PDX Wedding Celebration: ChiChi Gets Around

Everyone loves our sweet little chihuahua, ChiChi. Sure, she barks when people she doesn't know well first come over, but she's just doing her job of helping to keep us safe. Once many guests start coming through the door she stops and instead starts checking out who's going to hold her. She really got around at our wedding celebration

ChiChi all dressed for the party in her aloha shirt.

PDX Wedding Celebration: Eats & Grindz

The last thing we had to do to get ready for all of our guests was the food. One of the most important things! Again, we wanted to reflect the Hawaiian Islands in the choices we made for our food. We brought some food items back from Maui with us and planned the rest of our menu around foods you would find on the Islands.

Getting the food all set up before our guests started to arrive. 

PDX Wedding Celebration: Favors & Good Cheer

Even with a celebration after the wedding, it was important for us to have a little something to give to all of our guests that celebrated with us at home. It was also important to us to have that gift reflect our wedding in Hawaii. With that in mind, we brought back macadamia nut Kisses that you can only get in Hawaii and Honolulu Cookie Company's Hawaiian shortbread cookies for everyone.

Favors table for guests to grab a bag and fill with Hawaiian treats. 

PDX Wedding Celebration: Setting the Stage

We know we've been promising more recaps from our Tiki Wedding Extravaganza for a while now and have kept you all waiting. We wanted to make sure to share our photos and video with our close friends and family first. Yes, there IS a wonderful little video that my friend, Brea, made for us. It's simply perfect. Since we still have one very important person to share them with, our Maid of Honor, we are going to kick-off with the recaps for our Portland wedding celebration.

Our Portland wedding celebration was held at our home, Knotty Cakes Ranch. We made lawn signs that were put out to mark the way through the neighborhood to lead guests to our house. It can be a little confusing trying to find our house the first or second time that someone comes over and we wanted to make sure that everyone easily found the way. And by "we made" the lawn signs, I mean, I gave our Maid of Honor the info and she did all of the graphics work.

Lawn signs leading the way to the reception. 

Grateful!

2012 brought us a bounty of reasons to be grateful. Getting married this year meant numerous opportunities to spend with friends and family and no end to parties that were had. From bridal showers to our cock n hen party to our rehearsal dinner to our Portland wedding celebration (pinky swear photos are coming soon). The reasons from those alone where more than enough reasons to be thankful. But, the reasons just kept coming.

We are so blessed for our amazing friends and family who traveled over 2000 miles, each way, to be a part of our big day. We loved being able to share Maui, an island we both love, with all of them. Even better, we were able to pledge a lifetime of love, happiness and trust to each other on a beautiful beach under a coconut groove. It was truly one of the best moments in our life together.

Surrounded by ohana on our perfect wedding day.
photography by Sara Sanger 

Fundraiser for the Skivolocke Family

For those of you who don't know, one of my best friends, Honey's husband, Joe, passed away on Monday morning. He was only 44 years old. He left behind not only Honey, but also their 3 year old son, Brixton and his 90+ year old father, Frank, that they had been taken care of. Honey, Brixton and Frank, could use a little help right now. Not that they would ever ask for it, but I know that they do. They are an amazingly strong family who are near and dear to my heart. They haven't given up since Joe was diagnosed in Jan 2011 and they have remained incredibly resilient through all of this. My heart aches for them. Especially knowing Brixton, who hasn’t even celebrated his 4th birthday, yet, will now be growing up without his father.

Thank you so much to everyone who has already made donations to the Skivolocke Family Fundraiser! I have been incredibly moved by the overwhelming support, generosity and love pouring in from friends, family and even those we do not know. It touches my heart to get to witness such selfless kindness from so many. As a result, I am stating another fundraiser to help support the Skivolocke Family!

Honey, B and Joe

Tikis in Paradise: Hali'maile General Store Rehearsal Dinner

Our day was just getting started once we got our nails done. After our fun Wahine Party we headed back to our cottage at Mama's Fish House to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. We got ourselves all prettied-up, got gifts together for everyone and found that almost everyone was wearing orange in their outfits without it being planned. It looked pretty fabulous for pictures!

Getting dolled up.

Presents for our parents and Sara.

Tikis in Paradise: Wahine Party

The Wahine party was just for the ladies. No boys allowed as Nicki so awesomly put on the invitations. A day of lunch and getting our nails done before the wedding the next day.

We all meet-up in Kahului at Da Kitchen, a locals' favorite, for some Hawaiian grinds. Their menu is pretty extensive and had something for everyone on it. A few who'd never had musubi before were intrigued by it and I encouraged them to give it a try. Everyone who did, loved it. Especially, Mykie!

