Transitioning

Based on our previous moves, I thought we would be unpacked by now.

I was wrong.

I was so VERY wrong.

I've got that Type A personality so I had everything ready to go, but when we got here I feel like my brain has yet to figure out that we are staying here for a while.  It feels like I'm on vacation or something. Know what I mean? While most everything is unpacked, it isn't decorated and it definitely doesn't feel like home yet.  I'm sure that will come with time, but for right now we are living in undecorated chaos.

There aren't a lot of big projects to do, just a lot of little things to check-off my Type A brain's list (i.e. stuff to purchase, organize, or decorate to make the house feel like our home).

Perhaps I have yet to decorate anything because I am still brainstorming what I want to do with the space. It is still a blank canvas because, as I told you last week, I didn't really start thinking about moving in until three days before....which was only 2 weeks ago. (Sidebar- Can you believe it has already been 2 weeks?!)

I made a video for y'all of our move and the first few days in the new house.  Enjoy our chaos for now, because I promise the DIY posts are coming with tons of decorations ideas and changes!

I hope y'all have a great weekend!  Anyone have fun plans?

What I’m Lovin’ Wednesday: A Very Merry Puppy Christmas

This was by far the best Christmas our pups have ever experienced.  Since we put the offer in on our house in October, the moment I was most looking forward to was introducing the pups to their new yard.  I kept wondering what their reaction would be: ecstatic? scared? spastic?  I just wanted to see their reaction and this was the dream I held onto while I was packing up those millions of boxes for our move. 

Opening the front door and they dashed-in, smelling everything.

Rooney did not understand the idea of a screened door.  The first few days of opening the glass sliding door, Rooney ran right into it knocking the door right off onto the ground.  I’m sorry but every time I laughed hysterically.  Even with the door laying on the ground he still didn’t understand.  He is so dopey sometimes lol

The FIRST time we opened the door (the screened door too)….they were off.

I took a video of that most anticipated moment and want to share that with you today. You get to see several "milestones" in this video lol
(Yes, I'm aware that my voice goes up several decibels when I talk to the pups. Don't judge)

They were bewildered by the doggy door.  Here is a video of the first time they both went through.

Showing these two our new home has been way more exciting than I could have anticipated.  We sure do love these pups :-)

Boxing 101

When we decided to move, I REFUSED to pack a single box until I knew we were definitely, without a doubt, 100% confident, moving. 

We put a contract on a house, nothing was packed.

Our house was appraised appropriately, nothing was packed.

Our house passed all inspections, nothing was packed.

Negotiations were finalized, nothing was packed.

We got the green light for closing two weeks early, nothing was packed.

I wouldn’t consider this procrastination; I simply didn’t believe it was going to happen.  I continually felt like the rug was going to be pulled out from under us.  There was no reason why I felt this way, and I wouldn’t normally consider myself as pessimistic as I sound right now.  Subconsciously, I think, I was trying to protect my high expectations from disappointment.  Such a silly coping tactic that left me with only 3 days to pack up our entire house before moving.  Not a great idea, and extremely anxiety provoking.  HOWEVER, with my frantic pleas for moving tips, you all were there with tons of advice.  As much as I wish I was this brilliant, this is a compilation of moving tips that y’all gave me.

1. Pack the vacuum last so that you can clean the apartment/house you are leaving.  (from Meg)
2. Lowe’s has great boxes. (from Joy)
3. Place foam disposable plates between your dishes for packaging to prevent them from chipping.  (from Meg)
4. Pack a few books in every box so that you have medium weighted boxes as opposed to several insanely heavy boxes.  This makes books easier to carry and no one gets hurt. (from Jessica)
5. Make a basket for keys and wallets so they don’t get lost or accidentally packed. (from Meg)
6. Have labels made of room names so that you can quickly stick them on boxes.  This will help your movers know where to put boxes and ultimately help you unpack. (from Stephanie) Labels could include: kitchen, living, master, guest, master bath, bath two, garage, linen dining, heavy, fragile, storage, don’t know.
7. Make a list of everything you put into a box and tape it to the house side, or write the contents directly on the side of the box so that you know what is inside (from Danie).
8. Number your boxes so that you know how many boxes you should expect to move. It is also key to remember this number.
9. If you’re moving yourself, you don’t have to pack your clothes.  Leave them on the hangers and create a “clothes line” out of Ratchet straps. (from Rich & Lura)  This is so genius!

