... that it's Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas!!!!!!!

Since Christmas is only a week and a half away (and we are leaving in a week to go to CA), I figured we better get our decorations up!

Actually Matt was really awesome and put these lights up right after Thanksgiving with the help of our BIL, Andy.  I was super lazy with everything else and didn't get anything out until tonight... oops.  But it looks cute now!

I wanted a star... then decided this was the next best thing.  And now I secretly kind of love it.

Matt's mom had the perfect ornaments: beautiful red balls and adorable jingle bells.  Plain and beautiful.  I also decided to add a few star ornaments made in Bangladesh that my boss gave me this year for Christmas:

Most of these decorations are my mother in law's.  In fact, all of them are except for the "Let It Snow" blocks and the tree skirt.  But at least we put them up!

I love Christmas!!!

... that we almost lost Tina?

I am a bad parent.

In my defense, Tina 1 is kind of crazy.  She is very jumpy, extremely fast, and not afraid to dive out of your hands and plummet to the ground.

Note to potential hamster owners: dwarf hamsters are the cutest, but they are all kind of jumpy and therefore very easy to lose.  However, I have found that the Djungarian dwarf hamsters (the two that Kar and Cait gave me for my birthday) are much calmer, less afraid, and make better pets, especially for children.  This is also the type of hamster that I had as pets in my 3rd grade classroom, and the kids loved them.

Tina 1, on the other hand, is a Roborovski dwarf, and let me tell you, she is FAST.  She has gotten away from me several times, but she hasn't escaped the playroom yet (knock on wood).  She is just so stinkin jumpy, and very easily spooked, it's hard to hold on to her!

On Tuesday, we had Mira over and of course she wanted to look at the hamsters.  She LOVES them.  So I got Tina 2 and Karboochie out and put them in a little plastic bin on the ground so that Mira could watch them.  She actually wanted to read them a book, which was so adorable.  But then I took out Tina 1 and was holding her in my hands, and with so many people in the room she got spooked.  She jumped loose and started tearing around the room.  I quickly barricaded the door, thinking that we could just catch her like always.  And then I saw her running toward the closet.  I had almost grabbed her when she slipped into a thin crack between the wall and a permanent drawer on the floor of the closet:



I started freaking out.  Where did that crack lead?  Did it open into the wall?  the floor?  Was she stuck?  Would she stay in the playroom?  Could we get her out?

I was devastated.

I set up her toy log as a ladder going into a bin with food to see if we could lure her out:



And at the last minute I put her cage on the floor with the door down and extra food inside.  I was hoping she might just crawl in during the night and stay there.  We covered the heater vents in the room and blocked off any other escape routes we could see and hoped for the best.  But the next morning when I checked her cage, the food was gone and she was NOT in there!  She had climbed in, taken the food, and climbed back out.  She is so stinkin smart!  She didn't even go near the log ladder and bin trap.  But I could still hear her shuffling in the closet, so I was really hoping she was just hiding back there and couldn't get into the walls.

So I set up my next trap:

I even smeared a little peanut butter on the board and the inside of the hamper.  I left it there all day, and was so nervous to check it when I got home from work.

No dice.  It hadn't been touched.  Which didn't really surprise me because hamsters are nocturnal and I thought she would just sleep all day.  I decided to leave it there overnight, but I put some carrot bits on the board before we went to sleep just to make it extra appealing.

This morning, I ran into the room to check the trap: two carrot bits gone, no hamster.  She didn't even climb to the top of the ramp!  She is just too wary to get on anything she doesn't know.  Why does she have to be so smart?  But as I sat there in despair, I heard a very quiet rustle coming from under the bed!  I yelled for Matt to come and help me and immediately blocked off the closet.  Then I had Matt pull out the trundle bed VERY CAREFULLY as I watched for Tina 1.  I could hear her scurrying as he pulled, and eventually saw a little pile of food that she had stashed down there!  We were close!  He lifted one end of the trundle, and there she was, just a tiny furball of trouble.  But as soon as I went to grab her, she bolted toward the closet.  When she couldn't get back in, she panicked and bolted again.  After 5 minutes of chasing her under the bed and barricading more escape routes, I finally caught her!  I was so relieved!  Not only did I have her back, but I really really REALLY did not want to have to tell my in laws that there was possibly a dead hamster somewhere in the walls of their house.  Luckily, that is not the case, and Tina is safe and sound locked back in her cage.  She is definitely grounded for a few days.

