No Boys Allowed

Hey y'all -

I was invited to my cousin Reed's wedding in Montgomery, Alabama, and there was lots of discussion in our house as to who else should make the trip. There is probably a fifty-cent difference between the cost of flying a family of four across the country and what my grandparents paid for their house. In the end, we decided that a maximum of two people should make the trip. Of course, your father would have been the obvious person to take as my date, but the more I started thinking about it, the more I realized that there's only one member of our household who loves air travel, lives to eat in restaurants, can't wait to dance in public, and owns an entire wardrobe of dressy wedding attire. And it's this joker:

In fact, that's a picture of Laney with her bag packed, ready to go on the trip (about five minutes after I first mentioned it, and three weeks before we were set to depart).

So while the boys stayed home together, we girls winged our way to the Deep South:

As expected, Laney was an absolute peach the whole way to Alabama, and you could tell she had channeled her inner southern belle when - ten minutes before landing in Montgomery - she decided she needed to put her face on. 

She had been so very very good all day, I was able to overlook that she was smooshing $16 worth of Estee Lauder on her face. 

When we got to Granny Jack's in the afternoon, Laney wanted to play in the hose. There was still snow on the ground back at our house in Montana, so the concept of playing in water outside was a novelty. We hand-washed every one of Jack's 3000+ landscaping rocks with a power hose, just 'cause we could.

Later that evening, Laney was reunited with her grandmother/soul mate, and they were able to begin indulging in all their favorite shared activities: going shopping, going out to dinner, talking about Disney World, planning their next Disney vacation, and watching "Frozen."



By day #2, Laney had played with Tex at the Montgomery Museum of Art and earned three whole tickets playing skee ball at Chuck E Cheese, and had decided she wanted to move to Alabama.

YOU try explaining to a four year-old that when choosing where to live, the quality of the public school system is more important than being skee ball-adjacent. It falls on deaf ears, my friends. 

Love,

Mom