Rim

This is a tire.

Our New Life Together

On our wedding day....On our honeymoon on P.E.I.....At home out enjoying the fall colours....

Sorry it's been so long!

Hi ALL!
I have not forgotten about my blog and have been thinking of posting again. I guess the first step is letting you all know that so you check in here at least once more. First off, I thought I'd change the title since I am no longer just me...it's US now...THE MORGANS!!
More pictures to come.

June in Pictures

I know, I know...I've been bad at posting this last month. So in order to recap this month's happenings, I figured the fastest way to do it would be through pictures. Which is no surprise, since I tend to post mostly pictures anyways!!
But just quickly I'll say that the countdown to the wedding is really on now. Its officially less than 1 month to go! We have been really busy, as you can imagine, finishing up our house and wedding planning, as well as playing baseball and trying to have some down time. But, we are both so excited for this next month and all the fun and lifechanging events to come.
Our newly painted kitchen. Good bye brown panelling!Brad, doing all the cutting in!Our new bathroom floor!Our beautiful new tub!The amazing quilt my grandma made for us.Just me and my mom!Our new rose garden bloomed beautifully!My girls doing their usual amazing job at hosting a party!The ONLY boy allowed at my personal shower - JADEN!!My little cousins - Shannon, Bethany & Sarah. Opening presents at a garden shower!My two amazing GRANDMA's!!THE GIRLS!Sunset on Lake Ontario - Canada Day!Waiting for the fireworks to begin!Our "1-month-until-we-get-married" picture!

The three little cuties...

KaitynBerlinRowan
These 3 little cuties will be my new nieces and nephew in just about 3 months. They belong to Brad's sister Briar and her husband Wes. Kaityn and Berlin will also be flower girls in our wedding. They are going to do a fabulous job I'm sure of it!!!

Renovation Update!

Bye! Bye! Purple tub and toilet!!The bathroom in its' current state!

Bedroom when we first bought the house...

Bedroom now.....

The Gardens!!
Lots of roses to take care of!
My cute little vegetable garden.
The deck area.
Raspberries!!!!...(notice the diagonal mowing lines!)

The man I am going to marry

So its late right now, close to midnight and I'm just getting ready for bed, doing my usual routines.....checking my email, doing a little reading, checking facebook, again, doing a little reading, thinking about making a post on my blog, but not really having the ambition do to it...etc...etc.
But then I started thinking about this guy that I just said goodnight to about 1/2 an hour ago, who will be my husband in t-minus uh...60 something days (What kind of a bride am I? I don't even have the countdown number running through my head!!) and realizing that I don't talk about him to the 'blogger public' enough and how much of a wonderful man he is. So I decided, right here right now, I would write a little tribute to my husband-to-be.....
Well, first of all...just look at this guys' face! He exudes happiness! Brad is one of the happiest guys I know. He is content in any and every situation and strives to find his happiness not in things or experiences but in just being. He is also one of the hardest working people I know. He is task oriented and when he gets an idea, he sees is through to completion....and not just completed...but completed the BEST way possible. Any job he does, he does to the best of his ability. He has this amazing ability to figure out almost anything he sets his mind to. He wants to know how things work and how they are put together and chooses to do a task on his own for the sake of learning. Brad is a really thoughtful, caring person and although he sometimes forgets certain things, he'll totally surprise me the next time with this crazy little detail he remembered that I totally forgot. He is the kind of guy that will go out of his way to meet somebody's need and sacrifice his time and efforts in a heartbeat. He is always doing something and helping out in anyway he can.
So there you have it.... a little glimpse into the man I am going to marry. Our engagement is flying by, just like everyone said it would. This Sunday June 3rd will be 3 months that we've been engaged and 2 months until we're married....so that means....as of tomorrow it will be 66 days left to go. See there, I fiigured it out...

Facebooking, Gardening, Flying and other distractions...

Well hello to all my blogger friends. Sometimes I am not quite sure if I still have blogger friends, but I was told to update this thing by one blogger friend so I know at least she reads it!! So as you can imagine, things have been a little busy this past month what with owning a home and planning a wedding and such! We have had a great month working on our house and are excited about the changes that are happening so far. I have mostly been in charge of all the outside work which I totally love. I am so excited to have our own flower and vegetable gardens. The previous owners left a lot of gardens to take care of, including many rose bushes, so I have been busy doing the usual spring clean up stuff, trimming, edging, making NEW gardens, taming the crazy raspberry bushes, planting all my vegetables and as of yesterday, a bunch of flowers! Oh wait, and my favourite...mowing the lawn. No seriously, I really like mowing the lawn! Can't really explain it, just really enjoy it. I think I got my diagonal line pattern all figured out by now. I'm such a geek! On the inside, Brad has been busy renovating our bedroom. We tore out some funky panelling on the one wall, re-trimmed the whole room, re-painted and put in new laminate flooring. My job was working in the bathroom tearing off the beautiful butterfly wallpaper! And for anyone who has done that job before, you know its not a fun one. It is quite addicting though and I was quite determined to get it all off ASAP. So, next up is the completion of the bathroom. At first we were just going to paint, but you know how that whole snowball effect happens and before you know it, the whole bathroom is apart. So, that is what's happening tomorrow....the purple tub and toilet are going to go. At first we thought we would enjoy them for a while, but their time is up and we're on to cleaner and brighter bathroom fixtures now!!


