Danny and Stephanie's Life »

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Welcome to our blog!

Danny and I decided to keep a blog about what we are doing in our lives back when we were planning our wedding. So many of our friends and family live in other cities, states, countries, (continents!) that we wanted a way to share our lives, wedding planning, and adventures with them. Now that the wedding is over (it was amazing!) we decided to keep the blog going. Please make sure to come visit our website often, and make sure to leave lots of comments!

About Us

Danny

Danny grew up in Danville, CA. He played volleyball throughout high school, and at the University of Oregon where he attended college. He graduated in 2008 with a BA in History and a minor in Business. He now lives in Pleasanton, CA with his beautiful wife and two crazy kitties. He is currently enrolled in a teaching credential program, and will be teaching High School History next year.

He is currently trying to keep the new grass in the backyard alive, learning to BBQ, and starting to play the guitar again.

Stephanie

Stephanie grew up in El Granada, CA (near Half Moon Bay). In 2007 she graduated from Lewis and Clark College, in Portland Oregon, with a BA in Chemistry. In 2008 earned her MS in Chemistry from the University of Oregon. From October 2008 - April 2009 she attended The Professional Culinary Institute in Campbell, California. She is currently enrolled in a teaching credential program, and will be teaching two periods of High School Chemistry as an Intern Teacher this year. She now lives in Pleasanton, CA with her amazing husband and her two silly cats.

She is currently trying to keep her garden alive, teaching herself to quilt, and enjoying moving into her brand new classroom.

Harley and Zoe

Harley and Zoe are the two crazy kitties. Harley is 3 years old, and Zoe is 2 years old.

Harley enjoys eating massive amounts of grass, sleeping, bothering her sister, putting her toys in strange places, and sitting on her daddy's shoulders.

Zoe enjoys talking incessantly, running as fast as she can through the house, climbing the window/sliding door screens, and banging her head into things.

We met in September 2007. Stephanie was starting her Masters Program at the University of Oregon and Danny was starting his senior year there. Stephanie took some summer courses with one of Danny's friends, who promptly adopted her into their group. Unbeknownst to both Danny and Stephanie, their mutual friend was plotting to set them up before they even met! They started dating soon after they met, and have been so happy ever since.

In October 2008, Danny and Stephanie went to Europe together for two weeks. They went to Amsterdam, Vienna, and Prague. It was truely amazing. After two weeks, Stephanie had to go back to the USA to start culinary school. Danny stayed for two extra weeks in Italy to visit some family friends. While he was in Italy he realized that he was seeing all sorts of amazing sites, and visiting all sorts of beautiful places...but he wished he could have been sharing the experiences with Stephanie. It was then that he decided that he never wanted to visit a new place without Stephanie there to share it with. So he decided to ask her to marry him when he got back!

October 23, 2008 was the 1 year, 1 month, and 1 day anniversary of Danny and Stephanie starting to date. Danny took Stephanie up to Coit Tower in San Fransisco for the sunset, got down on one knee and proposed. She said yes! If you want to read more about it click HERE

Danny and Stephanie got married on June 06, 2009 in Warrenton, Oregon in a small brick chuch, and had an amazing outdoor reception at her parents' house.

They are now enjoying fixing up their townhouse and looking forward to whatever big adventure happens to be next.

Bathroom Baskets

Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 11:08pm Posted in Photos, Wedding Related

by Stephanie
I have been to a couple weddings that had little baskets in the bathrooms filled with all sorts of things that may come in handy. I usually end up needing to use a band aid, or a hair tie or something. It is one of those little things that I always thought was so helpful so we put together our bathroom baskets for the three bathrooms at my parents’ house. Here are some pictures of what our baskets/trays look like and then a list of what is in the trays.

Q-tips
Band aids
Hair ties
Bobby pins
Comb
Tums
Aleave
Neosporin
Nail clippers
Oil absorbing sheets
Warm Vanilla Sugar body spray
Warm Vanilla Sugar body lotion
Nail file
Hair spray
Eucerin body lotion
Dr. Scholles Miracle Shield blister prevention stick
Clear nail polish (great for runs in your nylons!)
Sun screen
Apple scented hand sanitizer
Regular hand sanitizer
Wet ones
Shout stain removing wipes
Sewing kit
Lint roller
Listerine
Cups for listerine (or aleave)
Mint and Cinnamon gum
Mint and cinnamon breath strips
Dental floss
Single use “finger toothbrushes”
Paper hand towels
Kleenex

What do you think? Did we forget anything that might come in handy?

