March of 2026 was something to remember! A little preview of what our area went through. I circled our house in red on the top left of this picture.
Ava's birthday- we went to visit our friends and see their new house. While we were there we sang happy birthday to her and brought cupcakes.
At age 13 Ava has grown up so much this year, both physically and emotionally. She can be so helpful around the house and with Kai, and adores Kai. She loves her friends and has a big heart- always looking out for people who may need extra love or help. She loves to giggle and especially loves it when I tell her funny stories of things Kai did while she was at school. She has a temper and can get very frustrated with Coen and Audrey- mostly Audrey. She works very hard in school and is concerned about getting good grades. She loves her independence of having her own bedroom downstairs while the rest of us sleep upstairs. Ava has a beautiful heart and we are so lucky to have her in our family.
On Ava's birthday evening President Uchtdorf was doing a devotional at BYUH and Brent had VIP tickets for the conference that previous weekend that he had been hosting. Ava was so kind to babysit for us on her birthday so that I could go. We sat right up close with the people from the conference, including the Campbells.
Brent got very into Legos and decided to do monthly themes- a Lego set each month. Each night he and the kids opened one bag and put together a piece of the set. This month was the Snow White cottage he bought in Tokyo.
My birthday fell on a Wednesday which is not my favorite day of the week. When Brent got home from work I went on a walk by myself to the beach. I stood there, looking out at the ocean and pondering my life and another year gone by. All of a sudden a sea turtle popped up! I have gone to this beach so many times and this is the first time I saw a sea turtle at this one. It felt very serendipitous. After my walk at the beach, Brent and I went to get hamburgers at Seven Brothers.
A video of hula at sunrise. After dropping Coen at orchestra, I pulled over to watch for a minute. It was such a peaceful, beautiful morning.
These cute look alike brothers.
In the meantime, Brent had the younger three and went to Coen's basketball game, which wasn't canceled as it wasn't raining unlike many of the other Saturdays. Look how little Coen (far left) is compared to the rest of his team!
We had a fashion show when we got home from Target.
Brent's colleague, Joel Campbell, teaches a media & religion course and takes the students on a fieldtrip once a semester. Brent helped with the fieldtrip and drove a van full of students to different places of worship around the island. They went to the Buddhist temple...
It rained so much in February that for some reason I thought surely once we got to March the sun would come out. I was wrong. It continued to rain and rain. Often when I would look at the forecast, it looked like this:
Kai started doing this on his baby swing... We had to get rid of the swing, sad day- that means he's big!
With all the rain, Ava noticed a leak somewhere in her room, since the carpet was soaking wet in a quarter of her room. The workers from BYUH came and sealed up little cracks in the outside of our house.
Brent and I went to the dress rehearsal of Culture Night. We were just going to watch the actual Culture Night from home on the livestream, but it was so good that we went back after we got the kids in bed! This is one of the best parts of BYUH- all the different clubs present a dance from their culture. Here's a clip of the Philippines.
We brought Kai with us to culture night and he was actually very entertained and danced along!
See the white bird on top of the truck? These white birds called cattle egrets and they can always be seen following around lawn mowers and the garbage truck.
Kai our puppy dog hanging out the window. Ava lets him out when we're close to home and he loves to have the wind blow in his hair.
The kona low storm hit on Friday. School was canceled. Our power went out around noon. It didn't come back on until 10pm on Saturday, so we were without power for about 34 hours! A video of the storm:
After storm was over, there was some flooding, and of course we had no power. Our neighbors two doors down has a backyard that floods easily. My neighbor Mariah and I ended up wading around in it with our little boys. Something to keep us occupied while we had no power!
Kai says "Apple!"
The morning after the storm we had the coolest rainbow- it was sitting so low, like in the mountains. Can you see it?
On Saturday at lunch time we hit 24 hours of no power and eating shelf stable food from our pantry (we tried not to open our fridge because we wanted to keep it cold). We decided to go buy our annual passes to the PCC- it was a great thing to do! The PCC has a generator so they ran like normal. Here's Coen wringing out the coconut to get coconut milk at the PCC
These kids living the life:
That night we were prepared that we were going to have to throw away a lot of our food because we didn't think it could stay cool enough for another night of no power. We had put some of our things like milk and yogurt in our cooler with a couple hard frozen things from our freezer like a pork roast, trying to buy ourselves time. We were so happy that the power came back on right before we went to bed! We checked on the food in our fridge and freezer and only threw out a couple things which is a blessing since food is so expensive here.
