Ben and buddies on a hike.

We had fun this morning out hiking with a bunch of buddies. We reset a geocache and had a great time running through the woods with five boys all under 4  years of age. I think we had a 1 yr old, three 2 year olds, and a 3 1/2 year old. The moms are a great hiker hui as you can see by the big smiles! We were looking for root letters for our kids’ names – B for Ben, S for Sam, etc. Lehua (smiling above, in back) took a look at one that i thought might look like an “M” and she said “Oh, that’s pie!” and it took a minute for the rest of us to catch on that it wasn’t the edible pie she was referring to 🙂

Speaking of edible – dinner tonight was decidedly NOT. Dave was getting home late, but I didn’t know that until he wasn’t home by 6pm, so I started playing catch-up. Salmon is his specialty. Unfortunately the salmon was a bit too gone, so we ditched that after serving it up (boys hungry, almost in tears as salmon leaves their plate – I just couldn’t stomach more puking, after the 7-day puke-fest we had last month), then Dave cooked up some turkey meatballs and served them with a nice glaze of vintage 2008 canned tomato soup. He said it was totally fine because people used to keep that in their fallout shelters for years. Dating on cans is relatively new. (Mom, is that true?) So the boys chomped down on beans, corn from Sam’s field trip to Waimanalo (where he wore a Camelback pack as we usually do hiking because I knew it would be hot and sunny down there and he’d be thirsty – sure enough, the kids were thirsty but the teacher was thrown a bit for a loop when I dropped him off at school with a Camelback instead of a disposable water bottle). Anyway – I served up an incredible dessert to make up for all this (half-pound Reese’s cups – have you ever seen one of those?) with ice cream. Wow. Good dessert makes up for all kinds of transgressions. Dave and I were left hankering for something remotely resembling a reasonable dinner, though – Hungry Man, anyone?