Dancelle's baby blessing

   The day before the blessing I headed out for my weekly ski trip solo for the first time. It was a wild success. This pic is actually from a trip a few weeks ago. 

  We packed Emily and Jake in the back of our car and drove up to Rexburg on Saturday night, and had a great time eating dinner at Denny's on Valentine's Day with the family. Annelise is talking so much now, it makes me sad to miss the days in between.

That night we had a joyous reunion with the Mickelsens and the boys immediately set to arm wrestling on the floor. Of course Chelsea and I were set against each other against our wills. Even mom and Kathy had a go at it. The only non-participate was Garrett. I'm kind of curious to know how that would've gone..

  On Sunday we watched the baby blessing at the Mickelsens ward, and had a grand reunion with Grandma Mickelsen. She makes me laugh so much. Don brought us out to play with the horses and Kade turned out to be popular. 

  On Monday we went out the Grandma Mickelsens cabin at Island Park and had a ball socializing, snowmobiling, shooting guns with Ross and Whitney, and listening to Logan's mission stories. I was heartbroken to leave.

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Whitney's Birthday in Los Angeles

  Our adventure started when we showed up at the snowy Provo airport and security stopped Mckenzi for having a blade in her backpack. Turns out she had a hidden old exacto-knife in her backpack that had been in there for years. It took like 20 minutes for security to find it in the hidden folds of one of the pockets. Haha so random.

We got into LAX and piled into Whitney's car all giggles and happiness. It was like a reunion of the sisterhood of the traveling pants. Yay! We made it back and I met little Marley for the first time! We also got to meet Whitney's friend Abbey, who cooked us all dinner and ice cream cake. Amazingness. 

The next day headed out to Fashion Island and Huntington Beach to go explore. Beautiful! We decided we liked it so much that we came back with Austin the next day.

                                                                 #us

I loved exploring Balboa and the little shopping row along the beach. It was so quaint and reminded me of the Oregon Coast this time of year. Overall we had a blast just talking nonstop till our voices were raspy and our mouths were dry. We had sooo much to catch up on and Austin put up with it all haha. We laughed and cried and healed a little from the inside out on the sunny January beaches of Los Angeles. I forget how easy it is to be with my girls! No keeping appearances or polite nonsense to stress over- just letting our whole unabashed lives fall out in words for days. It's like an emotional spa. 

Well our trip home ended up being reminiscent of the desperate mom in home alone. After 12 hours of delay at LAX, because of fog at the Provo airport, we finally boarded a plane and flew to Provo, only to circle the airport a few times and be rerouted to Las Vegas because of fog again. We were offered a hotel for the night and another attempt in the morning, but by that time I had lost faith in Allegiant because of their incredibly bad service in general and the fact that the forecast was worse the next day. We jumped in a van with a buch of stranger hippies like ourselves and drove te remaining 6 hours to home sweet home. The van driver was even a band bum hipster. We told each other our life stories and ate tons of nasty gas station food all night, and I fell asleep and actually felt like we made the right choice. It was an adventure for sure.

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