6 Months of Marriage + Wedding Photos (FINALLY!)

Last week, the hubby & I celebrated 6 months of being married! Woo! Six months isn't a lot, but it's hard to believe sometimes how fast time passes. For us especially, since we dated for so long as well, getting married was the cherry on top of many things happening in our lives last year. So to get to the 6 month mark already was amazing and unbelievable. 

All wedding photos featured are courtesy of Alexandra Burnett, who gave me exactly what I was looking for in wedding photos!

I also thought that this would be the perfect excuse to finally show wedding photos here on the blog! I posted a good chunk of them to my personal Facebook and I post couple photos of us on Instagram every now and then, but I think it's now the time to finally show a glimpse into our wedding day. 

It was a cold, rainy day in the middle of Australian winter (July 20th). Funny enough, it rained the day we got engaged too. They say that it is good luck for it to rain on your wedding day; I saw it as renewal and refreshing of us as we enter this new season of our lives. Despite the rain and our ceremony being outdoors, we made it work and it did not stop us at all.

Wedding Day makeup -- nothing too extravagant here, we were on a budget and made it work :)

We only got engaged 6 weeks prior to our wedding so it was the culmination of a very busy, somewhat rough few weeks. It was great. I won't talk too much about the process of planning the wedding because I will save it for another post, but I will say that other than it being worth it, everything came beautifully considering our low budget we had for it. I'm pretty proud of myself, hence me writing about the wedding planning process in another post :)

We got married at a Chinese garden at an aboriginal reserve not too far from where we live. It was a beautiful backdrop for our ceremony, and because we were on a budget, we later had our reception at a friend's house.

It was a small, 40 person wedding that was nothing the way we ever thought our wedding day would turn out, but it was such a special and perfect and amazing day. I wouldn't change any part of it.

We do still intend on doing some kind of wedding or formal celebration when we move back home to America in a year or so to have our families formally become one and to meet each other as well! Until then, I just want to appreciate my blood relatives here in Sydney, as well as our friends that we have come to call family as well. (BIG shoutout to our wedding photographer, Alexandra Burnett for the beautiful photos!) I will mention this again when I talk about my wedding planning process, but honestly this couldn't have been done without them.

Friends, family, brides to be, or even just someone who stumbled upon my blog by chance, I hope you enjoyed our wedding photos! If you or someone close to you is planning a wedding, I hope you got some ideas through our photos, but stay connected with me on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) or send me an email if you have any specific questions, as I will soon be writing a post on planning a less than $1500 USD wedding in 6 weeks :) Stay tuned!

PHILIPPINES IN A NUTSHELL

Helloooo everyone! 

Pulilan, Bulacan -- A field in my mom's hometown

I'm finally back from the Philippines and have been settling back into reality. It's always hard to settle back into daily life after a long vacation, but it's been nice slowly getting back into it. 

I'll be writing more in-depth posts about different aspects of the Philippines such as food, provincial life, Coron Island, and many more as time goes on but I just wanted to post a quick update on how things have been! 

The husband created a recap vlog of our time with my mom's family, and hopefully, there will be more vlogs of the rest of our time because our time with my mom's family was only 2 weeks out of the 5 weeks we were there! This vlog documents our time in La Union, Mt. Pinatubo, and Coron, Palawan. Of course, there will be more photos and info on all of these places to come in the future, but until then, enjoy this short vlog :)

HELLO 2017!

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Can you believe it? It is already 2017! 

I love the start of the new year because it always represents new beginnings and fresh starts. & even though you can technically refresh & restart any time throughout the year, the new year itself is great because everyone is doing it as well. It serves as motivation. 

As I've done for the past few years on this blog, I've documented a few goals I want for the year, both blog-wise and personally. This year will be no different. Here are my goals: 

Blog goals: 

[] Post consistently every week, regardless of frequency

[] Make new business cards

[] Attend as media to one event

[] Attend at least one blogger/networking event

[] Venture out beyond this lifestyle blog :) 

Personal goals:

[] Travel to a new part of Australia

[] Travel outside of Australia (not counting California) at least once

[] Go back to school for something I am passionate about (I am actually working on this as we speak, please pray for things to work out the way they need to!)

[] Get into doing devotionals either by myself/with my husband, doesn't have to be daily

[] JOURNAL

[] Read at least 3 novels for pleasure

[] Physically create (paint, draw, sculpt, etc) 

[] Enroll in a creative fitness class (dance/silks) 

[] Learn to cook at least 2 Filipino dishes really well (so far I can cook 3) 

I write my goals down every year to keep myself accountable, to see how I change by the end of the year, and also to encourage anyone who may be on the fence or thinking about any specific goals as well. With my blog goals, because I failed so miserably with what I had for myself last year, I am keeping my list fairly short and simple this year. With my personal goals, I just hope to keep exploring and growing more and more. This will also be my first full year married (CRAZY) so that will be new for me as well. 

Here's to new starts! I hope you have a strong one to your new year :) I'm excited to see where this journey takes us. 

