The night before our flight was incredibly eventful. There was a huge earthquake and tsunami in Japan that would cause a ripple effect in Hawaii. We received the news that we were under a tsunami watch at around 8:30 that night. I had just gotten the kids down for bed and was thinking about bed soon for myself since we had an early flight the next morning. Kyle called to tell me about the earthquake and tsunami and told me to be prepared to have company if the watch got upgraded to a warning. I hoped that it would get downgraded but alas it did not. We spent the whole night waiting for the tsunami to hit. It finally "hit" around 3am. It was a very small wave with very little damage around our island. All the company we had were finally allowed to go back home at 730 the following morning. Our flight had inevitably been cancelled by the tsunami warning but thankfully they had already placed us on a later flight the same day. After hours of calling family to let them know we were alright we got some sleep and prepared for our early evening flight.
We flew 8 hours from Honolulu to O'Hare airport. It was a really long flight but the kids did amazing. They both slept about half the flight which I was thankful for. It would have been nice to get some sleep myself but that did not happen. So we covertly flew across the country with only my sister knowing. One of the pilots on the flight to St. Louis let the kids explore the cockpit as we were getting off the plane. The pilot was very nice and answered all of Alec's questions. Alec thought it was very cool. After we arrived in St. Louis, I called April and we set our plan in motion. I picked up our rental car and drove to my dad's to make the first of several surprises for the day.
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| Little pilot in the making |
The looks on everyone's faces when the kids and I walked through the door was worth the two months of agony I went through trying to keep the secret to myself. A big thanks goes to my sister, April for helping me pull off the my surprise. I know it killed her as much as it did me not to scream it from the rooftops that we were coming to visit.
After surprising Dad and Kelly, I moved onto my mom's house. I called her on our way over to say Kyle would like to stop by and I just wanted to make sure that someone was at the house. Little did she know that Kyle had not come in yet and we were really the ones that were going to stop by. Another successful surprise pulled off. We spent a few hours over there before Kyle got to St. Louis as well and met me over at my mom's house. Next we moved on to meet Kyle's sister at his dad's house. She thought she was simply meeting up with Kyle but we showed up about 5 minutes after him to surprise everyone that was there. It was a complete surprise for everyone at the house.
Our day didn't end there. We went to Texas Roadhouse to surprise Kassi and Kody at work and have some dinner. We had a good meal with great company. We only had two more people left to surprise, Lisa and Chet. They both work until late at night so we luckily had a little time to work with in surprising everyone else throughout the day. We were checking out Krystal's new house when we got a frantic call from Jordan saying her mom was on her way home from work. We hurried over to the house to get in place to surprise Lisa. We hid in her room where we knew she would come to change clothes after work. The kids sat on the bed waiting to yell surprise when she opened the door and flipped on the light. It worked perfectly and we got probably the best and most animated reaction out of everyone. Chet wasn't due home for another couple hours but I couldn't wait up for him. I was exhausted from the flight and the time change. I briefly said hello when he came in and then I was out again. We had dinner over there the next day and then Kyle went back to Missouri for school.
We spent the next two weeks with everyone in the family. It was a great time and there is a lot still to write about. I will have to separate the blog entries over the next few days. There is simply too much to put into one entry. I will have many more pictures in the future posts as well.
