While teaching definitely has its challenges, there is one major thing that makes it much, much easier: the BREAKS. Sorry to all my friends who work year-round and get 10 total vacation days, but having built-in breaks during the year and for summer is AWESOME. I love having my year come in seasons and knowing that there are plenty of random days or weeks I can look forward to for times of rest, silliness, and adventures. We used our summer after we got married to travel to Mexico and Sonoma, CA. Last summer we backpacked through Europe for 5 weeks. This summer will mostly be lazy with a smaller trip to Boulder, CO for Jordan’s Half-Ironman race and then a combined trip to Mexico and California in July. But beyond those trips…we’re mostly just being lazy.
Archives for May 2015
How To Plan Your Dream Europe Trip (A 10-Step Guide)
Last summer, Jordan and I spent our 5 weeks of summer traveling through Europe. We started in Ireland, where we visited some friends and drank lots of Guinness. Next, we headed to Scotland, where we learned about the dark history of Edinburgh, took a boat tour of Loch Ness, and took trains through the Scottish Highlands. From there, we hopped on a plane to Germany, and spent the next 3 weeks exploring Munich, Salzburg, the Swiss Alps, Geneva, Paris, and Bordeaux. It was the trip of a lifetime, and we loved every minute of it (minus the occasional frustrating moment dealing with French train officials. Seriously…they were the worst.)
And now for a not so humble brag….I planned the ENTIRE trip without the help of a travel agent, and I’m pretty proud of it! Below you’ll find a summary of the process I went through to plan our trip. I’m hoping to write some posts more specifically on packing, using a home base strategy, sightseeing, etc, but this is a great place to start!
Without further ado…here is my 10 step guide of how to plan your dream Europe trip!
Womanly Wednesday: A Guest Post on Chasing After Dreams
Holy moly…there are no words to describe THE Haley George. She is my best friend, and more than almost anyone I know has taught me how to love and be loved, how to share life and hearts and struggles. The way she has run after her dream of being a photographer in the midst of fear and doubt is beautiful, and she is one of the bravest, wisest, most adventurous and well-traveled people I know. It is an honor to have her as my friend and as my very first Womanly Wednesday guest post. Check out her website to see more of her gorgeous photos and stories!
There’s no one in the world who could have stared me in the eyes ten years ago and convinced me that my life would look the way it does today. Part of the beauty in getting to be a photographer, and the reason I love telling stories for a living, is the unexpectedness that comes with the process. I’m convinced that every story, in its unexpectedness, joy, and hardship, has much to offer the world— even mine.
Sometimes the way that pieces fit together is obvious; other times, despite the answer being right in front of you, those pieces seem too scattered to connect. Though I carried a camera around everywhere, I never considered being a photographer. Though I loved speaking other languages and experienced a natural ease toward learning words, I never imagined stepping outside of the classroom to use them. Though I loved traveling, I never realized it to be made for more than leisure. Though stories from across the world tugged at my heart like nothing else could, I never dared to enter into them. I’d like to say it has been easy to connect these pieces, but “formative, long, dependent, unfinished” is the more honest set of words that describe my process.
My Favorite Love Story (A Two Year Anniversary Post)
Two years ago this past weekend, I put on white dress, took my dad’s arm, and walked down a grassy “aisle” to marry the man of my dreams. It was a sweet, slow day full of joyful moments with people from all the different parts of our lives and our story. Today, in honor of my sweet husband who makes my world a whole lot brighter, I want to go back and share how our love story started. Some of you might already know this story but for me, it just never seems to get old!
Five Tips to Help Your Wedding Tell Your Love Story
Two years ago this week, Jordan and I were soaking in the final crazy days before our wedding. As friends and family started to arrive in town, the whirlwind of a wedding weekend began. We set up the barn, had our picnic rehearsal dinner at a local park, and then finally jumped into our wedding day. There were so many things I loved about how our wedding turned out. It was exactly like I had dreamed, and I still love flipping through our wedding pictures and video to remember all the little moments and details of the day.
When we look back on our wedding, our favorite part is all the ways that day told our story. Our wedding was uniquely us – a mixture of all the things, people, places, and ideas that defined our story and the story we were about to begin. While we had pulled in elements from weddings and styles we liked, we felt that our wedding represented who we are in so many ways .
There were a lot of things that went into planning our wedding day and making it ours. These five wedding planning tips below are the things I learned from planning our Memorial Day weekend, barn wedding two whole years ago, and I would do all of these things again in a heartbeat!
