May 4th

The first picture below shows Emma's favorite morning activity in Maui.  The pool attendants would regularly fold the chairs down if no one was using them and in the morning they would all be lying flat (there were tons and tons of chairs around the pools).  Emma did not understand why they would do that so she would proceed to put them all up.  Every morning.

On this day at the pool Emma decided to try the waterslide.  I thought it was great because we could go down together and I could just lift her up so she wouldn't have to go under water (she definitely doesn't like to put her face in the water if she can help it).  Well, the man monitoring the slide said we could do that a few times, but we were not allowed to go down together on a regular basis.  I put Emma on my lap and down we went.  She loved it and was hooked.  I wasn't sure what to do since she can't swim by herself yet so I told her if she wanted to go down by herself I would catch her in the water.  She liked that idea so I caught her at the end of the slide for a while.  However, we were then told that wasn't allowed either (people are not suppose to congregate at the end of the slide for safety reasons) so then we went to plan C.  Emma noticed other kids wearing life jackets so she asked if she could wear one and then she could kick and paddle to the ladder by herself.  We decided to let her try it and she did great!  She went under water a lot when she would go off the slide and into the water, but she would immediately pop back up and start kicking over to the side of the pool.  It was really fun to watch her try something new!

We also had shave ice for the first time in the afternoon.  If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend it.  It's kind of like a glorified snow cone, only much better.