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!

Spring is Here!!!

Can you believe it is April already?

Well, we had very warm weather early in March, some of the trees in our back yard were even getting little buds on them. We were able to turn on our water fountain back on as well.

This is a no-name tree in our backyard that bloomed first.

This is our favorite Maple tree. It is beautiful in the fall.

Gator and Ali enjoyed the warm weather too. Gator loves the sun and heat in general. His favorite spot in the house is right in front of the fireplace and sometimes he will find a little spot on the carpet where the sun is shining and curl up on it.

We took a blanket outside for the kiddies to suntan on but only gator used it.

Phil and I enjoyed the warm weather as well. We celebrated the warm weather out on the golf course. We love the course that we live right next to, so it is really convenient for us to just gather our clubs and hit the course.


I've been wanting to go see the Phantom of the Opera for a long time and it just turned out that it was playing here in Denver. We had a fabulous night going to the Denver Performing Arts Center and we both enjoyed the show so much. Phil promised me that we will also go to watch Rent and Wicked this year.

It's hard to see, but there are two dancing figure statues behind us that's really really cool.

This was taken after the show. I was humming the music still when we took this picture.

We thought spring was already here, but to our surprise, several winter storms came at the end of the month and we got almost a foot of snow. Hopefully the warm weather will come back soon.

Our backyard turned back into snow yard. We are hoping we won't have to turn the water fountain off.

Ali loves the snow. She will jump in it and eat it too! It is really fun and cute to watch her play in the snow. On the other hand, Gator does not like the snow. He will only go outside and find a path that has the least amount of snow on it and quickly do his business to run right back inside.


That's all folks for our March update. Stay tuned for more exciting April news.

PS: Congratulations to Susie and Tony for the birth of their second daughter, Sophia!!!

February

Hi everyone! I'm so sorry for the late February update.

This post will be a brief one since not much has happened since we last blogged. And for some reason I kept forgetting to bring my camera with me to places, so I don't have many photos to share with you.

We are still loving our life here in Denver.

We spend alot of our time playing with our kiddies. Here is Ali inside an empty bag of treats and Gator is looking up at us still hoping for a treat to come his way.

If the winter here is always like the winter we had this year, we will be very happy.

Yes, there were days it snowed and some days were so cold that we just wanted to stay by the fireplace, but it really was 100 times better than what we had expected. The best thing about Denver is that it is so sunny here with clear skies almost every day. It may be cold outside, but not gloomy to look at.

Most of our down time in February was spent decorating our house or looking for pictures, frames or mirrors to fill our empty walls.

Here are some of the additions that we made to our house.

We finally got our family photo framed and hung on the wall. We also got a sofa, coffee table and end tables. We think this living room is totally finished and it is our favorite room in our house.
Our bedroom was pretty close to being finished, but it just needed something on the wall above the bed frame. We couldn't find any cool frames, but did find these letters. What do you think?
We thought that we needed to spice up our guest bedroom. We added some more decorations, wall hangings, and a desk with computer. I apologize to the previous guests who had to stay in a much more boring room. This could be a great reason for you to come back for another visit. :)
Finally, we've added some more Florida stuff to our game room.

We also have been diligently improving our Wii skills. We are proud to say that now both of us are in Pro status at Wii Tennis. We also created Wii characters for Gator and Ali.

As for our pregnancy news...we are still trying. We have been what I call "casually" trying, but now starting March we are going to really really try. Hopefully soon we'll be able to share the good news with you.

See you again next month!

January 2009

January started off in the Johnson household with a big celebration, the Gators winning the National Championship title!! Both Phil and I wore our Gator gear to work and could not wait to get home to watch the game.
It was one of the most stressful games we've watched yet. All of us had at least one piece of gator gear on except for Ali.

We also had our third visitor to our house, one of Phil's best buddies, Troy (aka TK).
Troy was in town for the Rocky Mountain Dental Convention and came in a few days early to spend some time with us. Gator warmed up to Troy right away, but Ali growled at him the whole time he was here. We went to Champps (sports restaurant where we watched Arizona beat up Carolina), Sushi Den (Voted one of the best sushi places in Denver), watched Gran Torino, and watched tons of football. It was a short visit, but we had lots of fun.

We had unusually warm weather this month. One of the days, the highest temperature even reached low 70's (a record high here in Denver).
We were able to take Gator and Ali for walks and we even had to take their sweaters off by the middle of our walk due to how warm it was.

Phil took me to my first NBA game. Phil is a huge Jazz fan and they were playing the Denver Nuggets. We were able to get floor tickets right behind the Jazz players. It was so much fun.
We were close enough to smell D. Will's sweat!!!
Here is a player who we think looks so much like Ashton Kutcher.

We couldn't wait for the last week of January as we had planned to take a quick weekend trip to Salt Lake City to visit our family and also to watch the Lord of the Dance.
Phil's parents were awesome hosts.
Our guest bedroom welcomed us with a little goody bag with treats and fresh doughnuts for Phil on the bed. (Phil loves doughnuts!!!)
They also had our new favorite "Aveda" products for us to use.

We woke up the first morning to a yummy smell of a home cooked breakfast. Dad made these so called Strawberry Blintz. They were very delicious. This one was my plate...
This was Phil's... and wait 'til you see dad's plate.
Dad fixed himself this plate. Somebody loves whip cream!

After breakfast we went to see Jen (Phil's sister) and Dan's place.

We spent some time playing with little Lilly and Davis. Little lilly was just starting to take some steps.
We watched Davis and Lilly fight over a box of toys. oh, kids.
This is their family dog, Sophie. She is such a cute little Beagle.

We also went to visit Mark (Phil's brother) and Wendy's family. Phil tried to learn how to ride the ripstick with Zach and we also played Wii Tennis, bowling, and golf with the kids. Phil is now convinced that we need to get Wii at our house. Unfortunately we forgot to take pictures.

All of us went out to dinner and met with my sister's family at the Buca di beppo.
Here is all of us at the table, starting from my left.
Paul

Suku, Joshua and Aggie
Dan, Lilly, Jen, and Davis
Dad, Ashley, and Mom
Mark and Wendy
And... us.

This is how much food we had. The room we ate in was called the "Pope Room" and the statue on the middle of the table was a pope. Paul kept spinning the table so that the "scary" pope wasn't looking at him.
Little Lilly worked on getting her socks off of her feet, while...
Davis had successfully placed more pasta inside his mouth than outside.
Phil managed to put Joshua to sleep (once again).
Aggie contemplating whether she should try for a girl or not.
How can you not after looking at this little face. :)

We said our good byes to Aggie and Jen's families after dinner and the rest of us headed off to see the Lord of the Dance. We couldn't take any pictures during the show, but here are some pictures before and during the intermission.
Wendy and I were very excited before the show.
Phil and Mark had to have little treats and to my surprise they did sell these movie treats here. The show was unbelievably awesome. We could not stop tapping our feet and wanted to try the dance that they made look so much easier than it really is. If you haven't seen it yet, I have no doubt that you will love it. Go onto this website and see if there is a show coming to your area. http://www.lordofthedance.com/
We came back to Denver on Sunday morning and picked up our kiddies from the boarding place.
We brought out the bag of dog biscuits from Uncle Mark and Gator tore into the bag and got a biscuit out in less than 5 seconds. I wish I had gotten it on a video. They were so happy to be home.
Thanks everyone for viewing our blog. Please stay tuned for more exciting news from next month.