And yes, that is our mattress in the middle of the living room lol. We are sleeping downstairs since Harley is locked in our bedroom. When we had the bed in there she kept trying to jump onto the bed which was totally not allowed by the vet…so we have been exiled to the living room lol.
And they lived happily ever after…

by Stephanie

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May 1, 2009 - 6:06 pm mom - what about the little airplane size bottles of "special drinks" lol just kidding. The baskets look great

May 1, 2009 - 6:09 pm mom - oh yeah....don't forget the claritin

May 8, 2009 - 2:44 am dana - Cute! I'd wanted to do that, but the bathrooms in the Kelly House basement are shared between our reception hall and the smaller pub where the golfers hang out after they finish their round of golf. One less thing for me to worry about, I guess!

I need to order my invites. I need to finish designing them, now that we've decided to do online RSVPs. Ugh. I'm so blah about it lately.

May 8, 2009 - 8:05 am Stephanie - lol that would be SO funny if someone put the airplane bottles in the baskets lol.

Dana- I went to a wedding where the bathroom was shared with another event, and they just put a sign on the baskets saying they were for the wedding. It seemed like people respected that. I know it was one of those totally unnecessary projects, but I really wanted to do it! I guess a lot of people use full size items (and fewer types of items) but I just used little travel sized items so I could spend the money on more types of things which I thought was a good idea. It was a little harder to figure out how to display all the little tiny items though! I know what you mean about being "blah" about wedding projects...now that I am running out of time I am really starting to get sick of all the projects. You know you are almost to the wedding when you start wanting the planning to just hurry up and be over! lol. I'm starting to worry about not getting everything done in time. I guess we will see!

May 17, 2009 - 7:24 pm Becky - Bug Spray.

May 17, 2009 - 7:42 pm dana - Steph - it's starting to get better. Ordered the invites finally, and bought enough of the cover weight paper to make the bulk of my invites. I'm going to work on cutting and folding while I wait for the invites to arrive.

I've also done 1/4 of the flags I'm having people wave after the ceremony (we can't have anything thrown on the lawn, and I don't much like the thought of being pelted with stuff anyhow!), which are coming out super cute.

Meanwhile, I am SO EXCITED for your girls night!!! I can't wait to see you!

My engagement ring!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 1:11pm Posted in Photos, Wedding Related

by Stephanie
Ok so I somehow never put pictures of my engagement ring up here! It is so perfect. I love the vintage look of it, and the filigree (the engraving on the side) is amazing. I also love how it sticks up with the little hole underneath. It is an emerald cut surrounded by a bunch of small diamonds. The wedding band will look just like the band on the engagement ring. It also has the filigree which is nice. I love all the little diamonds on the ring. It makes it sparkle in ANY light. I like that it sparkles so much more than if it were just one single large diamond.

What do you think? Shiny and sparkly!

And they lived happily ever after…

by Stephanie

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Poor Kitty :-(

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 12:30pm Posted in Cats, Photos

by Stephanie

So we have been taking a little bit of a break from wedding related projects because one of our cats, Harley, managed to dislocate her elbow the other day. It was pretty bad. I am going to get a copy of the xray one of these days so I will post it. It was horrible!

The surgeon was able to get her elbow back in the socket and now she is in a big cast. The cast has to be on for two weeks total (one more week to go!) and then she can’t really do much jumping, climbing, playing, etc for an entire MONTH after she gets the cast off!

The worst thing about the whole incident was that when we brought her home after they put the cast on she had a REALLY horrible reaction to coming off the last of the anesthesia combined with the opioid (basically really strong kitty morphine) pain medicine they were giving her. She started freaking out and hallucinating and screaming and thrashing around. It was honestly the scariest thing I have ever seen. We had to call the ER vet again and ended up having to lock her in the bedroom with all the lights out and no noise or people and let it pass. Basically any stimulation just made the freak out worse. The next morning she was back to acting normal which was nice. Well, normal for a cat who has a cast on anyway!

