New Developments

Today was Alex's last day at Mammoth Elementary School. He came home happy about it being the last day and excited to not have anymore homework! I was relieved that he wasn't upset about it. He felt very special at his "aloha party" at school yesterday and said that all the kids were telling him good-bye today. He seemed to like that.

Another development from our day today is that we had an ultrasound and were unable to find out the gender of our baby. It was actually pretty cute--every time the technician tried to take a peek between the legs, the baby's knees would come together in an act of modesty. Ha ha! I had a feeling we weren't going to be able to find out, so I wasn't really disappointed. We still feel pretty sure this is our girl, but may have to wait another 22 weeks or so to find out for sure!

As far as our "stuff" goes, the shipping container should arrive in Kapa'au on Monday. We will then arrange to have a truck transport it to Jenny & Sully's property and put it on the ground (hopefully very carefully!). Our Landcruiser sets sail tomorrow, from what I understand, and will be waiting for us in Kawaihae (20 minutes from our new home) when we arrive. We are renting a car for the first couple of days so we have a way to get from the airport to our car and have a day or so to return the rental to Kona (an hour drive from Kapa'au).

One logistic we had yet to work out until today was how we would get our family to L.A. when it's time to catch our one-way flight. We have a hotel room booked for the 5th in L.A. so we can stay the night and be ready to go for our early morning departure on Tuesday the 6th. We had hoped to find someone to drive us to L.A., but then they would have to turn around and drive the 5 hours back again. We hadn't been able to work out a good solution for this issue.

Today we had our first guest (for our vacational rental business) fly from LAX to Mammoth, a new service our airport is offering. We reazlied (duh) that we could fly from Mammoth to LAX and save ourselves the 5 hours of driving with the kids. We also wouldn't have to find someone to drive us down south AND we'd be able to check in our bags at a nice, small airport instead of at LAX. So we did it; we forked out the $325.00 to take the 1-hour flight from Mammoth to L.A. I think this is going to make a nice start to our trip as it will be so easy to get to the airport here and we won't be worn out from the extra driving time.

So that's pretty much the udpate for now. We are looking forward to enjoying the kids' Christmas vacation. The San Diego cousins will arrive on Sunday and, I'm sure, provide plenty of entertainment for all!