Our First Christmas Tradition

So one day Superman and I were talking about our first Christmas together on our way home from work. We were both pretty excited about it as Christmas is our favorite holiday and we both get really into it. During the conversation the topic of family traditions came up and we were trying to figure out what our family traditions would be now that we’re married. We bounced some ideas off of each other but we realized that we actually already had a very special one…


~The Christmas Date~


Every year since we’ve been together we go on a Christmas date. It is always very highly anticipated and we take turns planning it. Whoever’s turn it is to plan the date keeps the details very hush hush. It’s highly confidential because it’s supposed to be a complete surprise to the other person, plus an unspoken goal is to try to top the previous planner's Christmas date.

Well it’s my turn to plan this year's rendezvous. I’ve decided that since we’re in a brand new home we’ll have it here.

The ambience will be perfect, what with all the Christmas décor, Christmas jazz music and the candles that are sure to fill the room.

“Home dates” are very popular with us. Usually we have them when we’re short on money or we just don’t feel like going out. We always make it special by having it somewhere different, we even dress up sometimes. Hot locations we’ve been to in the past have been the couch, the basement, the dining room or even in our bedroom…bed picnic anyone? It’s exactly how it sounds, it’s a picnic but on the bed. This usually consists of getting takeout, spreading a blanket on the bed and watching a movie. Its great fun, you should try it. Anyway, this year’s home date locale will be the dining room. As I mentioned before I’ll do it up real nice and romantic.

I’ve been pondering on the menu for a little while and I’ve finally decided on what will grace our palettes this year. We’ll be having: a wedge salad, NY strip steaks with shrimp skewers, roasted asparagus and twice baked potatoes. For dessert I think I’ll bake some red velvet cupcakes.

Now, what will I wear…hmmm…

To be continued...

XOXO,


TNB

Playing Host to a Host, My First Thanksgiving

Before I give you the rundown of hosting thanksgiving at my house for the first time, I’ll give you a little background about me. I LOVE planning parties and such. I’ll turn the simplest thing into a production. For example, back when Superman and I were dating, he up and quit a job he hated. Despite the fact that he didn’t have another one lined up, I was happy to have him rid of that dreadful place. So to celebrate the occasion I baked him a cake that said, “You Quit” on it in sprinkles (his favorite) and picked up a bottle of sparkling cider. There, now you see how I’ll use any excuse.

Now that you're aware of my love for all things event planning, then you know that the idea of hosting Thanksgiving dinner at my house was all too exciting for me. I always look forward to Thanksgiving because I have a big family and the house is always full of laughter, food, men yelling at each other and the television about football, intense Phase 10 card games and love. This year was no different. I had 16 people at my house. When I tell people that they're always shocked but its normal for us. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Anyway, leading up to the holiday I had a few people call and ask me if they could make their dishes at my house the morning of Thanksgiving. Thinking of how much fun it is cooking with the women in my family, naturally I said yes. However, I failed to think about that fact that I only have one set of cookware. Within that set, I only had one big pot...coincidentally, the one everyone needed for some stage in their cooking processes. Thus, we had to share. This made things oh so stressful. Dinner was supposed to be at 4pm but because of this snafu, it pushed dinner back 2 more hours. I had a bunch of hungry family members that were expecting to eat at 4pm, what was I going to do?.....Distract their stomachs with hot, buttery dinner rolls, that what. Remember when I used this trick on Superman for the first supper? Well, it proved successful yet again. They too, didn't know which end was up.

Once my family was distracted with the rolls, we were able to finish up and warm up all the food, we gathered around, Superman said the grace, gave thanks and we all ate. Unfortunately, I was so busy that I didn't get to take any pictures. But all in all, it was a great day. As a reward for all my hard work I stayed in on Black Friday, didn't get out of bed until 11am, ate leftovers and proceeded to spend the rest of the day lounging around the house.

XOXO,

TNB

Savvy Supermarket Shopping

Hi guys! First, lets all just take a moment to get past the fact that I haven't posted in a little while....

Ok! Now that we're past that, today I want to talk about grocery shopping. When I was living at home with my parents I used to do the grocery shopping for the family. In order to save my parents some money I would try to buy all the generic brand foods or shop on sale. Once I got married and started shopping for my husband and I, I used the same technique. I thought our grocery bill would be inexpensive because I was only shopping for two. I soon got a rude awakening. The bill wasn't as cheap as I was expecting it to be. I had blew my budget and I wasn't even done shopping yet. After complaining to my husband about it I decided to do some research on how to save on your grocery bill.

Instead of only shopping at one place I rotate through 6, depending on what I need and whose got it on sale. I know that sounds like alot but each place has its benefits. Four of them are my main "go to" stores and the other two are places I go to when there's either a big sale or I need something that the main four don't carry.

The first store I visit is the DollarTree.

