He knows me SO well

So I know I’m a newlywed, and newlyweds are usually all gushy and gooey eyed over each other, but I wanted to share this cool thing. As many of you know brides and grooms typically exchange some sort of wedding present right before the wedding. Many people do cuff-links or an engraved watch or other piece of jewelry, but Adam is really unique and never settles for average. As Adam and I were going over budgets and discussing money, we decided that it would be a waste to spend a bunch of money on gifts when we were already spending a bunch of money on the wedding, so we established a low budget for our gifts. Many of you know that Adam is incredibly talented and creative, so I knew that whatever he got me would be incredible. The night after the rehearsal dinner Adam and I exchanged are gifts, and his was amazing! He made me, The Book of Quality Time. I know that to many of you it doesn’t mean to much, but to me it meant everything. Awhile ago during our pre-marital counseling Brandon had us take the love languages test online. If you don’t know what it is, I strongly recommend you check it out here. It determines how you recieve and tend to give love, and there are 5 basic languages: Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Acts of Service or Gifts. Adam’s are Words of Affirmation and Acts of Service, and mine are Words of Affirmation and Quality Time. So usually we were missing the mark on the second love language. Now back to the story, so Adam decorated this antique looking book/box and in it were a ton of little envelopes with dates on them, all sealed. And he explained that he had come up with ”quality time ideas” for each Friday night for the next 6 months! Obviously some of those will have to be switched to Saturday nights, but just the thought that he had gone through and planned out ideas and things for us to do together, and spend quality time with one another, it literally took my breath away that he would be that thoughtful. So I get to open one each Friday, last Friday night was my first, and I was really excited. And it was perfect. Locatelli’s Pizza and a movie. We had a great night, we watched Lars and the Real Girl, hilarious movie, and the pizza was amazing. It was our first weekend at home being married, and I couldn’t have pictured it any better. I can’ t wait to see what this weekend’s will be. Thank you Adam, I love you so much, you are truly and amazing man and husband.

O Christmas Tree

 So it’s been a long standing tradition, as far back as I can remember that every year after Thanksgiving, my family goes to the Christmas Tree farm to cut down a Christmas Tree. While it might not be the most economical decision, it’s something that I’ve always looked forward to, and is by far one my favorite traditions. So this year, Adam and I got to cut down our very first tree together!! Saturday, we went with my parents, since they had to find a tree for their home, to the Christmas tree farm. We took Emme since we knew she would want to run around, and we found it. It’s little, and not very tall, but it’s perfect for our little apartment. We both took turn cutting it down, and it was so light that Adam could pick it up with one hand. We got some ornaments and lights at Target and had a little decorating party Monday night.

The Honeymoon

We had a blast! Honestly, it never really felt like we were going to Puerto Vallarta until we were on our way to my parent’s house Sunday morning. We left fairly early, which was ok because we waited a day in between our wedding and when we left, which I highly highly recommend. It totally made all the difference in the world for us. So, we headed out Sunday morning, and my parents and my brother took us to the airport. Chris, as always, photographed the car ride for us. Adam was clearly over-joyed about the honeymoon:

 We made it safely to the airport, with not much time to spare. It was nice saying good-bye to my family and then jet-setting off to our trip. We were pretty excited. I finally felt like I was going on vacation with my husband.

Unfortunately, when we walked into Terminal E, there was an incredibly long line. I mean long long. They had one line for weighing your bags and then another to check your bags. Our flight left at 8:45 and the time was 7:30. After standing in line for a while, and re-arranging our bags so that we didn’t have to pay extra for the weight (sometimes I pack too much ) we made it to the check-in counter at like 8:00. The gentleman made us aware that we should have been there much earlier for an international flight, that our flight was leaving out of Terminal B (even though we had to check into E) and that our bags might not make it on the flight, but he would try. So after a quick bag check, hurrying through security with people that don’t know how to take their stinking laptops out of their bags, we made it onto the train that takes you to the other terminal. We were literally running through the airport like on ‘Home Alone,’ except I didn’t get lost, the picture is a little blurry because we were running:

Luckily, we made it on the train just fine and boarded our flight and our bags made it wooo (deep sigh of relief), it was one of those really small planes where there are 2 seats one one side and 1 seats on the other. We were so excited we really didn’t care too much. We read our books and took a little nap, thankfully the flight wasn’t too long, just 2 and 1/2 hours, and no time change, even better.

 Not sure why my mouth is open, guess the book was really good. Anyways, it was really weird flying into the city because you never go over water since it’s on the west side of Mexico. And it is surrounded by mountains which is even cooler. I would have taken more pictures, however someone wanted the window seat.

