Memorial Day Weekend

Long, holiday weekends are simply the best kind of weekend, am I right? I'm sure most of you would agree with that. If not, well then I probably don't want to hear it. But thanks anyways... ;) Mine was the bestest, and honestly it wasn't long enough...it was full of sunshine, good food, friends, and relaxing. If only every weekend could actually be three days, right?! Right.

FRIDAY - we went to Hobby Lobby real quick after work (haven't actually done the craft I bought the supplies for yet), and then we ate dinner at Momo's Pizza again, since we were on that side of town. Super yummy.

Had to send out a Snapchat to a few friends of course ;)

SATURDAY - we met some friends down at Alligator Point Beach, and spent the day soaking up the sunshine, with our toes in the sand. The weather was perfect and breezy, and it felt great. On the way back to town, we stopped to eat dinner at Tropical Trader in Panacea. For you locals that might not realize this, it's like the little brother of Angelo's! Owned by the same people, but more casual and a bit less expensive. Such good food too! We all shared an appetizer of calamari, and I got a mahi mahi sandwich.

SUNDAY - ate sandwiches for lunch at Jimmy John's, and then went back down to meet our friends at the beach again! The weather was lovely again, and it was another good day in the sunshine.

MONDAY - we were up bright and early, so that our landlord could come by to look at the hot water heater, because it had stopped working... Long-story short, he ended up just buying a new one, and by 7pm last night, it was finally installed and working properly again. Thank the lord he worked so quick to get that done for us, or else this morning's shower would have been so freezing! We also did a lot of work around the house - laundry, tons of dishes, Jeff mowed the lawn (until the mower just stopped working), and we went grocery shopping.

Jeff grilled burgers and corn on the cob for dinner, and we had watermelon. And what I'm most proud of, was my homemade coleslaw! Our neighbor brought over a fresh head of cabbage from his garden, so I threw it in the Ninja blender, added in some carrots, mayo, salt, pepper, sugar & balsamic vinegar, and then topped it with sunflower seeds. It was so good y'all! Jeff and usually don't really even like coleslaw, but we both loved what I made last night! I was sad when I realized at like 10pm that I didn't take a picture of the fresh cabbage or the coleslaw though, so y'all will just have to pretend like I did, OK? :)

We were exhausted last night after a couple days in the sun, and a long day of working in and around the house. But it was all worth it, and we had a great three-day holiday weekend! We're thankful for those who have served in our military to make our lives so amazing in this great country of ours. We remember those who gave their lives, so that we can live ours free!

Happy Monday Tuesday! (This is going to be a confusing day...)

Summer Bucket List 2014

I've been meaning to post my Summer Bucket List since May 1st yall, but obviously I didn't quite make it for that... But it's still fine, because they're is of course still of ton of summer-time left. I mean technically summer hasn't even officially begun yet, but us Floridian's don't pay attention to actual season, and just base it on the scorching temperatures.

So it's unofficially summer down here now, and so I'm sharing my short little list of summer goals and plans. Can't wait get going on these, and share all the updates along the way!

1. Go kayaking (with our Groupon for a trip down the Santa Fe River!) wrote about it HERE
2. Start running in the mornings again, two days a week
3. Find a new house, maybe even one with a fenced-in yard for Primrose
4. Host a family BBQ out on our deck before we have to move
5. Visit a new beach in Florida, to collect another jar of sand and shells
6. Read 3 books (other than GoT, once I finish that series)
7. Get the second bedroom completely clean and ready for the boys to be here in June
8. Go to an FSU baseball game (since we didn't make it to one in time for my "spring" list...)
9. Go camping again (since we didn't make it in time for my "spring" list...)
10. Figure out the favorite books link-up idea I have swirling in my head, and do it!
11. Try three new restaurants around town (1. Merv's Melt Shop...)
12. Explore a new city nearby
13. Roast weenies & s'mores with the boys in our fire pit on the deck
14. Get snow cones from Big Easy Snowballs and eat them outside at Lake Ella
15. Set up a blate for a few Tally bloggers I haven't met yet

We are already planning to go on our kayaking trip this Saturday, and I'm super pumped about that. It's going to be so much fun! Did any of y'all make a list of summer goals and plans? If so, let me know so I can go check it out! Or if you haven't made one yet, you should! Because it's fun :)

Prim's First Beach Trip

Another couple of days just happened that were just too good to make me want to go back to work on a Monday morning... also, I just realized how weird that sentence sounded once I typed it out, but I'm too lazy to reword it or even change to a whole new sentence, so let's just roll with it, mmmkay? :) And let's just hop right into the weekend recap, where my brain has to work as little as possible...