One of my best friends turned me on to this one (Thanks Morgan). When I shop at Dollartree I pick up condiments, rice, noodles, spaghetti sauce, basic spices, bread, cleaning supplies, frozen vegetables, chicken thighs and even eggs. Yup, thats right, the DollarTree has a refridgerated and frozen section. I can't go on enough about how great the DollarTree is, it has saved us so much money and you'd be surprised at the selection they offer. I didn't even list all of their offerings. Try it and see for yourself, trust me you will not regret it.

Up next is Costco.

I just love this place. I could literally walk up and down their aisles for hours. They have pretty much everything. When I shop here, its usually to stock up on meat, I may pick up other things but only on occasion. I buy my meat in bulk and then separate it into smaller portions and then cook it as I need it. Buying in bulk is also good because you don't have to shop as frequently, plus its cheaper. Its also good to shop here when you have a deep freezer to store all of your bulk items in (Hint to Superman, Christmas is swiftly approaching).

After Costco is Aldi.

I mentioned this place in a previous post. Aldi is great because it like a regular grocery store but with discounted prices. However, the shopping experience here is a very unique one. First, in order to get a cart you have to insert a quarter into a chainlink thingy that keeps the carts locked. Once you put the quarter in, the cart is popped free. They also don't have coupons since their products are already discounted and you bring your own bags or boxes to carry your groceries out in, if you don't you'll have to buy bags from the store at $0.10 a bag. I made this rookie mistake on my first trip to Aldie lol. I should also mention that when you return the cart to the chainlink contraption you get your quarter back. Anyway, when I shop here its usually to get things like milk, stuff for baking, butter, cheese, frozen juice concentrate, fruits, veggies and other pantry items.

The fourth place is my neighborhood farmer's market.

Here I pick up fresh produce like sweet potatoes, white potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini and squash. While I do buy produce at Aldi, the farmer's market sells some things cheaper than Aldi does. I can a small box of the previously mentioned items for $1-$2. They also have other unique items from specialty chutneys to homemade skincare products.

Ok that sums up the main four, now I'll tell you about the other two.

The first is Harris Teeter.

I just recently started shopping here. Another good friend of mine told me about this one (Thanks Jessica). I shop at this one because their sales are always great. The special thing about their sales is that they don't just mark certain items down, they also do "buy one, get one free," and the kicker..."buy two, get three free." Yeah, I know, pretty amazing right? Anyway I signed up to get the store emails, so every week I check to see whats on sale that we need and I head on over.

Lastly, there's Shoppers Food Warehouse.

This is where I shopped when I shopped for my parents. However, now that I'm only shopping for two now, I only shop here when they have a good sale on something I need or if I need a certain ingredient for a recipe I'm making.

So now that you know where I shop, here are a few of my shopping strategies to help me save even more:

• I don't shop when I'm hungry


• I take inventory of what I have, I make a list and I stick to it


• I don't use coupons for things that I don't buy on regular basis, otherwise I'm not really saving anything


• I scan the sales papers to see who has what I need on sale before I go shopping


• I buy the generic brands. They taste just as good as the name brands to me


• I almost never buy junk food. It saves me money and extra pounds


• I don't buy anything pre-cut, sliced or shredded, I'd rather spend more time on something than more money


• We pack our lunch more than we buy it


• I try to either use leftovers for lunch the next day, freeze them or I re-use them in another recipe

Do you have any savvy supermarket shopping tips to share? Don't be bashful, I'd love to hear them.

XOXO,

TNB

The Wedding Night Narrative

This is a topic that I struggled with. I went back and forth trying to decide whether or not I was going to share it with you guys. I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t I wouldn’t be honestly providing you with the full experience of what it’s like to be a newlywed, especially since this topic is such an important part of marriage. What’s more is that more often than not it’s an even bigger deal in the beginning of a marriage.

(Deep breath) Ok here goes…

When Superman and I got married he and I were both virgins. Gasp! I know, shocking isn’t it? Well, it’s true. Despite this fact, I wasn’t nervous at all on our wedding night. I was curious and there was something exciting about the unknown. Of course I was also excited to finally find out what all the hype was about. I’ll paint the picture of how I imagined it to be like. It would be beautiful, romantic and passionate. And yes, I was aware of the inevitable pain and discomfort, I mean I wasn’t naïve but it wouldn’t be anything I couldn’t handle and it would most likely give way to pure awesomeness after an hour at the most. Ya know, cuz we are first timers here.

HA!

