Livefit update

So, I am currently in Phase 2 of the live fit trainer and going through the holidays has been a bit of a challenge to keep up with everything. We have been doing a pretty good job, but not perfect, which I am completely ok with given its life and stuff happens but I am ready for the holidays to be over and be back to a regular schedule. I have been lacking motivation to cook and prep meals the last two weeks, with our anniversary, christmas eve and christmas chaos I found it hard to keep on course this week too because I got sick. Everything is just kind of out of whack these past two weeks so I will be very glad to get back to a regular schedule, gain my motivation back and get things back on track! I am proud to say that we have been going to the gym 6 days a week leading up to the holidays and we do our best to make healthy decisions (with of course off days over the holidays). I haven't let any of the slip offs make me "feel bad" or anything like that because we have still been getting to the gym. I realize my results probably won't be the best they could have been had I stayed true to the program the entire way through but again, its a lifestyle change and I am just rolling with it and doing my best.

We will probably face another challenge when we move in a few weeks, but hopefully we won't have to miss too many meals/workouts during that time. I am sure we will miss some because moving is a pain in the butt and VERY time consuming and exhausting but that is ok. I am fully prepared and mentally ready to to kick it up a notch on Monday and start the new year off with a bang!!! I am loving the changes in my body that I have already and I love how strong I feel! Most of all I love the time Bobby and I spend together in the gym:) It will be even more precious when his classes start back up January 9. I can not believe that it is new years eve tomorrow and 2011 is just about over! I am so excited to celebrate with a few close friends tomorrow night it should be a blast! Hopefully it will be the City next year to ring in our wedding year 2013 ;)

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!! XOXO

A New Place to Call Home

So today we went by the new apartment complex to give them the final thing needed for our application to be submitted for approval and take a look at the apartment again/take pictures and we officially got approved! Yay! There was no reason we wouldn't be, but still you never know and knowing that we for sure have a new place is a big relief!! I am so excited to move, dealing with our landlords and living here has been so uncomfortable the last month and a half and I can't wait to be out of this situation. I know that it isn't going to be as easy as just leaving, but hopefully they won't try to do anything crazy and will just accept that we are willing to help them find replacement tenants and pay the one month penalty and call it good, but we will see.

We are supposed to go in tomorrow and sign our lease and our move in date will be January 25th! I love the new apartment, it is 2 bedroom 1 bathroom, open kitchen, the bedrooms are big and so is the living room. Since Bobby attends the University of Rochester we also get a special deal; reduced security, $700 off first months rent which just basically pays the $700 security deposit, application waiver, and we also are able to get an all inclusive package for our utilities which ends up saving us a lot of money. We just paid $100 heating bill at this place we are at now and it's only going to keep increasing the colder it gets! So crazy and so glad we won't have to do that anymore. Making one payment to our apartment complex and having it cover EVERYTHING is going to be so much better.

We have been looking at couches and decor and we are really excited to get in and start making it our home for the next year and a half. Everyone that works at the complex is SO helpful and nice I just wish we would have moved in there to start! But, live and learn. It is definitely going to suck to be moving in the middle of winter, but it will all be worth it in the end, and luckily we don't really have that much stuff to move. I will probably start gradually packing up little things once January rolls around, try to get a jump on it to hopefully relieve some of the stress.

So looking forward to all of the fresh starts that 2012 has in store, and this will be the first to kick off the year!!! What better than a new place to call home? :)

A Fresh Start

So I had posted awhile ago that we got our first snow of the season...well this is true but it pales in comparison to what we have going on today! It has been snowing all day long and we have accumulated about 2-3 inches in a few hours. I always love it when it snows because its such a fresh clean look, and it can make almost anything look beautiful. It's like a fresh start to the day, and as odd as it sounds I always love being the first person to make a foot print in the snow there is something magical and special about snow.

As I said, we didn't get our white Christmas that we were hoping for, but it does look like we will be getting a white New Years, which I actually like better. Its a fresh start to a new year in a sense, at least thats how my cheesy mind looks at it. 2011 has been such a fantastic year and I really have no regrets or complaints. It hasn't all been perfect or good, but everything that has happened has happened for a reason and it has shaped our lives in ways we may not even know yet. There have been many amazing things that have happened this year: Bobby got into a top rated MBA program, we got engaged, we booked our wedding date, I am going to be an auntie, we have made a solid group of amazing friends in our new place, we have grown to appreciate California more ;), I have two great jobs for two great families with two great kids, my oldest brother was released from prison after over a year and will be starting college soon, we have so many things to be grateful for and I have learned to count my blessings every day. There have also been some sad, yet growing experiences this year as well; my best friend lost her first baby to a terrible disease, we moved 3,000 miles away and I had to say "see you soon" to my favorite little boys in the world, we had to leave all of our friends and family (temporarily), Bobby lost his uncle in a very tragic way, we got stuck in a crappy living situation (but are dealing with it), and two of my close friends are both dealing with two very different, yet sad battles along side their fathers. Along with bad, always comes good, and I can honestly say that I know everything happens for a reason and with each experience comes a lesson we can all learn from.

