Weekend Re-cap

You know those lazy weekend days where you just lay around the house on the couch watching movies and sleeping late?? Well we never have those weekends!! I think sunday we decided we wanted to sleep in and woke up at 8am!!

Friday night we had a fun night out with our friends the Colemans. We went to dinner and bowling. Of course we had to bet on the game, girls against boys. Apparently Mrs. C and I are cooking breakfast for the boys on opening day of duck season, before they leave at 3am!! Obviously we lost =(

Saturday we got up early and got some things done around the house before we traveled out to Andy's parents house for lunch with the Alford Clan. After lunch I dragged the hubby around for some shopping. I wanted to find some a new coffee table and end tables set. After hitting about 3 different places with no luck he finally talked me into going home. He bribed me by offering to take care of some things on the honey-do list if we could just get home! haha Isn't he sneaky! Then we got home and did get some the rest of the trim put up which I was most excited about!! Now all we have left is putting something above our kitchen cabinets and our remodel will finally be complete (for now). My dad is coming out tuesday to help my hubby finish up the job. Then we were invited by the Colemans again to join our friends out for a night on the town. After some convincing, we finally agreed we were still young and could drag our exhausted butts out of the house (although our plan was to just stay home and watch a movie). We had a blast though so it was a good decision.

Sunday we attempted to sleep in. Woke up at 8am, of course. I cooked breakfast while the hubby did some things outside. We worked more around the house until the Jones clan, (my family) came out for dinner last night for our first big party at the new house. After everyone left we crashed on the couch and FINALLY watched our movie.

How sad is it when you have to schedule in time just to snuggle on the couch with your hubby and watch a movie!!

Show Us Your Life

Kelley's Corner is hosting Show us Your Life-Wedding Reception and Honeymoon so I thought I would participate although I am still new at the blogging world and have never done this before. Of course I just posted a few weeks ago about our whole honeymoon but I have never really posted much about our wedding other than a few photos.

As far as our reception goes, I really wanted to have a fun reception so during the planning process we really put an effort into the reception being fun. I wish I had better photos of the reception but I think our efforts paid off because everyone still talks about how much fun they had at the wedding, GOAL ACCOMPLISHED!!

Above is one of my favorite pictures of us from our reception only because it is just so typical of us! I am the one posing and smiling for the picture and Mr. A is eating and making a crazy face, as usual! Not to mention the fact that we both were starving at the reception but when the time came to actually eat we were so overwhelmed that we hardly ate a bite! We stopped at McDonald's on our way to our hotel later that night!

Here we are being introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Alford. You can't tell from this picture but everyone there was laughing because me being the sneaky bride I was, I wanted to add a little suprise in the mix for my husband for putting up with my OCD for the last months of the planning. See he is a farmer and works for a farm equipment company in sales. So for the introduction of our bridal party we played I'm Your's by Jason Mraz. When it came time to introduce us, I slipped in something. If any of are country music fans you would appreciate this. I changed us to be introduced to the song "International Harvester" so as the DJ starting saying our names a revved up tractor was playing in the background. Mr. A couldn't believe I had done this and you can see in the picture his suprise! I had some doubt if this would be too "redneck" for some but everyone seemed to get a big kick out of it!

This pictures is only about half of our wedding party lined up, we had 14 attendants, 4 ushers, 2 ring bearers, 1 junior groomsman, and 1 flower girl for a grand total of 22 people plus the bride and groom!!

You can somewhat see in the top of this picture the lights that we had draped from the ceiling. The pictures turned out really dark but I was really happy with the lighting effect we had. I really like candles and lights, I think it puts off a really romantic atmosphere. You can't tell very well in the photos but we had a black and white theme with red accentend throughout. The chairs were black and we tied white satin bows on all of them. The tablecloths were black and we had mirrors on all of the tables with a mixture of glass bowls with floating candles or glass hurricanes with tall candles and all tables had many small votive candles all over them. Luckily we had no fires! I was really disappointed with our photographer that he didn't get any photos of the centerpieces especially considering the long list of DEFNITE photos I wanted to get. So needless to say I dont have a single photo of a centerpiece! Oh well, it's over now though right!

