ma belle la vie: February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Happy 75th Birthday!

Last Sunday our family threw a surprise party for my grandmother's 75th birthday. Everyone was nervous that my grandmother would have a heart attack, but she did great. I honestly can't remember the last time I've seen her smile that much.

Does she look surprised?

Ma had no clue Aunt Pat (her sister) flew up from Florida!

All of her kids! (Except Uncle Doug)

All her grandchildren (most of them)

Aunt Pat, Ma's sister

Giving her speech!

My mom and Aunt Delores with Uncle Ron

Cousin Love

We had a great time!

The centerpieces

I'm so happy that we were able to do this for my grandmother. I know she appreciated all the hard work we did to pull this off. It was all worth it because she's an incredibly sweet and kind-hearted woman and deserves nothing but the best.

Happy Birthday Ma! I love you very much!

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Media Room

One of the things that Jonathon and I were super excited about when we decided to build our house was that the builder includes a finished basement (Media Room is what we like to call it) in every home. We will be using most of our current furniture the Media Room. This includes a tan sofa/sectional similar to this and many pieces of black furniture from IKEA which makes this room an easy choice to decorate first.

I found this helpful little outline to help make the design and decorating process a easier.

Things needed:

Throw Pillows

Coordinating Chairs

Art Prints

Instructions

Select color palette and theme.

Place throw rug in front of sofa.

Create a conversation area with chairs.

Tie your color scheme together with throw pillows.

Hang artwork that complements the room design and color scheme.

Now I just need to figure out a room design and color scheme!

Monday, February 25, 2013

Valentine's Day Recap (slightly late)

The day my husband proposed to me was on February 13, 2011 because I had school on Valentine's Day, so every year we celebrate Valentine's Day on the 13th and usually the following weekend. This year we celebrated once again on the 13th.

We decided that we would not spend as much on each other this year as we've done in previous years because of all the expenses we've incurred with the purchase of our new house. This year we picked out our Valentine's day gifts together! We both have a love for perfume and cologne and recently we discovered two designers that make incredibly great scents - Salvatore Ferragamo and Alfred Sung.

Jonathon received

Subtil by Salvatore Ferragamo

Hei by Alfred Sung

I received

F for Fascinating Night by Salvatore Ferragamo

Incanto Bliss by Salvatore Ferragamo

Salvatore Ferragamo's perfumes are by far my most favorite scents! Seriously check his stuff out because it is all pure heavenly bliss!

Since we knew what our gifts were ahead of time; we both surprised each other some other little gifts as well. It was really sweet. Also, as Jonathon always does, he wrote me a beautiful letter. He definitely has a knack for blowing me away with words. I'm a luckly girl to have such a sweet husband.

I have to say, I really enjoyed being able to shop in the husband card section this year. :-)

I hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's Day!

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Weekend Update

We made our usual visit to see the house this weekend. We were so excited when we turned onto our street and saw that they shingled the house this week. They also painted the trim and it looks great! We walked through the house and noticed they’ve gotten a few other things done this week including installing all of the windows!

Unbeknownst to us, a full on blizzard started while we were walking around inside of the house, it was practically a white out and the roads were awful. We realized that roads were bad as we started driving to get gas and Jonathon slid right through an intersection and I nearly had a panic attack. Actually, I did have a panic attack and heart palpitations. As we got closer back to our rental the roads got much better and we were able to make it home in one piece.

Later that night, we went out for dinner. We always have the most difficult time deciding where to go. Part of the problem is because we only go out to dinner once a week, so we always want to go somewhere different. Most of the places we attempt to go to have over an hour wait! Waiting over an hour to eat is absolutely out of the question because we usually don’t go to dinner until we’re absolutely starving to death. After calling around a bit, we realized the places that we wanted to go were not going to be an option, so we settled on Boston’s Restaurant and Sports Bar. We had a pepperoni pizza and cheese fries which were both extremely tasty.

Look at the cute heart-shaped pizza they made for us!

This was my first time at Boston’s and the food was great. I would probably go back just try some of the different things on the menu. The have a really BIG menu with lots of delicious sounding choices which made it extremely difficult for us to decide what to get.

Sunday was a laid back kind of day. We did have some visitors though!

They were hanging out in our backyard all day! They didn’t leave until about 630 pm. We're sure going to miss our friends when we move to the new house!

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

iPhone Dump

It's been too long since I've last posted. So many exciting things are happening but with being back in school I feel a huge time constraint.

I really want to try and be more consistent with writing posts as I've noticed that when I am writing posts for my blog it puts me in a happier frame if mind. I usually find myself smiling because writing these posts helps me to reflect in the positive things in my life and helps me to forget about the stuff that isn't quite perfect.

Please enjoy the photos!