But it's okay, because I love my hamsters!!!

... that I am a super nerd?

This is the story of how this happened:



I have always loved The Hobbit.  When I was a kid, my dad used to read it to us as a bedtime story, and I can remember all of us laying in my parents' bed while he read to us about Bilbo, Gollum, and the dwarves.  We had a cartoon version of the movie taped off of TV on a VHS that I'm sure is still in my parents' house somewhere.  I don't remember how young I was when I first read The Lord of the Rings on my own, but I remember how stoked I was when the movies came out.  Needless to say, JRR Tolkien played a significant role in my childhood.

Anyway, this picture actually started with MY BIRTHDAY!!!  (That's right, we're still talking about that.)  Matt had promised to get me tickets to see The Hobbit in the REAL theater (now that we live in Utah we rarely see movies outside of the dollar theater) for my birthday.  But amazingly enough, Chad won us two tickets to an early premier!!!  And what was in the fine print?

A COSTUME CONTEST!!!!!!!!!!

Those who know me well know that I never pass up the opportunity for a costume!  I had these costumes planned out in my head exactly 5 minutes after I saw the tickets.  And most of the stuff we already had on hand!  Matt wore an old shirt, a pair of pants rolled up with a rubber band, and believe it or not, he already had that wig.  He used a piece of material that we found in the sewing closet for his cloak and just cut two strips of fabric and tucked them into his pants for suspenders.  I had a long grey dress, and we raided Matt's mom's Halloween box for a witch cloak.  After that, it was only the details that were really hard...

Using wire, felt, foil, cardboard, a hot glue gun, gold puffy paint, and an old barbie from DI,
I singlehandedly made:

The Leaves of Lorien

Arwen's Evenstar Necklace

and Hobbit Feet

I am awesome.

Except for the part when I forgot to flip the other foot over before I glued stuff on, even after I reminded myself to flip it about 20 times.  So I made 2 right feet.  Blerg.  Except for that, I am awesome.

The jewelry was kind of hard!  The leaves were the hardest, but only because I am such a perfectionist.  The necklace and the hobbit feet I may have made last minute under my desk at work... I am such a good employee.  Especially cause I also ran to the theater on my lunch break and stood in line to grab the tickets:

 

That is called a nerd fest.  A theater employee even called us "Hobbit people."

Our costumes were ready, we had the tickets, and then Matt and I both got stuck at work late!  We rushed home to put on our costumes and grabbed some Del Taco to eat in the car on the way to the theater.

Note: Del Taco is not my favorite.  But it is my husband's favorite.  And this is my face whenever I am eating any kind of chili cheese fries, so really I was pretty happy.



We made it to the theater 5 minutes before show time.  Luckily, I was able to pick out our seats before hand, and they were pretty good.  I was sad because I thought that we had missed the costume contest, but just as we sat down, a Warner Brothers rep stood up and said "Okay, we're gonna have a quick costume contest before we begin!"  I WAS SO STOKED!!!!!  We ran to the front of the theater with 2 other nerds in costumes and a guy with a ring on his neck.  Needless to say...

MATT WON THE CONTEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Granted, there were two prizes and only 5 people to choose from.  But Matt's costume won one!  Maybe it was because when it was his turn, he acted out the ring falling onto Frodo's finger with his wedding ring and the entire audience went NUTS.  My husband certainly has a flair for the dramatic, and I couldn't love him more for it!  He won a little gift basket with a copy of the book, a tshirt, pins, two more books, the movie soundtrack, and a couple movie posters.  It was so fun!!!  And I was so proud of our costumes!  They were so awesome that a random stranger asked us to take pictures with them after the movie.  Seriously.



I forgot to mention that Matt did all of this with me while he had a really bad cold.  He had a runny nose and was tired the whole time, and he still dressed up, won the contest, and stayed out late with me after a long day at work.  Who else would have done that with me??  I really do have the greatest husband in the world!

