A Year in Pictures

Trying to write this post has made me realize I need to be better about talking pictures. I was trying to summarize 2012 in pictures, but there are large gaps where I have no pictures. Here is what I could scrap together:

Celebrated out 2 year anniversary!

Went camping for Spring Break. It was the first time we went camping together in Utah.

We went to Antelope Island. Didn't see any antelope, but we saw lots of buffalo.

Graduated from Weber State with my Associate's Degree in Nursing.

Off to Ukraine for the summer. Mike had an internship with the State Dept.

Went to Lyviv on a free weekend and met up with some people from Mike's mission.
We're standing in front of the Opera House there which is Mike's favorite building.

We found this delicious candy shop and bought ourselves a big bag only to
 find out these candies had alcohol in the middle. :p

We didn't eat here but varenkyky, or dumplings, was what we ate almost daily in Ukraine.

Ukraine Temple.

Went to Alaska for Caleb & Erica's wedding. I was so happy to see
moose in my parent's yard. Especially a baby moose!!

Mike got to be the baby jungle gym.

 After Alaska we flew home for a week so I could take my NCLEX to get my RN license. After our short stay we were off again to Minnesota to visit the Burnhams. We stopped at Mt. Rushmore on the way.

After our summer abroad we finally came home to stay and went back to school. Me to get my bachelor's in nursing and Mike to finish his double major in International Relations and Economics. 

Me at Halloween. I was an owl and made my costume myself. I was pretty proud of it!
 I took this on my lunch break and this ended up being the only picture I got of my costume.

Poor picture, but this is all of the us Burnhams at a condo in Park City for Thanksgiving.

We went to Alaska for Christmas and I have no pictures from there. We had a blast though. Mom surprised the rest of the family by bringing Alicia and Nick up for a few days after Christmas, so we had a full house! Only one family was missing. We played lots of games and ate way too much food and had a bonfire on a frozen lake for New Year's Eve. We each have only have one semester left of school! I'll be done for good, but then Mike still has a few years left in grad school. We have no idea where that will take us, but we're excited for the new adventure that is fast approaching!

December

Now that January is half-way over, I'm struggling to remember all the things that happened in December! It was a pretty busy month finishing up my last full semester at school plus Christmas parties and spending time with family. Hopefully I can remember all the important things.


First off, I gave my hair a big chop. I've basically been growing my hair out for two and a half years, ever since I came home from my mission. It started off that I wanted to grow it out for my wedding, but then Mikey told me he likes my hair long, so I just kept going. I've cut a couple inches off here and there, but nothing this drastic. I've always wanted to do Locks of Love, but have never had hair long enough, so I thought for sure I'd be able to do it this time. Unfortunately my stylist told me I was a couple inches short, but by that time I had worked myself up and couldn't just walk out without something different. I guess I'll know for next time I ever get it really long. Here are my beautious before and after photos:

Before

Before

After!!

Ever year my Grandma throws a huge Christmas party and it's one of the few times that the majority of her seven kids get together. My mom can never come since flying stand-by in December is a nightmare and usually she has to work, but she always feels really bad that she's never made it to one. This year she seemed particularly sadden that she couldn't come, so she told me to make sure to let grandma and everyone know she was sad she was missing it again for the um-teenth year. The Friday before the party my dad's sister called and asked if Mikey & I wanted to come down and they'd take us out to dinner and we could spend the night and go to the Christmas party the next day. On the way down (it's about a 2 1/2 hr drive from Logan to Orem) my mom called and asked me all about the party, my weekend and Christmas plans. No big deal, normal conversation. When finally pull in at 830 to my aunt's house, all the lights are off and I'm afraid we've made them wait too long. Nope. I knocked on the door expecting my aunt to open it. Nope. It's my mom. I just stood there and stared thinking "You're not supposed to be here! You sneaky mom!" Not only that, but right after we arrived she left with my dad to pick up my sister Alicia from the airport! I was totally surprised and excited to see them since we spent this Christmas in Minnesota and I wasn't sure when I'd see my parents next.


