another color sighting!

I got an email from the website theknot.com and they listed 25 wedding color combo's you've never seen. This is one of them that last on the site...ours is pretty darn close!

source

25 Awesome Wedding Proposals

I found this tonight and I thought it was pretty cool! Even if you don't wanna watch them all at lease fast forward until the last 2!!

the color blue

I found this post from The Bride Suite blog that I follow earlier this week. Isn't the color A-MAZING?? My mom has even asked me on a couple of occasions why we aren't having the color blue in our wedding. Actually, more specifically the color cerulean...it's a very specific color blue, and my favorite color of all time!! It's close to the colors below, but check out the Crayola coloring box color cerulean. It's gorgeous, rich, deep, happy, bright, beautiful, awesome, and so many other great words. Anyways, this post may have swayed me. Is it too late to change our colors?? My mom definitely may think so. But don't be surprised if you see a few sprinkles of my favorite color in there :)

link to this post here

weekend

this past weekend we had another family Christmas. It was with my extended family on my mom's side. Everyone's schedules were packed around Christmas day with tournaments, new additions to families, other family Christmas', and such. So we finally got together this past weekend. We (again) had so much good food-my diet was put on hold for another week :) We got to visit with everyone, play games, open presents, hold baby Gavin, and have awesome family time!

The only pictures I got were the ones from Garrett when he took my camera, but a few turned out pretty good....

Abby and baby Gavin

Adam and Ashley

uncle Darwin

and then here are mostly what the rest of my pictures look like...

oh and there are also pictures of ceiling fans, the my dog's butt, more inside of shoes, air vents, and people with their eyes closed.

The next morning everyone that was still in town had breakfast out at my aunt and uncles house. Sean and I had to head back to Iowa City for the Catholic counseling orientation in order for us to get married so we couldn't stay. The roads were awful and we saw many new cars in the ditch. We almost had a near death experience when a semi started to slide around right in front of us. Everyone gained control back and we made it back safe. Thankfully!!

my "break"

Classes started back today :( I thought I would explain a little about why I didn't post much the past month....Over Christmas "break" I had to do a 120 hours of experience at a community pharmacy. It was at NuCara Pharmacy in Nevada, Iowa. It took me about 3 and a half weeks to complete the hours because of the holidays and the pharmacy not being open. So basically my break was about 5 days long. But, I couldn't have asked for a better staff to work with! They were all so nice and helpful! I ended up staying at home a couple days after I was done working to do some wedding stuff with my mom and to have the dress fitting.

My mom and I got a lot completed during the short time we had to work on them. A couple big things we did were make a good start on our invitations and also made about 5 or 6 invitation samples for my mom's store. So if anyone needs invitations check out the Envelopments display at Memory Bound Scrapbook Store in Ankeny (No I was not paid for the advertisement) :) But, really they are really neat invitation blanks that can come in so many different colors, sizes, folder-type, etc.

We also finished a few wedding detail things...you'll have to wait and see for those. I want to keep some things a surprise!

Dress fitting (kinda)

I wasn't sure if I even wanted to post this. But here you go...Just a little background first. Remember when I talked about my dress here? And how much I was in love with it? Well about a month or 2 after that I started second guessing the dress because I started to compare my dress to other dresses. Big mistake. We thought about starting the dress search over, but I really didn't want to that. And, there were things I liked about my dress that we could work with. We decided to talk to a dress designer at Dornink in Des Moines to see what we could do to "customize" my dress. The first meeting was during Thanksgiving break and we talked about the different things we could do. So our second meeting was this past Friday.

So here is where the funny/embarrassing/motivating part comes... I stepped into the dress and tried to zip it up. Yea we TRIED. It did NOT zip over my butt-hence the embarrassing part. It was then when I realized how much I have really enjoyed my mom's baking/cooking for the past month and no rec center to work out in. All we could do is laugh, because it was quite funny. At least we got the hook at the top clipped so at lease we could make progress on the other things we wanted to do. In the end, I'm very happy with how my dress is looking now. Each time I look at the dress I like it more and more...

Now for the motivating part. How can this NOT be motivating?? In less than 6 months I have to fit into an expensive dress. Not to mention wear that dress in front of 300+ people. So I have started a wedding diet and start working out again! Our next meeting is during Spring Break so we'll see where I'm at then :)

6 months and the new year

Since it's the new year and I haven't posted anything about it yet I thought I give you a 2 for 1 deal...our countdown and what we did to ring in the new year!

This past NYE Sean's parents took us out to dinner to Dublin Bay in Ames. It's an Irish restaurant and it was really good! After dinner we went back to Sean's house in Boone and watched the movie Source Code. We have never really big NYE party-ers or big party-ers in general so we just had a low key night, which was really nice.

The next morning we headed to Ankeny and then to West Des Moines for some shopping at Dillard's for their HUGE new year's sale with my family! We all got some great deals and we even got the bridesmaid earrings :)

so now for the countdown...

