GRADUATION........again!

Friday May 27, 2011 I FINALLY GRADUATED

FROM NURSING SCHOOOL :)

This is definitely the best part of my life so far.......I have never felt more accomplished in my life. You cannot understand how happy I will be to go to work and come home WITHOUT having to worry about turning something in before 8AM the next morning! Homework is so over, and I could not be more thrilled to say goodbye to it. I'm hoping to go back to school in the future, but I just seriously couldn't take the step to keep going right now. I- NEED- A- BREAK, lol. All I have left to do is take NCLEX, and I am completely DONE with certifications, board of nursing fees, and standardized testing. WAHOO!! I must admit, although it was tortuously long, graduating at the Fed Ex Forum was a plus too. Keith came and took pictures for me, but none of them turned out really well. It was because of my subpar camera though , not his skills as an amateur photogtrapher.  This one is my fave, beause it's my name up on the board thingy that loops around the entire stadium.  Mine is the third one up top just incase you can't read it ;)

I must say that I am so thankful for my life. It's looking pretty magical these days :) I can't wait to take NCLEX and start working at Lebonheur. I am getting so excited about working with the little ones in the NICU too! Come on July 11th .

My New Job!!!

Monday afternoon I finally got the phone call I have been waiting on all semester. I got a job in a level III C Neonatal Intensive Care Unit @ Lebonheur :) I am beyond excited to get this job. The sickest babies in this area go to Lebonheur after being born for surgeries and just for being really small at birth, so I am going to learn so much. Anyone who knows me knows I absolutely love babies, so I truly feel like this is the perfect job for me. It's going to be hard and I'm sure there will be alot of stress when I first start just from the learning curve I'm going to have to catch up to, but I'm so excited for the opportunity. I start July 11th, and I can't WAIT! I know Keith is excited that he won't be the only one bringing paychecks home too :)

ENGAGEMENT PICS

Just wanted to show you some of my engagement pics! Here is a collage of my faves. We took them in downtown Memphis. We were going to go to the Botanical Gardens, but they charge way too much to let photographers take pictures there. We probably just should have snuck in! :)

My favorite background is acutally this big red door that our photographer found at this Episcopal Church near Lebonheur. It's so pretty

I also like the bridge picture, just because I love Memphis :) I wish we would have know which hotel everyone goes to to take pictures, so we could have went on the roof at night and got one.

One of my other faves is the one with my ring. I love love love my ring and I think it pops off of the rocks

We don't know which ones we want to order, but I don't want to get carried away since we have limited wall space in our house, and I know I am going to want TONS & TONS of wedding pictures :) We do have a $50.00 print credit to use at least though since we won our engagement pics in a contest.

SAVE THE DATES

I ordered out Save the Dates today :) I'm so excited about them because they are magnets! People can just stick them on their fridge so they won't lose them. I know when I have paper invitations, they always seem to get lost. Lately I have been putting them up in my kitchen on the cabinets so I don't forget about going to things. They even come with some super cute address labels too :) Hope you likes!

Since I have gotten a little older, I have friends getting married like crazy. Baby Showers, Wedding Showers, Birthday parties.....I love it though :) It's fun to be able to go to things and stay connected to old friends. I still need to sit down and decide what kind of parties I want to have for the wedding. It's only 5 months away, and I haven't even thought about what kind of showers I want. I think I just want to do one big couple's shower somewhere, because I'm not so much into going to parties alone. I would rather have Keith there, since most of our wedding guests I have met through him and his family. I probably won't end up having one until at least the end of June though, since school is so crazy and I'm trying to find a job.

Speaking of job.....I am going INSANE thinking about everything that is about to change. I have never been at a point in my life where I didn't know where I was going to be in 3 months. I am a planner to my core, and to not know what my life will be like after May 27th scares me SOOOO much. I know everything will work out, but I also know that I have a dream for my career, and I have recently found an opportunity for that dream to become a reality. I am praying to the nursing job gods every single day, because I am dying to get my dream job. I worked so hard to get to here, so I'm hoping my interviews go well and my passion for nursing comes through to them. Wish me luck!

