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A December to Remember

Wow. December was definitely a crazy month! It started off with our wedding on the 5th (Happy 1 Month Anniversary to us!) followed by Cory’s exams, our Honeymoon to Disney, my Grandmother’s passing the Monday before Christmas and finally a ton of Christmas and New Year festivities. I felt like I was on a crazy emotional roller coaster for the entire month. So many wonderful, yet very emotional moments.

Our wedding was an absolute dream. I am so thankful for our temple marriage and have already felt the blessings of it in the month we have been married. We were so blessed to be surrounded by so many of our family and friends on our special day even though it made it hard to speak to them for very long. The last thirty minutes was an awesome dance party and we had to almost literally be pushed out the door. It was a wonderful day and we are so thankful for everyone who made it so special for us. We spent that night at a bed a breakfast in Camden and had a little picnic in our beautiful room. By far the best day of my life.

The next week was a rough one. We were both impatient to be on our way to Florida but we still had school and work. After Cory’s exams were over we were finally able to leave. Cory finished with A’s and B’s by some miracle because I know he did not study nearly as much as he should have this semester, but I guess he had some good excuses. J Driving down 95 to Jacksonville in the dark is not an experience I would like to repeat. I have always been wary of big rig trucks and that is about all that drives on 95 at night. Plus there was construction going on almost the entire way so I was a huge bundle of nerves the entire time. We made it safely though and had an absolutely wonderful time. We ate so much food, but it was all delicious. Everything was decorated for Christmas and it was so magical. The weather was wonderful. We wore shorts and short sleeved shirts and even went to the water park! Cory had never been before so I had fun playing tour guide and showing him all my favorite parts. :) We are already talking about our next trip. :)

We got back from the honeymoon on Friday and my grandmother passed away the next Monday. She was in the final stages Alzheimer’s disease and so it was surely a relief for her to be free of that body. She was one of the most wonderful women I have ever known and it was definitely hard to say goodbye. She had been on a downturn since Thanksgiving and so we had expected it, but it is never easy to lose someone you love. She and my grandfather had been married for 57 years. Someone asked her once when she knew she was going to marry him and she answered “Third grade.” J She was always the last to sit down for dinner and the first to ask if there was anything you needed. Her recipes for tea cake cookies and spaghetti were famous. My brother and I even made our own commercial about her spaghetti while watching home movies when we were little. I have so many wonderful memories of her and feel so grateful to have had such a wonderful woman as my grandmother.

The thing about loss is that it tends to bring families together and that was definitely true for our family this year. It was nice to be able to spend so much time with my extended family leading up to Christmas and we really learned to rely on and help each other. Cory and I had a wonderful first Christmas together. The nice thing about getting married at this time of year is that you get to spend a lot of time together. It has kind of spoiled us. :) Our nicest present was from Mom and Dad. They are paying someone to paint almost our entire house and we are so excited and grateful! We finally have a move in date: February 6th! I can hardly wait! Right now we are living with my aunt in two little rooms. It will be so nice to be able to spread out! :)

For New Years we went up to Cory’s brother and sister in laws house to celebrate his nephew’s birthday. It was a lot of fun but crazy with all those kids! Cory and I are both looking forward to a wonderful New Year filled with many more exciting adventures! I will have some pictures of how the house is coming to post soon (fingers crossed)!

This has definitely been a Mega-post! I will add trying to be a better blogger to my already pretty extensive list of New Year’s resolutions so hopefully they won’t be so long in the future. :) Also, I am going to try and get Naomi to teach me how she uploads all those pictures. I am terrible at it and I think that is a fitting reward for such a nice long post. Right, Na? :)

A Quick Update

I have been procrastinating writing a blog post because I did not want to have to deal with posting pictures. They never do what I want and then I get all frustrated. So I have decided that this post will be pictureless! So totally unlike me but there it is.
The past two months have been a whirlwind! Cory and I have been doing so much work on the house and to be honest I am tired! Doing it all over again, I would have bought something move in ready so I could enjoy being engaged instead of trying not be super grouch with Cory because we are both highly stressed and going on next to no sleep. We continue to preserver however, and are actually starting to see some progress. This may or may not be due to the fact that we recently hired a professional to help with the more daunting tasks. No three words haunt me like "painted over wallpaper." I have given up hope that the house will be perfect when we move in and just hope we will have some space to live while we are finishing the rest. At least it will be an adventure! :)
Everything is going much more smoothly on the wedding front. I think that is because my mom is in charge of that project. :) I am actually fairly calm about it all considering everything. I am not too attached to the reception so if something goes horribly wrong, it won't ruin my day! Cory has been especially wonderful lately. He deals with my crazy mood swings like a champ and never fails to make me feel all gushy on the inside. I feel so extremely blessed to be able to spend eternity with someone so wonderful!
We have our interviews with the stake presidency tomorrow and I am very excited to put my recommend in it's little holder. :) I am really looking forward to getting my endowment. My aunt is actually going to do the work for my grandmother who passed away from lung cancer when I was 16. I feel so blessed that she will be included in such a special day in my life. I have really missed her as I have been making all of my wedding preparations. It is very difficult to loose someone you love and to feel the ache of their absence during special moments in your life but we have the promise of eternal families and know that we will one day be reunited. I look forward to returning to the temple often to give others the opportunity to receive that blessing.

