High Five for Friday - Week #5

Today is one of those Friday's where I am just beyond excited it's the weekend. Why you might be wondering? Because after work today, Jeff and I are driving over to St. Augustine for the weekend! One of my old friends from college is getting married on Sunday night, so we are heading over to spend the next few days in St. Augustine. And of course I'm really excited for the actual wedding itself, but I'm also just really excited to see some old friends that I haven't seen in literally years! Some of my old friends still live there so I see them more frequently, but some of the girls have moved away and I haven't seem them in like four years, which is craziness! And I am just literally so pumped right now I can hardly stand it...

But let's get to today's post now, and talk about some awesome things from this past week, in celebration of High Five for Friday with Lauren Elizabeth...

1. We had some overnight guests on Wednesday night, and let's just say the house was a bit more crazy than usual... We loved having them though while their owners were out of town!

From L to R: Primrose (mine), Ace & Gus. They were all so sweet and fun!

2. Angie came to kick boxing with me last night, and she says she's gonna come back again! Working out is always more fun with a friend there with you :)

3. I took some time (OK, a lot of time) one night this week lining up wedding recap posts for the next few weeks. I uploaded all of the pictures into new posts, and now I just need to write some in each of them before they're ready to go. But having the pictures all in order and uploaded is the biggest bulk of the process, so it feels good to have that done. Get ready for a flood of wedding recap posts in the upcoming weeks!

4. I'm still having fun on Instagram doing the photo-a-day prompts and challenges, so you should come join me over there sometime :)

Top L: 4 things // Top R: Pop of Color // Bottom L: Sunshine // Bottom R: Entrance

5. We're having a pizza lunch here at work today, provided by the boss-lady, and I'm pretty pumped for that. Pizza is always a favorite, and when it's free it's even better!

Seriously you guys, I'm so freaking excited for this weekend I can hardly even stand it right now! I'm not leaving at lunch today, so that I can leave work at 4, so we can try to beat the traffic a little bit getting out of town. First though, we're dropping Prim off with Jeff's parents, who are going to keep her for the weekend. I know she'll be in good hands with them, but I'm going to miss that little snuggle girl so much while we're gone! (I'm turning into such a crazy fur-mama these days...)

I hope y'all have had a good week too, and that your weekend might be just half as good as mine! :)

Posing for Engagement Pictures

So now that our save-the-dates have officially gone out to (almost) everyone - we're still having issues with the Outlook.com account we created - I can finally share our amazing engagement photos! We only ended up using two of the photos for our cards, but I still didn't want to let the cat out of the bag too early, then have none of our family and friends be excited or surprised if they had seen them already on the ole' bloggy-blog. But now the time has finally come!!

We took these way back in April, in St. Augustine, Florida. We were oh-so-very blessed and fortunate, because Jeff's Uncle Phil is actually a professional photographer! So he very happily agreed to shoot our engagement session for us in St. Augustine, especially since he lives in Jacksonville! Even though it rained on our entire shoot, basically the whole day, Phil did such an excellent job capturing so many beautiful pictures!

Get ready for pictures galore - "This is the event you've all been waiting for......and away we go!" That last part is a movie quote, and if anyone can guess it, I'll send you some Julep fingernail polish ;) Anyone?

This is one from our save-the-date, that Jeff Photoshopped the "5" in, since our original date was the 12th.

This one is definitely my favorite! There's just so many things about it I love.

This is the second one we used on our save-the-dates.  And this is my Mama's favorite one :)

We chose to do the photos in St. Augustine for a couple of reasons:

1. It was close and convenient to Phil and Tammy, without making them drive three hours to Tally. 
2. I went to school there, at Flagler College, so the small town was my home for four years during college, and I loved it so very much. 
3. It was the very first trip Jeff and I ever went on together, way back in 2011, to attend his Grandpa's funeral (in Jacksonville actually, but we also spent time in St. Augustine that weekend as well.)
4. We've gone back together multiple times since then to visit all my old friends who still live there, and Jeff has come to love the city too!

And for all those reasons, St. Augustine is a special place not only for me, but for us as a couple. And it really meant a lot to be able to have our engagement photos taken there as well, in this gorgeous little town that we both now love so much! All of these were taken in the following locations: historic downtown, the Castillo de San Marcos fort, the Spanish Mission, and Flagler College.

I am so so happy and pleased with the way the pictures turned out. I mean, you can't even tell that we were being rained on during the majority of these. For real - we were standing in the rain for at least half of the pictures above, and they still look amazing! Huge props to Uncle Phil (and his lovely assistant/wife/Aunt Tammy) for all they did for us that day, and the beautiful photos they created for us! If you're in the Jax area, check him out here.

Glad I'm finally getting around to sharing these with y'all, and thanks for being patient and waiting for the past three months! I promise not to take so long sharing our wedding pictures in a couple of months! :)

Much Love,
Halie

Puddles & Pictures & Play Time

So far this Monday morning is off to a pretty great start (despite my lack of sleep), because I'm still coming down off my high from an amazing weekend!! Jeff and I drove over to St. Augustine for the weekend, and we were able to spend some amazing time with my wonderful friends from college, but we were also able to finally take some engagement pictures!!!

