Year in Reveiw: 2011

I did this on my old blog the last few years and I really enjoyed doing it, so I decided to do it again this year!  This has been a huge, wonderful year for me so I thought reminiscing would be a great way to "go out" on 2011!  You are supposed to pick one picture from each month of the year, but it's my blog and I've picked more pictures :).  Here goes!

January

We spent a lot of time inside...it was a cold and snowy winter!

February

I found my wedding dress! 

And we spent time with good friends :)

March

We had our engagement pictures taken towards the end of March!

April

We found a nest of baby bunnies in our yard.  It was fun to watch them grow!

May

I graduated from nursing school with some wonderful friends!

Scott graduated with a Masters degree from Duke!

And I ended up in the hospital the night before my big nursing test with Salmonella poisoning :(

June

I passed my nursing test-  I am now an official licensed nurse!

We got our wedding invitations in the mail!! :)

July

I officially moved to Greenville...

We had fun playing at the pool :)

I had my first wedding shower! :)

And started my first nursing job in the NICU :)

August

I helped a wonderful friend celebrate at her bachelorette party!

And celebrated at my own!

I also had another wonderful shower hosted by some of my favorite family members :)

September

We had an amazing time with friends at our rehearsal dinner...

I enjoyed celebrating the wonderful women who graciously participated in my wedding at my bridesmaid luncheon :)

And I got to marry my best friend :)

October

We spent the first week of October in Hawaii on our honeymoon! :)

And Jess, Jake, David, and I went to the pumpkin patch!

November

We helped Scott celebrate his 24th birthday...

And hosted our very first Thanksgiving meal!

December

We traveled up the mountain and got our first Christmas tree!

David and I celebrated our first Christmas as a married couple.  We cooked breakfast (and Marley helped ;) )

It was a wonderful year full of exciting things and amazing people.  I hope 2011 was as good to you as it was to me, and I hope 2012 brings more wonderful things as well! :)

Merry Christmas!

The Bell's hope you all have a wonderful Christmas filled with lots of love and time spent with family!  We can't wait to spend our first Christmas together as a married couple!  Merry Christmas! :)

I Got the Big Bag!

This has been a hard holiday season for me.  I've loved decorating and I'm definitely in the Christmas spirit, but there have been so many changes.  One of the big changes is my job.  I've mentioned before on here that I had to work Thanksgiving and I'm working all of Christmas.  I've never been away from my family for Christmas so getting used to that has been difficult.  But, everyone has made this such a wonderful holiday season for me!

Friday night, Jess and Jake came over to watch a movie with me and David.  Jess and I had been shopping earlier in the day and bought matching pajamas (don't judge!) and we had so much fun!

We made sugar cookies and watched Babes in Toyland.  (A very strange movie...)

Marley has really enjoyed the Christmas tree...

 and Jovie has enjoyed...well...the bags.

David's family came up Saturday to have an early "Bell" christmas since we won't be able to go down there.  We opened presents on Sunday and just had a nice time hanging out!

David's dad got some gift cards to Lowe's and the Steve Jobs book!

David got a travel cigar kit, some gift cards to PF Changs, Visa card, and Lowe's, and this:

Do you think they are trying to tell us something?! ;)  Not for a while!! :)

Susan got a necklace, a pair of hoop earrings, a beautiful ring from her dad, a coach wallet, a fossil over-the-shoulder purse, and a couple of gift cards (I can't remember where to!)

Chase got a Lowe's gift card and a couple of bath towels!

David's mom got a necklace with matching earrings, a giftcard, and some home-made coasters with pictures from our wedding in September!

I got a new dish to go with my christmas spode collection, this cute monogrammed hand towel, a christmas scrapbook to fill a page each christmas, a pair of beautiful earrings from David's dad, and some gift cards to Target, Starbucks (yes!), and a visa card!  

Monday, my grandparents traveled down for a Christmas visit!  They have been to Greenville a few times, but haven't gotten to explore why everyone loves it so much.

They got in around 2:00pm and we showed them around our decorated house and then opened presents!

My grandmom got some cloth napkins from pottery barn.

My granddad got the biography of Steve Jobs--not lying, I want to read it, too!

David got a nice travel converter kit for when he travels to Germany, a nice pair of pajama pants, and a lowes giftcard!