2016 Overview + Looking Back on Goals

Hello from the Philippines! I've been having such a great time here, hence the lack of posts (which I warned about haha) but at the same time I'm also getting new ideas for future posts, and potentially... videos? 

Anyway, 2016 was a huge year of transitions for me. I moved to Australia, I got married, and I've been pretty much adulting for the rest of the year after that hahaha. Although a good chunk of my life wasn't documented here as it happened, I was still pretty active on social media (ahem, Instagram), and don't worry, many things I've experienced this year can also be saved for separate posts next year ;)

With the blog, I took a purposeful hiatus this time. Last year it was accidental and this year, while it was initially unintentional, I decided that I can't apologize for living my life in the moment. HOWEVER, I have gotten back into writing more regularly and it's been good (despite me being on vacation & slacking here haha, but you understand). Instead of pressuring myself to get straight back into my old schedule when I'd write 3 times a week, I now just have one post up a week until I feel comfortable to get back into more frequent posting.  As I've done with previous years, let's look through my goals for this year: 

Blog Goals: 
[] Get back to at least 2 posts per week  [] Send out a biweekly newsletter [] Have Instagram following hit 1500 [] Have Twitter following hit 1k [] Meet up with at least 4 other bloggers/influencers [] Start selling something (whether physical or digital) [] Make the move to self-hosted [Does my wedding count if I use the photos for my blog? haha] Pose in at least one full-on photoshoot (with a makeup artist/hair stylist, photographer, etc) 
Personal Goals: [] Go on a road trip with friends (carry over from last year) [x] Take at least two major trips (domestic or international) [x] Move. away from SoCal (;  [] Read at least 6 novels for pleasure [x] Go on a trip with Darell to anywhere [x] Become fully self-sufficient (parents do not financially support in any way at all) [] Take some kind of creative class (dance, crafting, etc) [x] Regularly attend a small group

Okay, so I clearly slacked in my blog goals but like I said, I'm not going to apologize for living my life! That's the hardest part about being a content creator, I think. It's the fact that while it's something you love, you always need to be thinking about the next thing. When you're out with friends, it may be taking photos or videos for a blog/vlog post. When you're at home with your partner relaxing, you might actually be writing instead or planning out what to do next. It's a hard thing to do, but it is definitely worth it when you can nail it all down. For me personally, having a full time job also really drained me from being able to write as much as I wanted to, but thankfully I'm done with that so I can focus more here!

Having said all that, I am pretty proud of myself and my personal goals, however! I accomplished almost all of them, which is really great. I went to Gold Coast, Australia and here now to the Philippines for my two major trips. I moved away from Southern California. On my trips I went to this year, I went with Darell, my new husband :) I have become fully self sufficient financially. And I also finally began regularly attending small group at church, something I hadn't done for maybe two years or so until this year. 

I've been seeing a lot of memes about people saying 2016 wasn't that great of a year, it wasn't anyone's year, etc, but honestly it was my best year yet! Yes, it was the hardest and most emotionally draining for many reasons (hello, US election) but I wouldn't change anything I did this year for the world. I'm excited (but kinda shocked) that 2016 is done already, and I cannot wait for whatever next year brings! 

I hope you are able to celebrate the end of this new year on a positive note even if the year itself wasn't very positive! Happy new year, and I will see you next year ;)

Next Stop: PHILIPPINES!

Hey y'all! So the last two weeks have been crazy with me finishing up my full time job, moving into the master bedroom of our home, and now packing for the PHILIPPINES!

I briefly mentioned it on Instagram a couple weeks ago but yes, it has finally come. We are heading to the Philippines for 5 weeks!

To be honest, we wanted to stay in Australia and work this holiday season because they pay so well in the holidays, but this year is also my family reunion for my mom's side of the family. I haven't been to the Philippines in 6 years (& Darell 5 years) so we decided to just take this time to enjoy with our families. Besides, we don't know when is the next time we'll be able to do something like this again!

We will be spending some time with Darell's family, as well as both my parents' families. When my family from America arrives just after Christmas time, we will pretty much go hard on doing touristy stuff for two weeks because it's part of the reunion celebrations and because my family is from there, we are less likely to do touristy things when we visit. We are even visiting the island of Palawan this time around, and I haven't island hopped in the Philippines probably since I was 3 or 4, so this will be a treat!

And then outside of those crazy two weeks, anything can happen! Our schedule is mostly free for the other 3 weeks that we'll be there without my American family so who knows what Darell & I will end up doing!

Having said that, we most likely will have some down time since we won't be in a hurry to do things most of the time that we're there, so I may have a blog post once a week while we're there, I might not. I will definitely try to do an end of year/new year post on the 31st and the 1st like I've done for the last few years since those don't usually take too long, but we will see! Hopefully I don't sleep our entire flight to the Philippines & maybe I can get some work done. 

We will also be vlogging our trip! Not sure how many vlogs it'll be but they will most likely go up after we come back. And of course, after the trip I will be posting specific posts about visiting the Philippines, the food, and so much more :) So until then, follow me on Snapchat (@duhhkrisellee), Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook where I will be posting updates!