Valentine's Day 2015

We're not big extravagant Valentine's Day celebraters, but we do alway exchange cards and usually some sort of little gift. It's also my dad's birthday, so we usually celebrate with him too. This year was a little more fun than normal because we have Connor! When I was growing up, my parents always surprised my sisters and me with little gifts on Valentine's Day morning, so I wanted to do the same for him.

His first Valentine's Day gift was this cute little book:

I wanted a book about St. Valentine, but I couldn't seem to find a good one... any recommendations? Connor obviously didn't particularly care about his book, but he did look super cute in his "My First Valentine's Day" outfit!

Jeff took Connor for a couple hours in the morning so I could sleep in (best. gift. ever.), and they secretly went to the store while I was asleep! When I woke up, there were two vases of flowers and two cards in the kitchen (one from each of them), along with an assortment of British candy and tea that Jeff picked up earlier in the week at one of our favorite little shops in Houston.

I got Jeff the latest Disney classics Blu-Ray release (101 Dalmatians). He's been collecting the Disney classics as they're released from the Disney "vault" so that we'll have a complete collection for our kids. This was the first one he's received since Connor was born, so it was kind of special. :)

We drove to my parents' lakehouse in the afternoon and met my parents and sister for a fondue dinner to celebrate my dad's birthday. So fun! I hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's Day!

7 Quick Takes

I have so many random little things that I wanted to mention on the blog, so I'm linking up with Kelly for Seven Quick Takes today!

1. Connor's Baptism

I'm still sort of floating on the high of Connor being baptized. I absolutely loved celebrating his first sacrament. What a blessing! Being on maternity leave gave me the time to actually plan the details of his baptism party and execute those plans so it looked like the image in my head, which was something I haven't been able to do for a party in a long time, and I really enjoyed it.

We didn't get around to opening the gifts and cards he received for a few days, and when we did I was just overwhelmed by the love and support of our sweet family. What a gift it is for our child to be prayed for and supported in his faith by so many people. Connor received so many thoughtful presents. If you're ever looking for a sweet baptism gift, here are a few that I'm jotting down in my mind to give as future baptism gifts...

Sacrament Keepsake Box

Noah's Ark Night Light

Lil' Prayer Buddy Lamb (it says the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be!)

Lord's Love Frame

2. Podcasts

I think I'm a little late to the party, but I've recently become a big fan of podcasts. They're perfect for keeping me awake during middle-of-the-night breastfeeding (and better than scrolling through Facebook or Instagram on my phone because I can still make eye contact with Connor while listening to them). I made it through Serial in about a week, and I started at the beginning of Fountains of Carrots and I'm about halfway through. What other ones should I be listening to?

3. 2014 Photobook

Our 2014 photobook is here (gracias to MyPublisher's latest free extra pages sale)! I don't love the cover for this year's book, but there were slim pickings for photos that had Connor in them (given that he was only outside my uterus for 15 days of 2014), and I couldn't do a photo without our little boy in it!

It follows the format of our 2011-2013 books and has all of our important trips/events/etc., including lots of Connor prep and Connor's arrival!

Like always, my favorite pages are the full-page landscape spreads.

(from our South Padre Island trip)

(from our Monaco trip)

On the back, we always pick an important photo and Bible verse for the year. This year, the little square photo HAD to be a Connor photo, and the Bible verse was an easy choice - 1 Samuel 1:27.

See our whole 2014 photobook here, or pictures of our previous photobooks here!

4. Bacon a la Pinterest

Pinterest told me that cooking bacon in the oven was a good idea. So I tried it. And I lived to tell the tale that YES - it is a good idea! 15-20 minutes at 375 on a foil-covered rimmed pan = cooked bacon, easy cleanup, and no bacon fat sprayed all over my stovetop. Love it!

5. Free Coffee February

PSA for anyone who hasn't heard - Chick-fil-A has free coffee for all of February. Totally free. All the time.

We have a Chick-fil-A right outside the entrance to our neighborhood, so it's on my way to anywhere and everywhere, and I think I've been there for coffee at least half of the days of February so far. The iced vanilla coffee is particularly lovely.

I was discussing this at a baby playgroup recently and some of the other moms were all like GASP! but, caffeine and breastfeeding?!?!, so I guess I'm officially a laid-back mama or something, but really... I don't think one cup of coffee is doing anything. Anything other than tasting delicious, that is. :)

6. Eight Years

Jeff and I just celebrated our 8-year "date-iversary" on February 11th. We don't actually have an actual "started dating" date, since we kind of slowly transitioned from "best friends" to "together," but February 11, 2007 was the first time we said "I love you," so that's the date we've always used.

