On My Way!

Just got our grades back for the second to last semester of graduate school so this should be an appropriate time for an update! 4.0 again this semester, which is beyond fathomable compared to how much I was struggling in undergraduate. I guess your approach for academics really changes how well you'll do. For the final hoorah, we had to complete an internship requirement, spanning a minimum of 150 hours over the summer. Now having to do this in addition to my full-time job is going to be a bit of a killer but I am so ready to get that M.Ed! After oh about three attempts to get internships approved, I finally found an opportunity that fits in line with my interests and for the first time in a long while, I feel like I'm able to directly contribute to something. Couldn't be happier!

Power of Now

Over the weekend, Alex and I had time to run some errands and I mentioned wanting to get a book and wished we lived near a bookstore with more choices. He made a detour and drove to the nearby mall which, as I forgot, has a Barnes & Nobles! I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I wanted something fresh to dive into during my two weeks or so without classes.

While Gone Girl and the Goldfinch caught my eye, 10% Happier by Dan Harris looked particularly interesting. After reading the summary and seeing a 30% off sticker slapped onto the book, I knew that this book was right up my alley. Two days in and I'm flying right through it - his personality was a lot like mine, quite a bit of unnecessary worrying and an overall stressed out persona, always just trying to get through the current obstacle. It's becoming more and more interesting and I can't wait to see where it goes. The idea of "living in the now" is both something that I love to read about and practice. Unfortunately the only time I actually utilize it is during yoga so I need to try to incorporate it more into my daily life.

I still have quite a few books at home that I've bought/received and need to finish:
Bossypants - Tina Fey
Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation - Aisha Tyler
Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand
The Lone Survivor - Marcus Luttrell

When I'm actually done with these, then I'll gift myself another book!

Tomorrow will help determine whether or not I need to continue my search for another internship opportunity. This is the only thing that's really holding me back from graduating by the end of the summer but I am fortunate that the next few months are a bit more flexible on my schedule.

Driving Myself Crazy

If I were to go into another interview, I think my biggest flaw would have to be my ability to overthink things. I love researching things so much that I end up becoming completely overwhelmed. Case and point: we went wedding dress shopping for the very first time this weekend before the engagement party and I actually fell in love with a dress that just felt like me. While I adored other dresses too, this one made me smile just a bit more :)

Being that my wedding is a whole year away and we already put a deposit on the dress, I need to stop looking at other dresses or I really will drive myself crazy. I guess one good thing is that when I look at other dresses, I wouldn't trade mine for 95% of the ones I see and I can only wear one dress that day, right?! I'm pulling the plug on looking at other dresses. Now.

Throwing an Engagement Party

Now that I've somewhat recovered from our engagement party this weekend, I'd like to share all the ideas and work that went into it! Obviously if I could have it my way, I wanted tiny perfect cupcakes with tiny perfect signs that say our wedding date and "save the date". Unfortunately this didn't happen since I just simply ran out of time! Oh, and I had to scrap an entire batch of "the best red velvet cupcakes" I found on Pinterest because they tasted like playdough. I hate playdough! I ended up buying chocolate cake mix and used my favorite cream cheese icing (Sprinkles recipe) to quickly decorate a bunch of mini cupcakes.

I received a ton of help from my family to set up and cook for the party. We must have had between 25-30 guests there and needed to feed them all but in a fun and not formal way. I was running around so much that day that I forgot to take some pictures of the actual set up of the food but here's what we served:

• Shrimp ceviche
• Antipasto Pasta salad - I doubled this recipe for the amount of people that were there and had tons of leftovers for my coworkers the next Monday, very easy and very tasty
• Stuffed mushrooms - these were amazing but my sister luckily had her husband to help her clean the mushrooms and scoop the filling since this is a rather time consuming meal
• Spinach and Artichoke Dip, tortilla chips, pita chips, and salsa for variety
• Crockpot Sweet & Tangy Meatballs - the recipe also includes a step further for creating meatball sliders but the meatballs alone were such a huge hit, fed a bunch of people, and were complimented on! Do THIS if nothing else. 
• Cupcakes, store bought chocolate and coconut macarons
• Pre-made sandwiches that we set next to a panini grill if anyone wanted a grilled sandwich. This was such a great idea of my sister's and a lot of people did utilize the "panini bar"

Drinks:

• Lots of ice on the side, one tub to cool the beers and another for serving
• Mimosas
• Soda

Antipasto Pasta Salad

Stuffed Mushrooms

Crockpot Meatballs

For the decorations, we made six pom-poms as seen here. I made two white, two sea green, and two peachy/vanilla for variety. It became fluffiness overload inside so we hung two of these outside where people would be hanging out too.  

My proudest decoration would have to be this right here:

It was such a blast having our closest family and friends (only the wedding parties were invited otherwise we'd be on capacity OVERLOAD). For our other friends, we just decided to meet them up for drinks after and there were no hard feelings! Love it.