The blog is fixed

I don't know what happened, but my blog template stopped working last week.  Don't worry, it's fixed now.

Marcus' new favorite activity

(It was Eric's idea to put his play mat up against the built-in bookcase.)  The good news is, it's a built-in, so it won't fall on him.

Military Appreciation Day

Saturday was Military Appreciation Day at the Honolulu Zoo, so we got to go for free.  We also got free lunch and a free sunburn.  What a great day!!  Here are a few pictures.

Marcus enjoying the free ride.

Giraffes!!  Marcus doesn't understand the concept of looking where we're pointing, so he spent the day looking at our fingers instead of the animals.

Marcus checking out the peacocks.  

This trip to the zoo was definitely more fun than the last trip, Marcus actually looked at some of the animals this time.

Our Cutie Patootie!!

I just had to share this picture.  It is too cute.

Okay, these aren't bad either, but the first one is my favorite.

Marcus sure loves his new laptop.  He plays with it all of the time.  His favorite activity?  Closing it and waiting on Mom or Dad to open it for him.

Here's a picture of the family (minus the picture taker, of course).

Eric also wanted me to post some pictures of the latest hike he went on.  Marcus, Kimber and I were sleeping while he did this.  (We're not crazy!!)

This is the Hawaii Loa Ridge, which is only open to Hawaii residents and Military, so it's pretty exclusive.  He left at 6 am to go on this hike, which is why the rest of us were sleeping.  It's beautiful, but we'll have to wait until we get a hiking backpack before we can go up there as a family.  It's pretty treacherous.

Marcus' new pool toy

We finally got Marcus a pool toy last week, so we took him back to the Hale Koa pool yesterday.  As you can see from the picture, he loved it.  He could float around, and kick all he wanted.  He also loved to splash us in the face with the water inside his tube.  Towards the end, he leaned back in the tube and was totally relaxing in the pool.

Warrior Ohana Day

Last Friday, I got a chance to participate in Warrior Ohana Day.  It was a chance to participate in activities that Eric has to do in the Army.  I was on a team with other wives from Eric's unit.  We started out with a trip through a convoy simulator.  We got to act like we were in a Humvee and got to shoot at enemy targets.  Then we moved on to an M-16 simulator where I had 4 confirmed kills.  I also got to take apart an M-9 and M-16.  Our team was the second fastest at taking apart and putting back together our weapons in the groups that we were with at the time.

The next part of the day was one station from the Leader Reaction Course.  This was an obstacle that we had to complete as a team.  Fortunately, I had done many of these in the Marines, and we ended up completing ours two minutes faster than the team before us.

(In all of these pictures, I'm in the grey baseball cap)

Here's our team at the beginning of the station.  We had to get the two ammo boxes (on the right side of the picture) and our entire team to the other side of the area without touching the ground.  

Here we are after we completed the station.  We were not told until afterwards that there were gloves for us to use and those pipes were hot after sitting in the sun all morning.

The next portion of the day was a modified Army Physical Fitness Test.  I say modified because we only had to do 30 seconds of push-ups and 30 seconds of sit-ups.  Also, it didn't matter if we did the push-ups on our knees or not, so of course we all did them on our knees.

After the APFT, we headed out on the two mile road march.  That was fun, and we actually ran a good part of it.  Once we finished that, we got to do the obstacle course, which was our last activity.  There were six stages to the obstacle course.  We started with the high wall, where we had to get all of our team up and over a 10 ft. wall.  Next was the weaver, where you're supposed to weave over and under 4 x 4's that are mounted at increasing heights and then they decrease again.  For this day, we just had to go over them, so it was a lot easier.  We then headed to the high step, which is shown in the picture below.  You weren't allowed to use your hands to get over the beams.

After the high step, we conquered the balance beam and cargo net.  The last obstacle was the low crawl.  The soldiers had intentionally wet down the low crawl and as a result, it was one giant mud puddle.  For some reason, they thought that their wives would enjoy getting muddy.

We didn't learn until afterward that it was actually the direct fault of two of the husbands from our team.  They were the ones that had come up with the idea of adding the water.  So, here is a picture of us after crawling in the mud.

The best part of the day?  Eric watched Marcus the whole time so that I could just enjoy myself.  This picture was the first time that I got to see Marcus that day.

I think he thought I was dirty, he didn't have a very loving look on his face.

We ended up winning the sportsmanship award for the day.  Here is a collage made from some more pictures from the event.