Rethinking the Honeymoon

We are anxiously awaiting the end of the semester and for Aaron's passport to arrive!  After some discussions and budget meetings, we think that while we would love to visit Montreal and Quebec City for our honeymoon, it would be extra awesome to be there in winter for the Quebec winter carnival.

Um, awesome!  (source)

So that would be a really fun first anniversary gift. (the traditional gift is paper - a plane ticket totally counts!)

As you can tell, I am longing for a get away in the much nearer future, and would like somewhere romantic-ish to go, but that isn't super expensive (ie: Paris) or isn't super typical (ie: crowded with tourists; ie: Cabo/Cancun)  Plus Aaron isn't really a beach guy at all, so I have to factor this into the equation.

Well it must be my lucky day/month/life because he has agreed to go on a cruise to Bermuda!!

And with luck, we will return home safe, lol  (source)

Insert Nerd Alert:  He thinks Bermuda would be interesting to visit because it is the second oldest continuously inhabited English settlement in the New World (after Jamestown).  This knowledge will win us Jeopardy! at some point I hope, lol.  

The cruise leaves out of NYC on June 3rd and is a week long, so we will get there in about a day and a half, and get to spend about four whole days on the island!  Win!  

Source

Source

Hello paradise!

So I am super duper looking forward to the trip, and it will be here before we know it! :D  (And now, Aaron won't quit singing Kokomo by the Beach Boys...ugh, lol)

Update 4/30/12: trip is booked!!!

Wedding Crowns on Display

I totally forgot to share with you guys, the gift that my Mom made for Aaron and I for Easter:

Love!

Close Up

She mounted our wedding crowns in a shadow box with our wedding program!  Love love love!  It is tradition to display your wedding crowns in your home after the wedding as a reminder that "God has united them to each other and to Himself and that He has bestowed His grace upon them to live in unity, faith and love." (http://www.antiochian.org/1285), so I am glad we can now partake thanks to my Mom's handiness with all things crafty.  Thank you Mom!!

Is it Honeymoon time yet?

(source)

Take me with you!!!

So ready for vacation.  I had hoped that we could be on a plane out of here the day after my last final exam of the semester, but I totally spaced and forgot to remind Aaron to get a new passport.  Some jerk face broke into his apartment years ago and swiped his backpack which had his passport inside, and he hasn't had to internationally travel since then.  So he went and got that handled this week, but it will be about 6 weeks (or less, hopefully) until it arrives.  I don't want to set myself up to be stressed out so I am holding off on booking any trips until he has the new passport in his hot little hand. 

We have a bunch of trips coming up, which is exciting!  Getting away is really under-rated.  In two weeks we are going to Dallas to see my friend Brad get married, yay!  (I am glad I will have wedding things to talk about again - still no word from my photographer about the photos, sadly!) Early June is hopefully when we can squeeze in our Honeymoon in Canada. Then in late June we are going for a long weekend in Port Aransas for a mini-beach vacay with my Mom's family.  We all went last year for my Granny's birthday, so it is turning into a tradition I suppose - which is great news to me!  Fast forward to Labor Day weekend, my bestie Katrina invited me to be her date to her friend/my acquaintance Aaron Blue's wedding.  He and his fiancee are getting married on a cruise ship before it takes off to the Caribbean, so we are going to just pop on the boat for the nuptials then spend the weekend exploring Miami!  Or failing that, lay on the beach all weekend drinking margaritas in Miami!  Woohoo!!!  Katrina and I know how to have some serious fun on vacations, so I am really looking forward to that!  Then in mid September Aaron, little brother Jeff and I are planning a trip to Japan, which is going to be soooo fun and cool.  I have never been so far from home before!  Side note, does anyone else think I totally over use the exclamation mark? Too bad, I like it! lol  Then after all of my vacationings I will settle in to what I have been told is an accounting semester from hades.  Gulp.  Last one, then I am done!!!!!!!!!  And once I get through that one, assuming I have any vacation time left, we hope to get over to Nevada over Christmas break sometime.  Then maybe an anniversary trip come January?  Maybe, we will have to see!  Aaron gets burnt out on travelling so I don't want to overload him. 

The really great thing however, is that while we haven't exactly combined our finances yet, we have just been funnelling everything we can into our credit cards that give us airline points (any pay them off each month, of course) but between the wedding and all that business we have enough points to get plane tickets to all of our destinations (aside from Japan).  So that is pretty sweet!  But until then I will be dreaming of vacation for a few more weeks...

Anyone going anywhere cool this summer??

  

Pascha!

Hey guys!  It has been a while!! (sorry!) 

Aaron and I are all moved into our new place, and about 95% unpacked at long last.  So I have been busy with the move and school and unpacking everything, I can't believe a whole month has gone by already!?  I also got cable AND learned how to use Pinterest (from my Mom of all people, lol) so both of those have been extreme time sucks.

For the Orthodox Christians in the group, yesterday was Pascha (pronounced Pah-ska)(Easter) or the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord.  So we had a feast!  It was sort of like our very first hosted holiday.  Normally we are at my Mom's or Aunt and Uncles, but no one in the family celebrates Orthodox Easter but us, so we jumped on the opportunity to entertain. 

We invited my Mom and my brother Jeff over to eat (at our little two seater table, lol)  At least 70% of this menu was inspired by Pinterest...

Cucumber Roll Ups (filled with feta)

Bacon egg and cheese deviled eggs. And Cadbury eggs, of course

Leg of Lamb

Aaron getting his carve on

Easter Basket Cake!

And we will be eating leftover from our feast all week long, lol.  It was basically a success - everything turned out well taste wise.  Time management could use some work, as I should have make a few things the night before but we were frantically unpacking the last bunch of boxes.  Plus we were at church all night for Pascha services.  It was mega fun breaking in a bunch of our new kitchen gadgets and things!  We are totally going to have a game night, or get together sometime soon so we can do this again!

On that note (and speaking of notes), our thank you notes came in, and it is my goal to get them 100% done by the end of the week.  I am pretty certain that everyone thinks we are ungrateful jerks at this point, but we were moving and everything has just been too crazy.

AND I got an email from our photographer that our pictures should be ready sometime this week!  Exciting!!! 

So I am going to start recapping everything very soon :)