Happy belated birthday to me and Darby!

D and I decided back in December that we would get each other a Nintendo Wii for our birthdays. However, when we started looking for one in June, everywhere was sold out. We figured we'd just have to wait it out. On Saturday, we were at the mall, and we decided to go to Best Buy on the small chance that they might have one. Of course they didn't, but while we were looking at the games, an employee told us that they would be getting a shipment of 10 in on Sunday. They open at 11 on Sundays, so Darb and I went over right after church and grabbed one! (It was so tempting to skip church to get there right at 11, but we decided to be a little more mature than that).

Darby was so sweet and bought me a game I had been eying (that spelling looks weird, but Blogger says it's right). It's called "Cooking Mama Cook-Off." If you're not familiar with the Wii, the controller looks like a remote control; it's wireless, and you can move it in any direction and the movement registers on screen. So, in Cooking Mama, you use the controller to stir, chop, peel, etc. You can compete against another person or just against the clock to make recipes from different countries. It is so fun! Here's some screen shots, in case my description wasn't clear:

This is chopping an onion: You shake the controller up and down to chop.


This is piping out cream puffs. You press the B button to squeeze the dough out, but you have to stop before it goes over the guidelines.

It's a pretty silly game, made even sillier by the slightly broken English comments. (It's a Japanese game). You make recipes from all different countries, so for France, you make cream puffs, for Italy, lasagna, etc. Guess what you make for the U.S.? Popcorn and hot dogs! Wow, I guess we're not know worldwide for our gourmet cuisine =) Anyway, I love the game, even though Darby beats me every time. That's okay, we still know who's the better cook in the real world!

The wait is over...

My wedding pictures are up online! Actually, it wasn't a very long wait, but I'm an impatient person. Emerald is a saint for not getting angry at my constant pestering. To view the pictures go to Em's blog. She did a great job (as usual). It is such a blessing to have talented friends! It was so special to have someone I know and love take the pictures, not just a random photographer. If you are in the Abilene area, I highly recommend Emerald. She can do family portraits, engagements, weddings, whatever!

Speaking of talented friends, I need to mention my friend Kalyn. She just moved to Frisco this week :( But it's exciting because her husband got a good job, and she is starting an art school from her home. It's called Ms. Kalyn's art school, and you can see her website here. So, if you're in the Frisco or McKinney area and are interested in art or piano lessons or know someone who is, check out Ms. Kalyn's art school!

Now, if only I had a talent that could make me some money! =)

It's official!

2 weeks after the wedding, I am officially Kayla Anderson Hewitt. We got our signed marriage license back in the mail today, and I went to the Social Security office at lunch to get my name changed. I still have to go to the DPS, bank, etc, but I'm going to go ahead and call the change official. I debated whether or not I should keep my middle name. It was my grandma's name, so I wanted to keep it, but I also wanted to keep Anderson. I didn't like the thought of being Kayla Jean Anderson Hewitt - too bulky. In the end, I decided to drop Jean. Grandma Jean dropped her middle name when she got married, so I guess I can still remember her that way. Plus, it's not like I'll forget that my middle name was Jean for 22 years. And this is nice, because if I forget and sign my name Kayla Anderson, I can just add Hewitt to the end!

TGIF!

Only 30 more minutes of work! Yay! This week has gone soo slowly. It's so hard to get back into the swing of things after a break.

D and I have a fun weekend planned. Tonight we're going to see Measure for Measure. It's part of the Shakespeare Festival at ACU, and it's FREE. Tomorrow, I'm going to be reading Harry Potter 7, of course! And tomorrow night, we're going over to my friend Shalis's house for homemade pizza and game night. I met Shalis through a book club I'm in, and she seems really sweet. We haven't hung out much, so I'm excited to get to know her better. Should be a busy weekend, especially since we also need to clean up our apartment and do TONS of laundry! Yay for our first real weekend as a married couple!

Honeymoon!

All right, here are some honeymoon pictures as promised. Darby and I had such a great time. Niagara Falls was amazing; everyone should go there at least once in their lives. The first night we were there, they had fireworks! Canada's independence day is in July, also, so they have fireworks all month long. So I got two fireworks shows in one week! Darby and I ate so much good food. I'm still stuffed. My favorite places were Coco's in Niagara Falls, where they have brick oven pizzas, and The Old Spaghetti Factory in Toronto, which is similar to the Spaghetti Warehouse in the West End in Dallas, but better because ice cream is included with every meal! We justified our eating with the fact that we were walking several miles each day, but I still think, in the end, the food won. Darby and I are perfect travel partners, and I'm looking forward to the many, many fun trips we will take in our lifetime. Here's the pics:



This was our hotel room in Niagara. We stayed at the Doubletree, which was amazing. You'll notice there is no picture of our hotel room in Toronto. It didn't merit a picture =)


The Canadian (Horseshoe) Falls. Beautiful.


Me and Darby on the Maid of the Mist boat ride where you go right next to the falls. I'm looking pretty hot! No wonder he married me!


This is the Maid of the Mist boat. From the picture, it looks scary, but it really wasn't.


The butterfly conservatory! Probably my favorite attraction. There were hundreds of butterflies of all different varieties flying everywhere. I took a ton of pictures but had to delete most of them because my memory card was getting full. I just posted my favorite one here.


Me and Darby at the Botanical Gardens in Niagara. This is about the only decent picture I got of the two of us on the trip, although I do wish we had taken our sunglasses off.


Casa Loma in Toronto, a mansion built in the early 1900s by a businessman and his wife. They went bankrupt 10 years later, so the city bought the house. A nice reminder that pride goes before the fall, I guess.

I don't have many pictures from Toronto. My camera started acting a little funny, and I was tired of photo-taking by that point. I really have to force myself to take pictures. I hate having to stop all the fun just to take a picture. Seems to defeat the purpose. Darby came up with the idea of having a vacation photographer. You could just hire someone to come with you on your family vacation and follow you around taking pictures. You wouldn't have to pay them too much as long as you paid for their airfare, hotel room, meals, etc. What do you think, Em? Could you get into that biz? Anyway, my favorite thing in Toronto was probably the zoo. They have a huge zoo with tons of animals. We had a lot of fun, even though most of the animals were sleeping when we walked through. We did get to see a monkey swinging around with a tiny baby monkey hanging on to its stomach! So cute!

Now we're just getting settled in to our apartment in Abilene. We've had some maintenance issues, but we're working them out. Living together is so fun! It's hard to imagine when we didn't live together. It just feels so natural. The honeymoon was great, but I think I like "real" life even better.

The BIG Day!

Well, the next time I blog I'll be married! Crazy! The wedding starts in 6 1/2 hours. I'm not really nervous, just excited. I guess I don't have much else to say besides the standard "Yay! I'm getting married!" I think my brain has been fried from wedding details. But I wanted to update for my Aunt Katina =) I'll be heading to Niagara Falls and Toronto tomorrow for my honeymoon, but I'll be posting pictures of the rehearsal dinner, wedding, and honeymoon when I get back.