Wedding Recap #1

Hey everyone! So, as you know me and Hubby Holmes finally tied the knot about a month and a half ago. I have been wanting to do a recap of our wedding weekend but when I sat down and started typing about all of it, I realised that I had WAY to much to say!! lol. So, I decided to break it up into parts. I wanted to start with the day before our wedding. So much happened on that day, both good, bad, crazy and sad. Some of which I wont speak about because its kind of personal and just doesn't really need to be a space that I want to revisit in my heart. No it has nothing to do with Hubby Holmes and me if you are wondering :). Anyways, I really wanted to write all this down because these are memories that I don't want to forget years to come. You might enjoy reading some of it too! Enjoy!


Our wedding weekend was such a great and exciting weekend that just didn't last long enough! My cousin and her boyfriend came down early from out of state on the Thursday evening before our Saturday wedding and stayed with me and Gracie at my moms house. It was so nice to be able to hang out with her a little bit before the chaos of the wedding started. We got up early Friday the next morning and headed to town to have a day of getting mani/pedis done and finishing up any last minute details for the wedding. I had hoped that Friday would have been a stress free day and that I wouldn't have very many "to-do's" to get done, but I don't know what happened, where I went wrong in all my planning, but for some reason that day was CRAZY! My two sisters were also with us that day, and without them I don't think I would have made it through that Friday, there was so much chaos! After getting our nails and toes done that morning, we headed over to the hotel that me and future "Hubby Holmes" would be staying at for our honeymoon night, as well as where the rest of our family would be staying that weekend. I ended up booking my honeymoon room for the night before the wedding also that way I could stay there and get dressed and ready there before the wedding. We went ahead and got checked in and unloaded what ever stuff for the wedding we already had in the car and figured out what our game plan would be for the rest of the day.

The hotel we were staying at was the Embassy Suites. I expected to have extremely good service at that hotel. Its the nicest hotel in the town we were in and just knew we would be happy we stayed there. However, even though I booked my entire families rooms over 6 months early, AND I booked them ALL with 2 queen size beds for each room, that was not what we got. Every room that we were given had only 1 king size bed. Which would have been fine, but the rooms were not booked for just one or two people each. They were booked for families. A family of 4 should not have to sleep in a king size bed, thats just crazy. When we complained to the front desk, we were told that you are not always going to get the room that you book. Then why don't they tell you that on the phone when you are requesting a certain type of room. Also, I requested a room that was not by the elevator. Since it is my honeymoon, I didn't want to hear all the chimes and dings from the elevator while trying to spend some quite time with my new husband. And what do you know, my room is the first room you see when stepping off the elevator. And I couldn't be moved to another room because the entire hotel was booked for the local college graduation AND a track meet competition that was being held locally. There were MANY other things that went very wrong with this hotel, but I will recap on those later.

Anyways, after dealing with the hotel, we decided that it is what it is and I wasn't going to let that ruin the weekend. I was getting married to my best friend the next day after all :). The hotel was having a happy hour down in the lobby just at that moment so we decided to let the kids go play in the kids play area and we headed over to the bar for our free drinks. Now, I don't normally drink around Gracie. In fact, I don't think I have EVER drank around her. But at this very moment of being pretty cranky with the hotel service so far and the fact that they were offering FREE, yes FREE drinks and snacks, I wasn't about to pass it up. And I was good, I only had one glass of wine and then we decided to finish up our day of tasks. We drove back to the city to my moms to get the last load of stuff and made it back to the hotel in time to enjoy pizza with my aunt and cousins who made it in from out of town. It was such a long day that was filled with so many little tasks, a ton of "just a quick drive over here...and there....and back here...". We were all so exhausted! It was 1am before any of us got to sleep. Gracie ofcorse passed out watching movies in the bed around 10 thank goodness! Looking back on that day there are so many things that I think about now that just weren't important. Its so funny what you feel that you HAVE to have while planning a wedding. Certain picture frames/decorations, little things that you feel will just make that day better. Then after getting married you hardly even remember those little details. If I could change anything from that day, and from planning all together, I would do away with all the little stuff. I wouldn't have worried about putting together the little decorations at the moment that weren't done, no one would have noticed if they were missing in the first place. I would have spent the day just relaxing and enjoying more of the company of my family that was with me that I don't see very often. Maybe spent the evening watching movies (like I had originally wanted to do) and just let go of what wasn't done. But if we only knew now what we didn't know then....

Coke Chicken

Okay so tonight for dinner we had coke chicken, thank you to the wonderful "Mrs. Nicki" as we call her in our household (she is our daughters music teacher at MDO and our dear friend). She gave me this recipie a while back and it has changed out lives! YES its that good lol. I give her all credit for this! I thought I would let this be the first recipe I post about since its one of our favorites at our house and we eat it no less than once a week since its soooo easy, cheap, and extremely YUMMY! Plus, its low in weight watcher points too. I forget how many she says its worth, but im sure its low in cals. and fat since there is pretty much nothing to it. So here you go!


