Hawaii: Turtle Beach

For Craig's birthday, he decided to go scuba diving with his brother.  Since I'm (a) not scuba certified and (b) pregnant, I got to stay home with the kids.  But then I decided that by golly I was in Hawaii and I wasn't just going to sit around twiddling my thumbs until Craig came home!  So I piled all my kids into the van, convinced my sister-in-law and mother-in-law to do the same, and we all headed to Turtle Beach.  I'll admit that this was not an easy place to go with little kids: the sand was super shifty and hot, making it very hard to walk in, and once you got to the water there were slippery, seaweed covered rocks everywhere.  So I spent most of our time carrying Ryder and holding Kendra's hand.  And trying to take pictures without dropping my camera in the water.  After about an hour of this we were all exhausted and headed back home.

But. we saw sea turtles!  So it was totally worth it.

You have to look closely, but there are two turtles in this picture-- see them???

This kid totally got in my way, but I still like how you can see the turtle's fins pointing up towards the surface

A pretty clear shot, if I may say so myself!

This one was just coming out of the water.  And then Bentley began crying because the sand was burning his feet, so I ran off to save him and didn't get any pictures of turtles sitting on the sand.  Ah, well!

 And then later that evening, once the scuba divers had returned, we had a big ol' family dinner:

Good times all around (although we learned at this dinner, after much crying, that Ryder's flipflops were too small for his feet-- poor kid!).


I'm just gonna say it: sea turtles are so cool.  It's impossible to not just fall in love with them.