We made it -- whahoo, phew, zzzzzzz

Well we made it! That was a long day of traveling. We had a quick “practice” plane ride, a three-hour layover in LA, and then a nice, long, uneventful plane ride to Maui. (Y’all know that “uneventful” is code for “insanely freaking great” in twinado land, right?) We left our house around 8:30am and got into the hotel room around 11pm our time. And our party girls STILL didn’t want to go to bed. TubaDad and I did. Luckily, we won.

A few pics:

Here are the three girls, fooling around taking a quick self portrait while TubaDad was loading our suitcases into the car Saturday morning. (One funny: I asked TubaDad what suitcase he was planning to take and he foolishly said “Oh I’m just going to pack a tiny one, I hardly have any stuff at all.” “Yeah…” I said, “You might want to use the big suitcase, because the girls and I have have a teensy bit of overflow…” Heh. Boy did we... He barely got everything crammed into the biggest suitcase we own.)

We brought the girls’ carseats with us, and this horror was uncovered when we pulled them out of the van. We were all kind of in shock. Just stared at it for a minute, then Ro said soberly “Um, mama, maybe you should take a peeshur of dat.”

At the beginning of the trip, we were all jaunty and ready for anything. Ro (red shirt) packed Lammie and Ree (green shirt) brought Lambie. They always emphasize that Ree’s friend has a B in his name and Ro’s quite certainly does not. Ok…

This sight gave me a little chuckle going through security:

We thought we’d be home-free during the plane rides, given the girls’ newfound obsession with the iPad and iPhone. But they barely glanced at our gee-whizzy electronics until the end of the trip, preferring instead to make crazy-messy projects with the little craft kits I picked up at the drugstore. I swear, we’re never going to have these sweeties figured out, are we?:

I, however, knew exactly how I would want to spend my time, and the lovely wine and trashy magazines whiled away the time perfectly:

We were greeted with gorgeous flower leis at the Maui airport, which TubaDad had thoughtfully ordered in advance. I loved mine, but the girls were pretty unimpressed and wanted them off immediately. So, although they look pretty in the refrigerator right now, we’ll probably skip that little expense next time and put that money straight toward some chocolate-covered macadamia nuts:

Saw an awesome sunset as we were driving toward the hotel and grabbed a quick snap through the car window. Oh, that reminds me, I didn’t bring the D300 on this trip, so all pics are taken with the little purse camera:

The girls were pretty stir crazy after an entire day of traveling, and were hamming it up by the hotel waterfall and rolling around in the soft Hawaiian grass while TubaDad checked us in:

And then we went to bed. :-) Aloha auinapo.