You can kind of get an idea of what the wall colour and flooring will look like in our room. The floor is now offically all done, but I don't have a picture of it yet.
For those more curious as to what the inside actually all looks like, I did put a bunch of pictures on my facebook profile....which leads me to the next thing has has been causing a distraction in my life lately. Yep...none other than FACEBOOK. I knew I would succumb to the trend at some point, it was only a matter of time really and in some ways, its a little more appealing than blogger. I was thinking about it though and realized its more of an short term appeal really....its great to find out what friends are up to, but once you know, its not quite as exciting anymore and you can just as easy pick up the phone and call them. Blogger, on the other hand, has more of a long term appeal as thoughts, experiences and opinions are documentmented over time. Either way, I'm not ready to give up this thing yet.
The other part to my title has to do with what Brad and I did this afternoon. We went for a helicoptor ride over Niagara Falls. We had been given a gift certifcate for this Niagara Helicoptor Tours that expired next week, so we wanted to use it up. Now Brad goes up in a helicoptor fairly often for work but I have never been in one before. I am not a roller coaster or heights person, so the idea wasn't too appealing to me. I mean, I wanted to see the view and everything, I was just nervous about the motion sickness and panic that could strike as we hovered hundreds of feet over rushing water!! Needless to say, the view was amazing, I didn't throw up and I learned I have an amazing Kung Fu grip!!

Homeowners

"Every good and perfect gift comes from above...."
This is the phrase that keeps coming to mind these days as I begin to digest all of the wonderful gifts that have been poured into my life lately. Sometimes I just have these moments and wonder, 'how did I get here?"...I have this wonderful man that loves me, amazing friends and family that support us and now a home in Vineland to start our new life together. Amazing! I recognize how easy is would be to take this all for granted and I desire more and more that I never will. I want to recognize that these good gifts are from my heavenly father and from nothing I could have done on my own ambition. I guess my job then is to enjoy it and give thanks in it all. So that we are doing and loving every minute of it. We officially got the keys to our new house this past Friday night and within an hour, were hosting a party. It literally came together in a matter of an hour as we closed the deal at 5pm, Brad picked up the keys while I picked up the cake and ordered pizza, and by 6:30, the party was starting. It was so fun to have friends and family in the house making it feel like home already. The weekend weather was amazing so we got right at some yard work on Saturday afternoon. We were using my Dad's truck to pick up a few tools and Brad's lawnmower, but before I knew it, Brad's dad was loading on tires and I was carrying car rims and shelves. Our parents are quite excited for us both to finally move out and they are taking every opportunity to 'help' us do that!! After being homeowners for officially one day, we ended up locking ourselves out of our house and although we had keys in hand, the stupid screen door latch locked and wouldn't let us USE the keys to get in the house. So....we attempted to break into our new house...and it didn't work, which in a way made me feel safer, but mostly annoyed that we couldn't get into our own house. Needless to say a little reefing on the door did the trick! We'll have to buy a new door handle, but it did the trick!! Anyways, the renovation and updating dreaming has begun and we are looking forward to making it our own before we get married. Its easy to dream really big and envision what it would look like with certain walls knocked down, but we won't get into that just yet. Just adding some colours and modernizing details. So here are only a couple pictures from Friday night. If you want to see more, you can check out the album I put on my facebook....yes, I succumed to the trend of facebook. Basically it was for curiosity's sake, so we'll see how long that continues, especially if I have a blog to update here. However, I have discovered it is much easier and faster to up load photos there. What the dilemma...:)
KitchenLiving Room

Things are a changing...

