Wedding Shower!

My lovely friend Samantha had her first wedding shower today. It was beautiful! It was nice and small and she got some great stuff. It makes me so excited for mine coming up in about a month! First, I LOVED the house where it was hosted. Our friend Jennifer's mom kindly opened her gorgeous home to us for the shower and we ate on fine china and used real silver. It was so nice! We had delicious baked potato soup, chicken salad, fruit salad, poppyseed muffins, and cake! It was just a great time to talk and get together with friends.

Sam with all her gifts... (check out the pond in the backyard and the awesome color of the walls!)

She got a mixer (it doubles as a hand mixer... how cool is that?)

Jenn making Sam's ribbon bouquet, she only broke three... hmm...

Sam with her ribbon bouquet :o)

You can't open a present with a big bow and not put it on your head, right?

Drum Roll, Please...

It's done!!! Well, almost. The house is complete as far as construction is concerned. They are cleaning things up right now. Woo-hoo!!! I thought this day would never come, but now that it's here, I'm a little overwhelmed. It's so scary! We'll close in a little over a week! At least if all goes well with the loan - say a prayer, everyone. Rob and I went out today and put some post-it notes up around the house pointing out some problems that still need attention, but they are still finishing things up.

It was fun to go around and turn the lights on and off and run the faucets. It's amazing how something as simple as ringing the doorbell can make you so happy!

My favorite part? Our front door!! I've been waiting ever so patiently to see the color of our front door on the house... like I've said before, I'm horrible with colors and "seeing" things. But it looks fantastic!!!

Ta-da!!

Our Range and Microwave

The kitchen, minus the cardboard that has been covering the linoleum

My first goal, after putting our blinds up, is to paint the walls. I'm thinking a nice neutral color. Just something besides white. I can 't stand the white. I want to get some curtains up and warm the place up a bit. It will be so fun!!

Check out the shattered window in our back door. Yikes! But, I personally think it looks pretty cool. Too bad we can't keep it that way...

Rob and I are going to look at a dryer tomorrow at Sears, hopefully we can get a good deal! Let the fun begin!

Just a couple of things...

First, Jennifer, here's the link you were asking for!!

Shabby Princess Desktops

They are in PNG format, which works with Photoshop. So you can use Photoshop to put the pictures in the frames, then save it as a JPEG to use for your desktop. If you don't have Photoshop or can't figure it out, let me know and I'll do it for you if you want!

Second,

4 MONTHS!!!!!

We're four months from the wedding!! I had to change it in my about me section. I love these days...

Check it out!

I've just discovered something on my all-time favorite scrapping website, Shabby Princess... Monthly desktops! So, check out my new desktop:


That's all, good night.

Wedding Choices

I had a wedding dream lastnight! My first one in a LONG time. I haven't had many dreams, but when I do they are pretty funny. I dreamt that I was getting married at a church attached to JcPenney's at West County Mall and I was running late. Then after I got there, I was sitting in the back pew of the church waiting to walk down the aisle. I was so upset because I wasn't "hidden" in a room before the wedding and everyone could see me. Then I walked down the aisle and a random person from my church was marrying us. Then they were having sound problems and I kept saying, "you don't need a mic!" It was pretty crazy....

Anyway, after my horribly depressing post yesterday, I thought I'd try to lighten it up with something wedding related. That's always fun right? We're coming up on 4 months (tomorrow!) and counting - 122 days, or 17 weeks - and we've got a bit of decision-making ahead of us.

• The first dance. This has been a decision that has been plaguing my mind for months now and we can't make a choice! Rob and I both love music and often just sit and listen together. We don't reall have "a song" which makes it hard, but we want our first dance to reflect our tastes. We both LOVE Coldplay and Jimmy Eat World. In fact, Jimmy Eat World just came out with a new CD, Chase this Light, which is AMAZING: and Coldplay is supposed to release their new one this year (May???). I'm really hoping to find something on Coldplay's new CD. But somehow I doubt it.... We also like Snow Patrol, Aqualung, Imogen Heap, David Gray, and many, many others. So, as my lovely readers, it's your job to make suggestions! By the way, you can leave comments even if you don't have a blog or aren't registered anywhere. So I know there are lots who read that don't post comments. Now's your chance. You could make your mark in my wedding!


