First Married Trip!!

So Cody and I have finally taken our first trip together outside of the honeymoon! We are visiting Franklin Tennessee for Cody's personal finance certification which he will be teaching this semester at Brainerd High School in Chattanooga along with history. We look forward to this new school year for him! 

So we left our apartment Monday at 6:00pm after dinner (to save money on on-the-road-dinners) and arrived in Franklin at 9:00pm. We enjoy driving together so much! Cody is so much fun to talk to! On the way our GPS also lead us through a cow pasture. I know, it was weird. But when we arrived I realized I had brought all of our food so we didn't have to buy anything there but soon discovered I didn't bring utensils. I also realized hotels don't have free water (we don't trust water fountains or sink water in places) so we didn't have water. So we did have to buy those two things. (I drink a lot of water in a day) so I didn't want to get dehydrated in a strange place. My body has a hard time cooling itself down (I hardly ever sweat) so I get overheated EXTREMELY easy. I have to monitor my outside time in the summer. But anyways, once we arrived we saw the most beautiful sunset in the entire world! The picture doesn't do it justice! The entire sky was this beautiful hue of pink!

We stayed in a Ramada Inn and it was pretty nice! Our room had two beds but they were double sized beds so we really had to squeeze tight together. We are too used to our king sized bed!

When we first checked in, the lady at the front desk looked at us up and down and said, are you both over 21? And we both said yes. But she didn't believe us and made us show her our ID's and looked at Cody and asked if he make a fake ID because we both look 17/18, and we were like no! And she still didn't really believe us! I was like, we are about to turn 23 too, and she said don't push it!! It's like what!?! LOL Funny story but true!

It was senior Olympic week in Franklin so we always had to wake up at 6:00am and beat the older people to the breakfast line before they ran out of food. I love old people! They make you feel so comfortable! 

So on the first day of Cody's conference I was going to wake up at 6:00am with him to get the breakfast but Cody saw how tired I was and let me go back to sleep and left for his conference at 8:00am. When I woke up at 10:30am he already had my breakfast there waiting for me in the microwave! He is such a sweetheart y'all!

After the first conference, Cody was tired of sitting all day so we gave each other a strenuous workout in the pool! We were the only ones there so it was awesome!! I love swimming so much!

We left back home to Chatt after the second and final conference day at 5:00pm. We got home just in time to have dinner (yes to save money ;)). I love trips with Cody and now we are feverishly packing for our Honeymoon Part 2 just here in a few days!!!! :D :D we are so excited!!

Love, 

Kayla Raborn

6-29-16

P.S.-Happy early birthday to my mother-in-law!!

Newlywed Life!

Just a side note for you guys before I start this blog:

I am going to wait a little bit to post all about the wedding day details just so I can get a few more posts up fist. Plus our wedding pictures aren't even in yet. 

So...Cody and I are settling in beautifully to the newlywed life! And man, life seriously can't get any better! I thought I loved Cody then but seriously you love each other more and more every day! I am not worried at all about the first year of marriage. Everyone says it is the worst but I have to disagree so far. If the whole first year is like this than I can't imagine how awesome the rest of our life will be haha! It is so much fun waking up to each other right next to one another and making breakfast together. Each night is like a sleepover with your best friend!! We have movie nights and stay up laughing to all hours of the night! We have so much fun together! Marriage is exactly what I expected and exactly what I had envisioned with Cody!

To start off, when we first got home, Cody and I had major beach withdrawals. We severely missed the beach and were a tiny bit sad our toes weren't in the sand and we couldn't run down to Thomas' Donuts. So we had to get these matching t shirts and wear them ASAP. 

So Cody and I have started immediately reading devotionals together every morning to start our day off right! Right now is the time we are establishing us, our routines, and the new norm for us, and if we want to make these spiritually healthy habits from here on out we have to start now. For example, never going to bed with a messy house, working out together every day, and feeding our spiritual needs of going to church, Sunday school, and bible study every week!

