heather, marc, wren & z mroz

oregon families vacation

The Mroz Family, Soemo Family and Knudsen Family all headed to a Yachats, Oregon beach house for a week to have an unforgettable vacation.

sorry for the delay of not posting anything new in the last few months. we i kind of got lazy with the holidays, me being off of work, going on vacation, and shoveling snow. we weren’t that good about taking photos on our vacation to seattle or even of christmas, but here is what we got.

random photos of wren from november and begining of december. yeah that is her toe in her mouth.

pics of wren at 6 months old. caution this album also contains photos of wren doing her business.

couple of pics from our trip to visit the soemo’s.

christmas 2008 photos… sort of.

pics of wren being 7 months old. her eyes are really blue, even when i use the flash too close to her face.

heather says the technical term for what wren is doing is not scooting as i call it, but it is creeping. i guess creeping is what you do before crawling. anyways, wren is one creepy girl. she can can creep her way around the room, getting to anything she wants (or should i say anything she isn’t supposed to eat). she was doing this scooting stuff more and more before our vacation, but in seattle visiting the soemo’s, she seemed to turn it up a notch. i think she liked seeing all the soemo boys and scooting to all their fun toys.

pictures from the olund family cruise are up for your viewing pleasure. about 15 of us went on a carnival cruise to grand caymen, cozumel, belize, and costa maya. we all had fun.

marc and I went to washington to visit the soemo family during spring break (beginning of april). we had so much fun with them and miss them so much already. I absolutely LOVE their sons and wanted to bring them home with me. marc and I both got sick and rhese took care of us and stayed by my side (he kept bringing me this rice sock thing that he had made from the freezer and it felt so good on my head!).  I learned more about Star Wars than I ever thought I would… and I’m actually interested in trying to watch the movies again (I usually fall asleep).

We all went on a very adventurous path to a waterfall. We got to climb over fallen trees, step in mud, keep our eyes peeled for ‘hatchet jack’ (rhese told me he lives in the woods) and ‘princess gurtrude.’ Paden put on a show for us in the woods (you’ll have to ask later), Harper tried to sleep, and Gradey was a trooper and tried to walk most of the way (Maggie was the biggest trooper of all – she carried gradey most of the way back).

Marc will hopefully put up pictures soon. It was so much fun!

we just got back yesterday from our trip to hawaii. a hospital on hawaii was going live with my work’s software, so i went out for the golive, brought heather along, and we made it a vacation. we took about 4 days off before i had to start working and got a sweet cottage on the north shore of oahu. our cottage had a great view of the crashing waves right off of waimea beach park. the waves were so loud, that is all you could hear all day, it was awesome. we were within walking distance to waimea beach park. the waimea beach had some crazy waves that if you weren’t careful would slap you back toward the beach and fill your pants with sand (literally my shorts would fill with sand as the waves slid me on my back up the beach) it was cool.

we are so glad we went to the north shore, most of the time the beaches and trails had few people on them. one of the beaches, malaekahana beach, was just about deserted, we only saw like 3 other people on the beach while we were there over a couple hour period. this beach was cool beacuse just 600 feet offshore is an island called moku auia seabird sanctuary (goat island), which is home to over 10 species of seabirds. heather and i braved the rough water and big waves and swam across the ocean to the island. you can see our war wounds in the photo section. it was a little scary swimming over there but once we got to the beach of the island there was tons of sharp coral reef and stones. getting on the island wasn’t so bad it just hurt a little. trying to get off the island and swim back was horrible. we tried to go back in the water the way we came in, but no matter which way we tried, standing, sitting, crawling, the waves would just push us back toward the beach cutting up our hands and feet as we flailed. after about 10 minutes of getting no where and feeling hopeless we made our way backwards to the beach we were trying to get off of. during all this the sky was starting to get darker, the waves seemed to get bigger, and we thought a storm was going to come. heather and i were a little scared. we eventually found a different part of the island that looked rockier but was really really super easy to leave from, and so feeling silly that we didn’t try this spot in the first place, we swam back. it took us a lot longer to swim back but we made it safely.
our cottage was just 5 minutes from waimea valley audubon center. at the end of the paved trails was the waimea falls where we were able to swim around the waterfall and even go under the falls. this was tons of fun, i wish we found some more waterfalls while we were in hawaii. the grounds of the waimea valley audubon center were nice but a little run down. they did have a place setup in the park were you could play “authentic” hawaiian games. heather and i had fun playing ‘ulu maika (breadfruit) a bowling game with disks and moa pahe’e (chicken darts) both games you had to get the disk or dart in between two stick goals. it was pretty much like horseshoes with out the horse or the shoes. we also played some other rock bowling game on a crescent shaped rock course, but i can’t find out what the name of that game was.
heather and i also did some hiking. we hiked the hau’ula loop trail which took us way up on the top of some mountain type hill thing it was pretty awesome. at the top you felt like you were practically in the clouds.

