Home Again, Home Again, Jiggedy Jig...

We made it!   Left early Friday morning, arrived home late Friday night, slept in a little and, *shazam*  We're home!  (Mate is leaving for a baseball game tonight... oddly enough, he can't find anyone in the house who wants to go with him.  Weird.  Go figure.  It's not like, you know, we've been gone for a WEEK or anything!  Okay-- the little kids wanted to go with him.  I'm pretty sure they were just trying not to fall asleep at six at night.  I wish him luck!)

But we're tired and happy, and we had a great time!

The thing about a vacation like Hawaii, though, is that very often you're having too much fun having fun to stop and take pictures of having fun, and that even if you're laughing constantly in the presence of your family, you're not stopping to record it because, well, you're on vacation!  But here's some random bits about the Lane family running rampant around the Aloha State!

*  The morning we left, Big T came out ready to go.  He was wearing a zip up jacket, the gray hat he bought in Oregon, plaid pajama bottoms, flip flops, a shirt that said, "I AM the Chosen One" and a red, blue, and gold fish scarf that I made him in 5th grade.  I said, "OmiGOD!  You're wearing THAT?"

So he went back into his room and took off the scarf.  Yup.  You can see by our return dinner of triumph picture, he wore that all the way back home.

Yes.  That's the hair of mystery,
Why do you ask?

*  Our second day out to the beach (and YES!  my fat water mammal body was FINALLY able to submerge in the ocean, not just one day but two!) we rinsed off, got in the car, and went driving back to  go shopping at one of the many tent fairs that we saw around Kauai.  I saw my hair in silhouette enough to be mildly alarmed, but it wasn't until we stopped in the bathroom of the Old Schoolhouse shopping center that I realized I now sported the hair of mystery, and small animals were running away from me in an effort not to get lost in the stiffened spirals of mom's hair minus the gel and plus salt water.  I turned to Chicken in horror.

"You let me go in PUBLIC?  Like THIS?  I thought you LOVED ME?"

She told me that she DID love me, she just didn't see how bad my hair really was, but she was laughing so hard I DIDN'T BELIEVE HER!

*  When we went to the tent fair, I managed to keep Zoomboy from buying a drum by buying him a tiki mask instead.  I was so proud.  When we went to the ABC store on our way out of town, he went up to his dad with another drum and his dad said yes.  I decided it was kismet.  Fucking drum.

The one out of four who was not
disappointed.

*  Chicken asked us if we'd gotten any tchotchkes for her friend Stevie, who watched the animals for us while we were gone.  I said, "Yeah-- here, some bracelets, some magnets... good enough?"

"I don't know, mom-- the dog crapped in the hallway and peed on the rug.  I'm thinking more!"

We bought a sarong.

*  Three out out of four kids wanted a ukelele.  One out of four kids was not disappointed.

*  Squish wore her p'ua poi (I hope that's right!) outfit all the way home.  The Hawaiian airlines people LOVED HER.  As they should have.  Our wahini princess was so damned cute she probably cured airsickness.

*  At the first beach, we got to fight the breakers.  I LOVED that part.  It was SO MUCH FUN!  But the best part?  Looking out and seeing Big T and Zoomboy rolling around in the surf together and not trying to kill each other.  Damn.  Those television commercials about a bringing a family together were SO RIGHT.

*  This picture here that looks like beach towels?  That's Squish.  We called it a Squish-sandwich.

*Mate burnt his nose.  And wore my straw hat (not pictured here) all the way home.  And went to fetch the carry ons that had to be checked because the luggage bins were full.  And let me buy not one muu muu but two.  He laughed a lot and made us go out to dinner when we were all exhausted and we enjoyed the hell out if it and it was nummy.  It was his idea to go see the Arizona, and he enjoyed tooling around the island and getting to know it just like I did.  He thought the ABC store was as cool as the kids and didn't mind a little kitsch in our luggage.  And he was all around awesome, and he was Mate.

*  We watched Lilo and Stitch about six-thousand times between the time we left and the time we got back home.  We still love it, except I think we love it even more.  Someone who LOVED that island had a hand in the making of that movie, you could tell.  I head a man (very native) say to his friends, "See you later, cuz-- we talk story then!" and I suddenly very much wanted to live in a place where I could say things like, "We talk story!" and "Mahalo!" and "Hanai!"  About the only thing that put me off was the one lane bridges.  I swore up and down that there were about five-hundred of them between our hotel and the beach farthest north.  Chicken said there were three.  She conceded that the number was probably between five-hundred and three, and she thought that would placate me, but when we got to #7, I shouted "HA!" in a deeply triumphant voice, because one of those things is too many.

And I'm going to leave it like that for a while.  I have poems in my head (don't laugh!) and maybe I will write those in the coming days.  I actually need to "go back to work" and write, because I have a hard deadline coming up in August, and the kids still need me, and...

And it was wonderful.  It was everything people say it was.  It was blue sky and blue-green sea and lovely smells and salt on your skin.  It was pretty fish in snorkeling pools and kind people and horses and herons (and sometimes herons riding horses!) and happy kids and the sound of rain at night.  Vacations must end, and life must return to normal, but for the moment I am happy and relaxed and so full of joy... that's it.  Full of joy.  I'm gonna ride the buzz of this while it lasts, right?  Aloha, Kauai-- you were frickin' awesome!