How I’m Finding Freedom From Shame (A Three-Step Process)
“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
Brené Brown –The Gifts of Imperfection
The first time I remember feeling shame, that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that something’s wrong with me, was in middle school. I struggled in my relationships with girl friends, and remember one particular conversation with a girl friend who told me she didn’t want me around when the boy she liked was there because I was “too much,” and when I was my full self I was “obnoxious.” I know that those words came out of a place of her own insecurity and fears, but they impacted me deeply.
I started to believe that who I am is obnoxious, that I needed to tone down my personality, my happiness, my intelligence, and myself in general to be liked and even loved by others. I desperately sought attention from boys, believing that giving them my body and my heart was the only way to overcome my “obnoxious” personality and be “loved” the way I was longing for. When I compromised my boundaries and values to make them happy, I felt an even deeper sense of disappointment and shame.
Easy Mocha Brownies Recipe
At the risk of sounding cliché….this girl LOVES chocolate. I am at my happiest when I have a bowl of something sweet, especially if that something sweet involves ice cream of any kind. When we traveled through Europe last summer, I made it my personal goal to have at least one ice cream cone per day (quite an easy goal to accomplish, I might add).
I especially love having dessert after a meal. It’s the perfect way to keep people at the table, to ensure that conversation lingers long until all that’s left on the table are crumbs, sticky plates, and almost-empty wine glasses.
I love baking sweet treats and trying new recipes, but this twist on a boxed brownie mix is one of my favorites. A pan of these babies has yet to last more than 24 hours in our house, and seems to be one of my husband’s favorite breakfast snacks. When I’m having people over last minute or don’t want to take the time to bake a dessert that requires more time, I almost always throw these in the oven. They take less than 5 minutes to prepare and comes out gooey and delicious (especially if you are a chronic under-baker like me).
Creating Our Marriage Mission Statement
“Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won’t matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength.”
Tim Keller – Meaning of Marriage
When Jordan and I got married, we knew we weren’t signing up for a lifetime of romance and forever happiness. We were lucky to have couples of all ages loving us, asking us hard questions, and speaking truth to us.. As we spent time with these people, one thing consistently stood out: these couples whose love had stood the test of time, tragedy, and trials of all sorts firmly believed that their marriages had a much bigger purpose than their “happiness.” These people trusted that their marriage was something God would use to shape them, to draw them to Him, and to paint a picture to the world of His love, joy, and commitment.
After the chaos of the wedding faded and the daily realities of marriage began to sink in, we wanted to revisit the things we had admired in those married couples who had counseled and inspired us. We decided to spend some time processing our dreams, values, and goals for our marriage, hoping that through writing out these thoughts, we could come up with a mission statement that summarized a bigger picture and purpose for our marriage.
We sat down together and started to brainstorm, focusing mainly on these questions:
- Ideally, how do we want to relate to each other? What action words, ideas, and concepts repeat as we describe what we want our marriage to look like?
- Who are some couple whose marriages we admire? What do we admire about them? How do we feel when we walk into their home or spend time with them and why do they make us feel that way?
- What things or ideals do we value in life in general? How do we want our marriage to express these values to each other and to other people?
- When other people walk into our home and sit around our table, how do we want them to feel? When they get into their car to drive away, what do we want them to say or think as they leave?
Home Inspiration: Painted Kitchen Cabinets
When we were looking for a house, one of my biggest priorities was a big, open kitchen. I learned to cook in our tiny apartment kitchens and was tired of stacking cutting boards, bowls, and pots on top of each other in an effort to get multiple dishes cooked at once. When we found our current house, the kitchen was one of my favorite parts.
A Letter to the Graduates and New Grownups
This May marks three years since I graduated college, but boy does it feel like a lifetime. In some ways, these three years have been a blur of wedding planning, learning to work full-time, and doing all those “grownup” things nobody warns you about. I’ve gotten married, traveled to Europe, taught in several different schools, and done a whirlwind of things since I graduated three years ago.
But in other ways, these last few years have been incredibly slow. I’ve wrestled with deep questions of who I am, where my value and identity come from, and what it looks like to find fullness and joy in a grownup world that often just feels routine. That struggle led me to counseling last year, and every day is another battle to choose joy in a world that invites me to choose sadness, cynicism, and hopelessness.
As I see all of your cap and gown pictures in my newsfeed, I remember how surreal that day was for me. I think I expected to feel different, to feel like I was somehow the more grownup, “educated” version of myself, but I still just felt like me. More than the hours of sitting on a sweaty lawn chair listening to way too many names, the moments that stand out to me from that season the most are the slow goodbyes over those few weeks in May.