Today's countdown: 149 days to the wedding &
                                  43 days until graduation!!!

Ella Mae or Marley,Jr.?

I love my sweet sweet girl Ella Mae. She's a chocolate lab that Keith & I got back in September. She has been so much fun, and is such a smart girl. Ryder & Lucy are still getting used to her, but they get better and better with eachother every day.

Now I know that labs are crazy and adventurous, but I work really hard to train Ella to be a good house dog. I can't stand it when people have dogs that stay outside and only see their owners once a day for food & water. To me, that's a cruel way to treat an animal that wants nothing more than to love on you. Ever since we got Ella, she has been an inside dog and has been really good at not chewing stuff up. We can even leave our shoes on the floor without her messing with them. I wish I could say the same for my brush and my hair clips though. We are still working on that.

 It took us 4 months to potty train her, which was rough, but we finally got it! Part of her problem is that she got a UTI that slowed down the process. We had to put her in diapers because she just constantly peed in the floor for a week.

Anywho, we made it through all of that, and now she is almost 9 months old! The last time we weighed her, she was 67 pounds! Hopefully she won't get any bigger, but I bet she does since she is still a puppy. She has learned to sit and lay down, and right now we are working on stay and come. I'm hoping one day she can be a pet therapy dog, and those are the 4 tricks she has to know really well to become one. She learned fetch in 2 seconds, but that's probably because she's a lab and it's in their blood to know how to do that. I love her tons, but I have one SERIOUS problem with her behavior. THIS:

She refuses....and I mean REFUSES to stop digging in this one spot in the yard. I have GOT to figure out a way to get her to stop,because Keith may or may not kill her. (I kid, I kid, but really.....it's bad). There is this one spot in the yard that just stays muddy because she goes over there and just dominates it with her face every time we leave her outside for more than a few minutes. Here is what she has done to it:

Keith had it covered up with an older pot and some boards, but she just pushes those aside and gets to it. PLEASE STOP DIGGING ELLA!!! PUH-LEASE! Everytime she does it I have to go hose her off and I get soaked. At least the weather is warmer now, so I don't freeze when I'm doing it :) Other than the digging, I love her so so much. Isn't she pretty when she is all nice and clean?

The other funny thing about her that drives me crazy sometimes is that she is always in the way when you are trying to get stuff done. If you are cooking or doing laundry, you are constantly tripping over her. She just likes to lay in the weirdest places too, like the doorway (which is right in the way, of course!)

I love this picture. I told her to look at me so I could take the picture, and she decides to only open one eye. Smarty pants ;) The only other crazy thing she is obsessed with is water. I'm talking about drinking from the toilet, running into the bathroom every time you go into it, ripping down the shower curtain and jumping in the shower with you obsessed with water. Yes that really happened, but I don't think you want to see pictures of me trying to get her out of the shower while I'm in it :) In conclusion I'm so glad that we have Ella, if for no other reason that to make us laugh every day. If we can get this digging thing under control, she will be such a great part of our lives for many years to come :)

Trying to be crafty ...

One thing I wish I were better at: crafting! I LOVE LOVE LOVE to read other people's blogs about how they make all these neat little things for their homes. I am super jealous of anyone who can sew too. It takes me 30 minutes just to get the thread ready, and I still don't know how to tie it right. I need to learn before I start having kids, or Keith is gonna kill me for spending a million dollars on cute little boutique stuff for them to wear. I just love it so much :) All the cute little applique shirts, and the tutus, and the monogram on everything & (okay I'm stopping now!) The one thing I have taught myself to do is to make letters to hang on the wall with ribbon. I just love it for baby rooms. I got to experiment with Marlee's letters first, and they look a little rough, but still alot cuter than if I paid someone 12.00 a letter to do it for me (crazy price!)

After I did Marlee's letters, I decided to make some for baby Tinley's room too.

