Hawaii

It's time to go home. It's a little bittersweet. I miss my kids like crazy, but it has been so nice to spend so much time with my husband. We have never spent this much time together. After 10 years of marriage and 3 kids, we needed it! We were together the entire trip. I think that the only time we weren't together was when one of us was in the restroom. It was so nice to spend time together, but we both really miss the kids. Talking to them on skype actually made it worse. Seeing their sweet little faces and hearing their voices made me want to fly home right then and squeeze them to death!

We got up early and went back to Boots and Kimos. This time I got the macadamia nut pancakes and they were delicious. I am really glad they don't have one here because I would weigh 400 lbs after eating those every weekend. We were done with breakfast by 7:20 and went to Aunt Susie's to say goodbye and return her stuff. We visited for a little while, vacuumed the sand out of the rental car, and headed to Honolulu. We left ourselves plenty of room in our schedule for things like traffic, delays in security, problems with returning the rental car, etc. Lucky for us, none of those things happened. We were at our gate, sitting down, and waiting for our plan a full 2 hours early. It was nice to not be so rushed.

The flight from Honolulu to Portland is about 5 hours long. That sounds like torture to me, but Ben and I had fun. We watched Burn Notice on the computer, we played games, we visited, I read my book, and did some word puzzles. Before we knew it we could see land out the window.

We got home and the kids were appropriately excited to see us. Even Baxter was jumping extra high so we would pay attention to him. They immediately wanted to know if we brought them "prizes" from Hawaii, but we decided to wait until the next day. It feels so good to be home. I'm afraid I'll wake up tomorrow and feel like I never left. Hopefully my tan will help me remember.

I really do love living in the Pacific Northwest. I love how green it is. I love the mild summers and the winters without huge snow storms. I can't say that I love that it rains half the year, but I don't mind the rain so much. Being away from home always makes me appreciate it more. I love that it's NOT humid here. Having curly hair and living in a humid climate is not good. I like that our temperatures vary more than 10 degrees. I like that I can see snow, the ocean, and desert all in less than a day's drive from my house. Thanks, Hawaii for letting us visit, but I think I'll stay here for a while.

Ben, let's do this again :-)