Home from the beach

So my Mom has been sent to the Oregon coast for 6 weeks by her job and one of the perks of this is that we get to go and hang out with her and camp out in her living room. Rock star had to work (as most people do with real jobs) But the kids and I went to the beach for 3 days.


We had a lot of fun and got to just kick back and let the kids play. It was nice having another pair of hands to help wrangle them too.

Here are some pictures from us at Nye beach in Newport.

What a lovely lazy day

It was another scorching hot day. So we literally spent about 7 hours in the pool today. We would get out just long enough to dry off, re apply sunscreen, maybe grab a glass of water and then hop back in.

My house is a disaster and my laundry is stacked up, but sometimes this is really nice to just spend the day lazing about playing Marco polo with an enormous inflatable turtle. Oh and my kids too.

Are you just a little excited?!

So This is what I came downstairs to this morning. These two parked in front of the TV with their goggles on.

The second my feet hit the last step, the first thing out of their mouth is NOT "good morning" or "beautiful day" or "thank you for giving me life". No, none of that.

"Good you are up. Can we go swimming now?"

Ok let me point out here it has just turned 7:30 am. The sun hasn't even had a chance to warm the water up yet.

They didn't like this reasoning.

But I'm glad to see that they waited until I got downstairs and then asked if they could go out. I was sort of nervous putting a pool out there. Little kids and pools can be a deadly combo. But I laid down serious scare tactics to keep them away from it unless a grownup is near.

I guess it's safe to say, they like the pool :)

Ok we really must do something about this heat.

It was 90 degrees again today. We are all tired of being stuck in the house huddled around the AC. So I took matters into my own hands and bought a pool.

I have been wanting to get one, but our yard isn't very level, so I had to go first go and get 600 lbs of river rock to lay down to make it level and not puncture though the liner.

By the time we got the rocks laid out, and then got the pool assembled, it was almost 3:00. Totally smack dab in the heat of the day. So we began to fill it up, but it is a rather large pool, so it took longer than hoped to fill. After about an hour of filling, we couldn't wait any longer. I don't care if there is only 6 inches of water in there, I'm going in!!! And so we did. We enjoyed that 6 inches of water like you wouldn't believe :)


In the end, it took almost 5 hours to fill it. Just in case you were wondering. Can't wait to get our next water bill :)

Happy 4th of July!!

What is the best part of summertime?

Well 4th of July of course!!

We are still sort of recovering from our vacation hangover, but luckily my friend Erin was having a giant 4th of July BBQ, so all we had to do was show up and enjoy the festivities. We didn't have to spend a fortune on fireworks, everyone else brought theirs, so we just sat around and enjoyed the pyrotechnic display. There were (what seemed like) thousands of kids running around playing so my kids had a blast getting sticky and dirty with all the others.

We brought our own tofu dogs to grill and loaded up on all of the classic picnic junk food that is required of the holiday.

Rockstar husband came home early and stayed home with Peanut who was having a hard time pushing his bedtime back. But Bug, Sunshine and I stayed for the fireworks. For being up until a little past 11, they did surprisingly well.

We really had a great time.

** As a side note, I would like to point out Bug's super patriotic picture with the flag. Being the perfectionist that he is, he was bummed that I wouldn't photo shop an bald eagle flying over him to get the perfect effect. He cracks me up :)

The turtle pictures as promised

As promised we got these developed. So now we can really say that we were swimming nose to nose with this guy. He was so docile that he barely even noticed that we were there.

This was seriously one of the most amazing experiences that we've ever had. Most surreal too.

Back to life...back to reality.

We got home yesterday morning. We took an overnight flight (which meant we missed a night sleeping) and then went straight back to the madness of our life.

We picked up the kids and had our big joyous reunion. As nice as it was to be child free for a week, I missed them like crazy. Every time we would see kids playing on the beach with us I would think about how much my own kids would have had if we brought them. It was sort of bitter sweet.

But we spent the better part of the day yesterday in a sleep deprived fog.

But one of the things I did do was take the underwater cameras in to be developed. The pictures turned out really cool. Of course the pictures don't quite do justice to just how cool snorkeling really is, but it captures the moment sufficiently.

So because there were just so dang many of these, I did a slide show of the greatest hits of Hawaii snorkeling.

Enjoy!

Home again , home again jiggety jig.

One last thing before I go....

We had a lot of time to kill before our flight left and I had this plan to do something extreme to commerate our 10th wedding anniversary. I know it seems silly to some, but a lot of my friends that got married around the same time as we did didn't make it see this milestone. It is just a fact that many marriages don't make it this far. Not that we are any better than anyone else, but I wanted to really mark the moment.

What better way than to do it by permanatly scarring yourself with synthetic ink?

I have had the itch to get another tatoo for quite some time, but I just couldn't settle on what exactly I wanted to do. I knew I wanted it around my ankle though. Then a couple months ago I got this idea to do a band of 10 plumeria flowers around my ankle. I wanted to do it while I was in Hawaii, but only on the last day because I didn't want to limit myself from going in the water.

I found a parlor that looked legit and we were off and running.

What I didn't take into consideration is how much it would hurt. I mean, I have a tatoo on my back that I got when I was 18. (another story for another time) I remember it hurting, but maybe the arrogance of youth clouded my memory. Well let me tell you now....it hurts .....Really....really ...bad. Needles poking into shin and ankle bones are unpleasant just thinking about.

But the whole thing took about an hour and a half and it was over. I found lamaze breathing comes in handy in the funniest places :)

Last day in Paradise

Sigh ....all great things must come to an end. This is our last day in Hawaii. We checked out of our hotel at 11 in the morning , but didn't fly out until 11 at night. So in short we had a lot of time to kill. We spent a couple hours body surfing here at Sunset beach on North shore. It was really hard to get out of the water knowing it was the last time for a long time that we would be able to do this. But we had been in the water for a couple hours and were beginning to feel a little over exposed to the sun. So we had to get out.

But before we said our good byes to North shore we had to snap just a few more pictures for prosperity. Please excuse my brillo-esq hair. It turns out my hair didn't do well with a combination of salt water and high humidity. I grew a little too comfortable to the rubber band method of hair care. I am not really ready to go home and face the cruel nature of blow dryers and flat irons again.