Blossoming Anew: About Ellie

A bullet-point biography:

I was born in Fukuoka, Japan to my Japanese mother and my American father.
My dad minored in Japanese in college and went on to teach English in Japan. My mom worked in the administration of the school my dad was teaching at, and he was the cool, new American hottie. All the girls fawned over him, but my mom beat all the competition and they got married.

We moved to Houston, Texas when I was about 2 or 3 years old
We lived in San Diego, California for a year when I was 5 and enjoyed the beautiful beaches. Then we moved right back to humid Houston and stayed there. Forever.
When I was about 10 years old, my parents got divorced and my dad remarried. I met my Mexican stepmom, 3 step-siblings, and my half-sister within that the same year. Meet my forever family 💓:

I moved to Utah in 2013 to attend college. Living by myself for the first time kind of felt like constantly falling out of the chair and having my roommate take pictures of it. Adulting is hard.
In 2015, I decided to take a 2 year break from school to serve a church mission in Nagoya, Japan. We rode our bikes everywhere and broke them at least once a month, lived off of cheap konbini food, and scared a bunch of Buddhists off the streets by talking about the Book of Mormon. I don't know if that sounds fun to you, but to us it so much fun and so rewarding.

On my mission, I met my future husband! (Don't worry, we followed all the rules.)
A month after coming home from my mission, we almost immediately started dating. Hehe 😉

(January 2016 in Japan)

(January 2017 in Utah)

On April 13th of that same year, he proposed and I said yes!!
A few months later, we got married in the Payson LDS Temple for time and all eternity on September 1st, 2017. 💖

And life's been great ever since!

Some fun facts about me:

I started figure skating when I was 5 years old. My biggest accomplishment was placing 2nd in Regionals when I was about 13. Nowadays, I coach or just skate for fun. Enjoy this trading card picture of me from when I was 8. (Yes, I actually had my own trading cards and I passed them out to everyone in the third grade because I thought was so cool and pretty much famous already.)