Any Other Party and an 80th!

I am SUPER excited!  I am going to the fabulous Any Other Wedding party in September!  Just booked my train so it's official!  Woohoo!

I have mentioned Rock My Wedding a few (OK more than a few) times during my wedding planning phase, when it was a godsend full of inspiration and ideas, but I have also been reading the fabulous Any Other Wedding and although I find myself still addicted to the RMW prettiness, I am now finding AOW more relevant as it seems to focus more on the post-wedding stuff and life in general.  I also LOVE their Any Other Photo feature and as soon as I saw a certain picture my Uncle Alan took at our wedding, I immediately knew I wanted to send it in!  (I won't show it here yet in case they decide to feature it :) but I will say it was the only one to make me teary so far!  Oh and our CD of all the wedding photos has been posted today so not much longer to wait until I get to see the professional ones, yipeee!  Hopefully there will be more tears, for the right reasons!

I am already planning my outfit for the party and think I'll wear my hen night dress but maybe with different shoes this time :)  I hope I'll be glam enough when surrounded by all these uber-glamorous, yellow skirted, blog writing, talented ladies I have been reading about for so long (as opposed to me and my little green obsessed online diary)!  I think I might be a little star struck, how pathetic am I!?  lol.

I have also been thinking what to do with the rest of the weekend because I'm not going all the way to London and swapping my day off work for just one night!  I will head down on the Friday and stay until Sunday afternoon so have arranged to meet up with Frances, a family friend I used to babysit for believe it or not, and then as we became older I'm pleased to say we became proper friends, although I secretly like to think of her and her sister as my little sisters I never had!  :)

Anyway, she lives in London (handy!) and is also uber-glamorous and just landed herself a fabulous job at NET-A-PORTER!  Congrats Miss Frances!  So she will fit right in at the AOW party and she's totally up for joining me and spending the following day shopping and perhaps the next day too!  ;)  Yay!!

And since I hate it when have no pictures in my posts, here are a couple Uncle Alan took of my Grandma who will be 80 on Wednesday - Nik and I went down to Yorkshire to surprise her at the weekend (she thought she was just having a Birthday BBQ with a few of the local family until we and my brother turned up) and it totally worked!  :D

With all the grandkids

With the first grandson-in-law :)

We all had a fab time at the barbecue and were super well fed all weekend - check out Auntie Bev's breakfast spread!!...

Amazing!

My last day at work!

Don't worry Kamran (the boss man) if you're reading this!  I am not leaving!!  I'm talking about my last day at work as a single lady (to quote Beyonce).  My wonderful girls at work (mainly Liz and Suzie as the co-conspirators!) had a few plans for me before I went off to be married!

Liz not only worked on a few projects at work and at home, but even enlisted the help of her 6 year old daughter's after school class!!

The sign made by the 6 year olds :)

Liz made all the green dragonflies stuck all over the practice and in my surgery and they made lots of signs and this....

My green veil!

They made me wear this all day, although I was allowed to take it off when treating people, but I had to have it on when they came in the room and when I went out for lunch! (I made Liz come with me and did get quite a few funny looks with my new bright accessory!!)

My wonderful Liz and her dragonflies in our surgery :)

She made my car a TIARA!!!!

They made me drive it away like this!  So embarrassing!

Thank god we managed to trade it in or I would have had Liz in cleaning the silly string out of those speakers with a dental probe! 

I am so lucky they wanted to make a fuss of me and they were please I took it all in good fun.  Liz apparently has a funny video of me driving down the road, cans rattling away!!  I will get her to upload it to Youtube and add a link here.

The sign on my door has now been replaced with this rather snazzy carved one Nik got me while in Kenya on honeymoon...

If you look closely you will see the elephant and giraffe carved into each end :)

Life update :)

I've been catching up a lot with blog posts about the wedding planning I just didn't have time to write about before the big day!  There are still a few more of those to come, not to mention the photos which I'm still waiting for, ggnnnnnnnnghhhh (impatient, it's torture!!!)  But, I decided that it was time for a wee update on life post-wedding!  Plus something exciting has happened!  :D

