A Busy Month of May

The month of May flew by us so quickly. Possibly because it was jam packed with so much fun and activities.

After the Furry Scurry on the first weekend of the month, we went on with our normal routine grind of working and playing with our kiddies.
Two days before Mother's day, I received a surprise gift at my work.

Everyone at my work got a big kick out of this one. One of them called her husband and told him that "Dr. Johnson received flowers from her dogs."
It was the most beautiful bouquet of lilies that I've ever received. They bloomed and lasted for more than a week.
"Thank you Gator and Ali!!!" (and mostly Phil!)

Another Mother's day gift was to go see David Copperfield at the Center for Performing arts.

We had a quick bite to eat and did some shopping before the show.

Here we are at the "Back Stage" coffee shop nibbling on little treats before the show. Phil always wants some kind of treats before any kind of show, whether it be movies or concerts or even magic shows.

We gave Mom Johnson a quick jingle to say "Happy Mother's Day" before the show.

We didn't know what to expect. This was the first time that either of us had been to a live magic show. We thought it was incredible. After every little act, we looked at each other and asked "how did he do that???". The last act of the show was the biggest highlight. David Copperfield was going to make 13 people in the audience disappear. He had 13 giant balls tossed into the audience and we were suppose to toss it up while the music is playing and whoever holds the ball when the music ends has to come up to the stage. And guess what??? Phil caught a ball!!!! I was thrilled. I don't think Phil was as thrilled as I was, but he didn't have any choice but to walk up to the stage. All 13 of them sat on chairs and a cover was pulled over them and about a minute after when they were uncovered, all of them were gone and reappeared behind our seats. It was so exciting. Phil was given an autographed photo of David Copperfield and was told never to tell a soul what really happened. :)

I got it out of him after I took this picture how it happened. :)

The following weekend was time for our 2nd road trip since the Salt Lake City trip we took last year. We were headed to El Paso to see our friends Susie and Tony. They had just given birth to Sophia in March and their daughter Gabby was turning two in May.

Kiddies were very excited, but little did they know that they would be traveling for about 10 hours.
We filled up our gas tank to the rim and Phil picked up "Road treats" and we were on our way.
I just wanted to share with all of you what exactly Phil brought back from the store that he thought were good "Road Treats". He was very happy about his decisions. :)

We started our trip at 3:30pm on Friday. Our first stop on our trip was Albuquerque, NM.
We entered in the address of our hotel and our Navigation system "Natasha" told us that it was going to take us exactly 6 hours.

Road trips are fun because there is so much more wiggle room in the agenda. We also could take our kiddies with us. Although, it was pretty hard to travel with them. Ali cried almost every hour of the first night in the hotel. We assumed it was because it was a different place and she must have not liked it.
We arrived at the hotel in Albuquerque. Doesn't it look mystical? (sort of?)

We unpacked and got the kiddies settled in and walked over to a Mexican restaurant for dinner.
The next day morning we got on the road at about 10 am for El Paso, TX.

Please meet Gabby and Sophie:
This is "care-free" Gabby in her PJ's.

This is "prettied-up" Gabby with her pig tails.

And.. This is Sophie who is only couple of months old.

Oh, and I can't leave out Albert, their first baby. Albert is named after The University of Florida's mascot.

We spent Saturday and Sunday with them and left their house on Sunday afternoon. It was a short trip, but we had so much fun with their little girls. It sort of was like a mini parenting workshop for us. Susie and Tony are such a good parenting team and we learned so much from them by just watching them. Here are some pictures from our trip.

Gotta love those hound dogs...

Albert knows to wait patiently for some food scraps.

Gator and Ali learned pretty quickly too.

Our Kiddies loved Gabby and I think Gabby enjoyed the attention from two other dogs as well.

Gabby is playing "mom" with Sophie.

Here is Super mom, Susie.

Gator is taking a nap with Albert.

Here is Gator taking a nap in the lawn. "Ah, This is a vacation!"

And here he is again, napping.

And, again.

There are so many more pictures, but I'll add just one more.

Gabby eating watermelon was one of the highlights of the trip. She ate it like in this picture for little bit, and then she would set the watermelon on a bowl and put her mouth to it and eat it that way too. At the end, she would take the bowl and slurp all the juice up. It was really cute. Susie and Tony, we had so much fun with your family. Thanks for your hospitality. We can't wait to get together again.

Since we came back to Denver, the weather has been really nice. There were some sunny days mixed in with some thunderstorms, but overall beautiful weather.

This month's addition to our house was this grill. As you can see in this picture, Phil was very excited to grill up some corn on the cob and some bbq meat.

