Home!

I have been planning a trip to go home (MA) for a little while now. I always like to take at least a few days between Christmas and April (when we go home) to visit my mom and dad. Once we return in April, things get crazy with the business and I only get one or two days off (maybe) until October and then we leave again! The few days home with my parents in March are always nice and a good time to catch up. Now that I'm engaged, I have lots of wedding things to do while im home, plus no one has seen my ring!

I had originally planned to fly standby on Sunday (my brother works for AA), but with the crazy snow storm taking over the country this weekend, I decided to buy a ticket and fly out Saturday. I've been a little crazy today trying to get some work done and pack. Luckily, B's parents are in town and have been able to help around the house.

I also am moving up in the world of cell phones and have upgraded to an iphone! This is a bittersweet day for me. I have always hated the iphone, mainly because I think the texting sucks. But with wedding dress shopping and Party Patrol starting soon, I felt like a legit phone with internet and a good camera would be worth it. I've used B iphone since day 1, so I'm used to it and don't even feel like this one is mine yet!

Bentley also went to the groomers today, which is always a circus. He is not a fan, but looks oh so cute! With my new handy dandy phone, I promise to take more pictures, but that will start tomorrow. Maybe.

Lastly, I was inspired earlier to make cookies, so I went with a recipe my roommate introduced me too. Its basically a chocolate chip cookie with a pile of nutella inside. To die for. Recipe can be found here.

My thin FL blood (that is a real thing, I promise!) will soon be entering the polar vortex and snow wonderland! Wish me luck!

Bridesmaids!

Now that all my girls have received their gifts, I can finally share the project here!

So I knew I wanted to ask my girls to be bridesmaids in a special way. I had found an idea on Pinterest awhile back and looked into buying shirts on etsy, but they seemed super expensive. I decided to try making shirts myself and they could not have come out better! I am so so happy with them, I even made myself a "Bride" one!

I'll do a how-to post later, but here's the finished product!

So there are eight girls standing on my side, my MOH (who happens to be married to B's Best Man!!), 4 Bridesmaids and 3 Junior Bridesmaids (my future nieces!). I wrapped each shirt in black tissue paper and tied it with gold ribbon. Each girl had the best reaction to the gifts and no one had any idea they were coming! It was so exciting and I think they all really liked it! It just stinks that we have to wait 18 months to wear them to any event!

Venue Trouble

I'm sure in a few months from now, I'll read this post and think how silly I was for worrying so much because by then, I'll have a venue (hopefully!).

So B is all about the wedding budget. And by budget, I mean spending pennies on the wedding. My mom had mentioned when we first got engaged that we should set our tents up at our MA house. Convenient, its pretty, oh and its free. I immediately shot that idea down, but not even an hour later, B had the same idea. I do not love the idea at all and feel like our wedding in our backyard would be seriously stressful. Am I being irrational? I'm having a hard time explaining to B how I feel about this idea.

Pros:

• It's free. I get that, but we have one venue that we like where we know the owner and he's willing to barter party rentals to use his barn (aka a free venue). We feel like we have some bargaining tactics because we are in the wedding industry (not sure if I've mentioned yet that we also own a DJ company), so we can try a referral system or links on websites, etc. So our house bring free doesn't hold a ton of bearing with me. 
• Convenience. Everything would literally be ten steps away. This to me is more of a con than a pro, but for after party purposes and the fact that all of our friends are big drinkers and wont want to drive after the wedding, it does hold some ground to not have to worry about transportation. Renting a limo/bus for 30 of our friends would be pricey, so I see his point. 
• Significance of our home. My mom loves this idea, from getting ready in our house to having all of our relatives at our home (yikes!), she thinks it would be so sweet. I don't disagree, but I do see myself getting worked up over this more than it would be worth. 
• Bathrooms. A weird one, but having an outdoor wedding means some sort of porta potty. Not ideal in long gowns. Our house has a seperate bathroom for our employees that's connected to our house, but can be locked so you can only get in from the outside but can't get into the house.

