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!