One lucky girl

Today is K's and my three-year wedding anniversary (from the Florida wedding, the one where we were actually legally married). Three years and a second wedding later, we still haven't had a honeymoon. We swore to ourselves that we'd finally get around to that this year, but between all the traveling for weddings, wedding showers, a baby shower, and we-haven't-seen-you-in-a-while visits, we just don't want to have to take off work again for something else. That, and sometimes it's just nice to be home for once!

We're very fortunate to feel like we have everything we want or need, so we didn't plan on even buying gifts.

So imagine my surprise today when I see an enormous bouquet of flowers coming up the stairs today. And when the bouquet was moved aside, I could see that the delivery person was K!

Of course he planned his arrival just in time for lunch. That alone was a nice treat, since we work in completely opposite directions from one another, so it's a good 40 minutes or so between my workplace and his.

Tonight is our weekly kickball game (by the way, I had an amazing catch at last week's game, AND I'm somehow the 3rd kicker in our new lineup!), which we always look forward to.

We're still going to fit in some of the sweet, romantic stuff -- we've got brunch and a couple's massage at a spa schedule for Sunday. Considering the jam-packed day we have on Saturday, which includes a 16-mile training run, Sunday's relaxation will be pure perfection.

But for tonight, we'll celebrate with a little kickball, lots of friends, and a couple beers.

That's more our style anyway.

Valentine's, Schmalentine's

I have nothing against Valentine's Day, really. I just don't think it's a very nice holiday.

It's one of those things that always sounds great from the outside. One of those things that only matters on that day. One of those things that matters more if you're unable to celebrate it for whatever reason.

I've always told K that I'd rather have flowers on any other day of the year than February 14. They mean more to me that way, and they're cheaper too. Unfortunately, K never quite got the hint.

So a couple weeks ago, I suggested we boycott Valentine's Day. K was down. See, it's not that we disagree with the principle of the holiday. That couldn't be further from the truth. We just decided we want to celebrate Us on a day that's significant to us. So this Sunday will be exactly that for us: a Sunday.

Instead, on April 1 -- the date that K proposed to me in 2007 -- we'll celebrate [OurLastName] Day.

There may be flowers involved. Card purchases will likely be made. There could be chocolate. There will be gifts.

So in the end, the card companies will get their way; the florists will still get our money (only a lot less of it). But it'll be on the date we chose.

It's our holiday.

I love everything about that.

Colorado, Part 5 -- Or, How I ended the trip on a good note

Since you can collect some good stories when you go skiing for the first time, I'm sharing them in installments, some of which are still ridiculously long (sorry). Find out why my instructor called me "The Troublemaker," and then read here about how I earned that nickname by having a screaming Tourette's tantrum on my first green slope. Learn how I finally made it to the bottom on an intermediate slope, only to come back for Day 2 and get yelled at by a crazy dude.

The man started walking toward us. "I want to apologize. I completely overreacted," he said.

We told him not to worry about it. I told him I felt horrible. I could understand why he overreacted; he was trying to look out for his daughter. "I saw her over there, and that's why I was heading to the right rather than going between you two," I said.

The man told us that the day before, his wife had gotten hit when someone skied into her on the slopes. She had to go to the hospital and get a CAT scan. (The man wasn't wearing a helmet. I wondered if his wife had been wearing one when she was hit. K and I both had helmets on.)

"Oh my gosh!" K and I both said. "Is she OK?"

"Well, we don't know."

(OK, this guy's a douchebag again.) He looked at me. "Lessons!"

"I did! I took beginner's lessons yesterday. I tried Schoolmarm afterwards. It was awful. That's why we were up here again today. But I'm pretty sure we're done for the day."

"No," he said. I think he thought it was because of him. Which, honestly, it kind of was. "Don't let that stop you." He was taking a couple steps backward to head toward the gondolas. We wished each other a good trip, and he was off.

And not a moment too soon.

My eyes welled up, and they started overflowing almost before I knew what was happening.

"Are you OK?" K asked me.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I have no idea why I'm crying." It was getting worse, so I put my goggles back on.

I was relieved that the man had apologized, but that act had made it harder to brush off what had happened. Instead of crashing into an asshole, I had collided with a father who had watched his wife get injured the day before. He had probably said everything to me that he had wanted to say to whoever hit his wife. (Never mind, again, the fact that his wife was potentially still in the hospital while he was out here skiing with their daughter.)

