HAWAII....Finally!

I am finally posting pictures of Hawaii!! I had my wave of three...Mckenzie cut her hair, My computer hard drive fried, and my Lawn mover broke yesterday....So that is why it has taken so long to post this. I am sorry this is going to be very long because I don't want to have something else happen and not get everything posted. At the bottom of this I put a slide show of Big Island Images. So the first picture is Justin getting me lei after we landed.

Here we are all tired from the flight with my lei! I was so excited to get leied!! :)


This bridge is made out of lava rocks



We went to the shopping center down the street from the resort the first day and walked back and there were so many pretty picture spots

I know, I'm a dork!

The resort had hammock's right next to the ocean that you could just relax in

I didn't realize that the big island is one big volcano, I knew there was a volcano on it. So it is lava rock all over, and white coral washes up on the shore and people take the coral and write words on the sides of the highway. Someone had already wrote Ash, so I made Justin take my picture by it.

Justin had fun with all the statues around the resort :)

Here is what most of the beaches looked like on the island

This is the Lagoon on the resort that you can snorkel in

This is just so we can remember where we stayed...since it seems like a dream now!

This is behind the waterfall in the Lagoon

Me and my friend Shayla. She works with Justin and earned the trip too. We were watching the Dolphins do tricks behind us

We went and saw the Kona temple, it was very pretty...on the slide show you will see these UGLY spiders that were all over the temple in the front. It was gross!

Us on the temple grounds

This is by the Kona Inn, a restaurant we ate at.

We went down on the rocks and the tide was out, so all these sea creatures were trapped until the tide came back in. Justin picked up a sea cucumber.

This is at the Kona Inn, that is the best pinacolada I have ever had!

This is us at the Tacky Tourist dinner. We didn't even make the finals. I was mad so I didn't take any other pictures of this dinner. :)

Justin sitting in the Lagoon after snorkeling

There's the Lagoon

What a nice day!

I think these gold fish thought we were going to feed them. We would go to the side of the pool and they would all swim over and there mouths were as big as quarters opening and closing. They let you pet them

This is an inactive lava tube. It doesn't look that big right now but in the next picture you can tell how big it is

Justin and Shayla's husband Aki walked through the tube and ended up about 200 yards out on the land

Our bus driver told us just to change letters on words so that you didn't have to make a whole new one, so I found one that said J+D and changed the D to an A.

I don't know why this picture turned sideways

Me and Justin at his awards dinner

Justin and his co-workers Tom and Shane

Justin and his boss Monique

Me and Monique

Monique, JoD, Me and Justin

Justin with his president's club award

Me and Corina (Tom's wife)

Me, Justin, Aki and Shayla

Me and Shay

Justin and Tom getting ready to boogie board

This picture is to prove that I went this far in the ocean...that wave came and I was out of there!

Laying out on the one of the white sand beaches on the island (Hapuna)

It was such a nice day for a burn

Donkey Balls....that's all I am going to say....come on, it's chocolate cover macadamia nuts! :)

This is a tree in Kona. A guy told us that they have a forest of them in Honalulu and it is dark in there

I didn't zoom this piture it very much, but the milk was $8.39 on the resort....but you could go to Walmart and get a deal at $4.50 a gallon!

We ate at this resturant called KCP where you had to dress up. Justin and I shared a meal and got these spring rolls, which were $14 and they were the size you get at Panda Express....Our main dish was a 10 oz rib eye 3 spears of asparagus and a spoonful of garlic mashed potatoes and we drank water and our bill was $75. It was crazy!! But the good thing was, Justin's work gave us $100 toward food on the resort and we had $50 left, so we only had to pay $25.

Here we re all dressed up for dinner...see the tiki torches behind us, they had a guy that was only in a short skirt thing and a garland on his head run the whole resort at sunset with a torch lighting all the tiki torches lining the walk ways and blowing a horn while he did it. It was funny.

This bridge crosses over one of the pools at the resort. Justin thought it would be funny to shake it.

This is on the way driving to the other side of the island which is the wet or greener side. This is how it looks at first

Then it gets thicker

And thicker

Until there is green all over. It was way cool, like an invisiable line

On the east or wet side of the island

The view out on the east side

It was desolate on the west side and over here it was rain forests! We were told that the Big Island is one of the olny places in the world that has all 13 climates

This is Akaka Falls. This waterfall was huge. The picture does not do it justice. We were across the valley from it.

This is called the boiling pots. I don't know why it is called that

Still at the boiling pots

There were signs all over that warned not to swim in this and as we were starting to hike out, these people (locals I think) came with towels and started cliff diving. So we stopped to watch

This is Rainbow Falls

This is the Volocano. The smoke is making it hard to see the mountain

This is the steam coming from the lava dropping out into the ocean. You an usually hick down there and see it, but the wind was blowing the steam over the land that day and it creates acid rain. So this is as far as they would let us go

I walked into this store and about died! They had a small wallet for $825. Who speands that on a wallet!!??

There were these "wild" cats all over the resort. We came back one night and there were like 20 in the parking lot trying to get these people to give them food. You can't even see them all in the picture, it was crazy.

