Quarter Century Celebration

On February 16th, my wonderful husband celebrated his 25th birthday. Which means he is officially 1/4 of the way to 100. Clearly, we wanted to celebrate this momentus occasion in style! Lucky for Ryan, his birthday weekend happened to start on Valentine's Day, so he got to share his time with love. We spent the evening at a new-to-us restaurant in Braintree, called Campanales, which was FANTASTIC.  Local friends, go there.

Lucky Me!

 

Saturday, we had plans to spend the night in Brighton to celebrate his big day with Eliot and Lauren. We were expecting a big blizzard, so Ryan and I headed out around lunch time. When we got there, we immediately popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate Eliot and Lauren's ENGAGEMENT! They called to tell us their big news on Friday evening, so we had much to cheers to...all day Saturday..! The rest of the night Saturday night was spent eating, drinking, breaking out into random dance parties, and walking through the "blizzard" to a local bar down the street to bring in Ryan's birthday in style. We seriously love those two so much and are thrilled we got to help celebrate their engagement and Ry's birthday together!



Told you we broke out into random dance parties!

The "Still 24 year olds!"

 

Last night, for Ryan's birthday we met up with Rachel, Chris, Ashley, and Tim at the movie theater to watch Lone Survivor, which was extremely intense, eye-opening, and sad. We closed out the night and the birthday with a late dinner at Hingham Beer Works! We get more of Rachel and Chris tonight and get to see our northern family tonight for dinner though which we're really looking forward to!

Ryan with his 25 birthday presents- one for every year of his life!

 

Overall, we had a fantastic weekend and really enjoyed the celebrations with our wonderful friends up north. Happy President's day, y'all!

An Anniversay

As  I sit here on this snow day, I can't help but reminisce on our lives just over a year ago.

Just about 365 days ago this week, Ryan and I were living in an empty townhome, sleeping on an air mattress, and saying goodbye to our wonderful friends from our time in New Jersey. We were loading up the car, driving up to our new home in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and going through the motions of moving for the third time in two years. Over this last year up north, my life has forever changed. I've made some lifelong friends, gotten comfortable in my new role as a wife, started an awesome job, and began a master's program in Elementary Education, making leaps and bounds towards becoming an elementary school teacher. Ryan and I have adventured through Boston, Vermont, and Maine, cheered the Bruins to the Stanley cup finals and the Red Sox to a World Series victory, and lived through a couple pretty epic snow storms (One of them is currently going on outside my window.) While looking back, I realized that I've never actually blogged about one of our VERY first New England experiences.

Many of you probably know this story already as it has kind of become my ice breaker story and has come up in conversation many times over the past year, but nevertheless, it needs to be documented.

So, we didn't get out much the first few days after we moved. We spent the majority of our time unpacking boxes and trying to make this new, foreign place feel like home. Suffice it to say, when the weekend finally rolled around,  we were more than ready to get out and explore our new area. However, Mother Nature had a different plan for us. Over the course of two days, Blizzard Nemo dumped over 30 inches of snow on us! Now, as you can imagine, Ryan and I clearly were not prepared for three inches of snow, let alone three feet! Luckily for us, there is a CVS just down the road from us, so we trekked it through knee-deep snow to pick up a snow shovel and finally free our cars.

Unfortunately, they were out so we had to resort to plan B. We (from this point on, when I say we, most likely what I actually mean is Ryan) grabbed what we thought would work to get our cars out of this mess, which turned out to be a Frisbee and an ice scraper. When you're snow shovel-less and your cars look like this....

Why yes that was the front of my car under there... 

...you have to get creative. I believe when all was said and done, it took Ryan about 4 or so hours working on getting the cars out before one of our nicer neighbors decided to lend him their snow shovel. Bless her heart.

Free At Last! 

 So there you have it! Clearly, New England welcomed these two southerns with open arms. I mean... who wants to be eased into a lifestyle change anyways???

Happy Snow Day, my northern friends and Happy Hump Day to everyone else!