One last thing planned for this month was to run in the BolderBoulder 10K.
This is me and Candi all geared up and ready to run. Candi has ran in this race for the last three years and she convinced me and Phil to run in it this year.

I told Phil that our goal is to finish strong to the end.
We did finish strong. We kept a good pace from the start to the finish, about 91/2 minutes per mile.
This was by far the best race we've ever ran in. The energy in the crowd was so good and it was amazing running into the CU stadium to finish. We are definitely going to make this our annual race.
We don't have any pictures from our actual run, but you can check out these links to see some pictures that were taken of us while on the race.
http://www.brightroom.com/go.asp?53585592

http://www.brightroom.com/go.asp?53585593

Thank you so much for keeping up with our blog. I'll end this long blog with a picture of Phil and the kiddies enjoying the beautiful weather.

April Showers (snow) bring May flowers

April was another fun and exciting month for the Johnson family.

The first weekend, I flew out to Gainesville, FL for one of my best friends bridal shower. (Disha) It was unbelievably awesome to see "The Girls" again (minus a few). It has been more than three years since I've seen some of them. We don't kiss and tell in our group, so I won't share every detail of our weekend together, but I will share some pictures with you.

Here is all of us right after couple of hours of spa and relaxation.

This is all of us all dressed up in front of our limousine for the night.

This is at a little cafe where we ate breakfast before we said our "good byes" 'til Disha's wedding in June.

Some of us could not pass up on the opportunity to stock up on more Gator gear. Alissa, Anabel and I stopped at the Reitz Union before leaving Gainesville.

Oh, just one more picture. This is Screech. He is Alissa's baby, well, up until she had real babies. Soon, you will get to meet the other babies of my friends; Albert, Tucker, Macchi, and Sake.

Talking about babies, we had lots of fun with ours this month.

We try really hard not to feed Gator and Ali with our food, but they are very persistent on trying to taste anything that we eat in front of them.

Here is the close up shot. Aren't they so cute?

We had our fourth visitor to our house. Angie was visiting Colorado from Okinawa for job hunting. She stayed with us for couple of nights. I'm so mad that I didn't think to take any pictures while she was here. Hopefully, she had a good impression of Denver and will end up taking a job near us.

We thought we were done with the snow, but we had another really big snow storm again. It always seems to snow on the weekends here.

This storm was on Friday afternoon and we had about 6 inches of snow already.

This is Friday night, and it is still snowing and Gator is really not happy about having to go out in snow to do his business.


We tried to make it fun for Gator to get out in the snow. Here is a little video clip of it.

It is Saturday morning, and it is still snowing!

























Phil made this big snowman, but because it warmed up so fast, it toppled over the next day!
















This is Saturday night, and it is still snowing. By Monday though, most of the snow had melted and it was back to 60's to 70's weather. Crazy, huh?

Ali loves to look outside the window, especially if Gator is still outside sun bathing. She will also look outside and start growling at birds.

So, we added this little birdhouse in our backyard hoping it will attract more birds. We have not seen a bird eat from the feed inside the birdhouse, but we did find a bird bathing in our water fountain. I tried to get a picture of it, but I must have scared the bird and it flew away.

Just this past Saturday, we participated in an event called Furry Scurry. It is an annual event of a two mile walk around a famous park here called Washington Park. All the proceeds go to help the homeless animals.
It was a little bit chilly, but many people came out for the event (More than we expected). We think there were more than a thousand dogs there.

We had just finished the registration and we are headed off to the start line. Gator did really well, but we think it was little bit too overwhelming for Ali.

Can you see the white banner way up ahead? That is the start line, and we were still pretty far up in the front of the pack. There were all kinds of dogs at the event and we did meet up with few of the dashchunds as well.

We moved away from the group whenever we could, so that nobody would accidentally step on our little kiddies (Especially Ali).

We did it!!! We are almost at the finish line and Gator hadn't barked or misbehaved a single time during the walk and Ali only struggled a couple of times. We were very proud of our kiddies.

After the walk, we went to eat sushi at a new sushi place near our house. We were so happy when a boat full of sushi was brought to our table. I believe we tried: A spicy tuna/salmon/shrimp crunch roll, sushi boy roll, and Phil's favorite, Spicy Tuna roll. We already have a favorite sushi place just two blocks from this place and we got to know the owner of that place really well, so we sort of felt guilty eating at this new place. We'll have to go eat at the other place soon.

We are hoping for more sunny weather in May and another exciting month to share with you all. Thanks for reading our blog and as always, we love your comments!