Cons:

• It's not special. This is the part I can't explain to B. I live there. I see this place every day. It's not somewhere new and different. Oh, not to mention that we work here 24/7 and the house brings a lot of stressful feelings because it's related to our business.
• There is no where to have a ceremony. Only enough room for the reception tent.
• There is no room for parking. This could be fixed by parking down the street at the town hall or park, but there would still have to be some sort of valet from there to our house. Not a problem we cant solve, but not ideal. 
• It's my backyard. Meaning I would drive myself absolutely crazy cleaning/organizing,vacuuming every speck of dirt from my yard. I guess some would see this as a good thing because I have control over the space, but I see it as added stress seeing my wedding get put together for a week. 
•  The business is run out of the same property. Trucks, trailers, bounce houses, all of it would have to be moved. Leaving the business for weeks is going to be hard enough, but planning everything out for the business to move temporarily for a few days would be hard. More planning on my part. Again, fixable, but more work for me. 
• I have zero desire to get ready in my bedroom, where I sleep every night. Weird. I've always dreamed about getting ready somewhere special with my bridal party. And I dont want to sleep with B the night before, but it seems silly to get a hotel and then drive back to our house later for our wedding. 

We are both keeping our options open and he is being super easy going about all of this. But if he had it his way, it would be at our house. I understand there has to be compromise, but I'm holding my ground on this one. Especially because there is potential for us to get a venue for next to nothing. And he knows that, so at this point we wait to see the venues and what they will offer. 

Valentine's Day

I finally remembered to take some pictures of my food! Friday morning, I made pink pancakes with nutella and strawberries. So pretty and fricken delicious!

 I also made pink, heart shaped rice krispie treats. Also super cute and easy!

 

For B, Bentley and I attempted a pretty crafty idea involving a plate, red paint and a sharpie. I do not have pictures of this, although I intended to, but within an hour of B opening that gift, Bentley jumped on the counter and smashed the plate. One very upset mama over here. Plate making attempt #2 will happen later this week. 

These last 3 days have been never ending with work, so today, B and I polished off an entire box of Girl Scout Somoa cookies before dinner. Ballin'. 

I have some fun things to share this week, including a special bridesmaid project I finally finished. Just waiting for the girls to receive their packages so I can share the goodness! SO SO excited about it! I also forgot about a venue, but it needed its own post anyways. Happy Sunday!

Venues

Oh venues...probably every brides biggest decision (besides the dress) and most expensive part of the wedding. When I started looking at venues, I realized a decision needed to be made soon, considering one of my top choices was already booked for our date (which is 20 months away!) Here's the criteria for the venue

• Outside reception and ceremony space-We plan to use a hexagon tent that we own for the reception, so we must be able to bring our own tents onto the property. MANY venues do not allow this.
• Separate space for an outdoor ceremony.
• Allows us to bring in our own caterer. 
• Within an hour of our house (we plan to have an after party, so we didn't want to have to travel)
• Pretty views (fall wedding, views are a must)

 We also didn't want to pay a whole lot for a venue, considering we are really only using the property. We don't get a wedding planner/doc, there is no bridal suite for me and the girls to get ready in, and we have to decorate from the ground up (which is what we want). It just doesn't make sense to us to pay thousands of dollars for us to simply use grounds. So here are our choices:

 

Montague Retreat Center-pretty, but expensive for what we want and the tent location is a hike and a half. It would be cool to have a hayride to the location, but not an expense we anticipated. 

 Chesterwood-The property was specifically designed to only hold tented weddings. Unsure about price, as no one has gotten back to me, and its a teensy bit far for our liking.

 Bramble Hill Farm- I know, I know, this is indoors, but how GORGEOUS! I loved the idea of having the option of something indoors if it rained, but they haven't contacted me yet either so I have no idea the cost of this either. Super plus-its like 2 minutes from my parents house

 Worthington Pond Farm-cute, but nothing special, it has potential though so I figured it stays on the list

 Still Worthington Pond Farm-you can hold the reception under the covered bridge-how cool!

 Rosedale Farms-Our top choice right now! It's a gorgeous vineyard with a giant red barn, but the best part? It would most likely be FREE because we know the owner and would be bartering party rentals, oh baby!

I've been really disappointed in lack of response from everyone except the Montague Retreat Center. Makes it hard to plan tours and get pricing! Really holding our breath for Rosedale Farms though, but want to keep our options open just in case it falls through.

Next order of business-finding the dress.

Weekly Menu

Two posts in one day...who am I?! Its storming like crazy here (love it!) and im waiting to feast on Iguana Mia's (my fav mexican food), so I decided I should make a grocery list. Here's the menu for this week:

• Oven Baked Chicken with mashed potatoes and a veggie (Bake chicken breasts in a pan with water and some bouillon cubes)
• Steak Salad (inspiration from Bice Grand Cafe, it has kalamata olives, potatoes, feta, peppers, and romaine with balsamic dressing and grilled steak, AH-mazing!)
•  BBQ Kielbasa with rice (great crock pot recipe, so easy)
• Lasagna and Salad (I use a meatloaf pan to make it a serving for 2 instead of 80 and use ground turkey instead of ground meat)
• Potstickers and pork fried rice (for the night im feeling lazy and want to use something from the freezer-testing out whatever looks good from the freezer section so hopefully its good)
• Something with ground turkey- I only use 1/2 lb of the turkey for the lasagna so ill use the other 1/2 lb for whatever inspires me between now and then. 
• One night we will eat out! 