Needless to say, mom had a very fun time surprising all her siblings. We went to a gymnast gym with all the aunts and uncles and cousins and ran around. They had a huge foam pit, which if you've ever been in one of those you know how hard it is to climb back out. We spent a majority of the night pushing the aunties in and anyone else that got too close. :)

Surprise!! The parents, Alicia AND Nick

We drove to Mikey's parents' new home in Woodbury, Minnesota, just outside of the Twin Cities. It was a 22 hr drive and we caravaned with Steve and Kathryn and we rode in Allie's car with her. We decided to drive straight through which was nice in some ways but also terribly exhausting. We didn't get there til almost 6am the next day, just in time for Mike's dad to get up for work! Minnesota was a blast though! We mostly just relaxed and slept in every morning. We had a wonderful Christmas and went shopping at the Mall of America with our Christmas moneys and bought a new DVD player to go with our brand new TV we got from the Burnhams! I was super excited because we no longer have to watch movies on our computers! We were also surprised by Jeremy from Alaska dropping by on his way to Oregon.

 On one of our last nights we went to Buffalo Wild Wings. My brother Lincoln introduced me to this place in Colorado a few years back and I've always wanted to go again. I LOVE it!! I love buffalo sauce anyways, but they've taken buffalo wings to an all new level! If you have one anywhere close to you, you MUST go! MUST!! On Tuesdays and Thursdays they have cheaper wings, so I'd suggest then. Mikey and I were having trouble deciding how many we wanted and even though I had just said I wasn't as hungry as I wished to be before we walked in, we decided to split 50 since we both loved them. Mikey ate like 25 and I think I managed 10... :s It was totally worth it though! We ate the rest later that night and the next day for lunch, so no wings went to waste. :)

Mmmmm. I LOVE this place!

A wet wipe package. Too true!

Our 50 wings. I'm drooling just thinking about them again!

We also went to the temple there. We've been spoiled here in Utah and I thought we could just show up whenever and rent clothes, but no. We got up super early only to find out we didn't have a car to get there (Allie  went shopping and took the Subaru keys with her and Steve and Kathryn already left) so we went back to sleep while we waited for a car to come home. We obviously missed our session, but we were still able to do initiatories which was nice since we haven't done them in awhile. It was a great experience remembering all the blessings we have been promised. 

St. Paul Minnesota temple. Look familiar?

The sun was super bright so it made for a bad squinty picture.

I was really worried we we left for Minnesota that it would be really cold there. Like colder than Alaska cold, but surprisingly it was really warm with hardly any snow. We had beautiful weather the whole trip until we had to drive home. We made it all the way to Utah and were only a few hours away from home when a huge storm hit and was a total whiteout in some places. I was driving at the time and pulled over to let Mikey drive. The snow itself wasn't too bad, it was the wind that whipped it up and made a wall so you had no idea were the road was. We had to stop the car a few times to wait for a clearing, but finally made it home safely. The next day on the news there were several stories of people who weren't so lucky and were blown off the road, so we were very grateful we made it home in one piece.

The back of the Subaru "Roo" after our near-death experiences in the canyon.

That's all for now. I'll probably be writing again in two week to summarize January, but at least I made it before the end!

Catch-Up

My college roommate Drew has a blog that she posts on only once a month which I'm beginning to think is a great idea since I'm usually too swamped with school to even do that, so maybe I'll try it and have more success with my blog! :)

Here is a little run down of our lives this past semester:

