when he asked me to read this book to him 10 times. Another one I knew off by heart. It was his favourite because he adores his own big brother oh-so-much, so how can a mom resist?

I kept reading it to him and then one day, said to Rylan, “Why don’t we make him his own big brother book”, so we set off to do a photo shoot. Rylan happily helped me re-enact all the images in the book by Valerie Fisher, and after 45 minutes we had all the pics. I bought a special album, and slotted the photos and the words in (which I had typed up and printed out), then Rylan gave it to Damian. It was an instant hit! We did this project probably about 6 months ago, well before I started this blog, but I thought it would be nice to share.

{Our cover - model Rylan}

Hope you all have a blessed weekend! See you on Monday!

Two

Dearest little Damian,

If I were to sum up you right at this moment in time it would have to be “positively delicious”! You are adorable, inside and out, and your Mama cannot get enough of you (which is good, since you will not leave my side!), or of those sweet cheeks that I kiss about a hundred times a day!

In recent weeks you have gone through a vocab and speaking explosion, and I mean explosion. You are literally talking all the time, you are learning new words faster than I can record them, speaking in almost sentences, and did I mention, talking ALL THE TIME. Here I had high hopes that you would be a little less talkative than Mr. Rylan, but I can see that those hopes are not likely to turn into a reality. Often the two of you say “Mommy”, as you start a sentence or request, so many times in the space of a minute that I really think my head may just explode! You speak surprisingly clearly for a just two year old, so much so that strangers can understand you, which is a good thing, since you say hello to everyone we pass, as you flash them your irresistible smile.

Your favourite things right now are a Handy Manny doll and his little Philips screwdriver, called Philippe (Philippe is almost always in your grip) and the red Radio Flyer car you received from Grandma and Pa for your birthday. You have basically been inside that car (with Handy Manny and Philippe, of course), since you opened it. You even woke me up three times in the middle of the night last night, trying to convince me that it was time to get up and drive your car, finally at 6 a.m., you somehow managed to drag me out of bed.
If there is one thing I could ask of you, that would be to PLEASE eat more, so I can stop counting the grey hairs you are giving me!! But everything else I’ll keep! Even being dragged out of bed at 6 a.m. because the delight on your face when you climbed into your beloved car this morning was just about enough to keep me going all day, even without sleep!

Happy second birthday!

Love you my sweet, little baby,
Mama

{Rylan and Damian in pjs this morning playing the fishing game that Rylan got as a gift from Damian on his birthday.}

{Rylan helping me the day before Damian's birthday to assemble Damian's tool workbench, which was his gift from us.}

Five years

My dear Rylan,

I cannot believe that you are already five years old! It seems like yesterday that I held you in my arms for the very first time. When you were born I experienced pure joy. I used to joke with family and friends that I must have been injected with a happy juice because it was like I was on a high for the first six (eighteen?) months of your life. Maybe this was because when you were born, I finally understood what I had been born to be – your mama, yours and Damian’s.

You have had quite an eventful first five years, and you have weathered all your challenges with an enthusiasm and grace well beyond your years. You have travelled to distant places – Italy, Swaziland, South Africa, England, the United States (many times), and throughout Israel; you lived through a war in Israel; said goodbye to your birthplace and the only home you’d known, as well as the friends you had grown up with since birth, to a new country where we spent 7 months in “transition” at Grandma and Pa’s. We finally settled in Hawaii, far, far away from the grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins you had so hoped to be near to. And you have embraced this unknown place, with no family and friends, and made it home, and sought out friendships in your social and friendly way.

In the midst of all these changes you welcomed a new brother into your life, and did so with a wide open and loving embrace. While I was pregnant, every night at bedtime you would ask if you could say a prayer for Damian, and you would, right next to my belly, “so he can hear me, Mommy”, and to this day you singing that prayer is one of the best ways to calm Damian down when he gets really upset. Before Damian was born we wondered whether you would have a hard time having a little brother who always wanted to play with your toys…but this has never been an issue, because as soon as Damian was born, everything became “ours”. Even though Damian is still sleeping next to mama, you call your room “our room” because Damian will eventually be moving in with you. And in turn for all the love and generosity you have shown your brother, he adores you and everything that you do. Damian’s favourite way to start every morning is to climb up next to you on the couch and cuddle up to you.

Although I often wish I could turn back the clock just for long enough to kiss those round cheeks, tickle those rolls of chub you called thighs, and smell that sweet breastfed baby smell…I am so proud of who you have become and love spending my days with you. You are such a bright, well spoken, interested, sensitive, and polite young man (and, yes, also talkative to the extreme, with a tendency towards the dramatic, and with energy pouring out of every fiber of your being!). At five you can read and write, swim, name every dinosaur that ever existed, are teaching me facts about animals that I never knew, can recite prayers beautifully, and was the only person who jumped to help an injured teammate in soccer (and sat with him until he felt better). No mom could ask for more!

Happy birthday, my sweetie!

With all my love,
Mama
Some pictures of our birthday picnic today.

Knitted surprise

I haven’t felt much like knitting since coming to Hawaii, it just doesn’t seem like the right climate to knit (it should be cold with a fire crackling in front of me…), but my folks are coming to visit and when they return to their home in the Midwest in November it will be cold...so I thought I would whip up a little something to brighten up my Mom’s winter! She happened to mention that she liked this yarn I bought (for another project), so I used a couple balls of it to make her a scarf. I think it is okay to mention it now, since they are safely in the air and next time she reads this blog she will already have her scarf! :)
And tomorrow, well tomorrow my Rylan turns five…five! When he was a little babe in my arms, five was “the big kids”, and now he is one! Where did the time go? I really hope when they are all grown up I can look back at these early years and say, “yes, we made the most of them”, because they are so fleeting and so incredibly precious!