Total Eclipse of the Heart

I wanted to share the anniversary present that I made for my husband.  Since we are renovating our office and some time soon want to add a roof to our outdoor patio, we decided to keep things simple this year (plus I had already planned our January date for our anniversary). 

So, I went to my go to source when I want a great idea - pinterest!  And, I came across this great picture and idea.  Click here for a full description.

I got a couple maps from AAA and I was going to just look online and print the rest.  Originally I was going to do hearts just like in the tutorial, but my friend, Shawna, had an awesome idea.  She suggested doing a different shape for each picture.  I had already decided upon the following "stages" of our relationship to do a map/picture for:

1. One boy (Hawaii for Jeff), one girl (Raleigh for me)
2.  Met in a hospital (New York City), I wanted to get a subway map
3. Traveled (2 awesome trips before we were married - Argentina and Morocco)
4. Got Married (Waikiki)
5. Bought a house (blueprints for our house)
6.  Had kids - ?Hawaii again?

Instead of doing a heart for each one, I decided to do a hospital symbol for the NYC one, an airplane for the traveling one, and house for the house, etc.  I also had to narrow down the maps - I opted to do just Argentina instead of doing half Argentina-half Morocco for the map because Jeff got really bad food poisoning on our trip to Morocco and sometimes that brings up bad memories.  And, for the kids one, I found some cute clip art of babies in a similar style as the man/woman icons and I found a map online of Queen's Medical Center where  I delivered both boys, so this way it was different than the wedding one.

I don't have a Cricket machine like the post mentioned, so I just printed out shapes on cardstock on my computer, cut them out and then traced them on to the map.  I did keep the part that I had cut out and used that like the post said to move around the map to find the section that you want.  The hardest part was getting the particular part of the map that I wanted to incorporate.  Like, for the boy one, I really wanted Jeff's neighborhood of Kahala to be really evident and that was a bit hard to center.  Finding a good, high resolution map of Argentina online was also tricky, but I found one that was from lonely planet guide book we used on our tirp.

And here's the final result.

one boy, one girl

met in a hospital (NYC subway map)

traveled (Argentina map, our favorite trip as a couple)

got married (Waikiki - map from AAA)

bough a house (blueprints of our house)

had kids - Queen's medical center map downloaded from online

I love how it turned out. What do you think?

Four Years?

Happy Anniversary to my wonderful husband. You are patient, kind and warm.  You're an amazing husband and father and I don't say it enough.  I can't believe it's been 4 years already.  We have accomplished so much in such a short period of time - we moved to Hawaii from Boston, bought a house, took over an ophthalmology clinic (and in the process, became bosses for the first time), and had 2 boys!  Yowser!

It makes me remember the write-up in the New York Times about our wedding.  I had submitted our wedding, more or less, as a lark.  I had some extra time between patients at Boston Children's one day and I figured - why not?  We have a cute story, met in NYC and I thought that might peak someone's interest. My college roommate had this amazing article about her wedding and I thought I'd give it a try.  So, I emailed off the one paragraph summary of our wedding and promptly forgot about it.  On the submission form, you have to list the names of your parents, priest and contact information.  Well, I completely forgot to tell anyone that I had submitted our wedding, mainly because I really didn't think we would make it in to the paper.  Then, a few weeks later, I was talking to my father and he mentions he got this strange phone call, from someone claiming to be from the New York Times, who was clearly trying to steal his identity - asking all of these personal questions.  Ooops!  So, I finally explained that he was a real reporter and here's the story below.

And, here are some pics from our multicultural wedding.  We had a Hindu ceremony in the morning (we had to fly a priest out from California since there are no Hindu priests in Hawaii), followed by an Indian vegetarian lunch.  Then we had a Presbyterian ceremony in the afternoon, followed by a dinner with a band, Chinese lion dance and interludes of Indian music! My colors were a deep red and pink (to echo the Royal Hawaiian hotel), with more gold in the morning to reflect the Indian ceremony.  Everything was DIY for the wedding - the programs, place cards, name cards, etc.  It was hard getting everything over to Hawaii from Boston, but I'm glad that we did.  Not only did it save money, but it added a personal touch.

If anyone wants help with ideas for creating an inter-faith, multi-cultural wedding, just let me know!  There are some things I would have done differently now in retrospect, but it was a beautiful day.