The past few months have been full of change and anticipation. So much has changed in my life and so much more will change in the months to come as I prepare to become a wife, move out of my house and find out where and if I will have a full time teaching job. Never have I experienced so much excitment and uncertainty all at the same time before! But the journey so far as been amazing and as you can imagine, the last couple weeks, especially, have been a whirlwind of activity. Things are really coming together for the wedding though and I get more and more excited as we can start to visualize it all coming together. In addition to wedding plans, however, we have some more exciting news to add to the pot....WE BOUGHT OUR FIRST HOUSE!!! I'm sure there will be more pictures to come, but here's a first glance at our home to be in Vineland. I can't wait for the official sold sign to go up!!.It all happened really really fast last week and I wanted to wait a bit before posting about it until all the conditions were removed. We have been driving by this house for months now and wondering why it hadn't sold, so we asked to see it last Monday and that night put an offer in. The next day, the house was ours...the big reason being that we could take the house immediately while other offers had fallen through based on people selling their own homes. And since we didn't have home to sell, we get next week!! That's right, as of April 20th, we will have the keys to our first home. We love it and can't wait to get in there and make it our own. I am so thankful for the time we have before we get married to paint and update it while gradually moving all our stuff over.
I'm looking forward to many good times ahead with friends, like these two, and family. We are all sporting our "Cornerstone Home Inspection" toques, compliments of Ted and Julie. The only bummer part is that we actually still need to wear them these days!! WARM UP ALREADY!!!

The latest...

Well, I thought I'd take a moment to fill in any of my curious readers on the latest happenings of the wedding planning process. Its all flying by so quickly already but I'm trying to enjoy it all. We have all the major decisions underway at this point so I feel good about that. The ceremony location is finalized, although we're trying to come up with a better name instead of just 'the Jordan Hollow'. And for those you who don't live around here, you wouldn't know that there is an old flea market down and there and a popular, yet extremely greasy breakfast joint nearby. We thought perhaps 'the Twenty Valley Trail' or 'GlenElgin" would give a better impression of a beautiful wedding location. Either way, its still a great spot. I have some fun ideas on decorating - since the wedding will be in the evening, possibly some cool torches along the trail leading up to the front of the ceremony - just one of the ideas! The reception will be held back up at my church immediatly following the ceremony. We are going for the party feel as opposed to the formal sit-down dinner feel. My friends jazz trio will be playing the background music while appetizers and desserts will be served. I think this style really represents Brad and I well and we are looking forward to just hanging out with all our friends and family in this way. As far as colours for the bridesmaids dresses go, I really had no set ideas on that but we've come to the conclusion of going with a limey, pistachio green. I know thats probably a really bad description, but there are a gazillion shades of green out there so you just gotta use your imagination. Flowers will probably be just really bright fun summer colours - mostly shades of orange and yellow. We met with a photographer the other night so I think we are set on going with her, we just have to confirm that yet. Oh ya, and the big one...the caterer. We've met with one and really love his ideas...just not his price!! We're going to meet with another one this weekend and do some comparing. Because we're going with a bit of a different style, we want someone who will do a great job at creating the atmosphere, not just making the food. Oh, wait, I forgot about the other big one...THE DRESS! Yes, I think I found it already. I don't have it in my hands, but I'm going in for the purchase tomorrow. I would describe it to you, but well, I need to take precautions should my future husband read my blog...which he actually rarely does since his excuse is 'he lives it'. Anyways, I'll just say that I love it and feel great in it. It was a little strange seeing myself in one for the first time, but it got more and more exciting the more I looked at myself. My head is a buzz with all the things that are left to do and l let me tell you, I've got quite a few lists going on right now. Its a good thing I've been praciting that for a while! I wake up every morning with some random thought about the wedding. I guess thats pretty normal. It's crazy how one little question can change so much in your life. I don't think I've ever felt so much excitement and so much uncertainty in my life at the same time. There are so many unknowns coming up in terms of WHERE we will live, if we will buy a house, if we will rent, if I will get a job in June or in September and where that might be or will I just continue supply teaching etc. etc. I know that everything will work itself out in the right time and that God has each and every step under control, its just another way that God is teaching me to trust and rest in his plan for my life.

Let the planning begin!

Well, we're back from Florida and ready to plan our wedding. We had an awesome week in the sun and enjoyed the relaxing time before all the busyness of planning begins. We have a lot of ideas worked out and so now the official booking and calling needs to take place. But most importantly, we did decide on an official date....Friday, August 3rd, 2007 will be the big day and its coming up fast! We are planning to be married outside, close to the spot were Brad proposed actually, on our friends beautiful backyard. The reception will be held up in my churchs' auditorium right after the ceremony. I originally wanted a tent for the reception, but it makes more sense to do it in the gym becuase then it will already be set up and decorated if, and only if, we need it as a backup for the ceremony. I really, really hope we can still get married outside though. Sunshine all the way! So that's two of the main things nailed down. Next, its on to photography, flowers and catering...oh, and THE DRESS!!