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.

Easter Festivities

We had a lot of fun this Easter weekend, doing the traditional things.
We kicked things off with some egg dying:
First, Dane put eggs in all the colors.

Then he'd check to see if they were satisfactory:

Pink didn't work very well.
But green did!

I was impressed with how well he used the little wire egg dipper thing.
But then hands were just easier.


Dane chose blue as his favorite.


Then, Easter Sunday morning, Dane found what the Easter bunny left him:

The Easter bunny left quite a mess, leaving carrot crumbs and muddy footprints all around the Easter basket. Fortunately for us, the mess was completely localized on this piece of posterboard that happened to be right under the Easter basket. Whew.


For the record, I didn't know my lumpy, pajamaed form was in the picture.
Rainbow beanbags!

And yes, I know Dane has his pajama shirt on backward. He does it on purpose because he thinks it makes him look like a football player. He says letters on your shirt mean you're fast.

We had a little family photo shoot before church. I must say, I think I live with two very handsome boys.

Joel taught Dane how to look dapper:

But Dane had his own ideas of how to pose:


Easter family!

After church, we headed down for our 9th Annual Easter Dinner with the Penovich family.
The Penoviches are so kind and friendly that they often have many guests for Easter. But this year they are empty nesters, and we were the only guests! (Including Kenji and his friend, Spencer). We felt special.
Our gracious hosts, Todd & Lanez:

After a delicious dinner, they hid 75 Easter eggs for Dane, Kenji, and Spencer.



Sometimes he'd have to race Daddy to get the eggs.


Dane found more eggs than Kenji and Spencer put together!


Happy Easter!

P.S. I have a few fun videos to post, but I'm having trouble uploading them. Stay tuned!

Rear Ends and Green Things

So, I was rear-ended a couple of weeks ago.

I'd just exited the freeway and was stopped at the light, checking traffic to turn right when I felt a big jolt. I looked behind me and saw a lady in a Lexus SUV saying "Oh no!"
So we exchanged insurance information, and I went on my merry way.

Only to realize I am an idiot.

You know, for months I've been thinking to myself as I'd drive, "I don't really know what to do if I'm ever involved in an accident. Exchange insurance, something, something. I should probably look that up." But I never did. And there I was, ignorant and the victim of a minor collision. Apparently, you ALWAYS want to call the police and have them file a report so there is an official document of what happened. Otherwise, the people at fault can just claim it wasn't their fault, and you're kind of stuck because it's just your word against theirs. It occurred to me to call the police, but I thought, "No one's hurt; she's acknowledging it's her fault; no need to waste anyone's time," but that is idiot thinking. Probably anyone reading this already knows these things. But I didn't.

Luckily, it still all worked out well. She acknowledged fault and contacted her insurance, got us a rental car, and they got our car all fixed up. Dane was really excited about our new, silver car.

It's not a particularly exciting story. The impact wasn't even that hard; it was about like braking harder than usual. I'd kind of been feeling bad about myself for being dumb after it happened because at that point we didn't know if she was going to really take responsibility or not. But then we drove past a serious accident with injuries and stuff and realized that we were really fortunate, especially since I'm pregnant and all.

Speaking of which, we have our ultrasound tomorrow! We're probably not finding out what the baby's sex is, but I am really excited to see its little features and make sure everything is developing healthily. I told Dane, "We're going to see pictures of the baby tomorrow; isn't that exciting!"
He said, "Uh huh. But, not izzattly because I don't want to hear the baby because it's scary."
I'd taken him to my last prenatal appointment, and we listened to the heartbeat. It didn't occur to me until Dane told me he was scared that the loud, windy-sounding thump thump of a baby's heartbeat in utero could sound frightening to a child. Especially when he was probably expecting the baby to say hi or at least cry or something.
Anyway, we'll update about that soon.

P.S. The pregnancy is why this post is titled "rear end" in plural, because my rear end is ever expanding. More details soon.

St. Patrick's Day
A leprechaun visited our house on St. Patrick's Day, leaving his footprints everywhere and one-syllable clues toward some sort of treasure. We helped Dane sound out the clues and went on the exciting treasure hunt:






Where could the next clue be?

Hmm....

(Joel felt quite proud that this picture shows that Dane bears some physical resemblance to him.)
There's the rainbow (and a clue that said "DIG")

A pot of gold!

What a nice leprechaun. And a cute boy.

Finally, my sister-in-law Laurie Jayne commissioned me to make a blessing outfit of lederhosen for her baby boy. Here are the results:


I was happy with how they turned out. And you can even see the baby boy himself modeling his outfit on her blog.

And stay tuned for ultrasound photos!