I think these turned out a little cuter, but I'm biased because I'm in love with black & green, and that's what

 April decided to do Tinley Jo's nursery in:

I finally figured out how to tie them in a better bow when I got to do Emme's letters for my friend Ashley, and now I'm obsessed with making these things! I can't wait to make some for baby Garrison's room once Patrick & Juli pick out the decorations and the bedding :)

So now I'm even more obsessed with personalizing everything I buy as baby gifts, since I figured out how to make these cute :) I hope you guys like them!

 I also personalized some wedding presents for Marlee, Rylee, & Tyler (ringbearer & flowergirls for the wedding). Aren't these just so cute?! They look even better with their initials on them than they did before I put them on there. This will be cute for them to carry around on the wedding day, so they don't spill drink all over their outfits :) I got lucky finding them, because they are the perfect size for them!

162 days....

162 days seems like so much time. When I say 5 months though, I start to panic inside a little :) I have only had one change or new development when it comes to wedding planning.....the Bridesmaids' shoes I ordered before are a no go. You know how stuff always looks better online? Yeah, that happened to me. They looked so great, and seemed to have all the bright fall colors I was looking for to tie in all the dresses. When you look at them in real life though, they are full of pink and purple and don't work with my colors at all (sad face). I never really have been a fan of wedge shoes either, and now I just hate them more. It just seems like an awful lot of shoe to be lugging around all day long. Anywho, I decided with a few of the girls to just pick out a pair of shoes from David's Bridal and have them dyed the color of all their dresses, since all brown or all black shoes wouldn't match everyone. Pretty simple solution, but David's Bridal shoes ARE NOT cheap. The cheapest ones I could find that were pretty were $59.00! Thank goodness the dress is super cheap, and they can actually wear it again. Dyeing them only costrs $4.00 too, so that's also a relief. Here's a pic of them, except they will be the same colors of the girl's dresses when they are done :)

Bridesmaids Dresses

The time has finally come, and I have locked in my decision for bridesmaid's dresses. This has been the hardest decision for me to make, since I could not decide what colors I wanted to use. About a month ago, I finally decided that I would use fall colors for the wedding. It started out that way in the first place, and I changed the color scheme 8,000 times after that, until finally I came back to the first choice I had made. That's how I like to do things I guess. I second guess myself alot, and this was apparently no different. I finally walked into David's Bridal friday afternoon with Milena & Ande and just decided. Thank goodness someone else was there with me to give me advice. I never realized that having someone confirm or deny your thought could lead you to making a decision faster. I always assumed that opinions would give you mixed signals, so you should just decide everything for yourself. They helped me a ton, however, when it came down to the final decision. I think I kept trying to second guess myself because I had never seen these colors in a wedding before, and I was afraid it would be too loud/tacky for people's tastes. Ande made a very good point of telling me that I like the colors, and Keith likes the colors, and the wedding is about us more than anything else. That's all I really needed to hear her say to finally make me decide that these colors were the right choice for me. I know this decision wasn't supposed to be this hard (it's kind of petty when you really think about all the other hard decisions you have to make in a lifetime), but it was....and I'm so glad it's decided and I get to share it with everyone today.

So the final decision about the bridesmaids dresses are: fern, ruby, golden, tangerine, cocoa, sunbeam, and wine. WHEW! I did it :) Now I know you are freaking out inside and saying, "OMG!  Seriously? How/Why did she pick so many colors!?". Well.....my absolute FAVORITE part about fall is seeing all the leaves change colors. I LOVE LOVE LOVE seeing all the pretty colors, and they are also my favorite kind of pictures to take. Nothing is better to me than a backdrop of bright colored leaves all around you when you want to capture memories. I also love the football type weather in the fall too, which is why we picked a fall evening setting to get married. I also decided to alternate between bright and dark colors so one section of girls wouldn't look louder than another section. That's was Milena's idea actually :) Good call. I picked out the actual dresses myself, and fell in love with the ones that had pockets and ruching (my 2 favorite things a dress has to offer). Anywho, hope you guys like it, because I'm in love with it!

I also ordered their shoes yesterday, and they should be here sometime next week. I got an awesome deal at Kohl's for $20 off each pair. I have been looking for some wedge platform sandals for them to wear for a while, since we will be outside most of the day for the wedding, and I didn't want them to have to dig their heels out of the grass every 5 seconds. I found the cutest sandals to tie in all the fall colors, and they match every girl's dress really well too.

