A long time ago, I mentioned in some photos about an awesome holiday train a man in my neighborhood sets up. This year, thanks to my handy-dandy iPhone 4, I was able to get a decent video put together.
As you can see, it’s quite elaborate and the kids absolutely love it! The train runs every night from 6-10 PM from the day after Thanksgiving until New Year’s Day. It’s even been covered by local news outlets. If you live in the North Dallas area, it’s worth taking a night and bringing your kids.
Last year, we decided to start a family tradition of going out and cutting down our Christmas tree. Our great friends Jerry and Kris Scott told us about this farm they went to called the Walls Family Farm. We decided to go and had a great time. This year, we started down the path of cementing the tradition with another trip to the Walls Family Farm.
It was a lot better weather this year and Emily was able to participate much more being almost 2 years old. The kids loved the hayride to get out to the tree fields, but maybe not the wandering around looking for a tree. They enjoyed that part for a little bit, but tired of it quickly as Maggie and I debated tree after tree.
We finally found our tree and I cut it down. We hauled it back to the barn so we could get it wrapped up and strapped to the roof of our car. During this wait, the kids played in the nearby play set and they had a blast.
Some pictures from the day:
Maggie and Emily on the Hayride
Brenden and Emily “helping” find a tree
The Burleson Family Christmas Tree (cue Clark Griswold)
Luckily, unlike Clark, I remembered my saw
Brenden remembered this playhouse and was all over it again
Emily got into the act with the playhouse this year
At the end of October, I decided to make a rather large change in my life: I quit my day job to pursue iOS contracting full time. An opportunity presented itself that would allow me to work from home while developing an iOS application for a large company. This would also lend itself to allowing me to work more on my BitBQ applications and related projects. It was a hard decision and took me a few days to think over. I talked myself into and out of the decision a million times (as my wife can attest). On my last day, a very nice co-worker gave me a bottle of The Glenlivet 18 as a going away gift.
I’ve been meaning to write about that change here, but I’ve been so busy in the whirlwind of a new job that I just hadn’t been able to take the time. Now with the holidays behind us, I can take a bit of a breather and mention it here.
One of the biggest changes is of course working from home. We moved my office into our guest bedroom so that I would have a door and be able to keep the kids from interrupting me while I’m working. One of the nice things I’ve enjoyed about the new situation is being able to take little breaks in the afternoon and playing with Brenden in the yard. He’s recently begun wanting to throw a Nerf football he has. He also wants to be chased around the yard. I also get to see little moments like this at home:
That’s Maggie and Brenden working on cooking a desert for us that night. It’s something Maggie thought up for them to do after Brenden woke up from his nap one day. I happened to have my office door open and saw them working together. It was awesome.
While the start of the new job has had me working a lot of late nights (due to trying to ship the 2.0 version of the company’s iPhone app), things should now calm down enough for me to reach a couple of my other goals: Blog here more about what’s going on in the lives of the Burlesons and also lose weight. More on this latter topic in an upcoming post.
That’s a quick catch-up on the changes around here. It’s exciting and fun. I’m really enjoying it and expect 2011 to be a fantastic year.
Funny how the time flies and you only post links to your blog. Heck, it wasn’t even me. It’s an automated thing. Well, here’s a honest to goodness actual post!
Friday, my little guy turned 4. He’s growing up so fast now. We took him to Chuck E. Cheese’s that night for some fun and play time, and man did he take advantage of that. He ran around like crazy for two hours and worked up a huge sweat. He played all sorts of games, earning lots of tickets which we turned in for some trinkets at the toy counter.
Yesterday, we had several of Brenden’s friends over for a birthday part at our house. That meant lots of kids running around and having fun. I grilled hot dogs and we had cake. Brenden was very excited about all his presents and couldn’t wait to play with all of them.
We saved the biggest gift until the end: his first bicycle! It’s Toy Story bicycle and we took it for the first “ride” yesterday evening. I’ll post more about that later (along with some photos).
Here are a few pictures from the party. You can see the rest in the Flickr Set.
Maggie did a great job getting the tables ready
Brenden getting ready to blow out the candle
More presents than you could imagine, we have generous friends
Emily loves riding all of Brenden’s old toy riders, she had fun during the party
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