I can't even describe how excited I am for the new year. There are so many things to look forward to; a new apartment, Laura's baby shower for Miss Harlow, dress shopping with my best girl friends, meeting miss Harlow Adrianna in April, Bobby's completion of his first year of grad school, Bobby's internship during the summer, the arrival of my step-sister's baby in April, hopefully a trip to Boston in the spring, visiting my best friend in Alabama, visiting my babies in SoCal, a BUNCH of good friends' weddings in the fall, and I am sure many more that will surprise us along the way! I feel like I have grown so much over the past year, and especially over the past 6 months. I have learned to be happy, not complain, appreciate every little thing I have, use experiences as learning opportunities, and live life to the fullest. Through unfortunate means, I have learned to never take life for granted and to always be kind, loving, and non-judgmental. Also to appreciate everyone in my life and to never take their presence for granted either, you never know when their last day will be. My faith has grown immensely along with my relationship with Bobby and my friends and family.

10am 

2pm

Julia loves the snow!

No matter how we decide to celebrate the new year, it will be welcomed with open arms. Thank you 2011 for helping us grow, I look forward to 2012 in helping shape us even more. <3

Wedding Theme

I know I have plenty of time to decide on a wedding "theme" and on colors etc but I actually think WE (yes I said we) have actually decided on a theme and colors for our wedding! Bobby usually doesn't have much to say about wedding stuff, at least not in the beginning, but lately he has been showing a lot more interest in the details of the wedding which makes me very happy and relieved. We have always known that we want our wedding to completely represent us and what we love, so we had decided awhile ago (before we even got engaged) that we want to somehow incorporate our love for travel into our wedding. That is actually how I came up with the name for this blog "Love is a Journey" I was thinking about travel and incorporating it into a day that is meant to be full of love and came up with that title and I believe it fits us to a "T". It inspired this blog and it also inspired my ideas for our wedding, so much so that I wanted to somehow incorporate that saying into the details of our wedding and have it be the overall theme for our wedding so that is exactly what we are going to do.

Coming to concrete decisions like this make me so excited and also make it so much easier to search for wedding ideas. Before I knew that I wanted to incorporate travel but really had no direction. Bobby and I sat down and were discussing colors and anyone who knows Bobby knows his favorite movie of all time is Indiana Jones, which is actually what guided us to the decision on colors. We want our colors to represent the colors of a vintage type world map; light blue, ivory, chocolate brown, beige, and possibly small pops of a red color. Ever since deciding on this whole theme and color combination I have been so excited and can't stop looking for more and more ideas. I truly believe this is going to come together so perfectly and represent exactly who we are and what we love to do together. We are also going to use names of places we have visited together as our table numbers...instead of numbers 1-10 we will have the name of the country. We also want to use a big vintage looking world map for our table assignments/escort cards, somehow pin peoples names to a specific country which would the table they would be sitting at. I have so many ideas rushing around in my mind now and its exciting and makes me feel so relieved to have plenty of time to bring all of these ideas to life! :) what do you think?!

Inspiration for it all

Christmas 2011-Just the 2 of Us

Merry Christmas! I guess technically it just ended here, but that's ok. This year Bobby and I decided not to travel so we stayed in New York. We, or at least I was anticipating a white Christmas, but that just did not happen. We are having an unusually warm winter here, therefore we didn't get any snow. We have had a few flurries, but nothing that has really stuck around.

Since we stayed here for Christmas, it was just Bobby and me on Christmas morning. We woke up around 9:30, cooked up some breakfast, Bobby played some Modern Warfare while I played around on my new Macbook Air (thank you baby). We hadn't watched the season finale of Dexter yet so we watched that a little bit later. After some hanging out, we decided to go do what we love to do...watch a movie :) We went to the last matinee showing of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was WAY good and I highly recommend anyone goes to see it. I am now really wanting to read the trilogy! The movie was a few hours long, so once we got home I cooked up a little Christmas dinner for the two of us which is kind of hard to do (and why we have TONS of left over ham).

The rest of our night has just been extremely low key, watched some basketball, house hunters, How the Grinch Stole Christmas...pretty uneventful. I definitely miss being home with my other family and friends, but Bobby is my family too. I was not about to fly home without him and leave him here alone. I was able to talk to my family and wish them a Merry Christmas which was nice...its always nice to catch up a little bit on the phone withe everyone.

