• Coffee Dates,  Life

    Let’s Have Coffee | Vol. 8

    April 11, 2017

    Hey friends, it feels so good to be back blogging today. It hasn’t even been that long and I already have missed it. Although the break and being on vacation has been nice of course! I was debating on writing a blog post this week or not because I kind of wanted to take the week off and just relax but then I realized that I love writing and pretending I’m on a coffee date with all of my blogging friends. So here I am, in the middle of vacation having a coffee date with you. 🙂 I also have a guest post on Thursday so be on the lookout for that. I’m really excited about it!

    If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I am really enjoying the aspect of being on vacation and not having to worry about cooking and cleaning. This is the first time I have been on a long vacation since being married and moving out and let me tell you, not having to worry about those things is a luxury in itself. 🙂

    If we were having coffee, I would ask if you liked beach vacations or if you preferred to take a trip to a city or maybe the lake? My husband and I are definitely beach people, but I’m learning that it’s really fun to break from the mold as well. This week we went boating with manatees and it was so much fun. I can’t wait to share all about it.

    If we were having coffee, I would tell you that this month (when I come back from vacation) is going to be hard. We are most likely moving out of our apartment this month and I am not looking forward to it. I really love our little apartment and we have already made so many memories there and I don’t want to say goodbye.

    If were having coffee, I’d say how nice it is to have a break in everyday life to spend time with family. I’m really loving being in Florida with a lot of my family and am having such a great time. Being on vacation and being so far from home makes me also excited to go back to regular life too because I realize how much I really appreciate it.

    If we were having coffee, I would share that I am hosting Easter at my apartment this year! It’s only a few people coming but I’ve never hosted a holiday before and I’m really excited about it. Do you usually host holidays? Do you love it or would you prefer to go to someone else’s house to celebrate?

    If we were having coffee, I’d just thank you for spending time with me. There’s nothing sweeter than having a friend to sit down with and really talk about how you are doing with (even if that is over the computer).

    Today I am linking up with Erin Salmon, where we have coffee every second Monday (or Tuesday) of every month. Come join in with us, we’d love to have you!

     

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  • Life

    New Posting Schedule + Info For The Online Bible Study

    April 4, 2017

    Hey friends! I just wanted to stop by really quickly today to update you guys on a new posting schedule for my blog. I usually get upset when one of the bloggers I follow disappears without explanation because I somehow feel as though we’re friends and I don’t want to leave you guys hanging like that. (Because we are friends, right?! 🙂 )

    New Posting Schedule + Explanation

    I’m only going to be posting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at least for the next month or so. I will reevaluate after May or June and see where I am at that point. I just have started to go in different directions and would like to have more time to work on starting my Etsy shop and even just working on the technical side of my blog. I also don’t want to write a post that isn’t well put together just to write a post.

    I am also still focusing on the direction I want my blog to go in and need more time to work that out too. It will always be a blog about Jesus and his love for us, but I want to work on making sure that that is the main focus and that it is obvious. I am going to be spending time praying and working through what that means for me and what I should be writing about.

    And finally, I also have a passion for marriage and want that to be another main focus of this blog, but am not sure how that fits in with my main focus. I want to work through all of this so that I can be the most helpful to you. I want to have a clear vision from God so that I can be used best. And to do this I need to have some more free time. It may be temporary and I may be back to posting every day in a couple of months or I may stay posting a few times a week permanently. It all depends, but I hope that you understand.

    Online Bible Study Info

    I am still working through how exactly this is going to pan out but I am so very excited to work through a study with you girls who signed up. Also, it is not too late to sign up! If you are interested, click over to this post, and read a little bit more about what the study will consist of and leave a comment that you are interested to sign up!

    Later on today I am also going to be putting up a poll on Facebook for which book we should read through. If you have a suggestion, please leave it below! 🙂 The poll will be up for about a week and a half. I am going to be on vacation from this Friday (4/7) until the following Saturday (4/15). I will probably not be posting from now until then. (Maybe one or two, we’ll see.) But visit my Facebook page to stay in touch and to vote on the book we will be reading!

    Another way to stay in touch over the course of the next couple weeks is Instagram! I will posting about my trip on there as well. 🙂

     

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  • Life

    Monthly Goals: April

    April 3, 2017

    March Goals Recap

    • Consistently blog Monday-Friday
    • Read 2 books
    • Plan Florida vacation
    • Finish crocheting another blanket
    • Write 4 Lifetree posts
    • Write post for Young Wives Club
    • Workout 2-3x’s per week
    • Spend more time outside
    • Pray for Tommy every day

    Well you guys, as you can see I did TERRIBLE at my March goals, haha. I honestly kind of forgot about all of them besides the working out one. I did end up working out 2-3x’s for half of the month and then we always just slack off at the end of the month. It’s so strange. Also, we ended up not being able to spend more time outside because it got cold again (and even snowed!) so that wasn’t even a realistic goal.