Friday night, Jeff's youngest brother and his wife were in town from Texas, so we went over to my in-laws house for some quick pizza, and then they treated us all to a night at the movies! We saw "Noah," and we actually really liked it. Now, please hear me say this - it is NOT 100% scriptural. There are parts of the movie that are just blatantly wrong, or not the way the story happens in the Bible, but that happens a lot when Hollywood spins their take on a Bible story. However, it was still a really good movie.

Saturday, Jeff helped one of his coworkers move into a new house. So I stayed home to do all the little wifey duties around the house - laundry, dishes, straightened up a couple rooms, went grocery shopping, played with Prim and her rope, and did a few other things. Then I got to watch a couple episodes of Parenthood on Netflix before he got home. For dinner we walked to Chili's for dinner (we live less than a block away from one), and then Jeff fell asleep on the couch around 8:30 :) I put him to bed around 9:30, and I continued watching more Parenthood!

Sunday we decided to take Primrose to the beach for the first time! We decided to try out a new beach, so we drove about two and a half hours over to Santa Rosa Beach, which is close to Destin. We did end up driving around Destin a bit, and had a late lunch there at The Shrimp Basket. Then we went back east a tiny bit to Santa Rosa Beach to enjoy the sand and sun for a while. The beach was gorgeous, but we decided we still like our usual spot at St. George Island best. It was good to explore a new place though!

The skies were blue and clear, and the water was absolutely gorgeous - but it's still freezing! I walked in the waves a tiny bit, but barely let it get up to my ankles. Mostly we just sat in our chairs enjoying the great outdoors, and laughing at Primrose. She was so funny, because she really just wanted to sit in our laps, even though we brought her little bed for her to sit on.

Well, it turns out, she HAD to sit in our laps anyways, because Walton County requires a permit to have your dog on the beach, or you get a $100 fine! Well, the Sheriff that came to talk to Jeff was feeling nice I guess, and told us that as long as we kept her in our laps, we wouldn't have to leave, or get fined. So she sat in our laps for the last hour, which she loved of course anyways :)

Everything was fine in the end, but I guess we'll have to check to make sure doggies are allowed on the beach next time we go somewhere. Oopsies! At least that Sheriff was feeling generous yesterday, right? It was kind of chilly with the wind blowing like crazy, so we finally packed up and got the car all loaded up again.

We stopped at Wendy's on the way home and fed Primrose some nuggets for dinner, since we forgot to bring some food or treats. And I'm sure she didn't mind, because she devoured those nuggets! But since we ate lunch so late, we just waited till we got back to Tally to grab some Chinese on the way home to share. And that was so yummy. We unpacked, gave Prim a bath, showered, and then crawled in bed pretty early after a long, fun day.

It was a great weekend, and I'm glad spring and summer are finally on their way here! It's not completely hot yet, and that's good for now, but I'll be so glad once it's full-blown summer and we can spend the whole day soaking up the sun and just enjoying life in Florida! I love it here :)

Sunny Love,
Halie

Partly Sunny Weekend Recap

So remember how I used to name every single blog post with a P? Well you might not, but I did...but then it got too difficult, and I re-named my blog anyways. And now that I can start it with whatever letter I want to, it still ends up starting with a P... Old habits die hard, right?

Anywho, it's nasty and rainy here today in "The Sunshine State," and rained pretty much all day yesterday as well, but I'm not going to let that affect my mood! I have already decided I'm going to have a good day anyways, despite the eleventy billion inches of rain it seems like we've gotten....This past weekend was a good one though, and in true blogger fashion, I'm gonna tell y'all all about it, of course :)

Friday after work, Jeff and I came home from work to wash up some dishes, and straighten up the house a little bit before our friends Robert and Dabney came over. Then once they got there, we all walked about a quarter of a mile down the road to check out the grand opening of the new Cascades Park, thats right by our house! It's going to be a pretty cool park, because they have an amphitheater and they're going to have concerts and stuff there pretty frequently. They also have some pretty little ponds, with big water fountains and waterfalls in them, and it's just a neat place!

The tall building in the background is the State Capitol building!

After we wandered around checking out the park for a while, we walked over to a restaurant close-by for some dinner. We had yummy food and lots of laughs and fun conversations, and just had a good time! Then we went back to our house, and had planned to play some games, but some of us (Robert & Dabs...) started falling asleep in the big comfy chair...

That's Gus, and he's her big doggie :)

Saturday morning we went over to my in-laws house to help them clean out the garage, and take stuff over to their newly rented storage unit. Well luckily for us, it's big enough that we were able to store a few of our things in it as well, since we don't have much room in our tiny little turquoise house! So that was nice of them to share some space with us :) After dropping off a huge donation load at Goodwill, we went home to gather up stuff, and then we headed down to the coast for a day at the beach!

