My Best Friend's Wedding Anniversary

365 days have passed since one of the best days of my life. 

No, not my wedding. 

Brooke and Levi's! 

Sharing in the joy of your best friend's wedding, a wedding you have planned since a very young age, is priceless. Joyful. Wonderful. 

Especially since it was the first wedding I'd attended since my own (10 weeks prior).

This wedding was one of the highlights of 2010 for me and I am so glad to have been a part of it. 

Happy First Anniversary, Brooke and Levi!

living room details

Day 2 of house details!

The chairs Carson loves with a pillow cover I made. 

One of our bookshelves with a favorite picture from our visit to Savannah and a bowl I recently painted. 

Same bookshelf again!

Paper flowers I made last summer when the days were loooong and boring.  

Top of the desk.  

Our travel wall - map and places we've been 

Top of bookshelf by door. Wedding invite and wedding picture.

Entry bulletin board. 

Another thing I painted. Clearly too cheap to actually purchase things for our home. 

There are more details, of course. Our living room doubles as our office, study, and dining room so there are lots of details involved. I'll post other pictures another time.

kitchen details

I love our little apartment. It's certainly the first place where we've been able to settle and view it as a bit less temporary than our summer dwelling last year. 

So I thought you'd like to see some details of the place! 

Today, we'll tour the kitchen. 

A pottery thing Carson's friend Nick gave us as a wedding gift, employed in holding kitchen utensils. Love that happy face spatula from Miss Em.

My bird platter and crate and barrel nesting bowls. 

Love the warm colors.

The counter. Next to the bird plate and bowls is the microwave. 

My apron collection, minus one. 

Something from our wedding - our last name!

We could prop this window open into the hallway, but I like to leave it closed so that I can leave my frames out there to look at while I wash dishes.  

My passive-aggressive note. We just needed a little reminder. 

Target clock from the wedding. I saw it there the other day if you love this one. 

Owl cookie jar! Anniversary gift from my wonderful mom-in-law.

Spices. I go through the parsley like you wouldn't believe. I've refilled it four times and it's empty again. I love parsley. 

Moved this bulletin board to the empty orange wall and employed it to display wedding pictures.

The fridge. The wedding invite on the bottom left is Josie's :)  

Tomorrow, I'll post some pictures of the living room details. 

This is mostly for my benefit, by the way. I love being able to look back and see our home!

US Tour, part one

Right now, I'm in this place:

(pictures taken last summer)

Spending time with this individual :)

This is part one of my United States tour. 

I continue west this weekend to see my in-laws and then fly to the East coast to visit my sister-in-law, brother-in-law and nieces. 

Update on those portions of my "tour" in a couple of weeks!

Oh, What a Night!

On Saturday, we had a Reilly girls' night

 (minus Josie and Heidi... poor planning on our part excluded them and we're still sad about it)

It was fun, and crazy, and just a great evening with great friends and lots of pictures (152 from my camera!)

So we got pretty

We got dressed up 

(the dress I'm wearing is the back-up dress I had planned to wear to formal)

And went to Chili's

(this was taken by my phone)

Where we took LOTS of pictures

Of us, of our food, of whatever

And then we walked around the park to take more pictures. 

With the statue

On the steps

I love this picture!

Kissing the air... 

And some jumping pictures, which, despite our attempts to time the jumping, are not great. 

We took about 20. 

We ran around the park, taking pictures, bouldering on the bridge, and dancing

It was a beautiful night. Cotton candy sky.

We peeked out from behind trees

And then finished it up with dessert at Wendys

Where we got free Frostys, just for being us

...or because we had to wait...

And then danced in the parking lot of the Reilly

Great Friends

I had one of the best groups of friends "back home". For nineteen years of my life, I lived in the same town, in the same state, went to the same church, and had a pretty decided circle of friends for most of my life. People came and went and our closeness changed as we hit stages of life at different times, but I was always surrounded by great people.

I moved to Spokane in 2008 after a summer spent in Ukraine and China which had not only grown and stretched me but also deepened friendships. It was a great summer that was over too quickly. I was in a new place, new state, without a church to call home. I had the world's best roommates/housemates and we all got pretty close, but in reality, we didn't have the history that I had with people back in Beaufort. Our relationships only went back to August, or if you want to be technical, to the day when we requested each other as friends on Facebook so we could get to know other Moody students. We hadn't lived life together like with my Beaufort friends. I wrote and received lots of letters and phone calls from home.

I was in transition after that. Christmas and Summer breaks in Beaufort, a new living situation in Spokane, a new living situation in Olympia, back to Beaufort, move to Naches (where we knew NOBODY), and finally back to Spokane, where thankfully, we've been since September.

This past year, I wasn't a student, but working. I wanted to continue those relationships with roommates and Moody friends so we got together for dinner or coffee. Living in a dorm-ish building with so many people definitely encourages interaction and since all our doors open onto the same hall, we're pretty much into one another's business all the time.

It's not the first time in my life that I can say that I have good friends. But being here and developing these deeper relationships in the past year have been so good. I honestly consider this home. I addressed an envelope to my parents recently and put "Spokane, Washington" instead of "Seabrook, South Carolina". My Moody friends and my CTR friends and the people I'm around all the time are making this place very much not my second home, but my home-home.

I know that this earth isn't our home, but I love the closeness of relationship afforded to us. God has been so gracious to allow such deep, close relationships with people in such a relatively short time!

Hairspray

This is a post with different hairstyles I've tried in the past few months. No words, just pictures. Shocking.