one month.

I came home to these babies today.  Yup, it's been a whole month and my husband still treats me like a queen.  He's so sweet.

We celebrated our one month anniversary with some chicken pillows.  Chris planned the whole meal and it was tasty.  We have really enjoyed making dinner together.  Leading up to the wedding and all through the festivities, it was all eating out for convenience sake and we got so sick of it.  It's nice to just have home made meals again (not to mention, left-overs for lunch!)

Happy Birthday Chris!!!

I just LOVE this man.  Good thing, right?  because we've only been married for a month.   Seriously, though, I'm so grateful for him.  He's such a great example to me and I'm so happy to be married to him. I had so much fun planning his birthday.  I had his four presents sitting out on the table a couple days in advance just so he could wonder.

He got a new shirt, a set of nice big "beer" mugs, a season of Scrubs and The Wedding Singer and two tickets to the Unwritten Law concert this Tueday (Oh and a gatorade, but that was really just to add weight.)

Then he found out we were going 80s roller skating!

 I just love Marshall's safety pads.  Nice touch, although I feel like no one really got in to safety until the 90s.

 It was a fun night with a lot of our closest friends.  After the skating we came back to our house and had strawberry trifle and just laughed and talked.  We really love our people.

what I do.

I just love what I do for work.  I'm the art director at Silhouette America and that means all things graphic design are my responsibility.  That includes product packaging, signage, trade show booths, photography, and my favorite, magazine ads.  I love these little projects.  A few weeks ago, we came up with the concept for this ad.

I bought a large metal garbage can and started collecting trash for my shot. FUN!  Pretty much, I had a blast working on this photo, getting the pear bites just right and picking up nasty old toys at DI.  (I wish the Treasure Troll with the chopped hair cut wasn't covered by the lid).  Through the whole process we debated about how it would be received.  Funny? or just flat out rude?  In the end, we decided NOT to run the ad.  We don't really want to be that company that's just out trashing the competition (excuse the pun).  And really, we didn't mean it as maliciously as it comes across.   We just wanted to highlight the one thing that really sets us apart from every other electronic cutter in the industry.
If you're new to the crafting industry, I'll explain.  At Silhouette, our flagship tool is the Silhouette SD, an electronic cutting tool.  Connect it to your computer and you can cut shapes and fonts out of paper, fabric, vinyl, etc.   Every other cutter in the industry requires you to buy a cartridge or a CD of shapes or alphabets (ie appx 50 shapes for about $80).  With the silhouette, you cut all the fonts on your computer (very cool) and have access to an online store of THOUSANDS of shapes that you can buy for around 99 cents a piece.  Basically, we are the iTunes of the crafting world.  Sorry.  I just really, really stand behind this product.  It's not that other tools aren't good... we're just better.

Anyway, instead of the edgy, funny ad, we'll be running this much safer ad.

My favorite thing about these projects, is the photography.  I don't profess to be a professional or anything (accept that I do this for a living) but I'm pretty happy with this shot and I'm improving all the time.  I like studio photography because you have tons of time to figure out exactly what settings you want.

The talented Traci Smith made this happy card and I really wanted a sunny windowsill to match it.  So I grabbed some fabric we had lying around and taped it to the window for my curtain, a wooden shelf for the base, and pushed the whole thing up against a window to get those sweet blown out highlights.  So much fun.

Here's the set up for this shot.  Nice, huh.

I just really love my job... most of the time.

Cancun

Oh, it was just perfect.  Perfect weather, perfect resort, perfectly in love with my husband.  We had so much fun at our all-inclusive resort in Cancun.  We slept in, ate when we wanted, hit the beach hard, went kayaking, rappelling, zip-lining??, snorkeling, and even played a little golf.  We scheduled parasailing four times and each time it was cancelled for too much wind.  Bummer.  I guess we'll have to do another tropical vacation soon.

On Sunday we went for an evening stroll along 5th Avenue of Playa del Carmen.  It was fun to see the shops and walk along the beach at sunset with a little gelato.

These coconut heads were funny.

Our extreme Tulum day wasn't as extreme as we might have hoped, but we enjoyed the rappelling and zip line enough.
Snorkeling in the Cenotes (underground river) was pretty awesome.  We didn't get any pictures of it, but it was a cool dark cave that we got to explore.  They served us a pretty awesome lunch and then took us over to Tulum.

Tulum is so pretty.  The water there is just amazing.  I wish we could have spent some time at that beach, but we were on a schedule that day.  Man it was gorgeous, though.  What a great place to build some ruins. :)

I have often seen these poles in Mexico, but never been fortunate enough to see the spinny-hanging up-side-down guys.  With the spring equinox that day, there were some extra festivities happening at the Mayan Temples.  It was fun to see these guys do their little dance and then just swing... upside-down... all the way down.

Lizards are everywhere in Cancun.  Especially these big iguanas.  Just trying to chase one down.  I almost touched one I was chasing once and it scared the devil out of me.  It was supposed to keep running. 

One night when we went to close the balcony door a lizard scurried in an up on our walls.  It made us both jump.  He was pretty panicked too, but fortunately, he found his way into Chris' backpack and we were able to get him outside again.

Just getting ready for the golfing season with a little pitch 'n' putt.

Worst packing job ever...

Yeah, I don't know how it happened.  I guess I was distracted or something before this trip, but this was without a doubt my worst packing job.  I forgot my toiletry bag including my toothbrush, deodorant, toothpaste etc (fortunately most of my make-up was in my purse), my cell phone charger, my small point & shoot camera with its waterproof case, and my Nikon D7000 charger... and my battery was dead before I could take my first photo.  Yup.  Sad, sad day for Amy Silva.  Can you imagine me walking around gorgeous Mayan ruins on the coast of a turquoise sea without my D7000?  I can and it hurt just a little.  Thank goodness Dave and Caitlin gave us a sweet little video/point&shoot camera for our wedding.  Seriously, Dave, it was a life saver because I just don't do vacations without cameras and it's awesome for videos.  We love it.  So fear not, friends, we have a couple pictures from Mexico for you yet.  In the mean time, there is a banana, chocolate, and carmel crepe calling my name.  More later.  See ya.

Bridal Shower

My good friends Jessica and Lisa Isenbarger threw me a darling bridal shower a couple weeks ago.  It was so fun, and so weird that it was mine.  

My favorite part, other than these strawberry napoleons, was the standard How-Well-Do-You-Know-Your Fiance game.  They asked Chris several questions about our relationship and recorded his responses.  If I didn't get the same answer, I had to pop another double bubble bubblegum wad into my mouth.  (That's me with 15 pieces of double bubble in my mouth.  I could barely close my mouth).  It got kind of ridiculous.  These were some of my favorite responses from Chris, though.  He's a sweetheart.

When did you first say "I love you"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9su6jhwI5BI

What do you love most about Amy?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aLQ1vqSRVU

Aren't I lucky?  I just love him!

A hint of things to come...

Chris and I took our Bridals and Groomals today.  The wedding is just around the corner and it still just doesn't feel quite real.  Even being there at the Mount Timpanogas temple, we were just playing bride and groom today!  It's hard to believe it's less than two weeks away.

But aren't my flowers gorgeous?  I couldn't be happier with how they turned out. My friend Marietta and her florist friend, Lori put them together.  Perfect!  I love the anemones (black center) and the ranunculus flowers in the boutonnière.  *sigh* It just came together so well.

 

Less than two weeks and everything is going smoothly... a little too smoothly.  First there was the apartment and today we had a similar experience with our new couches.  We went furniture shopping last night (so fun) and found a few good couch options.  The one we liked the best was just more than we wanted to spend.  We decided to sleep on it and come back the next day.  Today when we stopped by, we found that there was an identical couch in the scratch and dent section that is (as far as we can tell) just fine.   $289 for a couch?  Sold!  We are so excited to start furnishing our new place.  We also recently discovered our apartment doesn't have a microwave.  How did we not notice that?  Fortunately, Chris just found a good one on Craigslist for $50.  It just feels like everything is working our perfectly.  So this is what marriage is like?  Everything really is happily ever after?  What a relief!  Here I thought it was all going to be hard work and sacrifice.  ...Or is this just the "happily ever before"? :)