The sun was nice and warm, but it was only about 70 degrees and very windy, so it was actually a bit chilly. We stayed for a couple of hours though, and then met up with Robert and Dabney, and a group of their friends, at a super yummy BBQ place for dinner (Hamaknocker's) on our way back to town. We then quickly went back home to change clothes and grab Primrose, and then the three of us went over to Dabney's house for some more hang out time. We attempted to all play spades, but we didn't all know what we were doing, so that didn't last too long....

Sunday morning we accidentally overslept and missed going to church (oopsies!), so instead we got busy on some chores around the house. I washed dishes, cleaned out leftovers from the fridge, started laundry and cleaned up the side deck/porch all while Jeff mowed the lawn. Together we got a lot done in just a short amount of time, and the outside of the house looks so much nicer now. Then we got cleaned up and headed out on some errands. I was craving a sandwich for lunch, so we stopped at Jimmy John's, and that proved to be a delicious choice.

The Italian Night Club, on whole grain bread, with hot peppers added. So yummy!

We went to Costco and Walmart, and then by that time it was absolutely flooding. So we decided to hold off on grocery shopping, and went home to enjoy some "movie rest" time. We watched "Big Fish", which we've both seen before, but it was a good movie for the kind of chill mood we were in, and we both enjoyed seeing it again. I then ran to the grocery store real quick, and came home to make turkey chili and cornbread for dinner. Yummy!

And then we finally got around to hanging up some pictures and stuff on our walls at home! We've been married for a little over five months, and Jeff lived in the house for a month before that, but somehow we just never got around to hanging much. Well finally I got the bug, and it was all I wanted to do! And it looks really good now :) We aren't done, and still have lots more to hang up and decorate, but what we've done so far looks great! I'll have to do a little home tour for the blog over the next few months as we get things more settled.

Today is St. Patrick's Day (like y'all needed to be told, right?), and so to impress my half-Irish hubby, I'm going to attempt to make us an Irish meal tonight for dinner! So I found this recipe for Bangers & Mash, and we're both pretty excited to see how it turns out. I also got a thing of Irish Soda Bread from Winn Dixie yesterday to go with it. So it won't be a healthy meal, and it's definitely not our usual Meatless Monday, but hopefully it will still be really yummy!

Hope y'all had a good weekend, and that you have a good St. Patrick's Day today!

Sunny Love,
Halie

P.S. - Anyone know of any weekend recap link-up's that still happen? I used to do quite a few, but now I don't know that they exist anymore. I want to link-up!

Plane Tickets for the Honeymoon Have Been Purchased

So for a very abbreviated story real quick - I was cut off BIG TIME in traffic this morning on my way to work, and it infuriated me. I was yelling and laying on my horn like crazy, and my heart was racing. My mama (who was directly in front of me in her car), saw it happen and she said was so livid she wanted to get his tag number and call the police to report his aggressive driving. Suffice it to say, that wasn't the loveliest way to start off my day.....

But in much more pleasant and exciting news, I really just wanted to stop in here for a bit and say how freaking EXCITED I am, because Jeff and I got our honeymoon booked last night!!!!! Thanks to his very generous parents and their time-share-owner-points-stuff through Sheraton hotels, we will be spending seven nights at the Westin Lagunamar Resort in Cancun, Mexico!!!!

We also got a jump on it and booked our plane tickets last night, and found a pretty awesome deal through Priceline.com. Thanks for negotiating those prices for us, Mr. Priceline Dude. We appreciate that! So now, Plane Tickets for the Honeymoon Have Been Purchased, and the reservations at the resort have been made! And clearly I'm pretty pumped about that! Just to make you drool a little bit, here's some photos from their website of where we'll be staying :)

You guys, I'm so excited about this I can hardly even stand it! We're only 58 days away from wedding day, but that feels like so long in respect to boarding that plane to Cancun! Holy crap, we're going on our honeymoon to Cancun! Seriously, I might explode with excitement and happiness. Be prepared to clean up bits of confetti and glitter and sunshine rays, because I'm sure that's all that's inside me right now with all this excitement :)

Much Love,
Halie

Patriotic Festivities

"It's Independence Dayyyyyy!" (Pleas sing to the tune of the classic Martina McBride song from 1994. That's such a great song, and don't you even try to deny that.) You know what else, it's also my super sweet Granddaddy's birthday today as well. Yes, he shares his birthday every year with our country's birthday as well. And so every year, we get to celebrate a national holiday, and a family birthday as well, so of course it's always lots of fun! 

