Where have I been...?!?!?!?!

     So...you all may be wondering what happened to me?  Did I drop off of the face of the earth?  Did I quit blogging?  No...no...nothing like that.  I have just been BUSY!!!  I know that is the typical excuse, but it's true!  Although I can't update you on every little thing I've done since last September, I've tried to give you the biggest highlights!

     Well, as you all know (as my dedicated blog followers), we spent the EnTiRe month of September on a USA Road Trip!  It has been on my Bucket List my whole life and then switched to mine and Nick's joint Bucket List the day that we got married!  What a trip!  It was one of the best things that we ever did together and we suggest that every couple do it before they have kids!!!

     Then, once we got back home to South Carolina, I got heavily into my homemaker mode.  I cleaned and cleaned-out like crazy.  I cooked and tried lots of new recipes.  I was so happy to have switched from working full-time to working part-time...I feel like I have more time to be the kind of wife I want to be for Nick.  It's the best treat ever to have Nick get home from work and all of the cleaning, laundry, cooking and errands have already been taken care of by me!  After a hard day of work, I just feed Nick with yummy food, let him sit back and relax and it keeps us both happy!

     For the month of November, I had my friend Michaela visiting me from Northern Ireland!  That's the "curse" of traveling and living overseas...all of your friends end up in foreign countries.  But, the major blessing is that you get to travel to visit them too!  Nick and I are currently saving up money so that we can return the favor and visit her in Northern Ireland...:)

     During December, Nick and I took a trip down memory lane.  When we were dating, we drove to Asheville for the day and had lunch in this huge artsy booth place with a cute little soda shop.  We went back to Asheville for our five year wedding anniversary and walked around downtown until we found that same soda shop!  We enjoyed another great lunch, just like the one we enjoyed over six years earlier.

     Talking about wedding anniversaries, my sister Mary Ashley got engaged in August and then married in April!  We spent months talking about ideas, dreaming (mostly while browsing Pinterest) and planning.  We had lots of girl time with several special Bridal Showers, a Sisters-Only Bachelorette Weekend and, of course, the actual Wedding!

Bridal Shower

Bachelorette Weekend (YES, we made her wear that sash and veil the entire three days, everywhere we went, except while we slept)

Family Wedding Photo

While all of this was going on, we have also been in the process of getting our own little first home!!!  Last June, one of my dad's friends was planning on tearing down this cute little place in order to build something bigger and better in it's place.  Turns out, tearing down a house isn't cheap!  So, he told my dad that if we could figure out how to get it off of the property, we could take it!  My dad is a genius and came up with a great plan...

We stripped the house of all of the materials on the outside, inside, underneath and everywhere.  Everything was removed as carefully as possible so that we can REDUCE, REUSE and RECYCLE!!!

After removing all of the materials that we could, we cut the house in half to get it ready to be moved to its new home!!!

In took two days to move the two pieces of the house.  It only had to go 1/4, but the process was slow because of all of the tree limbs, power lines and one main street that we had to cross.  Many people stopped to watch all of the excitement and even followed the house to see where it was going...it's not every day you see a house rolling down the street!

Once the two pieces made it to our property, they were put side by side and the steel rods were removed once the foundation was built up under the house.

Here is the latest photo.  You can see the foundation, the new porch and on the right, we now have a third window!

It's such an amazing thing because of how Nick always said that he wanted to build us a house.  Although he didn't build this one totally from scratch, he (along with other guys, including my dad) has done months and months of work to remodel and fix it back up.  It will be so special when we finally move in and get to enjoy all of the hard work!

So...WOW...this was a very long post!  Now that the wedding is over and things seem to have calmed down, I am going to try to get back to blogging...I miss it!