Achievement unlocked: Climbing a volcano

We're leaving Hawaii tomorrow. It's been 2 1/2 weeks of doing things that JED would never get to do in Singapore like hang at beaches with white sand and clear waters, waking up to the beach at the balcony and turtles swimming up to shore or seeing dolphins close up in the wild. 

They've scored many firsts this trip but the one that we are bursting with pride over is the fact that the twins, not Muffin because he had just woken up and it was too much to expect of him, trekked from the crater of a 300 000 year old extinct volcano (Diamond Head) right up to the rim of it. This meant a 2.6 km hike up to the rim and back down and that included 226 steps, much of it, steep or spiralled.

Between the two, Evan is often the one that will complain about how hot, exhausting, uncomfortable or painful any experience is. But this time, the sheer idea of being able to climb to the rim and look into the crater to where we had actually parked our car was enough to motivate him up the endless flights of stairs.

They stopped once, to drink some water but pretty much soldiered all the way up. I recently remarked that our vacation was extremely cushy and comfortable. This, after finding out that a friend of mine had taken his family to trek the Himalayas. Climbing Diamond Head doesn't really rough up our holiday much more but the fact that there was no whining, no dragging their feet and no one asking us to carry them/ piggy back them any distance of the way was enough to unlock a whole new level of achievement. And the looks on their faces, as they looked down and discovered how high up they were from where we started and how far they had trekked, showed that they had surprised themselves as well.

Their reward? Telling them we were most proud of them as well as a big bowl of shaved ice complete with that red, artificial sugar syrup drizzled all over it.

Evan has been telling us about how he has to do NAPFA in primary school and how scary and tiring it sounds. We're hoping to tell him that if he were able to climb the crater and back, he wasn't going to have any problem with any of the stations in his NAPFA test.