Livin' the married life

Here I am!! Phew, I know it's been a looooong time, and I'm sure some of my faithful followers have been anxiously awaiting the first married post! Sorry it's taken soooo long to get around to it. If it helps, I have thought of you often.

SO we've been keeping busy since the wedding... man oh man. We spent some awesome time up in Aplington with family for the first few days after the wedding. Boy was it hot! But we still had a good time! I don't have any photos to show for it though... I clearly was still mentally recovering from the wedding!

Once we got home we still had gobs of unpacking to do from the move, then we had some gifts to open...

and find a home for. Boy people were WAY too generous. It was kind of stressful (in a good way!) but stressful nonetheless. Just didn't feel right to get so many things just for getting married! But we had a great time opening gifts and cards, and it has been SO AWESOME having everything we need! I feel like I was living like a barbarian before!

For the first week we continued to live off of fast food and restaurant meals because we didn't have so much as a grain of salt in our house (well until we opened our salt & pepper mills that is! haha!). Seriously. We hadn't gotten groceries in weeks. So when I finally went, this is what the cart looked like. Yeah, that's just for 2 people...

Of course, I could have saved a few dollars if I had known Brendan had been preparing for the apocalypse. Seriously, this is the amount of canned goods he brought into this house from his apartment (less the expired cans I threw away). It looks like he robbed a food pantry. We actually had to put up that shelving unit we found in the basement just to house it all!

Once we had a stocked cupboard and had all our new kitchen things put away, I decided to play housewife and make my new husband a delicious meal from scratch...

It's meatballs with pineapple and peppers (click for the link to the recipe), which Ashley introduced me to when I stayed with them this spring. It's unbelievable. Basically like sweet and sour meatballs. Except that the meatballs are like little balls of meat heaven. Seriously. I don't even like meatballs, and I could eat them all.

Since then we've been spending a lot of time putting things away and organizing the house. Admittedly Brendan has done more than I have. We did survive our first big project together and husband and wife... laying carpet in the basement. I have a bit of a short fuse, especially in frustrating tasks, so I was alittle concerned about our marriage surviving the task. But shockingly it went very well! I didn't even raise my voice! We laid down a carpet pad and then 2 carpet remnants (replacing the disgusting moldy/mildew-y carpet that was there). I also used an entire bottle of Tilex Mold & Mildew remover on the walls and floors (that stuff is unbelievable. Literally melts away mold without any scrubbing). We also dusted (and vacuumed) cobwebs out of every crevice for hours. Anyway, here's the finished carpet project...

It does have a couch and TV and coffee table and such now, but photos of the house are another post :)

Other than all of that we've just been hanging out. We did finally rent and watch The King's Speech a week or so ago. It was really good, and I am pretty picky about movies. It was fun to just hang out. During the movie I had a craving for some champagne (bc they were drinking it in the movie). Well luckily when you've just gotten married you have things like a spare bottle of champagne in your fridge :) So i busted that out fully intending to just put it in wine glasses. Well, I turned around and Brendan had unpacked our Waterford crystal champagne flutes from the wedding. So we drank champagne out of crystal in our sweats, on the couch, on some random evening. Slainte! (Irish cheers-because I'm Irish now :)

I'm actually a big fan of using nice things (rather than saving them for special occasions). I held a similar belief about my engagement ring. Apparently a lot of people don't wear theirs all the time (like to sleep in and such). It actually never occurred to me to remove mine. For one, I'm just terrible at keeping track of things, and I was pretty sure I wasn't gonna lose my finger, so it seemed safest there. But also, I guess I just like enjoying the nice thing we have. If they get lost or broken - well they're just things. They're replaceable. It's fun to get to enjoy having them.

Ok, back from my tangent. We've gone for ice cream a few times... went with our friends (and now neighbors) for some the other night. Brendan got something that looks like it should have been a child's cone...

He ordered 'purple cow' (grape), but they ran out, so they gave him some other fruit flavor, then he also took some of Kate's vanilla because...

She had 2 cones. That's bc her husband actually did take a child's cone. Yeah. He stole a kiddie cone that he thought was hers (even tho she ordered vanilla and this was root beer striped and a teeny tiny size!). So then when they started yelling for the vanilla cone we had to take that, too, because people were looking around like who's cone is this?! (we clearly didn't alert them to the fact that we had stolen the kiddie cone!).

Ok, well, it's getting to be past my bedtime, and I have a lot of school stuff to get caught up on this week. So, I'd better get some shut eye. Hope everyone is enjoying the end of summer! Sorry for the long delay, but you should be able to tell from the pictures that I really was thinking of you!

OH! One more thing! If you wanna see wedding photos, they should be up for another week or so. Just go here
Choose 'Flash Site'
Choose 'Client Galleries' from the bottom
Click on our names
Enter password: 4215
Enjoy!!

Love to everyone!