730 Days

730 days ago today, Ryan and I got hitched! 24 months ago, with our friends and family by our sides, we vowed to love and stand by each other's side for the rest of our lives. TWO years, people. Two years!

This past year of marriage has brought with it another set of new experiences and adventures. Some highlights: We made our first trip to Europe together. We (Ryan) received a couple promotions through work and (me) completed six out of seven classes towards a Master's degree. We hosted five sets of family members and friends up in Boston. And my personal favorite: We became Aunt Sarah and Uncle Ryan, welcoming little Leah into the world! 

These first two years of marriage together have been full of amazing experiences and we have made so many memories I will cherish forever. I am so excited to see what the years ahead have in store for us! Without getting too much more sappy on the old blog (Ryan, you know how I feel about you!), I'm just going to share how we decided to celebrate these past 730 days together, a couple days early.

Since our anniversary fell on a Monday this year, Ryan and I pushed our celebration up to Saturday night. Ryan, being the stud that he is, won an award through Dow that gave us a $100 gift card to the Chart House, a fancy pants restaurant in Boston.

To make the most of our trip into the city, we went in early to walk around and admire the city decked out for the holidays and do a little ice skating in Frog Pond! Once we parked, we walked over to Frog Pond since we thought it would be a good idea to ice skate before dinner. However, someone had other plans for us. When we got to the rink, the line to get inside the gate was ridiculously long. We stuck around for a couple minutes before deciding it would be a better idea to try to come back after dinner and hope that the line would be shorter. With our new plan, we set out to grab a taxi over to Quincy Market.

We spent thirty or so minutes walking around the Market, picking up a couple extra Christmas presents before our dinner reservation at 6:45. The Market had a special light show every thirty minutes, which was pretty cool to watch, but made picture taking by the giant tree tricky with the crazy flashing lights! We tried to ask people to take our picture a couple times, but could never seem to get all the lights on for a picture. Oh well!

Our dinner at Chart House was unbelievable. The service was so good and everyone made us feel super special for celebrating our anniversary with them. Once we were seated, a VIP sign was placed on our table and at least four or five different people came over to check on us and wish us a happy anniversary over the course of our meal.

Even the menus they gave us were specially printed, wishing us a happy 2nd anniversary! Such sweet little touches made our experience so wonderful!

For our meal, we started with crab stuffed mushrooms, followed by coconut shrimp for the Ry-Guy and a short rib and scallop dinner for me. Everything was D-E-LICIOUS!

As a compliment from the restaurant, our waiter brought us out a ridiculously tasty mud cake with coffee ice cream and an oreo crust. It was so large that the table next to us congratulated us on finishing the whole thing before we left. Win!

 With full bellies, we made our way back to Frog Pond to try our luck at ice skating again. Fortunately for us, there was no line, so we walked right through. The rink closed at 10, which gave us a good 40 minutes to play around on the ice. It had been YEARS since either Ryan or I had been ice skating. Needless to say, we were both pretty unsteady in our skates to begin. While Ryan seemed to get the hang of things pretty quickly, I tended to stick closer to the wall for the majority of our time on the ice! However, I am happy to report than neither of us fell on our butts the entire time!! Ice skating success!

Ryan on the move! 

Hanging out on my wall... 

Overall, our night was pretty similar to our first two years of marriage: extremely fun and full of new adventures!

For our actual anniversary tonight, Ryan and I are spending the night at home with some homemade spaghetti and meatballs and a bottle of champagne. Cheers to many, many more anniversaries, Ry!

Read about our first anniversary here.

Throwback Thursday: My April Trip to Georgia

This past April, I was lucky enough to spend my spring break from work in Georgia celebrating some pretty big events! If we're being honest, most of this blog post is going to be pictures though because.. well.. I just can't really remember everything that happened 2 months ago! 

The first weekend of my trip was spent putting together and celebrating my sister-in-law, Rachel's baby shower for their (now 1 week old) baby girl, Leah! Aunt Jane, Beth,and Becca came in from Alabama to help put everything together the night before and it was just SO great to spend some time with them! 

Rachel's baby shower was the day before easter so we decided her theme should be "About to Hatch." Everything was decorated very "easter-y" and I just LOVE how it turned out! Since I live so far away, most of the decorations are courtesy of Jane, Susan, Becca, and Beth and they just did an AMAZING job putting things together before the big day!! I'm not so secretly hoping I happen to be pregnant around this time in the future so we can use all these beautiful decorations you're about to see again!

