A Stroll Down Memory Lane...

Hello again! I wanted to share one of my favorite Christmas gifts with you guys, as well as take stroll down memory lane. You see, Kyle surprised me with another great gift this year... he is pretty good at that. He worked really hard to compile some of our favorite wedding pictures into a picture book. Below, you can click through and see what the book is like. It was crazy to take a look back at that special day, I can't believe it has already been over a year! We are so thankful that so many friends and family were able to be there to celebrate and make such fun memories! Now I can take a stroll down memory lane anytime I want! Take a look and feel free to comment on your favorite picture!

Wedding by Kyle Jacobson | Make Your Own Book

Hemphill Wedding

Last weekend, we traveled back to Knoxville to attend the wedding of Michael and Kathryn (Robertson) Hemphill.  We had a blast reunited with friends and family.  Some pictures from the festivities...

Photo by Brendan Kenny

Better late than never...right???

Better late than never as I always say! Especially since I have been meaning to blog about a weekend day date for approximately...well, we won't go into how long. The point is, I am doing it now and that is all that matters! So like I was saying... Kyle and I got to enjoy some of the "spring" Dallas weather one saturday with a day date. We started off by heading to the Dallas Arboretum for the Dallas Blooms. I had a couple people tell me how awesome it was and Kyle surprised me with tickets one afternoon. Yeah, he is thoughtful like that. Apparently, the Dallas Blooms is the largest floral festival in the southwest with over 500,000 spring blossoming blooms. The weather was absolutely perfect and we spent a good amount of time exploring the arboretum. The only thing that would have made the trip better was if we had thought to bring a picnic, but we didn't...so after we left we went to grab some sandwiches and had a picnic at a park. I love a good sandwich and Kyle had heard good things about a local place called Jimmy's Food Store. We highly recommend. We grabbed some sandwiches to go, I had the prosciutto panino and Kyle had the muffaletta. So good, and to top it off they have the good kind of Fanta. The kind I found in Italy... it is different and way better. We lounged in the park for a bit, a great ending to our date! Below are some of my favorite pictures from the day. Please forgive, combination of real camera and camera phone.

There were tulips everywhere!

Hydrangeas, my favorite.

Tourist 

 Prosciutto Panino

 Muffaletta

 The real deal Fanta

Picnic in the park with this handsome guy

How To: Get Out of Cleaning the Dishes

Life here in Dallas has been pretty good lately. We continue to explore new areas, I am learning my way around (needing my GPS less and less), and we have met some new people! I have had a bit of change of heart and am actually starting to enjoy our new city (mostly new to me). We have also had some visitors recently which has been fun!

As I mentioned before, I have really been working on my housewife skills. It has been a little more challenging now that I am working, but I think I put forth good effort. Throughout the week I usually cook and continue to try new recipes. I am not sure about your household, but in ours there is usually conversation about who has to do the dishes after dinner. Anyways, I thought I would share my 'how to' on getting out of cleaning the dishes. Stay with me here, the following information is important and goes with my tutorial.  This week Abe is in town for his spring break and Kyle has been wanting to make his Red Beans and Rice recipe. I decided to take a nap on Sunday instead of going to the grocery store, so I hit up Kroger after work on Monday. I got home quite a bit later than usual and had the task to finish up preparing dinner while Kyle went for a run and Abe went for a bike ride. Typically Kyle runs shorter distances during the week (4-5 miles a night). However, he skipped the day before so he was planning to put in some extra miles (aka be gone longer than usual). I had the task to chop some onions and add them to the other ingredients at a VERY specific time. I will speed up the story and get to the good stuff... fast forward, Kyle and Abe are gone now and I am multi-tasking (putting groceries away, watching the Biggest Loser finale, and chopping onions). As I am chopping away, I look away for a SPLIT SECOND to check the other ingredients... and SLICE! Pause....AHHHHHHHH! Let me add to the story that as Kyle and I were recently married we were very fortunate to receive a very nice set of knives. Me and these knives have a love/hate relationship. I love that they cut EVERYTHING so easily, but hate that sometimes everything means my fingers. Back to the story, the "slice" is no longer the onion, but my thumb!!!! Unlike several of my other knicks with the knife, this one is a bit more intense. I will leave out specific yucky details for those with sensitive stomachs. I work in the healthcare field so blood and such doesn't typically bother me. However, for some reason this one REALLY bothers me and I begin to feel a bit queezy. Panic mode sets in so I immediately text Kyle, only to hear his phone ding in the other room. Let me fast forward again, the good news is my finger is still attached, I sliced the chunk off so no stitches needed! At that point my finger felt terrible and continued to bleed for quite some time... BUT I didn't have to do the dishes that night! AND Abe helped put all the groceries away! Ok, so maybe I wouldn't necessarily recommend this 'How to', but for now... it is working for me! I have been dish free all week!