I love my husband, JRR Tolkien, and costumes!!!!!!!

... that it's STILL MY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!

That's right.
The celebration never stops.

Matt kept his word: on Monday, we went out to buy me a new purse!  After searching though 2 different TJ Maxxes for a purse that I had found earlier but couldn't seem to find again, we found this one:



Isn't it cute?  I love it!

Matt also insisted that I have a treat for my birthday, and decided that I needed a Tres Leches cake!

It was delicious!  He is the greatest :)

And the party didn't stop there!!!  My arch enemy Chad wanted to take us out for a little dinner and bowling celebration as well.  Since he insisted on going somewhere that he could watch the BYU game, I graciously agreed to have my birthday dinner at Iggy's.  Even after that game got cancelled, we still went there so that we could watch the Jazz game.  I'm so nice on my birthday, even to Chad.

Truth be told, Chad is pretty awesome.  He fraudulently used other people's personal info to win me tickets to a pre-screening of The Hobbit on Monday!!!  I guess he knows me pretty well, probably from stalking my Facebook and this blog.  Creeper.  But hey, we get to see The Hobbit, so I am stoked!

Towards the end of dinner, all the waiters burst out of the kitchen, yelling loudly and very obnoxiously.  As I turned around to see what the commotion was, I thought to myself, Oh someone must be having a birthday.  How embarrassing.  This was my face when I finally realized that they were coming to our table:

A chocolate sundae later, we were ready to hit the bowling alley, AKA Matt and Chad's very favorite place in the entire universe.

I did pretty good that night, alllllmost broke 100.  You would think that I would be a lot better than I am, considering how ridiculously often Matt and I go bowling.  But don't worry, Matt recently taught me a new bowling walk which actually has helped improve my game.  Because apparently I have been bowling the wrong way for the first 28 years of my life.  Whatever.

HAPPY STILL BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!!!!! 

... that IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!

Hooray for my birthday!

We started out the birthday weekend with a trip down to Provo to visit my sisters!  I walked into Kar's house to see this!

They got me not one, but TWO new hamsters!!!!!  I was freaking out.  I LOVE them!!!!!

They were planning on buying me one hamster, so they bought me a new cage a few days ago and decorated it with the names "Tina" and "Karboochie," thinking that I would just put Tina in this new cage with their new hamster, which they lovingly named Karboochie.  They decided that they couldn't keep a hamster alive on their own, so they waited to get one till Saturday morning.  And when they got there, the pet store gave them two hamsters for 5 dollars!  Which was good, cause you can't actually put hamsters together in the same cage unless they've grown up together.  So now I have Tina, Tina 2, and Karboochie.

AND I LOVE THEM SO MUCH!!!!!!!!



I don't even care that I am a crazy pet lady.  3 hamsters and 3 snakes?????  I obviously cannot control myself.

After I played with both hamsters, we packed up and went to Legends Grille, where Cait bought us all lunch on her student meal card.  Not too shabby!  Reminded me of eating there as a student... weird.  After lunch, Kar made appointments for us to get birthday pedicures!

Matt and I had to rush back home so that Matt could go to the Priesthood session of Stake Conference while I made dinner:  Momma's spaghetti.  Perfect!  Then we went to the Saturday session and relaxed for the rest of the night.

The next morning, we went to the Sunday session, then relaxed the whole day!  Talk about my ideal birthday!  Matt got me some beautiful flowers:

And a gift certificate for a massage!  He also wrapped me up a few other gifts: an old purse of mine that I had meant to throw away, and his parents' copy of "The Two Towers" DVD.  Why would he wrap these?  Because he wanted to give me a new purse (I have been talking about getting one for a while), but he wants to go shopping with me so I can pick it out!  And he promised to buy me tickets to see "The Hobbit" when it comes out in a few weeks!!!  Isn't this guy the sweetest??  I think he just wanted to see the look of confusion on my face when I opened these weird presents.  Mission accomplished.

He also insisted on making me dinner all by himself:

Lemon chicken with roasted broccoli and rice pilaf.  Killer!  It was perfect, and he did it all by himself!

I love my birthday!!!!!!!!!!!!