One Year Married!

About a week ago we celebrated our one year wedding anniversary! To be technical (and in case you are reading this way far in the future), our wedding date is August 22, but with that pesky leap year, our actual anniversary was on a Monday. I try to take any excuse to schedule a vacation day, so I took off work for our anniversary, but as I have more vacation days than Barry, he still had to work. But this meant we had a long(ish) weekend to celebrate our first full year of being officially and legally married!

Here is Our Super Awesome First Wedding Anniversary Weekend Extravaganza!

Friday - Softball, Scrapbooks, and Haunted Mansion

Barry is currently on a Fall softball team, so Friday night, he had his last night of practice before the games really got into full swing (pun completely intended). This was fine with me since I had to finish up his anniversary present anyway! After he got home, we got an unexpected surprise! Extremely awesome, loving and super rad family friends were enjoying their first trip to Disney in years and skyped us in so we could go into the Haunted Mansion stretching room with them! It was a lovely and exciting surprise to be sure! They are a fantastic family and Lucie is the creator of Hugs From Lucie, a non profit organization that donates time, and teddy bears to children in the hospital! Check out her website to see how you can be involved: http://www.hugsfromlucie.com/

Saturday - Salvation Army & Sushi

One of our favorite things to do on the weekends is to go thrifting! We had gone to too many thrift stores close to our house, and even though most thrift stores get new shipments every week, they had gotten to be a little stale. With our upcoming Disney trip, we wanted to put together a few outfits for Disney Bounding.

[What is Disney Bounding you ask? Well, Disney Bounding is a way to cosplay as your favorite characters, but using regular fashion instead of costumes. Check out http://disneybound.co/ to check out their outfit suggestions and to get more information! It’s a really fun thing to do whether you’re in the Parks or just living your normal everyday life!]

So we went about 30 minutes outside of our normal radius and went to about 5 different thrift shops to piece together some bounds as well as some Halloween costumes. I am a firm believer in creating your own Halloween costume. It's much more fun than store-bought! Eventually, all of our treasure hunting made us thirsty and since we were in the area, we decided to check out Jailbreak, a local brewery in the area. The inside of the tasting room was awesome - so sleek and open! They had high tables, great art on the walls (some was even by the lead singer of Jimmie's Chicken Shack, Jimi Haha!), and a TV viewing area complete with over-stuffed super comfy couches.

Weighed down by our thrifting treasures, we headed out to a sushi date with one of our favorite couples in the whole wide world! Katie and Jason have a special place in our hearts because they were the witnesses that signed our marriage certificate on our wedding day! SO, it was only natural that we should go out with them during our first wedding anniversary weekend celebrations!

Plus later that night, we got to hang out with their 4 month old daughter, who we have completely adopted as our honorary niece. It was the perfect Saturday!

Sunday - Glassblowing Studio

Sunday was special because we got to go to the glass blowing studio right down the street from our house! The studio is called Mcfadden Art Glass (website: http://www.mcfaddenartglass.com/). And not only do they so private classes and date night classes, they are also a working studio that makes special orders. Check out their website above to see how you can schedule a workshop or join a date night!

For our wedding, we knew we wanted to do some kind of unity ceremony, but we also knew that we didn't want to do the traditional sand or knot tying ceremony either. We had been to Mcfadden’s for a workshop (we drove by the studio every day since it was right by our house and had always wanted to check it out) and made a pretty serving bowl a few months before our wedding which gave us the inspiration to use glass in our ceremony! We swapped the sand for colored glass, and used a vintage cocktail shaker and glasses and ta-da! A totally unique and meaningful unity ceremony!

We had a ton of colored glass from our unity ceremony, so we decided we would make a lot of things with our colored glass so we would always have tangible tokens of our wedding! Last Christmas, Barry made a pendant out of the glass for a necklace, it was beautiful! This time, we wanted to make something practical, so we made a vase for my wedding bouquet (I used faux flowers so I could keep them forever). Naturally we had our GoPro with us, check out the video of us creating our awesome vase below:

Tim Mcfadden is the owner and head artist at the studio, and he was the one we got to make our vase with. He is amazing and so talented, not only at glassblowing, but also at teaching! He always explains why you are doing everything, so you really understand the process (sadly a lot of the audio of him talking in our video was drowned out by the sound of the kilns). Check out our finished vase below!

Monday - Rusty Scupper, Paper Lanterns, Wishes

Officially our one year anniversary! I finished up Barry’s present and gave it to him right before we went to the Rusty Scupper to celebrate. I made him a scrapbook (since the first year is the paper anniversary) filled with everything we had done in our first year of being married! I worked on it while I was at work so he wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon it in our house! Here are some of his favorite pages of the scrapbook:

One of my favorite things about getting married at the Rusty Scupper (besides the delicious food of course) is the fact that we get to go back and have dinner at the place we got married any time we want!

They were so nice and accommodating to us, giving us free champagne with our dinner!

And they even let us go up to the 3rd floor balcony (which is where we had our ceremony) and look out onto the harbor. It was another beautiful day - two years in a row! We couldn't have asked for better weather on our wedding day or on our anniversary!

After dinner, we stopped by my mom’s house to show off the scrapbook and then we headed to Katie and Jason’s to see baby Ellie and apparently to one last surprise Barry had up his sleeve - Paper Lanterns! We went out to a nearby baseball field to try and release one, but unfortunately it didn’t really go as planned. The wind was too rough and blew our paper lantern right into the ground!

However, we tried again once we were home and it was successful! See the video here.

Finally, we had some of our yummy wedding cake - it wasn’t terrible after de-thawing it- and sat in bed reading our well-wishes from our guestbook. We had guests write us advice and well-wishes to be put in a bottle and read on our first anniversary! I was great to read each person’s little scroll and appreciate all of the love they were sending us from the past!

It was a great first year of being married and I can't wait to celebrate more anniversaries in the years to come! Next year is the “China” anniversary..I wonder how much airfare will be to Asia in 2017…..