me, rachel
When Dave and I went registering a few weeks ago, I got totally stressed out. We spent way too long in the store, and I way over-thought things, and then changed everything online that night anyway!

And we only got through the kitchen. Correction: mostly through the kitchen. We didn't even register for everything we needed for that one room.

Now, before you go off thinking I'm a crazy lady, let me just say that the store we were in was quite small, and had an extremely limited selection. Which would actually make it easer for most women to decide.

Now you can call me a crazy lady.

Anyway, our excursion of several weeks ago is not my topic today. Today my topic is kitchen towels.

Mom sent me an email yesterday asking where I registered and specifically what color(s) I wanted in my kitchen. We had decided on awesome black and white dishes, but we tend to be pretty colorful people and mom needed a color for something. Unfortunately, the towels that the store we registered in were tan. Actually, they were called latte, which is a fancy word for expensive coffee and tan towels. Here's a picture:
So, this evening, Dave and I got on the internet and browsed the sites of the stores we are registering at, looking for exciting towels (to-be-weds are an odd group...for a month our idea of "quality time" was sitting in his cubicle after dinner and browsing for dishes on his computer).

I found these at Macy's, by Martha Stewart:They also come in a bright red. These I love. They are such a pretty color, and then Martha Stewart has a whole line of kitchen products, so I could accent with a blue spatula or bright mixing bowls, and have it all still match! I like matching. So we added them to our registry.

One big, ugly oozy problem: these towels (and the matching striped ones) are it! In the blue, there is no oven mit and no pot holder, and there are no wash cloths for neither blue nor red.

That's a problem. Then not everything will match!

So we unadded them to our registry, and continued to look elsewhere.

We ended up with the red version of the origional Latte towels. While they're not vibrant, Martha Stewart red, they still work, and have all the necessary pieces.

I just don't love them. Is that weird that I want to love my towels? I guess it's my house, and if I get to pick the way it look I really want to pick the way it looks! I don't want to settle for just OK.

Honestly, what I would love would be some light pink towels, to match my Kitchen Aid Mixer. I don't want a whole pink kitchen, but the stainless steel/chrome appliances we've already registered for as well as the black utensils and the black and white plates would look nice with a small amount of pink!

Two problems: one, I can't find pink anything anywhere. I don't want a pink toaster or refrigerator or anything, I'd settle for a pink towel set! Two, I promised Dave I wouldn't decorate his house in pink. But I think I can justify this one with the mixer color that he chose for me!

Any advice? We're currently registered at Bed Bath & Beyond and Macy's, an we're planning on registering at Target. Our kitchen badly needs color, and I don't know where to look!
me, rachel
I love Valentines day! Really, does it get any better than a day devoted to love, pink, and chocolate?

Didn't think so :-)

This is only our second Valentines Day actually together...even though it's the fourth since we've been dating. For the first two, I was still living at home with my parents and Dave was going to school here. Last year, we went out to dinner and a movie, which was fun, and this year Dave pulled out all the stops!

I had no idea where we were going or what we were doing. He kind of tried to tell me what to wear, but that didn't help me much...I dress up so rarely that I wanted it to be perfect!

Here's what I ended up wearing:




Don't worry...I didn't wear the slippers on our date :-)

We went out on Saturday, even though V-Day was actually Sunday. Dave had to work until 4, which gave me time to sleep in AND primp! Win-win!

I grabbed his gift, which I had wrapped in newspaper and written "I love you" all over in multiple different languages (corny, I know. But I had no wrapping paper! And I had plenty of newspaper...) and headed for his car.

When I got in the car, he explained how our plans had changed (which meant nothing to me, because I knew nothing of the plans in the first place!). He said we'd run up to his house, pick up my present and a chocolate pie (yum!), and head over to Michele's apartment (she is Dave's brother Wes' fiance (Dave lives with Wes for 2 more weeks until Wes gets married)) because his house was in the process of being torn apart and repainted. There we would exchange presents, watch a movie, and eat dessert. Then our dinner reservation was later so we'd do dessert first, then dinner!

When we got to his house, I saw my roses! Yay! I love having flowers!! We picked up the chocolate pie (yum!) and he grabbed my present and off we went! At the apartment, we exchanged gifts. I gave him this photo, blown up to a poster and framed:


It's one of our engagement pictures that I had photoshopped, and I knew that he really liked it.

Then he gave me my present.

A photobook of our engagement! He borrowed some of what I wrote on it originally, and added his own comments and perspectives.


Then after he told the story, he put in some of our favorite engagement pictures! But the back is my favorite:

"And so it begins..." I don't believe there is a more appropriate caption for that picture. Ever.

But wait. It gets cuter! On the spine, he put simply "2009." He said this is so we can make a new one every year with the highlights of that year! Ahh!!! I am simply melting from the cuteness! Isn't my Mister awesome?

He also told me that he had signed us up for ballroom dancing lessons! I've been wanting to take these with him since...forever. I've always wanted to take a class before I got married so that I'd know what to do on that dance floor! We had our first lesson tonight, we're taking it with Wes and Michele, as well as Dave's soon-to-be-roommate, Jim and his girlfriend Emily (Jim and Wes work together at the YMCA, where the class is held).

Then he told me to keep opening my present. It was a gift bag with lots of tissue paper, and right at the bottom was the movie "The Time Traveler's Wife." I've been wanting to see it ever since it came out, and this was our Valentine's movie! So much better than going to an uncomfortable theater, in my opinion!

We then cut our pie, made some tea, and watched our movie. It was incredible. I would recommend it. There are some butts though...watch out for that. But otherwise a very good romantic chick-flick.

