Show Us How You Live - Favorite Vacations

This week - we are showing off our favorite vacation spots.

One of my favorite places ever is Gulf Shores, AL. We are headed there soon!!

But my other two VERY favorite places I've been are NYC and Kauai.

In May 2004 - I went to NYC with 3 of my best friends. My friend Megan actually won the trip so everything was free but our food. We went to 2 Broadway shows and did all the sightseeing stuff. Here are Laurie and I in front of Lady Liberty!
I love this picture with the city behind us. This is Laurie, Hillary, me and Megan.
We discovered H&M on that trip and we literally went every day. We would buy a bunch of stuff and go back to the hotel every night and have a style show and decide what we liked and didn't like and then take stuff back and start all over. It was so fun! Laurie and I were waiting to go in one morning. :-)
Hillary and me on the double decker bus tour of the city
This is one of my very favorite pictures of the four of us. I have it framed in my kitchen.
We ate at Tavern on the Green that night.
At the top of the Empire State Building
That was SUCH a fun trip. I want to go back SO badly!
And this is a little heaven on earth. Scott and I have been to Kauai twice and we love it. We stayed at the same hotel in the same room both times and this was our view out our window. Can you understand why we requested the same room the second time.
This is the night we ate a little hole in the wall restaurant and we were sitting literally 10 feet away from Pierce Brosnon and his family. Actually Pierce (James Bond) held the door open for us as we came in and I nearly passed out.
We tried to be very "bachelorette" and took a helicopter ride to see the island. Only on the show it seems so romantic and in reality we were both about to lose our breakfast and I had to keep my eyes closed and hold a barf bag most of the ride. ha! But this was the view when I opened my eyes.

This was coming up the climb from our favorite beach - Hideaways. It is very hard to get through - you have to climb down a cliff basically but it's so worth it - it was GORGEOUS! (I had to be very careful because I was pregnant with Harper at the time!)
We waited until the last morning to try and take pictures in front of our beach and it was so foggy - you could not see the mountains or view. Oh well - lesson learned.

Hopefully we will move to Kauai one day and you can all come visit us.

Now - show me your favorite vacations so we can all see where we want to visit next!!!

Show Us How you Live - Wedding Receptions and Honeymoons

BIG Thanks to Tricia who designed this new button - the code is on the right!!!!

To see all posts and the upcoming schedule for "Show Us Your Life" - Visit HERE.

Tonight is the last of the Wedding Series. I don't have a whole lot of wedding reception pictures. We had our reception in the old sanctuary of my parent's church. It was really pretty. We had iron lanterns and fall leaves as centerpieces on the tables. The tables all had brown tablecloths. We had a lot of good food. This is us cutting our cake.

Our grooms cake was pretty - chocolate with grapes on it for a fall feel.

My big wedding cake

We honeymooned in Maui, Hawaii. We stayed at the Westin Maui.

I'm glad we are doing this because I haven't looked at our honeymoon pictures in probably 5 years and it was fun to look through them. Except for the fact that I realized how thin and tan I was on our honeymoon - that made me a little sad. ha! It was such a wonderful trip and we were SO happy!

Scott's favorite part of the day - breakfast buffet. ha!

One night on our way to dinner - Hawaii is SO romantic !

One of the pools at our hotel.

We rented a yellow convertible but we only had it one day of our vacation. So we really only got around to see the island for one full day. The rest of the time we just stayed at our hotel and ate at restaurants nearby. That was great and worked fine for us - we just wanted to relax but someday I'd like to go back to Maui and see more of the island.

Scott standing on one of the many beaches

Our favorite food in hawaii - Hula Pie!

This was on our dinner cruise. This was NOT romantic. We payed good money to go on this "dinner" cruise and they brought out stouffer's lasagna in tin pans and I got sick the minute I got on the boat and had to lay on the floor for the 3 hour cruise. We ended up getting McDonalds to go and going back to our hotel room so we could watch Arkansas play South Carolina in football (this was November). We played them in Little Rock on ESPN on a Thurs night on a cold night. It was very surreal sitting in our room at 4 in the afternoon and watching a live game being played in the dark with everyone wearing coats. ha!

Did anyone else go to Maui on your honeymoon? We loved it and it will always be a special memory for us. I always dreamed of going to Hawaii on my honeymoon and it was fun to make that dream a reality!!! It was totally worth waiting for!

SHOW US YOUR LIFE - Wedding Party and Flowers/Ceremony

Several of you have sent me buttons for this blog series and I'm still working on picking one to use. So hopefully by next week.............at least I finally got all the links in one place! ha!

So this week is all about showing us the rest of your wedding (except the reception). Tell us about your wedding.......what songs did you have, who was in your wedding party, .....really anything you want to show or tell about.

I'm SO sad because I just don't have any pictures to put on here. I'm too tired and lazy to go scan any in so I'll just put up two I happen to have on my computer.

We got married on November 1, 2003. I love fall and I love fall colors. I still really like my bridesmaid dresses and we all carried fall flowers. I got married at my parent's church in the town I grew up in. My dad is a Baptist Pastor and he not only walked me down the aisle but he performed the ceremony and that was special to me. At the end of the wedding - he gave us the Bible he used to marry us and he and mom had engraved our names on it. It's the Bible I use today. Scott and I put together a wedding slide show that we showed at our wedding that showed pictures of us growing up and then during our dating years. There were three songs in that slide show "A page is turned" by Bebo Norman, "Could Not ask for more" by Edwin McCain, and "Walk with Me" (I can't remember who it's by but it's a great song). Oh we also had the Razorback fight song in the middle with all of our Razorback pictures. I had a family friend sing "My Reedemer" by Stephen Curtis Chapman.
We got married at 2 in the afternoon so after we did pictures, we ate pizza for lunch while we waited for the wedding. So my mom had us all aprons monogrammed with our names on them so we didn't get messed up! ha!
I had 4 bridesmaids: Laurie - she was my maid of honor. She is my best friend who I've been friends with since college. Next is Megan - a sweet friend I've had for years and she moved away to NC right after her wedding and I miss her still. Next is Hillary. She and Megan were best friends from college and Laurie and I got to know them many years ago. She got married last September and moved to Little Rock. And last is Kandi. Kandi was my Matron of Honor and was my college roommate. She and her husband are celebrating FIFTEEN years of marriage today which doesn't seem possible. Each of these girls are so special to me. I was so thankful to have them with me on my big day!

UPDATE: My mom came to my rescue and sent me a few more pics to share:
I loved the long train on my dress - I felt very Grace Kelly from the back!

I need to note that we got married in the fall and I had to schedule around the Razorback's. We got married on an away game day. But the hogs played at Kentucky that day and it ended up being a 7 overtime game that we won. So we missed a very exciting game (but it was worth it).

My bouquet.....I loved the colors!

I look forward to reading about each of your big days!