Lets just take a moment to look at these gorgeous rings!! Cody did so amazing!! The wedding band was a surprise with the first time seeing it being at the altar. I was in awe!

I took a mini photo shoot of the rings in my bouquet on the car ride to the Gaylord Opryland Hotel!

One neat thing Cody and I do are cook most breakfasts' and dinners together! (We eat every meal together but cook only one or two meals a day (I like yogurt)) We both LOVE cooking so we have a blast together coking new creations! The collage bellow are just some of the many dishes we have created! Cody and I cook plant-based lean protein meals with minimal ingredients. We swap out unhealthy ingredients in recipes with greek yogurt or hummus depending on the recipe.

From top left to right:

-Whole grain waffle mix with vanilla greek yogurt instead of butter and 100% pure maple syrup with zero preservatives. 

-Same for the blueberry pancakes

-Buffalo tuna, quinoa, and veggies

-Zucchini boats with lean ground beef and reduced fat cheese with avocado deviled eggs (just boiled egg yolk, avocado, lemon juice, and paprika)

-Zucchini Parmesan fries baked in extra virgin olive oil and olive oil baked chicken

-Homemade pizza with 100% whole grain crust and low fat cheese (but with pepperoni ;/, good though!)

-Baked acorn squash with ground beef and skinny deviled eggs (just boiled egg yolk, plain greek yogurt, pickles, and paprika)

-Oreo quest bars

-My favorite breakfast, kicks cereal with strawberries and no sugar added almond milk

-Breakfast eggs for dinner

-Cody's sandwich creation

-Our grocery shopping

-Fresh lemon water for digestion health

-Meat, cheese, spaghetti squash casserole

-Mashed sweet potatoes with only sweet potatoes, dash of pure cinnamon, and plain greek yogurt for the 'sour cream'. Spaghetti squash for a side and olive oil chicken

-Oreo quest protein powder

One of the things we have had to do since getting back to reality is changing my name. Wow it is a process! It has finally been changed but has taken working at it every day. We make an errand list for us to accomplish and are 3/4 done! Some of those list items include hanging wall items, going to the bank every day for 3 weeks :( NOT happy with them, grocery shopping, and visiting family. With Cody and I combined, we have 16 close family members with July/June birthdays. Every day is a celebration! Why is everyone born in June and July?!? But as of now, all of my legal documents are changed to my new last name! I am now officially officially (and legally ) Kayla Nicole Raborn. And yes I still write and sign Dyar on everything and mess up constantly lol, i'll learn!!:)

Through the hustle and bustle of settling in, we still have to plan date nights every week. I feel like that is so important! A date night could be anything from seeing a movie, going to dinner, riding bikes, or having a picnic in the park! Cody is so much fun!

I still can't get over calling Cody my HUSBAND!! After 5+ years of dating it feels so weird but so so right!

One of the really neat things of having our own place is having family over. Mom and Morgan came over the other day to make Morgan's birthday cake! Morgan is 20 now and out of her teen years! I just can't believe it, I remember turning 20 like yesterday! It's so fun being with family now because they do treat you a little differently! Cody and I are like one now and our own family!! It's so cool!! I've anxiously waited 5+ years for this. 

Sister selfie! We both wore the exact same black shorts and a pineapple willies shirt. We have done this our whole life from time-to-time without even planning it! Morgan and I are a lot alike.

The end product of Morgan's birthday cake. I love how we can all still be kids! We came over to my mom's house to celebrate Morgan and played Clue, Life, Mancala, and Yahtzee! We also had a neighborhood get-together with my street just like old times! Wow had everyone grown! It was so bittersweet and was such a fun fun time! It was one of the best times I've had with my old neighborhood in a long long long time. College did that lol! ;)

So this was one of the honeymoon shirts I purchased in PCB. I love Pineapple Willies shirts! I also found my old Vans from high school so that was just perfect!!