After a couple minutes, I felt better, but I was still in shock about the whole thing. I couldn't quit replaying it in my head for a long time.

It had been lightly snowing all morning, and by the time we got to the bottom of the mountain, it had picked up a bit more. K and I walked through the charming streets of the resort to the restaurant where our friends were waiting for us. We actually passed the man and his daughter sitting on a bench on the side of the road, but I pretended not to see them. (Two run-ins was enough.)

We had managed to work up quite an appetite, so once we reached the restaurant, we destroyed chips and queso, and each of us had one of the biggest burritos I've ever seen. (Not to mention one of the most delicious Cokes I've ever had. And a couple ginormous glasses of water.) I actually almost finished my burrito. I'm not kidding, it was massive.

Since it was our last day in Keystone, I left the restaurant to return my rental skis, and the shop guys actually gave me my second rental day free. Score! The snow was still picking up as I walked the short distance back to the restaurant. All our other friends had arrived, and we decided to head out before traffic picked up on the one highway that led back to Denver.

By the time we walked from the restaurant to our rental car, the snowflakes were big and thick. It felt like we were really in a snowglobe. It was the most beautiful snow I'd ever seen!

We hurried to load 10 people's gear between our rental SUV and our friend's pickup. K was warming up the car, and he had turned up some music. Volbeat's "Still Counting" came on. It's a decently new song, and for some reason, it really makes me happy. There's a line in it (evidently it's actually "for betrayal, for betrayal") that I always sing the way I hear it: "a puppy trail, a puppy tray-hay-hayul." There's a funny dance that the beat always makes both K and I want to do, so we were goofing off doing the dance in the snow.

And one of my favorite things to do when it snows is to spin. I don't know why, but I think it's amazing. I go outside, and I stand in an open space, bring my arms up to my shoulders, turn my head to the sky, and spin. Something about the snow makes this an awesome experience.

So there I was, in the middle of the parking lot, laughing at the song, singing about a puppy trail, and spinning in the middle of a real-life snow globe.

Not a bad way to end Day 2.

Definitely not at all.

Our first Christmas tree!

On Sunday afternoon, K and I went got a start on decorating for Christmas. We visited a cute little Christmas store, where we bought quite a few nice ornaments, and then we headed to a tree farm to cut down our tree!

I've never had a real tree before. My dad is allergic, so it was never an option. K really wanted a real one, and I was excited to find a tree farm fairly close to us.

The tree farm was a quaint family-owned place. Since neither of us knew which type of tree we wanted, the workers were able to give us a few tips before they sent us out to survey the selection. They told us that people come out as early as the weekend after Halloween to begin staking their claims on trees! Some people had interesting ways of showing a tree was taken.

We couldn't believe how big some of the trees were!

I don't know if a lot of the average-sized trees were already taken, but it seemed that the trees were either 8 ft tall or 3 ft tall. I was glad we have tall ceilings in our living room! I had read an article that recommended buying a tree that's 6" to 12" from your ceiling. An 8-footer wouldn't quite be that height, but I figured it would be sufficient.

We found a tree that we were pleased with. It was a Leyland cypress, nice and full. There was one random stray branch on the side, but we could easily put that part at the back. The tree's height was good, and the top of it was really pretty. We found an employee who could cut the tree down for us. After he stood up from cutting down our tree, he bent over to pick up his saw from the ground ... and farted! I actually thought to myself, "It's a sign we found the right tree." (Hey, remember one of the biggest surprises I had once I got to live with K?)

When we got the tree home and inside the house, we were very glad that we hadn't gotten a tree any taller. I guess the stand (which isn't tall) added more than we'd bargained for. Thank goodness our neighbors had some good clippers! We trimmed the top of the tree and shaped it to hide our little alteration.

We put on Elf as we decorated the tree. As the movie was finishing up, so were we. K made us a couple mugs of hot chocolate, which we enjoyed during the final scenes of the movie. When we turned off the TV, we snuggled on the couch and surveyed our work on the tree with fresh eyes. We were pretty pleased with ourselves. K actually got a little teary-eyed, since after 4.5 years of being together, we were finally able to decorate our tree together. This will also be the first time we've been together for Christmas.

This is the most gorgeous tree I've ever had. I love that many of the ornaments are meaningful to us in some way, and I love that a lot of the decorations are new things we picked out last weekend. But the things about it I love most is that we chose it and decorated it together.

