After lunch, I headed home, made a grocery list, and headed to the store. I wanted to make a nice dinner for Jeff and one of his favorite sweet treats - coffee cake.
**Story of Jeff's love for coffee cake: We went to visit Little a few years back, and her mother made coffee cake which instantly became one of Jeff's favorite things. He joked that I almost lost him to my little all because of that cake! hehe**
The coffee cake was more challenging than I anticipated, but it turned out amazing and was really yummy. After I got that into the oven, I started working on dinner - steak, real mashed potatoes (not from the box) and steamed asparagus. I was a little nervous about it all because I had never really made any of those things on my own. I was really excited about the mashed potatoes because I know it is one of his favorites and I was hoping it would turn out yummy since it wasn't from a box... I wanted it to be amazing!
Here are some pictures from the yummy dinner and coffee cake...
Cooking the potatoes before mashing them...
Prepping the steaks...
Coffee Cake!!
Mashed potatoes!!! Yummy!!
Our yummy dinner...
The handsome fiancé...
The next morning, we both slept in a little and decided to kick off the wedding planning weekend with coffee cake and mimosas! It was a delicious breakfast! We started digging through wedding magazines for ideas and inspiration. Only sad part of the morning was when Jeff accidentally knocked over his glass, spilling his drink everywhere and shattering the glass. Luckily, it was an easy clean up and we were back in wedding planning mode.
While enjoying breakfast, we worked on "finalizing" the guest list and trying to estimate how many invitations and save the dates we would need to order so we can estimate costs for each of those things. Then we started looking at save the date designs and invite designs. Before we knew it, we had spent 3 or 4 hours looking through things and we were starving. In the usual J&M fashion, we made a pizza for lunch and enjoyed our beloved "dark soda" (aka. Diet Pepsi Max). Delicious lunch!
After lunch, we got ready and decided to head to Concord Mills to look at wedding bands and walk around the mall together. The shopping trip was successful! I found a super cute paisley tie for Jeff and he found a new Polo button up. I fought the urge to buy new shoes - which was a huge success! :) We were even successful in looking for wedding bands!!! Jeff found several bands that he liked and I got to try on the one I picked out the last time we were at the mall together. We can get Jeff's band and my band at the same place that he got the "sparkly" (J&M slang for engagement ring) from. Because of the shape of my ring, I have to get a contoured band, and more than likely one that is a wrap style. I tried on the same one that I tried on awhile back and it didn't quite fit exactly as I remembered, but Jeff assured me that it looked beautiful and that after the jeweler sized it down to fit my baby hands, it would look even better. He always knows what to say and always knows when I am worried about something before I say a word. Yet another reason to add to the list of why I am so lucky to have him in my life! The rings he picked out are made by a designer that uses a metal that is tougher than tungsten and is shatterproof unlike other types of metals we had been looking at. We learned that Jeff also has "baby hands" because his ring size was much smaller than what we thought it would be! :) The different bands he tried on were all fairly similar and were not the traditional plain silver band. They all had a little extra something that made them slightly different than the average band. Jeff is just trying to decide if he wants a band with diamonds or without. At least we have the choices narrowed down to a few different rings! :) Check that off the list... kind of! :)
Originally, we were going to go to the Bank of America 500 NASCAR race in Charlotte, but as last week progressed the ticket prices increased so we decided to save the money and instead go out to dinner. We went to the Rock Bottom Brewery in uptown. Jeff had a chicken sandwich and I had a yummy chicken salad. The restaurant was celebrating Octoberfest so Jeff and I decided to take part and celebrate by enjoying their Octoberfest brew. The waitress asked us what size drinks we wanted, and Jeff responded, "The bigger ones will be fine" not knowing what the difference between small and large were. The waitress brings us our drinks... we were shocked...
Fiancé with our drinks
These mugs were GIANT!!!
My drink is the one on the left...
I was having trouble holding both of them up because they were so heavy!
Empty!! Well almost... Mine was on the right... :)
After a very delicious dinner, we headed home. We were going to meet up with a few people but decided we would rather share a few drinks together at home and play cards. We were both pretty tired from the previous week. Staying home turned out to be a great idea - we had a BLAST playing rummy... I think Jeff won... Which means I have to beat him next time... At least we weren't playing Monopoly because that gets super competitive! :)
Sunday arrived too quickly. We enjoyed more coffee cake for breakfast (around noon - haha) and then started looking at invitation options again. We watched a little football, and celebrated the idea that the Bills didn't lose this week... probably because they had a bye... :) Browsing through all the invitation ideas inspired us to go to the craft store - Jeff's favorite place! (haha) We headed to Matthews (where the closest AC Moore was) and began looking at all the options for making our invites. We learned about different embossing machines, different heat embossers that use stamps and powders, and tons more. We left empty handed but full of ideas. Just as we were jumping on the highway, we noticed Michael's was right off the exit, so we made a quick turn and headed in to check out what options they had. We left Michael's excited that we found some paper we liked and bought a few pieces to make a sample.
By the time we left Michael's we were starving! We decided to head to a sushi place I found a few weeks ago. Jeff is not a big seafood person, and I was never a huge fan of raw fish. But, a year or so ago, one of my friends forced me to eat sushi and now I am addicted. I don't eat all of the sushi options, but there are a few rolls that I absolutely love! I convinced Jeff while we were on vacation this summer to try sushi at a bayside restaurant and he loved it! He was as excited as I was to enjoy some sushi at this cute place. We both had crispy California rolls. Jeff had a side of garlic noodles (which were amazing) and I had some fried rice. We were STUFFED after we finished. The food was amazing!
After sushi, we took a walk through Trader Joe's so Jeff could see what it was all about. It is a pretty neat grocery store filled with organic and healthy items. The best part about the store is their selection of "2 Buck Chuck" and their amazingly low prices on cheeses. I have found a new love for goat cheese which can be pricey - except at Trader Joe's! :)
After our walk, we headed home and tried to make our first invitation sample! We have pictures of the final product, but we don't want to ruin the surprise of what the invites will look like. If you want to see what we are considering, let me know! :) Here is a photo of Jeff hard at work...
I can't wait until I get to see Jeff again in just a few days when I head north for WVU's Homecoming!! Not only will we get to spend more time together, but we will also get to see TONS of our closest friends! It is going to be tough getting through the week with all the anticipation of the fun weekend ahead!!!
We are really looking forward to the next few weeks because we will get to see each other a good bit! :-) The next several weeks will be spent traveling a good bit, but it will all be worth it! :-)
xoxo
J&M
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