Burn's Night

Last Saturday was the annual Burn's Night Supper put on by the kid's primary school.  This was our fourth year attending the dinner.  Last year I was on the Burn's Night committee and the night was huge success and I had fun but this year I decided to just kick back and enjoy the night without any stress of working the event.  It was funny not being involved in the event this year after being so deeply involved last year.  I didn't even buy our tickets until a few days before the dinner!  We were prepared for a fun night out though.  We had our babysitter sleep over so that we didn't have to worry about getting back late.  The kids love when Iva sleeps over!  We called a cab, picked up friends on the way and started our night.  The night always involves alcohol and it always involves scotch whiskey.  I have my obligatory sip of the whiskey but that is all I can manage.  While Jason and a lot of our friends enjoy the flavor of Whiskey, to me it just tastes awful and it is really only good as cough medine.  This year I missed what was said for most of the toast to the lassies since the accoustics in the hall were not that good and the man giving the toast had a very heavy scottish accent that takes most of my concentration to understand even when there isn't a lot of other noise around.  I had a Scottish friend sitting next to me and he did "translate" some of it so it was still funny.  After the toast to the lassies and laddies and the toast to the haggis we sat down to enjoy our meal.  This year the serving staff didn't ask you what you wanted but just put heaping portions of everything on the plates.  As I did not feel like having a bloated belly this year I skipped the haggis and ate the potatoes and neeps.  Neeps, as far as I can tell, seem to be made from turnips but there also seemed to be some carrots in with it but I could be wrong.  There were two raffles this year.  The first raffle was for the bottle of Whiskey on the table and the second raffle was for a bunch of different prizes.  Our table all just put equal amount of money into the Whiskey raffle envelope and the opened the bottle and shared it among the table.  The second raffle everyone bought tickets for to see if we would win anything from the list of prizes.  It seemed our table was a lucky table as most people sitting at our table won some prize.  We came home with two boxes of legos...a helicopter and the jeep and green army men from Toy Story.  Once the raffle was finished and the plates cleared the tables were moved aside to make room for dancing.  We had a lot of fun dancing the Scottish dances.  I danced one with a Scottish friend who knew what he was doing but i still think that particular dance is very difficult even when I'm being dragged along by someone with knowledge of the dance.  The last Scottish dance of the night (I think it is called the Highland Barn Dance) Jason and I danced together and we felt that we finally figured out one of the dances.  It has only taken us 4 years to figure it out!  It was a fun night and we finally called it quits and got home around 3am.  We were grateful that Iva slept over so that we didn't have to leave the party any sooner!