Honeymoon

Hey there! So I warned you that I was new to the blogging world, so much so that I am bad at posting. Geez, I need to be better. I promise to try! With that being said, since you got a glimpse into our wedding last go around, I thought I would share a little bit about our honeymoon.

After our wedding, we spent the next day packing up and stuffing my car to the maximum in preparation for our journey to Texas. We squeezed family a little tighter the next morning and said our ‘see ya laters’ and on the road we were. It was a long journey to Texas, but luckily we had some fun stories to reminisce over. Unfortunately, Kyle had to go back to work immediately, but this gave me some time to nestle in and make this place ‘ours’. A week later, Kyle and I were fortunate enough to be able to get away for a honeymoon, just the two of us. Let’s celebrate that small bit in itself, this never happens! We dug out our bathing suits and sunscreen and off to Mexico we went! We headed to an all-inclusive resort just south of Playa Del Carmen. For once in my life, all our flights were on time and went smoothly, so we knew this was going to be a great week. Upon our arrival in Mexico, the weather was perfect, sunny and hot (these were requests for our honeymoon destination). Fortunately, this was just a preview of the weather for the remainder of the week. Our resort was awesome, sort of like a cruise, but on land. There was always an abundance of food and drinks available, and we rarely passed on the opportunity to eat! By the end of the week we were actually sick of eating! Kyle and I spent a very relaxing weekend enjoying each other and taking in all that had just happened. We also had the opportunity to do a little snorkeling, a monkey tour, and visited the Tulum Mayan Ruins. Again, it was really cool, and the views were beautiful. What an amazing God we have to paint such an awesome picture for us! We were also reassured that the world would not be ending, simply a new calendar for the Mayans. No big deal. All in all, I would say the honeymoon was a complete success. We were sad to leave paradise and get back to the ‘real world’. However, I was excited to get back and continue to nestle in our place. The ONLY negative part about our trip was the iguanas. These things were HUGE and I was terrified. For some reason Kyle found this amusing, he is so sweet.

Here are some picture highlights from our trip: 

Scary monsters

The view from our room

Sunset

The resort

Before dinner one evening

Monkey! 

Tulum

Tulum, with beautiful water

Tulum

You and Me Together...

Hey there! Sara here… I am a newbie to the whole blogging world (bare with me). However, I am excited to share our story as newlyweds, life in Texas, and anything else I might think is interesting. With all that said, this post is dedicated solely to our wedding, all other topics must wait for another date!

As you now know, Kyle and I are newlyweds. We have been married a whopping one month and 13 days! Whoop whoop we survived the first month! We officially became Mr. and Mrs. Kyle Jacobson November 24, 2012. The entire wedding weekend was absolutely amazing and more than we could have ever asked for. We kicked off the weekend with a welcome party given by my in-laws (still crazy to say). This provided our out-of-town guests something to do on Friday night, as there is not much to do in Johnson City. The party also allowed Kyle and I time to visit with some our guests before madness broke loose wedding day. I highly recommend a welcome party or something of the nature if you can fit it in to your weekend! Our wedding day was perfect, the best day ever, by far. I wish we could re-live our wedding day over and over, and over again. Obviously being a girl I have thought about our wedding day on more than one occasion and pictured what it would be like. I had pictured it a million different ways, with different decorations, flowers, and tiny details. Our wedding exceeded all my day dreaming expectations, on so many different levels. Also like many other girls these days, I was on Pinterest all the time ‘researching’ and finding different ideas to incorporate. We wanted our wedding to be special (like most people), but most importantly to be unique to our personalities and us. I may be a little biased but I think we rocked it out in that department. We went for the ‘rustic elegant’ theme as some people may describe it. We incorporated the burlap and wood, but also a little sparkle and candles to add a little more elegance. I had all these great ideas and things that I wanted to make happen. However, I was also finishing school with my hardest rotation so I wasn’t sure all these things would come together. With a very crafty and talented mom, dedicated sister, along with a great team of family and friends, things indeed came together. My mom is super woman. She paid attention to every last detail and made things come together so perfectly. Kyle was also a champion throughout the entire process. He answered all of my questions, provided great ideas and feedback, and put up with me when I was crazy! We had family and friends from near and far, we couldn’t be more thankful for everyone traveling to help us celebrate. Although the wedding day as a whole is a bit of a blur, I have absolutely loved re-living everything through our photos and wedding video. Needless to say, we are definitely surrounded by great families and crazy friends who provided lots of love, laughter, support, and great memories. Thank you to everyone who helped make our day so special. We love you all!

See below for the video Kyle created for our welcome party and some of our favorite pictures. It was so hard because there are so many good ones! Shout out to Rachel Webb Photography!