Back in the day, I would do these blog posts with a boatload of pictures. That seems fitting after vacationing in a gorgeous spot. 🙂 If you didn't read my previous post, we went to Hawaii for a few days in August.

So without further ado . . . I'll pick back up where I left off, with a trip to the beach with the whole gang.It wasn't just any old beach though. The beach that we had the most fun at also happened to be the beach that Eric and I most wished we hadn't gone to. To get there, we had to hike across a lava flow, plus do plenty of just plain old walking out under that hot, direct sun, and then of course whatever time we spent in the water was in direct sunlight as well, and it all combined to give us the worst sunburns we'd ever had in our lives. Thank goodness we somehow managed to keep the baby his cute, little white self, but the rest of us were so red by the end of the day.

There it is. That's the beach that did us in. It was so much fun though. The waves were huge but would quickly peter out to nothing, and our boys were out there in floaties having the time of their lives. After we were home and I actually looked at the camera footage, I was kicking myself that I didn't get more videos of them in the water. They had such a blast. I spent most of my time up under a big shady tree with Emmett, but the few times I got in the water were maybe the best part of the trip. Worth flying five hours for, that's for sure!

Emmett only got in the water for a little bit, but he was happy as a clam to play under the tree. I didn't remember to bring along any diapers OR sandals, but I did bring him a digger, so I guess I got the most important thing. 🙂

When he finally took a nap, he was just the floppiest, sweetest little thing lying there on some beach towels, and he slept so hard that I was able to carry him at least half of the way back with a towel draped over him so he wouldn't burn. I headed out before anyone else did because I had picked Emmett up when I thought everyone was about ready to leave, and I wasn't about to stand there holding him when I knew how far there was to walk back. I got a few stares from people going the opposite direction, me there with a towel draped over my shoulder and white little toddler legs dangling out from underneath. Yes, he's mine. Yes, he's alive. Yes, I'm with a group. No, I'm not just wandering around out in the middle of nowhere with a baby under a towel. An older guy asked me a bit nervously if I needed help, but I told him the rest of my group was right behind me. I'm not sure what he would've done to help since I wasn't about to hand over my sleeping baby, but it was nice of him to check in.

The walk back out was so long and so hot, but at least the pain from the sunburn hadn't hit yet. That would mercifully wait for the rest of our vacation. And I do mean the rest of it, and I don't mean mercifully.

Hawaii: where even McDonald's bushes are exotic.

On the way home we stopped by the side of the road so I could pick some plumeria for Alec. We had white ones back at our room, but I wanted to show him the yellow and pink ones as well. Such a perfectly beautiful flower, and one of the reasons I was excited to go back to Hawaii. Alec, of course, was properly thrilled. 🙂 There were so many flowers around that even he couldn't exclaim over each and every one of them, but he sure tried!

Aren't they just gorgeous? Plumeria perfection.

You know the one picture we somehow never managed to take on this trip? A group picture with all of us. I had meant to make it happen, but I kept forgetting. We were all gathered together for burgers that night after our beach day and then again the next morning for breakfast, but I didn't even think of taking a picture. 🙁

Just look at all those little blue shirts. 🙂 No one else in our party was getting up at 4:30am with kiddos, so we would go do our own thing for a while. Beach yesterday morning, Walmart this morning. Our skin was screaming, and we had already run out of Healing Elements, so off we went to try to find something else remedial. That Walmart run was pretty eventful and ended up with coffee AND eggs spilled all over the floor. 🙁

Eric and I had pretty much decided that it was the pool for us for the rest of our trip, but by the time the afternoon rolled around, Magic Sands was just too tempting. It was close, it had waves, it had sand, and we didn't have to walk half an hour one way in the sweltering sun to get there. So we slathered sunscreen all over our sunburns (bad sunscreen that might actually help more than our natural stuff did), and we headed out to meet up with some of the others at Magic Sands.

Again, the boys played in the waves with everyone else, and I sat back under a shade with the baby. Emmett figured out how to smile for the camera on this trip, so that made it even more fun to take pictures of him. 🙂

When we first got to Hawaii, I thought maybe we were an hour different or something. It wasn't till I was texting Dora that I realized we were three hours different. So a supper at 7:30pm with everyone was really 10:30pm for our boys, and it definitely showed. 🙁 Poor boys. That was also why our mornings kept starting at 5am for Eric and the big boys, and even earlier for me and Emmett.

These sunrise pictures made those early mornings worth it though.

About an hour and a half from us was a volcano, Mauna Kea. Fourteen thousand feet in elevation, and you could drive all the way to the top. Eric was really interested in going, so we headed out Sunday morning. It was a nice drive, but fairly unremarkable. We were on the hot side of the island, and it had none of the tropical-ness that you would expect to see in Hawaii. It was a lot more like central Oregon, to be honest. Other than the multitudes of lava flows, of course.Unfortunately, when we got partway up the mountain there was a visitor center that we had to stop at, and the guy there said he couldn't let us go all the way to the top because of how young our kids were. He said there wasn't enough oxygen at the top and that they'd had kids come back blue. 🙁 So if you're going to the Big Island to see Mauna Kea, make sure you're not taking little kids along. That was disappointing, but we had a fun morning nonetheless. We even found Sebastian a bulldozer out in the middle of nowhere.

