Domesticity X-ing

Well, it's happened.  I have become domestic. Kinda. I'm on the path anyway. Boredom+tons of free time=a clean home and cooking!

I have now spent untold hours scouring Martha Stewart's and Pioneer Woman's websites looking for recipes to try. And some for this week and some to keep in mind for the future.  In the vein of Big posting homebrew recipes I will start posting the occasional recipe or new found tip here as well!

Last week involved Ellen's (ma new mama-in-law) Blue Cheese Alfredo recipe (delish!!), devils on horseback (dates stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon) (soso) and chocolate/butterscotch chip cookies (the last batch was perfect!)

This was what my first bunch looked like. SAD!

I cannot eat chocolate chip cookies that look like this. They are just too pitiful looking.  My fix was to add more flour, put the batter in the fridge while a batch was cooking, form them to be as tall as possible with the dough being used, and add a few extra chocolate chips to the top before sticking the pan into the oven.  Now I don't have any pictures of the last/tastiest because I ATE THEM ALL (okay, Big helped too). This picture is from a better but not best middle batch:

The plans for this week include Pioneer Woman's Beef Stew with Beer and Paprika and her Baked Fudge! Mmmm.

Invitations and Dresses and Pictures, Oh My

Well, the timing is a little off, but I have pictures and they need to be posted!  So here are pics from the wedding invitation stuffing party-like fun times with Erin and Lindsay and lots of red wine!

 

 The other pre-wedding picture-taking extravagana was the somewhat epic, mostly really long and exhausting wedding dress hunt. The search for "the dress" consisted of hours and hours of online searching, somewhere between 5 and 7 store visits, lots of help from my mom and friends and an eventual happy ending that didn't include "the feeling" but did include satisfaction and good feelings. 

Here's a ridiculous amount of pictures to give you a feeling of how it all went down, and also to show off many of the dresses I didn't get.

There were SO. MANY. DRESSES.

Dress shopping was intense and this was pretty much how it felt.

This was almost the dress.

Could've been. Did have doo dad's afterall.

The skirt was so poofy!

 

Trying on dresses starts as fun and ends in yawns.
Sadly, this was only about halfway through the first  trip.

We tried to keep our spirits up though!

My Mommy found a pretty dress too!

We whipped out our hipster poses.

The matchy matchyness was totally coincidental and lead to adding another color to the navy and silver scheme.

This was the first dress I tried on. I totally fell in love with it at the time, but in the end it wasn't the one.

At my mom's request I tried on this SUPER poofy dress AND the crazy long cathedral veil. She cried.

I was also very close to getting this one at one point.

It was decided that this was the most flattering and also least me-like dress tried on.

I also this one on like 4 times and almost got it.

In the end, this is the one I went with. Maybe not the best picture of the dress, but I still rather like it  ;)

Honeymoon Highlights!

First blog post of married life! Woohoo! After a whirlwind of family shindigs, friend gatherings, moving mayhem and wedding celebrations Big and I were more than ready for some honeymoon r&r. The main part of our trip was CRUISIN in the western Caribbean but we also spent a couple of days before hand in SoBe (South Beach) Miami.  

Much to Big's dismay, we spent a couple hours of his birthday evening (also the day after the wedding) looking for our Miami hotel.  We crammed in as much research as possible into a short amount of time and decided to go with a hotel that had a great price, very mixed reviews and seemed like a great location - The Hotel Shelley . 

We were relieved and excited when the hotel's location was indeed amazing and the hotel itself was charming and our room (which they upgraded for free!) was perfect.

Our hotel was super close to the shopping district as well as the beach. They were experiencing horribly "cold" weather there - 60-65 degrees. It may have been cold to them, but it felt downright balmy to us.  

This shirt was EVERYWHERE and fairly hilarious I thought.

It was Art Deco Weekend, so there were neat booths and street performers all along Ocean Drive.  We watched Kate and her Amazingly Dangerous and Amazing Show.  She was pretty talented and very funny.

After a couple of days in SoBe we were ready and excited for our cruise.  It was fun, relaxing and an overall recommended experience.  We went on Carnival and had as much fun on the ship as off. Vegas-like shows, comedy acts at the Punchliner Comedy Club, a casino, live music everywhere, a giant outdoor movie screen, a romantic balcony, 24hr room service and food food, food, food. One fun little touch, was that they left towel animals in our room every night along with the FunTimes listing of everything going on the next day.

We had a truly wonderful time and went on very neat excursions. We saw the Mayan ruins at Tulum, checked out the port area on Grand Cayman and walked up the Dunns River Falls 600' waterfall in Ocho Rios, Jamaica.  Ryan documented quite a bit of our adventure on our new Flip video camera with the intention of sharing it here.  We'll try to post it soon!