Here are some tips and reminders that the Mr and I have learned from our moving adventures through the years:

1. Do your laundry before you pack or move.  When you get to your new home you will have tons of dusty things that will need to cleaned.
2. Liquor and wine stores have tons of great boxes for packing.  They are made perfectly to package kitchen items (i.e. glasses, vases, knives, etc.)
3. Before moving, have new tags made for your pet.  You want those on your pet as soon as they arrive at the new home.  Also update microchip information for each pet.
4. Everyone will ask for your new address, so before you even move have change of address cards made so that they can be sent out immediately upon arrival at your new home. (Please don’t be offended if you didn’t get a card from us; I’m a bit scattered brained with the move & the holidays.  If I did miss you, please let me know so that I can drop one in the mail for you)
5. To follow up with #four, 7-10 days before you move, have your mail officially forwarded so that you don’t miss any bills, fabulous magazines or awesome Christmas cards from friends and family.  When you do this will have to depend on when the previous owners have left and when you actually get to move-in, so you will have to use your best judgment for timing.
6. When you do get to your new home, go ahead and change all of your addresses as soon as possible.  Don’t forget: banks, driver’s license and registration, voters registration, magazine subscriptions, student loans, bills, all online accounts where you subscribe.
7. Timing IS everything.  If you are moving to Texas: DO.NOT.MOVE.IN.THE. SUMMER.  Just don’t do it.  We have moved twice in the summer since living in Texas; it was two of the stupidest decisions we have ever made.  Moving in December makes moving much more pleasant.
8. If you have people coming to help you move, have plenty of water ready and offer to feed them after they move you.
9. Humble yourself and ask for help.  This will make your life easier and people who love you WANT to help. Let them! This is always so challenging for me because I feel guilty asking for help.  Sometimes you just have to let go of that guilt so you can be showered with blessings.  HUGE thank you for those who volunteered to help us move!

Thank you so much for all of these tips.  They were put into practice and made for such a smooth transition.  Once again LWTH readers pulled us through; y’all are seriously THE BEST!
After a wonderful 3 week vacation I’m back at work today, refreshed and ready to go.  Happy Monday friends!

Moving Update

Like that title? I’m so full of creativity these days. Can’t you tell?  lol  I do feel a bit overwhelmed with my to do lists lately.  As things get crossed off I am hoping my creativity will return.  To recap, 12/12/12 we closed on our house and moved in on 12/22.  I took some pictures of the move and wanted to share them with you.

Our collection of packed up boxes
Last night in our apartment before the move.

The week before we moved we had our new appliances delivered.  They actually arrived on my birthday.  Nothing makes me feel older than getting appliances for my birthday.  Don’t get me wrong, they are fabulous appliances and we are blessed to have them.  BUT it sure does reminded me of previous birthdays when I got an expensive purse or a sassy new pair of shoes.
Moving day and the Uhaul was packed!  We have too much stuff!
How quickly some things were unpacked

Priorities people ;-)
Introducing the pups to their new house and yard.  Video to come soon!
The first harvest from our new garden.  These peppers are so good; I’ve been putting them in the Mr’s hummus and he loves it!

I’ve really got to get myself together on what I will plant in the spring.  I am so excited about this!

Just 3 days after we moved we celebrated our first Christmas in the new house.  It was also our first Christmas in Texas.  It was slow and peaceful; we enjoyed it very much.  We didn’t get a tree (I didn’t see the point in buying a tree that was probably too dry for only 3 days), so I put up a really small one I found while unpacking.  I hung Santa hung the pups stockings by the tree.  They got two LARGE chew bones and two toys each from Nanna.  They were so very happy!
On Christmas we skyped back home while we opened gifts.  The Mr also gave his parents a tour of the new house.  We are so grateful for how teachnology keeps up connected!More moving updates to come! Hope you’re not getting board with the moving posts; this is just where we are in life right now.   We’ve got more furniture and DIY projects to do, after that I can’t wait to give you a tour of case de Hawley!

What I’m Lovin’ Wednesay: Monkey Bread

I really wish I could take credit for this recipe, but alas I cannot.  This is my version of Monkey Bread, adapted from the amazing PW.  This is a recipe we should save for special occasions because of the caloric count……but we don’t!  It’s just too good to reserve for special days.  I hope you get to try this recipe soon, because it is fantastic!

