Aloha!

We're home from our trip to sunny Kauai! It was marvelous. However, I must say Kauai is a very, very long ways from Wisconsin. As in about 10-hours-in-a-plane-with-a-12-month-old-long ways. I have to say, Miss did wonderfully handling the travel and the time change. But that doesn't mean it was easy. Each time she went to sleep on the plane, a total of 3 naps and one overnight sleep (yes, we flew all night to get home), she slept on my lap. This required me to slouch down as far as I could in a plane seat so that she could lie on my belly and/or chest and be on a good incline instead of straight up and down. So I practically straddled my legs and stretched them as far under the seats in front of me as I could. I had no support under my back, my butt fell asleep, and I nearly wet my pants at least once. I am so thankful that for the longer flights, between Phoenix and Lihue, both ways the flights were not full and we were able to have a full 3 seats instead of just the 2 we paid for to "spread out" a bit. The extra seat was critical to let Miss have some space to play during the daytime flight and to have more room to try to sleep during the nighttime flight. For the overnight flight, I stayed in the position described above for the first couple of hours, then I had to switch to lying on my back with my head on my hubby's lap and legs scrunched up to keep from hanging into the aisle. Then my knees started to ache from being bent so much for so long, so I had to switch back to my slouching position. Finally I resorted to placing a beach towel over the seat between my husband and me and lying Miss down to sleep on that. She seemed to like this best and really sprawled out, which left about 6 inches of seat at both her head and her feet for Ben and I to try to get comfy to sleep ourselves. Needless to say, he and I did not sleep Friday night. But at least Miss did. And she adjusted to the time change with no problem in Hawaii. She has had a little bit more difficulty with the switch back, but she's still doing very well.

Now, in having told you all this, I don't mean to sound in any way like I'm complaining. The trip was amazing and it was really worth the long travel time. I just get a small chuckle out of picturing our contortions in the plane so I wanted to share. Here are a few photos to show just how worth it the whole thing was.

This was taken on the beach that was within walking distance of our condo. It was a pretty steep and scary hike down to this beach, especially carrying a baby, so we only went this one time and chose other beaches the rest of the time, but I love this photo.

This is the complex where our condo was (you can see how the hike down to the beach would be steep!!)

The view from our lanai.

I will post more photos and tell a little more about the trip in upcoming posts. Also coming up, Miss's birthday is this week, I'll be doing another cloth diaper giveaway, and there will be a big surprise on this blog!!