Our year in 2013

2013 was one for the books! :)

January - January marked 5 years since Tyler and I first started dating. Fun fact: if you didn't already notice at our wedding - the 6th is destined to be our day! We started dating on January 6th, got engaged on September 6th, and got married on July 6th. All of this was unintentional and I didn't notice it until well after we set the date for our wedding!

In the beginning....19 years old!

February - I was in full swing with wedding planning, working two jobs, house searching (will explain in September section) and trying to fit keeping in contact with Tyler at an 8 hour time difference. I don't know how I did it! Tyler and I made the decision for me to stay home during his season so I could plan for the wedding and work. It was very hard being engaged and living across the world from each other!

March - I was able to visit Tyler in Latvia for 2 weeks and spend my 25th birthday with him. It was bittersweet as I was so happy to be there with him but wanted so badly to just stay there! We had a fun two weeks and he promised me we would never be apart for this long again!

April - I went to Jamaica with my best friend, Nat, and we had the time of our lives! It was great to get a girls trip in before I got married and it was a relaxing break from everything. I highly recommend Jamaica if anyone is looking into going somewhere in the Caribbean! The water is absolutely beautiful and the people are so nice!

Soaking up the sun in Jamaica!

May - Tyler came home for the summer and I had my first bridal shower! It was so much fun to have my first taste of wedding related events and I couldn't believe how fast time was going and how close the wedding was getting!

Me and some bridesmaids/MOH at my shower

June - June was a busy (and sometimes overwhelming!)month with finalizing wedding details. But it was also a lot of celebrating and having fun with another bridal shower, I had my bachelorette party and Tyler had his bachelor party on his 25th birthday.

My basketball theme for the afternoon at my bachelorette party!
MISSING YOU GIRLS SO MUCH!!!! 

July - July 6th was truly the most amazing day! To us, it was perfect! We had so much fun celebrating our marriage with our family and friends and I would love to go back and celebrate with you all again! Most fun night of my life!... We spent our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta and we absolutely loved it. We ended up picking PV somewhat randomly. I had been looking into places for 2 months and couldn't decide where would be a good place to go. Finally one night in March when I was in Latvia, we sat at the computer and said "We need to just decide!" We went on a booking website, looked through some packages, and decided on Puerto Vallarta. It was the best "spontaneous" decision and I have to say PV might be one of my favorite places I've ever visited and would definitely go back!

Enjoying Puerto Vallarta!

August - It was back to the real world. After receiving different offers from different teams, Tyler decided to take an offer in Forlí, Italy. We both loved Riga, but we were both excited for a new chapter in Tyler's career and to go to ITALY! I am so proud of Tyler and Italy has been a great career move for him.

September - Tyler left right after Labor Day and I stayed behind to close on our house. I started house searching in January in hopes of finding a house for Tyler to come home to in the spring. I never knew the intricate process in buying a house and it was ten times more difficult with Tyler's job because no one had ever dealt with a person who's job was a professional basketball player in Europe. I won't bore you with all the details, as most of you already know the 17,583 hoops we had to jump through to get our house. We moved into our house in June with a move-in agreement with the sellers and we finally closed on it at the end of September and it is officially ours! It is the best feeling to be done with all of that as it was much unneeded stress piled on top of me during wedding planning! I told Tyler we are living in this house for a minimum of ten years for all the stress and nonsense we went through to get it! :)

October - My original plan was to leave the first week of October after closing on the house. I ended up getting delayed though as I was waiting on documents I needed from the Italian consulate in Chicago to bring here with me for use for a visa. I ended up spending the three extra weeks back home and now looking back, I am extremely thankful for that time. I was able to spend quality time with my family and friends before leaving. Then finally, after Tyler and I were away from each other for almost two months again, I left on Halloween for Italy.

November - Tyler was in full swing with his season and I was happy to finally start going to his games again and be a "basketball wife". I am the only American basketball wife. As a matter of fact I am the only wife on the team! We are the old married couple. For real! Everyone is younger than us and there are only a few guys who have girlfriends. I wish there was another American wife here with me to spend time with while the guys are at practice or away games but hopefully next year!

December - The highlight of our time together here so far was our trip to Venice earlier in the month. We are looking forward to doing more traveling and seeing more of Italy after that trip! Our first Christmas together was fun and relaxing and we look forward to many more!

2013 was, by far, the best year for the both of us thus far in our lives. We have many wonderful memories from 2013 and it will always be a special year to us. We can only hope for 2014 to bring us more wonderful experiences and memories! We hope you all have a safe and exciting time celebrating New Year's and we wish you a joyous, healthy, BLESSED 2014!!!

Buon Natale!

Merry Christmas! We hope that everyone is enjoying the holidays and spending time with family and friends. Although this is probably the hardest time of the season for us to be away from our families, we are already looking forward to our "Christmas in July" with them, right Laurie?! Tyler's mom has mentioned before that since we are never together on Christmas, we should have a Christmas with my family and Tyler's family in the summer. But with us getting married this July and Erica (Tyler's sister) getting married last July, we have yet to get around to it. So I am excited for this coming summer to have our Christmas!

