Kathy Goes Kiwi

Aloha from Waikiki! It’s our last night here in the US, if you can really consider Hawaii the US – it’s so crazy beautiful here and so laid back. We’ve loved the muuuuuch slower pace – so different from our everyday lives back home.

On the flight over, I happened to glance down our row of seats, four Fergusons all lined up like ducks. The girls were in the middle of Mark and me, absorbed in their individual movies, munching on some Nutella-to-go packs, totally chill. And the awesome responsibility of their trust blew me away. And kind of made me want to throw up – these little girls have NO idea what to expect and yet there they were, just going with the flow, like they always do. Trusting us to do right by them. But what if this is terrible? What if we all hate it? What if it never stops raining? What if New Zealand is a great place to vacation but a horrible place to live? What if they’re way behind in school and feel stupid? So on the flight to Honolulu, I began to really doubt this decision for the first time.

But then the next morning after a great big cup of coffee, we headed out to snorkel on the North Shore. We only had three snorkels, so I sat on the rocks while Mark and the girls snorkeled in Shark’s Cove. Watching him sort them out, get them confident and then on their way, I started to feel better about this.

Maybe we aren’t ruining their lives. We’ll hit some bumps and some days are sure to be miserable, but we will do right by them and this experience will be wonderful. Maybe not perfect, but wonderful.

We rented another snorkel and then all went snorkeling at a little cove called Three Tables. We stuck together and held hands and talked to each other under water and pointed out all the fish we saw and waved at each other and made funny faces at each other. A little tricky, trying to swim four people across with only three sets of fins, only the people on the ends using their arms to propel us (and Mark had a broken snorkel, so he had to hold it in his hand, which made him not the most productive swimmer trying to move the lot of us along), and Tate was mostly treading water, so her flippers weren’t really productive either, but it was perfection and I was certain then that this will be great. We have each other and we’ll figure it out.

We leave tomorrow morning and all of us are a little anxious at this point. It is STRANGE for all of us to be heading into the unknown. But we’ll figure it out and we’ll remember that life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.