Our First Wedding Since Our Own!

This past weekend Jonathan and I made a trip up to Austin for a wedding of a friend of mine from college. She was actually one of my roommates during my senior year! It was so great to see everyone! I got to see so many people that I hadn't seen since our wedding or even longer! I met Karen through my sorority at UT. People are often surprised to hear that I was a sorority girl but it was a Catholic sorority so it's much different than what you normally think of as a sorority. Really just an organization for Catholic women. I loved being involved with Mu Epsilon Theta in college. It gave me a home while being on such a humongous campus! Karen's wedding ceremony was held at the University Catholic Center on the UT campus which is where I spent a lot of time hanging out with friends. It was so great to get to go back to campus and reminisce. It had been probably over a year or more since I'd been back. Way too long!! Everything was exactly how I'd left it!

We got there early so we walked around campus a little before the ceremony:


The tower! The heart of campus!

View from the main mall with the state capitol in the distance.

The UT campus is so pretty :-). Before we knew it, it was time for the wedding! Here's a picture of the chapel right before the ceremony started:

It was a beautiful ceremony! Karen is never one for making decisions so instead of picking one color for her wedding, she chose 5! Each bridesmaid and groomsmen wore a different color and carried a matching lantern instead of a bouquet. It was so pretty and really symbolic of how their marriage is a light to the world.

The reception was held at Maggiano's Little Italy and it was a fantastic venue! The food was great and there was tons of it! The service was amazing, the place was beautiful, and we had plenty of fun on the dance floor. All of our tables were named after different TV shows that Karen and Evan love to watch. I was a bit disappointed to not get to sit at the Boy Meets World table but our table was full of fun people. We were the Firefly table, and proud of it! Karen and Evan were announced for the first time as Mr. and Mrs. and took their first dance:

By the way, Evan can dance! He has taught ballroom dancing at UT! I felt a little intimidated but that didn't stop me from getting out on the dance floor!

I did manage to get a few pictures with the bride!

She's so beautiful!!!

 

Roommates!



All the Mu Epsilon Thetas! Mu love!

And one of us...

He's so handsome...

Karen's aunt made her dress! Can you believe that??? Especially when her aunt lives in Maine! I'm amazed she could pull that off, but Karen looked absolutely stunning! Her cousin also made her wedding cake. I want connections like hers!

It was so great to see so many friends and to catch up with each other. After the reception we all headed to a friends apartment to play cards. It was a hilarious card game called Cards Against Humanity. It's like Apples to Apples but more "adult", if you get what I mean haha. We played that for a few hours and then headed back to the hotel. As we were entering the hotel we notice Karen and Evan sitting there. They were there hanging out with their family! How lucky were we to get to see the bride and groom again?? They seemed to have a great time at their wedding and it went perfectly. We chatted for awhile until we realized that it was past 2am and Karen and Evan had to leave for their flight at 7am that morning. We said goodbye and wished for them to have a great time on their honeymoon.

Sunday morning we didn't have time to do much since we had to get back to Houston to celebrate Jonathan's birthday with our parents. However, we did manage to sneak in some time for mass, Mangia's pizza, and the arboretum! Mangia's is one of my favorite restaurants in Austin. They serve deep dish pizza they way you're supposed to make deep dish pizza: sauce on top, then cheese, and then toppings! I spent the first 10 years of my life in Chicago so I'm very partial to Chicago style pizza! It's so good! I do not think any other type of pizza qualifies as a pie... Anyways, this kind of pizza is so hard to find in Texas so I'm always stoked when we're in Austin and can go to Mangia's. Just look!



Yummmm!

We finished our trip with some Amy's Ice Cream and this beautiful view from the Arboretum:




It's nice to get to Austin and see the hills. Houston is seriously flat. Normally I don't mind, but it's refreshing to see rolling hills every now and then.

I had a blast at the wedding! I was totally reliving every minute of our wedding the whole time putting me on cloud nine haha. It didn't hurt that our friends were also telling us how amazing our wedding was too. Even Karen said so! Don't you worry, hers was up there. We settled on my wedding being the best of 2012 and hers of 2013. We both win anyways because we get to be married to our loves! Sorry to be so cheesy...weddings really bring it out in me.

