Our Advent Activities

This Christmas season, we have had so much fun doing Advent activities with Camryn. I got this idea (as well as some of the ideas for our activities) from a super cute blog I frequently read, so I bought an Advent box on clearance last year at Target that we could start using this year. Each day when Camryn wakes up, we move the snowman on the Santa calendar and discuss what the date is:

Then she opens the Advent box for the day, where she finds a slip of paper with a new activity:

Some of our fun activities this season have included:

- Watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a family.

- Get Christmas stickers

- Send a Christmas card to a friend

- Read the Christmas story as a family at bedtime.

- Visit Santa:

- Watch the Backyardigans Christmas special as a family.

- Open presents with Jeff and Sarah Ellen:

- Wear new Christmas PJ's:

- Go caroling:

- Get a pink Christmas tree for your room (she saw this at Wal-Mart and asked for it, so we decided to surprise her with it one day as a treat!):

- Watch the Grinch as a family.

- Make red and green pancakes for supper:

- Ride around town to look at Christmas lights:

- Watch White Christmas.

- Make Christmas cookies.

Although this has definitely been work for Mommy coming up with something new each day, it has been so much fun to see Camryn run over to the box each morning to find out what her new activity will be. Plus, it has given us lots of extra "excuses" to do things as a family, so I think we will end up making the Advent box a tradition in the Burley household!

A Very Burley Christmas

This past weekend we had the Burley family Christmas. We all got lots of great presents, ate tons of wonderful food from the annual Christmas spread, had enough chocolate to last us until next Christmas (see picture below), and, of course, played several rounds of Christmas Bingo. Here are the pictures from our fun Burley Christmas Day.

Notice the tiny little baby stocking in the middle - CUTE!!

Love this!

Checking out all the stocking goodness

The baby's stocking stuffer

Opening presents

The 2.5 lb. Whitman's Sampler - WOW!

The cute pics

Playing Guess Who

Craft time with Grandma

Adorable little cousins

Thanksgiving 2009 & Tree Hunting

With all of the baby posts, Thanksgiving pictures got a little delayed. Here are our pics from Thanksgiving Day at my mom's.

Camryn in her big sister shirt

Keller's 1st Thanksgiving

Little turkey


The "kid" table

Mommy & the big sister

So cute!

Family pics

Cousins

The good

the bad

and the ugly

The day after Thanksgiving we went to a tree farm to pick out our Christmas tree.


Camryn helping us search for the perfect one

The winner

Ready for the ride home

Our pretty tree ... the SECOND time around.

We put the tree up the day we got it, and I woke up the next morning to find it laying across the couch with ornaments all over the floor. We had to take everything off the tree, including the lights, and do it allllll over again. Not my best Christmas memory ...

The Baby Story

If you weren't patient enough to stick with my last long, rambling, random post, you may have missed the big news that we are having another baby! We are very excited that we will welcome baby number two in June! Although we are excited, I don't think our excitement can compare to Camryn's! In case you haven't heard, this is her baby, and Jason and I really have no claim to him or her. And, according to Camryn, we are having a baby girl named Annalise ... which is news to us since we won't find out the baby's gender until February and since we haven't discussed names with her at all!


It really has been so much fun finally letting people in on our secret (I took the pregnancy test Oct. 26!) It's also been fun for me to hear the reactions we are getting from different people. I especially love hearing, "Ohhhhh, I was wondering when you would finally have the next one! I just knew you wouldn't have just one!" Every time, I want to laugh and say, "Really!? Because we weren't sure there would be another one!"


And, really, we weren't. I don't know if Camryn was a particularly tough baby (I'll let you know, maybe around August, when I have someone to compare her to!) or if we just weren't fully prepared as new parents because we had not really been around babies, but those first few months were haaaarrrrrrrddd! I mean, really hard. And once we got past those first few really tough months, and Camryn started to grow into a little person, and we started to have more fun with her, we just weren't 100% sure we wanted to do that all over again. I know some people will never understand that, because they would have their house busting at the seams with kids if they could afford it! I also know that may make us sound as if we don't like kids (which couldn't be further from the truth), or some people may even say that makes us sound selfish. But, for a while, I think we were feeling that God's plan for our family may only be one child. And, for some families, I think just one child is His plan. He is definitely aware of what we can and cannot handle!


