Why do we live in Utah?

So it's been snowing the past few days, and we've been back from Hawaii a little over a week now...and all I can think of is why do we live in Utah? Seriously, I keep telling Katelyn that Brigham Young should've taken the saints out to Hawaii, not to Utah. But such is life.

So we left for Hawaii super early on a Tuesday morning. I love being able to take an unofficial spring break, but at the same time it wasn't extremely fun getting everything done we needed to that we were going to miss. But hey, it wasn't too bad taking a test and writing a few papers early because the payoff was a week in Hawaii! We stayed at a condo in Maui with my family. I had an aunt and uncle come, as well as some others from my family's ward in CO. Our condo was really nice and right across the street from the beach. The condo experience was different (past "spring breaks" were at an all inclusive resort in Mexico) but nice in it's own way.

The beaches were great! They were quite a bit different than other beaches I've been to. The waves were quite a bit bigger but the part that was most different was that the waves tended to crash directly onto the sand. At other places I've been to the waves usually crashed where there still was a decent depth of water, which made it easy to boogie board, body surf, etc. The beaches here made it kinda hard to do that sometimes, just because they were so big and caused me to faceplant a couple times. Also, the beach tended to slope down really quickly, so the waves would come up fairly quickly. I definitely saw a little girl get taken out by a ten foot wave once. So yeah, they were beaches that were pretty crazy, parents would want to keep a close eye on the kids, and they could absolutely DOMINATE you if you weren't expecting it. I got worked over pretty hard a couple times. It was a lot of fun actually...

Quick side note, Hawaii blessed me with hair, as you can see here. It's amazing what the tropical weather can do to you!

Another highlight, although for different reasons for me than for Katelyn, was going snorkeling. I went out once just at the beach by our condo. There was quite a bit of coral just right next to where we were at. It was cool swimming in between fins of coral, a ton of fish, and even got surprised by a turtle. But the bigger highlight was when we went on a legit snorkeling trip. We went on about a half hour boat trip to a crater. It was pretty cool. We got to swim around a crater with a TON of fish. Katelyn was hilarious! Just a little background, she has a huge, kinda weird, fear of fish. You can't see the fish very well from the boat, but as soon as you stick your head in the water they were all over the place. Schools of fish would swim all around you, right next to you, and sometimes you would even touch them. So Katelyn jumped in and started to freak out so bad she started to hyperventilate. She would shriek every time a fish got close to her. If you haven't heard someone freak out while having a snorkel in their mouth then I would definitely recommend it, it's pretty funny. After the crater we got back on the boat to go to another spot where there are a bunch of sea turtles and...let's just say the baby made it's presence known. Katelyn got really familiar with a couple of girls seated in the back of the boat because she pretty much spent the rest of her time there puking everything she had eaten in the last few weeks up into the water. On the bright side, she did attract some pretty cool looking fish. But yeah, after the 7th time Katelyn blew chunks she was not extremely happy. But we did make it to the turtle place and I got to go swim around with them. It was pretty cool, we saw around 5 in total and they're pretty big animals. They would swim up to the surface to breathe and you could swim right next to them. I was literally at times within an arms length. Katelyn was disappointed that she didn't get to do that, but she was able to see a turtle from our balcony a couple days later. Anyways, Katelyn definitely needed some time to recover from that but it was pretty cool.

Another thing I did that was pretty cool, Katelyn got left out of this one because of the whole pregnancy thing, was ziplining. We drove up a huge mountain/volcano that's on the island and did an "ecotour" zipline. There were 5 fairly long ziplines (the kind where you get hooked into a harness, not the kind you hold with your hands) and at each one they'd give us some info about endangered birds. I guess some of the money we paid goes to help them, but anyways it was way cool. It surprised me a lot because this mountain goes up to 10,000 feet, and the spot where we did the ziplines didn't even look like Hawaii, it looked more like Colorado or parts of California. So yeah, it was pretty fun.

So other than that we mostly just had a relaxing vacation, chilling on the beach, playing games, reading. It was definitely a nice break from school. I am a very strong proponent of BYU getting a spring break. It helps out so much to be able to get a break towards the end of the semester. Not like it'll benefit Katelyn and me now that we're almost done, but oh well. So yeah, life is good, Hawaii is good, Katelyn is really looking forward to being done with classes. She's struggling with senioritis, if they even have that in college. But only a couple more weeks and then she's basically done. The baby is good, got to hear it's heart beat again today, and we find out in a week and a half what it is. I'm betting on a girl, mostly because Katelyn is so adamant it's a boy I figure I have to balance everything out. So life keeps going on, but I'm not going to complain. Except for the fact that we still live in Utah...oh yeah, Katelyn's probably going to put up a poll so everyone can vote for what they think our baby will be. Winners will owe us ice cream!