We went to this lookout and there was this goat tied up like a dog to this house, it was like thier pet.

It was very friendly, then Shayla's husband tried to ride it and it didn't like us anymore. :)

The Wapio Valley lookout

Justin tried balancing on this homemade swing and kept falling

This is the trail down to the black sand beach and these trees were like a cave you had to walk through

The black sand is from the lava getting smashed by the waves creating sand

Me and Shayla trying to show how black the sand was

Justin going back through the tree cave

We were leaving to go back home and I snapped our last picture of the hotel

Here's our plane

We were excited to go home

We had a lot of fun, but we were ready to come home and see our kids!

Beauty School Drop Out

Where did March go?? Oh maybe it got cut off with my Mckenzie's HAIR!! I have been home from Hawaii for 1 week trying to find time to blog about it and Mckenzie gives me something else to blog about first. She decided while I was getting my hair done that she would be her own barber.
She had a ponytail in and by the looks of if started taking out sides and cutting, leaving the oh so loved Mullet (Business up front, party in the back) or maybe she was going for the tail look, you know when boys (not mine) grown their hair out long and then cut everything but a tail.

She walked out to where we were doing my hair and grabbed the back of her hair, which came out in her hands, and said "mom, my hair is falling out!" At first I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I saw it! I didn't know how to react. My friend's sister was there doing my hair, Do I beat the child to a bloody pulp in front of witnesses?? I think I was more shocked, I didn't feel like I could yell either. I asked her were the scissors were, she just kept saying, "I didn't cut my hair" LITTLE LIAR!! I wanted to yell. "yes you did, now show me where the scissors are" She finally showed me and they were on the piano. But no hair around. I started walking around the house trying to find "the hair" on the way finding pieces in a trail. I went in her room and saw a little more by the bottom off her bed. Then I lifted up the bed skirt and there it was...........................

This is the pile I found spread out under her bed.

So luckily since I was getting my hair cut there was already someone there to fix it.

Here is the back after the first snips.

This just shows how short some of the pieces are that are sticking out of the already short hair.

Melissa did a really good job fixing it. It really is cute. I have been on the fence about cutting her hair like this and she just pushed me over.

All done!

Now I can post our Hawaii trip!

LESSON#235154...nothing you post is dumb!

When I posted my last post, I thought maybe it was dumb because how would any of the blogging world find my dog?? But about 2 hours after I posted it, my friend Kim (who lives up the street) saw my blog and had found my dog. They didn't know it was our dog because they had never seen her. There is a horse pasture at the end of my street that her parents own and she lives in the house right next to them. I guess Dakota went to the field and was trying to get their goats. They had 4 goats killed last year by dogs (not mine) and so they caught her and put her their old dog run (YEAH she stayed in it all night and never got out!!!!! Why can't she stay in ours?). They checked up the road but didn't think to come down toward the houses. Then Kim go on to her blog and saw my post. She commented but I didn't check my blog before we left. She called my friend and asked her about my dog and my friend told her it was mine. Now we have her back! I will never think anything I post again is worthless! Thanks KIM & FAMILY!

I never thought I'd post this....

***LOST DOG***
Dakota is missing. Those of you that know me know that my dog an I have a love/hate relationship. I HATE this dog...but yet since she's been missing, I've been obsessed with finding her. I am worried sick! We noticed she was missing about 4pm yesterday, but Alyssa said she ran out the door when a lady came to pick something up at 1pm. So she has almost been gone 24 hours. I drove the neighborhoods last night calling and whistling for her. I finally drove down the busy road to check the sides of the street.
This dog has been the biggest pain and also the best thing for our family.
She tears things up if you leave her in the house (separation anxiety). She won't go in a dog house/run if you put a juicy steak in there. She would rather sit in pouring rain/blizzards then go into shelter. She ripped apart my mom's bathroom (see earlier post). She broke out of a dog carrier, the door was pushed diagonal against the wall (wish I would have taken a picture) and we had to take it apart to get the door back on and it wasn't even bent!
We built a dog run for her and she gets out of that thing within 5 seconds of putting her in. She has dug holes in my yard. She has ruined my grass. We have had her on a lead since she won't stay in the dog run and she pulls and pulls until her collar slips off then just sits on the porch to wait for us to come home. We finally had to tighten her collar next to choking level to keep it on her. Before we tightened it she would go into the open dog run and jump over the top, basically hanging herself so that she could slip out of the collar. That was before she figured out she could just pull.

But then there are the times when she just comes to you and wants to make you feel better when you are sad. She is so good with my kids and they love her. She loves the baby, always trying to lick him, even though I stop her, Carson loves it. It was so weird to lock up the house last night and not have her there. It feels different. I never thought I would ever feel this way about her. I would always joke about how maybe she would run away and then we wouldn't have to deal with her issues anymore. But I know something else happened because really this dog would not run away. And I say this because one time when she got out of her dog run, she tried to chew her way into the house by chewing the rubber at the bottom of the garage door! What dog tires to get in the house? I thought they want to get out.

If anyone sees her, please let me know. We miss her!