We served chicken salad, deviled eggs, fruit salad, cheese and crackers, carrot cake cupcakes, and a couple different dips among other things I'm probably forgetting about! Becca's friends mother made and decorated these cookies below that were one of my favorite touches for the shower! So beautiful!

The jelly bean tree is another one of my favorite touches to the shower!! 

During the shower, we played a couple of games, and watched Rach open all of her's (or Leah's) gifts- which she is able to use now that Leah has joined us! She was born last Tuesday at midnight and is BEAUTIFUL! I can't wait to meet her during our next trip back to Georgia in July!

The second half of the trip was devoted to my friend Vida who married her college sweetheart Joe on the following Saturday! Friday, we all gathered at the church for the rehearsal before heading to Joe's parents house for the rehearsal dinner!

Ryan and I before the rehearsal

The bride with her bridesmaids!! 

We went to bed fairly early Friday night so that we would all be well-rested for the big day, which started bright and early the next morning at the hair salon!

OMG wasn't she just BEAUTIFUL! 

Once we got to the venue, Vida kicked us out of the bridal room so that she could put her dress on and surprise all of us, since we (or me at least) had never seen it on her in person! Let me tell you, she looked so stunning! Afterwards, we did the usual wedding pictures before the ceremony.

Oh la la Vida!! I can't wait to see the professional pictures!

The ceremony was perfect and before we knew it, my friend became as Mrs. and was on her way with her new husband to Georgia Tech to take some pictures! My parents, Ryan, and I decided to go get some drinks and appetizers in between the ceremony and reception before heading to the cocktail hour.

The rest of the night was spent eating, drinking, and dancing our butts off the way any good wedding reception should be spent. Vida, your day was wonderful and I'm so blessed to have gotten to be a part of it all!!

And that's my throwback Thursday for ya'll! Better two months late than never, right?!

A Celebration

As most of you know, December 15 was our FIRST anniversary. Originally, we had planned on spending our day (weekend) in New York City since we thought we had to go for an event through Ryan's work. When those plans fell through, the whole weekend opened up and boy, did we fill it! We started our celebration on Friday night, spending the evening in Boston, eating dinner and checking out the holiday lights with our good friends Kristen and Stephen. We talked about going ice skating on Frog Pond, but the temperature was in the teens and none of us were feeling it when the time rolled around. Instead, we drove to Quincy Center to check out the biggest Christmas tree I've ever seen! Since it was so cold, we walked around for a bit before calling it a night a little early.

 

Saturday was all about Christmas in the Smith household. In the morning, Ryan and I celebrated our first "Christmas" together. We decided to open our gifts to each other early because we're driving home on Friday afternoon and already have so much stuff to bring home. Plus, we thought it would be fun to celebrate our portion of the holiday just the two of us. We spent the morning opening presents, eating a DELICIOUS bacon, spinach, egg casserole, and attempting to take a decent picture in front of our first tree by placing my camera on the back of the couch (A tri-pod purchase might be in my near future...). Saturday afternoon, we attended a Christmas party of a friend's from church and at night, we cooked our first Christmas ham and watched... wait for it... Christmas movies! (Who guessed that?!)

 

Sunday, on our actual anniversary, we had big plans to drive down to Newport, RI and tour a couple mansions while they're all decorated for the holidays with our friends Rachel and Chris. Unfortunately, the weather got in the way (it was super icy outside from a winter storm the night before). While we were trapped at home, we continued our movie marathon, wrapped the remaining Christmas presents we're taking home, and opened our anniversary gifts to each other. The traditional 1-year anniversary gift is "paper" which we technically used, but put our own spin on it. I gifted Ryan with a big ole bottle of Scotch that came in a cardboard (paper) container and Ryan gave me a beautiful Alex and Ani bracelet that her purchased from "The Paper Store." Well played, Ryan. Well played. Also, as a side note, because it's too funny to NOT share... Ryan and I both got each other the SAME Anniversary card! Do we know each other's senses of humor or what?!?

 

 

For dinner Sunday night, we went to one of our favorite types of places, a Japanese Steak House. The dinner was fabulous and the company was perfect (of course). We came home and attempted to eat the top layer of our wedding cake, but it was AWFUL so we chucked it and opened up an AMAZING chocolate cake sent to us by Uncle Rick and Aunt Jane (Thanks, again!), eating that alongside a couple glasses of champagne. Overall, I couldn't have asked for a better first anniversary weekend. Even though we were trapped in our apartment on our anniversary, I wouldn't have wanted to be "stuck" inside with anyone else! I love you, Ryan. Here's to many more anniversary celebrations!