First Big Purchase

When most people get married their first big purchase is a new car, or a house, or some other big ticket item that a normal singleton probably couldn't afford. Us? Well our first big purchase was a vacuum cleaner. The one I bought 2 years ago died. So much for "paying for quality." It served us well for about six months before deciding that it didn't want to suck any more so I was looking forward to the day I could buy a new one... but I had to wait another year and a half.

This weekend we went to make use of some of our gift cards and went to Lowe's. (Fabulous gift idea btw!) After prying Blake away from the lawn mowers (which will be our second big purchase...) we made our way to the vacuum aisle. This time I came prepared. I did my research and I knew what I wanted -- either a Dyson or the Bissell Healthy Home. Of course they had to make the decision hard... This Dyson was on sale... like super clearance...


I've always heard amazing things about Dyson. And there's this whole you pay for what you get mentality so I really don't mind paying a little more for something if it's going to be amazing.

So we, like the crazies we are, spent too much time trying out the store models. In the end we went with the Bissell Healthy Home... and so far so good. We brought it home, put it together, and you wouldn't believe what it picked up. (Maybe I shouldn't put that out there for everyone to read...) It made our carpets look new. And when paired with our new Bissell SpotBot (ahhh-freakin-mazing!) we got out all those stains from a little puppy who shall remain nameless.

Maybe in a few months I'll give a different review of this vacuum but for now I'm loving it. 

And for being such a good sport, Blake bought himself a leaf blower. Amy gets a vacuum and Blake gets a leaf blower, don't we sound like fun.

Post Wedding Funk

I have it. And I think it's something like SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). For the past 10 months our lives have completely revolved around wedding. Everybody would always ask about wedding plans and we all had something sooo amazing to look forward to. But now it's over. And we're married which is great but it's also taking some getting used to. The whole concept of our relationship has changed and we have to get adjusted to that.

Our lives are incredibly busy. I see Blake for about 2 hours a day during the week since he works nights and then on the weekends. But the weekends are usually pretty crazy because we have football games, church, and then the families always want to see us. PWF is simply going to take time to get through (just like SAD) and I'm hoping it'll be a lot sooner rather than later.

We have TTD (Trash The Dress) pictures scheduled for Saturday so I'm stoked about that. I'm hoping they'll turn out to be absolutely amazing!

Favors

Wedding favors are one of those things that seem to be a complete waste of money. I've gotten all kinds and you know what happens to them? They end up in the trash. Really. They do. Except for the koozies - I keep those because they are handy when we have parties. Everybody just ends up with someone's wedding around their drink.

We did a few favors - the first one we planned was a monetary donation to Stop Hunger Now immediately following the Haiti Earthquake in January. I went to Haiti in 2007 and the people there captured my heart. My brother had just gotten back from Haiti about a month before the earthquake struck. We donated one meal for each of the people who would be attending our wedding.

The second was a candy buffet. I LOVE candy and thought this would be neat. Apparently it was a hit because we had NO candy left by the time we got to the reception. Literally. None. And I hear it wasn't just the kids eating it all...

Our final favor were koozies. I didn't think they would be as big of a hit and I wanted to make sure that I didn't have 100 left over at the end of the night so I ordered 150. These were gone by the time we got there. None left. Apparently I should have ordered another 100.

Our favors were just small tokens of our appreciation for everybody who came to the wedding. We hope you enjoy(ed)! :)

An Aloha Honeymoon

3:00 am the day after your wedding is not a good time to try and wake up. I didn't even drink anything and I felt like I had the worst hangover ever. And we had a 5:30 am flight. ugggh!

It all worked out though because we were soo tired that we just slept through all our flights. We landed in Charlotte and had enough time to grab some breakfast -- our first meal as a married couple: Burger King in the Charlotte airport! And the lady found out that we had just gotten married so she gave us the Senior Discount and 2 free cookies! It was awesome!

