Hau'oli Halalawa'eni

I don't know if that's how you wish a happy Halloween in Hawaiian, but for sure hau'oli means happy. Halloween could be transliterated a number of ways, although Halowini is probably more correct. I just liked the sound of the double "la" in the word. Any word with "-lala-" is a good Hawaiian word.

Anyway, for about half an hour today, all three of us were dressed up as Hawaiians. Rachel is wearing the dress that Andrew's parents brought back from their trip this summer, I'm wearing my mother's Hawaiian dress, and Andrew is wearing the lava-lava one of his mission companions gave to him.


Andrew is now out of the lava-lava and into his homework. Rachel is still in her Hawaiian dress, but she headed over to her grandparents' house to enjoy the Halloweening over there. I'm currently posting, but soon I'm going to be editing papers.

We did take a few minutes to treasure the occasion. Rachel and I actually took more than a few moments. She was in a pretty good mood this afternoon--my friend Kim brought over some teething tablets and we tried them. They seemed to help. Who knows?

Here's the photo shoot that Rachel and I did before Daddy got home:


And then as soon as Daddy got home, I made him put on his lava-lava and take a few more pictures of us.


We had fun for a few minutes, anyway. And I'd like to make it public that this year, so far, we've had five trick-or-treaters. It's a new record and five more than we had last year! Kim brought her twins up--one was a pumpkin and one was a skunk; and our neighbours across the hall stopped by, too--a fairy, a pirate, and some superhero/zombie/goblin creature (I couldn't tell what he was). I feel really popular, what, with having to open the door two times and everything.


In other news, our pumpkin died. The witch shriveled up and fell inside and it was all very sad. I brought the pumpkin inside today to fix it up a little. It was kind of tricky business because a spider had decided to make the pumpkin its home. I had to keep hitting the pumpkin to keep the spider from crawling out while I was operating.

The spider was very persistent so I had to hit the pumpkin quite a bit. With one of my blows, a big earwig fell from somewhere and started scrambling all over the floor. I grabbed a boot and smashed it a few times...and then went back to work on the pumpkin, trying to finish before anymore creepy crawlies decided to show up.


I think it turned out looking okay and was glad that we had a box of toothpicks on hand. Who really ever uses toothpicks for picking teeth? We usually use them for sticking jack-o-lanterns back together, or getting corn syrup out of the bottle to stick barrettes to Rachel's hair.

Happy Halloween!