Shaving!

This post is a tribute to bravery, courage, and craziness. And to all those that are contemplating the plunge. And those who really just need to suck it up and be brave!

My dear husband had never, up until the time of graduation from BYU, done ANYTHING crazy with his hair. Never grew it out, dyed it, or shaved it off completely. He was a perfect child. Not a rebel. And then he married me.

Just kidding.

Kind of.

Isn't he handsome?

BEFORE

So upon realizing that he was *nearly* released from the clutches of the Honor Code, and only nearly, because he still worked on campus for the summer, and realizing that this was the ONLY TIME LEFT before entering the big corporate world that doesn't appreciate hard rock hair styles, he toyed with the idea of shaving his head. And I said, "Do it!" 

It was a Sunday night to remember. We talked about shaving his head after coming home from church in the morning, and by dinner time I had him convinced that he should do it. He was going to let me cut it all off!

Progress in the dark

But of course, what is an adventure without the N family?!? Not a very fun adventure, that's what. So pictured above, I have a head lamp and Mike N is holding a flashlight for me, since we decided to shave his head at their house (less mess for us, of course), and outside. So we worked with what light we had. Pictures courtesy of Melanie N. 

Now we got pretty close to skin with the clippers, and gave him fun hair-dos in between, but the real test of faith was when Michael let myself and then Mike shave his head COMPLETELY with a disposable women's razor. Ah, true love. And it was smooth as a baby's bottom. :-)

Thanks, Mike and Melanie! You guys are the best!

AFTER

He almost looks like a different man, huh? Hot stuff either way!

GRADUATION!!!

In late April of 2012, an historic event occurred: the graduation of us from BYU!  Woohoo!  We were dang excited to be done with school, and both of our parents came to celebrate the day with us.

How do you memorialize such an event?  We could probably write an essay about it, cite 20 sources, and use proper MLA formatting, or we could make a poster about it, choreograph a dance about it, code a computer program... wait a minute!  We're done with school.  We've got our degrees.  Maybe we'll just sit back and let the pictures do the talking.  Yeah...

Bree and Dad H were really excited

Who got the degree?

Mom & Daughter, so cute.

Bree in her element

Michael with Mom and Dad C

Do we look intellectual?  Do we?  Huh?

Bree symbolically putting her books AWAY!

Celebratory kisses are way fun...

Hip, hip, hooray! 

Rockin' our diplomas

Bree's graduation present from Mom and Dad H

As may be visible in future posts, life got rather crazy after this (as evidenced by the timeliness of this post), so this is all we're going to show for now.  Suffice it to say, we were super excited to be done with college.  We were a little sad to be done as well, but we're ready for our next adventures in life.  Hooray!

(PS, kudos to Karem Ryker for taking these awesome pictures)

April Showers Bring...

The month of April was an exciting one for the Chambers household.  We started it off in style, with an early Easter!  My cousins were celebrating Easter a week early so they could all be together, so Bree and I drove up to be with them.  The Easter egg hunt was a lot of fun with the little ones.

Grandpa or Uncle G, being himself

Just before arriving at Easter Sunday, our house was invaded by a furry little fiend.  A MOUSE!  It was severely gross.  We thought we could handle it, supposedly being grown-ups and all, but seeing it scurry across our kitchen counter and hearing it bang around inside our stove was just TOO MUCH.  We seriously considered moving... This led to nice little games of what we affectionately dub "Attic Tetris", where Michael rearranges all of the storage in the crawl space to look for traces of mice and set up traps and poison.

Michael "playing tetris"

By the time Easter came around, we were on second and third Easter, or so it seemed. It was great. It turned out that the Easter Bunny doesn't forget newlyweds, and this was our cute Easter morning surprise.

We had our decorations up--cards from Mom C and
an Easter egg tree like at Mom H's house.

We each got a magazine and a chocolate bunny.
Can you guess whose is whose?

After getting home from church, we decided to play with the Ns. But it was Easter, so we had to do something cool. So we left plastic eggs for them to find in front of their house and the one on the door held the following note.

Some of the awesome eggs we dyed with the N family.

Between shifts of playing with the Ns (they left us a very cool Easter egg hunt of our own in response) and dyeing eggs with them, we went to the Hs for dinner. The Hs are very cool and have the best granddaughters in all the world. We're pretty tight. Below are some pictures of princess/Harry Potter/Easter bunny stories that happened during our latest epic adventure.

Aside from all of the celebrations, April was fun and busy. We experimented with homemade oreos (see pictures), and then made over 90 cookies, creamed them, and stacked them on plates in less than an hour and a half to take to our fellow folk dancers one morning. 

First attempt--a bit "puffy"

Second attempt, marathon cookie making

We've also made many quick dinners that were a lot more delicious and fancy than we were anticipating. The chicken, pesto pasta and salad night wins, coming in at just under forty minutes of homemade dinner goodness. 

