Tiffany and David: Parental Visit

We have a winner! My mom was the first out to visit us, proving she loves us the most and therefore winning the 'Who Gets to Hold Our Baby First' contest. Congrats mom!

Ha ha, just kidding.

Sort of.

(Actually, I found this hilarious picture on the internet, and was going to superimpose our faces on it - but, unfortunately, it looks like I am a photoshop retard, bc I couldn't figure it out. I gave up, so you get a cheesy pose shot instead.)

So my mom came to visit, randomly, for a week - which turned out to be great timing, as my temp job suddenly ended the week before she showed up. Which was maybe the only silver lining of that whole situation. Court took off work, so we had the whole week together. Before any of you reading this who know my mom and sister start asking, yes, they managed not to strangle each other. Progress!

So after the joy of seeing mom again died down, Courtney and I took stock and realized here was our mom, in Hawaii, with long johns. Her excuse was, "it's winter!" Yes, but it's winter in HAWAII, not Wisconsin. I tried to warn her of this before she came. This woman brought 1 pair of shorts and 1 short-sleeved t-shirt. So we spent the first day at Wal-Mart, buying mom appropriate island wear for her trip. The highlight of the shopping trip was seeing mom in one of those horrible local dresses that looks like it was sewn by 8 year old girls. She actually looked pretty good. Apparently theatrical local dress is good to her.

After, we headed over to Auntie Pastos, which is where my sister works some nights, for lunch. Mom wanted to see where we worked, which is why we ended up......

Laughing our asses off while hanging around the local high school, which is where my sister works during the day as a substitute teacher. Originally, Courtney and I had a full itinerary for her, of which we probably did less than half. It was a good balance between our 'let's show her everything in 6 days' and her 'just pretend like I'm a neighbor that happened to wander over.' (She actually said that to us)

So this ended up being of the best diversions from The Plan. It was here that I was offered my first in-depth view of the school system.

I haven't laughed so hard in ages.

Mom and I somehow ended up wandering into an English classroom for juniors and seniors - below is an actual representation of a story posted on the wall, written by a student who was somewhere around 17 years old.

I sincerely hope you clicked on this picture and blew it up so you could read it. I mean, REALLY!? Wow.

And people ask why we won't have kids over here. Other offerings included the subjects of princes slipping on diamonds, and how being in a gang sucks, but it keeps them out of Child Protective Services - all with a hefty dose of grammatical suicide. Maybe you had to be there, but we were glad it was after school and no one was around to watch us laughing.

Below, Courtney gets some inspiration from the story and works it into the classroom. Maybe she is trying to connect with the students on their level.

The day was rounded out with a game of Settlers of Cataan. The first time I played this was with some friends (the Dyes and Saugiers) and we were trounced so quickly and soundly by the Dyes that I thought this game was stupid. I have since reversed this decision, and now have the strategy of Get the Longest Road which always leads to Tiffany Winning. It's like a constant. As you can see, below is a proper representation of how most games end. (Mom's mustache is 2 road pieces - cute mom!)

We had such fun, we decided to play again the following night - and mom decided to adopt my strategy of 'get longest road'. It was cutthroat, dear readers. Mom and I stubbornly fought each other while Courtney quietly kicked our asses. I learned it's not as much fun when you don't win.
The next day we headed out to the North Shore, with the Dole Plantation detour, of course. Below is a picture I will treasure forever. Mom as a giant pineapple and not disguising her disgust. Classic. She spent most of her time at the plantation communing with the birds nearby.

However, she did emerge to come look at the pineapple growing in the sample garden. They always look weird to me - like someone saw a bush and placed a pineapple in it, not that it grew there naturally. I wonder if, secretly, employees wander around the garden at night with giant jugs of super-glue.

That just doesn't look natural.

We stopped at the outdoor shopping area in Halewia, which has some great things in it. Having lost track of mom, we wandered over to a section of the area that I've never seen - and there she was, making best friends with strangers. It was actually an outdoor music studio, and they were playing jazz. Only Mom could find jazz in Hawaii. We left with new friends and a personalized CD they recorded while we were there.

Overjoyed that Giovanni's Shrimp Shack was parked nearby, we pounded yummy plates of fresh-caught shrimp and took in some local entertainment, which I won't go into here for the sake of that poor girl.

Here we are at Papioloa Beach - which doubles as the set of Lost, which David and I found extremely cool.

It is kinda weird to see a place you watch on TV in real life. This was a pretty, deserted beach, where I had fun watching Mom break several environmental laws. It was kind of like having a little kid, "Oh no Nancy! We stay away from the pretty turtles!"

There are a lot of turtles napping on the beach, and it is illegal to get within 50 ft (I believe) to to walk between them and the ocean.

So Courtney and Mom did God knows what for a long time while David and I amused ourselves with the sets. They were all wrapped up in plastic, so it wasn't perfect, but you could see everything just fine. Giant security guys were lurking around making sure we didn't take an souvenirs, so it was mildly creepy - they kinda stalked us up the beach. At least it seemed that way to me. David would probably say I was being silly.

The main camp.

The kitchen! You can see the Dharma symbols on everything

The unfinished Church

Mom and Court bonding over shell-searching

Of course, no trip to the North Shore is complete without at stop at Matsumoto's - as you can see, usually everyone else has the same idea. But the line moves pretty quick.

One day, we went on a hike - Maunawili Falls.

It was a great hike, and to the waterfall it was fairly uneventful. Court climbed up and jumped off the falls - I attempted to tape it on her camera, but as you can see, I apparently suffer from Parkinson's.

However, on the way home I never saw mom. Apparently someone at some point said something to mom about being old(?) or slow(?) or something, and she was all about showing them wrong. So she was basically racing back to the car. It got to the point where I was stopping random people coming the other direction and asking if they had passed a crazy old lady power-walking (running like a dork) at high speed.

"Yeah, she was really moving!"

So, thank god we eventually caught up, and mom hadn't fallen on the rocks or anything. She's a spry old lady. And she'll kill herself proving it to you.

Afterward, we went and hung out at Lanikai - Mom went off along the beach by herself, so I just went wading in the water,

and my dog ate sand. I feel like I have a retarded child or something. And I used to laugh at tourists who couldn't keep their kids from shoveling handfuls of it in their mouths. Serves me right.

Mom's trip was pretty low-key, which is what I think she wanted. She cooked one night, we hung out, no crazy adventures.