Where has the time gone?!?

Being that we are soooo close to the wedding, I haven’t had time to do much around the house or cook any new dishes… such a slacker, I know. Apparently November is full of parties, birthdays and get-togethers and I’m just trying to keep up.

This past weekend I had a baby shower to attend, a birthday party for the twinsies and birthday party for Tyler who is now three! It’s amazing how time flies. Us adults played wiffle ball in the yard while the kids played in the street (parenting at its finest). I played first base and while I tried to do my best at getting people out, Steven (who we call Tampa) took me out! He ran to first base and ran right into me (I think it was an accident???) and we went rumblin’ and tumblin’ in the street. All I could think about when I was falling down from being tackled by a 275lb 6’4” dude was “strapless wedding dress”!!! Luckily, I had on pants and a long sleeve shirt so all I walked away with was a little scrape on my elbow and eyes full of tears because I was laughing so hard. It was hilarious. And we lost. But it was still a really good time!

We went to Edo’s Hibachi Restaurant last night to celebrate my dad’s birthday. Such. Good. Food. None of us could move very well after we left because we were so stuffed. I got him a new pair of kicks for his b-day, grey Converse All Stars, and he rocked them to dinner. Awesome.

Unlike this past weekend, (I’m pretty sure) I have nothing planned, which will leave time for last minute wedding to-do’s. Besides my grandma’s birthday on Sunday, I don’t think there’s much of anything else going on. Thank goodness, because this girl is tired. While I’m so excited to be married to my best friend and plan our big day, I’m kind of ready for things to go back to “normal”, whatever that is… But instead we have the holidays fast approaching; so, no rest for me!

Event list:

Sunday: Nana’s Birthday

Tuesday: last day of work for a week and a half (yippee!)

Thursday: Thanksgiving

Friday: set up venue and have rehearsal dinner

Saturday: our wedding day!!! and 5 year anniversary :)

Sunday: leave for honeymoon (finally a vacation!)

Friday: Stone crab feast

Saturday: Pinterest party! (I'm so excited for this!)

I can’t believe our big day is coming so fast, where has the time gone?!? It seems like yesterday we were months away and suddenly we’re only 10 days from getting hitched! Craziness. I’m so excited :) I just hope I can stay sane through all of the madness. Ha!

Ice Ice Baby

Quick update! Sean went to Home Depot today to buy the deep freezer that I talked about in this post. Let me tell you, it was worth the wait! He ended up getting it for just $150, that’s a $70 savings!!! They say “patience is a virtue”, and while I’m still waiting for “hurry the hell up” to be a virtue, it was definitely worth holding out. Now we can use that $70 we saved to buy boat loads of food! Yippee! Sean told me to bring home ice from work so we can stock up, I'm thinking ice cream sounds a lot better though...

Sorry about the crappy picture, Sean took it haha!

K, bye J

Happy Housewife

I got a call the other day from Sean’s awesome grandfather, whom we call “Da”, and he said that he’d like to meet up to give us our wedding gift. I told him he could just bring it to the wedding but he said that he didn’t want to lug it around, which automatically got my curiosity going… I resisted the urge to check the registry (it took all that I had not to log on to Bed Bath & Beyond!), so I waited. I hate waiting.

Anyhoo, we made plans with the Santa Claus looking fella to go to Red Lobster (his absolute favorite) and he would pick us up at 6. Like clockwork, he came up the driveway with a package in his hand. I let Sean open it since I had the pleasure of opening most of the gifts at the Bridal Shower. As he unwrapped it, I spotted the name that I’ve been longing to have in my house… DYSON! Yes folks, we have a Dyson vacuum! This one to be exact:

Check out the different options we have! It’s a DC 35 handheld that is run by battery. No dragging a cord, no tripping over a cord, no sucking up a cord and no being stopped to go into the next room... by a cord. We are now free to roam about the house. I was so excited, and surprisingly enough, so was Sean! For the first time since we’ve been living in the house, the househusband vacuumed. I. Was. Shocked. And thrilled J he was going to town trying it out on the different floor surfaces; it worked great on all of them, carpet, tile and our awesome Astroturf haha. And when he was over it, which didn’t take long, he handed it off to me! I vacuumed for about two minutes and it died… apparently it didn’t have that great of a charge right out of the box. Just my luck. Supposedly when it has a full charge it'll last for 6 hours. Yessss.

