Aloha! continued...

Day 3:

We woke up on Sunday, Day 3 to massive amounts of RAIN.  

We drove down the road to try to go down the hill to go to the church located in Hanalei.

Thanks to the rain, the road was CLOSED.

So we pulled around and called the resort and they told us of another ward located in Kapa'a.

45 minutes later we were at the church...

The Kapa'a ward was a warm, very welcoming ward and the boys loved the 

individual attention being in such a small primary!  

The church was such a unique layout and we really enjoyed our meetings there.

I made sure we took some pictures on a much nicer day of the Kapa'a ward building...

Day 4:

We woke up to a gorgeous day on Monday.

We decided to finally head to the beach!

Our resort didn't have direct access to the beach, but their sister resort down the road had a beach and we could access it staying at the Westin.

So we headed down to the St. Regis!

The St. Regis was amazingly unbelievably gorgeous, just a little too fancy for a family!

But the beach is breathtaking!

It wasn't the most swimmable beach with lots of rocks and coral, but the boys had a BLAST building sandcastles and playing in the sand.

Picture of the mountains...and some random people...

Ummmm...so beautiful.

This employee at the resort came around the beach recruiting kids to help her build a sand castle. 

The boys really liked it, especially Tagg. 

I don't know how well she liked Tagg though, since he considers himself the best sand castle builder around, he was not too found of all her directions on how to do it...

...until she showed them all how to make stairs and then he thought that was pretty cool...

I snapped these photos from the actual resort...

so if you look closely you can see my reflection in the window.  

Classy.  Super classy.  

But can you seriously handle that VIEW?  

I can't.

After the beach we came home and got ready for the Luau! 

We went to the Smith Family Luau and it was so great.

The food was so-so, Poi?  No thanks!

The boys were also still suffering from jet lag so...

it was a little touch and go there during dinner.

But when the show started and a lady popped out of a volcano and threw some fire, 

they were wide awake from there on out! 

Arriving at the Luau...

Got their shell lei's

 Family shot...

There were peacocks everywhere...they really are such beautiful birds!

  

The pig is buried under that dirt.

 Calling everyone to dinner...

YUM! ?

After this we ate and watched the show.

They wouldn't allow any photos taken during the show, which was kinda disappointing! 

But there were lots of hula girls which were fab, some fire throwing, and ukulele playing.

In the end we went home tired, full, entertained and happy...

what more could you want from a luau? 

Aloha!

Well we did it, we fulfilled a dream of mine...going to Hawaii!  

We were planning on taking the kids to Italy this year, thinking that they just might be old enough for us to share with them that part of the world that is so dear to us, but...we were using airline points for the tickets and it all didn't work out as smoothly as we had hoped. 

So we started fiddling around and found that we had just enough points to go to Hawaii this year!  HELLO!  I immediately got SO excited about it and did some research and decided on Kauai for our family vacation.  Our main goal was to go somewhere and just chill-ax for a week, spend quality time together, and make some great family memories...

Day 1: 

We woke up the kids REALLY early on the morning we left, leaving DFW at 6:45am.  We got to LA to find that our flight was delayed two hours.  Yuck.  We finally got off on our way to Kauai.  A 6 hour flight with two tired and grumpy boys, feeling very smashed and totally crowded took us all a little trip to the grouchy side...but when we finally landed in Kauai, and got off the plane we could just feel ourselves start to RELAX!

We drove the hour drive north to our resort and Todd and I just kept saying to each other the whole way there, "I just cannot BELIEVE how gorgeous it is here!"  Pictures, movies, etc. could never do it justice.  It really just needs to be seen with your own eyes.  And it isn't just the scenery, it is the smell in the air...so fragrant, and the thickness in the air makes your whole body just relax.  It really is just so magical. 

We got to our resort very jet lagged and worn out from our long day of travel.  We stayed at the Westin Princeville and it was SUCH a gorgeous resort.  We checked in got a bite to eat and then went to bed at about 7:00pm Hawaii time (11:00pm our time!).   

Day 2: 

We woke up to this on day two...

We were refreshed from a good nights sleep, and SO excited to finally be there!

We decided to just have a chill day at the resort and drive around the area...

We got the boys out in the sun ASAP to start un-jet lagging them.

The resort had amazing pools and we played all morning and afternoon...

About mid afternoon the clouds starting rolling in and then began a tropical rainstorm...

it rained buckets...

But we still went out that night and went down the hill from Princeville to the town of Hanalei.  Hanalei is this beautiful LITTLE town with the MOST amazing beach we went to later in our trip...

but for this night we found our favorite restaurant of the trip, Kalypso!

We LOVED this little place, they had the BEST fish tacos!  We ate here 5 times...yes, really 5 times. 

That's it for day two, stay tuned for more updates! 

Valentines Day 2012

Valentines Day this year was filled with strawberry pancake breakfasts, school parties, lots of candy, and sugared up boys! 

 We had a great Valentines Day celebrating together as a family in the morning and then Todd and I held to our tradition by going to the Melting Pot for dinner that night. 

 It was all pretty perfect. 

 I LOVE Valentines Day.