The sun is shining today, which I’m thankful for after all that rain from last week, but man I am just NOT used to the cold quite yet! As I pulled my furry North Face on this morning and slipped into my Ugg boots preparing to let my dogs outside, I had several thoughts running through my head… 1) If it’s going to be this cold, why can’t it snow all winter?! 2) Maybe I need to move somewhere where it snows all winter. 3) What am I saying? I want sunshine!! I really need to revisit that moving to California dream! As many times as I’ve checked the forecast for the next month, I don’t think it’s going to snow anytime soon, so that means just sitting here at my kitchen table pretending that it’s warm out when the sun is shining! And it fools me just about every time I walk outside…! ;)
There’s Reese’s Puffs cereal in the cupboard and the cozy feeling of someone else being in the house besides me and my dogs, and that could only mean one thing… my little sister is home from college!!! She had the most memorable first semester ever but I’m so glad that she’s home and that today we’re going shopping for Christmas decorations (which we decided on after realizing we have like no Christmas decorations in this house and we really need to go to Target for Christmas stuff like Kylie Jenner did on Snapchat last week). We’re hosting TWO parties this month and that’s a pretty rare thing for the Marcus household, so we’ve really gotta step our Xmas decor game up before those happen!! It’s been 8 years and it’s still weird not having our mom around to make sure the halls are decked with boughs of holly and what not… haha. Not that she ever hung boughs of holly… but anyway!
This weekend I assisted my dear friend Emily with her sister’s wedding (the second Sacra sister whose wedding I’ve gotten to help photograph!) and it was beautiful! A black and gold winter wedding with exposed brick ceremony and reception space with gold shiver chairs, gold chargers, and gold gilded frames… AH! It was to DIE for!! Hopefully I’m able to share a few of those photos soon!! I also had two amazing winter engagement shoots this past weekend and the Christmas decorations are just giving life to my soul. Haha. Talk about adorable. Those are coming soon, too!
Right now I’m in the middle of migrating my blog hosting to another provider and that’s put a little wrinkle in my blogging calendar so if you’re here reading this post after two weeks of silence, I love you. Thanks for staying loyal. I’m crossing my fingers that it’s all worked out soon so that I can get back into the swing of things with blogging – it was rough being out of town for a month then coming back to not having my blog situated! But this migration NEEDS to happen, so I’ll just be here waiting patiently as I edit all the pretty photos I have on my hard drive right now.
What I’m looking forward to most this month is spending time with family and friends. If you’ve been following along for a while, you might have gotten the hint that my life was a little too busy for my own good this year… and that makes me really sad! I’m fully prepared to spend this month (and my three free Saturdays!) hanging out with friends and just being a NORMAL 22 year old!! I think I’ve missed out on a lot of “normal” these past few years as I’ve been so focused on growing my business and now that it’s grown to a good size, I think I need to just slow down for a while and actually enjoy the life I’ve been building but neglecting. I’ve been engaged for a year and I don’t think I’ve done a single outing as a bride besides shopping for my dress and venue hunting… and that makes me sad too!! We’re only engaged for 5 and a half more months and I hope I can have more of a “bridal experience” this upcoming spring than I did the past year!
Last Friday Justin and I went home scouting for the first time EVER. And what I mean by home scouting is visiting two luxury apartment complexes in one of our favorite areas in Northern Virginia ;) We’re not sure what we’ll end up doing – we could be in a townhouse 45 minutes outside of D.C. or a studio apartment in the heart of the Capital – but the beauty of this season right now is having options! From wedding planning to our future home, the world is our oyster and we can still dream crazy dreams about where we’ll be living first, what kind of decorations we’ll have on our wedding day, and which island we’re going to visit on our honeymoon! Just one more beautiful thing about December and this time in our lives.
In less than two weeks, Justin will be walking across the stage in Eagle Bank Arena at George Mason University to receive his diploma and I can’t believe we are finally HERE. I dreamed of this day for so long … the day that college would be done and we could get married … and I have to be honest, the last four and a half years went by SO SLOW. But I’m glad they did. We made so many wonderful memories and got the chance to see the world together and I’m not sure we could have done that had we gotten married right out of high school (honestly not sure that would have been a possibility in any galaxy or universe but particularly here in Northern Virginia) so I’m just so happy with the way everything has turned out. As much as I wouldn’t ever recommend dating for this long to any Christian couple, I’m really thankful for these past 6 years… which reminds me!!! It will officially be 6 years on the 23rd of this month and that’s just crazy!! :)
We have an exciting blog post coming soon with some wedding-related fun stuff but for now, I’m off to start answering emails for the day, edit for a bit, then drive up to Hartland Farm with my little sister to cut down our Christmas tree!! And then that will obviously be followed our Kylie Jenner inspired Target run for Christmas decorations of course. And you can bet that there will probably be an iced caramel macchiato mixed in there somewhere… especially with how Starbucks has a way of popping up in Targets nowadays! ;) Fingers crossed that the blog migration happens soon and we can get back to swooning over pretty engagement photos together here in our little corner of the internet! Happy Monday, friends!!
Photo by Meredith Sledge