From the day we got back, Cody has had football every day from 3:00pm-9:00pm so I have been learning how to be alone in our apartment and not go too crazy. But one of the days Cody came home early and surprised me with flowers! He is such a sweetheart! He always thinks of me first!

My look of surprise that he took of me lol!!

More adventures are to come and Cody and I's birthdays are coming up very soon! And I guess that leaves me now to have to start looking for my own job. But to be 1,000% honestly I don't want to work until December. I am so fried from school I want nothing to do with engineering right now. And I am completely content with being a wife! I have my whole life to work. Since you are probably wondering since this seems to be people's only question, lol, we are waiting at least 5 years to have kids. I want to have all the time in the world with Cody before kids. Because once they come your life changes forever and will never go back to the way it was. It is a wonderful and beautiful change but only when you are ready. And let me tell you what. I am NO WHERE near ready, maturity-wise either. I'd rather be jumping on the trampoline right now or swimming all day in a pool than worry about motherhood. Also Cody and I want to be living in a small house before we have kids. Raising a kid in an apartment sounds like a horrible idea. We want to live in an apartment as long as possible (5 years max) to save money and we also want to have money when we have our kid so we don't have to extreme penny pinch. When it is time to have a kid I want to buy all the cute stuff LOL! I already look at the baby section when I go to Target! They have absolutely adorable stuff!!

With Love,

Kayla Raborn

6-29-16

Reception and Last few days as a Miss....

Hey guys!! Sorry for the lack of blogging even though it has been almost a month since the wedding! Everything has been so busy but don't worry! I have been working on 10 new blog posts!!  So as the last few days rounded up towards the wedding things were crazy as ever! The last 6 days before the wedding were so stressful but so worth it as I got a lot accomplished! They had to be like that because my plan worked perfectly, the rehearsal, rehearsal dinner day and wedding day were a breeze with ABSOLUTELY NO STRESS!! Even as my actual wedding day was re-arranged various times because of the massive storms, I came prepared with all plans A-Z and everything went perfectly! It was so neat knowing that I could pull off something so big that I planned mainly by myself!

Anyways, those details will come with my wedding day blog soon. So come Thursday night before the wedding and I am absolutely and completely overwhelmed and stressed. After my last clean up/set up of the reception and church locations, Cody takes me on a getaway date night around Knoxville which turned out to be the greatest date night we have ever had! He knows exactly what I need and it was bittersweet because it was our last date night before the wedding. We told no one where we were at so we escaped from the chaos, went to Panera's and putt-putted until midnight. It was beyond perfect! Everyone kept calling and wondering where we were. We ended the night going to our reception place, Cody turning on the music to our first dance and slow danced in the dark. It was so magical I can't even explain. That time together was so special. Cody stayed at my Nana's house with me which is 2 minutes away from the church until the night before the wedding where he stayed at the local Hampton Inn. 

This was my wedding errand face. Pleasant on the outside but frantic on the inside! I didn't want to forget anything but the incredible thing was that it really just all started coming together one day at a time! I was having a really fun time though. 

So jumping back a bit, the weekend before the wedding I visited Cody in our apartment and got the last minute details set up and had a movie night! I went to the bathroom and just looked in the mirror. It just hit me right then and there. I was going to get married. I was going to marry the love of my life my high school sweetheart, my soulmate. I will be a wife! So I captured the moment with my phone really quick above. 

One of the things besides my hair highlights I took care of down there was getting my name on the apartment lease! It was such an exciting moment! At that second, Cody and I were officially unofficially "living together". 

When I arrived back in Knoxville before Cody came up on the 1st, Mom took Morgan and I to dinner at the restaurant that Cody proposed to me and had our last dinner as the three Dyar girls. Mom got me a small bag of gifts with one being a gift from Morgan, a beach sand turtle! It was so precious and so cute! Cody and I did use it on the beach!!