Until next time,
-Chelsey

Dream Dinners!

Have you ever done Dream Dinners before? Dream Dinners is a place where you go and pick out what meals you'd like for the next month or so, assemble it there, and then take it home and freeze them and pull out whenever you want a quick meal. It's kind of fun because they have everything laid out for you and it makes the prep really easy. Jonathan and I did it once and it was kind

of like a date because it's fun to put everything together. It's more expensive than getting all the ingredients yourself but it's cheaper than going out so it's worth it for a lot of people. After Jonathan and I did it once, I really liked the food but I didn't think it was worth it for us to keep going since we love to cook and always have our kitchen pretty well stocked. I did really like not have to spend forever every night getting everything ready for each meal. So I thought, why not do it myself? I mentioned it to Colleen too and as always she was super pumped to join me! We tried it for the first time over the summer and it was a huge success. I made like 9-10 entrees in one afternoon. It was the best! Every time we needed dinner I just popped one in the oven for 30 minutes and dinner was done. The only problem was that I made the perfect amount for dinner and then we never had leftovers to take for lunch.

Well, we decided to do it again yesterday! This time around I decided to make larger portion things so we'd have plenty of leftovers for other meals. First up was chili! I made two batches chili: one with ground beef and the other with ground chicken which I'd never worked with before. I froze the first one and the one with chicken is cooking in our crockpot right now!



The recipe involved a lot of chopping, but look how pretty!

Doesn't look like much now but soon it will be delicious chili!



Colleen made a tortilla soup. I definitely want to try that next time!

I also made a pork marinade, combined that with some pork chops, and froze them for another day. I didn't take any pictures though.

Finally, Colleen had a great recipe for protein balls made with peanut butter, quinoa, agave, banana, dates, and other great stuff. Plus they were fun to make.



Ready to go in the freezer for an easy snack!

Even if it was a little messy....

And now I have homemade chili cooking in my crockpot as we speak. I can't wait to get home and be greeted with the wonderful smell of it cooking!


It looks so good! And pretty!

I already want to make more recipes! I am really really REALLY bad at planning ahead when it comes to cooking. I'm usually too lazy to plan and get all the ingredients ahead of time to make a specific meal. I usually just look at what I have on hand and figure out what I can make with it. Not that that's a bad thing, it's actually pretty fun most of the time, but sometimes that means I don't try new things as often. Plus, I have a bad habit about going out to eat when I don't know what to make for dinneror when I'm feeling lazy. Making my own freezer meals totally saves me with this! Anyone up for a dream dinners party? Any great recipes or ideas for the next one??

-Chelsey

Citrus and Running

You may be confused about the title of this post but those were the two highlights of my day! We've been enjoying a lot of great grapefruit juice lately. My parents have two grapefruit trees in their backyard that my grandfather gave us. About 15 years ago, my grandfather took the seeds from his morning grapefruit, grafted them (whatever that means), grew them until they were about 2 feet tall, and then drove them down from Iowa to Texas so that we could grow them in our backyard. They're beautiful trees and we never expected them to grow fruit. A few years ago my parents walked outside in their backyard and grapefruit were growing! I'm was really shocked and impressed! Who would have thought that seeds from a store bought grapefruit would turn into beautiful fruit producing trees?? The first year they got about 25 lbs per tree and since then they've gotten about 125 lbs per tree each year. That means 250 lbs of grapefruit per year! Fun fact of the day: did you know that grapefruit grow in bunches like grapes? That's why they're called "grape" fruit. I'm sure you're not surprised that everytime we visit my parents we get at least 8 grapefruit haha. We've been loving it and I've been using the juicer that we got for our wedding nonstop (thanks Jordan and Amber!) Just check out how much juice we get from one grapefruit:

And the juice is so delicious!

We were also lucky enough to get to visit some friends of ours before Christmas who have a lemon tree. They gave us a ton of lemons and they were huge: the size of oranges! I was so excited because we knew that we wanted to try making lemonade. We both like trying new foods. It came out delicious!

Juicing is so easy to do and I feel better drinking it since so it's so much healthier than buying store bought juice. It's so hard finding store bought juice that isn't made with hfcs or added sugar. I can't wait for our own house so we can plant fruit trees and a little garden in the backyard!