The Craziness Continues...

So it has been a crazy month. Cory and I found, bid on and got our dream house. It is a colonial style yellow two story house with a fireplace, garage and huge fenced in backyard. We close on the 21st and we are so excited!! We will be in the Windsor Lake ward with Cory's brother Mike, and some other really great people. Even before we got the house, Cory and I both felt like that was supposed to be our ward which was a little hard because my best friends are in West Columbia. But at the same time it is easy because I know that is where the Lord wants us. Last week Cory and I went to want Mike and Jenn play softball with their ward team and met so many nice people, including the bishop and it was just wonderful. I think we are really going to love it there! The house needs some work, but nothing we can't handle. Basically just some paint, new carpet and updating. I wish I had a picture to put up but everytime we go by, I have left the camera at home. Hopefully I will get some up soon.
We have also gotten a dog. I have not decided yet if this was a mistake. He is very cute but very hyper and crazy. He likes to bite which is probably his worst quality and I think the process of potty training needs no explaination. He is a Siberian Husky who we have called Warrick (too hard to say), little dog (when we hadn't thought of anything else), Grendel (which is reserved for our first mastiff) and finally Lupin (we are sticking with this one, even though I sometimes still call him little dog). He has his aborable moments which helps when he behaves like a terror. I think it will be a lot better when one of us moves into the house and we can let him romp around in the backyard for a while. It is defintely good practice for being parents, one day in the not so near furture. :)

Lupin's two personalities: super cute and super vicious. And yes, that is my arm. It is fine now though. :)

He hasn't quite gotten the posing for pictures thing down yet. :)

Today we checked two big items off our to do list. We had our engagement pictures taken which was super fun! Naomi was great and I am so excited to see them! After that we went by H H Gregg to check out their Labor Day sales and ended up purchasing all of our appliances! We got a great deal and some really nice things! They are going to deliver them for us the week after we close so we can start making dinners and washing our clothes over there while we work on the house! :) Things are working out so much better than I had ever imagined and I thank the Lord every day for such wonderful blessings in my life!

It's a Crazy Life, but a Good Life

So wow. In the 3 months since I last updated I have gotten engaged, graduated from college and started a new job. And those are just the huge things. That doesn't include the canoe trip to Augusta, celebrating 4th of July at the river house or the everyday monotony of cleaning, cooking, laundry and starting my wedding workout program!
So big things first. The engagement. Cory and I got engaged on April 25th when we went to Biltmore for the day. I absolutely love it there. It reminds me of all the grand houses I visited in England and it makes me feel a little like Lizzie Bennett traipsing about the country side. We've been several times but I had the inkling that this was THE time. After one foiled attempt in the gardens, he asked me in a little alcove in front of the house. He was so nervous that there wasn't going to be a time to ask and he was ready. He said he felt like Frodo carrying around THE RING. haha. So of course I said yes and have been constantly answering my moms many questions with "yes" "no" or "I like that one best" ever since. She has very easily taken the role of wedding planner and I am glad to let her do it. She is so talented and much more creative than I ever hope to be. So now I mostly just wait for December 5th to get here and plan the honeymoon down to every small detail. We are going to Disney World and ever since I booked it I have been slightly obsessed. We are super excited about it though!
About three weeks after I graduated I found out I had gotten a job at the Department of Transportation as a GIS Analyst. Basically, I make maps which is a great job for a geography major. It is exactly what I wanted to do and I love it! I feel so blessed to have gotten such a wonderful job at such a hard economic time. I work with some really great people and get off at 4 every day which I absolutely love. And I will have exactly the number of vacation days I will need saved up in time for the wedding!
Right now I am just trying to get all the small details of getting married taken care of. I booked the temple on Wednesday and did not stop smiling for about 2 hours afterwards. Something about that just made it seem more real somehow. Right now Cory and I are in the process of looking for a house. We have been approved for a loan so now all we have to do is find our house! It is a very exciting but draining process! We have also started registering places and it is so much fun! It will be even more fun when we have a house to picture all these things in! Well, that is a very quick and dirty update on my life! Now that I am sort of caught up with everything I will hopefully be better about posting consistently on here! I will definitely have a lot going on to write about! :)
If you want to know more about the wedding, we do have a site on the knot. It's http://www.theknot.com/ourwedding/EmilyKing&CoryWatts .

Laughter, Penguins, and Fainting

I had to have oral surgery to remove a bad tooth a few weeks ago. This is what happened.

