Natalie's Bridal Shower

So, this was several weeks ago, but life has been ca-razy! Seriously. Jed left to do window washing in California (for three weeks... it's been lonely). I had summer practicum, a visit to my brother who is acting in a dinner theater in Idaho for the summer, and just all around homework. I've also had some wonderful friends who have come over (even if it was to do laundry...ha ha) and who I've been able to spend time with shopping or at the gym. I even have a 15 page research paper (which is basically done! Yay!). So despite my husband being gone, life did not slow down for me. Oh and I have to get a root canal. But overall, we are very happy with life right now.

All that has nothing to do with what this post is really about, but I thought I'd give you a 30 second update on our life.

To the Bridal Shower:

Saturday, the 16th, I hosted my first party at my house! It was my long time best friend's bridal shower, which I hosted with Amy as well as with TONS of help from my mother and my great friend, Kyli.

So because I feel that I know Natalie quite well, I thought pizza would be a good food to serve because she loves pizza to death. So we gave Natalie some options of what she could choose, and so the menu was: margherita pizza, pepperoni, meat lovers, and bbq chicken. For dessert we had cinnamon sticks and fruit pizza. Oh and we served raspberry lemonade.

The morning of, Amy, Kyli, and later my mother came over to prepare the food. My kitchen had never been so messy (granted we've only lived here for two weeks, but still) and I had some moments of worry that we wouldn't get done in time as time flew by quite quickly! Luckily, everyone was fashionably late so we had time to clean and put out the food.





We also made the favors to give out at the end. We used one of Amy's wedding gifts, called Baby Cakes. It's this thing you put cake batter into, close the lid for like 5 minutes, and then out come perfect round cake balls! Then you can fill them, put sticks in, and cover with frosting or chocolate. It was amazing how well it worked, and I recommend anyone to go out there and buy this little contraption (Hint, hint to Jed.... Perhaps a future Christmas present...?). The favors turned out way cute and they were absolutely delicious. It helped that what we covered the cake balls in was white chocolate mint.... way addicting!





We chatted and ate, and then played a game.... jeopardy.... This was a game a took offline, a Jeopardy game for a bridal shower. It was silly, I'll just say it. I felt bad because I did not have time this week to make up new questions, but in the end, it was very fun and I think we all really enjoyed the giggling the game produced.

Then Natalie opened presents! I loved the variety. She got a present of kitchen gadgets (classic) and a couple of presents of lingerie (another classic). Then there were the others: a blowdryer with a diffuser and then the present of travel toothbrushes/paste/mouthwash. Ha ha so funny but both were things Natalie could use/needed!







I have to describe the present the freshman roommates gave to Natalie. After the cute and creative gift we gave Amy for her bridal shower, we had a hard time coming up with something different but equally as creative for Natalie's gift. I don't know if what we came up with was equally cute and creative, but it certainly was creative ha ha. So we fashioned it after a gift Amy got for a bridal shower. Someone gave her an umbrella, and when she opened it, there were dollar bills hanging on the inside "for a rainy day." So we got a big umbrella and hung lingerie in it "for a rainy day." Ha ha yeah.... we're not the most creative people. But it was cute and fun and Natalie was very surprised, which was exactly the idea!

She knew something was coming...





Also, I must highlight a cute idea for decorations. My mother made these for the shower. You need a wiffle ball, plastic flowers, and a ribbon. She got everything from the dollar store. So basically (I probably am missing a step), but you just stick the flowers into the holes of the wiffle ball. The ribbon can be used to hang it up, but that's seriously it. I feel the step I may be missing is if you glue the flowers it, but I bet if you stuff them in tight enough, they'll stay. So here they are:





All in all, it was a fun bridal shower! We had a good time, and I was so glad to be able to throw that for my best friend. Now on to the wedding in less than a week!

(I'll end with this sequence of pictures I really like...)

Our New House! The Complete Tour

For those of you that can't visit us, here is your guided tour through our humble abode.

The street view...



The backyard, complete with a fire pit! (Awesome? I know it's been fun already.)



Now it's time to go downstairs! Down to our apartment...



And here is the living room!





