Christmas Crazies: Utah Trip

At sort of the last minute, we decided to tag along with my parents and Kenji to attend my cousin's wedding in Bountiful:

It was a beautiful occasion, and I am happy that we went.

Considering it was really just a weekend trip+two days' driving each way, I'm pretty proud of how much we were able to cram in. 

How did we survive road trips before hand-held technologies?

First of all, a sad note: We brought Pugslee with us on the trip, snuggled up in his dog bed.

This ended up being the last picture taken of him. He had a long life, and I think the long drive and super cold weather in Utah was too much for him, and he died the night of the wedding. 

You may not want to know the rest of the story, so I'm not going to include that quite yet. Maybe if I get requests.

Joel's mom got the flu right before Christmas and had to cancel her plans of coming to Oklahoma/Texas for the holiday. Sad. So she drove down to Bountiful from Boise to see us, and we had another mini Christmas!

Pretty dress for Pretty Junie

Mom always gives the greatest tea parties for her grandkids. Traveling tea parties!

We also got to spend some time with my aunt and uncle, who just adored June:

Dane, too.

June was screaming in every photo, except the one where the rest of us decided to scream.

We also spent some quality time with Evan & Holly and Cindy & Eric. It was great (and always hilarious!) to catch up with them. 

But we were especially grateful to spend time with George & Melanee, who even let us stay with them! We always have such a great time hanging out with them. We ate delicious food thanks to Melanee, and we got to hang out with Megan, too, despite her busy schedule. 

We always stay up late into the night, which is probably why we never get pictures. They would just be pictures of us sitting on the couch in our pajamas, mouths awkwardly positioned in the middle of speaking. But one of these days we need to document it.

But, since I don't have any pictures of all of us, I'll post these random pictures I happened upon:

Joel and George chatting at our wedding open house, circa 2004:

I can't even remember when this was; it must have been after a football game or something. 

Blast from the past, George! And I found a couple photos of George and Melanee and Samantha at BYU graduation. Pretty fun.

Anyway, it was a whirlwind trip, and June slept terribly. Silly goose. Don't know what we're going to do with her. But I think the trip cured of her impossibly picky eating, because she eats much better now. Weird?

Dane and June promptly reacquainted themselves with their toys upon our return:

And I finally managed to finish the very belated grandchildren quilt I made for Joel's mom. It turned out pretty well, I think.

And finally, we had fun over the holidays morphing our photos together on MorphThing.com. This is one of all five Hood siblings. Kind of creepy, huh? Especially thanks to Kenji's facial hair. Dane keeps looking at it, saying, "That's Mika. Wait, no. It's you, Mommy. Or maybe it's Kenji. Who is that?" I'm probably enjoying messing with his mind a little too much.