Dreaming Big!

Inspired by my friend and fellow blogger, Sara, I decided to spend some time thinking about my big dreams. I really like to just scribble ideas on paper, so I grabbed some blank sheets of paper and a pen and just started writing all the things I've ever dreamed of doing as a career. I didn't let any details hold me back. For example, if I dreamed of being a doctor, I wrote it down. The fact that I would have to go back to university for many years and incur a lot more student debt would be irrelevant. At this stage, I was just brainstorming dreams. In the end (although there's never really an end to dreaming!) I found a business idea that fills me with excitement and eagerness every time I think about it! I wanted to apply the same process to my personal life as well. But I already knew what my big personal dream was, so I didn't even bother getting out the pen and paper.

At this point, I'm not quite ready to share my big professional goal with the internet world, as I'm still just getting a handle on how to go about pursuing it. As for my big personal goal, I want a big family. It sounds simple enough, but we would like to adopt, which is a bit of a process. Expanding our family through adoption will require a lot of planning, paperwork, time, etc.

Both of my goals are big, big dreams. But by taking each of them one tiny step at a time, I feel like they are goals I can definitely accomplish. And each day that I work a little bit on them, I feel completely energized! It's a wonderful feeling!

For My Non-Facebooking Friends

My nephew - solo breakdancing at his hip hop show! The dancers were given some freestyle time while they were waiting for the show to start and my 4 year old nephew got up on his own and rocked it!

Anniversary Loveliness

I love Sara and Matt's anniversary traditions. Mostly, I love that they do something simple and meaningful to them. I definitely want to plan some traditions for us. We've been married less than two months and I'm already thinking about our anniversary... obsessive planner much? Oh well!

Here are some ideas so far:

• picnic dinner
• annual camping adventure
• once we have our own property, we could plant a tree each year 
• carrot cake! I'm definitely a fan of making our wedding cake recipe every year... SO delicious!

We're definitely lucky to have a summer anniversary. So many options! Feel free to add your ideas as comments below!

The Wedding Weekend

We've noticed that it used to be tradition to open your wedding gifts the day after the wedding at some sort of luncheon with all your family and guests present. Honestly, I think this is a terrible idea. It alienates the guests that traveled far distances or are students on tight budgets, or anyone else who chose not to purchase a gift for whatever reason. It also emphasizes the ridiculous notion that guests are expected to shower you with gifts to celebrate your marriage. Umm... call me crazy, but I think guests coming to the wedding in the first place is the best way to show they value the committment you're making!

That said, I like the idea of extending the wedding celebrations past the wedding ceremony and reception to create more time spent with your family and friends. My favourite wedding bloggers, Sara Cotner and Matt Bradfor from $2000 Wedding, did just that. Their wedding was a weekend away in the mountains with plenty of time for connections with family and friends. While this was not exactly an option for us, we have looked at ways to spend a bit more time with our guests.

The first thing we are doing, now that we no longer live in the city we're getting married in, is staying in the same vacation rental building as some of our family. This will hopefully give us some extra family time during the in between moments or over morning coffee.

We are also bringing our wedding party together at Adam's parent's vacation rental condo for a very informal rehearsal dinner. Essentially it's a come-as-you-are and eat pizza with us kind of dinner! I hope this allows for more time socialising than a sit down dinner at a restaurant would.

Finally, we are looking into having a similar gathering in the same condo for the day after the wedding. We hope this will be open to all of Adam's relatives, as they are the guests that will have traveled the furthest to be with us. We really want to make sure we see as much of them as possible before we all have to go home!

It may be a stretch, but I'm thinking of also looking into some extra time with my family and friends. They generally live closer than our other guests though, so being a busy weekend to begin with, we may not be able to make as much time for this as we'd like. Luckily, we see these folks more often anyhow, so hopefully they'll understand!

What are you doing to facilitate time for connection with your guests?