Since we returned from honeymoon (those posts are still to come too!), life hit with a bang!  We were both back at work the very next day, having been so lucky to have had so long off!  Since then it has been a busy time with Nik starting his new job and working long shifts, I hardly saw him last weekend with his 9:00-21:30 shifts each day at the hospital plus travelling time.  I am however loving being a wife!  Things are really just the same as we've already been living together for 3 years, but it still feels different which is nice.  I've also been preoccupied with the excessive amount of organising it takes to change your name!  Life will settle down soon though and this weekend will be a good one, we're off to Durham on the Friday night to see his parents en route to Doncaster on Saturday for my Grandma's surprise 80th BBQ!  AND we get to go in our shiny new car!!!!  :) :) :)

I have been driving my lovely GREEN (yes I'm predictable!) Ford Focus for 5 years, and sadly it is now dying at 10 years old. The radiator started leaking, the car itself leaked into the foot-well when it rained so had a rather delightful smell of damp all winter (and lets face it, most of the rest of the year in Glasgow!), the rear and front bumpers had slight damage (not entirely my fault I hasten to add!) and it had silly string stuck in the speakers and other nooks and crannies (how do you spell crannies??) after my girls (Liz, Suzie, hmmmm!) went at it with the confetti, silly string and a huge home made tiara!  Yes they are amazing and I promise to post pictures soon!!!  And yet we still managed to get something for it as a trade-in! Methinks they didn't check it thoroughly enough...meh.

Soooooo, what do we have now?  A beautiful 2 year old silver (I will be adding green touches somehow) Qashqai Tekna and I love it!

We have already been accused of buying a 'family wagon' and yes, we do plan to keep this car for a few years and we do plan on starting a family at some point so it is a practical car (with wipe-able leather seats) but also, I just really like it!!!  It's spacious and fun and a wee bit sexy in my opinion.  I'm sure lots of people will disagree about the sexy part but I'm too excited to care :)

Our E-shoot - Part 2!

As Matt was staying with us for the weekend, he had requested Nik make his sushi after seeing a picture I put on facebook a few months before (I got Nik a sushi kit for Christmas).  It gave us the opportunity to get more intimate shots taken at home and he took some great photos of us working together in the kitchen.

OK, so I was mostly drinking wine!

The aftermath!

The result!

Post-sushi happiness :)

The next day, before he had to drive back down to Manchester, we took Matt to show him our wedding venue, Pollokshields Burgh Hall in Maxwell Park.  He brought the camera and we did a few more fun shots in all my coats and we had a quick play in the playpark!

Our E-shoot - Part 1!

We wanted to do a pre-wedding shoot to get to know Matt again and spend some time in front of the camera before W-day.  We arranged a weekend for Matt to come and stay with us on 1st April and planned a day up at Loch Lomond.  We chose that location as it's not only the place we initially met Matt on a photography weekend but it's a beautiful place we love to visit AND somewhere we could collect pebbles to use in our flower table arrangements!  It's also only an hour or so from here so handy for us!

Collecting pebbles in evening wear!

I had fun choosing outfits, accessories and props for the shoot and am really pleased with the results!  It took a few weeks for us to get the photos but they were worth the wait (I only hope the wedding photos are the same as I'm getting SO impatient now I can't wait to see them!!)

One of my favourites!

The twig heart was given to us as an engagement present by my bridesmaid Claire and I bought the heart chalkboards for writing messages (for this and the wedding day).  I also took along my new bright rainbow umbrella.

I decided to wear my classic beige mac but also took along a few other coats (I have rather a few too many!) I couldn't decide so asked Matt's advice and he said to take them all (um, eight!) and we could do a fun composite shot - still waiting for that one though.

My favourite coat - from Desigual (I love their coats!)

Matt had the idea for us to bring our scuba masks for some fun photos of us in the (freezing) loch!  We did it in the hope it would be worth it and here are the results...

I also took along some evening dresses and Nik took his grey suit for some random dressed up on the beach shots.  I love the ones Matt took of us with the forest behind us as well.

My handsome man :)

He also took some lovely detail shots of my ring...

The best of the rest by the loch....

Evening dress and zebra print wellies - a classic combination ;)

My present! :)

My gorgeous hubby gave me the best present on our wedding day (other than a husband!) I will admit there was some hinting from me and it worked!  He got me this stunning, perfect, GREEN Tiffany dragonfly charm with 3 diamonds in the middle.

GORGEOUS!

I wore it on my heart link bracelet he bought me two years ago for Christmas.

I also wore the tiny engagement ring charm on it
that he gave me when we got engaged

And on a silver chain on honeymoon with my matching bikini :)