Snowy Valentine's Weekend Recap

How was your weekend sweet friends? I hope each of you got to enjoy it with someone you love and had lots of down time to catch up on relaxation! Thank y'all so much for all the sweet comments you left me on Friday's post. I'm so glad that y'all enjoyed looking at pictures of Josh and I through the years! This past weekend I was still in Pennsylvania for the majority of my time. Let me tell y'all, I have seen more snow in the past three weeks then I have in my entire lifetime...and I loved every minute of it! So here is a look into my snowy and fun filled Valentine's weekend:

 We went sledding!

 Lots....

and lots of sledding!

 I spent Valentine's Day handing out these beautiful balloons!

 I learned how to trust those driving on the icy roads

 At the biggest plate of sausage gravy and biscuits twice...yep no regrets here!

And saw the largest icicles that literally formed on every house!
Then yesterday morning I hopped on a plane and am now soaking up the sunshine in good ole' Florida! Stay tuned tomorrow to find out how YOU can impact a little boys life on his upcoming 11th birthday! Happy Monday friends :-)

Five on Friday: Valentine's Edition

Happy Friday and Happy Valentine's Day! I'm excited to be celebrating one of the first major holidays of 2014 and even though I'm not at home, I'm sending lots of extra love back to my favorite people in North Carolina today. Today's a little bittersweet for me as this is the 5th Valentine's Josh and I have celebrated together but also the first that we don't get to be together. 502 miles separate us today but I can promise you that won't stop us from have a wonderfully long Skype date tonight! (Oh modern technology, I am so thankful for you!) So today I'm linking up with my favorite ladies for Five on Friday and I'm doing this post a little differently than normal. Today is all about looking back on the past five Valentine's I've spent with Joshua. Enjoy :-)
one// 2010

Our first Valentine's Day came a little over 3 months into us dating. We spent the weekend in Chapel Hill and got to experience our first snow fall together. We ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant and then had a snowball fight outside his Carolina dorm room. 
two// 2011

Valentine's Day number two was spent having Josh as my date to my sororities date function. The theme was "Famous Couples" so we went as the red and green M&M. Pretty clever right?
three// 2012

By 2012, Josh was interning as a youth pastor so we spent our Valentine's weekend skiing with 30 youth group members in West Virginia. Luckily no broken bones happened! 
four// 2013

Valentine's our senior year of college was celebrated with hearing the acceptance of Josh getting into grad school at Wake Forest! 
five// 2014 And since we aren't together today for me to snap a picture, I made Josh a little surprise montage of many of our pictures together. This is what I sent him earlier today, so if you have 4.5 minutes to spare you can take a little laugh at how much our looks have changed in the past five years!

Valentine's Day 2014 from Alyssa on Vimeo.

Happy Valentine's day to all of you, my sweet sweet friends! 

Valentine's Wish List

Oh my goodness gracious, can y'all believe it's already the last week in January? I feel like every month for the past year has flown by and I'm always left wondering where time has gone. This past week has been crazy with job travel and delay after delay in airports with the southern snow but I have finally made it to New Jersey!
With January on the way out, I've turned my focus to the holiday of love. Aka Valentine's Day! Now don't get me wrong, I love any excuse to get dressed up and have a fancy meal out with my hunk of a boyfriend, but I also feel that the way we treat someone on February 14th should be how we treat them all year. Anyone else agree with me? This is even a more true feeling with me this year as I'm on the road and won't be anywhere near Josh to celebrate, so I guess we will be having a good ole' Skype date! 
Even though I don't like to go super overboard for this holiday, I still have my eyes on a few favorite things that I wouldn't mind having shipped my way. I mean a girl can dream right? So here are my 2014 Valentine favorites:

1: Kate Spade Be Mine Pave Stud Earrings: $48 2: NYX Matte Lipstick Pale Pink: $14 3: Naked3: $52 4: Kate Spade Polka Dot Phone Case: $40

Happy New Year + First Blog Giveaway!