September

This semester has been the hardest by far with an additional class and trying to work part-time. I'm not fond of my job, but it pays the bills so I guess I should be grateful. I have an on-campus job at the "bindery." It's a windowless basement where we print, copy, cut, collate, bind, glue, staple, etc all sorts of paper projects for the school from posters to pamphlets to parking passes. I started working there in May to help produce the graduation books and was able to stay on through June and then come back in September once school started. I work with some great people and it's an awesome school job, but I guess paper is just not my thing.
Luckily Mike and I both had busy schedules so no one was bored waiting on the other to finish homework or something. This semester he was part of the Huntsman Scholars Program. It's through the business school, which is ironic since Mike has absolutely no interest in business, and is a scholarship program that is geared towards teaching business and leadership with international experience. I still don't really get the point of it, but they paid him money and sent him to Europe for a month at almost no cost so it was a good experience for him.
Also, my amazing husband has an awesome diamond-encrusted crystal award! Ok, well it's not really diamond-encrusted or crystal, but it's glass and pretty big so it looks fancy. Last year for one of his terrorism classes (he's studying international relations and peace, not how to be a terrorist) he was able to do an internship with the Cultural Intelligence Institute. He basically just had to write a paper for his class and then turn it into the institute with some minor adjustments and got paid for it, but his paper has turned out to be a pretty big deal. It was on how the media fuels terrorism and makes it easier for terrorists to terrorize. The institute liked it so much the want to publish it in their scholarly journal (http://culturalintel.org/Journal.html) plus his paper has been read by several important people (i.e. members of the CIA, a police constable in London) AND they want to fly him out to DC for their next conference to present his paper! So my husband is pretty amazing and that's not even a biased opinion!


October
In a nutshell, our month of October: Mike played in Europe and I studied and did giant school projects. As happy as I am for him he got to go, I'm totally jealous and think it's highly unfair that I had to sit at home and study while he traveled Europe for almost the whole month! They went to Switzerland and ate cheese, to Belgium and sampled chocolates, and to France and went to EuroDisney. (They also visited business like NATO, WHO,the Red Cross, Huntsman Chemical but I think these places were all an excuse so they could do the fun things.) While there, they also had a free weekend where they could travel wherever they wanted so Mike and a group of students went to Rome. He said it was the most beautiful place he's ever seen and someday when we aren't so poor, he'll take me there :)

Mike outside the Palace at Versailles

I studied and worked on papers and projects the whole month. I lived off McDonald's chicken nuggets and Little Caesar's pizza. I do love chicken nuggets even if they are horrendously bad for you, I love them, so that part wasn't so awful. One night I had a sleepover with my girl friends since Mikey was gone and we had a break from school. We went out to eat and made skookies (cookies baked in a skillet) and watched a scary movie and it was a blast. Even though I would never trade being married for the single life, I do miss sleepovers!


November
Thankfully this month was a little less hectic for the two of us, but still kept us busy. Mike was usually up all hours of the night writing and editing papers for his program and I was trying to go to bed early so I could be at the hospital at 430am. I've had more practice with IVs and while I'm definitely not a pro, I still feel pretty good about my skills, which is a good thing. I was shadowing outside the hospital for a clinical day and had someone I knew through church come in and at first I didn't recognize them since we were new to the ward. I realize who they were as I was preparing to start an IV, so I was very grateful they had good veins and I didn't look like a fool screwing it up!
Our ward boundaries changed and our apartment building was switched into a different ward which we were both way sad about. Both of us are shy and we finally felt like we were making friends, I was really enjoying my calling in the Relief Society Presidency and then they gave up the boot! We like our new ward although the dynamics are rather different since everyone is more established and some people live in real houses and not cinderblock prison cells! Mike is happy about the switch though because he is now the Sunday School President. Every since we've been married, his only calling has been ward missionary, which he likes, but is very difficult to fulfill in Utah.
November flew by but we were grateful we got to go to Orem to spend Thanksgiving with my aunt and uncle. I was super excited that my sister Alicia and her fam were able to drive down from Oregon. Like all aunties, I think my nephews and nieces are the cutest and her son is no exception! We went to Tucanos the day after Thanksgiving and had another delicious meal with too much to eat. We also played Nertz where for every round you lost you had to eat a Burtie Bott's jellybean. Luckily I only had to eat one and it was strawberry. Poor Mikey lost a lot a had to eat a rotten egg, moldy cheese and some other disgusting ones :) I felt bad after the first couple...

The lighting is not the best, but I love his turkey butt!

Thanksgiving was a nice break before my one last week of school and then finals. When we got back we found out where we are going for our preceptorship (kinda like residency for doctors) We have to follow a nurse around for their shifts for 140 hours. They had us sign up where we wanted to go in September so of course I had no idea. By time I finished my clinicals for this semester, I had a totally different idea of what kind of nursing I wanted to do than in September, so I'm kinda bummed with what I got. I have night shifts on the post-surgery floor, which will give me a good foundation, but it's a little scary to think that in 12 shifts at the hospital I'm supposed to be competent enough to care for patients all by myself! YIKES! I've decided I would have preferred the ICU or ER, but I guess I can always work there later.


