Four Acts of Kindness

In honor of Ava's fourth birthday, Ava "decided" (or perhaps more accurately, "agreed") to do Four Acts of Kindness for others.  Everyone's doing it...get on board, people.

Ava was pretty thrilled to take part and she chose each of the four acts, apart from the first, which had already been chosen for her.

1. Food to the Food Bank - This year, Ava had a joint birthday party with two of her best buddies, Griffin and Jolie. [Though she may not be aware of it, Ava has known these kids since the earliest days of her life when--sleep-deprived, confused, shocked, elated, and overwhelmed--the new mothers banded together in a new-mom's group, wisely determining that parenthood was not a battle to be fought alone.] In lieu of gifts, party attendees brought donations for the Oregon Food Bank. We collected 66 pounds of food at the party and later took a field trip to deliver the donations. The Oregon Food Bank is a pretty amazing organization and Helen's good friend and Associate Director of Development at the Food Bank, Ellen Dully, gave us a tour of the facility.

2. Cookies for Postal Carrier Allison - Ava knows the name and personal business of everyone who lives on our street, along with most others who walk down it. So we are pretty tight with our postal carrier. Ava runs onto the porch whenever she sees her coming and attempts to keep up conversations with her as she dips in and out of houses for deliveries. On Ava's birthday we baked her cookies and she outdid us by surprising Ava with a purple vest for her birthday. Seriously?! That woman is awesome.

3. Cupcakes for Nate, Amy, Olivia and Carter - Our beloved next-door neighbors were out of town for Ava's birthday party and Ava felt like they really deserved some cupcakes to celebrate in her honor.  After making the cupcakes, we realized that they were again out of town so Ava dutifully sat by the four cupcakes until they returned that evening to receive them.

4. Coffee Gift Card for Clark - We have the sweetest neighbor, Clark, at the end of our street. Every morning he takes his coffee mug and walks past our house to go to one of four coffee shops, where he meets his friends for coffee. Ava is OBSESSED with this lovely man and runs out of the house every time he passes so that she can scream hello. We're fairly sure he can't understand a thing she says but he's always happy to see her. We got him a gift card to one of his coffee shops and I don't think we could have confused the man any more than we did when we told him that for Ava's birthday we were getting him a gift.

Monster Mash

Ava drew you a picture of a monster.

December 2012

Mele Kalikimaka

The Rabold family escaped to Hawaii in December for an early Christmas treat. We met up with Brian's parents, his Aunt Joanne and Uncle David, and Paula and Joe. And though Joe waited to perfect his Mai Tai recipe until after we left, we still managed to enjoy ourselves.

For James, this was his first flight. Apart from being understandably disappointed at being caged into a 4 x 6 ft space for 6 hours, he remained jolly and spent lots of time flirting with the airline attendants.

This wasn't James's first trip to the ocean but it was the first time anyone had threatened to put him in it and he was quite horrified by the idea. Because we are wonderful parents, we made sure to dunk him down to his shoulders, amidst his screams of protest. Luckily, he does love to roll around in the sand and made himself quite at home in the kiddie pool.

Since our last trip to Hawaii two years ago, Ava has made a complete turn-around and loves the ocean, and loves the pool. She also loves the hot tub, and she stationed herself nearby so that she could wait for unsuspecting parents to put their babies in the water and then lecture them on the spa being too hot for small people.

In addition to lounging around at the pool, we also took a trip to the Maui Ocean Center, where Helen went SCUBA diving in a tank with 30 or so sharks. James and Ava looked on, waving and blowing kisses. Oddly enough, Ava was terrified by the idea of Brian going into the dunk tank at our block party a few months ago--screaming, wailing and gasping for air--but seemed at peace with the idea of Helen swimming with man-eating sharks. We'll try not to over-analyze it.

It doesn't feel like we had enough time at all, but we're glad we got to spend some quality time with the East-coast Rabold crew.