This was also wrap-up time for Winter Semester at BYU, and Michael was going crazy on his capstone project. He was amazing!! It took a few freak outs, and a few late nighters, and finally culminated in finishing at 5am on the day after it was due (which was totally kosher--professor ok'd). Bree was spending her time making sure all of the paperwork was done for all of her 150 internship hours she did this year, and dedicated one week to being the sole dishwasher for the sake of the capstone. She culminated her internship by having her "choir" perform at their end of the term hoopla/graduation/congratulations/etc thing put on by the English Language Center. And finally, she started to breathe again...

                                                                                        


Bree took these pictures of tulips (her favorite) on a walk between classes and her internship at the ELC.

And, despite her distaste for potatoes and most all things made thereby, she did succeed in making some pretty delightful deviled potatoes. Hooray!

One of the best moments came on the Sunday during finals week, after Michael turned in his capstone project and Bree solidly smashed her Astronomy final to A+ bits. We picked up the novels we were reading, Catching Fire for Michael and The Help for Bree, headed out to one of Provo's pretty parks, and read on a blanket for a few hours. It was idyllic.

Up next: Graduation and super awesome pictures!

March, March, Marching On...

March was quite the month in the Chambers household. March was so busy that we never got around to posting just how many adventures we were having! Apparently, April was also the same... So, to spare you, here are the highlights with photographic evidence of the coolest things that happened in March.

It all started off with a little jaunt to the east coast.  We stayed with Brianna's Aunt A and Uncle J in Maryland while we looked for the perfect apartment in Virginia.  This will be a very big move for us! We will be far away from our immediate families (sorry Moms and Dads), but it will be good to be near Bree's extended family.  They made me feel welcome and I look forward to getting to know them better.

These are our ridiculously cute cousins (1st, once removed, and across the country)  We loved playing with them!


Searching for an apartment was no easy task.  We had searched through quite a few complexes on the internet before we arrived.  Even still, there was a lot to choose from, once you got past the sticker shock.  Coming from Provo, when the sales associate asks "What are you looking for in an apartment?" an immediate list comes to mind.  The problem is, our list includes a disposal, a dishwasher, a washer/dryer in the unit, air conditioning, and preferably a bedroom door.  All of these came standard in every complex we toured, not to mention the swimming pool and tennis courts.  No, what they are really asking is "Do you want a lot of cabinet space in the kitchen?  Do you value more living space or room space?  How important is natural light to you?  Do you want an attached garage?  How about an iPod dock in the wall?  What about built-in surround sound?"  Faced with these questions, we found ourselves coming up with opinions on the spot.  Even still, we found some places we really loved.

Other than that, the trip consisted of a lot of driving (we bonded with our GPS and learned to avoid I495 whenever possible) and spending time with family.  We got a chance to explore the National Mall and see the Washington DC LDS Temple.  We even found time to drive through some beautiful countryside in Maryland on Sunday afternoon.  Having grown up in a land with little rainfall, I really appreciated the beauty all around us there.  We came back to Provo very happy.

Almost right after we returned, we went straight into the Spring Festival of Nations, our folk dance concert.  My Aunt K and Uncle G came to the performance, which was a real treat.  We hurriedly learned our Slovakian dance in a matter of days and managed not to look lost in the performance (despite the entire men's section being a full eight counts off for part of the dance).


My Dad turned 60 in March!  We made him a video, which was a lot of fun to make, though it took more time than planned.  Our favorite part to make was the bloopers section (about a third of the completed video).


 The rest of the month was spent in rigorous academic pursuits.  As the end of March neared, Bree would gleefully count the remaining days while I grew increasingly anxious about completing my Capstone project.  This project was meant to be in place of a Master's Thesis and caused both of us a fair bit of grief and lost sleep, but more about that in April...  We also, of course, took the time to enjoy good food and tried our best to help each other surface for air in the midst of school.

Bree studying

Michael studying, I think Bree wins

So the moral of the story is, we survived March.  It was long, stressful, exciting, and fast, but we got through it and lived to tell the tale!

Camilla's Golden Birthday Bash

This week was Camilla's Golden Birthday--when your birth date matches the number of years old you turn. So naturally, we had to have a fabulous party for our wonderful friend. We decked her out with a gold-sparkly headband complete with gold flower, some sparkly gold necklaces, and the apartment had more and more decorations go up as the afternoon went on. Here's a few picture of the beginning of the party--after that, we were too busy partying!

Birthday Girl in blue!

Jackie is the best, and she came over the night before to help make a chocolate cheesecake in my brand new cheesecake spring-form pans. Somehow, this is the only picture we took of our AMAZING chocolate cheesecake! It was DELISH.  

Veggie platter, cookie pops, yellow cake, comtributed by the boys' apartment, and chocolate cheesecake


These are the SUPER yummy cookie pops that my wonderful husband helped me make for Milla's Birthday. He even decorated them with all of the sprinkles, and ran on a late-night Jo-Ann's trip with me on date night to find the lollipop sticks. Isn't he the BEST?!? 

 

On Camilla's actual birthday, we went out to dinner at Pizza Pie Cafe for some yummy pizza and a birthday cookie monster. Birthdays should always include A LOT of dessert--this is the proper way to celebrate!