Tropical vacations have never been my thing. I’ve always preferred to explore cities with historical sites, palaces and museums, generally in Europe, and generally without kids. But I’m older now, and I’ve seen most of what I want to see, and I felt like it was time to show the boys a bit of the world beyond our borders. So we brought them to Hawaii. Aloha!

Day one has been a smashing success, except for the fact that we didn’t get to bed until 11:45 last night and Justin was up at 4:45 am this morning (cursed time change!) We played in the waves at Waikiki Beach, went for a nice lunch, and then took a submarine tour of the waters around Oahu. We even got to see three humpback whales on our way out to the submarine, so Brayden was pretty stoked. His day was almost ruined when we failed to get a picture of the first sea turtle we saw from the sub (the horror) but thankfully a second one turned up and we quickly snapped a photo.

Justin has been picking up random Hawaiian words and adding them to his mental database. On the walk back to the hotel, he said (with no prompting), “Mahalo to Mom for planning this vacation!”

Yup — this one rocks.