Although it was a pretty uneventful Christmas day, the weekend surrounding today was amazing and full of excitement so it was nice to finally have a day to just CHILL and do nothing. I ate like crap all weekend and am so happy to be back to the gym tomorrow haha. I am so thankful to have such a great group of friends and family to celebrate the holidays with near and far and am so glad that everyone I spoke with was having such a blessed day. I still can't believe Christmas has come and gone already and it is almost 2012. I am so looking forward to the new year and all it has in store for us. I know it will be nothing short of amazing!

A Very Bloom Christmas Eve

Today (Christmas Eve) we spent the afternoon and evening at our good friend Matt Bloom's parents house with him, his parents, two brothers, and his oldest brother's fiancé. They live in a beautiful area known as the Finger Lakes that is about an hour and 20 minutes away from where we live in Rochester. We haven't really ventured out very much since we moved here so I am glad we got invited to go over there today so we could see some more of Western New York. It was beautiful out in the country, some parts covered in snow, others not and it was especially beautiful once we arrived to their city of Bluff Point where one of Finger Lakes is. They live up on a hill overlooking the lake and it is a really beautiful view. Of course once we arrived it was straight into watching the football games, but with that also came the wine so I was ok with it haha. We met his mother "Tippy" his dad Sandy, younger brother "Piddle" which we heard a hilarious story about how he got that nickname aka Michael, and his older brother Jonathan and his fiancé Maggie.

At one point while the boys were watching football Maggie asked Matt's mom and I to come look at a dress (wedding dress) she had ordered online to get our opinions because she said her mom liked it but she wasn't sure. It was a cute dress, but wasn't "special" and you could see it in her face that she didn't love it. So we had to emphasize to her how important it is that SHE loves her dress, despite what her mom may think. She had never gone to try on dresses yet! So I told her she definitely HAS to do that so I am eager to see what dress she ends up picking for their wedding next June :)

His mom and dad made a delicious dinner; ham, smoked turkey, a yummy broccoli salad, orzo pasta, and homemade rolls which were amazing! I made dessert, cheesecake, which was just OK in my opinion. I have made it before and this was definitely not the best, not bad at all but just didn't have enough flavor for some reason. I have used a different recipe every year for the past few years and I really need to go back and find one of the other two because those were awesome! Unfortunately it is impossible to test a cheesecake after you make it so it was really just a hope for the best situation. Everyone seemed to like it, nobody died so I guess that is a success haha.

After dinner we chatted around the table for awhile, telling funny stories, etc and by 8:30 we were ready to head out since we had a long drive home. The Bloom family are definitely great people I would love to spend more time with. We feel so blessed to have such awesome friends that take us in as part of their family while we are here. It's days like these that make me so thankful for this journey that God has put us on, and makes me realize why we are here and that there is always a reason we end up where we do. We definitely never imagined in a million years we would end up in Rochester, New York but meeting all of the amazing people we have already met is a good enough reason for me:)

Niagara Falls

Today turned out to be such an amazing day! We went up to Niagara Falls for our anniversary and although it was really, really cold it was so worth the beautiful view. Bobby and I love traveling and seeing new places, and neither of us had ever been to Niagara Falls and since it is only about an hour and a half away from where we live now, we figured lets go!

I knew that during the winter months they light up the falls with beautiful lights which was one of the reasons I wanted to go up there for our anniversary, to see that. The whole festival of lights that I read about (the Christmas lights) were not impressive to say the least, but just seeing the falls was well worth it. So although the main attraction was to see the falls lit up at night, I also wanted to see it during the day time. We left around 2pm and got to the falls around 4pm which ended up to be perfect timing. The sun was still up, but setting so by the time we walked from one end of the falls to the other (Horeshoe falls) it was about sunset. We were able to capture some great pictures with the remaining daylight, then did our best to capture some good ones of the falls lit up at night too. The amount of water gushing through every second is absolutely crazy, I definitely think this is somewhere everyone should visit if they get a chance.

There are a lot of things to do near the falls; casino, restaurants, wax museum, bowling, Planet Hollywood, Margaritaville, Hard Rock, etc all within about 5 minutes of each other. It is like a mini Reno or Las Vegas, Nevada...at least that is what we would compare it too, Bobby said more like Reno haha. So, we were only at the falls for a couple of hours, we definitely spent more time driving there than we did viewing, but it was definitely worth it and we know that we want to go back up during the summer time and do the "Maid of the Mist" ferry tour where you actually go into the mist of the falls on a big ferry boat (obviously that does not run during the frigid winter months). Our toes were numb along with our faces by the time we got back to the car, we joked that it felt like we had just come from the dentist and been shot up with novocaine, that's how cold it was.

After the Falls we went and had a nice dinner (My diet is out the window this weekend btw) and went and saw Mission Impossible in Imax. We just got home not too long ago, anniversary is over...Merry Christmas EVE! We are heading to our good friend Matt's house tomorrow to spend Christmas Eve with him and his family, which should also be a very good time and I am sure we will get some pictures and have a lot of fun stuff to tell as well :)