Here are some more random photos from the rest of the reception:

For those of you who havn't seen it before, here is the link for a sneak peak at our wedding video:

http://www.dailymotion.com/user/digitalcraftpro/video/x8x623_alford-highlight-movie_people

I will leave you with my favorite picture from our wedding (although it is not from the reception) and then a few from our honeymoon:

I loved this picture just because I thought it was so cute! My little cousin in the front covering his eyes cracks me up everytime I see it!

We went on a wonderful cruise to the Carribbean for our honeymoon:

So there you have it, our reception, in a nutshell! We had a blast at our reception, especially since the stress of the day and everything was behind us! We hope that everyone that attended did as well!

Roxy Alford

Here are some more recent pictures of our "child". Who can say no to that sweet face?!!

"Rub my belly Mommy!!"

She is not spoiled at all!

On another note, a drunk driver wrecked right in front of our house last night. Its a miracle he is alive because his car flipped and landed in a ditch but he walked right out of it. Luckily no one else was on the road at the time! Drive carefully!!

Guard Dog's and Rodents

So I havn't talked much about our baby (and by baby I mean our dog) Roxy. I have talked a lot about our wedding and our home remodel but have never brought up our pride and joy, Roxy, and considering the night we had last night, I figured this was just as good of a time as any to talk about our favorite little fur ball.

Andy bought Roxy for me about a year after we started dating. I was living by myself and really wanted a puppy. I had researched and knew exactly what I wanted and even had her named Roxy before she even existed! Well Andy found her for me (what a good hubby!)! She is a yorkshire terrior who came from Missouri. We drove four hours there and back in one day to get her and at the time, she could fit into the palm of our hands. She weighed a whopping 1.5 lbs when we first took her to the vet. When I get some more time I will have to scan some older pictures of her when she was so tiny but for now, the picture below is one of her and my hubby (boyfriend of one year at the time) snuggling:

Roxy is the sweetest little thing. She loves to snuggle, be rubbed, and play with her mommy and daddy. She is great with kids and my niece Kendle loves her more than me I think! She is now four years old and weighs 5.5 lbs! What a fatty huh? I don't know what our life would be like without her!

Well back to the reason for this post, Last night. Roxy has always been the root of many jokes within our friends and family because she is so small and cute! And Mr. A and I always laugh back and say she is our gaurd dog. Since I did live alone for a while, I loved having her with me because although she is small, I always felt safer having her with me because she would always let me know if something was coming or around. She always barks when someone comes to the door or growls during the night if she hears something spooky. Well last night was no different.

The time was 3:30AM when Mr. A and I were woken up by Roxy barking like crazy. She had been out in the house for some reason and was barking and had come back into our bedroom which is really unlike her. Since she is of course spoiled rotten, she has always slept in the bed with us (usually her head on my pillow and my head pushed off onto the mattress although her favorite spot is between Andy and me). For her to be going through the house in the middle of the night was really strange.

Of course Mr. A and I were really freaking out thinking someone was in the house or who knows what. Well I grabbed Roxy and Andy, well he grabbed his gun. (Of course!) He walked out of our bedroom behind the door very slowly with gun in tow sneaking around to see what was causing Roxy so much trouble. Then he saw it. He snickered a little bit and said "Oh your going to be mad". (Knowing my OCD I have had lately regarding bugs and rodents since we have moved to the country). So you know what it was.....Drumroll please....A MOUSE! YUCK! Well I don't know if Roxy had scared it to death or what had happened while we were still asleep before she went crazy but Mr. A said it was still alive but it wasn't moving much. I of course was freaking out that it was playing dead and as soon as he tried to get it the stupid thing was going to run who knows where throughout the house. So without him walking towards it anymore he needed a box to try to catch it in. (Can't you just see us now, Mr. A chasing a mouse through our house at 3AM???)

So he slowly walks back into our bedroom looking for a shoe box and the first thing he grabs is this off of our nightstand:

This box was something my sister had used as a gift box for one of our wedding gifts and it matches our comforter. So he grabbed this decorative box we have on our night stand to catch a nasty rodent! Typical Man!! He slammed the box on top of the mouse quickly, which if the mouse hadn't already had a heart attack due to Roxy chasing it or who knows what I'm sure he did then. Now A is wondering how he is going to get the lid on. He slides it underneath and there you have it, mouse in a box. Probably the nicest and cutest place that mouse had ever lived!!

So see, Roxy really is our guard dog!! We really praised her after that for finding that critter in our house and hopefully she will continue this pattern and scare to death any unwanted guests we might have in the future!