• Decision number two is the invitations. I believe we've already picked out our invitations, but we are waiting until the last minute to order them because we want to close on the house. But we need to choose how to do the colors on them and whether we want lined envelopes and what enclosures we want. This is way more complicated than it needs to be. But I love the invitation we chose.

• What to eat at the reception. This decision shouldn't be too hard, but it's kind of been shoved to the side with everything else. I'm sure there will be something everyone likes. :o)
• Pictures! This is going to be the hardest part of the day, I think. We are VERY strapped on time. We have Clary, my wonderful photographer for 5 hours and I want to make the best of it. Rob and I have decided to see each other beforehand, which will ease some of that pressure, but we still need to make sure that everyone is on board and knows exactly where to be and what to do. Unfortunately when I need to be organized, I never am... I have to try really hard on this one.
• The Wedding Night. We have two choices. We can go home to our new house, or stay in a hotel. We're still debating on this one... I'd love to stay in a really nice hotel and splurge on room service. But, it would be much easier, faster, and cheaper to just go home - which would be nice too. If we do decide to go to a hotel, we need to decide what hotel to go to. Again, dear readers, any suggestions? FYI: our reception is at the Lake St. Louis Banquet Center, so I don't want to drive an hour or more to go someplace....

Since I don't want to bog you down with too many decisions to make :o), I'll cut it off there. Don't you love wedding posts? Me too! Now if only the wedding was here!

Breathe in, Breathe out.

We're almost there. It's almost done. I'm so ready for it to be done. I'm beginning to lose count of the "nervous breakdown" moments I have felt in the past week or two. There's times when I literally just stop, close my eyes, take a deep breath, say a little prayer, and keep pressing on. I feel like I'm running a race.

This weekend has been one of those extremely busy, yet unfortunately unproductive ones where you look back and wonder what the heck you did that made the time fly by so fast. Friday we met up with Rob's friend Ryan and his new girlfriend Stephanie - that was pretty confusing all night... :o) But we had a blast. We went and ate at Ethyl's (delicious!) and then went bowling at the new Brunswick Zone bowling alley (beautifully smoke free!) where Rob relived his days of being 6-time junior league bowling champion and putting everyone (well, me...) to shame. It was so much fun!

Saturday, I woke up to an absolutely beautiful day (I think it hit 65 degrees?). I took my babies for a walk. I love walking my dogs, but I'm too intolerable to cold to do it when it's below 35 degrees outside. Guys, I don't shiver, I convulse. Seriously. So, the puppies had a fabulous day and went home to take long naps after expending so much energy. Then Rob and I took his aunt Camille who was in town from Chicago to see the house. She loved it! They've got the doorknobs on as well as the stopper things. Not much else has changed though (e.g. my list has yet to be acknowledged - they still have time though!). Then Mom and I went shopping at the mall for a few things and I came home to go out to eat with Rob's family for his grandmother's birthday. She turned 79 this year (I think...)!

Sunday, I got up for church - running late again... and then went to work for the afternoon. Boring. Rob came over last night and we just bummed. Not very productive.

That's what I did, but here's what is causing me such mental distress... Tracy, our loan officer, called and said he wasn't sure if the loan was going to go through (my worst nightmare). He said we are great candidates (we both practically have perfect credit and Rob has no debt to speak of), but they are being EXTREMELY picky with the market the way it is. Awesome. So, he says he needs to re-figure a couple of things, get some updates on Rob's account balance and try taking me off the loan. This brings us to point number two. I hate my financial status right now. It sucks. I work when I can, but come on people, I'm a student. I'm POOR. I'm not a very good contributor to the newlywed fund, but I can't help it if Lindenwood is sucking the life out of me. So, my financial status is hurting us more than helping us... go me. That makes me feel loads better about how much I don't help out to begin with. Once I get out of school it will be different. Rob is such a good sport about everything too. He's the best and just listens to me and my little pity parties telling me he loves me no matter what. :) That's why I love him!

So, we get that figured out and now we're playing the waiting game again, hoping the loan goes through at our pretty good interest rate. Say a prayer everyone.

So, I just add that to the list of things constantly flowing through my thoughts all the time and try and make a habit of writing that mental list down every once in a while.

By the way, I apologize for the Debbie Downer posts lately, but I have to vent somewhere...