I should go buy a lottery ticket!

We are here in Hawaii (still pretty surreal to me). When we got here to Honolulu, we were greeted by one of the guys that Nick is going to be working with and his wife and children. It was nice to put a face with a name and meet some people on the island as soon as we got here. They were so super nice and even brought two vehicles to help us with our hefty load of 13 pieces of checked luggage! Crazy! They took us to our hotel so we could get all checked in and then took Nick to get our rental car. We stayed at The Double Tree in Waikiki. It was nice, but small for our family of four and all of our bags. (Below is a picture of our view from our balcony) I was SERIOUSLY dreading staying in that place for an unknown amount of time, we had no idea how long the wait was going to be to get into the housing that we wanted to be in.

We made an appointment to meet with the housing office on December 29th, to see just how long we were going to be cramped up in the hotel. We were expecting the worst, and hoping for the best. Everything we heard before we got here, was that it would be at least a month before we got into a house...maybe more because of the area we wanted. So, we anxiously showed up for our appointment 30 minutes early and got right in. We met with one lady that fills out our eligibility forms that say how many bedrooms we qualify for. She had asked us if we knew where we wanted, and we told her...her response "Oh, you will probably have to wait 3 to 6 months for there. Everyone wants to live there because there is a little extra room in those homes." So we were thinking "Great, exactly what we didn't want to hear! The worst is going to be our reality!" We were still hopeful though. We then had to meet with the civilian management company that the Navy contracted to manage housing. We sat down with their representative, and she asked immediately "Do you have a preference?" So, with skepticism we told her what we wanted. She looked at us and had a look of excitement and said "Ok, I actually have a house ready to go for you guys! Let me go get the keys and we'll go look at it." Wait, what just happened here...seriously?!?! Nick and I looked at each other in disbelief and high-fived each other, yep...this is really happening! We went and looked at it and really liked it, it was in our top 3 floor plans that we wanted. We, however, did not have any of our stuff yet, so we had to schedule a delivery of "Aloha furniture." They were not going to be able to deliver that until Jan. 4th, so that's when we set our move-in date to.

January 4th rolled around and we were all ready to have our house and have our own spaces! Our hotel was nice. like I said, but small. We enjoyed our stay in Waikiki and the kids and I had fun walking around (Nick had to take our rental car into work) and exploring. We didn't venture too far though, the kids weren't too fond of having to walk everywhere. LOL We went to the beach, ate at some great restaurants, and even caught the end of a Luau with the hula dancers and fireworks at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. That place is really cool, there is a lot to do just in that one hotel or should I say "in that one village." :) (See pictures below for some of the things we ate/saw while staying in Waikiki)

Anyways, back to the house...we were so excited!! Our house is DIRECTLY across from the pool, fitness center, playground, and multi-purpose rooms that you can rent out. It is on a corner lot, and is a ranch style home. (See below for pics) After having a 2 story home in SC, I now know why my parents always wanted to just buy ranch style homes...I despise vacuuming stairs and carrying laundry up and down. (Our laundry room was actually upstairs, but for whatever reason we always carried it downstairs to fold HAHA, silly I know!) We have hard floors in the entire house even the bedrooms, and I really like that but am getting some rugs to warm it up a bit. I really couldn't believe we got a house SOOO quickly and were able to move in right away!! I thought, we got so blessed and are so fortunate...this surely means that our stuff is going to arrive late or my Tahoe is going to take forever getting here too. We can't get THAT lucky more than once...





 ...or can we? We got into the house and were as settled as one can be with "Aloha furniture". The kids started school on January 10th, and are loving it so far. I was loving the fact that we can WALK to/from school. Sweet, I will get to save money on gas too while getting a little exercise in. It was about the 16th, and was a day off because of MLK Day. Nick decided to go into work (even though he didn't HAVE to) to study and get a head start on stuff he wanted to get done during the week. I checked my e-mail on my phone early afternoon, just before he called and told me he was on his way home. I had a forwarded e-mail from Nick that said our stuff was HERE!! Holy cow, is this for real?! I couldn't believe it, they said we wouldn't get it until the beginning of February...it was 2 1/2 weeks early! The kids and I were doing a happy dance after I read it and told them we were going to get our stuff...and we were all super excited!

On Tuesday, the 17th, I got another e-mail from the vehicle shipping company...my Tahoe had arrived on the island! Oh my goodness, now I was starting to wonder what the heck was going on, we hardly ever get that lucky so many times so close together. I was DEFINITELY NOT complaining though!!

So yes, if gambling were legal in Hawaii...I would have bought a lottery ticket!! LOL