planes & games & birthdays, oh my.....

I'M GOING TO WARN YOU HERE AND NOW...THIS POST MAY OR MAY NOT BE RIDICULOUSLY LONG AND BABBLY AND BORING. JUST SAYIN...

so we decided that since we had president's day off of work that we would make a *quick* trip back east to visit my sisters in maine and new hampshire.

*side note: we decided to only tell one of my sisters we were coming, and didn't tell the other one, and made it a surprise for them! when we knocked on the door, and my sister answered the door and saw us standing  there, thinking we were still in utah, she totally started crying and gave us big hugs and it was SO SO awesome. loved it.*

so we decided to get up super early friday morning, got on a flight pretty easily, flew to detroit, got in there a bit early so we had time to grab lunch, and then got on our next flight to portland, maine. for those of you who don't know, jae works for the airlines, so we fly free, but we fly (the dreaded) standby, too. so getting on those flights decently easy was a blessing for sure.

cold, snowy mountains out the window of our early morning flight out of utah

we literally spent the entire weekend playing games, eating, and just hangin out. cards, board games, the Wii, more cards - you name it, we played it. it was pretty nice to just sit back and do nothing! especially since it was so dang, bitterly cold outside.

all our new england babies! me, hana (poor girl had double ear infections - she was a trooper!), clara, zack, jae, kennedy, lizzie

we were planning on coming home monday, which was president's day and also happened to be jae's birthday. we happened to pick the perfect weekend when there were storms all over the mid east area. flights were canceled. if they weren't canceled they were overbooked. aka, not lookin so good for us standby fliers.

birthdays!!

well after hours of looking up what seemed like millions of different flights and places to fly and connections and everything else, we finally decided on flying out on the earliest flight tuesday morning (which happened to be my birthday) at 545AM to detroit. 545 people. that means we were up by about 345. can we say ugh??

well, long story short, (too late already, i know) we spent the next 12 hours in the detroit airport. no free birthday cake or anything. we finally got on a flight to kansas city, missouri (which got in late), we booked it off that plane, to the next gate (which luckily was right next door), and barely got on that one to SLC. we really shouldn't have gotten on that flight. it was a miracle. ahhh. salt lake. home.

this was the coolest part of the detroit airport. except that
 at 8 in the morning, it's a little much

we finally reached our front door around 8pm. which was 10pm for us, since we'd been back east. that's like 20 hours. our bed has never felt so good.

and then it was back to work the next morning...

we were so thankful we did get to go and visit everyone. miss you guys already!!!

here's to our 2012 birthdays! may they be better than 2011's   :)