I love that they kind of "dress the outfit down" a little. I didn't want the wedding to be super fancy, but I still wanted it to look really nice. I'm really happy with my how it's all turning out, and I can't wait to see everyone all dressed up and pretty on our big day :)

A Great Weekend...

I love pretty weather. I'm in a better mood just by waking up to sunshine in the morning. This weekend was so so pretty, and I  hope it keeps it up for a while before it starts getting miserable hot this summer. Saturday evening, I had a Scentsy party at my house. It was fun getting to see everybody, and I got a lot of free stuff just for hosting. I hope people had a good time there, even though I couldn't figure out how to total any of the orders at first :)

Thanks everybody who came to the party. I love having people over, and I hope you guys had fun and ate good!!

Scentsy is one of my favorite things to keep in the house because it always smells so good when I walk in the house. It is the only thing I have ever found to cover up the smell of the dogs being in the house all the time. I never knew what scents I liked because you can't usually smell everything before you order them, but the Scentsy consultant had all the little smeller samples for us to choose from, which made it so much nicer and easier to order stuff. My nose was fried after smelling every single sample though!

I also got a lot of free stuff just for my friends buying stuff, and for hosting a party. I added it all up last night and I am getting about $250 worth of Scentsy merchandise for $75! Not too shabby, and I will definetly not have to buy any more scents until next year. I'm giving away some of the stuff as gifts too. Here is my new Scentsy warmer that I got at the party. I love that's it green, and it will work for Spring & Summer so I won't have to switch it out for a while:

My favorite part about our mantel decorations is definetly our prom glasses from high school. I'm thinking about using them in the wedding as our toasting flutes, because I think it's so cute that we went to both proms together :)

Sunday Ande came over and we went to Em's bridal shower together. Em definetly had one of the nicest showers I've ever seen. Her table centerpieces and her cake were beautiful, and she got a ton of gifts! It's so great to see so many people come together to celebrate people getting married. Her wedding colors are so pretty, and I can't wait to see how gorgeous the wedding is. Ande's baby girl, Amelia, got sleepy and fussy so we had to leave the shower early, and she ended up taking a nap on my bed once we got back. I don't think a sleeping baby could look any cuter than this:

Isn't she pretty? Even though she looks just like her daddy, I can already see alot of Ande in her personality. Amelia LOVES to make funny faces at everyone, and I don't think Ande and I have a single picture together from college where she isn't making some kind of funny face. I love all my friends having babies before me, because it teaches me so much for when Keith and I start a family. Plus, I seriously love to spoil them :) I used to be terrified of raising my own child for fear of screwing it up, but seeing how great all my friends are at being mommies gives me a lot more confidence. It's nice to know that I will have friends that have done it before me to give me advice and stuff too :) After Amelia woke up, we all sat outside and watched the dogs play. It was so nice getting to just sit outside, talk, and do nothing!

Spring Break is over and I'm so sad, because I am to the point where I loathe school and just want to graduate SO bad. I'm also back to job hunting on Monday, which is super nerve wracking to me. If I don't get hired somewhere before May, I just might lose my mind. Everybody cross their fingers for me to get one soon :)

67 days until graduation!!!!!

Centerpieces

SO EXCITED that I got all the stuff delivered for the centerpieces. Hobby Lobby is awesome! I think everything is going to look so classic and pretty. Altogether the tables are going to have chocolate brown tablecloths, a hurricane vase with 5 fishbowl votives around them, and the leaves I showed you earlier. The candles in the votives will all be white, and I am going to get different fall colored candles to place into the hurricane vases. It will look something like this (forgive my crappy picture because I have NO IDEA how to make the candle flames look normal with my cheap little camera).

Someone PUH-LEASE teach me how to take better pictures :)

Hope you like the centerpieces!

SPRING is in the air...

