favorite pictures, episode two.

well, just another girl said that i should keep the photos coming.
so if this blog temporarily explodes into a narcissistic picture posting frenzy, you can go ahead and blame her.

clearly, it has nothing to do with me at all.

anyway, here's another one:



this picture was taken just after my sister and i arrived in maui. obviously, it was MANY, MANY years ago--if i had to guess, i'd say twenty years.

anyway, we were standing either on or very close to the beach, and there were humpback whales jumping out of the water about every fifteen seconds. it was really incredible. it was on this trip that my grandma got her nickname: my grandpa coerced b.j. into calling my grandma 'mamu the whale' when we were playing in the pool. obviously, my grandma wasn't happy. but eventually she came around, probably because we dropped the 'the whale' part, and just called her mamu.

there are a million reasons why i love this picture, like the way i'm looking at my grandpa, while my sister watches me for clues on what she's supposed to be doing. but, as with the first 'favorite picture' post, the real reasons that i love this don't really have anything to do with the picture itself.
i just love remembering this vacation.
i love that my grandparents had my father bring my sister and i to visit them in maui for two weeks, even though my sister isn't biologically part of their family. they didn't have to do that. i mean, look how young she is here--she never would have remembered that i got to go to hawaii and she didn't. but they always considered her part of their family, right from the beginning.

in fact, when my family (the family i lived with, b.j., me, our mom, and her dad) would go on vacation, we mostly ended up going to florida and staying with my father's parents. they always introduced my step-dad as their 'son.'

it's funny, i remember when i was in third grade my school started a weekly program for children from divorced families. they would encourage us to draw pictures and talk about our feelings. the other kids cried a lot, and the lady in charge kept telling my mom that i needed real help because i was 'repressing my feelings.' the truth was, i just didn't have any bad feeling s about it.
today, i know that is because the grown-ups around me made a very conscious decision to do everything they could to keep my family life as happy and 'normal' as possible.
sometimes when my family would go to florida to visit my grandparents, my father would be there, too, and we would all be staying in the same house. as a child, this did not seem strange to me.
as i grew up, and began to know my parents as adult people, outside of their assigned parent roles, i began to see that they really didn't like each other. they had major issues with each other, but i never would have known had i not specifically asked them. not only did they refrain from speaking poorly of each other in front of me, they managed to be around each other A LOT, even though i'm sure they would have preferred not to.

could i be any more blessed?

anyway, back to the picture.
i love it because it represents how loving my entire family is.
it's really that simple.