Good job Roxy!!

I will leave you all with our Christmas Card photo from a couple years ago with our little furbaby we love so dear:

Honey-Do's

So this weekend we have decided to be brave. We are hosting a cook out at our new to us project of a house that is still unfinished. There are just a few things left to do but this is a big deal for me as I want everything to be finished and look perfect when people come to our house, especially if we are hosting something! I am very anal about that kind of thing so my poor hubby has had a long honey-do list this week as we are having everyone over on friday night (which is tomorrow)!! The house is ok on the inside, we have just hung some curtains, straightened up his "man-cave" and tonight we need to finish the finishing touches up on the outside...(move some pots around, pull out some things, and cut down some trees) you know -just some minor landscaping. =) Did I mention I have the best husband ever that puts up with my craziness???!!

Here is a photo of my and my honey doing one of his favorite things:

(ignore the camo-I promise we are not redneck, my husband is just an obsessed outdoorman who loves to kill innocent animals and finds it funny to dress me up sometimes but thats another post )

The Honeymoon is Over

So today I have been dreaming of vacation in October since I have been talking about it everyday with our traveling couple Jessica and Erik(I know I know, I just got back from the beach-what a rough life you say). I thought I would post some details and pictures from our wonderful honeymoon since that is the last BIG trip we have been on and of course we had so much fun!

So if any of you know my husband, you would know that deciding on a vacation spot for our honeymoon was not an easy task. He is a cold weather person and I am a warm weather person. Not to mention he is a huge history buff and loves to go to different museums and learn about the history of our country, whereas I am ashamed to say I would be bored to death and prefer sitting by the pool somewhere. Since he is such a great hubby, he decided it was best to make me happy on the first week of our marriage to start out on the right foot so we picked a warm destination for our honeymoon. My husband is also an adventurist and not someone who can just sit at the beach sipping on a fruity drink all day so we had to pick somewhere where we would have a lot of entertainment and things to do other than go to the beach or pool so I of course had to compromise as well (we got the hang of this marriage thing early on!!) . So where did we decide on....??? We decided to go on a 7 day Royal Caribbean Cruise that took us to Cozumel, MX, Cayman Islands, and Montego Bay, Jamaica. To compromise with the hubby, our cruise left from the port in Galveston, TX so he did get a little history in and was able to see some very cool ships. Speaking of Galveston, TX, everyone remembers that little hurricane that went through there a few months ago, yep we were really thrilled about that at the time! Needless to say it did not mess up our plans at all and we were able to see up close and personal all of the tragedy and turmoil that that storm actually did cause in Galveston. It was a sad way to start out the trip but they are definitely putting things back together and will be better than ever!

Back to the honeymoon, below you can see a picture of our cruise ship, The Voyager of the Seas (which I would HIGHLY recommend). We took this picture as we arrived at the port out the car window so it definitely does not do this boat justice as to how HUGE it really was! It took us 2 days to just find our way around the place!

For any of you who have been on a cruise before, you all remember doing the most exciting emergency evacuation drill. Just what you want to think about before you leave port to go through the middle of the ocean with no where to go but down to the bottom!! What a way to start your vacation! See the picture below of my thrilled hubby (this was his 1st cruise, my second) as we go through the drill, lifejackets and all!!

So after we found our way around the boat for a while, we went for our first formal dinner. Of course one of the best things about going on a cruise is definitely the FOOD!! On a cruise you can order everything off of the menu if you want, all included in the price of your food. These are things you might never try again. We tried things like escargo (I had already had but the hubby had not) This is snail for those of you wondering and you should definitely try it, it tastes just like a mushroom. We had wonderful desserts, steaks, and our favorite was the LOBSTER. I had never had lobster before and usually my seafood tastebuds stick to shrimp and crab legs but I loved it! Andy of course loves all kinds of different fish so he tried all the fresh fish on the menu. It was definitely something you never forget because everything is so formal and nice, it's not something you do everyday. Here a picture of us at dinner on our first formal night:

Here is a shot of everyone at our table which was neat to meet people from different places with different jobs. One guy was a pilot for Delta Airlines and another worked in a state penetentiary (wouldn't want his job but he did have some crazy stories!!)


