Hawaii.

Erik and I went on a trip of a lifetime.  I have to say, Hawaii is the MOST beautiful place I have ever seen.  Erik and I went to Jamaica for our honeymoon....it doesn't have anything on Hawaii.  So the reason why we got to go on this trip was because of my hard-working husband.  He was rewarded for his hard work and dedication with basically a free trip to Hawaii.  Like I have told everyone, if you have lots of time and money.....go visit Hawaii.  

Anyways.  The flight is SOOOOO long....like really long.  Not to mention the 6 hour time change.  Our flight there and flight back was over 10 hours each way.  We stopped in LA each time.  If it were a direct flight I might would have gone cRaZy.  We left on Thursday morning at 7:45am and arrived there at 2:20pm (8:20pm) our time.  It wasn't too hard to adjust to the time change when we got there.  But when arriving back to Charlotte...thats a different story.  I don't think I slept for 2-3 nights.  

Our hotel was B-E-Autiful.  We stayed at the Westin Resort in Maui.  The ocean was clear blue and the residents/workers at the resort were super friendly and nice.  I will say that I wasn't so impressed with the food we ate, however the hula pie....YUM!

We arrived!

View from our balcony.  Ahhh!

I think his name was Bob, lol.

Yea, I took a picture of my breakfast.  They had a starbucks ON THE RESORT.  

We went whale watching.  We saw what they call a "pod" of male whales and 1 female.  They were fighting over "the love" of a female.  So much cool info we learned but one of the things the guides told us is that the males will hit each other with their tails, swim over top of each other so they can't come up for air and ram into each other for the one female.  Pretty cool.  Dork, yep.  

So pretty.

ONE tree.  160 years old.

Burnt.

Not gonna lie, that's the only time we got in the ocean.  Ha!

We were told to eat here...eh, it was ok.  The trivia as we ate dinner was pretty fun though!  Run Forest Run!

SO glad we did this.  Ziplining through the West Maui Mountains.  There were 8 zip lines ranging from 700 feet to 2000 feet.  

Beautiful Mountains in Maui...zip lining

Luau

Hula Pie

Easter 2015.

We celebrated Easter with the family this year on Saturday.  We went to my aunt Sheri's house and had our usual delicious meal.  The kids then hunted Easter eggs.  They had a fit because there was no candy in the eggs, only money...if they only knew :) 

Sunday morning we went to Easter service, which never disappoints.  There is SO much more to Easter than an egg hunt.  Thank you Jesus.  

11 months.

Happy 11 months baby girl!  Your slacker mom is just posting pictures this time :)

ONE.

I cannot believe its been a year since Lyla graced us with her presence.  My pregnancy with Lyla put me through one of the toughest things I've ever faced but I would do it again in a HEART.BEAT for her.

You know how you love someone so much you could "just squeeze them to death".  I'm not real sure who came up with that phrase because it doesn't really sound like something you would want to do to someone you love so much but seriously....I could just squeeze her!  She is the sweetest little thing.  She is always smiling, eating, reaching for any and everything, crawling and babbling.  Probably my favorite thing about her is her smile.  She wrinkles her nose and shows her teeth, love it!

Poor thing has had 5 ear infections since January and is well on her way to tubes.  She has 4 teeth right now but 2 are popping through.  She will eat literally anything....even dog food.  Don't judge.  She still has a big ol' head (bless her heart) and doesn't really care for headbands anymore.  I have to sneak them on her head.  She is still army crawling.  Now she will actually get up on all fours and will pull up occasionally but she is in no where close to walking...I'm ok with that :)

I'll be honest, I never really thought of myself as being a "girl mom".  I thought once we had Gage we would probably have all boys.  I'm not sure why I felt that way maybe because I wouldn't consider myself extremely "girly" and I don't have a lot of sympathy which has kinda back fired considering Gage is not afraid of anything and rarely gets hurt (I just knocked on wood by the way).  However, I love our little girl too.  Girls and boys are just so different but don't ask my how or why because I don't really know.  We just know how blessed we are to parent a boy and a girl....really to even be a parent is a blessing.

So here is our Lyla girl.  What a joy she has been so far.  We couldn't imagine life with any other little girl.  Happy first birthday Lyla Ray!

More pictures to come.......