Let’s just say that that beautiful picture I painted for myself was soon ripped to shreds

I mean don’t get me wrong. It did start out beautiful, romantic and passionate but as soon as we got down to the “nitty gritty,” I suddenly wasn’t so excited, curiosity had decided that it wanted no parts of it and the “pure awesomeness” stood me up without even calling. The only thing that remained constant and true to my beautiful picture was the intruding presence of the pain and discomfort. Oh and remember when I said those two would only last for an hour? Um, yeah that was a gross miscalculation. It was more like, let’s see…add 3, carry the 1, minus 5…a month! Yup that’s right. It was about a month before I started to feel any resemblance of pure awesomeness and even then it was more like pure awesomeness’ distant cousin, once removed. However, I will say that our first experience together was still beautiful because we love each other and we had the privilege of experiencing this great act of love for the first time, only with each other.

Now, for all you engaged ladies that have yet to be de-flowered, I’m not trying to scare you. I’m simply relaying my honest experience to you guys. I mean yes, for the life of me I couldn’t understand WHY anyone would want to do it, but eventually I did find out why (wink, wink). It won’t always be that way. It can and will be everything “they” say it is. It just takes patience (a lot of patience) and practice (a lot of practice) on both of your parts. You have to get good at it just like anything else. Take math for example…er…ok well perhaps I shouldn’t use math, I’ve always sucked at it no matter how much I practiced but you get my drift.

Here’s my advice, if you want to educate yourself about something you have to do your research right? Look it up on the internet...

read books....

try different techniques...um...I can't exactly give you a picture to go with this one...

Anyway, my point is that everyone is different and different things work for different people so don't get discouraged. Have fun and don’t give up!

XOXO,

TNB

The First Supper

Ok so for my first grocery trip for our new home we went to this really cool discount grocery store called Aldi (I tell you all about its sheer awesomeness in another post). While browsing in the meat section I found these really cool beef filets wrapped in bacon. You should know that Superman loves bacon even more than he loves me so with that fact in mind I decided they would be great to cook for the first dinner in our new home. Mind you they were kind of small, like not-even-the-circumference-of-a-coaster small, but what with my excitement about the cool grocery store and interest at the fact that they were clothed in bacon I don’t even take their size into account, I just happily throw 2 in the cart.

We get home and later on my pastor and his wife came over because my pastor wanted to talk with Superman about church stuff. While the men are in the family room talking, my pastor’s wife was in the kitchen with me. So I’m cooking and she’s asking me questions about what we’re having. So I show her the bacon-wrapped beef filets and she’s all like, “Oh those look good. So you get two and Superman (Of course she didn’t really call him Superman, duh only I get to call him that) gets two?” I’m like, “…Nn-no…I get one and he gets one.” Then she proceeds to give me a look that suggests I’d asked her to donate one of her limbs to science. Mind you if they’re small now imagine how small they’ll be after they cook down. So by this point, panic begins to set in. I was really excited about the first dinner and I really wanted it to be perfect. In my head I’m thinking, “Crap! What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?

Snaps fingers) I KNOW!


So my new plan was to serve him a salad before dinner so he would think dinner was in courses and I was trying be all creative, when in all actuality I’m just trying to make him full so he won’t notice how ridiculously small his cut of meat is (Haha, genius, I know). Long story short, of course that gullible goat played right into my hands and thought I had planned it like that all along (He didn’t know which end was up)! So with the crisis averted he ate the salad, those stupid beef filets, the broccoli, the baked potato and drank the grape juice that I deftly kept refilling his glass with throughout the entire affair. In the end he was full and none the wiser.



XOXO,


TNB

"Home" Wasn't Built in a Day

So…I know I haven’t been here in a while. Please forgive me. I’ve been super busy as always. In the months that I've been gone my husband was liscensed as a minister and my sister got married so I have a good excuse, see? But anyway as I mentioned in my previous post, my husband and I were having our first home built. Exciting right?! Yeah I know, we were excited to be finally moving in.

On the morning of moving day we got up, got dressed and started…well…moving. Before we moved in we’d been storing all of the furniture hand-me-downs and houseware items we’d been accumulating in my in-laws’ garage. Being that this was the case my father-in-law was all too excited about being able to actually park cars in his garage again so naturally he wanted to start moving these items first. While I’m moving things like glasses and dinnerware, Superman (btw my hubby will here by be known as “Superman” from now on…so get used to it), his brother and his dad start moving the heavy stuff. While on my way back to the garage from loading something I hear an agonizing yell. It was my Superman!

I immediately run into the garage to see him writhing in pain on the garage floor, holding his leg. Apparently while attempting to move part of a bed frame there were two very heavy glass slabs leaning against it, covered in blankets. Superman didn’t see it and therefore they both fell onto his leg, he narrowly managed to save his toes from being crushed in the process. I then hover on top of him and try to comfort him as best I can.

Then my father-in-law comes up with the great idea to get him off of the dirty garage floor and into the house. We place him on the couch, elevate his leg and I go and make him an icepack. His father then proceeds to ask him a few medical type questions, ya know, like…can you move your toes?…can you feel this?…does this hurt? Superman answers all his questions and to me the prognosis looks good until my father-in-law stands up and says very nonchalantly, “Yeah, we should probably take you to the emergency room,” and then just walks back into the garage.