Ingredients:
3 cans buttermilk biscuits (the non-flaky ones)..generic brands work fine
1 cup sugar
3 tsp cinnamon
2 sticks butter
½ cups brown sugar

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Quarter the biscuits.
3. Combine the white sugar with cinnamon in a gallon zip bag and shake to mix evenly. (3 tsp of cinnamon gives it a fairly strong cinnamon flavor. If you’re not so hot on cinnamon, cut it back to 2 tsp.)
4. Drop all of the biscuit quarters into the cinnamon-sugar mix and shake vigorously. This will get all those pieces unstuck from one another and nicely coated with cinnamon-sugar. Spread these nuggets out evenly into a bundt pan.
5. Melt butter together with brown sugar in a saucepan over medium-high heat. This can be light or dark brown sugar. Cook butter/sugar mixture, stirring for a few minutes until the two become one. Once the brown sugar butter has become one color, you can pour it over the biscuits.
6. Bake for about 30-40 minutes until the crust is a deep dark brown on top. When it’s finished cooking, remove it from the oven. If you have the willpower, allow it to cook for about 15-30 minutes before turning it over onto a plate.
7. No need to be fancy, just get your fingers dirty and start pulling the nuggets apart.  You wont regret it!

The Top Fifteen of 2012

This has been a HUGE year in the Hawley house.  So many wonderful things have happened to us where we have grown in our marriage, finances, occupations, and so many other things I could list.  We have had the awesome opportunity to share our lives with you and we are so grateful to our readers!  Thank you!!!  Come, join me, and take a stroll down memory lane while we revisit YOUR favorite top 15 posts of 2012.  If you’re new around these here parts (yikes sometimes my southern draw just slips out) this might help you catch up with LWTH. 

Tomlin’s New Brother

Glass Etching

Pinot’s Palette

Dueling BBQ Sauces

Knock You Naked Brownies

Struggles and Praises

My New Office

Professor Hawley

Pots de Crème

Our New House

Fall Decorations

Fall Monogrammed Wreath

Giggling Mondays

Blates

Be sure to check out my beautiful sisters Whitney, Selena, and Stephanie

Fall Fashion

Were any of these your favorites this year?

For more on the Hawley nest, check us out here.

Here are ways you can follow us and stay up to date with the Hawley happenings throughout the year.

Facebook – Twitter – Pinterest – Instagram

For us, it seems like each year gets better than the last.  Of course we have our trials and storms but God always seems to bring us through them.  We are certainly looking forward to what the Lord has in store for us in 2013. 

Happy New Year!!!

Five Spectacular Years

It's hard to believe, but tomorrow, the Mr and I will have been married for 5 years.  5 years people!!!  I cannot believe it!  While it seems like this time has gone by so quickly, it also feels like I can’t remember life before him.  It has occurred to me, with this marital milestone, that I have never shared our engagement story (despite several requests from my sister- sorry Kel!) or about our wedding.  It’s probably about that time, don’t ya think?  Since it’s our anniversary I will start with the wedding and tackle our engagement story another time. 

For some background, the Mr and I had just moved to Houston from VA.  While I am from VA, the Mr is from the Pittsburgh area.  We were engaged in September of 2007 and started planning our wedding right away.  Because we wanted to get married over Christmas break (since we would be back home anyway and it was between graduate school semesters for us), we had the worry of the snow.  There would definitely be snow and my family wouldn’t be able to get to Pittsburgh area and vice versa.  So the inevitable idea of two weddings emerged.  We decided that the Mr’s father would marry us at his home church in WV followed by a reception, we would then go on our honeymoon, and then we would fly back into VA for a second wedding reception.  In theory, this sounded like a lot of fun (and don’t get me wrong it definitely was), but planning two weddings (one in WV and one in VA) from TX in 3 months, during my first semester of grad school…….what in the world was I thinking?!?!?!  I was clearly head over heels and blinded by love! lol With a quick engagement it allowed me to focus on the most important things, and I didn’t get lost in the buttons and bows of a wedding; I just didn’t have time to worry about details.  So this is how it turned out:

Attending: WV wedding and reception- 150 people, and VA reception- 150 people

Engagement: 3 months

Invitations: These were very inexpensive and the only picture I have of them is from my tutorial on making them into a Christmas ornament last year.  haha See here

Colors:  Our colors were silver and black

Bridal Party: I chose my sister, Kellyn, and pledge sister, Katie, (actually we are all DZ’s), to stand up next to me at the alter; what a blessing these two were!  The Mr chose a childhood friend and his brother for groomsmen.

Parties: My bridesmaids threw me a great shower at our sorority house and it was such a great surprise.   I remember everything about that night.  For my bachelorette party, they planned another great surprise for me: it was a tacky tour with all our girl friends in a limo around Richmond.  It was so perfect for me and everything I could have ever wanted.