Ingredients:

• We use about 2lbs Boneless Skinless Chicken (I have used both chicken breasts and chicken tenders)this is what will feed our family of 2 1/2 (yes, I consider Gracie a half lol) But you can use as much chicken as you need to feed your family.
• 1 cup of ketchup
• 1 can Diet Coke, Any kind works well. (Tonight we didnt have any diet coke so I tried it with a can of regular Pepsi and it worked GREAT!)

Thats it, thats the only ingredietns you need! Its wonderful lol.




Directions:

1. Grease a skillet pan well and place on burner with heat turned to Med-Med/High. Place chicken in skillet (You dont have to wait for pan to heat up)
2. In a large bowl mix together ketchup and coke, then poor over chicken in skillet.
3. Heat chicken and coke mixture until boiling.
4. Once boiling, turn down the heat and cover with lid. Let sit for about 30 min. I usually turn and stir every 5-10 minutes, but you dont need to.
5. After about 30 min. of simmering, take lid off and crank the heat back up to high.
6. Let boil until the soupiness of the sauce has thickend up to a BBQ consistancy. You will know its done when the sauce is as thick as ketchup or BBQ sauce. The chicken will be almost falling apart at this point also. REMEMBER! If the sauce is still soupy then it is NOT done. You need to let it cook as long as it needs to cook for the sauce to be thick! It shouldnt take more than 30-35 min. for it to be cooks completely.
7. If you want a little more seasoning you can always sprinkle with some garlic powder and onion powder.
8. Serve with fries or veggies and ENJOY!

                                          

I plan to try this recipe in the crock pot the next time to see if it works. I will update on that as soon as I try it out :)

Crayola Color Bubbles Review

So I have been wanting to do a review for a long time. Really on anything lol. I am that person that when I want to purchase something that I dont know alot about then I google reviews, I look on youtube to see if anyone has any video reviews on the product, I search and search and SEARCH about the product if im going to be spending a good amount of money on that certain item. And sometimes I like to read reviews about small products too. Its just nice to hear from other people what they think about products that we may or may not be interested in. This review is going to be over the Crayola Color Bubbles. You may have seen the commercial for these. In the commercial the kids are blowing bubbles in the yard and the colors of the bubbles are very vibrant. The bubbles come in a bunch of different colors. The colors we bought to try out at Green, Orange, Pink, and Purple. However, we only ended up openning the Green and Orange so those are the only colors that I can review.

Anyways, so we got our two color bubbles and headed outside. Now mind you, I had Gracie in only a pull-up and water shoes because I was expecting the worse with these bubbles and just knew that If I kept her clothes on then we may ruin a nice outfit and that was just something I was not going to be okay with lol.

We started with the green bubbles. Notice that the lable says "Spill Resistant Bottle" :




After openning the bottle, it was clear that it was NOT a spill resistant bottle AT ALL!

Gracie was insistant that I give her her very own bottle, so I gave in and let her have the orange, This is the result of letting her play with her own bottle:

We tried blowing a few bubbles. I tried to take some pictures of the bubbls to show you how vibrant the colors really were but they didnt turn out to well because it was pretty windy that day and the bubbles would float away before I could capture them on camra lol. This is the best I got:

My overall score on these bubbles is a 5 out of 10. They were a little fun, but even Gracie was not interested in them after about 5 min. She didnt like that they were getting all over her and even she didnt like the mess. The good thing about them, is that they are very washable! After we played we headed straight for the bath tub to get Gracie cleaned up and it scrubbed right off with little effort. Although, I cant say if the colors come off of your clothes well or not. We were lucky enough not to have got any on my clothes, and Gracie was only in a pull-up lol. I would recommend these bubbles be something you play with while your playing outside ONLY and maybe while playing with a sprinkler near by. They were fun, and the colors were neat, but we seemed to be fighting the mess and splatter from the bottle more than enjoying the bubbles. It was a neat idea from Crayola, but I think they need to do some changes to the bottle a little bit.

New and Improved!

Yes, I know. Another stay-at-home mommy blog. If there aren't already a million others out there, and probably every single one if them is way cooler, more informative, way more interesting then this blog is. My mission in life is to be the best mom, wife, friend, person that I can be. I've learned so many things from my family and friends over the years that have helped mold me into the person I am today. I only hope to use this blog as a sort of notebook of all the things that I learn along the journy of my life and maybe you will find something of interest to you :).

So in rediscovering my blog (Thank you Pink Chicky for inspiring me to get back into this btw!!), I have wanted to find a way to have everything more organized and put together. That way its easy to find specific topics I post about. It took me awhile but I have finaly finished what is now the new Holmes Sweet Holmes blogging home page! Im so excited and cant wait to start posting and blogging! Stay tuned because I have alot of neat ideas/recipes/crafts and just plain fun stuff to share with you all!