Bingo Party

The Annual Anderson Family Bingo Party was held this weekend-which is essentially White Elephant. There are always a few recurring gifts that people dread getting, but this year, Justin Bieber was definitely the hot item!

We left our camera in the car, so it was fogged over for this picture, but we had to get Cherilee with her fake mustache and bacon band-aids!

Jake was the first lucky recipient of the Justin Bieber doll-how exciting!

Josh, being the horrible uncle that he is, stole Justin Bieber, purely to torture his niece.

And yes, he got the lump of coal that he really deserves for Christmas!

Alex and his "Romantic Evening Package"

In the end, the ever-deserving Andrea, got to go home with Justin Bieber.

The very exciting news of the night for Josh is that his brother, who is either very gracious, or has too much money, bought a season pass to Beaver-and Josh got it! Geez! A treadmill, a beautiful daughter, and a season pass to Beaver, what a spoiled boy!

Merry Christmas to all! We are so excited at our house!

Famous Idaho Potato Bowl

Anyone who is reading this, I'm sure is already aware that the Aggies lost their bowl game :( So I won't dwell on it a ton. But we did end up going, and I'm really glad that we did. It was a lot of fun, and the game was...good except the last 2 minutes. There ended up being a smorgasbord of people that we went with. Josh drove in a car with his friend Jonny, his brother Jake, and Jake's friend Kami. I drove in a car with myself and Meili, my parents, my brother and his wife, daughter, and dog. We left Saturday the 17th at about 10 in the morning and got to Boise about an hour before the game. After the game, we ate dinner at Cheesecake Factory and left the next morning. My car stopped at Shoshone Falls on the way home-which was beautiful!

The players as they were coming on the field

Josh, Meili, and I. Look at how cute her hat is-made by my talented friend, Hope. Our tickets were pretty good-we were on the bottom level on about the 20 yard line. Luckily for us, most of the action happened right in front of us.

Spuddy Buddy: the mascot for the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl

This is the view from where Josh was sitting

Kami, Jake, Josh, Meili, Nelson, and Jonny

The good news about the game...

-The Aggies played really well, and dominated most of the game.

-It was cold, but not as cold as I thought it was going to be-and warm enough that we were able to take Meili with us.

-We supported the Aggies in their first bowl game in a long time.

-The Aggies won more games this year than the last 3 years Josh played combined.

The bad news...

-The Aggies lost.

-In my (very humble, uneducated) opinion, it wasn't the players fault that they lost-which was the part that sucked the most for me. When Josh played, we were always able to say that the O-line didn't block well enough, or the quarterback made poor decisions, or they had stupid penalties. I felt like we lost this game, purely by conservative coaching and play calls.

-It came down to the last 2 minutes-which was the story in about 9 or 10 of the games this year, and one of these days, that is going to be the death of me.

-It was still cold.

I'm still so glad we went, and excited for next year. Go Aggies!

The Month of the Hair

This month, I realized that Meili doesn't fight me as much when I try to do her hair anymore and when I do it in the bathtub, it's even better. Plus, her hair is also getting to the length where I can do more than the one ponytail on top of her head. So I have, of course, taken full advantage of that. Therefore, many of the pictures I took have to do with her hair.

I wish you could see this better because her little pigtails were so cute!

A different way I tried pigtails.

This next picture is called "Unsupervised..."

Ha Ha! Love this picture! Naughty or nice? You decide?

The added bonus of doing her hair is that when I take it out at night, it looks all crazy like this!!

As for milestones for the month...

-The first question everyone asks-is she walking? Well...no...not exactly. She got to the point where she was pretty comfortable walking the length of the rooms throughout our house, but then we went to Boise, and she was always either in her car seat or being held, so now she's backtracked a little. But we're not concerned because she is fully capable, it will just be on her own time-like so many other things in her life.

-She started out the month shaking her head at everything: "Do you want to eat this?" (Head shake.) "Do you want to read this book?" (Head shake.) "What would you like to eat? (Head shake.) Then she started kind of saying "Na," now she has learned a very distinct "Nooo!" and yes, that is still the answer to everything.

-She still has just the 2 crooked teeth, but I'm thinking another is trying to pop through right now.

-She's mimicking more and more everyday, and gets more and more fun everyday.

If I Could DVR My Life

I promised myself that after Meili turned one, I would stop the monthly updates. But then she just did too many things this month and I made the last year of my blog into a digital scrapbook-which I love! So, I guess you will have to put up with more regular updates.

Maybe it's the fact that Meili turned one, and so now I really realize how fast time goes, or maybe now it's sunken in that she will only be this size for today, but this month, I've just kept thinking about how I wish that I had the whole last month recorded. I know there would be so many scenes that I would replay over and over.

As far as milestones...

-At the beginning of the month, Meili finally got her first tooth! By the end of the month she has...one tooth. And it looks like it might be coming in a little crooked. But we'll take it! We have all worked hard for that one tooth.

-Meili has taken up to six steps at a time, but for the most part, she's just stubborn. She'll try to walk when she wants to, but if we try to push it at all, she just sits down. So we're letting her go at her own pace.

-It's as if Meili now knows that she is a one-year-old. She all of a sudden got super picky about eating. There was about a week, that she would eat fruit and junk food and that was it. She also decided that it's time for her to start talking. She jabbers to everyone as if they should know exactly what she is saying.

-She has just barely started making animal noises. She's done a lion/panda/tiger a few times (because in our family, they're all the same noise-roar), and she's pretty good about doing a monkey-especially if she sees a picture.

-She also points at things that she wants, and waves bye when she feels like it.

