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. 

A Year of Fasting

Have you noticed that you probably haven't seen us out and about much lately? Yeah, we are staying home. Don't worry, it's not you, it's us. We are on a spending fast. In our effort to get rid of what's toxic in our lives in 2013, we need to be honest with ourselves and how toxic our debt really has become to us.

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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. 

Chris Isaak Live!

A few weekends back we headed to Spirit Mountain Casino with our friends, Jason and Kirstie, to see Chris Isaak preform. For the drive down, Kirstie put together a great picnic dinner for us all to enjoy. It was the best idea considering that the casino doesn't have very good food and we were driving down right at dinner. Thanks, Kirstie!

We got to the casino a little early, took a look around and did a little gambling. And by little, we mean less than $5. We just aren't gamblers.

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

You're Invited to an Ultimate Spa Facial Party

I'm thrilled to share with all of you a new chapter in my life; I'm starting my own business with Arbonne! Arbonne is a Swiss skincare and healthy lifestyle company featuring natural botanically based cosmetics, anti-aging products and a full line of detox cleanses. So, yes, as you imagined, I'll be peddling lipsticks and protein shakes and couldn't be more excited about it! I truly love these products!

Hale Pele Media Preview Party

Last night we had the privilege to attend the media preview party for Portland's newest tiki bar, Hale Pele. A selection of drinks and small food plates beckoned for all to try. It also finally provided a look inside to see the overall product of everything they had done to the previous tiki bar that was there before.

Greeted at the door of the new Hale Pele.

Once inside, we saw how nicely everything had been cleaned up. For those of you who use to go to the tiki bar that was there before, you may remember that the ventilation system didn't work very well. It was usually smokey from the pupu platters and kitchen food. At times, it made it hard to breath. This is a thing of the past! We actually talked to Blair, the owner of Hale Pele, about this issue and he guaranteed us that all of that has been fixed. You will now be able to breath freely while visiting Hale Pele!

Tiki Around Portland: August 2012 Edition

With Mayor Sam Adams declaring last summer, August Tiki Month in Portland, there's now been a whole lot of tiki going on. Not that there wasn't already a whole lot of tiki going on last August in Portland. It's just that this August there's been even more.

Tiki Month kicked off with the 10th year of Tiki Kon. It was a three day event with live music, vendors, symposiums, tropical drinks, the original home bar tour and so much more. Drew and I both went down to help out our friends putting on the event on Friday and Saturday. Of course, Saturday was a record breaking day in regards to the heat. Poor Drew was setting things up for the big event that night while I had my feet in the pool enjoying a Mai Tai. Mahalo Drew for all your hard work in that heat.

At Tiki Kon with an amazing flower in my hair from our garden
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Where is Your Tiki Magazine?

Back in March when I had my first of many bridal showers, I took a picture with many of my girlfriends that was submitted to Tiki Magazine. Yesterday, I was happy to get many texts from friends and family showing that the picture had not only made it into Tiki Magazine, but it was also a full half a page!

Sharing the tiki love!

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: Cock n Hen Party

We went on our Cock n Hen party with all of our friends that came to the wedding the Thursday night before the wedding. We booked tickets on the Pride of Maui for their sunset dinner cruise. We hit the water on boat for a few hours of live music, open bar and an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Lise, Nicki, Jon, Traci, Drew, Kimmy, Matt, Heather and Lars. 

Due to Hurricane Daniel, the weather on Maui started to take a turn on Thursday. It became more windy resulting in choppier water. But, that didn't stop us from enjoying out time at sea. Hey, you never know what's going to happen when you are on a tropical island.

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: The One Where We Get Our Marriage License

Reality really hits that you are getting married when you go off to get your marriage licence. We started off the day with our morning tradition of breakfast on the lanai before getting ready to head to Kihei for our appointment. How much do you love my tiki pajamas that our friend, Honey, gave to me for my birthday? They are perfect for having breakfast out on the lanai in Hawaii.

Mahalo Honey for the tiki pjs!

When we got to our marriage license appointment we realized we weren't the only ones scheduled for the 10:30 time slot. What they don't tell you when you make your appointment is that many other couples are scheduled at the same time and it's really first come, first serve. If we had known this, we would have come earlier instead of waiting for what we thought was our specific appointment time. Now that you know, get there early or be prepared to wait.