Honeymoon Part 1: Rome

Hello! I can't believe it, but Chris and I celebrated our one month anniversary yesterday! One month already!!?? Well, it's finally time for me to get back into the regular blogging groove, and I'm going to start off by recapping our wedding! First stop: Rome, Italy!

Our plane left an hour late due to air traffic congestion, then we were only in the air about 30 minutes when a passenger had a medical emergency and we had to turn around and land in Boston! The passenger was fine, I'm not sure what the issue was...but they safely got him off the plane and then we had to wait another HOUR for the plane's engine to cool down before taking off again. Oy! It didn't bother me too much though, I was too excited and exhausted - having only gotten 3 hours of sleep the night before.

Waiting for take off at JFK, exhausted but excited!

We arrived at our hotel (Hotel 21) after 12 hour plane ride tired, but anxious to explore.

It was around 2:00 in Rome when we arrived, so even though I only slept about 2 hours on the plane, and Chris didn't sleep at all, we went out exploring and most importantly, looking for FOOD! To start, we had one of my favorite meals on the whole trip: Spaghetti Carbonara and of course PIZZA!!

About .2 seconds later...

I could probably write a novel about all the stuff we did in Rome, so I'm just going to include a few highlighted pictures with captions.
We saw the trevi fountain:

The colosseum:

We ate more pizza...

We saw the Vatican, the POPE (from afar) and climbed the vatican!

 I wore a fanny pack...and Chris was NOT very proud. Haha

Spanish Steps

Top of the Spanish Steps

They were filming a music video for an italian singer on the Spanish Steps

 Statue of the Unknown Soldier

We had wine at every dinner

I had one of my top 3 meals at my favorite restaurant we ate at in Rome: Renata Luisa

Pasta all'amatriciana

And of course, we ate LOTS of gelato:

Rome was amazing and exhausting...we had three very packed days there, but I was super excited for our next stop: Florence!!

Professional Pic Preview

Soooo I was going to start off with a recap of our honeymoon today, BUT last night as soon as I left work I noticed an email on my blackberry from our photographer. I couldn't view the link on my phone, so my commute home was torturous!! As soon as I got home I went on my computer, and this is what I saw....ENJOY!!!!


So excited by some of these pics!!

Music Wedding Video

 Well, we worked non-stop alll weekend, and our house is still in complete disarray, but we are finally all upstairs into the house, and each room is slowly starting to take shape. We were still going through some things until midnight last night so I'm going to highlight this awesome wedding video I found today. Quite a new take on the wedding video- how about a wedding MUSIC video??

joya and emre | wedding music video from David Robin on Vimeo.

I plan on starting my honeymoon recaps this week, here's hoping I get back on track this week!

Slow-Go on the Recap Front

Hey Guys! Moving upstairs has proved to be more of a task this week than I initially thought. Chris and I are working tirelessly as soon as we get home from work until late at night to set up house upstairs so recaps are a slow go right now.


So here's two other teaser pics taken by my good friends Kate and Kristin!

Courtesy KristinB

Courtesy KateV

Have a great weekend!

Wedding Recap: Mani/Pedis with a side of Champagne

Hello! After about 3 weeks of wedding/honeymoon madness I am finally back to reality. I can't believe everything that has gone on in my life in the past few weeks, and now moving upstairs into a house is bringing about even more change for us in the coming weeks! I am so overwhelmed by all the catching up on things that I need to do, but I'd really like to get started on these recaps! So let's get started shall we?? 

Friday, May 20th - The day before the wedding

I was still running around all morning making some last minute errands on Friday. I was multi-tasking a little too much and actually got a ticket for being on my phone while driving!! I was heading to our venue to drop off our seating chart and some other items, and really needed to call our hotel to confirm some things with our party. I know I know...I was being bad, but I swear I had it on speaker phone! Well, Mr. Cop pulled me over right away. I was too frazzled and angry to give him a whole sob story, so I didn't even go into the whole "but I'm getting marrrried..." thing. Sometimes you can tell when a cop might cut you a break or might not. This guy - most certainly was not an "I'll cut you a break" type guy. Great way to start the weekend huh?


Luckily, most of my bridesmaids came in early that day around 2:00 for lunch and then mani/pedis at a place down the street. Smith and Mal made a little pit-stop at the liquor store next door and supplied champagne for the event! When I arrived at the salon, wedding weekend had officially begun and I wasn't going to let anything get in my way, not even a stupid ticket!

Mal and Smith!

Mal and sister Melissa!

Getting a pedicure!

Smith!

We pretty much took over the place when we arrived. Mom finally arrived a little bit later and jumped on the champagne bandwagon!

Smith was a good bridesmaid and made sure that I was always drinking my champagne...even when I couldn't do it myself.

So DIVA

Can I just point out she's wearing the wedding colors?

Kerry got stuck in some traffic after school getting to the salon, but I'm so glad she was able to come! (I think we maaayyy have finished the champagne by the time she came though...whoops!! Sorry Kerry!)

Sister!

Me and Mamma!

Cassie was there, too!! But she also arrived later and I didn't get any picture of her :( Sorry Cass!
Mani/Pedis was a great way to start the weekend and get everyone excited and ready to go! I highly recommend doing this with your girls before the wedding if you can!

Next up: Our Rehearsal!

Hello from Italy!

Hey everyone! Chris and I are having a great time in Italy! So far we've been to Rome and Florence and are currently on our way to Cinque Terre this morning. We've had some great times so far seeing many sites, taking a cooking class and wine tour in Tuscany and finding the boys of the Jersey Shore filming at a restaurant right outside our hotel!

Unfortunately, I had my first ever bout with food poisoning last night, which was probably was one of the worst nights of my life, BUT I'm back in action today, chris was a champ helping me through it, and it's the hard times that make you stronger right? (How have I lived in America for 26 years and never gotten food poisoning and I come to Florence and get it? Backwards right?)

That's all for now! I don't have anymore posts prepared while I'm gone so I'll be back next week! Hope all the June brides out there are excited and doing well!

Honeymoon Series: Bridesmaid Gifts part II

In addition to the flip flops that we put in the bridesmaid bags, we also included these adorable necklaces that I ordered off of etsy:

I ordered these from ERia Designs on Etsy. I ordered each girl's initial with a hammered looked to them. I loved them so much, I got one for myself too! Here's one of the 4 M's I have in my Bridal Party! ERia Designs was very easy to work with and extremely quick, I had them within the same week I ordered them!

My mom made these great Wine Bottle Bags. I bought wine from Trader Joe's (classy I know...but hey, it's award winning!) and put it into the bags. Then we tied them with a lacey ribbon

Lastly, I included these zip-up hoodies in each bag for them to wear while getting ready the morning of the wedding.

Oldnavy.com

I bought them at OldNavy.com. I initially wanted to iron their initials onto the front of the hoodie, but the initials I ordered were actually way bigger than I wanted them to be, and in the end, I thought they'd get more use out of them in the future if I didn't put a huge rhinestone initial onto it.


Next up: The Bags that these gifts went into! (that will have to be shared AFTER the honeymoon)