Due to the fact that our beloved Dyson was deader than a doornail, we decided to hang up the charging station in our laundry room. I love it. It’s more accessible than our broom, plus we don’t have to deal with scooping the junk up with a dust pan, which never gets it all…

Cody wanted to make a cameo J

Maybe now we won’t have such a hairy house! Ha, who am I kidding… with two crazy furballs it will always be a constant struggle. But, at least we’ll have a better defense! Let the battle begin!



Much ado about nothing…

This past week/weekend has been filled with nothing but cleaning, running errands and getting things done. And while I’m happy that things are a tad more organized, I sorta missed the fun stuff that our weekends are usually chock full of.

After a trip to Sams Club, Sean and I have come to realize the money saving opportunities that are available when you buy in bulk. However, when you have a little starter home like we do, space is an obvious issue…  So, in an effort to take part in these “bang for your buck” deals, we went on a hunt for a deep freezer.

We found this guy at a good price point and asked a lovely Home Depot associate if they had one in stock. After saying they didn’t, they then told us how many they'll be getting in because of a killer deal that starts tomorrow; early Black Friday Pricing!!! Yippee! So not only will I save money because of that, I also got a coupon in the mail that day from Home Depot for 20% off anything over $200. Score!!! You know where we’ll be tomorrow J

As for the jumbo pack of paper towels… they’re scattered all over the house, haha! At least we can have more space to store food, I guess!

Tangent time! Here’s another pumpkin update. We went from a cool fish:

To a mushy moldy mess:

To a smushed orange smear across the yard. Thanks Sean.

I'm hoping that's the last pumpkin update I'll have for you, I'm over that nasty gourd.

In better news, the weather is beautiful, Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and we’re two and a half weeks away from wedding bells!

Oh, and we have a lil bit of fall decor on our tabletop J

And did anyone happen to see that full moon on Friday? Briana sure did...

Sorry, I had to... 'til next time folks!

Pumpkin Spice and everything nice

It’s November already! It’s amazing how time flies…  Last night, the dogs were barking like crazy the trick-or-treaters came by; so, naturally, we had some friends over, hung out in the driveway, the guys were drinking beer and the country music was blaring. It was pretty much a typical night at our house! With the exception of all of the princesses, scream masks and Harry Potters that were gallivanting in our streets… Oh and my dad, Frankenstein haha

I decided to add to our sugar induced outlandish state by making some pumpkin spice cupcakes! Pumpkin is such a versatile ingredient in the kitchen and since it's fall, I fully intend on using it as much as possible! 

One of my favorite qualities of pumpkin is that you don’t have to use too many ingredients along with the puree to get great results. I showed you before that pumpkin dip uses only three ingredients, now I’m about to show you a recipe that only uses two! Pumpkin spice cupcakes, yummm J

To make these treats, you literally only use a can of pumpkin and a box cake mix. Usually I use a yellow cake mix, but I decided to spice it up a bit with some spice cake mix. The cool thing about this recipe is that you can make different things with it; cupcakes, cakes, or bread! It just depends on what dish you bake it in and what you top it with. I decided to top mine with cream cheese icing. ***Side note: Pillsbury cream cheese icing is not all that great, definitely stick with Betty Crocker or make your own!

As for the directions, you literally just mix the two ingredients together! After trying to mix it with a spoon, I remembered that Sean’s grandmother got me a hand mixer for by bridal shower, so I busted it out and used it! Little did I know she got me the hand mixer on steroids and “Speed 1” is like warp speed; so needless to say, I splattered pumpkin and cake mix everywhere!!! Such a mess… But, back to the task at hand; after you mix everything thoroughly, plop a dollop of the mixture in the cupcake liners and throw them in a 325* oven for about 25 minutes. Because the mixture is so thick, whatever it looks like when you put it in the cupcake liner is what it’s going to look like after its baked:

So, if you want a smooth top, take a knife or spatula and spread it out on top. Boom. Done. As you can see from the picture above, I didn’t care what it looked like haha, it all tastes the same in the end!

