A day at the Hyatt

One of our favorite places to go on the island is the Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort in Poipu.  The Navy Ball is held their every year so we usually spend a few days there, and then any time someone has friends or family staying there, they usually invite everyone to come hang out at the pool for the day.  It's kind of hard to describe just how nice the pool area is, because it's definitely not your typical hotel pool, but the entire pool area is pretty incredible!

Here are a few pictures from when we spent the day swimming there back in April (the day we met Drew Brees).

Aunt Holly sent Noah an airplane pool toy that Noah loves "flying" on, but he also loves throwing himself off of it!



Noah and our friend Andrea having fun in the pool

Being silly with Mommy

 Daddy squishing into the inner tube with Noah

 

Playing in one of the waterfalls

 

 

Noah & Mommy sharing the inner tube

*Flying* with Daddy

 Squirting Daddy

Family Photo

Hahaha, the coolest kid at the pool ;-)

 Blowing bubbles

That's our boy  :-D

(he takes after his father, hehe)

NFL Experience #2

In July, the local Pop Warner football league had a mini football clinic with Rhett Ellison, a tight end for the Minnesota Vikings, on base that all of the military kids were invited to as well :-)

Before the clinic officially started, the kids were all running around on the field having fun. 

Noah made a couple of new older friends and somehow managed to get their football away from them! He had lots of fun running away from them with their football ;-)

Luckily, the boys were good sports and had a lot of fun chasing after Noah

Rhett Ellison of the Minnesota Vikings

The kids were all divided up by age group and got to work with some of the Pop Warner football coaches, and then Rhett went to each group and spent time working with the kids :)

 

Here's a photo of Noah running out for a pass from Rhett:

Throwing the ball back to Rhett

Autograph time :-)

NFL Experience

Noah has now met and personally chatted with two different professional football players!

Back in April (I told you...I am WAY behind on some blog posts), we were hanging out with some friends at the Hyatt Resort swimming pools when none other than Drew Brees, the quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, walked past us!

He was there on vacation with his family so we didn't want to bother him, especially while he was playing with his kids, but it just so happened that the pool Drew and his family were playing in was the pool that Noah loves to play in, too :-)  It is basically a fake beach (as in fake sand and not salt water) lagoon area so the kids can walk into it, and there is a large, shallow area for the smaller ones to play and splash around. 

As luck would have it, Noah ended up playing with Drew's oldest son Baylen, which led to Drew and I getting to chat  :-D 

Of course, at this point I couldn't take any pictures because then it would have been really awkward and not about two parents chatting about their kids (but I promise, we really were up close and personal with him, haha). 


The last part of this story is Ely's favorite part: Drew Brees *saving* Noah's life:

Noah and Baylen (who is actually a year and a half older than Noah but about the same size as Noah, haha) were playing a game where they were each in an inner tube and they would bump into each other.  As they were playing, they started getting into deeper water and one time when Baylen went to bump Noah, Noah sort of fell out of his tube and lost his footing and went underwater. Drew ran to Noah and plucked him out of the water, thus saving his life!!!

***As a side note, Drew just happened to be the closest adult to Noah when it happened, but had he not been there I would have been able to pick Noah up out of the water myself...or if Noah had bothered to try standing up his head would have come out of the water...so there was no real danger involved but it sounds much cooler to say that Drew Brees saved our son's life ;-)

Here are the few pictures I did manage to covertly snap of Drew Brees:

 This was intended to be a family photo, but the girl who took the picture just happened to get Drew bending over in the background in the top left corner ;-)

 

 Noah chatting with Drew's wife and sister-in-law (I feel like these photos may border on stalkerish, but I was just taking photos of my own child swimming in the pool...honest...hehe)

There he is!!!

 

Drew was a VERY nice guy and was great with Noah!

I have several more pictures from our day at the Hyatt that I will eventually post  :-D

Mango Season

I think our favorite time in Kauai is MANGO SEASON!!! Noah and I really love our mangos :-)

There are a few trees on base that we can pick our own mangos from, which Noah loves! Ely will climb the tree to get the mangos that are too high for us to reach from the ground, and then it's Noah's job to try and catch them.

 So excited about mangos!!!

We were also very lucky to have one of our good friends from church (Uncle Larry) supply us with buckets full of mangos from his own tree and his son's tree! We received so many delicious mangos that we got to do lots of experimenting with different recipes. I made several loaves of mango bread, mango salsa, a mango and pork recipe, and Ely even made jam and mango sauce! 

 

This is just a small portion of *one* of the loads of mangos we got from Uncle Larry



By the end of mango season, I had the cutting and chopping process down to a science ;-)

4th of July

Hmm...we are half way through September (and less than 2 weeks from Baby Fletch #2's arrival!!!) and I am just now getting our pictures from the 4th of July posted.  I might be a *little* behind on my posts, and since things are about to get REALLY busy at our house, I don't see that changing any time soon. But I'm going to try my hardest to get as caught up as possible in the next couple weeks!

So, back to the 4th of July:

We spent the evening at the house of one of our friend's in Kalaheo.  Due to budget cuts, the base did not have their huge fireworks display on the beach this year, so we created our own fireworks display in the street of our friend's neighborhood!

Perhaps the highlight of Noah's night was getting to drive around in this go-cart sort of thing :-)

He might need a little more practice on watching the road, but Noah had a blast!!!

 Noah got to have his first experience with sparklers!

He was enjoying holding the sparkler, but he really didn't want to move it around too much because he didn't want it getting too close to him

...and then he decided to just drop the whole thing!

Unfortunately, while Noah and I were playing with sparklers, the guys decided to light off this huge black cat line that started pretty close to where we were standing...Noah was not a fan of the repeated loud noise (especially since it started without his knowledge) and so he was not really interested in any fireworks after that! He actually went back into our friend's house to play with toys while everyone else was outside watching fireworks.  I was finally able to coax him outside and get him to sit on my lap with hands over his ears so he would at least watch some of the actual fireworks. 

Luckily, our friends had some old computer game headphones that they brought out for Noah to wear. As an audiologist, I am completely aware that these headphones were not actually doing much to block the noise, but they made Noah feel more comfortable!

Of course, getting to eat his own bag of chips helped, too :-D

 

 

 You can see Daddy in the background having a blast lighting fireworks



Just to give you an idea of how many fireworks we had:

Happy 4th of July!!!

Noah & Daddy throwing poppers on the ground

Our silly boy

Walking with friends

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, a few of us wives get together for a 3+ mile walk. 

Our single jogging stroller bit the dust a few months ago, so Noah has been riding in our double stroller on our walks. Last week our four legged friend Nui was struggling in the heat, so he hopped in the stroller with Noah. 

Noah was so excited to have his buddy riding with him :-)

                        Nui & Noah

Noah also managed to sneak a few pictures without Mommy noticing :-)

Apparently, I was too deep in thought to notice Noah playing with my phone (or something like that!)

Noah selfie:

Mmm Nutella

One of the big treats at our house is an apple with Nutella. The other day Noah requested this treat so I cut up an apple and put a little Nutella on each piece...

Noah proceeded to lick off all the Nutella and leave most of the apple behind :-)

 He also managed to get Nutella everywhere!