Eight years of telling him I love him, and I still think I love him more and more every time I say it. :)

Here's a photo from around that same time... look how little we were!

7. Breakfast (and let's be honest, lunch too)

I'm obsessed with this new cereal from Quaker Oats. Peach + Apple + Walnut + Granola = Mmmm. Next time Jeff goes out of town for work, I might just eat this stuff for every meal until he gets home. :)

Celebrating Four Years of Marriage

I love celebrating our anniversary. We never do anything super fancy or extravagant, but we always do at least a little something to celebrate and give each other little gifts. I've always given Jeff gifts that go with the traditional anniversary gift list, and Year 4 is "fruit and flowers."

Fruit and flowers was the hardest theme so far for me (1-3 were paper, cotton, and leather... much easier!), but I ended up buying Jeff a few months of Harry & David's "Fruit and Cheese of the Month" deliveries and we've really enjoyed it so far! In the first two deliveries, we've enjoyed delicious peaches, nectarines, goat cheese, and promontory cheese!

Jeff went with the theme this year as well. When I got home from work on our anniversary, there were a BUNCH of vases of flowers all over the house. They were in the living room, the kitchen, our bedroom, and even our bathroom! I was running around the house all excitedly looking at them all. Definitely one of the sweetest things he's ever done. :)

 

 

 

 

 



He also surprised me with an assortment of chocolate-covered fruits from The Chocolate Bar. Delicious!

 



Since I spent the weekend closest to our anniversary out of town at a bachelorette party, we ended up postponing our official anniversary celebration a bit. We eventually celebrating with dinner and a movie at Alamo Drafthouse (our first time to see a movie in a theater since Mother's Day 2012... we weren't intentionally avoiding going to the movies, but life happens!). We saw The Giver (one of my favorite books from grade school!) and enjoyed Alamo Drafthouse's Houston Restaurant Weeks menu (three courses of deliciousness!).

 

 

It was a little weird to celebrate our fourth anniversary knowing that on our next anniversary, we'll have a seven-month-old baby! We have four wonderful years behind us, but our biggest adventure is yet to come!

 

Travel Back in Time: Here's how we celebrating our first, second, and third anniversaries!

Four years ago today...

... in a little chapel, on one of the hottest days of the year, I married my very best friend and I couldn't imagine ever being more happy or more in love.

And then four years went by. We did law school and the Bar exam (I say "we" because you know, team effort). We saw the world. We moved into a new house and we made it our home. And sad things happened, and happy things happened, and eventually we were blessed beyond measure with a lovely little baby who will join our little family this winter, on one of the coldest days of the year.

And after all of that, now I look back on our wedding day and I think of how little I knew about happiness then, how little I understood about love. I loved my sweet husband so much on that day, but oh, how much more I love him now! And yet, part of me still thinks that at this moment, I must be the happiest girl in the world, and I still can't imagine how it could be possible to ever be more in love with him than I am today.

But the beautiful thing about fourth anniversaries is that after four years, you start to kind of sort of figure our how this whole love thing really works. And I know it only gets better from here. And I know that one day he'll love me even more than he does right now, and I'll look back and smile at how I thought I loved him so much today. And that makes me so, so amazingly excited about the next four years. And the four after that. And the forty after that.

I can't wait for years five through forever. :)

It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.
1 Corinthians 13:7-8
Want to travel back in time? Here are my posts from our third anniversary, our second anniversary, and our first anniversary. And here's how we celebrated our first, our second, and our third.

Median Marriage Age

When you fall in love with your future husband at the ripe old age of 17 like I did, chances are you're going to end up getting married pretty young. I mean, who wants to wait years and years to be the wife of the man of your dreams once you've found him? I'm really glad I married Jeff relatively early in life for a million different reasons, but we were definitely on the young side of the curve.   

(Our wedding day - July 31, 2010)

