happiness in hawaii -- part one.

It's true. Anyone who has ever been to the islands can tell you that. It's been a little over two weeks since we got home, but honestly, it feels like months. I miss Hawaii. I miss it everyday. I feel so blessed and fortunate that we could go for a week, take my mom and stay in a quaint beach cottage on the North Shore. It was a dream and one of the most relaxing, wonderful, memorable weeks I have EVER had. No lies.

I was all set to load and crop and embellish all the photos from our Hawaii trip...just one problem. I have like ten pictures on my dslr. Hmmmm. I guess I took all of our vacation photos on my phone. Ooops. Three of the pictures are the ones I was planning on using for our Christmas card, sooo I can't share those. ☺ That leaves about seven pictures. No wait, make that six. I used one for wordless wednesday.

I have had a hard time transferring all of the pictures from my iPhone to my computer. It would be so much easier if I had a Mac and the power of the cloud. {sigh} Someday. A girl can dream and hope, right? ☺ I'll try a bit more and see if I can work some magic. Cross fingers! {Yay, I got it to work!}

I will break down our visit into a couple of posts, because if I put photos and talk about what we did and where we went, you might be bored to tears. I can't have any of that on my blog. It's supposed to be fun here!

We'll start off with telling the girls of our trip. We had kept it a secret for ages. AGES. It was so hard. This reaction was well worth the long wait. I watch the girlies surprise and still crack up.

We boarded a plane the next day and headed to islands of Hawaii. Yay!!!

This was our first glimpse of the islands. I think this was Maui. So much beauty!

 I love this face. It was one of those unexpected pictures that turned out to be one of my favorites.

Yes, this is the macadamia nut isle at Wal-Mart. A girl needs supplies for Hawaii, right?! ☺

We finally arrived to our cottage and what a pleasant view it was. {sigh}

This is the view that greeted us in the backyard.

 We unloaded our groceries and did this the rest of the day...

More happiness to come. Stay tuned! ☺