Hawaii

The island is just beautiful. I don't know what else to say about it. This is another shot on the road to Lahaina. Can't beat the view!

We stopped to watch a few surfers. I loved the shot with the pinapple fields in the background. We went to Baldwin beach for a few hours. The water was great. Not to many waves. Megan said in the winter time not far from this beach the waves get over 40 feet high. I would love to see that.

The sunsets are just as beautiful as the sunrise.

This is the view from up near Megan's house. Just a good sunset.

Liquid Gold Sky!!

Now for the sunrise!!! WE went up to Haleakala National Park. Also know as "House of the Sun" Nothing like seeing the sun come up over the Horizone and turning the sky to liquid gold.

The drive to the volcano is 37 miles up from sea level to the summit. It is one of the greatest elevation gains in the shortest distance in the world. Nothing like touching the sun!

Well holding it in the palm of your hand is pretty cool as well. We left Megan's house at 3:45 am to make it up the top in time

Can't tell you how pretty it was!

It was 42 degrees when we got up there.

Someone sang a very beautiful song while we watched it come up.

These next two shots are what they call the crater. By definition though it isn't really one, but it is cool to see.

Maui Island is in the shape of a body. This is a picture of the neck. This is the view coming down the volcano.

This is one of my favorite pictures. It looks like you drive right off onto the clouds. Actually we were talking about how it looked like you could walk across the clouds.

Maui

First of all I should thank Megan for letting me come visit her for a few days. I met her in the Singles ward here in Houston. She is from Maui and went home for the summer. It was my pleasure to finally see for myself what the Bushman's are always talking about. It is beautiful!!! As you can see for yourself.

I flew to Colorado first and then to Maui. The flight from Colorado to Maui was 7 hours. I've never been on a plane that long or one that big. This is the big screen that was right in front of me. We watched one movie and then several tv shows on the flight.

Megan and her nieces made a lay for me out of plumerias. It smelt so good. I tried to bring some home for Alona, but left them in seattle on the way home. Oops!

This is a picture of the pineapple fields that were everywhere. It was really something to see.

Day 1 we took a little trip out to Lahaina to see this massive tree.

The Banyon tree took up a whole city block it was amazing. Needless to say if you were to ask me what one of my favorite things in Hawaii was I'd have to say it was the trees. I love them all.

The tree was so big that they put stakes in the ground to help hold it up.

This is the few from the road to Lahaina. I told you it was beautiful.

Aubrey Lyon Westwood (well almost Westwood)

Natalie put on this wonderful bridal shower for Aubrey. Actually Natalie is one of the most talented and creative person I have ever met. I usually hate bridal showers with all of the games and silly things you usually do. Natalie makes it most entertaining and a learning experience. For example, for this last bridal shower she put together a booklet of wedding dresses, from the time with they were blue to the modern day. It was very interesting to see the different styles and who copied who. Then we played a board game which at the mometn slips my mind. Anways you answer questions then you put your answers in order on a board and people put coins on which one they thing is the correct answer. You get points if yours is correct, if you put a coin on the correct answer and so forth. Our questions all related around weddings. How long was Princess Diana's train? It was alot of fun.

Then you have the usual open gifts and oh and ah over what she gets. That's a lot of fun as well.

Natalie is the one on the far right in the white shirt. We are going to miss her, but excited for her. She's moving to Colorado.

Kim and Stacie worked really hard at making a beautiful hat for Aubrey out of all the ribbon and tool wrapped aroun the presents. I was pretty impressed with their talents. They have some skills.

Aubrey trying on her lovely hat.

I'm telling you Stacie and Kim should go into business together. It looks really good.

It even has nice ribbon in the back!

Katherine's Place

Katherine has the greatest outfits if you ever wanted to dress up for anything. She has tons of great hats, wigs and pj's. She was gone for a few weeks over in Egypt so we decided to have some fun. She let us stay at her apartment during youth conference so we didn't have to travel 45 mi
Here are a few pictures that we took to remember the occasion by.

Kim dressed up. I'm not sure what you would say she was dressed up as.
Jen, Kim, Stacy. We love the hates and all the bears she has.
Can you tell it's getting late. We had tons of fun though. Thanks Katherine. We left you a nice gift.

Hope you like it.

Houston North Youth Conference

These last two days were spent helping out at Youth Conference. The Houston North Stake asks the Single Adult ward to be councilors during their two day youth conference. They put tons of work into it. Friday was spent participating in the Amazing Standards race. It was really fun and the youth loved it!