Now that Jeff is 27 and I'm 25, we're officially the average age of couples getting married in Texas. Nationally, the average age at marriage is 28 for men and 26 for women, but here in Texas it's slightly lower at 27 for men and 25 for women. (Here's a fun graph of marriage statistics by state, if you're fascinated by that kind of thing like me!)   When we got married, I didn't think I was really young (although, in hindsight, I guess I was!). Our families and friends were always really supportive of us getting married, and no one ever told us that we were too young to get married or anything like that, so we just didn't really think of ourselves as "young." I knew objectively that I was one of the first of my friends to get married, but I wasn't THE first, and I think we were looking at it more in terms of life goals being met rather than how old we were.    When we got married at just barely 21 (me) and 23 (Jeff), we both had our bachelor's degrees, and we had been together for four years. We had decent-sized bank accounts and even some small investment accounts thanks to working during college, and we were debt-free thanks to some wonderful blessings - sizable scholarships, great college jobs, and some financial support from our parents during college. We just didn't really feel "young," even though we technically were.    But, regardless of all that stuff, marrying young makes our lives different from couples who marry closer to the average time. It's fascinating to me to think about how our first few years of marriage would've been different if we had been getting married now (at the average age of 25 and 27), rather than four years ago.    Because we got married so young, we've had to sacrifice things for each other. There were a lot of great law schools I wanted to go to that weren't in Houston, but I decided to go to UH instead so we could be together. Jeff sacrificed things too. He was married to me throughout those law school years, and he dealt with all the stress and insane amounts of study time. He even missed attending his brother's college graduation because I had final exams at the same time and he wanted to be home to support me. If we were just now getting married, he'd have missed all that unpleasant stuff. I've seen Jeff give things up for the sake of my happiness (and he's seen me do the same for him), and because of that we have the sort of mutual trust in each other that can only be created over time. Marriage involves sacrifice at any age though, so I'm sure this is one of those things that happens regardless of when you get married.   (Law school graduation - 2013)   Because we were relatively young when we got married, our first few years of marriage were also the years when we were getting established on a practical level as adults. We figured out how to file taxes together. When we bought cars for the first time, we did it together. We bought our first house together, we started planning financially for retirement together, we figured out our priorities for budgeting/saving/spending together, and the list goes on and on. If we were just now getting married, those are all things we'd have done on our own already, and we wouldn't have those shared experiences. Once you have a spouse, you have more motivation to save for things like future kids' college educations and house down payments. We started thinking about those things at a really young age, which has been a big blessing to us. When we merged our bank accounts when we got married, our bank accounts were really small. We've come a long way since then, and I love that we built all of that together.   

(Moving into our first house - 2011)   I'm glad I went into law school and my legal career with a husband by my side. It forced me to wrestle with the work/life balance issue from Day 1, and I've learned how to prioritize my life and say "no" sometimes even when it's hard. I think I'd be a total workaholic if I wasn't married. It's something that would be really hard to adjust at this point if I was just now starting to balance family with lawyer-stuff, so I'm glad we were married from the beginning.    There are definite downsides to marrying young though. If we were just now getting married, we'd have plenty of "couple friends." When we got married four years ago, most of our friends were still single. We would get really excited when we met a young married couple we liked, or when one of our single friends was getting married. We felt a bit like an anomaly during those first couple years (me particularly, since I'm a couple years younger than Jeff) because we didn't have many friends who were in the same sort of life situation as us. I do think it would've been nice to have a larger network of married friends during that time. It's something we do have now, and I really like it.    Sometimes people say you shouldn't marry young because you should "see the world!" or "live your life!" before you "settle down." I'm going to go ahead and say that I think that's completely ridiculous. :) We've had so many adventures in the last few years, and I'm so glad we did them all together! Memories of exploring Singapore or seeing gigantic glaciers in Alaska with my husband are way better than memories of doing those things on my own. Getting married doesn't mean you can never get on a plane again. It just means you have a wonderful partner to share your adventures with!   (Alaska - 2013)   People also say that you shouldn't marry young because you're still going to change a lot. Jeff and I have definitely seen each other change since we first started dating, but I love that we've been through those changes with each other. We're not the same Jeff and Katie that we were in high school, or in college, but that's totally okay (actually, I'm really glad Jeff's not still the same person he was in high school or college! haha). I was really comfortable getting married even though we were young because we'd already grown and changed a lot throughout our relationship, and I knew we could do it together. Plus, do people ever really stop growing and changing? My parents and Jeff's parents are still growing and changing and adapting to life together. If we were just now getting married, I think we'd still have to adapt to that. That's the beautiful thing about marriage... you grow with your spouse, and you experience an infinite amount of things together, and you know that you'll always be committed to each other no matter what changes. It's amazing.    Anyway, I don't think there's a right time or wrong time for getting married in general, but it is funny to think about how our life would be different if we were just now getting married. I sure am glad we tied the knot when we were 21 and 23!   If you'd like to read more thoughts and musings on marrying young, here's a wonderful series of blog posts by a lot of different women on the topic!  

Wedding Vows Print

So once upon a time I was wandering around HomeGoods and I saw this frame:

I loved it, so I bought it and brought it home. I ended up putting it on my nightstand, but it sat there for months without anything in it because I hadn't planned out what I was going to put in the pretty frame before I bought it (please tell me I'm not the only one who does that!). 

