Wedding Photos

Guess what! Our wedding pictures are finished! Feel free to check out the pictures and tell us which were your favorites! All you have to do is enter your email address and then peruse!

Wedding Slideshow

Here's the wedding slideshow from the rehearsal dinner :)

Anniversary

What special thing happened on your anniversary?

This is what happened on ours!

Thursday (Pre-Wedding)

So. I thought I was going to blog about the wedding. Then we came home and the apartment was a wreck. Whoops. I'm going to do this a day at a time to try to remember the most stuff. Here we go.


Thursday before the wedding was crazy. Everything was calm and in order until then, but from the minute we woke up at David's parent's house on Thursday everything went insane. Well, before that we'd had some minor guest list problems... One thing was that we'd apparently invited too many people. We had about 30 more people RSVP yes than we thought we would, but we'd worked that out by Thursday and everything was in order. Thursday people started dropping like flies. By lunch time almost 10 people were maybes or had last minute changes in plan. Since we'd already paid for their meals we decided to try to find people to replace them. Sadly, David's grandparents had both gotten sick and were among the 'maybes.'


After we got the guest list almost straightened out, David and I went to return some doubles of gifts we had received. We had to go to Belk and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I chose Belk first because I knew it would be the more difficult of the two stores. Let me tell you: I HATE BELK. It took us nearly two hours to complete some simple returns. Horrible. David almost died. However, Bed, Bath, and Beyond was a very simple return process and we finally had some honeymoon cash in our pockets.


Next we met two of the groomsmen at Men's Warehouse to try on and pick up the tuxes. After fixing a half-broken button we went home for dinner. The best part of the day was still ahead. 


At 8:00 we met a ton of friends at Natty Greene's for $2 pint night. This was the perfect way to kick of the wedding weekend. We got to hang out with lots of friends, a lot of people who were going to be a part of the wedding got to meet for the first time, and we all drank some really tasty beer. (Red Nose!)


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I've gotten one room of the apartment cleaned and organized, only five more to go! Hopefully I can finish another room tomorrow and blog about Friday!

Mr. and Mrs.

Woot! We're married. 


Check back after the honeymoon for the whole crazy story!

Christmas

One Christmas down, three to go. Last night we had Cottrell Christmas (my dad's family) and the next Christmases, in no particular order, are nuclear Cottrell Christmas, nuclear Earley Christmas, and friend Christmas in Reidsville. Last night at Cottrell Christmas, the cousins outlasted the adults at dinner for the first time ever. It was quite an accomplishment! We were sitting and chatting at the dinner table almost an hour after the adults had gotten up. We're growing up so fast!

With 15 days left until the wedding, we've been very busy, and it has been a little hard to get into the Christmas spirit. David is sad that Christmas snuck up on us this year. We haven't had as much time to enjoy it as we would have liked. My hope is that next year Christmas will be a huge deal! It will be our first married Christmas and we will be able to make a big deal out of everything.

I don't expect to have a lot of time to post between now and the wedding. Merry Christmas to everyone, and Happy New Year! We look forward to seeing many of you at the wedding and the rest of you during our many Christmas travels!

Thankful

I never said what I was thankful for, and after such a long week, I'm going to take the easy way out.
I'm thankful for David. Here are the blurbs from our wedding website about how we met and how he proposed. Enjoy!


How we met:
Catherine and David attended the same school (Caldwell Academy) from 1996 when Catherine started there until 2004 when she graduated. They knew of each other but did not become friends until Catherine's senior year. They dated for a few months but decided to take a break and went their separate ways for three years. Neither of them know exactly how they started talking again, but in July 2007 they decided to restart their dating relationship. After graduating from Appalachian, Catherine moved to Raleigh where David was in school at NC State to work and begin graduate school (and to put an end to their long-distance relationship). Catherine and David were not apart for more than a weekend from the summer of 2008 until David left for Alaska in June 2010. 


