I have always loved the idea of a gallery wall in our house and as it is, there are a whole lot of framed photos in our house. For me, photos are a major part of making a house a home. And I take a ridiculous number of photos on any given day at any given event. I’m that friend who people tend to groan at because I’m insisting on yet another group photo. The result of that though is that I have a lot of photos of great moments, great people and great memories and I would definitely love to start showcasing them in a more special way. I stumbled upon these images of this living room on Apartment Therapy and instantly fell in love with the stunning yet simple grouping of photos on the side wall. Don’t you love this?

{photos by Sean Slinsky}

I’m thinking I’d love to do this on one of the large blank walls in our living room choosing favorite photos from our engagement session, wedding and honeymoon. I would probably stick with all black frames, but I’d definitely switch up sizes and styles. Perhaps some are ornate with traditional white mats while others are clean, sleek and modern. I love groupings of mismatched but alike items so I like the thought of a dynamic photo display that, over time, would likely evolve as our lives do. So the architect in me (practicing or not, you can’t shake 4 years of architecture school and obsessive measuring) is thinking I might grab a level and a chalk line and start blocking out a wall and then from there let it grow organically. Heck, soon enough I might even have a disc of wedding photos so I can get this party started right.

Anyone else put together – or looking to put together – a gallery wall in your house? I would loooove to see pictures!

For a lot of newlyweds the first few months of marriage are spent nesting - carefully unpacking and displaying wedding gifts, inviting friends over for dinner parties, contemplating home decor and getting those new pots and pans dirty in the kitchen. Well, at the end of this week we’ll officially have been married for three months and I can happily admit to largely ignoring all of that thus far. While many of our gifts are stowed away, I still have stacks of glassware and serving platters to contend with and we’ve only had visitors over once. I haven’t even unpacked all of the big bins full of wedding decorations. Those are languishing away stacked up against the back wall of our home office. Instead, I’ve been putting all of my energy into the launch of my new blog The Sweetest Occasion.

A few years ago I began coordinating weddings for friends and family members. I’ve always been obsessed with making and checking items off of to-do lists and I’ve always been obsessed with design - it seemed natural that I sort of evolved into filling this role for loved ones. With my undergraduate degree in architecture, I have an educated understanding of space planning and creating environments that are welcoming visually as well as being highly functional. With a Master of Business Administration, I have a keen awareness of organizational systems, marketing and branding. The more I dabbled in helping friends with their weddings, the more I fell in love with doing so. Somewhere along the way I started blogging and by word of mouth picked up a few clients for coordinating jobs, brides who found me through one blog or another. I got engaged, became fully immersed in the blog world, landed my dream job working for one of the premiere letterpress print shops in the country and have continued my obsession with weddings and events of all kinds as well as for writing, dreaming and inspiring.

All of this culminated in my getting married, going on a honeymoon, getting home and almost immediately pulling together some of the most talented people I know including E, who is not only the mastermind behind EAD but also my dear dear friend, to help me realize my dream of a website that is both supportive of my hopes to continue the fun I have coordinating weddings part time and to give me an outlet for the creativity in my brain, the things that inspire me daily. The Sweetest Occasion will be about all things weddings, of course, but it will also be a source of stylish inspiration for all of life’s many occasions - birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, graduations, dinner parties, July 4th barbecues, surprise 30th birthday parties and so so much more. I would love for you to come visit and tell me what you think - I can’t wait to share with you all the bottled up inspiration I have saved up!

(And, my husband can’t wait for our typically organized house to get whipped back into shape, but that’s another for another post entirely.)

PS  - Of course, I’ll still be here at EADL each week too!

My husband is turning 30 in December and as the party-loving wife, it sounds like the perfect occasion to host one heck of a surprise party. As the husband is a huge sports fan (baseball and football in particular) and an avid coach (both baseball and football…go figure), I’ve decided that a stadium-themed tailgate-style party is definitely in order. Luckily for me, all of his teams (the Atlanta Braves, the Buffalo Bills and the teams he coaches at school) all share the same colors of red, white and blue so that gives me a pretty good place to start when it comes to gathering inspiration.

{Cracker Jack photo from Passionate Eater}

{Martha Stewart does it again - I love these!}

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One of my bridesmaids in our recent wedding is literally my oldest friend. We started at the same day care at age 2 and even attended the same preschool before ending up in the same grade school classes every year from 4th through 8th grades. Somewhere along the way, she met my cousin and they both developed junior high crushes, although all the way through high school they were both dating this person or that person and never each other. Low and behold, somewhere during the college years they met again, fell in love and just over a year ago got married. Now they are expecting their first baby next month and this weekend everyone came together to celebrate the impending arrival with a really fun jack and jill baby shower. There was a delicious cake topped with momma and baby rubber ducks, lots of balloons, a miniature army of kids running around playing in the water and fishing off the dock, and an overwhelming sense of excitement. Oh, and there wasn’t a single cheesy baby shower game! (Ohhh how I loathe such silly games.) Truly, I’ve never had such fun at a baby shower before and loved getting to celebrate this amazing occasion with two of my absolute favorite people.

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Just about 11 months ago now, I made the decision to come out of the fat kid closet* and own up to having lost a massive amount of weight. It was a major move for me. I found incredible strength and support in sharing my journey with an incredibly loving online community and, in turn, great motivation to keep moving forward toward my weight and fitness goals as I approached our July wedding. To this day, I think opening up and sharing my “fat kid” photos was one of the best decisions I could have made. It was liberating and to my great surprise, inspiring for others, something I never would have imagined.