    April Goals

    This month we are traveling to Florida to visit my grandparents so that should be super exciting. Also, we are moving out this month!!! (Insert all the crying emojis here!) I am heartbroken over this just because this was our first apartment we ever lived together in. But oh well, I will make the best of it. Onto my April goals! Let’s see if I can actually remember them throughout the month. 😉

    • Have the best time in Florida with family
    • Start hosting the online book club
    • Pack up all of our things well
    • Move out! 🙁
    • Make 2 more Etsy products
    • Meal plan through the craziness of packing

     

    What are your goals this month? I’m linking up with Autumn for #MonthlyGold. Come join us! 🙂

     

    Also, check back tomorrow for updates on the Online Bible Study and a change in my posting schedule for the next few months!

     

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  • Life

    My Cleaning + Laundry Schedule

    March 31, 2017

    This feels like a silly post to write but I really enjoy reading these types of posts from others. I’m telling myself that you guys might enjoy reading this then, haha. Actually, let me know which types of posts are your favorite! Do you enjoy faith-based ones, marriage ones, or ones that are just updates of my life (like Friday Favorites or What’s Up Wednesday ones)?

    Over the past few weeks I have created a cleaning schedule that I’m hoping will be a good fit for the home that we live in now. Great timing on that too because we move out the end of April! We actually know where we are moving after this though and this cleaning schedule should work there as well. (Fingers crossed!)

    Four Hours Of Cleaning? Yuck

    Up until a few weeks ago I would clean our apartment all in one big sweep. I would wait until I felt like it needed to be cleaned, then would spend all day cleaning. Our apartment is roughly 1000 square feet, so it’s not big by any means. It would take me about 4 hours to do a really good deep-clean from start to finish. I really didn’t mind doing this but I wanted a system where I didn’t have to stop basically everything for the day to do it. Because let’s be real here, I wasn’t going to get much more done after cleaning for 4 hours. I was exhausted. So I decided to try to figure out a system where I would be able to do a little bit every day.

    Cleaning A Little Every Day? I Don’t Know…

    I didn’t set up a system like this before because I hated the idea of only cleaning a few rooms every day. I felt like I would never have a completely clean house. I love the feeling that you get after sitting down on your couch, after cleaning for 4 hours, knowing that everything is clean. Do you know that feeling I’m talking about? I just felt very accomplished and happy that everything in my house was sparkly clean.

    The system that I put into place still has me feeling like that without cleaning for 4 straight hours. It’s truly a great thing, haha! 😉 There are two days of the week where I am actually cleaning the house (rather than doing things like laundry), and I try to do those back-to-back so that there aren’t days in between when I cleaned two different rooms. I say try because a lot of the time this doesn’t happen – I’ll clean two rooms on Monday, and then the other rooms on Wednesday or Thursday. But if this is a concern of yours you can make sure that you clean them back-to-back.

    The other thing that helps with making sure that the house feels completely clean is I try (again) to clean each room once a week. Before I probably was cleaning them anywhere from every 2-3 weeks. Cleaning them every week keeps the dust from really building up and everything just constantly feels clean all the time. What a great thing! (Well besides the floors, because hardwood floors are the worst to keep clean!)

    My Cleaning + Laundry Schedule

    Day 1: Clean bathroom + bedroom

    Day 2: Clean kitchen + living room + dining area

    Day 3: Laundry: Clothes

    Day 4: Laundry: Bed Sheets, Towels, or Tommy’s Work Clothes

    I love how this schedule is written out. I didn’t use days like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. because I know myself and I won’t want to clean the bathroom and the bedroom every Monday. Some days I have a lot of blog stuff to do or I got a bad night of sleep and won’t want to be that active. With this schedule I can choose to not clean at all that day (since there are only 4 days to clean) or I can choose to do an easier task – like towels. This system works great for me because then I don’t have the guilty of “I was supposed to clean the bedroom today, but didn’t”.

    I also love how the laundry days are super easy. I used to let the laundry pile up too and the have to do 2-3 loads of it every other week or so. With this system it’s great though because it’s just a little bit to do every week. Smaller loads of laundry make me happy. Especially since our washer and dryer are not in our apartment!

    The reason why the fourth day has multiple types of laundry is because we don’t need to wash our towels, sheets, or Tommy’s work clothes every week. We can get away with doing these every 2-3 weeks.

    \\So I’d actually love to know, what is your cleaning/laundry schedule? Do you wait and do everything in one day or do you try to break tasks up into bite size chunks?

     

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  • Wedding

    What I Wish I Knew When Planning My Wedding

    March 30, 2017

    I don’t think anything stressed me out more in life than planning my wedding. The biggest problem I had was that I had only been to two wedding in my life prior to my own. One was when I was in Kindergarten  – so I was five or six; and the other was when I was seven or eight, when I was the flower girl in my aunt’s wedding. This ended up being a major issue because you see, I barely remembered anything from those weddings. Obviously right? So I really didn’t understand how I was supposed to plan my own while not even knowing what happens at a wedding (aside from the obvious things you see on TV).

