Tuesday, November 30, 2010

HEY EVERYBODY!

We are ONE YEAR OLD!

our plans for the day are as follows... we will read our birthday book, open some more presents and all of our cards, Mommy will make us Daddy's Famous Banana Pancakes, then we are going to the zoo! It's going to be a great day. Mommy will blog about it all later, we promise!

It's a Sock Monkey Birthday

We had the kiddos first birthday party on Saturday at our pool. It was a really windy day in Ewa, but we tied down our decorations the best we could and still had a great time with our Hawaii friends and family. The babies had a good time but got really tired by the end--i almost thought they wouldn't make it to the cake and presents! Don't worry though, they held out and found some more energy for the best part of the day! Thanks to everyone who was able to come and to our family and friends back home who sent presents for the kiddos!

Snuggling up with my big boy!Meet some of our guests...we didn't get pics of everybody!

Tracey, Connor, and Baby Amelia

Elizabeth and Bethany
Jenny and Caedmon

Uncle Bryan and Nora
Aunties Jenn and Sarah
Auntie Marybeth and Nora
The Decorations




Cupcakes, two 1's...looks like 11!


hanging out in the pool
nora just loves her floaty
Holden thought the water was too cold! He just wanted some love!

Birthday boy they seemed to like their cupcakes more this time than when we took our smash cake pictures...maybe because they were a more managable size...or maybe they are just getting used to the sweet now! lovin' it

with my sweet babies
The Presents---the were very interested in this part...loved the paper and the unwrapping part...and the toys part....basically they quite enjoyed the whole thing!







The loves of my life...we're just missing Daddy

Monday, November 29, 2010

Movie Monday

~Happy Birthday Party Day~

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Burns Family Thanksgiving--Deployment Style

Hello. Mike Here.

So I am sure there are many of you out there asking "What does Mike do on Holidays over there in Iraq/Afghanistan"?

Well let me tell ya.

You can usually start off your day with an organized run...This year was the "Turkey Day Trot", a 5k around the FOB (Forward Operating Base) ...if you know me, I don't like the cold (which it is right now) therefore I save these runs for the 3 other seasons where morning temps hit 60 or above. So instead of running...you guessed it, I went to work? Who knew there could be so many problems on a holiday? Why cant these guys just take a nap on holidays celebrated by Americans? Heck, it's a holiday where you eat a lot of food and take a nap ...it's a double win!

One of my great friends and fellow Warrants, Ruby Freeman, runs the Dining Facility and coordinated to have our entire section sit together for lunch. So at 11 o'clock everyone from the Support Operations (SPO) Cell came together to share the Thanksgiving meal. In addition to the folks from SPO, my friend Jason who works on a different FOB was able to fly in and enjoy the meal as well. The contract staff did a great job this year with the food and decorations. From the moment I walked into the door my senses were overcome by sights and smells of what was to come. While I am away from my family and home, it is still nice to have such a great group of folks to call friends. After the meal, the rest of my day was filled with a movie and lots of relaxation as I took the time to think about what I was truly thankful for this year.

Me Me and JasonSPO Thanksgivingthe decorations

A Message from Mike





and on the home front....

Jessi Here.

Our Thanksgiving this year was nice and low key. We ate dinner at our friend Jenny's house. Jenny is actually Jason's (who Mike had Thanksgiving with) wife. They have a son, Caedmon who is 17 months. Two other couples came and we all brought a few dishes. So...no major cooking or clean-up was in order this year. We did make a HUGE pot of mashed potatoes, corn pudding, Caramel Heavenlies (cookies) and some wassail.

The babies didn't really take much of a nap but were very good all day long. They were however quite tired when we got home and they went straight to bed. Mike called and we talked for a little while and that was the end of the day. It was a quiet, peaceful, beautiful day and as I am ever year, I am so thankful to have good friends to share the holiday with even though we are away from family.

I actually did a terrible job of taking pictures and do not have any to share of our Thanksgiving meal or friends. Still, here are a few from the day.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Do You Read?

This has been floating around facebook today and caught my eye...

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. In bold are those books i've read in their entirety, italicized are the ones i've started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14. The Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon on the TBR pile!

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


So that is 18 books i've read, and 6 that i've read excerpts of. Many of these other books are on my "to-read" list and I should go ahead and thank my Asheboro City Schools education for making me read about half of these! It's nice to know i'm doing better than average, but i'd love to hit at least 50 one day...maybe i should make that a goal for next year, i've got time, yes?

Comment back and let me know how you add up!

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

This time last year...

we went for our 34 week appointment and instead we were admitted to stay until our little ones came out! What an interesting Thanksgiving! Oh how our lives have changed since then!

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

First Look!

Here's a sneak peak from the photographer of our shoot on Saturday...Love It!



Monday, November 22, 2010

Movie Monday

Sleeping and Eating and Sleeping....


Saturday, November 20, 2010

Picture Day

The babies had their 1 year photo shoot today. I am very excited to see them! We did a couple of different outfits, a christmas photo and a cake smashing session.


Here are some hints for what is to come....
the 2 tutu's that i made (both for Nora of course!)And here is the babies birthday party invitation...the theme flowed into the cake smashing photo session as well. They were so cute, actually not too excited about the taste of the cake--guess they aren't used to the sweet (i thought it tasted great!), but it was cute watching them explore.