I for one am super excited about today, and so I wanted to share some about what my day will look like!

First of all, I'm totally splurging on this healthy eating kick, and eating a super delicious meal for dinner tonight, including ribs, baked beans, potato salad, mac and cheese, and some dessert thrown in there as well. And I'm not going to let even one ounce of that deliciousness make me feel guilty.

Found via Google image search

Oh, and that mac and cheese I mentioned earlier, Jeff and I are in charge of bringing that, so I've scoured my "Pasta is my Favorite" board on Pinterest for the past week, in search of the yummiest recipe. And I think I've found the winner folks. We're going to be using cheddar, jack and mozzarella cheeses, and adding fresh crumbled bacon on top. Hello?! Who wouldn't eat that yummy, cheesy goodness?!

From the recipe post on White on Rice Couple blog

Moving on from food now, I will be rocking as much red, white and blue from head to toe as I can possibly manage - as long as that doesn't include my blue and white umbrella in all this nasty, thunderstormy weather. Come on Florida, get it together. I have some ideas in my head of outfits I can wear, but those are my backups. But first, Jeff and I are gonna hit up Old Navy to see if we can find something matchy-matchy to wear, and just be that sickeningly cute couple :) Now, I don't think it'll be quite like the picture below, but who knows? If we find it on sale, maybe...

Found via Google image search

In addition to my sporty red, white and blue outfit I'm sure I'll be wearing, y'all know I'm also gonna be rockin' some festive and patriotic nails as well. I actually already painted them two nights ago, but I don't have a picture right now, so I'll just wait for Mani Monday to share them with y'all. In the meantime though, here's a picture of some awesome nails, I only wish I had the talent to paint free-hand!

Photo found on the Pams & Kin Facebook page

Now what I'd like to be doing tomorrow afternoon before dinner is laying on the sand, with the sun shining bright in the beautiful blue sky, getting my tan on. But noooo, the weather in Florida has to be rainy and crappy all week long, so the chances of my preferred scenario happening are pretty slim right now. However, if I had it my way, this looks like the perfect spot to hang out on the 4th of July...All I would need is a bottle of sunscreen, a cooler of snacks and drinks, and a book to keep me company. And I guess my fiance would be a good addition too ;)

Photo found via Google image search

Oh sorry, I gotta jump back to food for a bit. Since my whole family (of 12) is eating together, we're doing it potluck style and each contributing, thus why we're in charge of the mac and cheese. So my mom is bringing some dessert for us, but she's keeping it a surprise and won't tell us what it is. We know it's festive in some way, but that's about it. Oh, and she said she's sure it'll end up tasting good, but she's not sure how it will end up looking, so who knows what she has up her sleeve. I'd love to see her attempt something as pretty and Pinteresty as this, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see...!

Photo found via Google image search

And of course at the end of the night, after gorging ourselves on some yummy food, and maybe playing a game, and definitely sitting around having weird, random, hilarious conversations, eventually there will be fireworks. Now, I don't actually know if we're doing them ourselves, or if we're going somewhere to watch them, but either way, they'll definitely be happening. And if they can look even a little bit like the ones below, I'll be a happy girl.

Photo found via Google image search

I'm so grateful and thankful for this country I was blessed to live in. I hope you guys know how lucky we truly are here in America! I hope y'all have a great 4th of July celebration today (and throughout the weekend too probably), and that you enjoy your time with family and friends! Happy Independence Day, and Happy Birthday America, and another Happy Birthday to my Granddaddy!

Python, Water Park, Beach & Pool

It feels like I'm still halfway sleeping, so instead of words (basically any words at all), I'm just gonna flood y'all with a ton of pictures from our incredibly busy but extremely fun weekend...Ready, set, GO!

FRIDAY
Took the afternoon off to go to the beach with Jeff and the boys. And we lucked out with perfect weather.

SATURDAY
Pool day with lots of friends for us and lots of friends for the boys.

SUNDAY
Wild Adventures theme park in Valdosta, Georgia. We did the water park section first, then did the regular rides and stuff as well. (Get to cross another thing off my summer bucket list, because one of them was to take the boys to a water park - DONE!)

Obviously, it was super fun and we all had a blast. But I definitely still need some more rest and recovery before I'm back to normal! I'm feeling exhausted this morning, as I'm sure you would expect, but it was super fun, so it is definitely worth it. I'm thankful for amazing weekends like this we get to spend with the boys, and memories we get to make as a little "family!"

Linking up with Glitter & Gloss, Sami's Shenanigans and Synfully Delicious.

This wasn't a perfect mani, but I still liked it! And this was a few days in, so there's some chips already...