Aloha!

Well, if Buddy hadn't made me crazy-mad several days/weeks in a row, we wouldn't be here...

Greetings from beautiful Waikiki Beach.

It all started with "talk" about going to Hawaii one day. And "talk" about taking a "family vacation" once we finally were a family with kids (plural). I've been excited to take family vacations for several years now. We took a bunch of vacations when it was just the two of us, like trips to visit family in Utah/Oregon, Victoria in Canada, Las Vegas, New York, and then a cruise to the Caribbean. Then when Noah came along we went to the Oregon Coast a few times, Utah/Nevada to visit family, and Disneyland/San Diego.

But then as soon as Pee-Wee came, I wanted to go someone just the four of us. Plus G and I just celebrated our 10-year anniversary and that definitely is something to celebrate. And then Buddy royally hoarked me off one day. G came home from work and I said that I was either getting a part-time job and putting Buddy in daycare, or we were taking a trip to Hawaii. I needed a break from the normal grind in a major way. Next thing anyone knew, the airline tickets and hotel were booked.

And here we are.

We got here yesterday and we've been having a great time. Buddy is so over the top excited, we can hardly get him to relax or shut up. First it was Sea World, then it was Uncle Luke's farm, and now it's the ocean in Hawaii. He has a new favorite place on earth.

A few highlights so far, although we'll have many more stories and certainly cool pictures later.

• The 6-hour flight was uneventful -- except when Buddy somehow fell asleep and peed all over the seat. Buddy never sleeps in public and for some reason he has a problem holding his pee when he goes to sleep. Well, just that once he fell asleep. Oops. Thank goodness he was wearing nylon pants that dried quickly. I feel really badly for the poor person that gets that seat next flight.
  
• We are totally messed up on our time since we're three hours behind Pacific time. We were in bed by 10:00 PM last night and up a little before 7:00 this morning, which is unheard of for us.
  
• We went to the popular swap-meet here on Oahu today. It was hot, but pretty fun. A lot of cool touristy stuff and a lot of junk, but we got some treats, a sun hat for G and some beach towels at least.
  
• We swam in the ocean today, which was really fun. We had to because we were so tired of Buddy asking us to take him. And now that he's been, he won't stop asking to go back. He loves, loves, loves it.
  
• But Sam, not so much. He'll get a little more used to it, but he didn't really like being covered in sand.
• We took a "walk" to look for somewhere fun to eat dinner tonight. We walked and walked, following a bunch of people we had overheard talking about a good place to eat. But Buddy walks slower than those adults, so after about 45 minutes of walking, they got too far ahead of us and we couldn't see where they went. We ended up eating at a Hawaiian "hamburger stand" that we walked past on our long walk. It was a place we talked about driving to tomorrow. Thank goodness we rented a car and are paying $24 a day to park, when we end up walking everywhere...

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In other old news, we have had an extremely eventful month of May. I plan to blog about the highlights later when we get home. But if you're interested in hearing about why I haven't had time to blog (including my trip to Utah, my new primary president assignment, or Sam's sealing, you can read my sister's post. Since we pretty much spent the entire month together -- which was really, really great.)