Happy Birthday Dustin (early)

The best part about having your Birthday fall during a weekend is you get to celebrate all weekend long!  Since we planned on going to Lagoon tomorrow on Dustin's actual birthday we decided to open presents and have cake tonight.

Its always a scramble to open presents with our kids around...they grab all of them and rip off all the paper before you even realize it!  It is also fun to take your kids to the store to pick out a present for someone else....you never know what you are going to get, for example:

A lighter!

A coconut!

Star wars Legos!

Jody sent Dustin a bunch of books from a comic he introduced him to several years ago.

Dustin's brothers sent him this package....check out all the stamps!  The perks of working for the post office...

 Hot salsa!

Dustin requested a peanut butter cup cake....so we found him a yummy peanut butter cup pie!  

Yeah...the kids REALLY wanted to dig into that pie!

Happy 39th Birthday Dustin!  We've got one more year to make some sweet memories in your 30's....and we already have plans to ring in the 40's with a BANG!

Shaved Ice Hut

As summertime approaches we see more and more Shaved Ice huts pop up around town.  This year someone got smart and put one right behind our daycare location, which is also next to a Charter K-8 grade school and a pre-school.  So of course me kids keep talking about getting snow cones everyday when we pick them up!

Finally today we told the kids that when we picked them up after work we would get them some shaved ice.

Do you see how HUGE these are?  This is the SMALL SIZE!  So yes, there was more shaved ice that made it in the kid laps or on the floor than what made it in their bellies....but they had fun!

I am sure we will be hitting up this place again as Summer moves forward.

A family of mustaches

Just keeping it real....

Hawaii - Day #8

Today in the morning Mom, Garrett and Renee went horseback riding and the rest of us decided to drive and explore Mauna Kea - a very old dormant volcano area.  The drive goes up quite high in altitude...in fact they say this is the only part of the island that gets cold enough to actually SNOW!  As you can see from our bag of chips - the air is different up here.

Our drive put us above the clouds.  Overall it was a very dry area.  Lots of 'mounds' in the ground that  probably helped vent lava tubes awhile ago.

We did find some pretty flowers growing.

They have a visitors center to explore near the top of the Mauna Kea area.

The kids look excited to watch a video don't they....

Afterwards we headed back to the Hilo side of the island.  We were meeting up with the family members that went horseback riding for lunch and were going to explore the 'live' violence area of the island.  We made one more stop at Rainbow falls just outside of Hilo...we had a bit more time to kill.

For lunch we found this burger place that had great reviews in a travel book we had purchased.  It was gooooooooood!  They even had board games for people to play with while waiting for your food.  Zach and Scott decided to play a round of battleship.

Now everyone was energized and ready to hit up the Volcano National Park.  One of our favorite things to explore at this place is the lava tubes...

We hit up many scenic overlooks.  At this one it was just a valley of hardened lava.  There was actually a trail down to it, where you could explore further.

Garrett, Renee, and Dustin decided they wanted to go down and explore on that valley floor and took all the kids with them.  Jen and her parents decided to go explore other parts of the Volcano Park.  Here were some pictures of their findings on the valley floor....

We all met up back together when it got dark on the far side of the park where the 'active' volcano was.  We wanted to see the glowing at night!

Quite the busy day for us.  Almost everyone slept in the car on the drive back to the other side of the island.

Hawaii - Day #7

What better way to start the day than by heading to TEX drive in for some fresh malasadas!  These filled fried sugar coated pastries are so yummy....this is a must stop every trip we've had to this Hawaiian Island.

Now after that yumminess we needed to burn off some calories....so we headed off to explore Akaka Falls.  The drive there is so beautiful.

The whole Twogood clan near the falls!