Scottish Rite Checkup

9/4/2008 Category :General 0

The first time we went to Scottish Rite to talk to the doctor’s about Brenden’s hand they told us he’d be fine, he’d amaze us, come back in two years. Today was the day that we went back, and we had a pretty familiar message. He looks fine, he’s doing great, come back in two years. I really didn’t expect to hear anything other than that because I honestly can’t see one single way not having a hand is holding him back. But I did expect a little more observation. I thought they’d watch him play more. I think we met with the 4 doctors for about 10 minutes after waiting about an 1 hour and a half to get in. I’m not complaining though. I’m glad there wasn’t anything that stood out to them as a problem that we just weren’t seeing. So we’ll go back before he starts school and make sure he’s getting the hang of shoe laces and buttons and things like that.

Brenden did have a great time in the waiting room playing with a little boy named Gavin we happens to live very near us. He also liked the big train they have in the hallway. He was worn out by the time we left at 10. Of course that didn’t stop him from waiting until 3:30 to go down for his nap. But he did play very quietly until then.

More Flowers

9/4/2008 Category :General 0

Here are some more flowers and some bananas that popped out in our backyard over the weekend:

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The Holiday Weekend

9/4/2008 Category :General 0

Well, this is a little belated, but we had such a good holiday weekend I wanted to write about it.

It all started Thursday when I ended up leaving Brenden at Grandma and Grandpa’s for the night. I made plans to go to dinner and a movie with Patrick and both were excellent. Then Patrick surprised me with the news that he had spotaniously taken Friday off. So 4 day weekend!

Friday we slept in. Went and got late donuts. And started to tackle our long to do list. We were expecting to need to pick Brenden up around 3, but got an even bigger break because he ended up being out until 5. So we got a ton of stuff done.

Saturday we had a little pool party in the afternoon and early evening. It was a come and go thing and we really didn’t know how long it would last. Since most of our friends that came had small children or weren’t participating in the swimming, it wrapped up around 6 which gave us plenty of time to clean up and rest. We had a great time hanging out with everyone. Sadly, I didn’t get any pictures because I’m paranoid about Brenden and the water and so I was watching him 99% of the time. But I think he had a great time having friends over and I know we did!

Sunday was spent tackling more of our to do list and we came pretty close to finishing it. I don’t even know what we did Monday.

It was really nice to have 4 days of our little family being all together, having fun and getting stuff done.

One of the things I accomplished was to take the ugly gold shower doors off of the tub/shower in Brenden’s bathroom. We are putting up a car theme in there since he loves them so much. Here he is admiring his new shower curtain.showercurtain.jpg

August Rain brings August Flowers

8/25/2008 Category :General 1

A few pictures of the pretty flowers that have popped out since last week’s rain.

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A few more Pictures….

8/19/2008 Category :General 0

Since I don’t seem to have time to post much else.

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Getting ready to hit the pool.

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Enjoying some more chocolate ice cream. The picture doesn’t do a good job of showing just how covered in chocolate he was.

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All dressed up to go spend the day with his Nanny.

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Still wound up from his day away from home and enjoying a could climb on his bouncy ball.

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Not the best picture. He climbed this slide all the way from the bottom to the top rather than go to it the easy way.

Mess Managed

8/8/2008 Category :General 1

I’ve been feeling a little stressed out this past week and wasn’t really sure why. Oh sure, we’ve had our share of chaos and things gone wrong—dogs getting sick on the carpet in many spots, broken ac in the car, broken pool heater, broken dishwasher (again!)—but I really don’t feel like any of that was quite it. Sure, those things added up, but tonight it hit me what the real problem was.

When Patrick got home we finally moved a few pieces of furniture around. They were small changes but they helped us complete some rooms that had been chaotic. I also worked pretty hard during the day today to make some progress on cleaning out the future baby’s room. We’d piled all the unpacked boxes in there and you could barely walk through. So lots of things fell into place today. As things came together tonight I was reminded how important it is to me to have everything in it’s place. Yes, I’m anal. Yes, I’m a neat freak. But it just really stressed me out to walk over or around things that are out of place. It stresses me to not be able to find something or to have to move things to get to what I want.

So the house is far from done, but I’m feeling much better now that there is less to put away.

We moved!

8/1/2008 Category :General 3

I know I haven’t posted much lately. We did finally get our house sold and we moved. It was a huge roller coaster and we didn’t know from minute to minute if the selling or the buying was going to happen. Actually, we didn’t know if the buying was going to happen until about an hour before it did! But we moved in to our new house last Friday and have been busy setting things up and finding a home for everything. I thought I’d post the couple of shots I’ve had a chance to take of Brenden since we’ve been here.

