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!