Overdue update/end of South Lake Tahoe leg/Passport saga

We are way overdue for an update here. We will summarize briefly and share some of the more funny or unusual stories over the next few days.

First heres a picture of Sage riding in a swing for the first time :)

This outfit had a billion snaps at the bottom....aint nobody got time for that

Here's some favorite South Lake Tahoe photos...(we had some great visitors!!)

He learned how to stand up and cruise on furniture while in Lake Tahoe

We made a day trip to our favorite place and where we got married, Sugar Bowl!

Sunny Tahoe days

In his full snowsuit garb

Lakeside walk with Sage

Grandpa Mancini visited us!

On gondola to Sugar Bowl Village

Lunch with Grandpa

Uncle Zak and Aunt Laura visited! At Emerald Bay

Emerald Bay

Team MIL DIL! (Mother in Law Daughter in Law) :)

Views for days at Heavenly

St Patrick's Day with Aunt JoJo!

Health/injury updates (kind of sad that this is a specific category of our blog haha):

-2 days prior to leaving SLT, Nik got the ‘clearance’ from ortho to snowboard. Well not really but they said “You technically shouldn’t be snowboarding yet but if I were you I’d probably ski”. That was enough for Nik to get back on the mountain! So we got to get 2 days together before we had to leave SLT…one at Heavenly and one at Kirkwood…more to come on that later :)

-My left foot which has been causing me problems since September I finally got another MRI on and it shows a ‘stress reaction’ in my cuboid bone (a bone in the foot), which basically is the initial stages before a stress fracture. It was kind of nice to know there was a legitimate reason for the pain and that it’s not actually a fracture but at the same time disconcerting as this is the 2nd ‘stress injury’ to my left foot since the fall as I had a stress fracture in one of my metatarsals in September. Ugh. Oh well..it could always be worse!!

Kirkwood was AMAZING! First time for me, 2nd time for Nik but he was young when he went and just learning to snowboard. That mountain is a gem. Very unique terrain/layout, beautiful scenery, a ‘mom and pop’ feel. Most of the chairs are fixed grip 2 person chairs which is great for a powder day because everything doesn’t get skied out. Luckily the day we went it had been snowing for 2 days and we found some powder stashes of around 6 inches…not bad! Enough to get us hootin’ and hollerin’! :)

We moved out of the house in South Lake Tahoe (aka SLT). It was surprisingly harder and more stressful than we thought to get everything out fo the house and back into the Subrina. To top it off both Nik and I came down with a weird GI bug that morning so it was even more challenging to get things done when you are feeling yucky. But we did it!

After SLT we headed to San Diego to fly to Whistler. This was a doozy of 48 hours! We had to reorganize our massive pile of crap and pack for our Whistler trip, all while trying to tend to a 10 month old’s schedule who just wants to crawl/cruise/try to walk. Thats enough to accomplish in and of itself however us Altenberg’s like to complicate things. Turns out Sage needed a passport to fly from Canada back into the United States and we found this out 2 weeks before our Canada trip. (fyi incase you need to know, traveling from Canada via sea or land with an infant birth certificate is acceptable)

To get a passport within 72 hours, you must go to a specific government passport agency that does expedited passports. Well there are only 10 of them in the US and one of them happens to be in San Diego. So innocent optimistic us assumed that with an appointment and all the required paperwork we should be able to get one the day before we were set to fly to Canada (or so we were told on the phone). Wont get into too many more details here but suffice to say this was NOT easy and NOT straightforward and involved 3 separate plans (A, B, and C) walking to different government agencies throughout downtown San Diego among the homeless, and a 1 hour drive up to our North County to our storage unit. We ended up getting lucky enough to use plan B, as plan C was far from ideal. And Sage got a passport! Is this not the cutest passport photo you’ve ever seen?

More to come tomorrow!!