We let the boys run around at a ranger station for a bit before heading back to Kailua-Kona for lunch and a quick stop at our room to get our swimming stuff and reapply a massive amount of sunscreen.Then we were off to join the others at Two-Step Beach. It was over on the side of the island that wasn't so hot, and it was much more lush and tropical. While everyone else went snorkeling, Renae and I stayed with the boys. The water started out right at our feet almost, and it was a more stressful beach stay than usual because Emmett was in and out of the water and had to be watched the whole time. And then the water kept getting closer and closer, and we moved all of our stuff to higher ground, but it kept coming, and pretty soon Renae and I were sitting there on wet towels with the water literally right there. The day was getting colder, and eventually Emmett was wet and grumpy, but I had no way of getting a hold of Eric to let him know we were ready to go. I sat there in the sand, with not-warm water lapping around me, feeding my cold, sad baby, just knowing we would be stuck there for hours yet.

Imagine my relief when I heard Eric's voice talking to Alec behind me. Praises be.

Our littlest boys fell asleep on the way home, a very common sight this whole trip. 🙂

Supper in town that night was an absolute disaster, but we got a cute family picture before everything went downhill. And we got to see a gorgeous sunset!Everything devolved from there. That three-hour time difference was coming into play again, and our boys had been up since very early that morning. We knew going out for supper was risky and almost just stayed home, but I guess now we have sunset pictures.

On a brighter note, even Sebastian's Yogurt Bear got to go to Hawaii. 🙂

This was the next morning, when we'd all had just enough sleep to make us sane enough to try to get home. Because that's what was next on the agenda. Another long flight, this time into the night. Yikes. We didn't fly till late afternoon though, so our morning was spent returning rental stuff, doing some souvenir shopping, and going to Magic Sands one last time.

Getting to Hawaii had gone about as smoothly as it could have, but going home was a different matter. We had to be out of our room quite a few hours before we had to be at the airport, and the boys were extra tired, so they weren't dealing well with much of anything.

(Side note: how many more kids can we have before Eric can no longer carry everything by himself?)

Then when we were cleaning out our car at the car rental agency Emmett burned his hand on the exhaust pipe. I didn't realize at first what had happened, although I was fairly sure he was hurt because of how sharply he'd cried out, but he bulldozed through a lollipop, sat and waited for a shuttle bus, and rode all the way to the airport before I saw the blister swelling up on his hand. Thank goodness I still had our big suitcase, and thank God I'd brought along my natural first aid kit with its Burn Salve. That stuff worked wonders for his sad, little hand, and he finally quit crying.

Unfortunately, by that point we were back at the airport, and Sebastian recognized it as the place where he'd last seen his blue palm tree flip flops. They'd broken at the airport when we flew in, and we'd had him throw them away, but he was apparently expecting to see them again now that he was there. First it was just a mournful, "I miss my blue palm tree flip flops." But then it was, "I can't find the garbage can with my blue palm tree flip flops!" And then it was top-of-the-lungs wailing, "I want my blue palm tree flip flops!" Poor boy. Life is hard when you're four.

It felt like we mitigated disaster after disaster after that, all boy-related thankfully and nothing flight-related. Until we boarded and realized that not only were not all of our seats together . . . none of them were. We had four aisle seats, all in a tight little square, and while that would work fine with adults wanting to travel together, it certainly would not work with little boys who would refuse to sit beside a stranger for even five minutes, much less five hours.

Eric was the man of the hour, as he always is, and he got it sorted, but those types of things always stress me out. Plus, the boys were wild-men, just full of pent-up energy and limbs to flail and brothers to bother and inappropriate things to yell. At one point I looked across all three rambunctious boys to where Eric was sitting on the other side of the aisle, and I mouthed, "I don't think this was worth it."

But of course it was, and by the time we were two hours into our flight, every last boy was fast asleep.

The big boys woke up refreshed and sweet and happy not long before we landed, and they walked through the airport holding hands and just talking away in the sweetest little voices.

Emmett slept through the landing, getting off the plane, and getting our checked bag. He finally woke up with a happy little noise on the shuttle bus as we were going back to our car.

We got home a little before 3am. The blue shirts were stained, the parents were worn out, and none of our skin was coming home quite the way it'd gone, but we'd seen some pretty sights and made some fun memories, and we were so glad to be home, but we were also so glad we'd gone.Funny story: Eric just flew this past Saturday with, of all strange coincidences, one of the same flight attendants who'd been on our flight home from Hawaii, and when Eric mentioned how crazy our boys had been, the flight attendant remembered all the little blue shirts and said our boys hadn't been crazy at all, not in the world of flight attending. Now the seat behind us, he said . . . that was a different story. 🙂