On our coffee table sits our little betta fish, Stephanie Stephenson. Yep, that's what we named her.



These are our lovely long walls that lead us to the kitchen...





So here we are in the kitchen. Notice the light over the table? We bought and installed that! Hence the lovely white line on the wall, because we made it into a plug in lamp.



And here is the kitchen.



So here is the part of my kitchen everyone, including myself loves. This little butcher block is awesome and the big, deep drawers are awesome, especially with the stainless steel finish. Love it.!



Here is our lovely second bedroom. I like to say that this is Jed's room, because all of the decorations represent him.





And here is our bedroom!



And here are the built in shelves that are super cute and are my next project...



So, there you have it! There are of course a few features I did not put in, like the bathroom (beautifully painted by the previous tenants--my friends Katie and Mark), the washer and dryer, and our storage under the stairs AND on the stairs.

Hope you can come visit!

Decorating... My newest talent?

Living in Wymount, it was hard to decorate. Cinderblock walls, no painting, no nails, small spaces, it's hard to decorate. But then we were blessed with our new apartment, and especially since I was able to paint, I was basically presented with a blank canvas!

My inspiration for the paint color comes from pillows my dear friend Amy gave to me! She was moving and was going to leave the pillows for her roommates, but offered them to me and they were perfect! I already had a rug and that little wall painting I had made that I hoped to use again, so since these pillows matched, it was a done deal.

Jed and I took the pillow to Home Depot and found the exact right paint color. It was a fun date ha ha. Then we painted (see the post about moving to see the process) and after moving, I had the fun time of decorating! Jed had a TON of paintings from his parents and some painted by his grandma (which are excellent), plus we have many received as gifts from our wedding. I wanted to use some of the ones we didn't get a chance to in our Wymount apartment, and so that was the beginning of my plan....

This next picture is to show you how I planned what to put on the walls. I don't know where I even got this idea, but it is brilliant. Get a ton of butcher paper and trace all your wall hangings. Cut out the shapes of your pictures/clocks/etc. and then you can tape those up on your wall so you can visualize what your pictures would look like on the walls! It's brilliant, especially when you want to put a few together on the wall. I felt happy because not only did my arms not get tired from holding heavy paintings up, but I could do it by myself. Another brilliant thing about it is that you can mark on the paper where to but the nail, and then nail right through the butcher paper! You get to put the nail exactly where it needs to go and then the butcher paper rips right off the nail. I love it! So here is what it looked like in planning:



And here is the end product:



Do you like it? I love it!

This was not the only wall I decorated. Here are some others:







As you can see, I've discovered wall vinyls to put up cute sayings on my wall... perhaps I have gone a tad overboard, but I think I have a good balance.

I also have to showcase my mother's curtain's that she made, because I think they are very very cute:



They are Roman shades and I love them.

So all my decorating is almost done! I have a few curtains to make for the two bedrooms and I have this as a project:



These shelves are in our bedroom. The backs are covered simply with cardboard, so my idea is to finish covering them with cardboard, but to cover all of the cardboard with a cute patterned wallpaper!

So, there are my decorating adventures. I hope that I can develop this into a real talent, because it's fun! I also think that this, coupled with my love and organization in planning for weddings, could lead to a nice little job or business when I'm a stay at home mom? Who wants to hire me?

The Adventures of Moving!

Well, two weeks later, here comes a post about how the moving went!

Previous to moving was painting... all week long my family (most especially my mother) helped us paint as well as some wonderful friends. We had fun and we were really happy with the result!

As you can see there was a ton of spackling involved and some maintenance...





These are not all the people who helped paint... just the ones I remembered to take pictures of!







Here it is all finished!



With the painting done, it came time to move! July 2nd was a warm day, but we had lots of people come help!







Here are my photogenic friends, Michelle and Peter (to be married in almost exactly a month!).



So, with two trips from Wymount to our new apartment, we were moved! We were exhausted, too, but with the help from my mom, sister, brother, and a few friends we were almost all unpacked by that night! The exception was the office, but considering the amount of stuff we have, I was proud of us!