For those of you who don't watch the Amazing race this is the adaptive version. Each team was given a map of the course and one clue to start out with. At the completion of each task, which every team member had to complete or someone had to complete it twice, we would get another clue. There were 12 different tasks that revolved around the Standards of the Church. It was very clever. I don't remember what the names of all the clues were, but here are some of the task. They had to get all of the plastic spiders out of the spaghetti and on the table.
Be ye therefore clean! We had to dunk our hand in a bucket of mud and then using spray bottles clean someone elses hands off. You could not clean your own hand.
Pay 10% tithing. They had tiny bowls set out on the table. You can't see them to well. We had to stand behind a line and toss dimes into the bowl. Each team member had to get one dime in the bowl.
Be modestly dressed- Make a modest outfit out of newspaper and tape. It was very entertaining!
Kim and Stacie were also councelors. It was pretty hot outside, but the day passed by quickly with all the running around we did.

Day two of the conference was spent at the temple. On a very rare occasion President Bradford, the temple president spoke to the youth about the temple.

Here are some of the girls that were in our group! They were a really good group. When we got back to the church we had Standards Idol. I take from American Idol. They took popular songs of the day and we had to come up with new words based on the standards from th Strength of the Youth Pamplet. For example we had the song from Maroon 5 This love. We had to change the words to something about Media and entertainment. The songs were then performed by each group during dinner. They youth were great at cheering each other on. One of the Songs was a slow country song. Many of the boys went and grabbed a girl to dance while the group sang the song. It was awesome!

BIRTHDAYS

Well I may be getting older, but the birthdays are getting better! Let's see a few years in review.
Turning 27 was not the best birthday ever. In fact you could probably say it was the worst. In our house it still is a story to tell. It was horrible for about a 2 weeks time period. One of the many things that happened during the two weeks surrounding my birthday was that my car window go smashed in. Susannah was very nervous to come and tell me about it. I don't blame her. I also dropped out of graduate school because tuition was more then I could handle at that time. Looking back it is a very funny story, but it was not at the time.

In 2007 things got a lot better. I met a cute boy in the Sam Houston 2nd ward one night at family Home Evening. I was really hyper and thought I had embarressed myself pretty good. Not to bad I guess because he got my number from a mutual friend and asked me out on a date on my birthday. I thought I was going to spend it all alone, but instead got to go to a concert at the Woodlands Pavillon with Kurt. It was a lot of fun. When people got back in town we had a party at our house.

This year for my 29th birthday ( I know that sounds really old) The Bushman's did a great job of celebrating my birthday. I'm going to Hawaii in a week so we decided to celebrate Hawaii style. We had some really good food and lots of people came. I had people from High School, College and Houston come. It was kind of fun to see everyone from different stages of my life.

They did a great job with designing all the food. It looked beautiful and tasted good!

It was great to have so many friends around for the evening. Here is Susana Reyes and I. One of my favorite parts was that my cousin Daciana and her husband Mark came. We grew up together and did everything together when we were in elementary school before my family moved to Houston.Another fun suprise was that Brad came back to Houston. Alona and he were good friends before he moved away to Law School. He's back in Houston for a while and graced us with his presence.

What fun friends! From left to right Carla, Cynthia, Stacie, Katherine

Daciana's husband Mark got free tickets to see Chicago and Doobi Brothers in Concert. They had four tickets and gave me two of them. So I asked Nate to come with me. It was a lot of fun.
Daciana and Mark made friends with one of the staff members and we were able to go up to the stage when there was about an hour left in the concert. It was fun to be that close to the stage and they actually started playing songs I knew. The Doobie Brothers and Chicago played several songs together. One of the lead guitarist and singers of Chicago was trying to give a pick to one of the young boys standing in front of us. There was also a couple standing near who wanted the pick. I was watching them and afraid that they were going to get it. I noticed that it was next to the married couples feet, but they didn't see it so I bent down and picked it up. I gave it to the boy and was watching his face as he was admiring it. Daciana hit me and told me that he was talking to me. When I looked up the guitarist (Jason Scheff) Told me thank you.After the concert was over he came back out on stage and motioned for me to come here. So I walked up to the stage and he handed me a pick and said "Thank you for being good." I really wasn't big on having a pick, becuase I'm not that big of a fan of Chicago, but you know I'll keep the pick now for a good story.