Lizzie and Nick tie the knot

There are few things more heartwarming than seeing two people who are so incredibly in love tie the knot. And I'm so happy to have had the chance to celebrate Nick and Lizzie become husband and wife this past weekend. It was a night filled of dancing and cheersing to the happy couple - let's not forget the scream-singing to Call Me Maybe, dougie teaching, and the Chi O tradition of singing "Shades."All in all, it was a magical wedding.

Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Battaglia! (Or are you opting for a combined last name? After all, Battcat does have a nice ring, no?)

  

Isn't she absolutely beautiful?!  

P.S. Did I also mention that Erin made the wedding cake?! She's amazing.
P.P.S. Ahem, guess who caught the garter?! :)

Toasts and Singing for the Bride-to-Be

 

In a nutshell, the bachelorette party was filled with a spa visit, photo booth, lingerie cookies, "We Love Lizzie" signs, an amazing Italian dinner, the best dance moves you've ever set eyes on, singing at the top of our lungs, hugs, dancing in the streets, late night hotel treats, late morning brunch, beautiful ladies and most importantly, a glowing bride-to-be!

Yep, we know how to have a good time. I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking!

 

Celebrating Sizzler!

Bring on the high heels and fake eyelashes, because the girls are hittin' the town to celebrate the one and only Sizzler! (Lizzie loves her nickname :)) Tomorrow morning we'll be heading down to Portland for a fun, action-packed bachelorette weekend. I anticipate many tasty cocktails, scrumptious meals, funny decorations, brilliant dance moves and Lizzie hugs. (What can I say? The lady loves to hug after a couple drinks!) 

Have a fabulous weekend, friends!

P.S. So many fun bachelorette parties.

Bride-To-Be

While celebrating the lovely Bride-to-Be this weekend, it got me thinking about a few of the reasons I love this lady. So here goes:

• She gives the best hugs, hands down
• Her kitties are cute and she lets me take care of them :)
• She has the guts to do a complete career shift to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse 
• I wouldn't be surprised if she was a makeup artist in her past life
• She's got your back. (Better go and get Sharonda?)
• Her laugh is contagious
• She's seriously one of the sweetest people you'll ever meet

Lizzie, your wedding is right around the corner! Can't wait to watch you marry the man of your dreams!

A night out on the town

What do you do when two out-of-town girlfriends come to visit? Well, you plan a happy hour, of course. Then happy hour inevitably turns into getting another drink elsewhere, which turns into dinner at Serious Pie, which turns into hanging out at Steph's until the wee hours of the night. What can I say? There was a lot of ground to cover. Love you girls!

Meet William, Harry, Pippa and Kate

Lizzie gets to keep William and Harry. I guess that leaves me with Pippa and Kate? :)

Oh, I wish. One day, I tell you. One day.

Pain is temporary, but pride is forever

This is the motto that was on the back of a runner's t-shirt during the Rock n' Roll Half Marathon this weekend. We must have took it to heart because by mile 11, I thought I was running to my death bed. My breathing was fine, but my muscles were shutting down. All I could think about was walking, but wouldn't let myself after all I had worked for so far... Must. Keep. GOING!

BUT, in the end, we were triumphant! Autumn, Maddie, Lizzie, Nick, Kathryn and I (among 25,000 others!) all finished in one piece. Kathryn and I ended up finishing the race together at 2:10:28! My goal was 2 hours, but I am extremely happy with this time (which originally we thought was a little less than this, but again, I'm so happy with my results!).

Some of the highlights:

• First and foremost, our adoring fans: Straubs, Steph, James, the Doherty's, Pat and Mary. It takes a diehard to wait on the sidelines for hours just to see someone run past in a matter of seconds. Thank you all!


• Also, a big thank you is on order for Pat, Kathryn's husband, who sacrificed his morning to forge through the incredibly bad traffic to get us to the race. I owe him a drink. Or two. Maybe another trip to the Little Red Hen is in order??


• The beautiful course, especially along Lake Washington.


• At one point everyone was pointing at this bald eagle and I overheard a lady saying, "Oh crap, is everyone pointing out another big hill?!"


• The funny water station volunteers who would be holding out water and yelling, "Bud Light, come and get it" or "Gin and tonic! It's your friend."


• Where the full marathoners split, there was a man yelling, "Come to the dark side" and all I could think was, "Oh, hell no!"


• The MJ tribute in one lady's lawn - complete with a framed picture and blasting Billie Jean.


• The makeshift band with a 10-year old boy taking his job oh-so-seriously.


• A woman in the blue wig or the lady with the sequined cape and shoe covers. There were just some overall fashion disasters going on.


• The mile 12 marker. Damn, it had to have been the longest mile in history.


• Somehow managing to gather enough energy to sprint to the finish line. DONE! (Well, until the next one on October 3rd.)


• Brunch with the Doherty's after the race - as Maddie puts it, we were playing with house money and could eat whatever we wanted. (I may have taken this too literally over the course of the day.)

Kathryn and me - I must say, it doesn't look like we just ran 13.1 miles.

Lizze, Maddie, Autumn and me dazzling the camera with our bright colors.

Did you know that the major disaster of Michael Jackson in 1984 was that his hair caught on fire?

There’s something about trivia that I just love. It must be my uber-competitive personality, but when I play, I’m in it to win it. I think that would explain my fascination and minor obsession with Jeopardy. I mean, really, I can only answer like 50% of the Jeopardy questions on a good night (well, give questions to the answers to be completely accurate) and we won’t even discuss my off nights. So I’m not well-versed on Russian History in the Stalin Era or Corporate Espionage, can you blame me? But when the Teen Jeopardy Tournament is going on, I feel like a genius!

So last night, I met up with Lizzie, Nick, et al. for a fun game of trivia at the Pied Piper. They are regulars at this trivia night (actually they have come off a 3 week winning streak!!), so I was just getting my feet wet. The system there is pretty cool – so you have 4 rounds of 8 different categories and before each round you pre-score the categories (1-8) and get points on more of a weighted scale based on what you think your strengths are. Thanks to Nick, I think that the “High School Musical” category was a strength of ours and for the record, no, he doesn’t have any young siblings… At trivia, there’s always that one question that comes up and the answer is right there, just not quite right there. It happened again and now I will never forget that the inventor of penicillin was Alexander Fleming. I only know this because I got one of those chain emails about this crazy story of how Fleming was put through school by Winston Churchill’s dad and yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. I just googled it to link it to my blog and found that it was an urban legend, bummer. Nonetheless, I did learn that Fleming invented penicillin.

So the group had 2 teams since there were too many for just 1 team and one of our teams took 2nd! Good, but not good enough. I plan to return until we achieve victory. Better go brush up on my random trivia.