HAPPY NEW YEAR FRIENDS!

I can just already feel that God is going to bless us with a great 2014! How did y'all spend your New Year's Eve? Hopefully it was surrounded by those that you love. Any one make it up to New York City to see the ball drop in person? I have to say, being in Times Square to celebrate a new year is on my life bucket list!

The family and I hung out at our home like we do every year and I was thankful that Josh was able to join us once again. Originally, Josh and I were going to attempt to spend NYE in Charleston, SC but my work schedule has me going back out this weekend for the next 5 months so I'm trying to soak up all the time I can with my family. Instead we played games, ate lots of my mom's yummy food, and counted down the last few moments of 2013. No matter how you brought in the new year, I hope you loved every second!

Now on to my BIG and EXCITING news! If you read my post yesterday, you learned that today I was making an announcement that I could not wait to tell you all. Well, here it is: I'm hosting my first giveaway! A few days ago I finished reading the wonderful book by Joy Cho titled "Blog, INC." and knew right away I had to give a copy to one of my wonderful readers. The book description goes as follows:

via

"With roughly 95,000 blogs launched worldwide every 24 hours (BlogPulse), making a fledgling site stand out isn't easy. This authoritative handbook gives creative hopefuls a leg up. Joy Cho, of the award-winning Oh Joy!, offers expert advice on starting and growing a blog, from design and finance to overcoming blogger's block, attracting readers, and more. With a foreword from Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge plus expert interviews, this book will fine-tune what the next generation of bloggers shares with the world.

Learn how to: - Design your site
- Choose the right platform
- Attract a fan base
- Finance your blog
- Maintain work/life balance
- Manage comments
- Find content inspiration
- Overcome blogger's block
- Choose the right ads
- Develop a voice
- Protect your work
- Create a media kit
- Leverage your social network
- Take better photographs
- Set up an affiliate program
- Partner with sponsors
- Build community
- Go full-time with your blog
- And more!"

I could not put this book down and took so many notes which have made me all the more excited about Southern Abundance and the direction it will go in 2014! So here's the time frame, the giveaway is open now and will run through 11:59pm on Wednesday, January 15...aka you have 2 weeks to enter! Note that tweeting daily about the giveaway will allow you to enter you name in it even more so feel free to do so! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I'll leave you all with a few not-so-high-quality pictures that I found via New Year's Eve family video circa 1999. You know the year right before Y2K came and the entire world was supposed to crash? Well, I guess my 9 year old self wanted the fam to wear hats that year! And from the second picture I guess we survived into the year 2000! HaHa Enjoy :-)

Goals for 2014 + Exciting News!

Raise your hand if you can believe today is the last day of 2013...well my hand is not raised! As I sit here writing this last post for the year, I am in awe at how quickly time flies when you get "old". I wish there was a way to wave a magic wand and turn 1 minute into an hour so I could celebrate more memories. 

As I look back on this year, there are no words to describe how blessed I was. 2013 brought about my student teaching semester in my dream grade (5th), I graduated from college, landed my dream job as a Traveling Leadership Consultant for my sorority, and have now completed my first 5 months of traveling the country. In 2013 I also took a chance of starting a blog after reading others blogs for months. Even though I'm still getting into the swing of "blogging world", I am so excited for what 2014 holds for both my personal life and for Southern Abundance. 

I've never been much of a "new year's resolution" setter as I'm more of a month by month goal person. So to start New Year's Eve off right, I wanted to share my top 5 personal goals and my top 5 blogging goals for January. Then at the end of the month we can all take a look back at them and see how I did! Without further ado, here are my January 2014 goals:

Now that you know my top goals for the coming month I'm excited to make the following announcement...

Starting tomorrow I will be hosting my first giveaway! YAY!!! That's all I will tell you write now but be sure to check back tomorrow for all the details!

What are your goals for 2014?