Katy scores another football! And we got our car back!!!

If this keeps going the way it's going, we're going to have to get her a jersey! Katy just adores football. Yuki does too, which is ultimately why Katy got another football today.

We drove a long way away to get it too, but got to do so in our own car. We finally got it back from the body shop after driving around a rental for 3 weeks. Keep reading for why we had a rental for so long...

... back to the football ...

Mr. Field Notes thought Katy deserved to have her own football after Yuki usurped it from her on our last football adventure to the dog park. This is the brand new football she just got a week ago and was bought specifically for Katy after she went bananas over the one she found at the park and wanted to bring home. Well, at the dog park to break it in, Yuki just would not let Katy fetch the ball, or alternately, Katy just wouldn't assert herself to snag it out from under Yuki. So, Mr. Field Notes had to get Katy another football today so they could both have one. Now, really, we did not make a special trip to the store (an hours drive away) just to get Katy a ball, but rather were already in the vicinity on account of needing to go retrieve some custom framing that was finally ready. Target just happened to be conveniently located and we thought we might be able to find a broiler pan for Mr. Field Notes to use in his new oven. The footballs were an impulse buy, so to speak.

Katy certainly appreciated it and posed for a second or two with her new ball. I had to snatch the camera and quickly take a pic to capture the fleeting moment so the photo has a funny exposure and is out of focus, but you can imagine how majestic and proud she looked in real life as she posed.

... and so the car ...

A guy slammed into us in rear end collision while we were stopped at a red light back in February. It seriously screwed up our Honda CR-V (incidentally just a few weeks after I finished paying it off! Murphy's Law, isn't it?) He hadn't even hit his brakes, so it was a pretty good size jolt we got. No one was hurt in the slightest but our car sustained enough damage to warrant 3 weeks in the body shop. The other driver's insurance covered the repairs and the rental. The only pain in the butt was that we had to wait almost 2 months before our car actually got into the body shop.

We got a brand new Toyota Highlander to rent. It was nice. Huge. HUGE. Compared to our CR-V. There's no way we can transport 2 newfies, a baby in a car seat and any stuff in our CR-V, but we could if we had a Highlander. It rode much more smoothly than the CR-V too. More like a car than a truck. Ours rides like a truck. But, the Highlander got horrible gas mileage so we weren't tempted in the slightest to go out and trade our wrecked car for a Highlander.

I am glad to have our own car back. No more worries about whether the dogs would mess up the rental too much. They only road in it once, to go to the dog park, the day before we got the call our car was ready — Murphy's Law again. So we (ha ha ha!) I mean Mr. Field Notes, had to clean up the Highlander, when if we had known, could have waited a day on then not been bothered with the clean up. Oh well.

Pur CR-V looks a little strange with a brand new back end and darned if it doesn't look much, much nicer with a washing! I swear they returned it to us cleaner than it has ever been since we took possession of it 3 years ago. We both remarked we're going to have to actually wash it every once in a while because it looks a lot, lot less ratty when clean.

My other brilliant (I think?) idea with the car is to install the baby's car seat now and put a stuffed animal in it to get the newfs accustomed to having to sit in their places and not jump or crawl over the back seat. I think that will allow us to see whether they might ever be able to ride in the car with the baby. Otherwise, it will be just the dad guy taking them to the dog park for years while I stay home with the baby. Or vice versa. Humpf on that. That's no fun.