Needless to say, she does NOT like having the cast on. After about two days she figured out how to walk (hobble, hop) around really well. She can walk well enough that she can make a break for the door every time we open it up lol. She now feels good enough that she will sit next to the door and bang her cast on it over and over and over. It sounds like someone is knocking on the front door. The vet said she can bang it all she wants, it isn’t going to hurt her elbow…instead, it will just drive me totally insane! We have been giving her Lorazepam which is supposed to calm her down a little bit, but it doesn’t do anything.

Here are some pictures of our poor kitty in her cast. We both signed her cast with a purple sharpie which I thought was really cute

Still totally wiped out after coming home

She is SUCH a daddy’s girl lol.

The cast had to immobilize both the shoulder and the elbow.

Zoe is still wondering what the heck is stuck on Harley’s arm!

“Get this stupid thing off of me!” She kept kicking at it for two whole days.

This is when she still refused to stand up. She would just drag herself around the room. It was so sad and funny all at the same time. At least she felt good enough to drink some water though!

It took her a while to figure out how to turn around with the cast on. She would just sit and stare at her bed because she couldn’t figure out how to turn around enough to lie down. We would have to pick her up and put her in her bed.

“But I want to go outside!!!!”

She can stand!

“What do you mean I’m not supposed to play with anything!?”

“What if I just play with Zoe instead?”

Her arm sticks up in the air when she lies down on her side

The used such cute VetWrap! It is more like a sticky ace bandage, or medical tape, than an actual plaster cast. She has a big plastic splint underneath, wraped up in gauze and then wrapped really tight in VetWrap.

She is so pretty. I wrote “I love you! Love Mommy” on her cast.

“I’m not playing I swear! I have NO idea how this mouse toy got under my paw…”

She really wanted to play so we made a makeshift toy for her. We didn’t want her flopping all over the place throwing her mouse around so we tied it to some ribbon so we could control where the mouse was. She loved it!

Happy kitty.

She can walk!

You can sort of see what Danny wrote on her cast on the right. “Get well soon! Love Daddy”

They are such good sisters. Zoe misses playing with her SOOOO much.

So she gets her cast off on May 4th. Hopefully when the take her cast off the elbow will stay in place. There is a chance that it could pop back out if the ligaments haven’t healed themselves all the way. If it pops back out they have to do surgery and screw the elbow in and maybe use some pins…not what we want to have happen. Please keep your fingers crossed that it stays in place!

Once things calm down here I promise I will be back to all my wedding projects!
And they lived happily ever after…

by Stephanie

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Wedding Search-A-Word

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 12:37am Posted in Handmade, Wedding Related

by Stephanie
I hate when you go to weddings and it takes forever to get everyone seated and situated before the ceremony actually starts. You end up reading through the program 10 times trying to kill some time.

That is why Danny and I decided to put a “wedding search-a-word” puzzle into our program packet! (Yes, I said “program packet” you will read why it is a “packet” later…once I finish the programs and can take pictures).

I decided to do a search-a-word instead of a cross word puzzle for two reasons. One, I thought it was more fair to those people who wouldn’t know the answers to the “clues” in the cross word puzzle. Not everyone at the wedding will know all the same things about us as other people. Two, my grandpa loves search a words and I always remember watching him do them, and helping him out with them, which was a lot of fun growing up.

Here is a picture of what it will look like (I made it a really small picture so people don’t find all the words now instead of at the wedding ceremony! No cheating!)
What do you guys think? Do you think it is a fun idea? Do you think anyone will actually DO the search-a-word?

And they lived happily ever after…

by Stephanie

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Tulips!

Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 10:27am Posted in Photos, Random

by Stephanie
This is a totally non-wedding related post, but these pictures are so amazing I just had to share them with you guys! These are aerial pictures of the tulip fields in the Netherlands near Amsterdam. Amsterdam is one of my three favorite places in Europe (in no particular order, Prague, the imperial gardens & zoo in Vienna, and Amsterdam). Amsterdam was one of the cities that Danny and I went to this past summer, but we didn’t get a chance to go out to the tulip fields (they weren’t really in bloom like they are now anyway).