The flight from Charlotte to Phoenix wasn't bad. We didn't get to see any of the major landmarks like the Mississippi River or the circle fields but we saw a lot of the back of our eyelids. The flight from Phoenix to Honolulu though -- that sucked. It was 6 hours of ocean below you. Nothing cool to look at and by this point we had caught up on sleep. We couldn't watch the movies because we didn't have headphones and we were bored. bored. bored.

But we got to Honolulu, got our bags, found the car rental bus and got there. The guy asked us what brought us to Hawaii and when we said Honeymoon he totally gave us an upgrade -- instead of a dorky Chevy Malibu we got a Ford Mustang Convertible for the week! sweet! We almost had a disaster when we left the Car Rental because the GPS couldn't find a satellite. We decided to just drive and we'd find our way. Well then it started raining and we couldn't figure out how to put the top up! So here we are in a "foreign" land having all these issues. I was about ready to go back to the airport and come home. But, being the level-headed people we are, we pulled into a neighborhood (that looked pretty ghetto), read the owner's manual (a ha!), and got the top up. Right about this point the GPS found us (and we were 4800 miles from Hwy 264, so we couldn't go home) and we were able to figure out how to get to our resort.

We got to the resort which was absolutely amazing. It had everything we needed -- we didn't even have to leave there! We settled in and began a fun and relaxing week.

We did a self-guided tour of Oahu. We basically "conquered" (saw all there was to see) in about 4 days. We drove through the mountains, saw the amazing coastlines, visited the pineapple plantation, saw the surfer towns, climbed Diamond Head, visited Waikiki, went to a luau, and shopped. It was amazing. On Wednesday we took a trip to the big island of Hawaii and had a tour of Hilo (a town there) and Volcanoes National Park.

I can't pick out just one part of our trip that was my favorite. It was all amazing. I enjoyed getting away from school, work, and life. Even though we were still connected because our phones still worked (which was very nice) it was just Blake and me. After all the excitement and craziness that was our wedding, it was nice to immediately get away and enjoy being with each other. I think it was the best decision we made for me to take a week off school and get away together.

And we're already planning a "post-moon" to visit Hawaii again :)

Our Perfect Day

Our Day actually began the night before at the Rehearsal & Dinner. The Rehearsal wasn't quite as smooth as I had hoped because the rain and flooding kept people from arriving on time. But everyone got there and figured out what they were supposed to do. Afterward we had an awesome Rehearsal Dinner (that had a few kinks in it... like the food was late!) and the Fellowship Hall was beautiful. Blake's ECU Stadium Groom's Cake was absolutely amazing. We went out for a drink after then parted ways until we were to meet at the alter. I last talked to Blake about 12:05am on the day of our wedding and didn't talk to him again until I saw him at the alter... that was amazing.

So I got up early the morning of the wedding (because I definitely couldn't sleep in today!) and my dad made me French Toast and bacon. Daddy knows how much I love my breakfast in the morning and it was a tradition for him to make breakfast every Sunday morning. So I ate my breakfast, checked in for our flight to Hawaii, then momma dropped me off to get my hair done. It was cool to have all the girls together getting their hair done and it was very relaxing because we didn't talk wedding--just girl stuff. We left the salon for the church where we got ready. You would think that getting to church at 12:30 for a 5:00 wedding was plenty of time but I still feel like we didn't have enough time for pictures! Allison Dameron did my makeup (which was awesome!) and my mom's, Blake's mom's, and Julie's. The girls got dressed, took a few pictures, and then it was my turn to get sewn into my dress. It really took about 20 minutes for me to get into the dress. Once that was on it was time for pictures. I didn't have any time to be nervous -- I think all the girls expected me to be crying and nervous but I wasn't. It was amazing.

One of the special parts of the day was my gift from Blake. He gave me a new Bible with my new name on the front. It was incredibly meaningful to me because it will be a tool I will use all throughout our marriage and the raising of our family. My gift to Blake? A trip to the Big Island of Hawaii to tour the volcanoes!