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Our first day at the house. We’d spent the week in Sherman and Brenden had stayed with his grandparents on the last day while the movers came and we set up his room. Then he and Grandpa dipped their feet in the pool!

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I mentioned before that Brenden’s new room would be done in a Cowboy theme. My Mom had been gathering some things for it and these boots were among the items. I haven’t fully decorated his room yet but I had the boots on the bookshelf and he had been wanting to wear them to be like Sheriff Woody in Toy Story.

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I bought him this boat way back at his birthday but we’d never used it. All week he’s been looking at the box I’d stuck by the back door and wanting it but I knew I couldn’t blow it up. Darn asthma! I finally remembered to ask Patrick to do it last night before we all headed out to the pool. Brenden was so excited about it that he climbed in before we even got it out to the water.

Ice Cream

7/9/2008 Category :General 1

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I took Brenden for an ice cream treat today while we were out running an errand. He really enjoyed it as you can see. Also, check out that nice haircut he got yesterday. Hard to tell in these photos but he looks very handsome and grownup.

Brenden’s got something to tell you:

6/29/2008 Category :General 2

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That’s right, we are going to have another baby! Look for baby Burleson #2 to arrive in January. Current due date is Jan. 15th, but because of my diabetes it will be an earlier c-section.

House update

6/23/2008 Category :General 0

We made it past our house inspection and after a few stalls our house is on the road to being sold. The buyer’s option period (were they can cancel for any reason) ends tomorrow morning and then we just have to wait to make sure their financing will go through.

We’ve found a house we like and have the winning backup offer on that, but we aren’t holding out a lot of hope of their first deal falling through, so we continue to look.

I’ll keep you updated. But as of tomorrow afternoon, we are starting to pack up things we can live without for the next month! Yikes.

Under Contract

6/16/2008 Category :General 1

We accepted an offer on our house this weekend. If things go well, we’ll close on July 23rd. We just have to make it through the inspection and hope that their financing goes through. But considering they got preapproved the day before they made their offer, I think we’ll be ok on that one.

The funny thing is that we had decided we’d tell our realtor on Monday (today) that we wanted to take the house off the market because the two offers we’d gotten had been so terrible and people were mentioning that they could be new construction here for around the same price. Guess it was meant to be! Hopefully anyway…

Big Boy Bed

5/28/2008 Category :General 2

I bought a toddler bed for Brenden off of Craigslist.org a couple of months ago, but we’ve been waiting to move to put it up. Brenden has long been too tall for his changing table, but we’ve kept using it anyway. Last week though he started climbing up on top of the changing table and trying to climb into the crib. We decided to set up his toddler bed this past Saturday and take his changing table out of his room.

We had planned on setting it up right after his nap and talking about it all day so that he could get used to the idea. But Sat. morning came and we had an early house showing. We went out for that and when we came back we were about to put Brenden down for his nap when we got another call saying the agent was running late and hadn’t been to the house yet. He’d be by in about 15 minutes. So off we go to walk the neighborhood. Brenden finally laid down for a nap and so did I and the next thing I knew it was 5:30. Patrick got Brenden’s crib taken apart, we all went grocery shopping and then we played outside while Patrick grilled. The next thing I knew it was closing in on Brenden’s bedtime with no bed.

We got that together as quickly as we could. Brenden was so excited about it. Until we took his crib out of the room and told him it was time for bed. He’s supposed to go to bed between 8-8:30 but it was 10:00 before we could get him calmed down enough to sleep. He was so upset. He slept through the night though.

The second night he went to bed much more quickly but he got up two different times during the night. He’s still getting up some nights and he’s waking up much earlier than normal in the mornings, but getting him to go to sleep has been much easier. At least until nap time today! It’s going to take some getting used to having someone that can come into our room in the middle of the night though.

Here’s a picture of his bed. We had to turn the bed backwards because that is the direction Brenden is used to sleeping and if he puts his head at the end of the bed he’ll fall off! Once we know where we are living, he’s going to have a cowboy themed room. As in coboys and indians not the team.

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The Dallas World Aquarium

5/28/2008 Category :General 0

We went to the Dallas World Aquarium on Sunday with some friends of ours and their 1-year-old son. Brenden got excited about the big huge turtles, the penguins and the sharks. Otherwise, he really just wanted us to put him down and let him run. Patrick blogged more about it here.

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Brenden enjoying the sharks.
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Brenden’s new “chicken” friend that we bought him in the gift shop.

