Our Christmas Village Has Been Deforested

And this is the reason. 

 Our darling, adorable little kitten, RacerX has been wreaking havok on the village. He's been very curteous with the houses, but the trees and Santa were not so lucky.  Especially Santa.

This is how the village started out yesterday.  But it didn't last long.  It was soon demolished.

So I put all the trees away in a safe place. And this is how our village looks now.

I'm probably going to be putting the Christmas tree up sometime this week.  I fear for it's safety with these two little guys.

Santa's Got a New Gold Bag

Our Putz Christmas village needed a Santa and sleigh.  I searched all over eBay until I found one that I was happy with.

I chose this Santa because I liked the size for the scale of our village. He's a little big, but he's not too huge. I also liked that he was one of the only ones that had actual brown reindeer. They aren't pictured because they didn't need a new paint job like Santa did. White reindeer have their place, but I think Santa's reindeer should be brown. Santa had seen better days. His paint was badly cracked and peeling and he lost his reins. So I gave him a bath in pure acetone to strip off all the old paint. And I did the same thing with his sleigh.

Then I carefully wiped off whatever paint particles were left in all the crevices and gave Santa and his sleigh a new coat of paint. I'm not sure what the original paint was, but I used Tester's model paints on both Santa and the sleigh. Originally, Santa's toy bag was a very dark, chocolate brown.  But, the set of model paints I was using didn't come with brown and I lean more toward the gaudy, metallic side of Christmas decor.  Luckily the paint set did have a lovely shade of shimmery, metallic gold.  So I painted the toy bag gold.  I love it!

And here's Santa with his all his reindeer:

(this was before Rudolph's time)

I still haven't come up with how I'll replace the reins and I think I need to add some miniature holly and maybe a tiny Christmas tree to his sleigh.  But, for now, he looks much better!

The Bibble

Wow!  My last blog post was about PREY?!  We've had lots going on since then.  But the biggest development is the Bibble.  Yep, that's the very first picture of our first little monster taken at my first appointment back in August.  The EDD is April 10, 2012.  We're nearly half-way through already!

We're very excited and we can't wait to find out more about our little one next week at the anatomy scan.  We already know that the Bibble is growing right on track and is VERY active.  So active that after 4 hours of ultrasounds we were not able to complete the NT scan.  But I just got the results from the 2nd trimester blood tests and everything is just fine.

I've been feeling pretty good.  I've been very lucky that the biggest pregnancy symptom I've dealt with is fatigue.  I felt a little sick in the beginning, but nothing too bad.  Michael has been absolutely wonderful.  He keeps on top of the litter box and puts up with me with extreme patience.  He's been taking great care of me and the Bibble.  I couldn't ask for a better partner in crime!

In the meantime, we already started adding to our little family.  We adopted two little baby boys a few weeks ago.

Bridget, one of our anatomy instructors, found these adorable little guys in her yard when they were just barely two weeks old!  She raised them by hand; bottle feeding them and doing a little litter box training and now they are happy wild little men.  Bridget is really an amazing person.  Two weeks later she found the rest of the litter and she's fostering them until she can find the best homes possible.  The big boy on the green pillow is Blade.  He's all black and fluffy and he loves to eat and bite fingers.  The little guy that's sleeping is RacerX.  He's very dark grey with black stripes and a curl at the tip of his tail.  He's very independent and loves to play with Judo.  And our little Judo is doing very well with her new little brothers.  She plays gently with them and licks them all over when they come to snuggle with her!  They are all such happy kitties!