Hawaii - Day 1

Once we finally reached Hawaii it was PARADISE (and I can honestly say that because I was only visiting for 9 days and not living there for 2 years....there's definitely a difference!) Due to storms in Texas, our flight from Iowa was about 2 hours late causing us to miss our connecting flight (that would have taken us directly to HI from Dallas). We met Michael in Dallas and were rerouted to Los Angeles. We cut that connection REALLY close as Michael was convincing them not to close the doors because we were on the escalators only 50 feet away. We grabbed a bite to eat at a short layover in LAX and then endured the long flight to Hawaii. The boys were actually (surprisingly) very good on the flight even though everyone was exhausted. It was such a blessing to have Boagie with us to calm Zachary down when he was overly tired and fighting a nap. We landed around 7:30 pm, got the rental van, checked into the Hilton Hawaiian Village, and then crashed for the night. Zachary woke up once for about an hour and his crying made Mike stir, but overall it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. We managed to get about 7 hours of sleep and started our next day with a big breakfast at Denny's.

This is the view from our hotel balcony:

Boagie and I strapped the kids in the stroller and started walking down Waikiki beach. We stopped at the International Market Place for the kids to watch the coy.

Then we let them dip their toes (or in Mikie's case: his entire lower body) into the ocean on Waikiki beach. Zachary has some sensory issues and hated the feeling of sand between his toes. He fussed most of the time and wanted to be carried so his feet weren't dirty.

You can tell that Zachary isn't thrilled about having to stand on the sand.

I forgot to pack Zach's sunglasses, so my mom let him borrow hers. He liked wearing them, but they kept slipping off of his face so they really didn't do any protecting or shading of his eyes....they just provided a cute photo opt.

The classic Waikiki shot with Duke:

With the help of the warm Hawaiian sun, it didn't take long for jet lag to catch up with my little ones. They were both zonked out before we made it back to our hotel room. We decided transferring them to a bed was probably a bad idea so they took their nap in the stroller in our room while Boagie went to the pool (and the clouds rolled in...sorry Mom!).

Once they woke up, we all joined Boagie at the pool for a quick bite to eat (gigantic hot dogs for the boys and a Bahama Mama for me!). Then we braved the cloudy weather and cold pool temps and let the boys splash and swim. Mikie still says going to the pool was his favorite part of Hawaii (geesh...I could have spent $3 and taken him to the pool close to our house instead of flying across the entire USA!)

Having my mom around to help me with the boys all day long was incredible, but the evenings is when we really took advantage of Super Boagie. She would watch, feed, bathe, and put the kids to sleep while Michael and I relived our "days before children" at several of our favorite restaurants.

The first night, Boagie took the boys to Cheeseburger in Paradise. Now, the actual name of this restaurant was "Cheeseburger in Waikiki" and I've been told it took a lot of convincing for Mikie to finally agree to eat there.

Michael and I had to go to his Navy social and got back to the hotel fairly late so we just ate some sushi at one of the places in the hotel and then gave in to our jet lag.