Top Ten Reasons Why It's Good to Have All Girls #10

#10: It's really easy to make them match.

These are the girls' Christmas dresses for 2007. They had their pictures taken in them, along with their new cousin Cadence (the new daughter of Tammy's sister Maria and hubby Will). Cadence had the same dress as the rest of the girls. When the pictures come in, we will post. I wish that we were able to go the studio, sit for a picture, and immediately walk away with a digital file that we can do with as we please. Instead, the studios are still taking analog photographs, and they still "own" the image, and it is probably illegal to even scan it to post it on a blog. Oh well..

We are all decompressing from the holidays. The kids are enjoying their new things. There is a problem with the train table though. The kids like to take the track apart, and it's so complicated to put together that it just ends up staying apart until a tall person comes along to put it back together for them. We are probably going to just glue sections of it together and leave them a few track pieces separated so that they can be creative.

Sara is slowly becoming more interactive. She has smiled (real smiles) for Mommy a couple of times (all Daddy gets is gas smiles--except for one time that looked like it may have been real, but was still very likely just gas). It is difficult to have to wait so long for the interactive phase. She is almost 4 months old (but only 2 months from her due date). She has beautiful blue eyes, and she's somehow looking more like a Hood everyday. I guess you are what you eat.

Google Bomb

This is kinda cool. We are now thoroughly googlable. Just enter "Joseph and Tammy Hood" into Google and see what you get . . .

Update: When this blog was first posted, searching "joseph and tammy hood" in Google would show our blog at the top. Well, It seems that's not the case anymore for some reason...

Christmas 2007

Santa brought the kids a new playroom. The kids got a train table, an easel, and a play table . . .

Grandma Baker helped Santa with the train table (it was a little out of his price range) . . .

The big man even had time to doodle on the chalkboard after setting up the presents and eating his cookies . . .

Amy and Mikala had never seen something so cool as the train table (at least not anywhere besides Books-a-Million). They ran straight to it at 7:30 and we finally coaxed them away from it at 10:30 by explaining to them that Santa had also left them presents at Grandma and Grandpa's house . . .

Claire was plenty content just dreaming of sugarplums and fairies . . .

And the littlest elf stayed asleep through it all.

Christmas 2007

Date Night

Nothing says date night like a Glock.

Caleb and Katie (Hood[3]) took us to the firing range Friday night for date night. Caleb brought his gun, and we rented one at the range. It was Tammy's first time shooting something more than a BB gun. For Joseph, being the man of men that he is, it was not his first time, it was his second. Shown above is the result of a little friendly competition between Tammy and Joseph. Tammy's shots have circles and Joesph's shots have x's (hard to see from picture).

We shot at 7 yds, and it was a tie. Afterwords, we all went to California Dreaming. Nana and Pops (Hood[0]) watched all the kids, half of which slept the whole time.

Reserved Assigned Parking

The humble working man has always striven to find new ways to stick it to the man. This resourceful recumbent cyclist has found a way to park in the big boss's parking spot--audaciously attaching his preposterous vehicle to the ominous "Reserved Assigned Parking" sign.

We just got new cell phones. Who knew they were making phones with built in cameras? Anyway, expect more 1.5Mpixel pictures on the blog (instead of the normal 6.0Mpixel ones). It's easy to just pull the cell phone out for random things we see as we're oot and aboot--like Grandpa's bike parked at his work place - the TOC (Transmission Operations Center)

Generation to Generation

This tape is 20 years old. My Grandma Baker gave it to us (my generation) to listen to on Sundays when we came to visit. Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of me sitting in the corner next to the tape player, pressing my ear to the speaker (the volume was turned down low because the adults didn't want to hear it), and mouthing the words.
I recently asked my grandma if she still had that tape. She said she did but she didn't know where it was. One Sunday, she handed me the tape on our way out the door to go home. She had found it when she was getting her Christmas stuff out of the attic. I was ecstatic. I couldn't wait to play it for the girls. I started wondering if we even had a tape player. I knew the stereo on the entertainment center had a tape player, but it's ancient and i didn't know if it worked. The CD player on idoesn't work so why would the tape player work? I popped the tape in, and voila. Amy and Mikala LOVED it! They started dancing and singing right away. This song is "Itsy Bitsy Spider" at the part, "Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain."
Here they are dancing to "Ring around the Rosie." I hope they can enjoy some of the same memories I had as a child.

Christmas Queens

Amy (middle) and Mikala (bottom) saw a dress up opportunity when we brought out the Christmas stuff. The tree skirt became a cape, and the stockings were actually used as such. We have been very busy this year, and our Christmas decorating has been neglected. This time of year is usually marked by Joseph performing treacherous acts of bravery involving icicle lights, a latter rated for 200 pounds, a greater than 200 pound man, and a 30 ft gable. We also usually have a real tree. This year, it's a 3-ft-walmart-charlie-brown-fake tree. Once again, we have a crawling toddler (isn't she cute?) who would not enjoy anything more than to eat the tree ornaments, so the charlie brown tree is on top of our entertainment armoire. When the semester's over in a week, we'll get the house lit up and stuff. One day we will be out of school...

