Our Story

Once upon a time, in 2004, two college friends went on a trip.

He asked her if she wanted to go for drinks. She said yes.

They sat at an outdoor cafe and drank Coronas and talked for hours.

Those Coronas in 2004 led to an apartment in Indiana in 2005,
a cross country move to Maryland in 2006, and a diamond ring in 2007.

The diamond ring in 2007 led to one of the best nights of their lives in 2008.

In 6 years together, we have shared three apartments in two different states.
We opened a joint bank account, adopted a dog, and jointly purchased a car... all before even being engaged. We planned a wedding, dug ourselves out of credit card debt,
and spent 9 months waiting....

And then late, late, late on October 26, we got to
meet the daughter we'd been dreaming of.

It's been 12 days since this little girl stole our hearts and
I can't imagine a better way to spend
our second anniversary
than holding my husband's hand and staring at this little face.

Anniversary Traditions

Way back in the summer I came across a great idea over at Make Mine a Mojito. Mojito Maven did a photo shoot to commemorate their first anniversary and I obviously got on that bandwagon. I'm actually kind of mad I didn't think of it myself; let's think about it - beautiful photos (engagement-shoot style) to celebrate a full year of wedded bliss? Yes, please. Of course, I'm going to take it one step further and do family photos every year around our anniversary. It's going to be a great way to get nice photos of all of us every year, and just in time for holiday cards, too!

For our anniversary shoot, I looked at a ton of photographers in the area, but everyone's prices were super serious (ie out of our price range) for location shoots. I think that pictures done in a studio are nice, but I really wanted to shoot in downtown Annapolis, where we were married. As a last ditch effort, I posted an ad on CraigsList looking for someone to do our anniversary shoot... and not even 2 hours later I had an email from Gene of Eugene Huskey Photography. We emailed back and forth for a while and ended up booking him that night! My disc just came in and we're thrilled with the results.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Haha, looking through the disc I realized that about half of them are me and him making out. Awesome. I'm excited to continue this tradition - I'm already picturing a thick album of anniversary photos out on the cake table at our 50th anniversary!

For those wondering about the anniversary gift exchange, I have a post coming up for you! And hey, anyone else on the anniversary shoot bandwagon? Or am I the only one?

First Anniversary: Year Old Spice Cake

Our wedding cake was amazing. I bet everyone says that about their wedding cake, and I can appreciate that. But seriously, our wedding cake rocked. It was spice cake with buttercream frosting, done by Enticing Icing by Katie... they have since gone out of business, which is a shame because her cakes are delicious. I can vaguely understand the going out of business though, as we paid for apple filling yet no one could find any apple in their slice. Though even without the apple filling, it was still the best wedding cake of all time.

Now, the cake size we chose for our wedding yeilded enough slices for all guests if we served the top layer. At the time, we figured it wouldn't be that big of a deal to just save one slice of wedding cake, serve the rest, and call it a day. For one, we lacked the freezer space. More importantly, our cake package included a fresh top layer on our first anniversary.

Seeing as our cake lady went out of business, we weren't able to fulfil the free fresh cake. Kill me. Because I was SO looking forward to that. Though how hard is it to have someone else bake a spice cake, right? Right? So I ordered an anniversary spice cake from someone else. But we'll get to that in a minute.

Now, let me set the stage for you. We're in our hotel room. We're freshly back from dinner, just opened gifts, one or both of us may have cried at the thoughtfulness of each other's gifts, and I say "Oh, we still have cake!"

Ryan: Do we have to eat the old cake?
Me: Yes.
Ryan: It's going to all freezer burned and moldy.
Me: I don't care. One bite.
Ryan: Why would we eat old cake when we have fresh cake?
Me: It's tradition. We're doing it.

Here's Ryan opening the wedding cake:

Here is our last glorious slice of wedding spice cake:
And here is Ryan's face as he put a fork full of wedding cake in his mouth:
Directly after making this face, his eyes brightened and in pure shock, he says "It's still awesome!"

And it was. It was still 100% awesome. This is possibly due to my wrapping technique (put cake into zip lock bag, squeeze out all air and ziplock the bag, wrap bag in foil, wrap foiled wrapped bag in foil AGAIN, put entire thing into tupperware container, throw in freezer, enjoy a year later) though I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that the cake was some sort of magical concoction of deliciousness. We each had a forkful, and Ryan said that it would be awesome if we wrapped the rest and at more next year. I'm thinking we could possibly get 5 years out of this, so I readily agreed. Plus, we had the whole fresh cake, right? So I wrapped up the wedding cake and threw it in the room fridge.

Here I am with our anniversary spice cake:

Directly after taking this picture, I got up to get a knife. I cut two slices of cake and turned to Ryan to feed him. The dog took that opportunity to run her tongue up the side of the cake.
The anniversary cake was so pretty - I loved the fondant leaves:

It did not, however, taste like our wedding cake. I didn't expect it to, seeing as it was baked by someone else, but it reeeeeally didn't taste like our delicious wedding cake. Two bites in, Ryan says, "Is it bad that I want the year old cake more than I want the fresh cake?" I couldn't blame him.

Nov. 7, 2010 - I can't wait for another bite of wedding cake.

Up next - Beatles themed anniversary gifts!

First Anniversary: Loews Loves Pets

Yesterday was our first anniversary! We had a fantastic time in Annapolis, and it was so fun to stay in our wedding night suite again. The room (obviosuly) was exactly as we remembered; when we walked in for the first time yesterday I had the weirdest feeling of "Oh where should I hang my wedding gown?".
But before we get into all of the fun things we did on our first anniversary, I want to tell you how fantastic the Loews Annapolis Hotel is. I may be a bit biased - we did have our wedding there after all - but I'm pretty sure it's the best we've ever been to. It's beautiful, the staff is great, and oh, they love dogs.

We wanted Marley to be in our family photos (more on our anniversary shoot later) and Loews is dog friendly, so our pup joined us on our anniversary trip. She loved it:When we checked in, the front desk gave us a "Dog Ammenity" bag full of the cutest stuff! There was a cute blue "thristy mat" to soak up water bowl spills, a map of dog parks and outdoor seating restaurants, a little gold dog bone shaped tag for her collar (it says Loews Hotels on it), a bunch of poop bags, and my favorites.... a little travel size water bowl (&bottle of Poland Spring water) and a hang tag for the door.

Here's a shot of the blue mat with her bowls:

And here's the super cute door hanger:


This was awesome because we left Marley in the room alone while we went out to dinner. We didn't have to worry about housekeeping or anyone else going in the room while we weren't in there.

Here's one of me and Marley at the end of the night:

Loews made it so easy to travel with a dog! They don't have any restrictions on weight or breed, and don't have any policies on leaving the dog alone in the room or crating. She slept up on the big king size bed with us, just like at home. It was great!!

I have a ton of pictures I want to share with you guys, so I'm going to split up the anniversary recap into a few parts. Which part do you want to see next - gifts or cake?