-And of course, the development we're most excited about (sarcasm)...She is OBSESSED with the book The Night Before Christmas. I like the book and everything, but I just don't understand how kids pick their favorites. It's a book much like many of the other books we have, but she wants to read this multiple times a day, and multiple times in a row. Today I tried just talking to her about the pictures, and she looked up at me like "those aren't the words."

K, we're shifting topics now...

This is titled "How the Gods of Football Shined Down (yes, that's right-shined) on Romney Stadium." So for those of you that don't want to read about Aggie football for the next couple of paragraphs, you are welcome to skip this section.

Starting off with some background...I have been somewhat of a fan of Aggie football for as long as I can remember. But more seriously for the last 8 years. For as long as I can remember the Aggies haven't been very good at football. Listen...I endured 3 years of Josh playing football, and in 3 years, the team won nine games. One season the offense didn't score a single point in 4 games straight, and I became the Queen of finding the silver lining. I also endured games that we lost 42-0, 63-10, and screwed up in games in every way imaginable. But I pressed on and never lost faith-I also never believed that things would really get better. In all those years, I have never been so frustrated, and disheartened as I have been this season...And in the end, that just makes the story that much better.

So, now fast forward to the Louisiana Tech game this year. It was truly disgusting, and after 4 should-have-been wins that we lost in the fourth quarter, I decided I couldn't take it anymore. I told Josh that I wasn't going to anymore games this year. But, Josh being the wonderful banker that he is, he ended up getting tickets to the San Jose State game because he was the best in the district. So I felt bad not using tickets that were given to him as a reward.

The week before the game, I kept going back and forth trying to decide if I could handle another heartbreak, because it was supposed to be really bad weather. The day of the game, it was snowing pretty hard. I waited and waited and waited for it to clear up, and it never did. So about an hour and a half before the game, I texted a couple of my friends to see if they would watch Meili. I still hadn't heard from either by 12:30, and the game was at 1. So Josh started to get ready to go without me. Right when he was on his way out the door, one of my friends texted me back, and said she could watch Meili. So I got ready as fast as I could, we got a bunch of cold gear together, dropped Meili off, and made it to the game a few minutes late.

Josh had heard that if we took cans of food to the game, we could get free Chick-Fila. So we started walking around to find where we needed to turn the food in. As Josh was walking around he told me to stop by the Icon table to guess our scores for halftime. I filled out my guess, then wrote down all of his information, looked to see if Josh was anywhere nearby to guess his score-but I couldn't see him, so I wrote down the first 2 numbers that came to my mind. Utah State 10, San Jose 7.

And then there was the game. It was pretty much the same as usual...awful. Only this time it was colder.

At half time the Aggies were down 20 to 7. I asked Josh if he was ready to go home, and he said that if the Aggies got down by 3 scores, we would leave. Right before the second half started, they announced the winner of the Icon half time prediction. Someone named Josh Anderson. Hmm...that's weird. It couldn't be MY Josh because his score was off by 13 points total-which is quite a bit of difference when it comes to football. Josh wanted to go check.

We walked up to the table, and I said, "My husband's name is Josh Anderson, but it couldn't be him, cause his score was WAY off." (I should know, I guessed it.) The man at the table showed me the paper and sure enough, my handwriting. So JOSH WON A TREADMILL! Yea!

But that's only the beginning of how the gods of football shined down on Romney Stadium...

(I just wanted to point out, that everything had to align for us to win the treadmill. If I hadn't gone to the game, if we hadn't gotten to the game late, if it hadn't been so cold, we probably never would have won. So it was meant to be. Someone knew that Josh and I are truly meant to be skinnier.)

Now, we'll fast forward to the 4th quarter. If there's one thing I know about the Aggies, it's that incredible things happen in Romney Stadium. However, usually they do not benefit the Aggies. In the 4th quarter, the same player (who will remain nameless, because I think he was also partly responsible for the win in the end) turned the ball over 3 times in 3 consecutive series! So I figured this was just more of the same that I have seen for years. But somehow, in someway, the Aggies pulled ahead! It came down to the last 3 seconds in the game, and I knew that even with 3 seconds-it wouldn't last. San Jose decided at the last minute to try for a field goal...a 69 yard field goal. Josh said to me, "I know no one in the NFL has kicked a field goal that far, but I don't know about college." Yeah, famous last words. I had flash backs of Fresno, who, a few years ago beat us at the last second with a 59 yard field goal-which was a school record. Like I said, if there's anything I know about the Aggies, it's that with them, incredible things happen. Luckily, someone had a lot more faith than I did, because the Aggies BLOCKED THE FIELD GOAL, and we miraculously won the game!! What a beautiful day!

That's just the beginning...

After the game, the commentators on the radio started talking about bowl games. They said that if the Aggies won 2 of their last 3 games, they would be bowl eligible-which hasn't happened since 1997. If one of the 2 games they won was Nevada, they would have better than 50% chance of going to a bowl game. If one of their wins wasn't Nevada, they would have less than 50% chance of going to a bowl game. I really had no hope then. In all 6 years that the Aggies have been in the WAC, there's 2 teams they've never beat: Boise and Nevada, and with the rocky road they had had this year-no way.

Without going into anymore detail. Yes, the Aggies did beat Nevada-which is unbelievable in itself to me. Even after the win, I still didn't believe they would get a bowl game. One thing my dad has drilled into my head is that NCAA stands for Nobody Cares About the Aggies.

But then, the announcement came on Monday. Not only did the Aggies get invited to a bowl game, but they got invited to one that is extremely close to us, and if everything goes as planned, Josh and I will be spending Saturday December 17th at the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in Boise, Idaho!!! WOO HOO!

Here is our beautiful girl-who was such a trooper at the Nevada game!

Go Aggies! I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN! I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN! I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN!