An accidental month off. April summarised...

I don't quite know what happened but I seem to have gone over a month without blogging quite accidentally, I just never had that urge to sit and write about anything, I'm really not sure why. I also felt the longer I left it the less I knew how to come back and what to write. So, I'm sat here at my laptop with no real plan hoping that I can summarise what I've been up to while I've been  away from the blog! I got the idea from Charlotte to do a Someday Summary from blogging days of old, but I felt I needed to update people reading (and my future self that I see reading to remember like a diary!!) about the month I was absent for!

Okay so this was actually at the end of march over Easter weekend, we finally had all of our family together for an engagement meal/party, a difficult task when Sam's siblings are based all around the country, with us also at the opposite end! It all started well with a lovely Italian meal booked and a few bottles of champagne paid for. It ended with me hugging my Sister in Law and bridesmaid to be after I fell asleep on the stairs and hugging the toilet not long after. I discovered after not being much of a drinker since my college days that I actually quite like champagne. Especially it seems when it's being used to toast my future ;)

These are probably 2 of my favourite pictures from the month of April. The top one is where I pulled over on the side of the road on my way to the place where I was going to learn to take blood (yeah!) and I realised how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful part of the country. The bottom picture was of our first day off together in the month of April, around the 20th, where we packed ourselves off to Keswick and got the boat round to do the fairly introductory walk called 'catbells'. I'd highly recommend it to anyone in the Lake District to walk, we're not hardcore walkers and this is very little work for great rewards of amazing views! It definitely felt better than slobbing around and tidying the house! We also went for a particularly lovely meal and ice cream in Keswick afterwards.

I can barely make it through a conversation without mentioning wedding planning these days so I could hardly leave it out of this! The month of April is our wedding month to be and this sweet little countdown is something I got for Sam (and myself, I mean, we live together) for our pre-wedding anniversary. It's also reversible with something for after the wedding so I feel like it was worth the investment ;) I honestly can't believe we're under a year to the wedding already. this whole year is going so quickly. We got engaged in January!!
The picture to the left is the best response we got to someone receiving our magnetic save the dates, Sam and I really do not face swap well. I had never really considered save the dates but we're having a weekday wedding and so wanted to give people more notice than just the invites. I just did a simple design and got them printed through printed.com as recommended by Rosie. We're doing the same with our invites (although they won't be magnetic and face swappable!) and hopefully, if I can manage it, our stationery too!


Hope you've enjoyed my little disjointed summary of April and a bit of March, I'm hoping I won't leave it quite so long next time!! I always post over on instagram if you're ever really looking out for what i'm up to ;)
I'm so excited at the moment because we had our engagement photoshoot this week with our wedding photographer and he's slowly releasing a few sneak peeks of our pics as he edits them, so exciting! I'll do a whole post on them once we get them all i'm sure!

Sunday through my iPhone.

This is going to be one of those posts that I'm not sure anyone except my future self looking back and reminiscing will find interesting, I was going to do another photo an hour post like I've done before but if I'm being completely honest I forgot for the first few hours so instead this is like a Sunday highlights reel, a fairly mundane Sunday but a good one.

07:32

I woke up naturally today at half past 7, it's easy to see why when you can see the sunlight already streaming through the windows, honestly though it's not something that bothers me. I find my health and energy levels feel much better if I try to stick to some kind of sleep routine, plus we had planned to be up and at the gym for 8am (haha). 

10:30

We did eventually make it to the gym! This was when I accidentally opened the camera trying to swipe up to change the song, spotted my reflection and remembered I had planned to take photos today. Unfortunately I didn't take a better one than this because I was far too scared of being caught taking selfies at the gym! 

13:04

Today was the perfect first day of Spring here in Cumbria and being garden-less we decided to try make the most of it with a walk around Talkin Tarn. We took some strawberries, smoothies and iced fingers and just did a circuit of the tarn. If it weren't for the really quite cold breeze I could be fooled into thinking this was a picture from midsummer, the sky was blue, the water was blue and people were eating ice cream at every part of the walk! Some with gloved hands but I think it counts. 

14:19

The much more mundane part of Sunday came next, an hour long blitz of the house, Sam tackled upstairs, me downstairs and then we joined forces with the laundry. I love our little (deceptively large) terrace so much and although we're never short of space it really doesn't take long to get it all cleaned up nicely. 

15:16

Always the reward for some Sunday cleaning - a bath. For me there's nothing more indulgent than a bath during the day, before I changed jobs I had far more midweek days off and I used to luxuriate in the fact I was soaking in the bath while everyone else was at work. Amazing. I used half of a Lush Milky Bath, I've mentioned this so much it's my absolute favourite bubble bar and this amazing Golden Egg which putting in the bath made me feel like a Triwizard Tournament contestant. (Come seek us where our voices sound, we cannot sing above the ground...) I hadn't tried this bath bomb/melt hybrid from Lush before and it's so lovely, it has the Honey I washed the kids scent and it left my skin feels so so soft. 

16:58

What else is there to do after a bath other than put on lovely fresh pyjamas? I did get dressed again later on but that's besides the point. Here I'm holding my new favourite not bad for you snack, mozzarella and pesto Kettlebites, and an apple. The apple was meh but oh boy, those kettlebites. They're so good. 

Right:18:29 Left:18:49

Oh baby. These were worth getting dressed for. This pizza van comes to Carlisle and the surrounding areas each weekend, we had never tried it before but wow, this will not be the last time. There's something about a wood fired pizza, the dough is so perfectly crisp around the outside and just cooked to perfection in the middle. There was barely a drop of grease on the boxes after we'd finished these pizzas and although they're indulgent I really don't feel sluggish or heavy after eating them. I feel like I have to go back and try all the flavours. If you're in the Carlisle area and haven't tried these guys you're seriously missing out.

20:18

The last picture of the day because I am a true granny and all I'm planning on doing now is deciding whether to watch Louis Theroux on Netflix or Derren Brown on All 4 or whatever they call 4od these days! Got our delicious new candle burning from TK Maxx (they don't ship the UK yet but if you're lucky like we were and theres a vanilla bean in your local TK, get it!) and I might make a peppermint and liquorice tea soon, wild! 

Hope you've enjoyed this utterly mundane Sunday run through, it really has been a great, if uneventful, first day of spring for us here. 

Booking the wedding!

I can't believe I'm typing this but we have actually BOOKED OUR WEDDING! Sorry, I just can't believe it, we're both so excited and keep reminding each other that each event that happens this year will be our last before we are husband and wife. Last Christmas, last New Year, agh! I couldn't be more excited, well I could, If i won the money to pay for it all right now, then I'd be super excited, but I'll stick at just being excited that we are really doing it and I have to pick up a few Sunday shifts here and there because no one has won the lottery yet ;)
We looked around a venue on Monday that I had been to for afternoon tea last year and fallen in love with but that Sam had never stepped foot in. I secretly knew this was the place for us and just hoped that Sam felt the same way, he did! We went for a very classy post 'could this be the place?!' lunch (see below) and looked over our (my! very Monica) planning notebook and got super excited.

We actually saw another place after that but cancelled the 3 more we had booked in because we just knew! Now we get to do the exciting stuff since so much is already taken care of in the wedding package we've chosen, it really feels like so much of the work has been done for us without us losing any of the personality and mood that we're going for, yay!
Now I'm designing Save the Dates and pinning endless amounts of bridesmaids dresses and decor ideas (wedding dresses being pinned to a secret board because, well, it's a secret!) and just wishing I could make this wedding thing my full time job.
We have a meeting with a wedding photographer who's work we've both fallen in love with around easter and then it'll feel like a lot of the big things are taken care of and we've just got the lovely bits left to do, that and the final legal bit which can't be done until its within a year of the wedding but I'm ignoring that for now! I can't believe that next year we will officially be married!

Another thing that made everything feel so amazing was finally being able to give my 2 bridesmaids their cards illustrated wonderfully by Emily who blogs over at Jammy&Jelly. She did my illustrated new years resolutions back in January :) I love the cards so much and the girls loved them too.

I'm not sure what Emily thought of my request when I emailed her to start with, I'm sure it sounded like quite an odd question to be asking but I wanted something humorous and personalised which I think is exactly what these are, I love them!

I'm not sure if I'm going to include much wedding content on here because I wasn't sure if I had anything much to offer about planning a wedding but since I suppose at the moment it's all a big part of my life it'll be mentioned here and there, I hope thats okay! Sorry I've been a bit AWOL recently but along with all this happening I've also started back at uni this week and been ill with what I think was 2 very serious illnesses and Sam believes was a stomach virus. We have agreed to disagree on that one, I don't do being ill very well!

{FROM THE ARCHIVES} My Hair History.

This post was previously posted on my old blog in 2013, I had a quick read through it and thought it would be fun to update it. I hope you don't think I'm cheating by posting an old blog post, but I have updated it!
Now over to 2013 Jacquina...

I love reading these posts, I think your hair can often show things about you at different stages in your life (does that sound really shallow? Never mind) and mine has certainly changed a lot! So let's have a look back...

 

Aww look at that, 3 years old, naturally blonde and more posing than you can shake a stick at, could this photo be any more 90s? (I'm wearing clip on Pocahontas earrings)

Oh wait, it can get more posey, I'm about 5 here and I'd been allowed to grow my hair long!  Those are Belle's shoes by the way, hold in your jealousy.

Fast forward to age 14 and I've got a full fringe again and dyed my hair dark. Also, this pose? It was totes in fashion, as was the school tie.

Back to my natural hair colour, quite long and probably the only time I haven't had some kind of fringe. (This is my 17th birthday.) It actually grew quite a bit longer than this before the next photo happened but I seem to have worn it up more often than not and can't find any good pictures.

The red hair picture shown here was my 19th birthday, I loved my hair like this but red is such a hard colour to maintain, and I wish I'd never cut it. I then decided blonde should be my thang for summer. For a girl who thought red hair was hard to maintain blonde was not a good choice. I lasted as a blonde for about 6 months.

The first accidentally supremely mardy picture was taken early summer last year (thats summer 2012) when I had just grown my hair out to a good length again, and the second was around September '12 where I stupidly decided a bob would be a good idea again! Now I'm back to the inbetween stages of growing my hair out again and we're up to date with my hair history!

That's what you think 2013 Jacquina, let us continue...

Oh this picture holds many memz, this was the first time that Sam met my family and probably the first picture of us as a couple, we have both changed so much in the 2.5+ years of being together it makes me laugh, Sam especially looks his age these days (in a good way! the beard he has now has mad that baby face a thing of the past)!

Fast forward a bit and I had started to go to a hairdresser to have my hair coloured instead of DIYing it, as you can see from the previous picture, box dye on top of box dye made it go a bit patchy and I ended up having hair of all different colours, getting it fixed meant either bleach or dark and by this point my hair was really quite long and I was terrified of damaging it so dark it was. All of a sudden my hair was long enough to be commented on as something unusual, I hadn't even noticed how long it was but before I got it cut (spoiler alert!) it was probably just past waist length. 

I had to have a good long chat with my hairdresser to convince her to cut 8" off my hair to this length but I was so happy with it. I think shorter and darker again is the way for me to go from here, I am such a fickle thing when it comes to my hair, always looking for the next thing I want to try! 

Now we're up to date on the left is my hair when I first went for the full chop, darkened it up a bit and got some balyage in there too and on the right is it a bit grown out and a bit faded so the contrast is a bit less harsh. I know I wrote back in 2013 that another bob would be a mistake but I love my shorter hair and i think its because it's the 'lob'. I think the next step for me might be to tone down the balyage a little bit, mostly because I love it when I style my hair but for everyday when my hair is just put up in a ponytail it can look a bit odd! I can't believe I've lasted this long without getting a fringe cut back in too, its a minor miracle. 

Hope you enjoyed this post and it hasn't been too self indulgent! I think this is a fun way of giving a sneak peek of your history and if you've done a hair history post then link it below because I love 'em. Thanks for reading.

I also hope you don't mind me pulling a post from the archives every now and then, they're a good glimpse back for me.

 

We're Engaged!

I'm sure if you follow me on any of my social media you'll know this already but on the 28th of January, Sam asked me to be his wife, and I said yes!

In a style so completely us that I don't think it could have been any more perfect, Sam asked me in our favourite hotel, that we were staying in as a birthday present for me (or so I thought!).

The day of the proposal on our blustery beach walk. 

I had just got out of the bath, make up less, damp hair and probably looking a bit pink. I found the ring hidden behind a very grown up love note (Jacq loves Sam 4eva and eva!) that I had written Sam earlier to thank him, in a silly way, for the hotel room. Upon finding the ring I completely froze and Sam, being the oh so cool person that he is said 'So, shall we get married then?' I'm not ashamed to say I cried before holding out a shaking hand for him to put the ring on. We had champagne on ice ready to pop (me not Sam, he's scared of it!) to toast our future.

The first sunrise we saw as an engaged couple. All firsts at the moment are feeling so special, and both Sam and I keep catching ourselves looking at that ring on my finger and thinking about everything it means. We couldn't be happier.