The kids and I had fallen into a sad routine.

We'd make fabulous plans during the week, but by 9 a.m. on Saturday they'd start falling apart — my 6-year-old unable to resist the siren call of her friends at play and my 13-year-old equally powerless as the blinking blue beacon on his modem guided him to his computer as he rubbed sleep from his eyes. Me? I'd pop open my computer, check my e-mail and inevitably end up sucked into something or other while waiting for my children to announce in concert that they were ready to go — something that is unlikely to happen in this lifetime.

As a result, I was working too much, my daughter was perpetually realizing too late that she'd missed out on something and my son, though happy, was in danger of sprouting mushrooms. We needed a new launch pad, so for Labor Day weekend we headed to Waikiki.

As it turns out, the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort is perfect for the overwired family. We were able to plug in the Nintendo Wii, run movies off my laptop on the TV and, of course, we could have had high-speed Internet, but I decided that anything that we couldn't access with my phone was off-limits. It was the perfect setup for a weekend indoors, but aside from a couple games on the Wii and a couple episodes of "iCarly," we didn't spend much time in front of the TV.

We'd barely checked in before my daughter started agitating for a dip in the pool. I convinced her to have an early dinner at Mac 24-7 first, which ended up being the only meal we ate in a restaurant that weekend. We spent the first evening at the pool, hit the beach for snorkeling the next day, meandering back to the hotel by way of the Okinawan Festival to grab andadogs for lunch.

I slipped off by myself for a couple hours for some literary nourishment at a food-themed live taping of the "Aloha Shorts" radio show at Hawaii Public Radio and when I picked the kids up, they were eager to get back into their swimsuits — still damp from the beach — and swim until the pool closed. Our final morning, we considered our options and ended up back at the pool, the kids in the water, me on a chaise lounge thinking that I'd finally start "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," but flicked through just a few iPod-sized pages before I realized that we'd spent the weekend so waterlogged that I hadn't taken out my camera. Reading material went into the bag and the camera came out so I could capture their antics in the pool instead.

We came home browned and burnt and — I thought — good for nothing but baths and bed, but the weekend wasn't quite over yet.

Before I made our impromptu staycation plans, I'd promised my daughter that I'd take off the training wheels on her bike, and still invigorated from our successful weekend, I held to my promise. It took just a few jogs up and down the street with her until she figured out how to balance, then about another 15 minutes of bracing her at take-off until she was suddenly doing it on her own.

And as she wobbled up and down the street, I knew that things had changed. The structure stayed the same: the kids went back to school, I went back to work and work came home with me. But when my daughter asked to ride her bike, I told her to wait, not until I finished work, but until I finished cooking dinner, which I left cooling on the stove as I headed outdoors with my laptop to work to the joyful noise of my daughter and her friends at play.