How we got engaged:
David spent the summer of 2010 in Alaska set-net salmon fishing. After being gone for a week he knew that he never wanted to be separated from Catherine again, especially by 4000 miles. He called Catherine's father (and woke him up from a nap) to explain this and ask for permission to marry Catherine. Cecil told David that he and Catherine's mother trusted David with their daughter and gave him his blessing. For the next 8 weeks Catherine and David's parents kept the secret from her and helped David find a ring and arrange a surprise proposal for the day he flew home. On Sunday, August 8, David's plane landed at 1:09 pm. He deplaned and walked towards the people waiting for him (his parents, Catherine, Catherine's parents, and his sister and brother-in-law). After a few hugs from parents, Catherine hugged David, and at the same time his father passed him the ring. He then stepped back, got on one knee, and proposed. Of course, Catherine said yes, the date of January was decided, and the wedding planning commenced.

And now we're down to 39 days! Everything is getting crazy with Thanksgiving, the end of the school semester, Christmas, and wedding planning! I just finished the wedding slideshow last night and I really want to share it but I'm going to (try) to wait until after it debuts. Here's a few cute pictures to hold you over, though.
 

Ian

ovember 5 this little cutie turned 1.

Ian lives in Seattle so we don't get to see him as much as we'd like, but he is definitely one of the cutest little kids I've ever seen. Technically he is David's second cousin, but we think of him more as a nephew. We spent Saturday at his first birthday party. Rumor has it that this was his first experience with sugar...

It was quite funny watching this little guy tear into that cake. At first he didn't really know what to do with it, but after some help from his mom and his cousin he got the hang of it. He even went at it face first a few times. Cute, cute, cute.

On a side note, with the help of some great friends, I got all of my invitations addressed, stuffed, and stamped today! They will be in the mail tomorrow morning. Only two more months!!

My First Shower

hower number one was a great success! My mom and I woke up early Saturday morning to run errands. By two o'clock we had successfully marked everything off our list and were heading to the Clement's house.


Ginna and her mom were the perfect hostesses (along with Teresa and my aunt Kathleen)! They thought to include my favorite foods (glass bottle cokes, goldfish, reese's, kitkats, oreos) among the adult food (fruit salads and quiches). We partied and opened presents for almost 2 hours! 


The only thing about showers is that when it's your shower, people look at you the whole time. It's a little unnerving. I was also a little unnerved when Dorothy suggested everyone go around the room and say how they knew me and the funniest thing they remember about me. Nothing too embarrassing came out though.


Overall it was a great first shower. No bows were broken (to David's relief... it's not that we don't want kids, but it would have scared him if I came home with 5 broken ribbons), presents were received, great friends were seen, and future plans were made. Hooray for parties and swag!

Wedding Buzz

t's starting. As of last Friday David and I are busy almost every day until the wedding. Between my grad school work, both of our multiple jobs, football, family, holidays, and the wedding, we are overbooked. This has been a fun experience thus far and I definitely prefer a six month engagement to anything longer than that, but it's about to get extremely chaotic. We were supposed to go to a Chick-Fil-A opening this Wednesday but I think we're going to stay home and take a break instead.
There are two more Chick-Fil-A openings this year, one in Suffolk, VA and one in Kinston, NC if anyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and come with us. They're lots of fun and you get 52 free #1 combos if you participate. Let us know if you're interested or have any questions! If there's one thing we'll make time for, it's free Chick-Fil-A.

Registering

hen David asked me to marry him I was very excited, but my reaction was not quite as animated as some may have liked (but I think anyone that knows me should not have expected that anyway). I was much more animated a few hours later when I realized we would get to register!! This, of course, caused David's father to remark, "Now there's the reaction we were all waiting for!"


We've finished registering at this point (and by that I mean, we are done, but I still log on and add a few little things every once and a while because it's fun), and now we're just sitting and waiting. One cool thing about registering though, is that you can see what you've registered for, how many you want, and how many you've received. Awesome! So I can check my websites every day and see what we've already got!!


Now, some people call this cheating, but I think it just adds another level to the whole gift receiving process. This way, I get to be excited when I register for it, when I see someone has bought it, AND when I open it.


Planning a wedding is fun and a little stressful, but registering and getting presents is just plain awesome!