We're almost done with our master bedroom re-do (I know, I know... we're the slowest re-decorators ever), so I figured it was about time that I actually put something in the frame. The only problem was that by that time, I had become pretty attached to the little paper inside of the frame. The colors just complemented our bedding so nicely!

So I came up with a plan that would allow me to keep the pretty paper, but cover up the part with the brand name and "8 x 10." I printed out our wedding vows in a scripty blue font on some cream cardstock, then I cut out a little design and a little heart and strategically glued them onto the paper to cover up the words.

The whole "wedding vows art" thing is much more sentimental and sappy than I normally am, but I actually really love having our vows printed and displayed in our bedroom. When I was making this, I actually had to look up my blog post about our wedding ceremony because I couldn't remember exactly what our vows were. But now, I see them every day and I have them memorized and I think that's a wonderful thing. Easier to keep them if you remember what exactly you promised, right? :) 

Valentine's Day 2014

I'm only oh... over a month behind on blogging about Valentine's Day. Haha. But I have to document it anyway, right? We were never big Valentine's Day celebraters before we got married (mostly because we were long-distance dating and not ever in the same place, I think), but over the past few years we've really enjoyed doing something special for the 14th of February. We don't do really expensive gifts or meals or anything, but we try to just do something sweet and use it as an excuse to spend some quality time together.

First of all, a few little house decorations:

I ended up stuck at work late on Valentine's Day, but when I finally got home Jeff surprised me with a really sweet card, tulips (my favorite!), and chocolate covered sunflower seeds (another favorite).

The tulips were still attached to the bulbs and in a special vase that keeps the bulbs and roots growing, so they bloomed beautiful red flowers for weeks! Jeff also gave me a little gift - a heated blanket! It sounds like a silly gift, but it was actually really sweet. I had been complaining about how I get so cold at night when he's out of town for work, so he bought me the blanket to solve the problem and make me miss him a little less when he's on business trips. I gave Jeff Little Mermaid on Blu-Ray (he's collecting all the Disney classics as they come out on Blu-Ray).

We went out to dinner a couple days after Valentine's Day (once the deal I'd been working on day-and-night on finally closed) at our favorite little Mexican restaurant. Mmm, enchiladas! :)

I look pretty tired, huh? You can tell I'd been working really long hours for a few days.

So that was Valentine's Day 2014! Nothing spectacular, but lovely nonetheless. :)

Things I Never Blogged About - Part 1

It's no secret that this blog hasn't been updated super-frequently since I started work last September. It turns out that BigLaw lawyering kind of takes over your life. I experienced my first "all nighter" at work last week (and it came after a string of nights including a Saturday and a Sunday and a President's Day that weren't technically all nighters but were well-after-midnight nights, so basically... totally exhausting).

Jeff and I are trying to balance everything and I think we're doing pretty well (Jeff is becoming quite the chef lately!), but the blog seems to have fallen pretty low on our priority list and it just doesn't get updated like it used to.

But there are so many things I do want to document and share, so I'm going to try to do a little series of catch-up posts, starting with three special events from over a month ago!

New Year's Eve
We hosted our third New Year's Eve party! It ended up being a really eclectic group of people (friends from church, neighbors, our siblings, friends of our siblings, my coworkers, Jeff's coworkers, etc.), and it was really fun!

While I was in law school I was accumulating reward points with a legal research website I used a lot (I had a free membership as a student), and right before I graduated I spent all my accumulated points on the best thing I could find in their little point redemption store — a chocolate fountain! We broke it in on New Year's Eve with some dark chocolate - yum!

It was a fun night!

Tim & Emily's Engagement
A few days into 2014, Jeff's little brother Tim proposed to his girlfriend Emily! They've been together since high school, and we are SO excited for them to finally be married!

I'm particularly excited that I'll officially have a sister-in-law soon! Emily and I were friends even before she started dating Tim, and she's just the sweetest, and I am SO excited!

Beautiful, right?!?!

Jeff, Matt (Jeff's other little brother), and I were out celebrating my sister's birthday the night Tim proposed, so we were waiting for the phone to ring all night. When it finally did ring, we could hardly hear them because the bar was so loud, so we sent them this picture to make sure they knew how excited we were:

I wish it wasn't blurry (iPhones don't focus too well in the dark), but I kind of love it anyway.

We can't wait for their wedding next December! 

Julianne & Ben's Wedding
Also in January, my cousin Julianne got married! The wedding was so fun, and it was really great to get to spend some time with my grandparents and extended family. I wish we had a family wedding at least once a year!

All dressed up!

My grandparents, great aunts, sisters, and parents!

Such a pretty dress, right?!

(with my parents and sisters)

(my Gran and Grandpa)

So now I'm only... oh six weeks or so behind on the blog? Slow and steady. :)