A week in the country

5/28/2008 Category :General 1

Two weeks ago Brenden and I went and stayed at my parents house. They’ve had some land for a little bit and have been watching our dogs while our house is on the market, so when they went out of town we went to watch the dogs. Brenden loves walking the field there. We really enjoyed being away from the ringing phones and the constant need to keep the house clean. At the end of the week, Patrick came and spent the weekend with us. Here are some pictures from the week.

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Random Funny Brenden

5/28/2008 Category :General 0

° He thinks that elbows are called Elmo and whenever he touches his elbow, he laughs like Elmo.

° He thinks that Nemo is called Elmo.

° Whenever he sees a Tommy Hilfiger symbol he says “Daddy” because most of Patrick’s work clothes are Tommy

° Whenever he sees the Hard Rock Cafe symbol he also says “Daddy” because Patrick has a lot of those shirts

° He thinks that turtles are called tchickins–like a mix between turtles and chickens.

I knew there was one more:

He thinks water towers are hats.

Brenden is TWO

5/2/2008 Category :General 2

We had Brenden’s 2nd birthday party last Sunday and it went really well. All the kids played nicely and I think the adults had fun visting and watching the kids play. We had a Thomas the Train cake since Brenden is still loving all types of vehicles, especially choo choos.

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On Wed. morning (his actual birthday) I took Brenden to his 2 year appointment and it went well. The only thing we have to follow up on is that he seems to be out of the range on his vision test and will need to go to the eye doctor to see what that means. Otherwise, we don’t go back until he is 3. Patrick and I were both a little taken aback by that, it’s just proof that he’s growing up.

The stats:
Weight: 30 lbs 9.6 oz (77%)
Height: 36 1/2 in (93%)
Head: 19 3/4 in (85%)

New Brenden video

4/26/2008 Category :General 2

I know I usually have the video directly on the page, but this time you’ll have to click the link.

Pee U.

4/16/2008 Category :General 1

The bushes in the front of our house smell funny sometimes. Especially after a rain or in the early morning. After receiving a few comments from potential buyers that our house smelled like cat urine, we started febreezing the bushes every day in order to mask it. But it wasn’t working. And I really didn’t like having people think that I would really let my cat outside to pee on the door. So this past weekend we ripped them out. Here is a shot of our little family project before it got messy.

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April showers bring broken fences

4/10/2008 Category :General 1

This morning, or last night—depending on how you choose to see it, I woke up around 4 to increadibly loud wind and tons of lighting. I instinctively grabbed a sleeping Patrick and in my half sleep told him that it was storming really badly. Startled, Patrick jumped out of bed. I got out of bed to and we went and looked out the window at the storm just as the tornado siren sounded. When this happend a few weeks ago I had time to gather some things and get Brenden and the cat, but this time we just grabbed Brenden and headed for the bathroom. Our power was out but we have a weather radio and flashlights in the bathroom. The radio was saying there were confirmed reports of 84 mph wind and reliable reports of 87 mph.

Eventually the wind passed and we emerged and Brenden started to play. The power was still off. When the storm died down I put Brenden back to bed and went outside in the rain to see the damage. The majority of the back line of our fence and our trash cans were all over the alley. We picked them up the best we could and then headed back in, the power still off for some bad sleep.

The power did eventually come back on. We were very greatful to have nothing more serious than a broken fence. Now lets hope the people coming to look at our house tomorrow night can deal with it being down because we can’t possible get out there and fix it until Saturday!
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Catching up

4/10/2008 Category :General 1

I know I haven’t been blogging much, so here is a dose of pictures:

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Brenden on his 2nd Easter. He was so sick he had no interest in hunting eggs, but he did love sitting on this tractor. He also loved the plush fire truck Easter basket we got him. He’s acutally still carrying it around most days.

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I took Brenden for a haircut on Monday and he was pretty good. They lady still had to work hard though because he wiggles so much and whips his head around. When it was wet and slicked down with gel, as above, I thought she did a really good job. But after it dried I could see it’s pretty bad. I cut the mullet end off the back and trimmed the front up some more, but there are still a lot of uneven places. He’s still handsome though!

Last year we started a new tradition of going to opening day with our parents and we continued that on Tuesday. It turned out to be a beautiful day despite the 40% chance of rain warning and the fact that the Rangers lost badly.
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Could they look any more alike? Father and son walking into the Ranger’s game.

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The smiling boy at Opening Day.

Oh, last week Brenden went into the doctor again! This time it was a rash that had spread all over his body. We suspect that he shares my allergy to all the drugs in the penicillan family and had to switch him to his 3rd antibiotic prescription for the still raging ear infection. He started taking his first antibiotic March 19th and won’t be done with this last one until the 12th of this month. But knock on wood the whole household will have been healthy for a whole week tomorrow! It’s a miracle.