Brent was very happy that the power turned back on in time for the Oscars on Sunday. He had a few students and friends come for an Oscar watch party.
Mashed potatoes all over the place. Kai always feeds himself and often does pretty well with a fork or spoon. Sometimes he just wants to shove it all in though. We get lots of messes around here!
Audrey really needs attention or else she turns into such a stinker. We don't always have a lot of time to do that, but when we do, she eats up her alone time with me or Brent.
Brent tried to get the alarm to stop, but it wouldn't. He finally pulled the smoke alarm from the ceiling, and some water poured down on him when he did that. We could hear that it was raining pretty heavily outside, so we thought we had a leak in our roof and I ran to get a bucket. The rain mysteriously stopped coming through our roof though. I checked my phone and saw a message in the Facebook Moana chat group, "Our street is flooded." We looked out our window and saw this:
Many of our neighbor's cars were ruined in the floods, as the muddy sewer water rose high enough to get into the inside and the engine.
Luckily all of the neighbors on our street could stay connected through our Facebook chat group. The Elders quorum from the ward across the street came walking around to each house to make sure everyone was safe and doing ok:
It was surreal to see so much water outside. Here's a video I took from our bedroom balcony upstairs. You can hear me say, "oh my gosh..." as I'm seeing the extent of it.
I responded in our chat group if we should do anything- should we bring everyone to the second level? I had no idea what to expect- was it going to keep rising and we were going to have to evacuate, or even swim in it? It was 2am and I was sleepy and trying to process everything- like what do we do? Brent had the presence of mind to run downstairs and check on our garage and start bringing in things out of the rising water. I brought in Kai's and Audrey's life jackets to have ready, just in case.
Our mailbox is unusually tall and the houses are raised, so it's hard to tell from these pictures just how high the water came to. If you look at how high the water is on our mailbox in the picture above, and then compare to this picture I took another day, you can get an idea.
Our neighbor hopped in his truck and left. We assumed he was going to campus to check on things, but he said he drove to the temple so that they could at least have one working car. After leaving his truck, he swam/waded home!
In this video you can also see our neighbors two doors down (remember how I said their yard floods really easily?) after they evacuated to our next-door neighbor's house. Their house is not raised like the rest of us, so they had water up to their knees in their house. It took us a while to fall back asleep after the adrenaline rush. It was amazing how fast the water receded. This picture was taken at 6:50am. By about 9am it was completely gone.
That morning, Friday, the whole neighborhood came out to clean up and help those who had been hit by the floods (anyone whose house isn't raised). BYUH was canceled, and the kids were on their last day of spring break.
The church became a shelter and also a gathering place for supplies that were being donated. That afternoon Seven Brothers brought their food truck to the parking lot and gave out free hamburgers to our neighborhood. There were so many touching examples of service during this time.
These days reminded me of covid, where our whole community experienced something scary together. Because of the flooding and damage, we were locked into our side of the island for some time. We can only get into Honolulu through kamehameha highway the north way and the south way, and both sides were closed for a day and a half. This means that our community only had two grocery stores on this side of the island, and they were wiped out, just like during covid (see picture below). We only have one gas station around here too, and the gas station even ran out of gas. This was all just one week after our last storm and power outage.
On Saturday Coen went with Brent and the elders quorum to help some other families in our ward that were hit hard.
On Sunday it was emotional to see our whole ward family cleaned up and ready to worship together after spending the weekend cleaning together in the muddy waters.
Our Primary class loves Kai so much. He gets lots of attention!
After we got home from our walk, we were chatting outside with neighbors and Audrey went with Kai to the trampoline. Right then I had to run inside to tell Ava to go to choir. Long story short, Kai walked off the trampoline and landed wrong. We weren't sure if it was sprained or broken, but when he wouldn't walk on it the next day, Brent took Kai to the hospital for xrays. He had a small break above his left ankle, poor baby!