Um…WHAT?!

I should probably mention that according to my mother-in-law, my father-in-law has a bit of a preoccupation with the emergency room. At the slightest stomach ache or muscle cramp he thinks that a trip to the emergency room just goes without saying.

I remembered this tidbit of information and immediately calmed down. Superman did not need to go to the emergency room, he just needed to stay off his leg…which meant that he couldn’t drive us to our new house. No biggie, I would just have to drive us. Did I mention that I only have a learner’s permit (Hey! Don’t judge me, I’m workin on it!)? So of course being a man, Superman insisted that he was totally fine to drive and of course we all know that he totally wasn’t, so I drove. Do you know how scary it is for a new driver to drive behind a flat-bed truck carrying furniture and an entire king size bed where the mattresses are swaying as if they’re gonna go any minute? Ooh, ooh, I do! I do! It is pretty darn scary lemme tell ya.

I kid you not this is exactly what it looked like except we were on back roads and those 2 dudes in the back definitely weren't there

However, I managed to keep up, not get pummeled by any mattress missiles and get me and my injured Superman to our new home safe and sound. And, as a reward for reading this long post….you get to look at pictures of our home from start to finish!! Yayy!!

XOXO,

TNB

Our "Sold" sign and me in heels trying not to kill myself on the rocks

Who knew one could be so happy to own so much dirt?

More of our dirt

The foundation/basement


The foundation/basement filled around w/ more dirt

Me standing on the dirt, peering into what would become the basement


The wood package that would be used for framing the house

The beginnings of the framing

The framing from the inside and me trying to dodge pictures. As you've probably noticed by now, we visited our house like everyday lol. Don't judge us!

The starway to Heaven...jk, the main staircase


The living room and kitchen


Here it is completely framed

Almost complete, just missing some paint on the door and some shutters


Home Sweet Home!

Livin’ with the In-Laws

So… after my husband and I got married, we spent two nights in a great hotel and went directly to live with my in-laws. Originally this was not the plan. At this point in our lives we were having our first home built and expected it to be completed in time for us to move into directly after the wedding. However, as is typical when building a new home, our move in date was pushed back. Ok so I know what you’re thinking…you feel sorry for us, but this wasn’t a bad thing. While we were disappointed we simply had to re-adjust our minds to living with his parents and being ninjas at night… if you take my meaning…wink wink.

Normally it would be very disappointing to have to live with your parents/in-laws during the first 3 weeks of your marriage but it wasn’t bad at all. Why? Because I have the BEST in-laws in the entire world!


I truly feel for people who don’t have a great relationship with their in-laws because I can’t imagine NOT getting along with them. I mean, his mom is like my mom and his dad is like my dad, his little sister is like my little sister and his little brother is like my little brother…even down to the bickering back and forth.

On our first night back at their house we went upstairs to my husband’s room and opened the door to find a nice, clean room complete with a vase of fresh cut, red roses on the nightstand. It looked like a hotel room. Who does that? My mother in-law that’s who. She’s one of the sweetest women I’ve ever met. Did I mention that in addition to being a stay at home mom, she was also our realtor? Yup, she was. Also during our time with them we all watched movies and TV together, my mother in-law cooked for us and when our new home was finally ready, the whole family helped move us in. To be honest...dare I say it...we even miss living there sometimes, we have that much fun with them.

All in all, they helped make our stay with them wonderful. I couldn’t ask for better in-laws. If you have a relationship with your in-laws like I do with mine, you should cherish it because what we have is rare. If you aren’t fortunate enough to have this, I feel for you but take heart and keep working at it.

I love you mom and dad!

XOXO,

TNB

I's Married Now! ...So Now What?

Ok fine so I’ve been married for a little while now, sheesh. Anyway, hello all and welcome to my newlywed blog!

I started this blog first as a means of creative expression after I had my wedding, then I realized how helpful it could be to engaged women or other newlywed brides.

There are so many blogs about wedding preparations but not very many centered on life after the wedding. Isn’t the latter more important anyway? I mean, we’re told from the time we’re little girls that we’re supposed to get married and live happily ever after. Most of us grew up watching as Ariel, Jasmine and Belle went off to do so but not once did the movies end with any of those chicks ever telling us wide-eyed, impressionable little girls how to.

I mean I’ve never seen any sequels that pick up from “Happily Ever After” and the opening scene is Cinderella and the Prince arguing over him leaving his dirty socks all over the floor again, have you? No? Didn’t think so. But no matter, you guys can join me on my action-packed quest as I learn how to “live happily ever after," find out what really happens after the wedding's over and become the ultimate wife an all around domestic diva.

XOXO,

The Newlywed Bride (TNB)