Friday, April 20, 2012

Maggie's Memos: The Forgotten Birthday, or How Badly I Can Guilt Trip Mama in One Post ;)

Yes, we're still here.  Seriously, I think we just need to assume we'll be MIA from the blogging world from February thru March each year.  Between all of the birthday parties and school activities, it's very hard to get Mama's attention, much less have a chance at the computer.

And speaking of the computer...Dude!  What's up with Blogger?  I knew they were changing things, but it was totally not cool to lose Picnik.com and have to learn a new Blogger format in the space of 2 days!!  Do the people who make these programs just enjoy making our lives difficult or something?!  I think the new Blogger stuff will be fine once I get used to it...I'm just having issues finding things since they're all in new places!

Anyway, enough excuses and rants for now.  As some of you might have noticed, either from reading the comments on my earlier post, or by reading Mama's "My Dolls" page on her main blog, Mama completely spaced my birthday this year.  As in...she didn't even notice she'd missed it until 10 days later...and that was only because I mentioned it!  Wow...I feel so loved.  It's not like I was ONE OF HER ORIGINAL DOLLS OR ANYTHING!!  I mean, Hayden gets a princess party, Charlie gets a dog, and I get...nada...zilch. Okay, honestly, it's not about the gifts (although those are pretty awesome, too!)  I'd just like to be REMEMBERED.

So because Mama felt completely awful (she's sooo easy to guilt trip), she did some thinking to figure out what she could do to make my birthday extra special.  She just told me that as a special birthday present, she's going to let Rachel and I go see "The Avengers" when it comes out!!!  :D  It will be an early birthday gift for Rachel, too (her birthday's on May 11th).

I can't even tell you how excited we are!!  Rachel and I loved Captain America, and Rachel really enjoyed Thor too.  I'm thinking we might need to have a marathon of origin movies before we go, just so we're up to speed with all of the Avengers.  I think we might have to borrow a few from Mama's brother.

Anyway, that's about all the news for now.  Mama's room is completely torn apart at the moment, as she was trying to juggle too many projects already and then decided to add rearranging her room and closet to the list.  So, of course, this means that OUR living space is all cluttered, since we're in the same room as Mama.  I'll be so glad when we get our new rooms and everything's back to normal!

Jenna is settling in well.  Right now she's sharing the room with Rachel and I, so we're pretty crowded.  I never thought I'd have My Little Ponies, carousel horses, and Sanrio characters in my room!  Ick!  I'll be so glad when Jenna gets her new room with Hayden.  Oh...you guys didn't know about that?  Yeah, Hayden and Jenna really hit it off...they have a lot in common and have been inseparable since Jenna moved in.  They requested to share a room, since in our new rooms there will only be enough space for 2 dolls per room, so all 3 Hathaway girls couldn't be together anymore.

Okay, we'll hopefully be on a little more often now that "birthday party season" is over, but I won't make any promises...just in case. ;)  Talk to all of you later!

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Maggie's Memos: Hatching Dragon Eggs

Since I knew all of our readers couldn't survive another week without hearing from me (hee hee), I thought I'd do a post about my latest goodies from Mama:  dragon eggs from "How to Train Your Dragon" (my favorite movie!).

A new Goodwill thrift store just opened in town, so Mama, Grandmama, and Mimi have been having a blast finding all sorts of treasures.  One of the things Mama found were these surprise dragon eggs.

Pretty awesome, huh?  I couldn't wait to see which dragons were inside!  Mama got one of these for 99 cents and the other one for 49 cents (because it was missing some of the packaging).

The back of the package shows the 14 different dragons you can get.  The three dragons on the top are the most rare, the 6 below are rare, and the 6 bottom dragons are the most common. 

The package also gives instructions on how to get the egg open.  Not only that, but it demonstrates how the dragons have interchangeable heads, tails, legs, and wings!

As the package states, you are supposed to move the...three plastic wraps?  Huh.  I removed one...maybe that's why I had problems!  But more on that later!

The instructions say to fill a bowl with warm water.  Thankfully, Mama was on hand to help me.  I don't think I could have gotten this up to the table by myself! :}

Next, you're supposed to submerge the egg in water and watch it foam and fizz and eventually dissolve.  At least, that's what it's supposed to do.  This is pretty much what my egg did the entire time!

Getting impatient, I finally decided to tear the egg just a little bit.  Then I ended up with a few little bubbles, at least.

After another little rip (I'm impatient, okay?), it started bubbling even more!

Finally, the water looked like this...and dragon parts were floating everywhere!  It was actually a little gross looking.  I should have let Tess see! ;)

When the water quit fizzing, I fished all of the parts out of the water...

...dried them off...

...and put them together.  Doesn't he look fierce? :)

I was super excited to find out that I had an ULTRA RARE dragon!!

See?  He's the third one on the top row.

Now it was time to try the other egg.

This one was a complete dud.  It absolutely refused to fizz at all, even with Mama's help.  I am wondering about that "3 layers of plastic wrap" thing, though.  I don't remember taking off that many layers.  Maybe it would have worked better if I'd gotten all of the layers off! :}

Anyway, since I didn't notice the instructions until typing this post, I resigned myself to ripping the egg open with my bare hands.

This was the result.

I dried him off and put him together.  On both dragons, the wings were super hard to get on!

After checking my guide, I discovered that I had the second guy on the second row of the RARE dragons.  Not too shabby for a thrift store find, eh?  I was totally expecting two common ones!

So, here they are in all their glory.  I probably won't interchange their parts too much, especially their wings.  It's too much work!  But they're still pretty cool.  I think they'll look great next to my Hiccup action figure. :)  I can already tell that Tess won't be too impressed, though. ;)