6 super easy meals that aren't too expensive either!  Grocery list is made (my next routine to get into is reorganizing my lists so i'm not back tracking through the store 15 times because I forgot something)

I also plan to try two new croissant recipes this week. I am a sucker for croissant rolls (put some butter/brown sugar/cinnamon in those babies, wow!).  I'm going to try putting some strawberry jam in some and some nutella and PB in others. Cant go wrong with either one, right?!

As mentioned before, I'm going to make some red pancakes for Valentines Day and probably some red, heart shaped rice krispies too for B.

Tuna Salad-My Way

I. HATE. Mayonaisse. Like despise it more than anything. Therefore, potato salad, pasta salad, tuna salad, are all things I will never eat. I've created my own recipes for all these things without mayo and they are always a huge hit! Plus, they never have to be refridgerated at BBQ's and picnics, win win for everyone!

One of the trickiest things I encounter when going on the boat is what to pack for lunch. Sandwiches with lunch meat gets old real fast. So I turn to tuna. Here's what you'll need:

A can of tuna per person
Tbsp or so of Olive Oil
A shake of Season All
Black Olives (however many you like)
Dill Relish
Sharp Cheddar Cheese
Crackers/Rolls

Basically, you mix everything but the cheese together in a bowl. When ready to serve, put slices of cheese on either crackers or rolls and pile on the tuna! Super easy!

I got really adventurous this summer and decided to make tuna melts. Same concept, but make it like a grilled cheese! I use plain old slices of American cheese since it melts way better, butter two slices of bread and pile on the tuna salad. Flipping is slightly tricky and the tuna tends to fall out, but if you only flip once, its not too bad. And its so worth it! Such an easy lunch or weeknight meal! And the tuna part is pretty healthy too, but full of flavor and very filling.

I apologize that I don't have any pictures, I'm lazy and get super focused when I cook. Next time.

In other news, I am not a fan of valentines, but B and I never turn down an excuse to plan for a fun day! I plan to make him red pancakes with nutella and strawberries on top (I promise I'll take pictures) for breakfast. We have dinner reservations at a fancy restaurant on the water. Im getting him an 80 min. massage (which he will sleep through probably 70 min. of that) and Bentley/mama are making him a very cute craft! Pictures to come soon!

The one picture I do have for today's post, B's engagement present! A friend had pinned this idea on a group board once we got engaged and I had to have it! Plus, he deserves something after buying me a pretty expensive ring. It's not fair he doesn't get anything in return (oh right, he gets to spend forever with me!)

It's a lure that says "Hooked 1-17-14" HOW PERFECT?!

Long Lost Blogger

I've been a terrible blogger lately (serious props to all you moms out there who find time to blog). We've had 8+ guests staying with us for the last 2 and a half weeks or so and we finally had the last of the guests leave yesterday. It was a whirlwind of time with friends and family and we had a blast, but boy are we happy to have some time to ourselves (and to celebrate being engaged!)

 

 AH-MAZING! We just about peed our pants when we heard/saw dolphins practically jumping in our boat!

 

Hung out at Ft. Myers Beach and played corn hole all day.

 

 B and his friend caught Conk Shells (which we googled and learned its illegal so we quickly threw them back). Notice how far away from land we are!

 

I drove the boat A LOT, so B could enjoy some cocktails!

 

My friend, me and Bentley fishing.

 

B and his friend trying to pull up the anchor which got stuck in a GIANT cement block and weighed a ton!

 

Us girls caught dinner, and the boys cooked it.

 

My favorite picture ever, if B and I were showing a little more love, it could be a potential for a Save the Date! (My minds been reeling for Save the Date ideas and I have some ideas up my sleeve)

I was super sick for the first 3 days everyone was here, which was a total downer. We also celebrated B and his friends birthday with dinner and karaoke. But now that everyone has left, I am in full on wedding planning mode! I am gearing up for some serious venue searching within the next few weeks (finding a venue while halfway across the country is proving to be very difficult). I'll also vent about my dress woes soon! Bring on the planning!