One of my favorite things mom got me was my eloquent office clock with my name on it, perfect for my engineer work desk at my future job, and my key necklace!! It is so beautiful and says, 'She believed she could so she did!' Perfect for me!

Another one of my early wedding errand day selfies in my wifey t shirt. So that made it a little bit better!

When Cody got to Knoxville to stay June 1st, the first thing we did was get our marriage license! It was so incredibly exciting!!! We had been putting it off because Cody had just finished school a few days before that and the courthouse hours were strict. 

Some of the set up for the wedding included little details such as the honeymoon fund jar. It was so much fun decorating!!

On Thursday I took some time really taking in all the beauty of my reception venue as we set up. I knew on the wedding day it would be a blur. This picture of the 'I Do' pillow was really special because it signifies how I would say I Do to Cody a thousand times over, there is no doubt God make Cody for me!

This was the chandelier inside the girls bathroom!

And the couch in the bridal suite! So eloquently beautiful!

Just look at the beautiful scenery!

Just one of the main reasons we chose this fantastic place! I mean.....breathtaking!!!

This was one of the decorations inside the church! It was so special to Cody and I because my Grandfather, two great-grandmothers, Cody's grandmother, and my great aunt has passed away within the last 10 years and we miss them so so much. It is such an overwhelming peace knowing they were still with us on or big day!

So here was the sneak peak of the flowers from our florist! I was so glad she did that with me because I didn't get to see any of that on the wedding day! Above is Ada, my 7 year old cousin flower girls baby's breath halo. Legend has it that having baby's breath in the wedding signifies you will have many kids and rain means good luck and fertility. I am predicting then we will be having a little army one day lol!

The bridesmaids had BEAUTIFUL bunches of babies breath.

The sign-in table had this beautiful vase of babies breath, and snap dragons. I went with the classy traditional white theme if you didn't guess.

Here is the centerpieces for the reception! White roses, greenery, white snaps, white hydrangeas, and white babies breath.

So the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner rolled around and the rehearsal went so smoothly!! We only went through the whole ceremony run down twice! My wedding day coordinator was awesome!! Also having my dad there for the week and a half before was a lifesaver! He was amazing! Also having my mom there by my side to help me with whatever I needed was a true blessing from God. She was my true hero! She would stay up with me until 2:00am making sure everything was done! Cody was fantastic with errands and moral support and Morgan made sure I remembered the big picture and didn't stress over the details. So the picture above was at the rehearsal dinner at Calhouns on the river downtown Knoxville! We were the first guest room! My mother-in-law threw it and it was the most beautiful dinner I have ever been to in my life! It was drop dead INCREDIBLE! Totally blew me out of the water! She put so much time and energy into it! It was the most magical time of my life and I will NEVER forget it the rest of my life. I was so in love with Cody I couldn't hardly stand it. It was our time. He would just hold my hand everywhere with such tenderness.

The pure joy written across our faces. This is also our favorite date night restaurant in Knoxville!

I mean just look! My MIL really outdid herself!

Me, Cody, Tyler, Morgan, and Edgar sat at the head table. It was so cool! And look at the beautiful place settings!!

And the bouquets!! Oh my gosh!! So beyond perfect! Everything was our wedding colors!!!

As the night dwindled down, Cody and I gave each other our last kiss as Mr. and Miss and parted ways. Cody had a blast with his groomsmen staying up late talking up a storm! I'm so glad he got that time with his friends he hasn't seen in a while!

I went to bed pretty "early" about 1:00am and each of us before bed opened up each others gifts we had for one another. I had given Cody all 4 diaries I had written to him since day 1. It was so special! 

To end the night, my cousin Nathan had Cody and I open his gift to us and it was this drop dead beautiful beach painting. We were blown away! It was the best gift we have ever received! Nathan has such talent and is so sweet to do that for us!

Love, 

Kayla Raborn

6-29-16