Love the bracelets in our wedding colors given to me by Honey at my first bridal shower.

Tikis in Paradise: Welcome Hukilau Part 'Ekolu

Ok, we were just joking around when we said that the party got really crazy after the parents left. We got all that craziness out in our 20s and early 30s. Well, unless you call getting crazy playing with sparklers. We aren't talking about the sucky sparklers they have on the west coast either. We are talking about the old-school metal sparklers that leave tracers. These sparklers were the real deal!

Since our Welcome Hukilau was on the 4th of July, we put together cute little sparkler packets for all our our guests. Yes, we really did think of everything. We used these great templates that I downloaded from Twig & Thistle. Used the straw tags, too. Didn't end up using the matchbox covers because Mama's Fish House had their own cute matches and it saved me a little time. We gave each of our guests a sparkler packet and everyone had a ton of fun with them.

Loved finding REAL sparklers to use for these. 

Tikis in Paradise: Welcome Hukilau Part 'Elua

After everyone was feed and happy, we decided to take them over to the beach to show them where we would be getting married on Saturday. Just as we were rounding everyone up, we saw a rainbow stretch across the sky. It was the first of many rainbows that we would see during our wedding week; a sign of good blessings on our marriage.

There's a reason they call it the rainbow state. 

Tikis in Paradise: Welcome Hukilau

After our day at Baldwin Beach, we invited everyone to join us for a Welcome Hukilau. This hukilau was packed full of all kinds of excitement from dinner, to giving out of town bags, to crazy fun with sparklers to celebrate the 4th of July to showing everyone the wedding ceremony location to celebrating a birthday. Yes, so much in one night!

Because of that, we'll be splitting this night up into two posts. There's just so many pictures to share! Of course, we won't be posting all of them. You will just have to make sure to come to our Portland celebration to see all of the pictures.

Nicki, Mykie and I left the beach early to pick up some trays of food from Da Kitchen and get everything set up. We though it'd make things a lot easier for everyone to have the main food catered and only have to add a couple smaller things ourselves. Plus, Da Kitchen has great local grinds and their catering is really affordable. We highly recommend them when you are on the islands.

We served kalua pork, chow fun noodles, a salad of organic spring mix, tropical fruits and papaya poppy seed dressing, taro and Hawaiian sweet bread rolls, tropical fruits and some of our favorite local snacks like Hurricane Popcorn. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food and was ready to big in and eat after a long day at the beach. We also set up a self-serve bar of local liquors like coconut vodka and tropical fruit juices.

Cutting up papaya for the salad. 

Tikis in Paradise: A Day at Baldwin Beach

On the 4th of July, we kicked off the first day of a full wedding week of activities! It was perfect starting it with a holiday bang. We headed to Baldwin beach for the day and invited everyone to join us before the Welcome Hukilau that night.

Now we picked Baldwin beach because of it's location, the safe lagoon they had that was great for keiki (Hawaiian for children) to swim and its big white sand beach with plenty of room around the lagoon. Or at least it had been that way for years and had been that way the last time we were there in January. Not so much that way when we showed up that day.

None of these trees were on the beach before. 

Tikis in Paradise: Aloha from Paradise

Aloha! We are doing well and having a blast in paradise! Everyone has been joining us the last couple days on Maui and we officially kicked off the wedding week on the 4th of July with a welcome party. It's been great seeing all of our hard work finally start to come together.

Of course, now we are really busy with all things wedding. But, we promise to post as we can and continue to give you updates on our trip and wedding. Especially since our amazing wedding photographer, Sara Sanger, is already sending us links to our pictures! So excited to already be getting to see some of those. A little sneak peak for all of you from our trip to Baldwin beach yesterday:

Almost everyone joined us for a day at Baldwin Beach. 

April Showers Bring...

July weddings! Or something like that.

As you may remember, Saturday was our coed bridal shower with my family. I had a few things I'd learned from my bridal shower with friends that I wanted to carry over to my second shower in hopes of getting more pictures. Well, let me tell you that was a big fat FAIL. The one thing I learned from our second shower was no matter how much you try to be prepared things can always come up that you have no control over. That being, Drew got sick during the shower.