Living Vicariously through the Silver Screen

So you know how when you're a teenager and you watch all those cute romantic comedies and they make you all giddy and all excited to find a boyfriend or find the love of your life? Oh who am I kidding, this was me in college, too, pre-Jed. Well, considering that I have found the love of my life, these movies just make me happy to be with Jed and glad I don't have to go through silly drama. And then, when I was engaged and newly married, I watched every movie about weddings I could get my hands on. Say Yes to the Dress was the best TV show ever! Even a couple days after we got married, at the cabin in Lake Tahoe we stayed at, they had a movie collection for us to borrow and both of the movies we watched were about weddings! (Don't I have a great husband who will watch those with me? I think he was just happy we were married so he let me watch whatever I wanted. And we ate popcorn they gave us. I highly recommend this place. We loved it. And they serve you homemade waffles for breakfast. Amazing.)

So now you wonder, what movies make me all giddy and excited now? Movies about pregnancies! Seriously, it's funny how excited I am when I discover a new movie on Netflix that has to do with being pregnant. Then I tell Jed all about it (because why in the world would a man want to watch those?) and he laughs at my silliness and how happy I am and so goes my evenings. It's funny, too, because I feel like the movies are similar to us: Woman gets pregnant and may be scared in the beginning but is super excited and loving it all (hopefully I'll be super excited and loving it all too....) and then the guy is generally scared and worried and recognizes the responsibility of having a baby and is a bit more practical...in other words: Jed. While we aren't expecting yet, I have to say that these movies make me super excited for when I can finally say that we are expecting. Jed's excited, too, but still scared for all that is to come. But I'm grateful that for now I can live vicariously through movies until we're lucky enough to be living what is in the movies...At least some of what is in the movies.


P.S. I hope you don't skim this post. At least read it thoroughly enough to know that I'm NOT PREGNANT just excited to become pregnant. I don't want rumors running around...

A little preview of what's to come...

Hello blogging world!

So, many of you know this weekend we moved! As much as we loved our cute little Wymount apartment, we were ready for a cute, not so little apartment. One of my best friends, Katie Mitchell, let us know a while back that the house they were living in had an opening! An opening coming in July, that is (and this was February when we found out). She actually was living in the basement apartment at the time and in July would be moving upstairs, so we would get the basement! There are so many pluses to this apartment: just under 1000 sq. feet (our Wymount apartment was somewhere between 600-650), washer/dryer (!), dishwasher (!!), we could paint the walls and hang things on the wall with NAILS (something that Wymount did not let us do), it's a house with a backyard (that happens to have a firepit, garden area, and a screen for projecting movies for an outdoor movie experience), and last but not least, we would be living under two people that we both love to be with (which as all you married people know, this can be hard to find). So all in all, you can see that this apartment sounds amazing. Being about $40 more for rent a month than our other apartment, this place was a win on all pages.

Before we moved in, so many people were amazing friends and helped us paint! No one was more so than my mother, who has been to our apartment almost everyday helping us spackle, paint, sew curtains, pack, unpack, organize, etc. I was about to start to name more names, but seriously the list is long. Thank you to you all! (But especially Mom.)

I bring up paint, because while we have in fact painted the living room/kitchen area, and we have begun decorating, our apartment is in no shape to take pictures of it to show you all. We still have a lot of work before it is worthy of showing people, especially putting up permanent pictures on the internet.... HOWEVER, if you're like me, you may be dying to see some of the apartment. So I am going to allow one picture to go up, because I think this section of the living room is completed. So here you go:



Note that you can see in this picture not only our light blue walls (I promise it's a little darker than the picture portrays), but also our laminate hard wood flooring, which is AWESOME, as well as our new brown slip covers for our sofa and loveseat... Probably one of my most favorite purchases ever. (It's the two piece slipcover... NEVER go with the one piece! You'll be tucking it in for the rest of your life.)

Know that I hope to have the apartment worthy to show by Saturday, so fear not, you shall see more soon enough. Also... if you know someone (or are someone) who is good at decorating, I'm struggling with some walls. We have a super duper long one that our sofa and table rest against, and I can't figure out how to decorate it! So if you have time this week, please come by and give me some advice!