When we got to the hotel, we checked in and it was a little to early to head to our room. We grabbed a drink from the bar and headed to the conceriege desk to make dinner reservations. Although the resort was all-inclusive, you still had to make dinner reservations. They were ‘booked’ until we mentioned it was our honeymoon, and ‘magically’ a table opened up. We walked around for a little bit until our room was ready, and headed up and took a nap It was like all the exhaustion from the past week had caught up with us both, and we passed out! I mean like for 5 hours passed out, how’s that for a romantic honeymoon. It was ok though because we were together and we were at a resort in Mexico. So we slept. Can you not totally tell we just woke up from a nap, nice hair. And when we awoke the sky was like this (beautiful huh?):

So we finally got around to getting ready for dinner, not wanting miss our ‘reservation’ for dinner. We dressed up and were a little early, so we sat outside, grabbed a couple drinks and discussed our plans for the week. I was pretty excited about the steakhouse for dinner, I figured that if anything, it would be a nice transition into the Mexican culture, ha! This was no American steakhouse, not even close. Adam got a rib-eye, and I think it was like a centimeter thick, and well-done, perfect. And he ordered the chocolate mousse, which I think turned out to be chocolate marshmellow. I the red wine was horrible, so much so that we drank champagne the whole not. But we just laughed it off. It was pretty funny, and made us a little curious as to how the food would be for the rest of the week (it got much better). After dinner, we went to watch part of the show, and headed back to bed, and went to sleep (for real). I think we were just absolutely exhausted, but we both slept like a rock.

The next morning we woke up and headed to the pool. We laid out and took a walk down the beach, and made our plans for the week. We got a good deal with a tour guide for a snorkeling trip and zip line adventure (both turned out to be amazing) and made our reservations for that night’s dinner (Japanese……??) The day was great, we also ended up getting a spa treatment, a mud body scrub, that was definitely the best part of the day. They put us in the same room, which was nice, and scrubbed us down with this mud stuff and then wrapped us securely in these heated blankets. I laughed to myself as I wondered how long it would take for Adam to realize that he was strapped in. After I had fallen asleep from the head massage, I hear this, “Senora…Senora…..quantos minutos???….quantos minutos????……caliente!!!…muy caliente!!!” I laughed becuase I could hear a little panic behind his voice. But overall it was great. After we rinsed off they gave us another massage. That night we headed to the room and got ready for dinner. Our dinners were never until like 8:45, so it was nice because we always got to watch the sunset from our room on our balcony. That night we were both a little nervous to eat Japanese food, considering our experience with the steakhouse. But surprisingly, it was really good. They had a ’sushi’ plate, although nothing was raw, thank goodness. That night we saw our first show at the theater, it was hilarious, Michael Jackson. Imagine 7 very untrained dancers, lip-syncing to “Billie Jean”, hilarious, absolutely hilarious, it was a great day.

The next day we had to wake up bright and early because we had to make it down to the pier for some snorkeling. Me being used to Cozumel and Cancun threw on a t-shirt and shorts over my bathing suit at 8 in the morning, and I was freezing all morning long (it’s a little cooler over there on the Pacific side). I was pretty leary of this so-called ’snorkeing trip’ becasue we had gotten it for free with our zip-line adventure. Well, it ended up being a blast! They took us out to this rock formation called Los Arcos and the bay that early in the morning really is beautiful – if only I had thought to bring a sweatsuit

We went for a fairly quick snorkeling trip in really cold water, seriously the guides were wearing wetsuits, that’s when you know you aren’t prepared. But you warmed up pretty quickly after swimming. I felt something kinda sting me in the water, but it felt similar to when you shave the morning before you go and get in the ocean, you know what I’m talking about. Anyways, we saw lots of fish, and we got back out of the water, and oh ya, we forgot towels, so we had to air dry, seriously needed the sweat suit then. But it quickly warmed up as the afternoon went on. We were going across the bay to a place for lunch. While we were on our way to the resteraunt they had a dancing competition. Which turned into an acting competition between me and another guy and Adam and another girl. We won (of course!) and this was my prize:

After the dancing and acting, we laid out and soaked up the sun – which was great since we finally started to dry off. They came around and gave us a fruit shot of something, and did the thing like at Carlos and Charlies, except that you had to wear a large sombrero (sp?). The crew really was hilarious. There was this woman on board, like 60ish who was getting down to the music the whole time, like everyone else would be dancing and she would be on the top of the boat shaking her thing. I should have gotten a picture.