It is officially 6 months! Can you believe it?? Me neither! But, this month I'm going to list things we are looking forward to/our "bucket list" in 2012

1. our wedding!! duh!

2. The Dark Knight Rises. Comes out July 20th

3. our honeymoon (estimating December 2012-January 2013)

4. make it to Chicago

5. move into a new apartment

6. the Summer Olympics!!


P.S. stay tuned for my next post. It is funny/embarrassing/motivating. Confused?? You'll see!

weekend wrap-up (2 of 2)

We had a big day on Saturday when we went to my friend Abby's wedding in Sioux City. Remember her bachelorette party? Sean and I started to travel about 12:30 in the afternoon with our friends Brittany and Brady. We arrived in Sioux City a little early so we stopped to get some food at McDonald's. After our quick snack we proceeded to get ready in the McDonald's parking lot. It was probably pretty funny watching us button up our shirts, finish our hair, etc. in the parking lot.

The wedding was so beautiful and it was a lot of fun! It was great to see a bunch of my friends that I hadn't seen since the end of last semester!

Pharmacy people! Brittany, Dani, Dani, me, Katy, Abby, Libby, Tana, and Tom

me, Katy, Dani, Dani, and Brittany

the lovely bride and groom! (I stole this picture from facebook)

The next day Sean and I spent a few hours over at Sean's sister Abby's new house and did some painting. I really like the colors they picked and it was fun to spend time with Sean's family, too! 

I'm glad Sean and I are getting experience doing handy work so we are prepared for when we get a home :)

weekend wrap-up (1 of 2)

I decided to split up my weekend into 2 posts-1. because it may be long and 2. because I somehow got hooked onto Kourtney and Kim take New York and there is a marathon going on.

So I turned 23 on Friday. 23 sounds so OLD :( My day started pretty good though....I took donuts into the pharmacy that I'm working at. But, apparently everyone there likes sprinkle donuts as much as I do because by the time I went to go eat one they were all gone :( After work I went home and my mom made us really good lasagna, salad, and garlic toast. Then for dessert we had German Chocolate cake- probably my favorite cake!

Later that night we played my new favorite card game Hearts (my mom taught all of us kids how to play earlier in the week).

More to come later this week about the rest of the weekend...

Rewind...Christmas from 2011

Again, sorry for such a delay. As I said before I am basically working four 9 hour days a week as part of my pharmacy program for school. Which also means I'm working for FREE! or actually I'm paying to work...

Anyways, back to Christmas. Sean got to come home (to Boone) after work on the 22nd and we spent the night with Sean's family. Abby, Adam, Avery, Chris, and Heather were also all back! The next morning we got to go see Adam and Abby's new house in Boone. That night everyone from the Hagan clan came to my house for dinner. I'm so grateful that our families get along so well :)


the Hagans

Our family



the dad's and their liquor

Chris and Heather

Christmas Eve morning we had my family's Christmas. My mom made us a few yummy breakfast casseroles and then we all opened our gifts.



Adam and Ashley with their lottery tickets



Sean and I with some clothes

Dad and his Chicago Bears ping pong paddle

Alex and his Hawkeye ping pong paddle



Abby and her swim suit

some gloves for all of us girls

Later in the day we all went on a walk around our neighborhood because it was gorgeous outside!! We even stopped at the park and climbed around. I threatend Sean with having to bake the cookies we gave to Adam and Abby if he didn't come, which is probably the only reason he did come on a walk. But, in the end he even said he had fun and that he felt athletic :) At the park Abby, Alex, and Sean all climbed up onto the tall spinning thing and Adam spun them REALLY fast, we thought Alex was going to fall off and puke!

After our walk and showers we headed back to Boone for Sean's Christmas. We went to Church then went back to their house and had Chili and Chicken noodle soup, one of their traditions. After dinner we opened gifts. We bought Avery a very large chair/bean bag for her new room and I'm so glad that she enjoys it!!

Christmas day some of Sean's extended family came to Boone for lunch. Later in the afternoon we went back to Ankeny for my extended family Christmas. Right before dinner we played another newly-wed or almost-wed game (My mom gave both Ashley and I "How Well Do You Know Your Groom?" books for Christmas so we played off of questions from that) It was really funny! But, I think there was a clear loser team, cough, Ashley and Adam :) I agree that the questions can be confusing but still they didn't do too hot. Even though Ashley claimed "they had in the bag". It's okay though. They still have over a year before they plan on getting married.



Sean, Me, Adam, Ashley, Matt, Jana, Jill, and Butter all playing the game

the boys writing down their answers

We had to do a tie breaker for the winning team. It was Butter and Jill vs. Sean and I. Sean and I ended up winning, but I think we had a slight advantage because we went through part of the book the day before :)

Later in the evening we played the dice/nickel game called Left-Right-Center. We have played it may times before and it's always really fun!

We had such a good time with both of our families over Christmas! We love family time, relaxing, and food. It can't get any better than that!