Wide Awake

Matty and I have been married for 1 year. I cannot believe it has blown by so fast! We have gone through a lot of big changes, and I love him even more.

Matt was laid-off, but got a new job a week later.

I graduated from The University of Arizona.

I started my first “real” job out of college.

We came back to the house we were living in to have water damage. Then later, twice, someone tried to break in.

Moved into a beautiful new house.

Decorated our new house, successfully.

Celebrated Christmas, separately, with both of our families, successfully.

Went to Urbana09.

Took a wonderful vacation to MN and ILL.

Have seen amazing friends leave us in Tucson, for other parts of the country, and Mexico.

And we have, to date, attended 7 other weddings since our own.

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Before our wedding in MN, I made a little “music” video at the Arboretum where we said our vows. The video is set to Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours.” Meghan and Elizabeth helped me out with the production, and I am so thankful for their continuing love and support.

In The Ceremony picture (below), my cousin Mariah is holding a laptop so my Gramma could see the wedding via Skype!

What a wonderful day. The weather was perfect. The reception was AMAZING. We had The Return which had EVERYONE dancing (which is exactly what I wanted). We had an open house the day before so I got to mingle with new family and old friends so that I could dance at the reception (which I did).  :) Perfect.

Matty took me on a date for our anniversary. We went to Vivace. It was fantastic! I had the seafood lasagnette, it was amazing. Fresh. Light. Delicious. Perfection. And we had the stuffed mushrooms for starters I had a glass of zinfandel and matt had a martini. Wonderful.

I love my Matty!

We all started our adventure at Pizza Luce, we had some amazing pizzas! So delicious! We had the Shrimp Al Pesto, The Bear, Ruby Rae, and The Rustler.

Then we walked around the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Trail in the Minneapolis Riverfront District. It was very beautiful and a lot of history. There were lots of boards up with historic stories about the dam and how this district started.

The hubby and I took a little trip to visit family and the City this past month. We had a lot of fun visiting with family, eating at a lot of great places, watching Knight and Day with Gramma Pat, and visiting the hubby’s hometown.

We took a little trip down memory lane in Crystal Lake, ILL. We also met up with family for a great family dinner at Gramma’s house. We took Gramma out on a date to Leona’s, and saw Knight and Day (which I thought was pleasantly entertaining).  Then we made a pineapple upside-down cake, which we ate at 12:30am when it was finished baking.

The next day we took the Metra  into downtown Chicago for the Taste of Chicago. We had some great tastes! Chocolate covered banana, Pad Thai, Pickle, Chicago style hotdog, Jumbalaya, Pot stickers, and Lemon Italian Ice. We also went to Dominick’s Cooking Corner and this egotistical chef was telling the audience how to loose weight (How he did…) it was ridiculous! Then he had about 15 minutes left of his hour time limit to cook….lame.  But we took a lot of great pictures and saw some interesting people. We also got some great tan lines!

We had a great time in Illinois! We hope to go back often On our way back to MN, we stopped at Portillo’s, a really cool retro diner with hotdogs, beef and burgers. Great food!

This 4th of July was spent playing Settlers of Catan, eating, shooting, s’mores, drinks and fireworks.

Settlers of Catan was fun, once we figured out all the rules. Dad won…. lucky duck.  We made a very tasty dinner; bacon wrapped shrimp and sea scallops on the grill with a brown sugar glaze. We also had burgers and crunchy coleslaw. Tasty Delicious. We thought about attending the Taste of Minnesota, but a) it cost too much [and we made our own food,] and b) it was too HOT and too HUMID.

After dinner, we were a little lethargic, but there were “varmints” in the backyard. So we had to do a very American thing, shoot at them with BB guns. After all the squirrels were out of the yard, we set up some targets [See Pictures].  We all took turns trying to hit the balloons and targets from the back windows. I got my first shot, a far away balloon! Booyah! Eventually Matt, Jessica, Mom and Dad hit the other targets as well. I felt very patriotic! (and I hit the most targets!)

But the highlight of the night was the FIREWORKS. Matt and I MAY have bought some fireworks in another part of the midwest…. VIEW HERE.  My favorite, and this was our finale, was a little hand-made firework.  “THE BIG ONE.” Sooooooo awesome. Thank you Nancy and Jessica for coming over and sharing this time with us! We had a lot of laughs!

Fireworks

After fireworks, we watched My Sister’s keeper.  A great day.