When our movie was done, we dashed off to the Seasons Bistro and Grille. Amazing. This was a cute/fancy/hole-in-the-wall place with amazing food. Delicious. Delectable. Mouth watering. I had the Poultry Pot Pie, and it was with out a doubt the best pot pie I've ever had.

After our romantic, candle-lit dinner, we wen't back to Dave and Wes' house (soon to be Wes and Shele's...hence the reason it was a construction zone) and played with their puppy and Will and Anna's dog (Will is Wes' twin...Anna is Will's wife. I should do a post about the fantastic, alibet confusing, families we come from. That may be helpful!). We were playing with the dogs because the other four were in the kitchen painting and cleaning and sorting and sweating, and none of that sounded fun for me in my pretty dress.

We had an amazing Valentine's date, and I look forward to many more in the future!
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me, rachel
So, one of my profs hung a bunch of these up on the bulletin board in our news room today...sooo funny! They're from a blog called 10,000 Words, and I thought I'd share my favorites with you :-)


Those are cute, but this is my absolute favorite!


Aww...sap :-)

Share these with a writer close to your heart...it'll make them smile!
me, rachel
About the time I decided to design my own invitations, the creative bug bit me. This is weird because I've never been a very creative person. I love to make things, but mostly I like to follow patterns (this is why I'm still scratching my head over my decision to get a graphic design minor. It just doesn't fit).

Anyway, when I realized that I could have complete control over my invitations if I designed them myself, I got pretty excited. I'm a little bit of a type-A personality, and having control over something like my invitations makes me feel more secure. And, designing my own invitations made me want to use this new-found talent and design everything. And I mean everything. At some point through this whole wedding planning process I have considered how I can personalize or unify almost every part of the wedding. Thankfully, besides the stationary, the only one I've stuck with personally designing is our website.

Every wedding web site worth its salt offers brides a free personalized wedding web site. This is a place for the bride and groom to post information and directions for the guests, as well as provide an alternate way to RSVP, and acts as a socially acceptable way to get registry information out there. I've signed up for multiple wedding sites, and looked into every personal web site availiable, always looking for one that would let me put my own design or template into it. None of them let me.

Normal girls would take this as a sign, pick a pretty pink-flowered pre-made template, and get on with her life.

Normal girls would do that. I have never been a normal girl. So I didn't do this. Want to know what I did instead?

Yeah, I know you do. You can't resist my strangeness.

I talked to my loving fiance about this dilemma. I told him how I wanted a site that was just so "us," and one didn't exist out there. About how everyone had a web site, and we weren't going to be any different, but how I wanted our web site to be a first glimpse for our guests into our wedding day, and some pre-made pink-flowered template with someone else's loving phrase scrawled across the top wouldn't cut it.

Yeah, I know. That's low.

Anyway, the past two weeks we've been designing and building our very own personalized wedding web site. A wed site, if you will (hehe...sometimes I make myself laugh. I understand if I didn't make you laugh. It really wasn't that funny). Now, it's almost done, and we're almost ready to put it on the web!

I'll give you a sneak peek:


This is just the designing part...my part. Dave is using his mad skills to turn it into a web site instead of a static image. But it was super fun do design! I did the whole thing in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

So now it's almost done, and we'll put it up as soon as we can decide on a domain name! Dave basically gave me the job of picking one, and I don't know what to use! So, I'd love your help. We've thought about using stephenswedding.com, which would work. Or we could do something like daveandrachel.com. Or even wearesomuchinloveitspilledoverandmadeawebsite.com. Perhaps picnicwithteawhodoesthat.com.

See why I need your help? It's pretty bad. So give me your ideas, if they're better than mine (is it possible to be worse than mine?) maybe we'll use them!

Then I'll definently give you all a link here when it goes up! There's some super cool content on there! I'm just so excited to show it off!
me, rachel
I got one of these yesterday!! Well, kind of. Dave and I started our registry last night, and this is on it!

After talking about it for a long time, and looking at (at least) five different stores for dishes we liked, we finally picked up the gun and started registering!

Today we went to Bed, Bath &Beyond because we figured it would be a good place to start. The lady we talked to was very helpful in signing us up, then she took us around the store.

Oh. My. Goodness. It was overwhelming! All the pots and pans and dishcloths and measuring spoons and irons! Unfortunately, the way she started us out was not my style. She would walk up to a display and hand me two pans from two different collections and say, "Okay, which one feels better?" I would pick one and she'd write something down and then speed walk over to the next display, where she'd hand me two spoons and do the same drill. After we had circled the entire store, she handed us the registry gun and told us that what we had looked at was already on our registry, and to find whatever else we needed.

Now, I am the sort of person who likes to look at all the options and choose for myself, the long hard way. This is proven by the fact that Dave and I then spent two and a half hours in that store going over the rest of our registry, and didn't even get halfway done! We finished all the main kitchen things (we haven't yet registered for our dishes, the ones we like best are at Macy's), but didn't register for anything else really. We looked at bedding and such, but spent forever looking and didn't decide on what we liked best!

My mom is making us a beautiful quilt for our bed, so maybe next time we go home we can pick up a swatch of the colors so we have something to base our sheet color choices on. One thing we did notice at this particular store was that the selection was slim. This was a very small branch of BB&B, and as such there were very few styles and colors to choose from in any area. We will probably go to a bigger store in the future to finalize a few more things.

I was exhausted by the time we got done, and so ready to sit down! So we got Panera for dinner and came back to his house to go over everything. We went through and deleted duplicates and edited things that we had thought were different (for example, I thought we registered for stacking cookie racks, but we had accidentally gotten a regular one).

Today, looking back, I'd say we had a good time, got some good stuff done, and learned our registry style, which will be very helpful when we register again in the future!