After our pictures, Beth came back and fixed up my hair (thanks so much!) and the girls just hung around. Soon after that my Girl Scouts started arriving and coming back to hang with me. That was really cool too because they have meant so much to me that I wanted to make them feel as much a part of the day as possible. They left to be seated and soon after my bridesmaids left to line up. So here I was, hanging with my daddy, waiting to go down the aisle.

The rest of the day was pretty much a blur. I remember seeing Blake at the alter, I was focused on him and when I first saw him he looked so nervous but as soon as he saw me I could tell he was a lot more comfortable. When we got to the end of the aisle my dad messed up his only words -- instead of saying "Her mother and I do" he said "I do." OHHH!!! I nudged him and made him fix it... everybody laughed which made me laugh and put me at ease. We had a wonderful service. God touched that service so greatly. The beautiful weather, amazing music, wonderful guests... The homily was perfect. (From what I remember of it.) The only snafu was that I got wax on my dress while lighting the unity candle so I picked it off during several of the prayers. Communion went better than I thought and I think everyone thought it was a cool addition to the ceremony. (And for those of you who are wondering--no I didn't dip my bread into the grape juice because I was afraid of spilling on my dress.)  This was the only part of the ceremony where I even remotely noticed who was there -- if I didn't see them during communion, I had NO clue who was there or not. (I hate it, but it's the truth.) So we said our vows and were off!


There are so many pictures after the ceremony but you really don't have a lot of time to do them. We went as fast as we could but we've heard we still took forever. I think we got some really amazing shots and I'm excited to see them.

And then we got to the reception. Apparently we were late so there were issues about the food... but I didn't care. Nobody was going to mess up my day! We were introduced, danced, blessed the food, but never really ate. We enjoyed going around and talking with all our family and friends who came to celebrate. I'm sorry if we didn't get a chance to get to your table, but know that we were trying! We planned on 250 people at the reception and ended up having 320. We were so excited to share our day with everybody and are so glad that they wanted to share it with us!

At the end of the night we did a bubble send off and went off. We were both completely exhausted and 3 am was going to come very early...

The week before

Saturday before the wedding was the Bridesmaids' Luncheon. I imagined a really nice morning brunch with my four bridesmaids, mom, mother-in-law, and wedding planner. It was a really nice morning and we had a good time but geez.... nothing went right. The food we ordered was wrong, the service was less than stellar, and in the end I was just ready to be done with it. So I shrugged this off as what was going to go wrong with the wedding -- we went ahead and got it out of the way early. I still think everyone had a good time and I (hope) they loved their gifts.

Monday morning before the wedding it started to rain and it rained all day. Tuesday morning it was still raining. And it rained all day. Guess what was going on Wednesday morning? Yep. It was raining and it continued this way until Friday about noon. The entire week. It rained so much that school was canceled Thursday and Friday because the rivers had gotten too high, roads were flooding, and the sewage system at school was down. It was pretty funny watching me and my dad run into stores to pick up his suit & tux, then watching me and my mom dodging rain drops while picking up flowers and ferns for the church. We also had to take all the reception accessories to the City Hotel & Bistro in the rain. What fun! I was so scared that it was going to rain on Saturday ... I mean I did ask God for no hurricanes and for a beautiful day MONTHS. He sent rain the entire week before and a Tropical Storm. He's a pretty funny God.

I was so glad I took off Wednesday - Friday before the wedding. I had a chance to chill out, clean up the house, and run errands with the family. I was not nervous during these days... I was really excited and sat around finding random things to do to fill up the time.

Oh and by the way, the rain began again on Sunday morning as we were flying out of Greenville.

Getting back to it...

So obviously it has been awhile since I blogged and I've thought about all the blog posts I need to do... Over the next few days I'll update cyberspace on our wedding and the awesomeness that was October 2, 2010. And the last minute mishaps and married life after wedding. Enjoy! :)