FACT: Bears Eat Beets. Bears. Beets.

Fact: I have made blueberry pancakes the last two days in a row. I ran out of baking powder after day one, so day two I used my sister's gluten free pancake mix and it was awesome! This was also the first time I ever made pancakes "from scratch" before which seems so ridiculous to me now. I've made crepes many times but pancakes, I always went for the Bisquick. I will never go back! So easy!

Mmm!

Fact: Being on vacation means having free time to watch adorable tutorials on cool braided hairdo's. I recently found this tutorial from Barefoot Blonde and tried the braided half-up do and it looked so cute. 2012 is so the year of the braid. I'm determined to figure out how to recreate my wedding hair updo that my very talented hairstylist did for me. Anyway, I'm happy my hair is 'long' enough to do fun braid styles. It's just so so so hot everyday so I think braids are just the perfect thing.

Fact: Last night's dinner was a GREAT success and I'm so happy for it. My sauce wasn't exactly like the restaurant from the seaside but it was really good. I think their homemade pasta might also do the trick. My MIL wants me to teach her how to make a balsamic reduction and the bread was the big hit of the night. Yay! Also we all got a little wine/Polish beer happy and were making plans with my brother-in-law, Ivan, about coming (home) to America with us for Christmas! So excited already!

Fact: My brother-in-law rocks! You may remember our amazing engagement pictures that my wonderful friends at Genius Creators took for us in Philly (especially because it was both me and Tomislav's Facebook profile pics forever). The pics are so fun and city-like which I just love. Well, check out the wedding present we got from Tomislav's brother!

It's us! 

 Painting based off this photo - how cool is that?

Happy Friday everyone! Hope you like my new blog makeover! It's a known fact that Polish women love redecorating (it's true, if you're a Polish woman or you know one, ask her if she rearranges her furniture every couple of weeks/months!), so I finally decided it was time to redecorate Dream of Home Tonight. And that's my last fact of the day :)

Save the Date!

Just over three weeks to go, 23 days to be exact, until our big day! I can't believe how excited we are and unfocused on anything and everything else already. Since we have so many people coming from overseas and abroad, I guess it leaves us even more excited than others may be before their wedding days. I can't believe we will see my family and so many of our friends so soon! I wanted to share our Save the Date's with you all, if you haven't seen them yet. You may remember, our amazing friends (Genius Creators) took our engagement pictures. We saw the idea online of holding up signs or letters to spell out "Save the Date" and we wanted to try that out and it turned out great! We made postcard Save the Dates with help from the Wedding Wire website. The problem was we wanted to use 3 pictures, not 2 which is how many templates were set up for. I am not the craftiest person in the world (although I try to be!) so I really wanted to use a template to make them. See below for how our postcard Save the Date turned out!

Photos taken at Rittenhouse Park in Philly, the "the" is pretty close to the actual place where T-Slav popped the question!

 On the back of the postcard, we shared some English-Croatian translations of important words to know!

Feeling the Love

When Tomislav and I went home to the States in December, we had a long trip. We were flying on different flights (boo) that arrived at the same time at EWR (yay!), but the day was long so we were really excited to get there and to be able to stay the night at my sister and brother-in-law's place. The next morning we were driving up to my parents house in PA. My sister and I are super silly and she suggested, wouldn't it be fun if we got all dressed up for our Mom and I totally agreed. My Mom is super fashionable and loves to dress nicely so it was the perfect idea for her. We even took it a step further and got T-Slav to put his suit on! Anyway, we drove to PA, feeling a bit jet lagged but we were OK.

When we got to my parents house, my Mom and Dad ran outside along with Paul (my brother-in-law) and his siblings (who we knew were gonna be there) and we were so excited to see everyone! It was amazing to reunite! We greeted each other outside, took some pics, and T and I were kind of confused why no one was commenting on how dressed up we were!

Anyway, so we walk up the stairs to go into the house and....

 

239 Days to go!

Wedding planning is finally starting to be fun! Tomislav and I got engaged nearly 10 months ago and we're just now starting to seriously plan and I think we needed that time to figure out, you know, which continent we're going to live on and what not. No big deal. Anyway, I'm super excited that we're getting the ball rolling, especially because I'm loving how things are starting to come together. The first time I was in Zagreb back in the winter of 2008, I fell in love with Crkva Sv. Katarine (The Church of St. Katherine). It is the most beautiful baroque church in Zagreb and was built by the Jesuits between 1620 and 1632. It's also located on a beautiful square:

 
This is it:

Look familiar?

Last summer, I got a painting of it on Stross (nearby) at an outdoor art fair.

We've got the place and the date, looking for a DJ/band now, and I'm getting ready to finally make our save the dates. Luckily, we have the perfect pictures to use thanks to our lovely friends, the Genius Creators, Britt and Lindsay, for taking our awesome engagement pictures!