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  1. Camping with the Family

    Tuesday, July 30, 2013

    I know, I know... Another long gap in blog posts. 
    This month has just felt rather hectic. Next month will be too.
    My family is here this summer for their furlough from Cambodia. They only get to come every other summer, so everyone's trying to cram in as much time as possible with each other. However, my sister is now going to be going to school about an hour out of Chicago! Super exciting. So I'll be able to see her much more often now. 

    Before my family moved to Cambodia, we would go camping every summer to Peninsula State Park in Door County, WI. Now my family goes for 2 weeks every other summer when they are back in the States. This year I got to join them for one week! It was just me and Aria this time because my husband had to work. We had a great time! I hadn't gone for 4 years, so I was really excited. It turned out to be a super muggy and hot week, but we still had fun. And Aria and I came back a couple shades darker (yay).

    Fair warning, there are A LOT of photos.


    ^^Above is a hammock that my family takes with every time they go camping, and I learned something new about it this year. It is 37 years old! My mom bought it on a trip to Venezuela when she was younger. As my dad puts it, "Mom has known this hammock longer than she's known me!" Wow.







     

    ^^ Every 3-4 years these fish come close to the shores around the peninsula to breed, but due to the heat of the shallow water, many of them die. So all the beaches we visited had a lot of these little dead fish everywhere. Not too bad, but kind of smelly.





     



    ^^ We rented a bike cart to take Aria on a bike ride with us. She was so excited to wear her "hat". She only slept for about half an hour, but of course that was when we stopped to take a photo, courtesy of my sister who happened to be jogging past.






    ^^We stopped at a Farmers Market in Jacksonport on our way to The Farm. We bought some homemade strawberry fruit roll-ups, which were delicious. Unfortunately when we got back to the campsite later that day we forgot to take them out of the ice chest at night and a raccoon family ate them all. :(





    ^^Aria loved the goats. I thought she was going to love the kittens best, we always did when we were younger, but she loved following the goats around more. Probably because they were an animal she had never seen before and she could feed them out of her hand. Much more exciting than sleepy kittens.



     

     





    ^^Climbing up Eagle tower. We attempted to fly my dad's kite like we usually do, but there really wasn't enough wind.






    ^^Aria woke up at about 6am every morning we were gone camping, so I had to find something to occupy her until everyone else got up... So here we are at about 7am, beach to ourselves.



    We had a great time at Peninsula State Park, and I highly recommend it. I may put up more photos later after I get the ones off my mom's camera. :)




  2. I know it's been FOREVER since I posted something. I just got married on June 29th, and to save money I did almost all DIY. So I was extremely busy in the weeks leading up to the wedding. 

    We did our own flowers for the wedding. It was a mix (half and half) of real flowers and fake. I ordered wholesale roses, carnations and dusty miller leaves online and the rest were fake. I got all my floral inspiration off of Pinterest and it turned out exactly the way I wanted. 

    Of course my family was a GIANT help. Everyone pitched in. I made the bridal/bridesmaid bouquets and large vases, my grandma made all the boutonnieres and corsages, and my mom and sister arranged all the bud vases. My family also helped to keep the flowers alive until the wedding day by trimming the stems and changing the water everyday. :)



    I took these photos at the wedding rehearsal while we were setting up the decorations. I didn't take a finished photo, you'll have to wait until I get photos back from my family and the photographer. I came up with the idea to make lace "ribbons" as a backdrop for the wedding. 

    My church has a long metal pipe set up to hang banners from so it was perfect! My grandma and I bought lace fabric and curtains from the thrift store and cut them into 2-inch wide strips and then sewed them together to make long enough ribbons to hang. I cut the strips at slightly varying lengths after it was all hung up and my brother and cousin helped to hang white Christmas lights behind which gave some sparkle.



    One of my bridesmaids and myself off to take portraits before the wedding!


    New teapot wedding gifts!


    Grilled Kale and Bread salad using wedding gift grill pan.


    Lemon-poppyseed waffles with blueberry sauce using wedding gift waffle-maker.


    Homemade frozen vanilla bean custard with wedding gift ice cream machine. The texture wasn't quite right because when I chilled the custard (before putting it in the machine) it developed small lumps which I didn't bother straining out. Oops. Now I know for next time. Tastes great though.

  3. Bloglovin'

    Monday, July 1, 2013

    Don't forget to follow me on Bloglovin' since Google Reader is closing down today!

    I know I haven't posted in a long while but this past Saturday was my wedding day! It was pretty much all DIY so we were all incredibly busy up until the wedding and completely exhausted afterwards. :) This week I'll be doing thank you cards and trying to find homes for all our new wedding gifts, including an ice cream maker - which I'm super excited about. :D

    Below is one of our wedding invitations, I made them myself.