It's almost here! Sunday is the first official day of spring and I am so excited :) I absolutely love this weather. My favorite season is and will always be fall, but something about seeing everything start blooming just gets me. I also love all the pretty colors you can decorate with in the spring. Here is our front porch right now:

I need to get some flowers to hang up, but I'm still not sure what kind I want. I should probably get the ones that need the least amount of maintenance, but I always end up picking the ones that need to be watered twice a day during the summer. I love fresh flowers, but they are some serious work, and I am awful at it. We had a bunch of potted plants on our porch at our rental house last year, and I killed all of them by August. (sad face)

Instead of getting fresh flowers all the time, I opt for fake ones, and they turn out pretty good:

Daisies are my favorite. They are seriously all over our house, and they will definetly be in my wedding boquet. I know I'm supposed to be all about tulips right now, but to be honest, they're not that pretty to me.

Sorry Ande I know those are your favorite :)

My favorite part of the front porch right now is our Lucy bow:

I've never met this little girl, but I love her so much, and I'm praying for her every single day! She has brought so much unity to this county lately, and it so great to see total strangers coming together for her. Her mom's blog moves me to tears every time I read it, and I just know they are going to beat the cancer. GO LUCY GO! For anyone who doesn't already know, you can buy these bows for $10 @ Hometown Flowers in Covington. You can also get the stretchy Livestrong bracelets that say GO LUCY GO on them for $5.00 @ The Freckled Frog, and one of the banks in Covington is selling t-shirts for her as well. Here is a link to Lucy's momma's blog to find out more about all this:

erikandkatekrull.blogspot.com

I know 100% of the bow money goes straight to Lucy's family, and I'm pretty sure everything else is strictly for them as well.

Last but not least, what would my front porch be like with something monogrammed?!

I love garden flags. I have 3 or 4 of them already. This is my spring/summer flag.

I can't wait until this is actually my last initial :)

Even better than decorating, is watching the kids (the ones with fur) play outside on a nice day. Ella is so happy that I'm letting her out in the backyard more.

She and Ryder actually played outside for a while this morning. I love this picture of them :) Usually it's Ella & Lucy that like to play, and Ryder just wants to sunbathe and pee on everything. He's the sweetest chihuahua you will ever meet though. He is always everyone's favorite when people come to visit. All he wants to do is cuddle, and his sweet face gets me everytime:

Lucy was not in the mood for playing this morning. All she wanted was for me to hold her. Hopefully I can get some pics of all three of them outside playing soon! P.S. our yard looks like CRAP and we know it. Keith sprayed roundup the other day to kill all the weeds, and they all just grew instead! Our backyard was so pretty last summer when we bought the house and the snow just made it all wet and nasty. I hope we can get it nice and green again. The dogs are doing a great job fertilizing it for sure!

It's all in the details.....

Today a couple more of my "wedding details" came in the mail. I'm pretty excited about them! We are on a very tight budget for our wedding, so instead of having flowers in our reception table centerpieces, I decided to get leaves instead. I'm not sure if you're familiar with buying fake leaves, but it's a tough find if you actually want them to look real! I searched high and low and accidentally stumbled upon these beautiful suckers the other day:

They are called Sunlight Autumn Array, and I am so in love. I called the lady in Florida to order them, and I got the last 25 bags of them that they had available. I call that fate :) These are going to be placed around glass hurricane vases and fishbowl votives with candles in them. You likes?

*The other thing that came into today was our wedding monogram cake topper. Anyone who knows me knows I am obsessed with initials and monogramming everything. Making something personal is the icing on the cake to me. I found this topper in my favorite monogram font on etsy the other day, and had to order it. I think it will go with our cake perfectly!

I <3 it! I am going to pick up the rest of the centerpiece glassware on Friday, so stay tuned to see a pic of the whole setup :) I think it will be a great alternative to flowers on the table.