since we stayed on the north shore we were about 10 minutes from the legendary surf town of haleiwa, where there were tons of shops, resturants, and my favorite favorite hot day treat: hawaiian shave ice. i didn’t really realize that hawaiian shave ice was a thing that came from hawaii. i thought it was just a dumb name someone gave to a fancy sno-cone. however i was wrong it really does come from hawaii, or at least its from hawaii via the sizeable nikkei population who brought with them the tradition of kakigori (delicately flavored japanese shaved ice) and the filipino halo-halo (a parfait containing crushed iced, tropical fruits, sweetened beans, and ice cream). anyways shave ice (not shaved ice like i thought before i went to hawaii) is freaking awesome, its a billion times better then any crappy sno-cone. the ice is very finely shaved like snow flakes on a hot summer time morning, and then its covered with all kinds of sugary goodness syrup flavorings. in hawaii you can actually get your shave ice with ice cream at the bottom which makes the most magnificent surprise of melted ice, ice cream, and syrup when you finish eating the shave ice from the top. or you can get it with these “sweet” black beans at the bottom of your shave ice. heather was brave enough to try her shave ice this way, she was also brave enough to dump her beans in the garbage when she realized just because you put the word “sweet” before bean it doesn’t make it stop tasting like a bean. that is unless of course instead of calling jelly beans by their given name you like to call them jelly sweet beans, then you would be okay, but come to think about it jelly beans don’t really taste like beans anyways, so you can ignore my before mentioned rambling.
after our wonderful vacation on the north shore i had to go to work. my work put us up at the hawaii prince hotel waikiki, in downtown honolulu. it was like culture shock to come from the laid back very small beach towns of the north shore, to the ubercity of honolulu. downtown honolulu has tons of resturants, fancy fancy stores of designers i can’t remember the names for, and beaches. i never actually made it to waikiki beach since i was working 13 hours of the day, but heather said it was nice but over crowded. the pictures of the sunsets she saw look amazing. our hotel room was nice. all the rooms in our hotel faced the ocean and had big picture windows that actually opened up all the way. the sunrises and sunsets from our hotel window were amazing (maybe it wasn’t a sunrise… maybe a moonset?).
the night before i started work, heather and i went to a luau. germaine’s luau to be exact. we had fun but it was definatly not worth the price. it was a very very very manufactured luau (not that i’ve been to another one but you know). they picked us up on a big tour bus to drive us to the place on the west side of the island. our “escort” georgie was over the top. they want you to feel like a family at the luau and on the bus so they make you do all kinds of silly ice-breaker games and junk to get you to talk to the other people on the bus. once you get there they have a ton of picnic tables and smaller tables where you can sit on matts on the beach. the food was a buffett and not very authentic. the did have pork that came from a pig they cooked there in an underground oven pit on the beach. heather and i hoped the show would be a ton more authentic, but it was a lot of crappy hill billy, hawaiian, lounge singing mixed in with, audience participation, and what seemed to be some slightly authentic-ish polynesian dancing. oh yeah you can’t forget the guys from the audience who got suckered into wearing grass skirts and coconuts, because it wouldn’t be a luau without that. later we found out that the lady who started this company is actually a native of chicago, go figure. i’m not sure if it was so commercialized when marcia germain was alive and running the place but now it seems very commercialzed and very manufactured. we had fun, but the only reason we are glad we did it was that we would have thought it was something super cool that we missed if we hadn’t done it.
so that accounts our awesome trip to hawaii, heather and i had tons of fun, it was totally worth the long flights and 5 hour time zone changes. if we go back again i would like to go to one of the other islands that has volcanos on them. thanks kaiser permanente for having a hospital on the great island of oahu, hawaii.

heather and i went to visit the moore family in kansas and nebraska. shane, tiff, maddie, and fletcher are doing good. they were living with shane’s parents since they sold their old house. however they just bought a new house and closed on it while we were there. we had fun hanging out with them and helping them get the house in order. heather and i didn’t do a ton of work but we helped clean, steam wall paper off the walls, and sand down some dry wall. i can’t wait to see it when shane finishes it’ll be awesome. shane’s dad carl even took me up for a short flight in his plane. check out the pictures of our trip to “mooreland.”

we went to phoenix, arizona for a vacation right before christmas. see the pics from our hotel, grand canyon, lake pleasant park, and el dorado hot springs. we had lots of fun and i got to check off an item on my to do list, see the grand canyon. our trip even inspired heather to start a to do list of her own.