A Visit From the Grandparents

My parents came to visit for 10 days and we had such a good time with them.  Never was so excited to see his Grandma and Grandpa that he talked about it every day for the week before and on the day of their arrival he insisted he wear his Grandpa shirt even though it is really too small.

While they were here we did a lot of fun things together.  We of course spent a few days at the beach,

We went to Chinatown a couple of times to see the Chinese New Year celebrations  

 but I think the biggest highlight to their visit was out whale watching trip we took on a catamaran.  The humpback whales spend the winter around the Hawaiian islands and during this time it is easy to see signs of them from the coast but this does not compare to seeing them much closer from a boat.

As far as Nev was concerned he was happy just playing trains with his Grandpa.

We were sad to see them leave but we are looking forward to visiting in the Spring when Nev will get to meet his new cousin!

Happy New Year!

Well 2011 has wrapped up and the holidays are over.  We had a good Christmas.  On Christmas Eve I made a ham dinner and Micah's nephew who is in the Navy here joined us for dinner. 

That evening we all got new PJ's and Nev put out milk and cookies for Santa.  It was a little hard to convince him to leave the cookies and milk there for Santa.  I explained to him that Santa was going to come while he was sleeping and bring him some presents so we were leaving the milk and cookies as a present for Santa.  This seemed to work pretty well and I think it also helped with getting him to bed that night.  It was super easy to get him into bed.

 

He had a lot of fun on Christmas day unwrapping presents and playing with his new toys.  I got a new DSLR camera for Christmas (which I actually recieved a couple of days before) and I have had a lot of fun playing with my new "toy".

Unfortunately, however, I did not get any good pictures from Christams because I had the camera in manual focus when I thought it was in auto focus.  So needless to say most of the pictures were blurry and I am still learning how to use the camera and the basics of photography.

It has been consuming a lot of my time, however.  I have been on the internet reading as much as I can about photography.  I am starting to get the basics down.I have started a 365 project which is a project where you take a picture everyday to document a year in your life.  You can view my project at http://365project.org/jaimeratchford/365.  This is a pretty cool project and the idea is that by forcing myself to take pictures everyday and seeing and following other peoples projects will help me get better at photography.  It's also just a cool way of documenting a year of your life! I can imagine that it will be easy to neglect this project after the initial excitment of it wears off but I am really hoping that I will stick with it and take a picture everyday.

Anyway I hope everyone had a good and safe New Year's Eve!  Ours was very mellow for the most part.  We spent New Years Eve at the beach.  I was wanting to go see fireworks in town, mainly because I wanted to try to photograph them, but we were unable to get a babysitter so it was a night at home and a movie.  New Year's Eve in Honolulu is crazy!  The amount of fireworks people set off is insane!  For about 4 hours last night it sounded like we were in a war zone.  And this is just from the people in our neighborhood.  I was not able to sleep until it was all over around 1 a.m.  Amazingly Nev slept through the whole thing! 

Anyway, I hope the holidays were good for everyone. My parents are coming out for a visit so we are getting ready for that.  We are all very excited and Nev can't wait till Grandma and Grandpa take a ride on the "big airplane" so he can see them.