{Here is a fat kid photo. Approximately  270 lbs. Yikes!}

So, what this have to do with present day? It’s quite simple really. My weight loss journey is not yet complete, but you wouldn’t know it from the way I’ve been eating and totally slacking off on work outs since the wedding. How easy it is to start settling into newlywed life, ease off the pressure a bit to look fabulous in an overpriced dress and wham! The next thing you know your jeans are just ever so slightly uncomfortable. Not good, friends, not good. So, with just a touch of bitterness, I’m doing what I’ve done so many times in the last three years. I’m gearing up, buckling down and getting ready to put up a good fight. I’m still convinced I can reach all new heights of being physically fit and improve my approval of what I see in the mirror along the way.

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A month later, the cat is out of the bag. I got married and I didn’t change my name. (*insert shock and awe *) I will come right out and admit that it I find it rather insane that in 2009, people still assume that I changed my name just because I got married. Honestly, in the last month I have found myself outright stunned by the large contingency of people who are taken aback upon learning that, no, I did not in fact change my name. How is it that such a thing is still somehow shocking, surprising, perhaps even a little taboo? As if retaining my maiden name somehow makes me less married than had I forfeited my name to take another. So, I’m just going to put it out there - no, I didn’t change my name. And honestly? I think it’s one of the best decisions I ever made. Not that this was a decision I entered into lightly. It was a source of great debate and personal reflection, but in the end, the decision was clear.

{Source unknown}

My great debate about whether or not to change my name was not something I publicly discussed nor blogged about before I was married. In fact, it took me a while to figure it out myself. I had a lot of mixed emotions at first, but in the end it was a surprisingly easy decision. I debated changing my name, but keeping my maiden name professionally. I debated taking my maiden name as my middle name. One thing I didn’t consider was hyphenating - it would have required far too many syllables for my taste. Ultimately, the only thing that felt right was making no change at all. So that’s what I did. Nothing. I have yet to have a friend get married and not change their name, most being outright gleeful to do so, and so I understand that this lodges me firmly in some kind of minority category. I’m ok with that. Ultimately, this was a decision I made for myself, in consultation with my then fiancé, and it wasn’t a decision that required the input nor approval of anyone else. Which, is good, because I haven’t received approval from very many people, most of my largely conservative family included….despite it being their name I was unable to part with. The irony, huh?

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Fair warning - there is just about nothing healthy when it comes to this recipe. But, honestly, this was too good not to share. I actually made this last fall, so while it may seem a bit premature to be planning for apple season, keep this one in your back pocket for when the cooler weather descends upon us. Here in Upstate New York, I’ve already noticed just the slightest hint of orange kissing the edges of leaves on a few trees so fall will likely be here before we know it…

At any rate, last fall M and I were excited to host our first set of out of town visitors, having just recently moved in together after battling the woes of a long distance relationship for more than a year. His brother and sister in-law (AKA our Best Man and Matron of Honor at our recent wedding) and two of our groomsmen came to visit us and check out our new abode for a little Halloween gathering, minus the costumes and candy, but with the addition of great fall foods and timeless Halloween flicks. I mean, The Simpsons are totally timeless, are they not? So I had a whole bunch of apples still lying around from our fun apple-picking adventure a couple of weeks prior, which I had picked with the sole purpose of baking a pie. With visitors on the way I went on a hunt through my recipe box for my tried and true recipe…..only then to discover it was MIA.

So what’s a girl to do when her favorite recipe has somehow stolen out of the recipe box in the middle of the night and lost itself never to be found again? Especially when this girl is very picky about recipes and can spend literally hours reading reviews of recipes online before committing once her mind is set on a specific dish she’d like to prepare? Why I did what any self-respecting girl would do and I cut the crap and called up my girl Martha. Unfortunately, Martha had a prior dinner engagement and couldn’t take my call so I did the next best thing and headed to her website, found what I quickly deemed to be the best classic apple pie recipe and, in the words of Tim Gunn, I made it work. Oh boy, and work it did. Even my mother, who also joined us for the shindig, was raving and my mother is more than a little bit confident about her own pies…and, frankly, she’s not lying. The woman can bake up one hell of a pie.

Yes. Martha calls for tiny pads of butter atop the filling before closing the pie. I told you. No good will come from this recipe aside from your taste buds crying with happiness and gratitude.

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Hi everyone! Let me start off by saying that I am thrilled to be here blogging for Living as a freshly minted newlywed! For the last seven months I have been blogging about my wedding planning adventures on EAD Weddings, one of my absolute favorite wedding blogs, and on my own blog, The Sweetest Occasion. It a sincere joy to now cross over to share my nesting adventures with all of you! My husband* and I have been married just shy of a month and are loving the calm after the storm of wedding planning as we enjoy what’s left of an unseasonably rainy summer here in Upstate New York along the shore of Oneida Lake in a little house we like to think of ours, even though it really belongs to someone else. (Don’t you hate that?)

[A recent Oneida Lake sunset from our dock - photo by yours truly.]

Obsessed with all things paper and stationery and hopelessly in love with design, architecture, photography, fine wine, honing my culinary skills, good books, traveling the world and dreaming up excuses to host fabulous parties, I gleefully spend my days working in marketing and public relations for my favorite letterpress stationer. I like to think of myself as a bit of a connoisseur of fine rieslings and I am outright in love with weddings - planning them, dreaming about them, attending them, you name it! In my spare time I subscribe to several hundred blogs and regularly find myself struggling to stay on top of my Google Reader queue, while also working to further establish my fledgling part-time wedding coordination business. Did you catch all of that? If so, welcome along for the ride! I can’t wait to share with you all of the adventures and excitement of newlywed life from the perspective of a girl who is a little bit crazy but a whole lot of fun.

[One of my favorite wedding photos I have seen so far by our wedding photographer, James Bass.]

*husband is such a funny word to get used to, isn’t?