And this year, I got the big bag!! Every year, whoever gets the "big gift" gets the big gift bag and never once have I gotten the big bag!  Until this year.  I was so excited :)  My grandparents got us some much needed tv trays!

I also received a very nice coach over-the-shoulder purse which I love, a new pair of flat boots from Nordstrom, and a pair of fleece pajamas!

My grandparents also started a new tradition for us: they gave us an ornament of a partridge in a pair tree- I'm sure you can see where that's going :)

After presents, we took my grandparents to downtown Greenville to walk around and show them the Falls.

 We had so much fun walking through the Mast General store and walking through some of the cute shops.  We ended the evening with a nice dinner at Trio's- a really cute italian place!

Our families and friends have really helped make this a memorable Christmas for us and we are so thankful.  I am looking forward to coming home from work on Christmas morning and having Christmas with just my husband, my dog, and my cat. :)  We are making new christmas traditions and we couldn't be more excited about that.  I hope that everyone else is having a wonderful holiday season, too!

Honeymoon: Day 2

The second day of our honeymoon we woke up really early, like 6:45am!  We were still getting adjusted to the time change!  The hotel had one restaurant that served breakfast and it was packed.  This is totally just an observation, but there were a ton of Japanese people in Honolulu!  I understand why, there is such a history with Japan.  But they were always lined up for breakfast and the line literally wrapped around the hotel!  We didn't want to wait to get our honeymoon started so we hunted down the coffee shop in the hotel and had breakfast there. :)  It kind of became a tradition in Oahu :)

Honeymoon pictures always crack me up because there are just two people on the trip so you hardly ever see pictures of both people in the pictures, haha!  We have quite a few pictures of us individually!  After breakfast we headed down a few blocks to the Honolulu Zoo.  It was small, but so much fun.

One of the first things we saw was this colorful tree.  It looked like someone had painted it!  This picture really doesn't do it justice, but it was so unique!

We have about a million pictures of your typical zoo animals, but I just love this one.  This elephant was such a ham!  She kept putting on a show and she is just smiling away in this picture. :)

The plants in Hawaii are out of this world.  The colors are so brilliant and bright.  David and I really want to blow up some of these onto canvas and hang them in our house!

We spent about 2 hours walking around the zoo and by this time is was only around 10 am!  We took a little break to share a cherry icee and regroup.  We had so much fun spending time just the two of us as newlyweds. :)

Once we left the zoo we walked a little farther down to the Waikiki Aquarium.  It was really cool and it was very educational and a place I think schools probably take field trips to, but it didn't have big enough fish for us. :)  (And maybe the fact that we had walked so much already had something to do with it...?!)  They had one shark...ONE!  They had a few stingrays and this very cute little fella!

 

He was putting on a show doing handstands and standing straight up in the water.  He was too funny!  We headed back down to our side of the island and just couldn't believe we were experiencing this beautiful place.  The sky was completely clear and the water was so translucent.  It was really just breathtaking!  I honestly have no idea what people do for work around there.  There were constantly people laying out in the parks, kids were skateboarding down the street, and surfers in the water at all times.  When do these people work??!

We ate lunch at little dive down the street from our hotel called Cheeseburger in Paradise.  We halved a hamburger and spicy fries.  Our hamburger had PINEAPPLE on it!  It was so delicious!  I am so glad I've grown out of my "picky" stage because I would have missed out on some great food.

Once we finished up lunch, we went back to the hotel, loaded up on sunscreen and headed out to the beach!  We hung out (or rather, David slept and I people watched...) for a few hours and got some nice rays before we went to dinner that night.  Dinner was at a place called Gordon's Biersch.  It is a restaurant based on german dining and David was so excited about eating there because he works at BMW and speaks pretty good german!  The time change was getting to us again at this point so we were pretty tired at dinner.  We sat outside near a pier and there was a pretty little yacht floating right where we were eating.  The sky was clear and the stars and moon were beautiful--just like everything else in Hawaii!  We always tried to take a picture of ourselves before/after dinner each night and this happens to be the night we went to Gordon's Biersch.
 

I am having so much fun going back through my honeymoon pictures and posting about our days on my blog.  :)  It really helps me remember how much fun we had and David and I just can't wait to go back.  We loved it so much we even said we would be willing to live there.  (Although, we'd love to live on Maui...but we'll get to those posts eventually ;) ) We had a blast on our second day of honeymooning!