Two years, already?

Time flies when you get married, send your new husband off to war, work out the whole time he's gone, welcome him home, plan your "real" wedding, and then move across the country together to live with each other for the first time in your entire four-year relationship!

(Did we seriously do all that in two years?!)

It's been an unconventional first couple years, but I wouldn't trade them for the world. I'm stealing these words from a picture frame K and I bought together several months ago:

I love you not only for who you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.

One of our very favorite pictures from the wedding, taken with our matchmakers, whose wedding we met at. (Thanks, CG!)

Lord, thank you for blessing me with such an amazing man who brings more love and laughter to my life than I ever could have imagined.

Exciting things

Because I can't leave you with just that post after such a long break:

• Look! A homecoming picture (more later, really really really, I promise!)!

• My wedding dress is in! (I haven't run in weeks ... here's hoping it zips up!)
• K and I are going to be famous! (OK, not quite.) There's a media outlet that does a little love story-type feature, and K and I got interviewed for it today!

Maybe I should become a detective

I did quite a bit of detective work this morning (including a phone call to Amer!can A!rlines, where I wound up crying before I finished explaining my dilemma!) to figure out which flight K was on, but I did it.

I was able to get to the gate in plenty of time. In fact, I was an hour early. But better an hour early than even five minutes late!

K's flight arrived at 9 a.m., and he was on a plane full of soldiers headed home for their mid-tour leave. They got a nice welcome from the Dallas Fire Department, which had trucks on either side of the runway dousing the plane as it taxied the runway. K said it was really neat.

The U.SO and Lock.heed Mart!n had groups of people there to welcome the soldiers. It was wonderful of them to do that!

Soon after 9 a.m., they lined all of the families up on either sides of the doorway the soldiers would be coming through. As soon as the war veteran volunteer who was standing in the doorway caught sight of the first person in uniform, he cued someone to turn on patriotic music on a stereo nearby.

Two soldiers came through the door, which instantly brought tears to everyone's eyes. We clapped for them, and they shook the hands of the volunteers, who were holding up signs and waving flags.

















There was a bit of a lull before more soldiers came by. After a few minutes, I caught a glimpse of K coming toward the door.

I had wondered many times if I would cry when I saw him. But the moment I saw him, with the emotion of the music and having so many volunteers there -- not to mention my excitement over seeing my husband for the first time in nine months -- my eyes flooded and spilled over. He had the same reaction. (Honestly, I don't think anyone left there with a dry eye!)

We hugged for the longest time, and then a volunteer offered to take a picture of us. We kissed quickly after the photo, and a few female volunteers ran up and said, "Kiss her again!"






































It's wonderful to have him here again. I didn't know what it would be like for the first day or so (it took about half a day for things to feel normal again when he returned from Afghanistan), but it really feels like he never left, which is amazing.

Now, if you don't mind, I'll leave you with these pictures for a day or two. I'm gonna go spend time with my hubby!

(By the way, Piper TOTALLY remembered K! She was really excited to see him and has been lying by him and enjoying playing with him all day!)

Professional pictures are in!

Some of my favorites, and a few neat ones:

You can see more about our wedding weekend here and here, and there are more photos here:

This post makes me feel like I'm really married!

By yesterday afternoon, I felt a lot better about that whole name change thing. I'm still a little torn on whether I should've just added it onto my name, but I'm OK with how it is now. I'll just make sure I tell all my girlfriends who are getting married (Courtney, Heather: Consider yourselves warned!) to consider all those options before going to change their names. It seems like such a no-brainer, but I managed to miss an option!

Yesterday was a little slow at work, so I busied myself through part of the day with practicing my new signature. I'm getting pretty good at it, and I actually like having a capital G in my name now. It's a fun letter!

Last night was a late night for me. K has been here since Friday night. He's got two weeks of vacation since he's deploying soon, so we'll get to spend 11 straight days together. That ties our previous record of consecutive days spent together. It's been nice, even though I've had to work for three of the five days we've had so far. I'm off work for the rest of them, and I couldn't be more excited about that.