Brent and the kids went to the play on campus, Peter and the Starcatcher. Here are the boys posing by the set where cast members had signed their names. That's another Brent's signature- my Brent was not in the play.
I measured how much water we got in our garage during the floods- exactly 12 inches.
Brent and I went to a dinner at the PCC for all those volunteers who had helped with the LDS Media conference in February.
- Our neighbors keep their dogs in a large cage on their driveway. They found one of their dogs unconscious in the water and were able to resuscitate it!
- Ada our babysitter said she was watching a movie with her roommate and they finished a little after midnight. They went to bed with no water on the ground and within 2 minutes, the water came rushing in and was ankle deep. She went running into the connected house to wake up her family. Her cousin who was sleeping on an air mattress in the living room, started floating away from her still asleep on the mattress.
-We found our garbage cans and the neighbor's toy bikes across the street and down a couple houses.
- People began coordinating washing clothes and towels for those affected by the floods
-We had a neighbor who had just recently moved in and is head of security at BYUH. He told us that he went into work at 3am when he saw the flooding to check on the buildings (some of the student housing flooded), unlock rooms that could be used as shelters, etc. We asked how he got to campus? He said, "I swam in."
-A man speaking in our ward said that during the night of the flood his neighbor's car alarm kept going off. It woke him up and he was getting so frustrated. He went to the window to see what was going on with the car when he saw the flooding. The neighbor kept sounding his car alarm over and over to wake everyone and alert them to the flooding.
-Some neighbors slept right through the flooding. Our friend Jolene said she kept trying to wake up her husband. She was saying to him, "Hey! The backyard is a lake and the road is a river. I said, the backyard is a lake!!" He just rolled over and went back to sleep. Haha.
Above all, I don't want to forget the amazing generosity and selfless acts of service I saw. So many who were affected by the flooding were out helping their neighbors first.
Over the next few weeks, if you walked around our neighborhood on a sunny day, you saw everyone's car doors open, trying to dry out their cars and see if they could be salvaged.
Brent went to Chicago again this year for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference- here are the highlights:
He was able to connect with so many of his former professors, colleagues, and friends. Brent absolutely loves conferences and this was his second of five this year! I will be able to accompany him to two of them for the first time this year, including to Portland, Oregon next month in April.
Back at home...we gave Ada a birthday card and present. Audrey says: I like to do the splashpad with Ada.
It was hard timing with Brent out of town and Kai's leg being broken! I had to carry him so much because he was pretty mad about crawling. By Thursday he started standing on his leg a bit. His splint also kept falling off. Here's a video:
At school Coen's kapuna teacher (Hawaiian history) had all the kids draw pictures and write about the flood. Here's the flood through Coen's eyes:
After Coen's basketball game I saw a funeral at the north stake center. I believe it was Samoan as they were drumming outside as they loaded the casket in the hearse. Often they'll do fireworks here at funerals too.
There were many places around the community where people were gathering supplies for those affected by the flood. They consolidated and put everything in our kids' elementary school cafeteria. There were so many housing cleaning, hygiene supplies, and food!
We took Kai to the orthopedic after the airport while we were in town. I was expecting to get a cast on Kai (this was 8 days after his injury) but they said it had pretty much already healed! The doctor said simple breaks like that will heal in 6 weeks for a 6 year old, 5 weeks for a 5 year old, on down to 1 week for a 1 year old, which was true in Kai's case. Wow!
We went to hear Sister Gray's presentation about how she discovered the rare set of casts of the Gates of Paradise. Originally the doors of the Florence baptistery, they're 17 ft tall by 10 foot wide, created by sculptor Ghiberti in the 1400s. During WWII they were taken down for protection and several plaster casts were made. One of the replicas was acquired by a BYUH professor and were stored in crates for 32 years and forgotten. Sister Gray, who is an art professor, stumbled across the doors sitting in crates in storage. She pulled back the bubble wrap and immediately recognized what she had uncovered. She arranged to have them shipped to BYU Provo, where art curators have spent the past decade restoring the panels. They are now at the BYU Museum of Art if you want to go see them!
And that concludes March- what a month! Thanks for reading!
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