Day: February 13, 2008

Saturday, Feb 2nd we watched the Chinese New Year’s Parade. It is now 4706 in the Chinese calendar, the year of the rat. Dollar bills are being fed to the lions and dragons for good luck, and Leilani is mighty brave when it comes to lions and dragons – especially for someone who is very afraid of Santa Claus…

Leilani is playing in the street while waiting for the parade to start.

Are the coming yet?

Here lion, lion, lion, come, I got lion food…

Her y’go lion:

Too close for comfort, Leilani faces her fears:

Bye bye nice lion…

nom-nom-nom

A tiny bit scary… (according to her own words)

It’s the year of the rat.

Click to watch video:

I figured if I ever wad to post this article I better make 3 out of it: We were in Oahu for 5 days 2 weeks ago. The very first thing we did – after pitching our tent and waiting for Leilani’s nap to end – was to visit the Punahou Carnival.

We had gone there last year and all of us had loved it. It was pretty rainy and very muddy this year, but we still had a lot of fun.

Look, there is Kauai!

Helicopters are fun!

But Merry-Go-Rounds even more so

Andy took this one while riding on the horse next to her (while yelling wave to Mommy, fortunately Leilani was smarter than that and did not let go of the pole…)

She had called that one the “Dancy” or “Tanzi” last year. This year she referred to it as the dragons or the dinosaurs.

At the end of the day Leilani demanded the camera, we were in a hurry and I was weighted down with lots of books and things we had bought at the “White Elephant Sale” and was not in the mood to put the stuff down and find the camera to give it to her. I asked what she wanted to take a picture of, she pointed to the little church with the late sunset behind and said “The tower, the castle”. That moment I realized that she did not just want to play, but had artistic vision. I did not help her frame it (although I cropped it later in photoshop), and right after she had taken it she asked me to show it to her in the viewfinder, and seemed very pleased with the result.

I have not put a video on YouTube in a while. I tried 3 times, the quality want from unusable to awful to bad. Then I tried 3 more times and it stayed at “bad”. I guess that’s it, and I’ll try to find a better way to publish videos…