We had grabbed a bite to eat the night before since we'd been doing so much to get ready to go out of town and once we stopped to eat it was almost 9. To make things a little easier on ourselves we ran over to one of our favorite cheap places to eat. We ordered one of our usuals, but when it came it wasn't exactly what we ordered. This one had different meat in it. We weren't that concerned with it since everything else was the same so we just kept what was brought to us. There were so meats in it that we wouldn't normally eat. I'm not one to eat things like tripe, so I passed, but Drew gave some of it a try. The rest we brought home for ChiChi. She also ended up getting sick, the next day.

Shortly after dinner, Drew started saying he didn't feel the best. However he also had a phone call that affected the count of our at home reception and meant us having to come up with even more funds for it. I thought maybe the phone call had upset him and made him not feel well. We weren't sure what it was, at that time.

The next morning Drew still didn't feel the best. As the day went by and we drove up to Seattle, he started feeling worse and worse. He felt like he just couldn't stay awake. As soon as everyone arrived and he'd said his hellos, he went into the back room to lay down for a bit. he pretty much passed out and we didn't see him again until I woke him up to open presents. Poor guy.

With my fiance sick in the next room, I barely thought about taking pictures. The ones I did take were all taken before everyone got there. Yes, of the cupcakes. Would you expect anything less?

My one request for the shower was to have Trophy Cupcakes. They are my favorite shop in Seattle and even do a Hawaiian themed cupcake. Mom was nice enough to fulfill my request and not only got Hawaiian themed cupcakes but, also red velvet and vanilla minis. I didn't even know that Trophy Cupcakes did minis. She also made some bunny sugar cookies since it was Easter the next day and put "diamond rings" on the hands of some of the bunnies. Super cute!

Red Velvet mini cupcakes with Easter candies. 

Sharing Our Wedding Invitation with Family

It was not an easy decision deciding to have a very small destination wedding and cutting most family out of our invite list. In fact, it was one of the hardest things about wedding planning. I guess, no matter what you have to make sacrifices somewhere. That was our big sacrifice.

Even though we decide to only invite our parents, my grandparents and Drew’s brother as our only family to the wedding, I knew it was still important to me to share as much of the wedding with all of my family, as I could. I still wanted them to feel as though they were a part of our big event. I’ve made sure to invite them to all of the wedding related events we are having at home, to send them the link to our wedding website and to share a copy of our wedding invitation with them.

Pretty early on, my grandparents let me know that they would not be attending the wedding. I get it, they are both in their 80s, don’t like to travel as much these days and they think that Hawaii is too hot. I get all of it. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t any less crushed when they told me they wouldn’t be coming. I really wanted them there.

Engagement Party Photos

Photos from the engagement party are now up at our wedding website on the Photo Gallery page. If you have any additional pictures to add, please let us know. We'd love to add more.

Thank you again, to everyone who made it to our party.

Oregon Coast Aquarium

Before we headed home to Portland, we drove over to Newport to go to the Oregon Coast Aquarium. It’d been many years since any of us had been there so we were all very much looking forward to our afternoon there. Lucky for us, there was a really great national touring art exhibit, Washed Ashore, taking place while we were there. If this exhibit comes near you, we highly recommend checking it out.

This fish is made out of materials that were found after being washed ashore on the beach.

Always enjoy seeing the sea lions swim.



Cute little puffin taking a bath. Have you ever seen one swim in the water? It looks like they are flying in the sky.

Amanda and her friend inside a whale skeleton made of garbage found washed ashore on the beach.

Squid attack!

Coral reef made out of Styrofoam washed up on the beach.

This fish was made all out of flip flops and the pieces of plastic the flip flops are cut out of. All found on the beach.

Jellyfish of plastic bottles.

In the Passages of the Deep.

What are you lookin' at?

Love the huge kelp. Makes great jump ropes while at the beach.

Sharks!

Such beautiful creatures in the sea. It's sad to think how horrible we treat the sea and how that not only effects the creatures that live in it, but us as well.

Playing in the tide pools.

Jellyfish!

Japanese spider crab

Little baby seahorses!

What do seahorses feed on? Sea monkeys!

Weekend at Glenden Beach

*We interrupt our regular scheduled blog posts of Tiki Road Trip Take 2 to bring you a two part series of our weekend at Glenden Beach. We will resume to our regular scheduled posts later this week.*

We spent last weekend at Glenden beach and boy, did we luck out. The sun was out and the rain did not fall. We walked barefoot on the beach, did a little shopping at the Lincoln City outlets, BBQed and swam under the stars. We couldn’t believe it was January in Oregon!

Can you believe this is January in Oregon?

Lots of sea foam on the beach during our walk.

Sand labyrinth

Grilling us up some yummy veggies!

Love the beach early in the morning!

View from the hot tub during out early morning dip.