What I did on my Winter Break...

Did you ever have to do these reports at school? What am I saying? I think it was a requirement at all elementary schools. Except it was usually "What I did on Summer Vacation". And involved beach vacations, playing outside, and messing with my little brother. And some dance competitions thrown in for good measure. Oh how I wish I still actually had a Summer Vacation, and a Winter Break, for that matter, that I could get paid for and not be forced to take Paid Time Off. Oh well. I'll call it Winter Break to make myself feel better.

So for MY Winter Break, I was off of work for 12 glorious days, including weekends. I'm actually still on it. Woo hoo! So far, it has been spent with my husband's family and my family and we had a great time at both. Tyler's family is huge, mine not so much, but we always have so much fun when we visit both. I think there were about 20 people at Tyler's and 6 at mine, plus 2 dogs.


I am super blessed to have married into such a great family, full of wonderful personalities, senses of humor, and kind hearts. They may have started a rumor that I was pregnant this year, but that is neither here nor there. Our visit was still great. :)






And of course, my immediate family rocks, though I am a little biased of course. You won't find a more loving, caring bunch in the world and I love spending time with them. We always laugh so much and there's nowhere I'd rather be on Christmas.





Top 5 moments of Winter Break so far:
1.) Being with family
2.) Seeing 3 of my best friends
3.) Seeing all of my nieces and nephews reactions to Santa Claus when he visited my sister-in-law's house on Christmas Eve!
4.) Seeing National Treasure 2 with my family. Super fun movie everyone. And then dinner after.
5.) Sitting on the couch playing with my brother's Mac Book. "Photo Booth" is HILARIOUS. I only wish I had emailed myself some of the pictures we took. I haven't laughed that hard in a while.

Lots more top moments, but I think I've reached the word limit on my "What I Did on Winter Break" report. Hope everyone out there had a Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

White Christmas

I just wanted to say, for the record, that this movie with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, is excellent. I hadn't seen it before - I have no idea why not, as I LOVE Christmas movies, but it was on tv last night and I forced my Grinch-y husband to watch with me. I think during the times he looked up from espn.com, he actually enjoyed what he saw.

Christmas in Vermont in this movie looks awfully pretty and I must admit, I'm a bit jealous of it right now as I sit in 70 degree weather here in Atlanta. And I'm also bummed now that I missed White Christmas at the Fox because I know I would have loved it. But, we are going to The Nutcracker next weekend, so I'm not complaining. It will be my first trip to the Atlanta Ballet, and I am way too excited. My husband on the other hand took a little convincing, but here's hoping it's not too painful. It's the Nutcracker though! Who doesn't love The Nutcracker?! Also, he gets to go to Aspen for 4 days in January, so I don't want to hear any whining about sitting through a 2 hour ballet. ;)

Wow, I got way off track. Point of this post: Watch White Christmas, if you haven't seen it already. I'm also planning to check out Holiday Inn, which stars Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Man, I love old movies.

Thankfulness

I've been thinking a lot about thankfulness lately, for obvious reasons, and have realized that I have so much to be grateful for. So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I have decided to make a list of some of the things I am most thankful for in my life. In no particular order.


1.) God's grace
2.) Beautiful, crisp fall days
3.) My husband's sense of humor
4.) Fun shopping outings with friends. Named Brenda. :)
5.) Lazy Sunday's
6.) My health
7.) Good books
8.) Movies that inspire a sense of wonder
9.) A loving family
10.) The ability to travel
11.) My sweet, snorting, lovable dog
12.) Wonderful friends
13.) New babies
14.) My grandfather being at home
15.) Turkey and dressing
16.) Loose fitting pants :)
17.) My home
18.) IMDB
19.) Netflix - especially because of the WGA strike, which is something I am most definitely NOT thankful for.
20.) My church family
21.) Laughter
22.) coffee with hazelnut creamer
23.) hopefulness
24.) My faith
25.) A 3 day work week!!

May I always remember these things and others that I am thankful for, not just at Thanksgiving, but all year long.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Jen: Bargain Shopper Extraordinaire

I am not always the most frugal person - I tend to buy things when I see them and like them and not wait until they go on sale. So sue me. But I have gotten better about using coupons at the grocery store. Point for Jen. However, today I scored what I believe to be a major bargaining coup. My office was having an office furniture sale today, getting rid of extra chairs, shelves, filing cabinets, etc. We've needed a new chair for our computer desk for a while, due to a somewhat destructive bulldog. So, I was able to score this sweet, ergonomically awesome chair for $15. Regular price? $889! I actually got something we really needed and saved 874 bucks in the process. SCORE. Sadly, it was only an office chair. If only the coffee table I want would go on sale....