Name That Baby

One of these photos was taken years ago. The other was taken yesterday. Let's play Name That Baby. In fact, let's play:

• Name That Baby
• Name That Year
• Name That Location
• Name What's on that Baby's Face.

The winner will receive nothing. GOOD LUCK!

Fall

The Hood[1] and Hood[2] cousins spent time together at Virginia-Hylton park with thier dads. The mothers were able to get some much needed time to decompress (i.e. clean the house). The leaves were the rich, beautiful colors of fall: bright red, brilliant yellow, and bold orange.

Thank You NICU

State-of-the-art, just-like-the-real-thing, you-must-really-love-your-kid bottle. $7.48 each

Hopital issue, disposable, you-might-as-well-take-em-home-cause-we're-gonna-throw-em-away-anyway bottle. $0 for a bag full

Finally finding a bottle Claire will take?

priceless.

Thanksgiving

Some of the Hood side extended family gathered at the Hood home for Thanksgiving Dinner. Present: Hood[0], Hood[1], Hood[2], Hood[3]*, Jessica with Fiance Jamie, Grandma Scott, Tiffany with this month's boyfriend, and Janis' kids Hanna and Haley. A few more were in and out during the day. We had an excellent meal, and of course, we brought out the traditional "Sombrero of Thankfulness," donned by Mikala this year.


*Family Array Notation: surname[index], will be used throughout this blog to provide a shorthand method for addressing Hood Family branches. Hood[0] refers to the Root Node (Thomas E., Nancy and family members still at home). Hood[1] refers to the branch of the first born (Thomas N., Heather and their offspring). When a Hood child leaves home--i.e. flies the coup or cuts the proverbial apron strings--their branch will then be assigned an index equal to their birth order. This convention can be extended to future generations simply by adding a dimension to the array, i.e. Hood[2][1] for Amy's branch (or Hood[2,1] if you prefer rectangular array indexing). This convention was officially adopted by the Hoods in 2002, and clarifies statements such as: "We'll meet you at the Hood's House at 6:00, and the Hood's will be Babysitting, and the those other Hood's will met us at the restaurant at 7:00."

Sleeping Child

The most powerful combination of emotions in the world is not called out by any grand cosmic event, nor is it found in novels or history books, but merely by a parent gazing down upon a sleeping child.

-Thomas S. Monson

They are angels of God in disguise; The sunlight still sleeps in their tresses, His glory still gleams in their eyes, These truants from home and from Heaven, They have made me more manly and mild; And I know now how Jesus could liken The Kingdom of God to a child.

-Charles M. Dickenson

...and through the woods

Amy and Mikala spent the day yesterday in Newberry with Grandma and Grandpa Baker. Their favorite part about going to Newberry is the trampoline. "I wanna bounce" is the first thing Amy says when she gets there. The rest of our family joined them after work for a pre-Thanksgiving dinner. The kid's cousins were there too: Ethan, Evan and Ari. Mikala was pretty grouchy (Grandma let her stay up too long the night before--invoking her grandmotherly right to lax discipline). Amy's cousin Tyler has made Amy scared of monsters lately. Every time she would hear a sound, like an acorn falling or crickets chirping, she said that it must be a monster. Some good news is that we were able to drive the van up to Newberry. It needed a repair that may or may not be permanent. Unfortunately, that leaves us crossing our fingers every time we drive it.

Today by the Numbers

162,795 - Mileage of our Kia Sedona

2200 - Price to replace automatic transmission for Kia Sedona

0 - Amount we budgeted for automatic transmissions this month

83 - Percentage of our family that fits in our Ford Escort

248,131 - Mileage of our Ford Escort

Sara Christine Hood

This being our Inaugural Blog Post for our newly created blog Life is Hood, we thought it would be appropriate to post a photo of the most recent addition to the Hood family: Sara Christine. Sara was born September 11th. We adopted Sara on October 8th. She was born two months premature and has been home with us from the NICU since November 2nd. Sara is one of the many reasons why Life is Good at the Hood Home. Three other big reasons are her sisters: Amy, Mikala and Claire. Even though the big sisters are a little jealous of Sara right now, they love her very much and like making her laugh. Between Sara and Claire, we get very little sleep these days. We average about 5 hours per night (weekends are better). We find that good time management is the key to our success. We keep a detailed weekly schedule, planned to 15 minute intervals. Heather has been staying with us for the past week while Thomas is in Savanah working at his new job and buying a house. Tyler and Ainslee are here too, and it can get to be quite a mad house sometimes with 6 kids confined to 1200 sq ft, but Amy and Mikala do have a lot of fun with their cousins.