Water for Elephants

So I just got done reading this book a few days ago, and I LOVED it. I told myself I would read a chapter or 2 a day, but I read the whole thing in a day and a half! The story is set in the 1930's, during the Great Depression, and it's about a guy who loses his parents a couple of days before he is supposed to take his finals for and Ivy League Vet school, so he packs up and starts walking, ending up on a traveling circus train. I really didn't think this book would appeal to me, but it is a really funny, intriguing, suspenseful love story. I can't wait to drag Keith to go see the movie in April now. The movie is going to be even better I think, because I love Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon, and the crazy guy from Inglorious Basterds (Christoph Waltz). Even the movie poster gets me excited to see it:

Are you going to go see it too? :)

Said YES to the dress :)

Today was the big day & I FINALLY went and bought a wedding dress. I went to Low's Bridal in Brinkley, Arkansas. It takes about 2 hours to get there from Munford, and it may be the most boring drive I've ever taken, but the trip was well worth it. The building is so neat on the inside, and they have these little rooms that they take you to that are divided by dress size. It made it really convenient to go straight to your sizes without looking through tons of things you couldn't fit into. I only tried on 3 dresses, and the third one was "the one". I actually tried the same dress on in 2 different sizes, and the smaller one fit (score!). That diet is actually paying off now :) I ordered the dress and was on my way back home in an hour and a half. I had fun with the ladies that were helping me, and I feel really good about my decision. It was hard to hand over that much money at one time, but I'm glad I did it. I can't wait for Keith to see it on the big day. I'm not gonna post a picture of it because I want you guys to be surprised, but I will tell you it's ivory lace, which I totally never expected I would look good in. I'm so excited to wear it, and I hope I look as pretty as I felt trying it on :)

It's coming along!

So this weekend our wedding invitations came in :) I've already started putting them together, and I have quickly realized it is going to take forever! It took me almost an hour just to put together 25 of them, and I still have 125 to go. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. I just hope that all the guest will be comfortable RSVPing online. We had to do that to try to save money. Our wedding website has a really cool way of doing it though, so I hope it works. We also took our engagement pics with Echo this weekend. I can't wait to see them. We went walking down Front St. in Memphis & also to an Episcopal Church near Lebonheur on Poplar with really pretty red doors. Once we get our pictures in I can add some more photos to the blog and everything too, which I'm pretty excited about.

Today I went to talk to the wonderful Mary Baugus in Covington about our wedding cake. We decided to do go with a 3 tier, square cake. I'm not going to give everything away, but I will tell you that we are going to have heavenly ivory, red velvet, and chocolate for the flavors. Hope you guys like that! I especially like the red velvet because of the story Mrs. Mary told me about it. She got the recipe from a lady in England years ago, and it's about a chambermaid trying to impress a guy by baking for him. How neat is that?! I'm am in awe of love stories, so I couldn't resist picking that flavor :)
180 days to go......and I seriously can't wait!

6 more months!

183 days seems so far away, but today is actually the 6 month mark. That's right! In 6 more months I finally get to marry the man of my dreams. It feels like yesterday that it was summer of 2004, and we had just started hanging out with eachother. Those night were some of the absolute best times of my life. Fireflies, barbeques, trampolines, fireworks, concerts, movie dates.......how could you not fall in love with all that around you?! 6 1/2 years later, here we are, and MY GOODNESS, I could not be happier! SO far I have booked the venue for both the ceremony and the reception, ordered linens & chairs, spoken with the florist,ordered invitations (should be here by next Friday!), booked a photographer, caterer, & a DJ, picked out bridesmaid dresses and the guys tuxes, and bought all the centerpieces for the guest round tables. WHEW! The best is still yet to come though, because Tuesday I will be going to get my wedding dress!!! Yes I know, I should have ordered it sooner, but I was trying to lose weight before I went so I wouldn't be as embarassed to try on dresses. 17 pounds down, I still don't like my body at all, but I can't wait any longer, since you are supposed to order a dress 6 months before the day. Hopefully I will just lose more before September, and they can alter it down a little. My goal is to lose 50 pounds before the wedding, so I guess I've got 33 more to go. I'm also going to talk to the cake lady on Monday, so stay tuned for how that goes as well :) And Echo will be taking our engagement pictures this Saturday too! YAY! Can't wait to see how those turn out. I need some new pictures of us badly. I've been using the ones Keith's aunt Gwen took for us for a couple of years now!