Hey guys, guess what!? We entered our first hedgehog christmas photo contest and took 4th place! We took 8th in the voting round out of 118 entries (with some very suspicious voting anomalies), and 4th in the judged round – that’s pretty dang good for a first entry.
Thanks to everyone who voted! You are all great!
http://www.carolinastormhedgehogs.com/christmas-contest-2013.html
Here’s the entry:
On the day after Christmas we packed up a minivan and headed out on the road for a trip to go visit family in Alabama. This was the first time we’ve traveled with Princess Pricklepants, so this was a learning opportunity for us. So far we’ve learned that traveling with hedgehogs isn’t as bad as it might sound. The kids have also learned that traveling with their parents is as bad as it sounds.
For this trip we took along another traveling companion, Fancy, who you probably remember from a previous post. Fancy is our giraffe friend who was a costar in the theatrical release of the drama, “The Princess, the Dragon, and the Giraffe.” Fancy has starred in many long car drive based dramas, including the early hit, “Ow!” as well as many other serial dramas like “Don’t Make Me Pull This Car Over,” “Does Anybody Need To Go To The Bathroom,” and the incredibly long running “No, We Just Got Food.”
After a long day’s drive, we pulled in for dinner at Cracker Barrel in Beaumont, Texas. Fancy generously covered our dinner at Cracker Barrel.
The Cracker Barrel cashier was quite surprised to be able to meet Fancy, we guessed that he had never met a giraffe actor of Fancy’s fame before.
Once we got checked in at the hotel Fancy called his agent.
No new jobs, but a he did send over a script to look at called, “Annoying Private Ryan.” Here’s a shot from one of the many, many rehearsals:
The next day we made it to Louisiana. The visitor’s center had a lot of construction work happening which created some tension between Princess and Fancy in the parking lot.
Then we made a startling discovery. The Louisiana Visitor’s Center was prejudiced against pets!
Facing grave injustice, Princess and Fancy made up and joined together in solidarity.
Together they laughed at danger:
Unfortunately, Fancy had broken the law. Princess was a strong law and order hedgehog, who felt she had no choice but to arrest him.
Princess had stark plans for the scofflaw Fancy.
Fortunately a very friendly and cooperative local construction worker stepped in and began the long needed process of bringing peace and healing between hedgehog and giraffe.
(Side note, has anyone noticed that Christmas keeps coming earlier and earlier each year? It’s not even January, and they already have these things up.)
Coming after this, The Perils of Pet Prejudice Part 2.
Princess got a new toy dump truck, a stuffed hedgie friend, a lovely Christmas outfit (to be modeled soon), a new hat and scarf. Her favorite toys – wrapping paper, bows, and a toilet paper tube. Next year we can just wrap a tiolet paper tube and give it to her.
Munching on ribbon:
Tubing
And playing in wrapping paper.
First off, OMG! We made Cute Cute Overload! Yay!
For an additional First off, Merry Christmas!
Secondly, there is a Christmas Photo contest we are in, so if you wanted to look at it and vote for whatever photo you wanted that’d be awesome. Don’t feel any pressure to vote for us, even if you’d feel terrible, lingering, pressing guilt about not voting for us, since our photo (#53) is really kind of good. We like it anyway. You can vote for as many entries as you want, but only vote once.
http://www.carolinastormhedgehogs.com/christmas-contest-2013.html
And finally, Princess has grown a lot since we first took that teacup profile pic (yeah, it’s a coffee mug, but she prefers “teacup” – she’s a dainty princess, after all). She was a teeny little baby girl at that point. Now she’s more like a teenage princess. In most senses.
So we though, “Hey, let’s take some pictures of her in the teacup (coffee mug) now, to give a little sense of how she’s grown larger and cuter, and more adorable, and sweeter, and oh, my little princess, I need to pick you up and hold you close, we’ll do photos later.” Later we did photos. This went poorly.
Wrong end.
Put her back in the cup, grabbed camera, she bolted for the wrong area. Though that corner did smell interesting. I understand that she had to check it out.
Back in the cup, grab camera, watch full bore escape attempt. Clearly she was not interested in the cup. At all.
Haley will help.
Sort of.
Sophie steps in.
More work remains.
Kind of cute, but the angle is all off. (Light isn’t great, either.)
Ta da!
That was the best we could manage out of 63 attempts, so I’ve decided to like it. There are a lot of photography nitpicky things that might be said about the photo by nitpicky photographers, but this is a hedgehog blog, not National Geographic, so it’ll do.
Well she was being really docile last night so we went and took a few more holiday photos. She even put up with the hat.
We finally have a few decent holiday photos from the latest attempt. Yay!
Hark, the Herald Hedgehogs Sing
The multi-talented Princess P. P. never fails to amaze.
Calmly and patiently modeling the hat that was surprisingly hard to sew.
Christmas means carnage!
“Please sit still, please, please. Come on.”
Pay no attention to the hand behind the chair…
Carolina Storm Hedgehogs has a Christmas photo contest, so we’ve been trying to get something going. She has not been cooperating.
Let’s see if we can get this going. It’ll protect her from the cold.
She really just wants to crawl through the sweater, more than stop when she’s in it.
Almost there…
And we’re done.
The Pleasantries of Princess Pricklepants 