Happy 2nd birthday to our little buddy!!!

Happy 2nd Birthday, Noah!!! It's hard to believe he's two already! I can very clearly picture his birthday party last year back in Jacksonville, and it doesn't seem like an entire year has passed since that time.

We had another pool party this year for Noah's birthday and all of our new friends from the base came to help us celebrate (along with Papa and Grandma Anita).

Noah had the best time running from the pool to the playground to the food :-)  He was having so much fun at the party that he didn't end up opening his presents until we got home (and he took a nap, haha).

This was the first (and probably last) year that I made Noah's birthday cake.  I'm really happy with how his Thomas cake turned out, but I realized that I spent more than twice as much time working on the cake as I spent actually giving birth to Noah! Granted, since it was a c-section I think the whole thing took only about an hour, but trust me, this cake was a true "labor" of love!  Luckily, my mom was there to help make the other two cakes or I might have ended up pulling my first all-nighter since college.

We ended up with over a 100 pictures from the day, but here are just a few for you to enjoy :)

"Happy birthday to me!"

The birthday boy and our friend Eli

Cake table

The "N"s are for Noah, of course (they just "happen" to look similar to a certain school that we all know and love ;)

Some of the kids playing with Noah in the kiddie pool

Posing with our two-year-old

Playing bashful from all the attention (but he loved it!)

Quite the "bite" of cake

Back into the pool to clean up, ha!

It's probably a good thing we waited to open presents because Noah wanted each and every gift opened and out of the box so he could play with it, so it took quite awhile to get through all the presents and cards.

OOOOH

THOMAS!!! He loved ALL of his new Thomas the Train stuff!

Already saving up for college ;-)

Tired from all the birthday fun but not wanting to let his new toys out of his hands!  I think one of his trucks may have sneaked into bed with him tonight ;-)

Noah wanted me to tell you all "tank oo" for all the birthday love!!! He is one very blessed little boy :)

San Clemente Pier

Before the Nebraska/UCLA game last week, Pam and Ray wanted to show us "their" beach so we drove down to San Clemente Pier to check it out :) The beaches in California are definitely a lot busier than the beaches in Kauai.

Our first visitors have arrived!

I still have lots of photos to post from our trip to California, but I thought I'd post a picture of our first visitors to Kauai: Papa and Grandma Anita!

I feel like an official Hawaiian now that I've made my first lei! After seeing some of the other leis at the airport I realized that perhaps I could have used smaller flowers, but go big or go home, right? And of course only the biggest and the best for my mom :-)

We are very excited about showing them around our new home :)

Mission Viejo

For the first half of our trip to California, we stayed in Mission Viejo with our good friend Jeremy's parents, Pam and Rayner. They were awesome hosts and we enjoyed seeing them again. We just wish we had had more time with them (darn you Delta for causing us to miss an entire day of vacation!) Luckily, they have a timeshare in Kauai so we will get to see them again next summer along with Jeremy and Becca.

Here are a few photos from the park near their house:

Heading to Cali

I'm posting this entry as we are driving from Mission Viejo to San Diego :) the first part of our California adventure is over and now we are heading to San Diego to have some fun with Grandma J and Aunt Sara! It's definitely a bummer that we are finally making it out to San Diego where Uncle John lives, but we won't get to see him because he's off having his own "adventures" overseas.

Here are some photos of the guys being silly on the 5 1/2 hour flight from Kauai to LAX. The airline (Delta, boo!) cancelled our original flight on Wednesday night so we lost an entire day of our trip but we are making the most of the time we do have. We left Thursday night at 8:30 pm and landed in LA Friday morning at 5 am! We had hoped that Noah would fall asleep right away and sleep the entire flight, but he decided he wanted to party for the first two hours...yay. :-)

Fun with a box

Even though we've lived here for about 3 months, we still have a *few* boxes sitting around our house (shocking, I know...).  It's mostly boxes filled with books that we don't have a place for yet (we are in the process of finding a new bookcase) but there are a few boxes of random things we are just trying to find a place for.

So the other day I managed to empty one of these random boxes, which led to several hours of fun for Noah and Daddy! Noah really liked to climb inside the box and have Ely spin him around several times.  He loves the sensation of being dizzy, and its not enough to just spin him around, he then wants to be able to walk around while he's dizzy.  I finally got the box taken out to be recycled, but any box Noah sees he wants to get in it.  Yesterday he actually brought the box that the Cheerios had been in (the giant Costco box) and he tried to put his feet in it and told me to "pin" (spin) it.  He's such a character!