Holiday Recap!

Hello there!

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year! I sure did! It was a tad hectic, but isn't it always!

I will recap how my holidays went and my New Years resolution as well post a great glute workout I just did!

The weekend before Christmas Joe and I went to Iowa to see his family! It was our first time traveling a long distance with our two dogs; Mac and Jake. Jake is 16 and if you know him well would say he's a little bit on the ornry side, but what old man isn't? We weren't sure how well he would do on the ride to Iowa let alone the upcoming 16 hour drive to Florida we would endure the following week.

We got up to Iowa on Friday and just spend quality time with his family which was nice! We ended up having to make it a short trip and turned around and drove home the following night! Bummer!

Our plan for Christmas was to leave early about 4 am on Christmas Eve for Florida. I have done this drive numerous amounts of time and have always left around this time to make it straight through around 8 or 9 pm. Joe ended up getting his shift covered the night before so we decided to leave the afternoon of the 23rd to get a head start and take our time. We left about 3pm, and it poured pretty much the whole way all the way to Atlanta. Ugh! With Jake we had to stop about every 2-3 hours to let him out and feed him, which kind of put a delay on our timing as well. We decided to drive to the Florida border and stop and rest so we wouldn't be absolutely exhausted when we got to my dads. Once we got to the border about 4 am and checked into the hotel the dogs were sooo ancy! They would not let us sleep at all!! We probably only got about an hour worth of sleep if that! Mac barked at any sound she heard and was just all restless due to being in the car all day.

Exhausted, we got up and continued the 4 hours left in our drive. Once we got there it finally felt so good to get out of the car. My dad lives on 5 acres of fenced in land and has 6 dogs; 4 German Shephards and 2 Belgian Shephards. I knew Mac was going to have the time of her life! We were a tad worried how Jake would handle everything but it ended up working out great! All the dogs got along soo well! Jake and Mac were living life on all that land to be able to run and play.

Christmas was wonderful! My dad made a delicious meal with beef tenderloing and my fav Yorshire pudding! Yum! The day after Christmas I wanted to take Joe around the Ft. Myers area as I lived there for a short while and vacationed down there so often growing up. We went to Bonita and had lunch at Doc's Beach house, one of my faves! Then I took him through Ft. Myers and through Sanibel Island and we hung on the beach for a bit!

The next day I decided to take Joe to one of my moms and I favorite spots, Jupiter Florida. My grandparents bought a condo here in the 70's and we had it up until a few years ago that my family decided to sell it. I spent many of times here since I was a baby and my mom absolutely loved it there. After my mom passed her wish was for her ashes to be spread in the ocean right outside the condo, so that still has a place in my heart. We spent the day on Jupiter Beach and then had plans to meet with my moms cousin and uncle up at his place in Hutchinson Island. It was so nice to be able to see more family so unexpectantly! Afterwards, we decided to go to my moms favorite restaurant in Jupiter called Jetty's. It sits right on the inlet and overlooks the Jupiter Lighthouse, another one of my moms favorite things! I so so wish we still had that condo, it holds so many special memories to me and my family. Hopefully soon I can go back for a few days rather than just an afternoon!

We were leaving on that following Tuesday. We got up at 3 am and was on the road by 3:45. We were making great timing! Hit ATL way sooner than hoped. Got past Chatanooga and into the Nashville area when we came to a complete standstill!!! I guess earlier that morning a semi and a pick up smashed together in the west bound lanes(we were going east) and they had shut down one lane of our lanes. It took us about 2hours to get through that as wel as hitting a bunch of other little accidents, we could not get out of Nashville to save our life!! Plus it was right at traffic hour too! We finally got through and got an hour outside of Indy and hit a pot hole and got a flat tire!!!! If things could not go worse! At least we were safe, we hit the pothole at a pretty high speed so it could have been really bad! We called AAA and they fixed us up in a about an hour. So we did not get home till 3 hours than expected! But we made it home safely! That's all that matters!

But needless to say, we won't be driving 16 hours with two dogs probably ever again! lol! Aside from the traffic issues we had such a wonderful time and it was so nice to be able to spend Christmas with my dad!

My New Years wasn't anything special. Just had dinner with some friends. As for my resoution, I am not quite sure yet. I have some small little goals to accomplish and I think that is what I will focus on!

Goblet Squats into Bench Jump Squat

Recorded below are goblet squats supersetted with low bench squats into a jump. I go pretty heavy on the goblet squats to really activate the glutes. The low squat also helps me activate the glutes with my hips being able to go that deep! 5 sets of 8 reps each!!