Happy Halloween from the Burns!

Because Tyler and I are huge dorks, we decided to dress up in absolutely ridiculous costumes for Halloween. We were a hit at the costume party we went to and with the kids on Halloween night. However, at the costume party, we pretty much just had to stay in a room by ourselves and let partygoers come to us. I was too fat and Tyler was too tall. It was pretty awesome. So I figured why not share our dorkiness via my blog? Hope you all had as much fun as we did!

Ireland!

My husband and I just got back from a trip to Ireland with his parents - I highly recommend it. It was a beautiful, relaxing, wonderful trip! I also highly recommend taking 2 weeks off work if you can - it's awesome.

We flew into Dublin and then just made a circle around the country - staying in Galway, Dingle, Killarney and then back to Dublin. My favorite part was Dingle town, with the Connemara region north of Galway coming in at a close second. The coast in Dingle was absolutely gorgeous and the mountains and valleys in the Connemara region were breathtaking.

The food was not as bad as I'd heard/feared it would be. It's all just very heavy. I ate a lot of vegetable soup over there and their Irish brown soda bread is so delicious. I need to find a recipe for it to see if I can even come close to making it at home. But yes, you get kinda tired of fish and chips after a while and we did eat Subway one night we were there. That was the best darn Spicy Italian I've ever had I think. Oh, and the Guinness. Oh the Guinness. It's so delicious over there. Tyler was in heaven - ha!

The driving was also quite an experience - or I guess I should say being a passenger was. I didn't actually drive, but I almost had several heart attacks on the narrow roads with oncoming traffic zooming past on one side and a hard, unforgiving rock wall on the other! It really was insane to see semi trucks, flying down the road at about 120 km per hour, driver talking on his cellphone. And this wasn't an interstate. It was about the size of a one way street over here and it was in the middle of the country. And being on the opposite side of the road didn't help either - but I must give props to Tyler and his dad for being champs about the driving. Well done, Burns men!

So anyway, we had an amazing time and wish we could have stayed longer!

Mission: Accomplished

Well, we did it! My teammate, Angie & I successfully walked all 60 miles of our Breast Cancer 3 Day Walk. It was harder than I thought, emotional, inspirational, rewarding and I'm so glad I did it. I fared a bit better than Ang did and escaped relatively unscathed by blisters, pulled muscles and generally just came away with an all-over soreness that went away in a few days. A little knee issue, but it's all better now. It really was amazing to see all the women and men walking - all different shapes, sizes, walks of life, and reasons for walking. There were pregnant women - and I mean PREGNANT and might give birth around mile 32. There were survivors and women who were going through treatment and it was amazing to me that they were able to get out there and walk. What amazing strength they must have.

It really was a wonderful, lifetime experience that I would do again in a heartbeat, as challenging as it was. I was so happy to be able to walk in honor of my grandmother and in honor and memory of the thousands who have been touched by it. When all was said and done, the Atlanta 3 Day raised 6.6 million dollars for breast cancer research! Amazing.

The camp life was much better than I thought - it was about 45 degrees in the mornings, so we froze a little bit, but the days were beautiful and the community support and cheering stations were so great. It was kind of a disappointment not being cheered for everywhere I walked after I finished! The food was delicious - and they made sure we always had snacks and drinks on the route. Let me just say that there are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on graham crackers that exist that I did not know about and I am on a mission to find them so I can have them at home. They are wrapped to look like ice cream sandwiches and are delicious. I had an awesome sleeping bag that kept me nice and warm at nights and the port-a-pottys, well, I just had to get past it. It is what it is.

And my teammate, Ang, was awesome! She soldiered through wicked blisters, bad arches and walked the whole way without getting picked up by one of the vans. She totally rocks and I had the best time being her teammate and tentmate. She is a true wilderness girl and without her, our tent never would've gotten put up. I called her a Red Feather, but she didn't so much like that - I just meant she had awesome camping skills, as opposed to Troop Beverly Hills, which is the troop I would have been a member of.

What a gift it was to have my health and such a wonderful support group to be able to do this walk. The Lord has truly blessed me!

Here are some pictures from the walk - enjoy!



Tent, sweet Tent. And yes, that's a TNT towel. We Know Drama, baby.









Ahh, camplife.










My nemesis, the port-o-potty's.








Tyler came to cheer me on at one of the cheering stations along the way!










Closing ceremonies - Everyone held up a shoe in honor of the survivors.