hawaii

after spending a day in the freezing snow & a night out last saturday, i came home & at midnight got online just surfing the internet. i was in need of WARM weather. the only place that had warm weather & we did not need passports was HAWAII. so i look at options to see if we could squeeze in a trip before the kids went back to school. by this time it was 2am & steve was snoozing - i asked him if we should take the kids to hawaii. he mumbled, that's fine. i explained that we would have to leave in 3 days & we could stay for a week. he said, sounds good. so i booked it. then, i scurred around for the next couple days to get things ready here so we could leave for a week then was busy getting new swimsuits & summer clothes & haircuts, etc. the kids were super about helping get everything done so we could go on such short notice.

we were all excited & started our journey. it was a different hawaii vacation - not the relaxing vacation you would expect but we had a BLAST! there was not to much relaxing with 3 kids in tow but we did alot of activites with the kids. the kids loved everything about hawaii. they did not want to come home: jake asked if we could miss our flight so we could stay longer & keegan asked me why i didn't buy a one-way ticket (i was kinda thinking the same thing). brock this morning asked if we could go to the beach when i said NO he asked about the pool when i said NO he then asked about the ocean... he LOVED the beach (the other kids did too but he was cuter about it). he had his sand shovels & bucket & in the pic below you will notice that he is ANAL - he would line up his shovels then using his hand fill the shovels up with sand then take the shovels one by one & dump them into the bucket. this is how he filled the bucket to make a sandcastle. he had a ball!

we would go to dinner downtown waikki & then walk the strip. the kids LOVED all the people on the streets (painters, breakdancers, mimes, magicans, hula girls, even elmo) . keegan  asked every night if we could go to the "activites" on the streets & wondered why we didn't have activites like that in utah. needless to say, we spent many dollars on these "activites" that fully entertained the kids. 

i must admit that i did not take very many pics AT ALL. to be quite honest, i just did not want to hassle with it. i was just more into enjoying the moment rather than trying to capture everything on camera. now that i am home, i do regret it BUT there will always be a next time.

i knew there were lots of things that i'd like to do with the kids in hawaii that we would not be able to do on this trip because of my current condition (surf the big waves on north shore, hike sacred falls, diamond head, etc.) but i was OK with that - i just really wanted some SUN & thought with the kids out of school WHY NOT. It isn't like you can only go on a family vacation to hawaii one time - so i am sure in the future (when the kids are older & i am not prego) we will go again & can do the things we did not do this trip.

i did not feel so pregnant until this trip. it wasn't until i held brock on the plane to get him to sleep & it was then that it hit me how hard it was holding him in my lap with my big belly in such a small space for such a long time. then, when i put on a swimsuit i realized that i am HUGE. then when i was snorkling with jake- we were far out & had to come in, i had to pull him back to the shore, i then realized that i was 7+ months prego & that was a little more than what i bargained for. several times on the trip, i thought ... am i crazy for doing this in my current condition? sometimes i just forget that my body is not the same when i am pregnant.