HUGE tree in the center in Bologna!

Our tree :)

I've spent 3 of the last 4 Christmases in Europe and it is just not the same as back home! Of course Christmas is a big celebration here, but there is nothing like an American Christmas! Even though Christmas here is generally the same, there are a few differences in the traditions. Finding stockings here was like finding needles in a haystack. Apparently in Italy stockings aren't part of the Christmas tradition?? I don't know but we looked in at least half a dozen stores and couldn't find any stockings. Finally, we found some at a store that would be equivalent to a dollar general store in the States. They literally had 2 stockings and they are most hideous things I have ever seen. Obviously being one euro each, they are cheaply made and I'm convinced someone made them while blindfolded. 

They are ten times worse than what they photograph. They are just awful. The gold one is supposed to have a Santa holding a sign that says "Buon Natale" but that fell off the minute I took it out of the bag. You get what you pay for but hey, we have some stockings! 


Even though we miss being in the States and we aren't with our family and friends right now, we are making most of the time we have here. We are very happy to be with each other and have our first Christmas together as a married couple. We are trying to start our own traditions that we will have for years to come as well as doing the typical things like watching Christmas movies and making Christmas cookies. 

Tyler getting ready to decorate :)

Having fun!

Our (messy) end result! Yes, we are aware that our cookies look like a bunch of 3rd graders decorated them!! :)

We hope all of our family and friends have a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!! We're at the halfway point of the season and being home!!! :)

Venice

How lucky am I that I get to say I just hopped on a train and spent a day in Venice? I continue to thank God every day for everything He has blessed us with and try to soak up every single moment of it!

As I said in my last post, Tyler and I have been talking about doing some traveling. After his games on Sunday nights, he gets his schedule for the upcoming week. We always know that he is going to have Monday off, but occasionally he gets Tuesday morning off as well - which is what we need to happen in order to really be able to travel somewhere and not have to rush (even if it is only 24 hours). We found out he didn't have practice until 3pm on Tuesday so we decided we were finally going to take advantage of his time off. We first talked about going to Florence and Pisa. We quickly decided though that it would be too much to fit into one day. Venice has been at the top of my list of places to visit. Everyone here keeps telling us how beautiful it is and how we really need to go see it. So I said "Let's go to Venice!" and that's what we did!

We got up early Monday morning so we could catch the 8am train. Bless Tyler's heart, he was exhausted. He had an away game on Sunday, played all 40 minutes of the game and didn't get back until about 2am and still got up at 7am so that we could go. What a nice husband! We took a train up to Bologna and then switched to a high speed train that took us into Venice. That was my first time ever traveling by train. It was a cool experience and it only took about 2 and a half hours to get there.

The train station in Venice is located right on the Grand Canal. You walk out and you are just right there in the middle of everything. We started taking pictures right away like typical tourists. We both were in awe. I can't even explain how beautiful it was. Mind you, this was the coldest day yet since I've been in Italy, cloudy and dreary, and it was still unbelievable! I can't even imagine how breathtaking it is in the spring/summer! Everything is connected by a maze of bridges and boats everywhere in the canal. Tyler and I decided probably within the first hour that we were there that we would definitely be coming back in the spring to visit. 

After taking our first initial pictures, we decided that we needed to get a hotel room because of course we were dragging around an overpacked bag I had for one night ;) After dropping off my stuff and freshening up, we walked around and saw all the shops and we went to lunch at a cool little pizzeria. We had some great pizza and some in-house brewed beer, which was actually really good! 

Really thrilled that I am taking his picture :)

I really wanted to ride on a gondola because of course that is what you think of when you think of Venice!  We found a couple of guys who were giving gondola rides and I asked how much it would be. He told me for a 30-40 minute ride it would be 80 euros. ($110) I said "80 euros!??!?!!??!"  Yeah right! I did not want to ride it that bad on a cold, bitter day for that much money. He then tried to tell me that since it was still daylight, he would bump it down to 60 euros. I said I would talk to my husband about it and we started walking away and he literally ran after us and told us "ok ok 50 euros!"  Obviously we had the word "AMERICAN" plastered to our foreheads and he was trying to make suckers out of us being tourists. We told the guy we'd think about it and kept walking. Tyler told me if this was something that I really wanted to do, we could do it. I told him that I would take him up on his offer this spring. It was just way too cold and it will be much more enjoyable on a nicer day. (An Italian teammate of Tyler's told him today that if we would have been Italian it would have only been 15-20 euros. I'm not falling for that high price next time we are there!) 

Can't wait for spring for a nice gondola ride!

We enjoyed a nice, authentic Italian dinner and walked around some more at night. We really only saw a sliver of Venice and were only there for such a short time, but it was so nice for us to take this trip together. We were able to enjoy being with each other, be in a beautiful city, and Tyler was able step away from his job for a little bit. It was a perfect little getaway! Now we are familiar and know what to expect in Venice and I can't wait to visit again! 

Enjoying Venice at night!

A beautiful morning as we were leaving