Well that's all from us!

Success!

So now that school has started, I probably won't ever post anything, but I figured this was a big enough event that I had to let you all know... all 3 of you who read this ;) As some of you know, this is my second and last year of nursing school (YAY!!) and we are spending a lot of time in the hospital. Despite the high-tech mannequins we get to practice on, they're no where close to a human being when it comes to practicing skills. At orientation, they taught us how to do IVs, but of course mannequins with twenty poke marks already in the right spot aren't the best teaching tools. With our one day of practice, they told us we were "ready" for the real thing at the hospital. YIKES!!

I was pretty nervous for this, but luckily one of my first shifts at the hospital I was given lots of practice. SUCCESS!! In my short 6 hours at the GI lab that day, I successfully inserted 3 out of 4 IVs! :D (Plus the unsuccessful one was really close. I just felt bad for the guy since he told me he hated needles and I had to have my nurse redo it on him. :s But he was my first and I felt pretty good about it, despite having to stick him twice.) AND, the last guy I stuck said it didn't even hurt, so I felt pretty proud of myself and the nurse that was supervising me later told my teacher I did an awesome job. :)

I've had my up and down feelings about nursing school and as the end draws near, I still have a hard time picturing myself being a "real" nurse all by myself, but after this week, I'm feeling much more confident. Hopefully I can just make this last until I've graduated and doing it on my own...

ALASKA

Mike and I had plans to stay in Utah for the summer because Mike had two classes he needed to take this summer. We were getting a little worried that we would need to take out a few school loans since we couldn't find good jobs and I was only making minimum wage. After his first day of class, we found out that his classes only lasted a month. Mike suggested there was a possibility we could still go "home" to Alaska for the summer and within 30 minutes, we had called and emailed family and jobs to let them know we were coming.


We had a good trip up. I had never been to Canada, despite it being our neighbor, so I was pretty excited about the trip. It took us four days to drive almost 3,000 miles and we saw an abundance of wildlife. We had plans to camp out each night to save some money, but the first night it poured rain and we didn't want to try and find a campsite and set up camp in the rain, and the second night Mike got pretty sick camping, so we stayed in another motel the third night, just cross the Canadian border. By the second half of the third day, my butt was sore and I was tried of driving, but all in all, it was a fun trip.

Canadian border. Our guard was a grumpy dude and
 didn't laugh at any of my jokes. They weren't even Canadian ones!

Some mountain goats on the side of the highway.

A mom and dad and two baby goats, very very close to the highway.

Two black bears we saw about 30 feet away.

Mike posing on our Alaskan motel bed. It was rustic,
but surprisingly nice compared to the outside.

Along the way, we saw 3 bears, a couple moose, lots of deer, a porcupine/gopher-thing, and the goats. I was excited to see them since I hadn't seen wildlife up close in awhile. Whoever thought you'd miss seeing moose in your yard?

Lake Pal

I've fallen way behind on my blog, so I thought I'd take some time to catch up on everything, but it will probably take me awhile.... 


May:
For Mother's Day, we went with Mike's family to Lake Powell. I had never been, but it was gorgeous and now I understand why so many of my friends love it. We mostly rode around in the boat and waterskied. It was my first real time waterskiing and I loved it! We had a great time, and I was grateful we went in early May instead of later in the summer because I burned way bad even with two applications of 50 SPF sunscreen. :s

We took a little hike to a place called Rainbow Bridge

Rainbow Bridge

Me waterskiing. I can get up no problem, but once I'm up
I can't control myself and fall right back down.

My sisters-in-law like to laugh at the Utah accent which make it sound like Lake Pal instead of Powell.

Allie, Laura, and Kitty

We got out and did some swimming too. The water was super cold, but once you got used to it, it felt nice to get out of the heat.

My poor burnt leggies.

My feet got it worst. Somehow I forgot to put sunscreen
on them, so considering, they look pretty good.