For our first day off of the boat we were in Cozumel, MX which was by far the best excursion of our trip (considering all of the other ones we booked were cancelled but I will get to that later). In Cozumel, we chose to go on a catameran boat, go snorkeling, and we were taken to a private beach island which was great. Well as you remember I said my husband is into adventure and I am not. Well I had been snorkeling before and it did not go so well. I can never figure out how to breathe out of those masks and operate the flippers at the same time so I was not super excited but going to brave the sea's anyways for my new husband and be a good sport. Well to say the least, snorkeling was my favorite part of the whole trip! I LOVED IT!! It was such a better experience than the one I had before. My goggles worked and so did my flippers! It was so neat to see everything under the water, it is just a different world under there. All of the fish and the coral were so beautiful, I could have stayed out there all day and it was such a great experience to share with Andy. He of course was like a kid in a candy store, diving under water and touching the bottom of the coral, I was not quite that adventurous but I loved it none the less! We had some really cute underwater pictures that we bought from the trip (of course they make money off of the honeymooners) but they are not with me now. I will have to post them later but I do have some that we took on our own on the boat and the private island. Another perk of the catameran was they offered free margaritas and beer. If anyone has had a margarita in mexico, they are just not the same as the ones here, they are soo good! So of course we enjoyed a few, AFTER the snorkeling of course!! When we got to the private island, they had all of these water toys you could play on which of course we took advantage of. See the photos below:

What a cutie!!
Our next port of call was the Cayman Islands. Once we left Mexico, our boat was really rocking. The wind was terrible and there were 13-20 foot waves. Luckily we never got sick but a lot of people on the boat did. When we got to the Cayman Islands, we had like snorkeling soo much that we chose a similar excursion, snorkeling with Sting Ray's among other things. Well the wind was so bad that they cancelled our excursion and many others. It was so bad we had to port on the back side of the island and take a taxi to the tourist part of the island. We were fine when we got there, we walked through many of the shops and got some neat stuff. Andy was impressed with Grand Cayman a lot more than Mexico, of course the town you can tell is cleaner and has a lot more money. The shops are higher end. We were able to buy a few bottles of authentic liquor as well as Grand Cayman's signature island, Rum Cake.

Here are a few photos of Grand Cayman (the water is so blue in the carribbean, it's sickening!):

Our last stop was supposed to be Jaimaica. Well as I said before, the wind was insane and the waves were 20 feet tall. Apparently at the port in Jamaica, there is only 25 feet from the bottom of the boat to the bottom of the ocean so they were afraid with the waves being so tall that they would take our boat up and down and we would hit the bottom of the ocean floor, so we didnt get to go to Jamaica!! We were totally bummed but we entertained ourselves anyways. Here are some random photos from the rest of our trip:

My hubby the adventurist climbed the rock wall on top of the ship, with crazy wind and everything! I was a nervous wreck but he made it out ok of course!

Our second formal night

The view of our dining room from the top down, there were 3 levels!

A picture from our last day hanging out at the pool on the ship

So there you have it, a little sneak peak into our honeymoon and a few of the many pictures we took along the way!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KENDLE!

Well I know that I am not a mom yet, just merely the proud aunt of two little girls, the first: Kendle and then the newest addition: Katie-Blair. These girls are not your average kids to say the least. Kendle is the american idle lover, never shy singer and dancer of the family. Ever since she was born our whole family has not been the same. She is always the center of everything we do and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Now Kendle is a big sister, Katie-Blair was born the day after Thanksgiving this past year. She is full of life, always moving, splitting image of my sister. It's amazing how much they look alike.

Well as you can tell by the title of this post, today is Kendle's FOURTH birthday!! I remember the day she was born as we waited anxiously for the first baby of our immediate family. She was a week late, of course! Knowing how much patience the Jones family has (which is in negative numbers) she of course wanted to make us wait! As soon as she finally arrived we were all in love. I can not believe it has been 4 years ago and she is turning into such a big girl! I am not even her mom but I just can not believe my little Kendle is growing up so fast!!

So in honor of Kendle's birthday, I wanted to share with you all a few photo's of my adorable little niece and wish her a very happy 4th birthday!!

Kendle smiling as a baby

Kendle and JUJU (thats me) at the pool in florida

Kendle relaxing at the pool

Kendle dressed up as a princess (as usual!)

Kendle and JuJu at her dance recital, isnt she the cutest little bunny!!

Kendle and Uncle A.Kendle as our flower girl at our wedding-she did such a good job!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY KENDLE-LU!