The took us to the other side of the bay, which took a few hours actually, but it really was so nice and relaxing. We had such a blast just hanging out and enjoying the trip. We saw two huge Manna-Rays (20 ft) across, I had never seen anything like that before in my life. I tried to get pictures; however, they swim right on the surface of the water, so you couldn’t really see it through the camera. They truley were breathtaking creatures. Just a little tid-bit of trivia, the bay in Puerto Vallarta has a maximum depth of over 4,500 ft deep, isn’t that crazy? The humpback whales come into the bay Jan-April to have their babies, pretty cool. We made it across the bay and had a great lunch at this nice little roof-top bar called “Skybar.” It was nice to finally have some good, authentic Mexican food. We enjoyed our lunch, and lounged around…until we were approached by the people that paid for the lunch. Marival Resort. Adam and I being new to this whole marriage thing, didn’t realize we were prime candidates for time-share sales people. We were approached, offered a 4-day vacation, free breakfast, and $80 to come and listen to a “90-min presentation.” If you ever hear the words “resort” and “90 minuite presentation” and “free stuff” in the same sentence run, run fast, run very fast. We got suckered in and agreed to come and see the women the next morning. In the mean time, we soaked up some more sun on our roof top resteraunt, and took in the scenery around us, it was beautiful.

That afternoon when we returned to the resort, we took another nap ( a shorter one) before we headed to our sunset massage. Massages are relaxing, especially when you can hear the ocean behind you, but it was a little chilly for sure. We were walking out to the massage tables when I snapped this picture:

After our massage we went back and got ready for dinner again….a fushion resteraunt tonight. Again a little nervous about the cuisine, but more hopeful since the Japanese place was much better than the steak house. The dinner was great, lots of new foods, good wine, and great dessert. The waiters always knew the best dishes on the menu.

The show that night was Vegas I think, they kept getting better and better (and by that I mean more and more hilarious), but it was always nice to just go and sit outside while laughing at the dancers. The next morning we woke up and went to the ‘90-min presentation’ which turned out to be a twist-your-arm-till-it-breaks timeshare presentation. Three and a half hours later we left, not too happy, and blew our $80 gift certificate at their souvineir shop. And we definitley won’t be using the ‘free 4-day vacation’ which is not free by any means, discounted is more like it. Those people are worse than used-car salesmen, seriously. After we left the resort, we headed to the Westin to go to Niki Beach. It was great, they had beds that you could lay on, and great drinks and food. We stayed there for most of the afternoon relaxing and reading. And that little sting on my arm from snorkeling turned into a welt that wrapped around my entire arm, like 13 inches, it didn’t sting anymore, it just itched really really bad. We heard all kinds of remedies from milk to vinegar, but I just waited it out and tried not to scratch it, I thought it was kinda weird how it didn’t show up until the day after I got stung. It’s still not completely gone, hopefully it won’t leave any type of scar.

Dinner that night was at the buffet place, so we didn’t get too dressed up, and the show was actually funny because it was a guy vs. girls thing. It was a pretty good day, minus the presentation. The next morning we woke up early to go on our zip-line adventure. It was awesome! We took a speed boat across the bay again to this area that you can only get to by boat. The students that come to this town for school arrive by boat every day. We then took army vehicles, like where you have to hold on to the straps so that you don’t fall out, up the side of a mountain through a couple small villages. We then reached our destination. They fitted us for harnesses and helments, and put us on a mule to go up the remaining portion of the mountain side. Adam’s mule was hilarious, and held the whole line up because it kept stopping to eat. After we reached the top, we hiked for probably a good 10 minuites straight uphill, we were all sucking wind by that point, but we were literally on top of a mountain. From there we zip-lined through the jungle. Hiked, repelled down a waterfall, ziplined into a pool of freezing cold water, repelled some more, and finished off with hiking, and walking over tight-rope bridges. I would defintiley recommend this tour because it was great. The highest zip-line that we did was 450 feet in the air, so great.

Taxis can get pretty expensive in Puerto Vallarta because the majority of the hotels and resorts are outside of the adventures and the town, and we heard about the local bus for 50 cents a person, and we were all over it. Because we had been paying anywhere from 6-15 dollars for a taxi, and these were fixed rates because we were staying in a resort area, so you couldn’t haggle with the taxi drivers. The bus was great, the only drawback was that you had to wait awhile. Adam and I waited probably 20 minuites for the bus after our zipline tour, but we didn’t mind, we had fun.

That night we ate at the Mexican resteraunt, which was really good. I think their plan was to set the bar low on your first night so that it only gets better from there. It was a very romantic night, we walked along the beach after dinner and had great conversation. It was at this point that the whole wedding thing sunk in. I asked Adam if it had really happened, because the past week had felt a lot like a dream, it was so surreal.