Check out that TX tan! lol

Rehearsal dinner:  Since the wedding was in WV so was the rehearsal dinner.  Everything was such a fast blur that I don’t remember much.  I know that everyone was sitting at large round tables, but that is about it.  I don’t even remember what was served.  Though I do remember the Mr getting me to try fried pickles for the first time.  They were pretty good but were not what was served at dinner.

Dresses: Because I was in Houston and didn’t have a lot of time.  I went one afternoon in October to one store and picked out my dress.  It was the first dress I tried on and I loved it.  It was nothing like I thought I wanted.  My favorite part was the crystal broach at the waist.  The store said that they would have to order it for me in my size. Since I didn’t have much time for a dress to be ordered and altered, because I was having my bridal portraits the next month, I asked what size the dress on the manikin was.  It was my size, and a perfect fit---no alterations needed and $200 off for being on the manikin.  Perfect!  Dress buying took me about 30 minutes. 

In the store trying on my dress and veil.  I loved the bustle on my dress.

Here are some of my bridal portraits.  Sorry for the poor quality.

When Kellyn and Katie, my bridesmaids, came to Houston to dress shop, I told them that I didn’t care what kind of dress they got as long as it was black.  I know so many women spend hundreds of dollars on dresses that just hang in their closets, and I wanted them to get something that they would wear again, and everyone wears black dresses.  They picked out their dresses before they saw mine, and it was the perfect dress because when they saw my dress the beading at the top was exactly the same.  My bridesmaids and I wore our dresses at both receptions.  What other time would you get to wear your wedding dress twice? ! lol

Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: My something new was my dress, my something blue was my garter, my something borrowed was the pence in my shoe, and my something old was my pearl earrings.

Shoes: These were so precious to me. My sister spent three months making me shoes and socks for the wedding. I wanted to be comfortable but I’m also a foot and a half shorter than the Mr. So my sister helped me to find affordable platform white tennis shoes (this is much harder to find than you would expect) and she made them pretty for me. They were perfect for all the dancing!

Flowers: This was something that I was a little disappointed with.  I wanted fake flowers to carry (seriously I might be the only bride who has said this) so that I could keep them forever.  I wanted tulips, and I got tulips, but they did not look great.  Since it was right after Christmas, the church was still decorated with candles, poinsettias, and Christmas trees.  I still love this aspect of our wedding because I love that time of the year.  There is a joke with our families because I didn’t want bows on the pews to reserve family seating.  I told them that I didn’t want “pew bows” and they all thought I said I didn’t want “pewbs”  I’ll let you think on that for a second.  haha We still laugh about that.  Instead I had evergreen swags made with black and silver ribbon and Christmas ornaments instead of “pew bows”.  We still have these and want to use them as Christmas decorations in our new house next year.

Vows: Our vows were not traditional, but they also weren’t memorized.  We were so nervous that if we had to remember something else I am pretty sure one of us would have passed out.  I have written about our vows before, see here.  They are currently posted in our kitchen so that we can see them daily and be reminded of our covenant.

Cakes: In WV we had the Mr’s favorite vanilla cake with whipped icing.  In VA we had my favorite cake baked by a great family friend with buttercream icing. We used the same cake toppers on both cakes: an old wooden bride and groom that has been used on every cake in my family for decades.

West Virginia cake

Virginia cake- I loved the fountain in the bottom

Food:  We had a sit down dinner at the first reception with ribeyes, chicken cordon bleu, or salmon.  At the second reception it was a buffet styled dinner.

Photography: One thing I recommend to all brides-to-be is to invest in a photographer. I was cheap about this and I regret it ALL the time. I wish we had better photos of this day.  The best pictures I got were from family and friends, not our photographers.

First Dance: The Mr and I took several dance lessons because we didn’t want to dance like we did in college at our reception nor did we want to dance like we did in middle school.  We love Frank Sinatra so we chose to dance the Fox Trot to “World on a String”.  The first time we ever performed our dance perfectly was at the first reception; thank goodness! lol

Honeymoon: Since we had just moved to TX and were so over the heat, we wanted to go somewhere cold.  The first night after our wedding we stayed in Pittsburgh in a hotel over looking the Steelers stadium and the next day we left for Montreal, Canada.  It was –15 degrees and we definitely got what we wanted: COLD!  I think our favorite memory was swimming in the heated pool on the rooftop of the hotel at night in the snow.  It was gorgeous!

So that is a little taste of our wedding.  Like all marriages we have had our highs and lows but through the Lord we have laughed at the peaks, and clung together in the lows.  Hubby you are more than I could have ever dreamed of and I praise the Lord for you daily.  Thank you for being such a spectacular husband.  I am truly looking forward to many more years with you!