On to the running part of the post! If you read our blog on our wedding website you know that I really got into running the past three years and ran my first half marathon last year. Well I'm planning on running another one this year in March! I have to be honest with you. Running this year has been tough for me. I always have to take a break from running over the summer because it's just too hot living in Texas. Once the fall starts I usually get right in the swing of things and start running as much as possible. Well this year I haven't really been able to run much at all. Most of fall I felt pretty awful because the weather kept swinging back and forth and constantly messed with my sinuses. I was so frustrated because I really wanted to run but never felt great when I tried to run. I just couldn't get into a groove and couldn't run very far before having to walk. It made me so nervous because I started doubting whether or not I could even do this half marathon. Last weekend I was super determined to go out and have a great run and then that morning I took a fall down the stairs, hurt my foot, and spent most of the day on the couch icing my foot. I was convinced that the universe was working against me and was determined to keep me from running! (I'm fine by the way! I was able to walk again by that evening and took it slow the rest of the week.) Well today had one of those runs where I just felt great! I really enjoyed running and wanted to just keep going and going. It just made me realize that running is tough! Sometimes we have good runs and sometimes running sucks and that's ok! I should just be proud of getting off my butt and working out. My favorite motivational quote is:

And it's true! Did you know that you burn more calories when you walk/run instead of running nonstop? When you run you're body gets very efficient at running and you burn less calories than doing intervals of running and walking. So there's no need to feel embarrassed when runners pass you while you're walking!

Here's some more of my favorite running quotes:

I tell myself this after the crappy runs!

Hahahaha makes me laugh!

So if any of you think that running just doesn't work for you and you've never been able to enjoy running like other people do, please stay with it! When I first started running, it took me about 3 months before I started really loving it. Now again after months of struggling with running, I'm starting to love each run more and more! It takes a lot of determination and stubbornness sometimes but it'll pay off in the end.

Do you have any great running quotes that keep you motivated?? I'm always looking for more ways to stay motivated!

-Chelsey

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! I have to admit, I was kind of sad for 2012 to end. 2012 was a really amazing year. We got engaged, got married, moved into a house together, and as you've read we've gotten to see and do a lot of fun things since then. Then again, the fun doesn't stop in 2012 and 13 has kind of been a lucky number for us. We started dating on Friday the 13th when Jonathan and Ana came up to Austin to surprise me. People think we're crazy when we tell them that, but for us it turned into a good luck thing and we get excited when another Friday the 13th is coming up. That's why we wanted to get married on April 14th: it was 5 and a half years since we'd started dating. Plus it was a bonus that our rehearsal dinner was on a Friday the 13th. So bring it on 2013! I'm sure it will be another amazing year!

For most people, New Years isn't a big holiday. At least, for me it wasn't before I started dating Jonathan. I quickly learned in our first year of dating that for Venezuelans, really all Latin Americans, New Years is a big celebration. Every year it is a very elegant event and it is very important to ring in the new year with your family. This was quite a big surprise to me because I had never thought of New Years as very important in the past. It took me awhile to get used to it but now I look forward to the big dinner celebration every year. This year we wanted to host New Years at our house. We love to have people over and cook for our friends and family so we were really excited to host our first holiday dinner. Both of our families came so it was great to ring in the new year with everyone.

Jonathan having some yummy cheese. Our homemade Christmas goodies are on the far end of the table too.

Clockwise starting in top left: kale, potatoes and vegetables, pork loin, and sweet potatoes!

Unfortunately those were all the pictures I took of the night. Everything was so delicious so I got a little distracted. We finished dinner with a rocky road pie and champagne to toast the new year. Then we went to a family friend's New Years party where we had more champagne and of course 12 grapes as the clock struck midnight. It's tradition to have 12 grapes at midnight on New Years. It is for good luck in the new year and you have to eat 12, 1 for every month. It's kind of a funny sight to see a big group of people trying to drink their champagne, eat their grapes, and hug and kiss each other all at the same time haha. I assure you, I am the least graceful one out of everyone. Nonetheless, it's a very cute tradition.

I hope you all had a very good New Years! What did you do to celebrate?

- Chelsey