After letting it cool for about 5-10 minutes, I iced them with some whipped cream cheese icing, and just like that, they were done!

I took the extras that didn’t get eaten to work for the guys. This recipe will make 12 pretty large cupcakes; I’ve also made it in bread form which makes a pretty decent sized loaf. Hope you enjoy!

No booze or Strippers... But still a lil crazy!

As promised, here is the video!!! My great friend Sarah created it from all of the pictures and videos taken from the trip; thanks girly!!!

I told you before that my bachelorette party was full of craziness and fun. Here’s a little insight as to what is going on in the video; hopefully it will make a little more sense after this haha!

To start out, the pictures on the couch (with the lamp) were taken out of sheer excitement of being in Cocoa Beach, and just because we wanted to take pictures and thought we needed better lighting hahaha; they pretty much just ended up being wacky photos…We then headed down to the beach where we searched for hatching sea turtles, but found none (sad face!), so, we did the next best thing... took more pictures!  The crazy pics at Ron Jon (and in the bathroom) were taken because we all competed in a scavenger hunt (Bri and I won!!!), and last, but not least, the awesome interpretive dancing (creatively done by Kelly and Megan) to the Lion King song, was done because they tied in the game “Who Knows the Bride the Best”! Kelly, in the end, was deemed the winner J A fun time was had by all, and we were all completely sober the whole entire time! When was the last time you heard of a completely sober Bachelorette Party?!? This goes to show you that tons of fun can be had, even when alcohol (and strippers) are not involved! Enjoy my friends!

  

24 more days till wedding bells!!!

Nood Chicks

Caught your attention with that title, didn’t I? While you all should know by now that my spelling isn’t that bad, you should also know that there aren’t any “nude chicks” in this post, just some chicken… and some noodles. Sowwy! Get ready for a long post folks, annnnd go!

While driving to my parent’s house for breakfast on Sunday, we ran across this gem sitting on the side of the road just begging to be taken. So, we did just that.

We cooked a boat load of food on it that afternoon. We tried to smoke everything, but ended up charring most of it hahaha; this is what we ended up with! Under all of the burnt looking stuff was some really good meat, the chicken being my favorite!

Since we had some chicken left over, I decided to make some chicken and noodles! I started with the rest of the chicken that I stuffed with a purple onion for some extra flavor; it smelled so good while cooking!

To make the broth, I put the chicken in a pot full of water (enough to almost cover it) and seasoned the snot out of it since I didn’t have any bouillon cubes. Next step, boil! I rotated the chicken in the water every-now-and-then just to get it all flavored and moist.

 Check out that backsplash! Whoooo it looks good!

After about an hour later, I took the chicken out and busted out my homemade noodles from this post!

I had to untangle this brain looking glob of noodles, which was equivalent to untangling your hair after driving with your windows down going 80mph on the highway. I know some of you girls can relate.  After that was all done, I plopped the noodles in the stock that I made to let them get a head start on cooking. There was still some flour stuck to the noodles which tends to thickens the stock; depending on your preference, you can add more broth if you’d like it to be more soupy, otherwise it will thicken into a gravy.

While that was cooking away, it was chicken pickin’ time! I tried to pick all that I could off of the carcass. We even broke the wishbone, and I totally lost… Dangit!

After picking all of the meat off, I threw it in with the noodles. I let that cook on a medium high heat to let the broth thicken a little more and get all of the flavors to blend. After about 10 minutes of that, I served it up!

It was the perfect meal for a fall night! Bonus: Sean loved it! Whoop whoop! I’m loving this fall weather; I’m thinking chili might be in our near future, yum J Oh and the best part? It made enough to have left overs!

Yay!