We spent last weekend just relaxing. We hadn't gotten to do that in such a long time! Sunday, we found a recipe online and headed to the store to buy the ingredients. Beingmccrary had recommended a yummy pumpkin dish that I really wanted to try until I realized it had no meat in it. K and I browsed Rachael Ray's 30-minute meals until we found one we thought sounded good: Turkey Sweet Potato Shepherd's Pie. Just like last time we cooked together, K teased me about my lack of kitchen utensils. (Seriously -- who needs a potato masher? Or even a potato PEELER?! That's why we have instant mashed potatoes!)

So after spending a ton of money on ingredients and finding 2 1/2 pounds (yes, pounds) of sweet potatoes, we headed home to start cooking. For starters, Rachael Ray is a liar, because it took the two of us much longer than 30 minutes to prepare this dish. And once we finally got it onto our plates, we felt like all we were eating was sweet potatoes! I don't know what Rachael Ray has against meat, but this recipe was so bad I've kind of lost faith in her. K is still willing to give her another shot. I think I'm done with sweet potatoes for life, though.





























































At least we had good wine to go along with the dinner. There was a little vineyard right by our hotel at K's cousin's wedding. We stopped by on the way home and picked up a couple bottles. It was delicious! We're trying to figure out if we can work in a trip by there when we're in PA this weekend so we can get more bottles. We're going to get one bottle of their nicest wine to save for after K returns from Iraq. That'll be a neat way to celebrate.

Monday, K and I made dinner again, but this time, we stuck to what we (especially half-Italian K) already knew: spaghetti. It was delicious. And it took so much less time, which was perfect, since it gave me time to get crafty.

Some of our friends are expecting their first child in just under a month. The husband is in Iraq right now until April, but he's coming home for his two weeks of R&R soon, and they're hoping to time it just right to where he's in town just a couple days before his baby girl is born. Now, you have to know him to really grasp how perfect this creation is for their family, but I'll try to explain it as best as I can.

Scott is a man's man. He can build things (fences, decks, grandfather clocks -- you name it), he's in the Army, he's got a little bit of a Northern accent (he's from Ohio, but he still has an accent), and he likes to talk a lot of smack. The thing is, though -- and this becomes very clear pretty quickly -- that Scott's a big softie. Around the guys, he acts like he's the tough guy who wears the pants in the family. But the guys all laugh at him, because they know he would do absolutely anything his wife asked him to. He's really just a giant teddy bear.

A giant teddy bear who really wanted a son. So much so that he upset his wife with his reaction to the fact he was having a daughter. None of us were surprised he reacted that way, but we all had to laugh at him because we know Scott, and we know the very second he lays eyes on his daughter, he will be done. Done.

Still, his loving wife is trying to keep the pink to a minimum, so the baby's room is decorated in neutral colors of green and yellow. But K and I knew we had the perfect idea for a shirt for the girl. It was so perfect that we had to make it ourselves. I think it turned out pretty cute, don't you?




















I also decided to update the shirt I made for myself. I wanted it to be really clear why the shirt is camo. Mission accomplished.




















Last night, K and I had leftover spaghetti and headed out to run a billion errands. When we finished, we immediately headed home and got dressed for the gym. We worked out for an hour, and it was so cool to have K there on a weeknight. He got to meet a lot of the people I have gotten to know in our little gym community, so that was exciting. It's been so cool getting to do all these mundane, normal, routine things with him these past few days.

After the gym, we redid our unity sand (I'll post pictures of that tomorrow, hopefully). I love how it turned out! We got a package ready to send to Scott and his wife, and I packed for PA. By the time I showered and climbed into bed, it was after 2 a.m. But I'm all packed for a fun extended weekend in Pennsylvania. K and I have some awesome things planned: a trip to a pumpkin patch to pick our own pumpkin and carve it (I've never done either before); a night or two in Washington, D.C., to visit some friends; and spending some time with some of K's friends from back home. It'll be busy, but it'll be fun. I just hope I get some rest somewhere in there!

The post you've been waiting for: PICTURES!

It may not seem like, it, but these pictures are shown in chronological order. The sky during our ceremony looked completely different depending on which way you were facing with the camera. These are just a few of the 50 bajillion pictures we have that everyone has taken -- and we haven't even gotten the professional ones yet!

See more about the wedding here and here. See our professional photos here. 



*** Does anyone have a really great photo-sharing site to recommend? I still have so many photos left, and it would be great to have a place online to store them all -- especially if people in other states could add theirs as well and see everyone else's. We're going to compile all the pictures we get and put them on a CD eventually, and we'll send those CDs out to everyone. It would just be great to be able to keep them all online as well.