I had to wake up at 7:20 on the morning of my surgery. My dad was taking me because you are not allowed to drive yourself home afterwards and he is a stickler for being on time. This is quite inconvenient as being late is one of my major weaknesses; however, I was uncharacteristically prepared for this morning and hastily threw on my favorite jeans (now with holes in the knees from falling down the stairs at the institute building) and a white shirt t-shirt I usually sleep in but somehow thought would be comforting I had laid out the night before. My dad and I get in the car at 7:40, thirty five minutes before my surgery is scheduled and drive twenty minutes to the oral surgeons office in Sumter. After waiting a surprisingly short time, a nurse come to get me and leads me back to the surgery room. I don’t actually know what it was called. It looked like a normal dentist room, except it was for surgery thus: surgery room. As we are walking back, the nurse says “You sure are smiley. You aren’t nervous?” “Not really” I reply. This is a lie. Despite the blessing I got the day before, I still don’t like the idea of being injected with some sort of medicine that renders me unconscious, but you know what they say, fake it ‘til you make it. As soon as I sit down in the dentist chair, the nurse puts on a mask that gives me laughing gas. I really hate the smell. The surgeon comes in and I am reminded again how glad I am that I chose him over this other dentist I had seen a month earlier in Columbia. This man is all smiles and reminds me of my dad. The other man reminded me of Napoleon, telling me I had several problems with my teeth but not to worry he would fix them all through multiple surgeries and for thousands of dollars. Not to mention his office was a funeral home in a past life. Almost as soon as I was out the door, I was calling my dentist for another referral. My new surgeon leaves the room and I am left to chat with the nurse about my major and other easy topics of conversation knowing all the while she is just waiting for me to stop making sense so she knows the medicine is working. This makes me determined to make sense for as long as I possibly can. I am still doing pretty well when the surgeon comes back into the room to give me the IV. He makes a big show of pretending he is going to stick it in my neck instead of my arm and I can’t help giggling. Blast! I have finally lost. When the nurse clamps things on both my wrists and one of my fingers to monitor my vital signs during the surgery, I start really giggling picturing how funny I must look with all these things coming off me. The nurse assures me that it is all quite normal to them but I can hear the laughter in her voice all the same. The next thing I remember I am being asked to pick out a ring I suppose because I was such a good girl during the surgery. She suggests I take a pink one to which I reply with an emphatic "no. " I have a slight vendetta against the color pink ever since I was a nanny for a little girl in college who was ALWAYS wearing pink when I got there. She was always wearing a different color when I left because I had to change her after feeding her lunch. I thought this was a major victory against pink. After speaking with various mothers, I have been informed they always dress girls in pink so they will not be confused with boys. I still think it is slightly ridiculous to always dress them in pink, but whatever. I ended up choosing a blue on with a penguin on it. I don’t remember making that decision, but I have always liked penguins. The nurse leaves to go get my dad and the surgeon comes back in from whatever he was doing, washing up or something I imagine. He notices my ring and tells me conspiratorially that they are really for children, which I could deduce even in my semi-drugged state seeing that it would only fit on my pinky; however, he does his best to find me one slightly larger like I am going to wear it every day after this, but in the end only succeeds in moving it from one hand to the other. When the nurse comes back in she says something about this, but I can’t make my body respond to her even though I am thinking of it. All of the sudden I am aware of how terrible I feel. I’m hot and dizzy but can’t manage to tell anyone this. They try and get me to sit up, but I can't. They ask me what is wrong and I just say “hot” and then I think I fainted. The next thing I remember a nurse has a cold cloth on my forehead and my dad is holding my hand. They try and get me to sit up again but still nothing. I tell my brain to get up but nothing happens. At this point I hear my dad saying that he is taking my things to the car and will come back to get me. He lets go of my hand, a fect I both notice and dislike. At this point I think I lose consciousness again but when I hear my dad’s voice again I automatically reach out my hand for him to hold again. They must have thought I was really in trouble because by this point there was another nurse in the room who remarks “Honey, you are as white as your shirt!” (insert Cory here saying “did you tell them that was normal?”) The two nurses and my dad manage to get me up and take me out the special door they use for patients as they exit as not to frighten those waiting for their turn. As we are walking in the parking lot I throw up blood which should have frightened me, but it didn’t. Turns out a lot of that runs down your throat during the surgery. One of the nurses says “I thought that was going to happen” which seemed to me a very stupid thing to say. When they finally get me in the car, I am feeling slightly better but still only semi conscious and as thirsty as I have ever been in my life. My thought then is how awful it would be to be in hell if that is really how it feels. As we are driving home my dad asks if there is anything I need and I manage to croak out “water” so my dad stops to get me some and after that I don’t remember anything until I am in my room and fall into bed and almost immediately go to sleep. I wake up a few hours later with the penguin ring still on my finger and feeling completely fine.
I had my check up a few days ago and Dr. Marks said everything was great and he was glad that I was okay. Apparently they were all quite worried about me. Not that I wouldn’t make it, he assured me, but just in general. And the nurse made a note in my file so if I ever have to have surgery again, I won't have a repeat experience.

I'm Dailyboothing

So basically you upload a picture of yourself a day with a caption. As many of you know, I love photos so I had to do it. You can check me out here: http://dailybooth.com/itsemily