I am not sure when I started to become more open to the possibility of having another baby, but if you talked to Jason a few years ago, you know he was done. No more. I wanted to know where he really stood on that - if he was serious, or if he was being that firm to keep people from nagging us about when the next one would come! I remember driving back home from Anderson one Saturday and having a very serious discussion in the car about whether or not we felt our family was complete. We talked for a long time about money, Camryn, our fears, our relationship, etc., and came out on the other side of the discussion deciding we really did want to have another baby ... just not right then.



At the beginning of the summer, the timing finally felt right for us. I stopped taking my birth control, but we decided just to leave the rest up to God. We weren't counting days on a calendar or anything like that - it was just going to happen when and if it happened. Even so, when Oct. 26 rolled around, and we saw the big "PREGNANT" word on the test, there was definitely some shock! There was lots of shocked silence in the house that night and by 3 am that morning, I was laying awake in bed wondering how in the world we were going to do this all over again. Oct. 27 was the day of crying - almost all day long. Yes, we knew what we were getting into when I stopped taking my birth control, but when it actually happens and slaps you in the face that there will not be just one but TWO little bodies in your household, it is HUGE! By Oct. 28 we finally started to get ourselves together and decided we could handle this. Of course, by November 5, when we went in for our first appointment and saw that tiny little heartbeat, we were all smiles. How can you not be when you see that on the screen?



Both of our sisters knew by the first week, because we had to tell someone! We waited until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to tell Camryn. The first thing she wanted to know was what were we going to name the baby, and she immediately followed that by placing her order for a little sister. Camryn wore her "I'm Going to be a Big Sister" shirt to both my mom's and Jason's parents' house for Thanksgiving, and we let all of our friends know that day as well.


I think it is an understatement now to say we are excited. It is so much fun to share this with everyone - especially Camryn. She prays and thanks God every night for her little sister (bless her heart if this baby is a boy!) and kisses my tummy everytime I leave the house. We are really just enjoying every week and every minute of this pregnancy, because it is likely we'll be done after this. But, who knows ... we may be traveling in the car again and have another serious discussion that changes our minds. I guess it will all depend on how loudly the baby is screaming in the backseat that day!

Oh, the things you can learn from a blog!

They say you learn something new every day! Keep reading . . . you never know what you may find out!

1. If you have 3 quarters, 4 dimes, and 4 pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.


2. Odontophobia is the fear of teeth.


3. 1 in 5,000 north Atlantic lobsters are born bright blue.


4. The king of hearts is the only king without a moustache.


5. Elephants are the only mammals that can't jump.


6. American car horns beep in the tone of F.


7. There are twice as many kangaroos in Australia as there are people. The kangaroo population is estimated at about 40 million.


8. The average person makes 1,140 telephone calls per year.


9. You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV.

10. The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.

11. Children grow faster in the springtime.

12. The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

13. More than 80% of the Earth's surface is volcanic.

14. Humans blink over 10,000,000 times a year.

15. Rats are incapable of puking.

16. You share your birthday with at least 9 million other people in the world.

17. All polar bears are left-handed.

18. Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.

19. Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.

20. There are one million ants for every person in the world.

21. Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using only one row of letters of the keyboard.

22. Mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue twice as much as any color.

23. No word in the English language rhymes with "month."

24. The most common name in the world is Mohammad.

25. The most money ever paid for a cow at an auction was $1.3 million.

26. There are 10 human body parts that are only 3 letters long (eye, hip, arm, leg, ear, toe, jaw, rib, lip, gum).

27. Burley baby number 2 is due June 25, 2010!!! :)

28. A skunk's smell can be detected by a human a mile away.

29. The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.

30. 99% of the pumpkins sold in the United States end up as jack-o-lanterns.