The next day was our last full day in Puerto Vallarta We decided to wake up whenever we felt like waking up, and headed down to the pool. It was so nice out. We laid around for awhile, and then decided to head in to downtown PV by local bus. We ended up getting a little lost, and got off the bus a little too early, which was ok, because we had a great time walking around. We went to the flea markets, the local art festival, a historic church, and giant sand-castles. We got haggled by timeshare sellers, but we were much smarter this time. We had a blast, the downtown area is so pretty because all the streets are hilly, unlike the Carribean islands. Around sunset we found this awesome area called Playa Los Muertos. It was very non-touristy, and very pretty, towards the south end of the city. We watched the fishermen come in and filet the swordfish, and then we headed to dinner on the beach. It was an amazing resteraunt, called La Palapa, and it was so great to have really amazing food, with amazing wine, and my amazing husband. It was the perfect evening to wrap up our honeymoon. We even got this flaming coffee drink that was so cool to watch them make.

The view from our table at dinner:

 

The next morning we woke up early, so that I could catch a few more rays of sun before we headed home to Houston. We laid out and wrote our names in the sand, something we did very long ago in the summer of 2004, where we wrote “The Future Mr. and Mrs. Ashworth” and here we finally wrote it.

We finally headed home around 1ish and got to the airport on time! We were sad to go, but we had a blast.

After a long trip home, that airport was so loud! We made it, and had a great homemade meal from my parents and some great wine, and then we headed to our new home, new home for me at least. The honeymoon was amazing, by far the best vacation ever, we had an absolute blast, and we laughed and relaxed, it was perfect.

Bridal Portraits and Engagement Photos

I was very blessed to have two great photographers through out the wedding experience. And I wanted to share some of the pictures with you guys in case you are interested.

Bridal portraits were by my brother Chris, who did an incredible job, I absolutely loved them and could not picture them being any different. You can check out the rest of them here. And you can visit his website for other photos he has done.

My engagement and wedding photos were all done by Kyle Barnes, another incredible photographer, you can check out our engagement photos here and I will post the wedding pictures when they are finished. Take a look at his blog as well, it’s awesome.

Wedding Recap

It’s hard to even fully describe how much I loved the wedding. From my breakfast in the morning with my parents and brother to the incredible DJ, everything was flawless. While I was dancing with my dad, he asked me what I thought about the wedding, and I honesly answered, that I could not have dreamed of anything more perfect. It was so important to Adam and I, that those who joined us at our wedding felt that they were part of something initmate and that reflected us as a couple. Here are my favorite moments from the wedding week:

1. Running errands with my mom the few days leading up to the big day. We had such a blast together, and we got a ton done. And the rehearsal dinner that was loud, but still perfect and a ton of fun. It’s not every day you get to have all of your favorite people in a room together.

2. My wedding morning was perfect, the only thing I wanted was a relaxing morning with my family, and it was extremely relaxing. We ate breakfast around the table, cooked by my dad, and just laughed and enjoyed ourselves. Adam even came over that morning to drop off Emme, and in keeping with tradition I stayed in another room, but there was something so cool about knowing that my very soon to be husband was in the next room.

3. One of the biggest blessings of the whole day was that I didn’t have to worry about a thing. Debra and Melinda did the most amazing and incredible job in the world. I literally lost my breath when I saw how perfect everything ran and looked, thank you!

4. The fact that the rain held off until everyone got to the reception, and the few moments that my dad and I had waiting outside the church before we walked in was so perfect. The bells chimed at 5:00, and it felt like a scene out of a movie.

5. Walking down the isle. I remember just reminding myself to keep walking, and smiling so big because I saw him at the end waiting for me. My dad squeezing my hand to help me make it there, and finally making it.

6. The ceremony overall was awesome, from the music to Brandon marrying us, it was so perfect. I loved when Hayden forgot to get the rings, being able to look out and see my families faces. The music that brought tears to my eyes, and being able to finally say our vows to one another. And defintiley in the top 10 – singing to ‘O Happy Day’ from the balcony of the church with our wedding party and parents. That was a scene out of a movie for sure.

7. Remembering the way our reception looked, with the candlelights and flowers. The amazing food and how cute the candy bar turned out. And walking into the room, just so happy and excited.

8. Dancing the night away with my friends and family. Watching Jake split his pants, and Adam pull out some breakdancing moves that I haven’t seen since Bearkadette Ball 2000, seriously!

9. Running down the stairs and kissing my parents goodbye and all the rose petals falling around us. 

10. Waking up the next morning as Mrs. Ashworth and going to see my family the next day and exchanging stories from the crazy night before.

 

All in all, it was perfect. Thank you to everyone who made it so perfect, I could not have imagined my day without you all there.

The Suite

Just thought I would show you guys the most amazing suite ever. We stayed at Hotel Zaza our wedding night and absolutely loved it! Except for the fact that our a/c wasn’t working at first, so we spent and hour and a half waiting for the repair man to fix it, but we had a blast anyways, and we got 50% off of our room for enduring the maintenance man, at least he was nice. Thanks so much to Tonya for decorating.

Posts Are Coming!

I am planning on catching up during lunch, but I can’t wait to share thanksgiving, wedding, and honeymoon stories soon.