Collins

Monday, September 3, 2012

We had a great Labor Day weekend. Friday night we stayed home and watched Mirror Mirror as a family. On Saturday I went on a hike with the Boy Scout troop in our ward. It was just over 5 miles long. This is the first real hike we have taken the boys on since I started working with the troop about 6 months ago. We had 24 boys from our troop attend. For many of the boys a few valuable lessons were learned:

1. Eating breakfast before going on a hike is a good idea.

2. Bringing only 16 ounces of water to drink is a bad idea.

3. Guam, a tropical island, is surrounded by water (yes, while standing on a ridge where you can see water almost completely surrounding the island an11 year old scout who has lived on Guam his entire life sincerely asked "are we surrounded by water?")

In spite of some poor preparations, all of the boys had a good time. We hiked down to these beautiful falls and cooled off in the water. Many of the boys proved their manhood by climbing midway up the falls and jumping out from behind the falls.

Saturday night Paij and I went diving with two other couples. We went at dusk and the visibility was pretty poor. We were pleasantly surprised when we came across a rather large ray. It was the first ray that Paij or I had ever come across. A video our friend got of it is posted on my facebook timeline if interested.

On Sunday we relaxed, TOOK NAPS!!! and hung out as a family. We watched family slideshows of the girls since they were both born and then had chocolate fondue. It was a lot of fun. Morgan struggles to understand that the baby in the slideshows is her. In spite of multiple reminders, she continues to refer to herself in the third person when she sees pictures of herself as a baby. The girls both love watching the slideshows and even start to dance a little to the music we have put to them. It really is a fun family activity and Paij and I love to reflect back on all the memories our little family has been blessed with thus far.

Today (Monday) we went on a hike with some friends to a beautiful isolated beach. After seeing a puffer fish in the water Morgan finally built up enough motivation to actually use her mask and snorkel and put her face in the water. Granted that only lasted four seconds, but that is huge progress for our daredevil Morgan. Hopefully soon we will have her enjoying more of what these waters hold.

Here are Morgan and Paij celebrating Morgan's first snorkeling experience.

To get outside the reef we had to snorkel over coral in some very shallow water. If you look close in this picture you may be able to see the aftermath of Paij's first close encounter with the coral.

Jaycee, our adventurous one, having fun on the beach.

We found a couple puffer fish while snorkeling and brought them in close to shore so the kids could check them out. They really are fun fish to play with.