FRIDAY
Left right after work and Jeff and I drove over to St. Augustine
Met up with Kaley, Dani, Jenni and Cally and had dinner at Mango, Mango's - one of our favorites!
Went back to the girls' house to play cards and laugh and have fun

SATURDAY
Woke up semi-early, got ready, grabbed Dunkin Donuts coffee and met our wonderful photographer! (Jeff's uncle!)
Spent the hours of 9:30 am - 3:30 pm dodging the rain and tons of puddles and taking pictures
We also had a yummy lunch with Uncle Phil and Aunt Tammy at Cruisers, another favorite of ourse!
Came back to the girls' house to rest for a while, Facebook stalked people, chatted, Jeff napped, ate a snack
Got ready and went downtown to eat at our friends' restaurant, Catch 27, that he just opened in January!
Went next door for some yummy desserts from Bon Ami
Bundled ourselves up for winter weather, and sat on the beach for an hour or so just talking and laughing
Went back to the girls' house, where more friends joined us, and we just hung out and had so much fun together!
Made a couple Vine videos, and VidRhythm videos, and stayed up wayyy too late being silly

SUNDAY
Luckily everyone was able to sleep in a little bit, then we got showered and dressed and had brunch at Cafe 11
Hung out at the house for a bit, packed our stuff up, then Jeff and I wandered around downtown for a while
We stopped for a coffee break, then hit the road back to Tally!
It was super windy and a bit rainy still, so we drove home slow and finally got back around 8:30 last night
Got some essentials from Publix, and a turkey sub from Jersey Mikes, then went to Jeff's house
And our photographer was already done editing and had uploaded all our pics already!
Sat around looking at the 60 beautiful images Phil & Tammy created for us, in such awe how they turned out!

This past weekend truly was amazing! We had such great times with my awesome friends, had an wonderful photo shoot with some talented family photographers, and got to spend quality time with people we love. We both felt so happy and blessed after such a great weekend! Oh, and in case you missed the subtle hint up there, I finally jumped on the bandwagon for Vine (about a million years late), and I'm loving it so far. Already can't wait to take some more random videos! (Search for me with my Twitter name, "HalieRenee88" - I think that's how I signed up for it...?) Also, my friends and I all love Instagram, so here's a collage of all of our IG pics from the weekend! Ooooh - and we found a new app we like a lot too, called InstaPlace, that is pretty neat. Those are the top left and bottom right corners below.

At some point, I will be writing a much more detailed post of the engagement picture session, because I definitely want to remember that day, but it's a lot and I want to save that for later. And of course I'll be sharing more of the pictures, but I want to keep some of them a surprise for now. (The very middle of the above collage is my favorite from the day.) I will however give you a little sneak peek preview of them though, with another one of our favorites!

So to recap - we had an amazing weekend, we now have beautiful engagement pictures, I love my friends from Flagler so so much, and I love my fiance so so much too! I am a very blessed woman.

Linking up today with Covered in Grace, Sami's Shenanigans & Synfully Delicious.

Palm Trees Wrapped in Christmas Lights

First up, let's talk about how cute my new layout and color scheme is. But more importantly, the cuteness of my header picture up there now! I am in love with it :) I think it's gonna stay for a while, but I'll probably change the pictures out occasionally as we go along!

And next, we can talk about today's installment of Mani Monday (which I haven't done in a while...), but this is my super duper easy Thanksgiving-themed mani! Just a simple turkey face on my thumb nail of my left hand, and then some polka dots on the thumb of my right hand, (which I forgot to take a picture of...). So simple, and oh-so-cute!

And now moving on to my weekend recap... 

This past weekend, Jeff and I drove over to St. Augustine, to spend some time with my bestest friends! A few weeks ago I heard my friend Nicole and her husband (from Pensacola now) were going to be there this weekend too, I decided we also had to go and make it a little reunion for us! 

We ate lots of yummy food, did a little shopping in downtown, visited a unique gourmet popcorn shop, counted down at the Nights of Lights celebration, played Catch Phrase with all my friends, and then ate some more yummy food before coming back home on Sunday. We took it easy and relaxed and just hung out all weekend, and we all had a great time together. From here on out today, I'll just let the pretty pictures speak for themselves! :)

(Click on the "Read More" below to see more pictures, and the end of the post!)

And one of the great things about St. Augustine, and pretty much all of Florida, is that we even have our Palm Trees Wrapped in Christmas Lights. So tropical and so lovely too! I hope you guys had good weekends as well! I know I sure did. And now I only have to work three days this week, and then we get to celebrate Thanksgiving! Hooray! I love short work-weeks!

Oh, and also - I was a guest blogger yesterday over at Let Them Eat Cake. So if you want my super easy recipe for Pizza Puffs (which let me tell you that you DO in fact want that recipe), head on over HERE to check that out!

And today I'm linking up with Covered in Grace, Glitter & Gloss, Sami's Shenanigans and Synfully Delicious.