Our First Year

Our first year of marriage has flown by.  I can remember April 23, 2011 like it was just yesterday.

Being surrounded by the love of our friends and family is something I will cherish forever.  From the amazing moments, such as looking into Chris' eyes as we said our vows, to the funny moments like the cake dropping - I treasure the memories we made on that day.

Our first year for the most part has been amazing!  I'll be honest with you, it had it's low points too (from an outside source), but it taught us that we are stronger together.  Sometimes we just have to step away from a situation, focus on the good that we have in our lives and hope that time will heal the hurt that they caused us.

But enough of that, lets get to the celebration!!  Our family cruise was planned for the beginning of April so we decided to celebrate our anniversary a little early sailing the Caribbean.

On Isla Roatan, in our Mexican cooking class in Cozumel, enjoying a martini tasting on Carnival Liberty.

For our actual anniversary on Monday we kept to the tradition of eating the top tier of our wedding cake.  Here it is in all of it's glory on our wedding day.

And here it was a year later after defrosting for a couple of hours.

We never had a chance to taste it on our wedding day because our top tier was different from the two tiers that were cut. Chris and I love strawberries, but we didn't think that all of our guests would be big fans of strawberry cake/strawberry filling combo so we saved that just for us.  The cake part was a little dry, but the middle section with the filling was very tasty for year old cake!

After tasting the cake, we enjoyed dinner at Brio and exchanged gifts.

Since we're gearing up for a house hunt (yay!) we decided to keep it small and stick to the tradition of paper.  Each of us came up with something to add to our future gallery wall (thanks for the idea Amanda!).  I finally printed a couple of our wedding pictures and decided on a double frame.  The top half has one of my favorite detail shots, our rings on top of our personalized cake topper. The bottom frame contains the words we said as we slipped those rings on to each other's finger, printed in the font from our invites and matted on the green and blue cardstock that we used in our DIY projects.

Chris' gift was amazing and touching as always!  He took passages from the book he wrote for our wedding day and incorporated wedding images into the words "Love Of My Life!".

I can't wait to see what the next year brings for us!