    I also had this idea in my head that everyone else had this grand idea of what happens at weddings and that nobody ever really did anything differently than these ideas that everybody knew about besides me. So as you can imagine this alone caused a ton of stress. I was constantly trying to make sure my wedding met these standards without really knowing what the standards even were. Sounds a little crazy, but I really didn’t want to do anything at the wedding where people were going to think we were cheap or just think that our wedding wasn’t a good one.

    Now on the other side of this I can see the flaws in my thinking. For one, there is no such thing as this grand wedding that everyone knows about besides you. There are traditions in weddings, like cake cutting, first dances, and a garter toss; but honestly nobody cares if you participate in them. And the biggest thing is, if you don’t care about something and don’t want to participate in one of these traditions, then just don’t. You don’t owe anyone an explanation as to why you didn’t do something at your wedding. Your response can simply be, “We decided it wasn’t right for us”. And honestly, people are very unlike to ask why you did or didn’t do anything anyway.

    What I really wish I knew is that most people don’t care about what you do at your wedding.

    It’s honestly so true, most people understand that it’s your wedding and that it’s your choice what you do or don’t do and they will respect that. I know it’s easier said than done but don’t let other people’s opinion stress you out about your own wedding. At the end of the day, you aren’t going to regret the things you didn’t do because you thought so and so was going to be upset if you didn’t. But after the wedding, you might second-guess whether or not you really did need to spend the extra money trying to impress your guests. Your wedding day is about you. Do what makes you and your fiance happy.

    The other thing that I wish I knew when planning my wedding is that you are going to be so excited about getting married that you really won’t care about what people are thinking of you and your day.

    This one is more helpful for the introverts. The other major source of stress for me prior to my wedding day was me being so fearful of what people were going to be thinking about me throughout the day. I was terrified to have to say my vows in front of everyone – like absolutely scared out of my mind. Public speaking is literally my worst nightmare.

    But to be completely honest, I didn’t think twice about the people who were watching me. All that mattered was that I was actually getting to marry my best friend. This was all really happening. The day was finally there. I was actually excited to say my vows in front of everyone and share with them the love we both had for Jesus and for each other.

    (If you’re curious what our vows were you can read them in this post: Zinhobls Say I Do: Ceremony Pictures.)

    My hope is to encourage you if you are so stressed and nervous about planning your wedding. Everything is going to come out beautifully because you are working so hard. Your guests will be happy because they love the two of you. They will be happy for the two of you and that’s all that matters. Take it from me on the other side of the stress. 😉

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  • Life

    What’s Up Wednesday: March 2017 Edition

    March 29, 2017

    Happy Wednesday friends! Today I’m linking up with Shay, Shaeffer, and Mel for What’s Up Wednesday. Come join us!

     

    What We’re Eating This Week

    We splurged and went to Shake Shack after church this Sunday and it was so. good.

    We’ve been eating lots of fun things this week, including these homemade Starbucks chocolatey chip frapps! Also so delish!

    I also made homemade fried rice this week! We just picked up a quart of chicken and broccoli to eat with it and it was such a great meal.

     

    What I’m Reminiscing About

    Our wedding! The weather’s just starting to break and remind me of Spring around here, which brings me back to the time we were planning vigorously and then to the actual wedding day. In just a month and a half we’ll have been married for one whole year. I really can’t believe it.

     

    What I’m Loving

    I may have just mentioned it already. 😉 That the weather is starting to break. It’s still only in the 50-60’s here in New Jersey but I’m hoping that the temperatures start hitting the 70’s really soon and we can once again go outside and enjoy the sun!

     

    What We’ve Been Up To

    Nothing too much to be honest. I’ve been working hard at getting my Etsy shop up and running. I went to JoAnn’s this month and bought all of this yarn and am so excited to reveal what I’m working on soon! (If you’re interested, follow along on Instagram, where I’ve been giving updates! 🙂 (@ashleyzincrochets).

    We’ve also seen a lot of our family this month, which was nice. We had my mom, brother, and his girlfriend over for dinner one night, and my cousin came over another night. We also went and visited Tommy’s family too.

     

    What I’m Dreading

    Nothing! (Which I am soo thankful for!) 🙂

     

    What I’m Working On

    Well, I kind of already answered this one in the what I’ve been up to section. But I am also working on trying to put together an online bible study. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, check out this post! We only have a few people so far so I’m really hoping more people will sign up!

     

    What I’m Excited About

    A week from Friday, my family and I are driving down to Florida to spend the week with my grandparents! We are also going to be hitting up the beach a few days, and I am so beyond excited to go. Warmer weather. Grandparents. Florida. The Beach. Yes.

     

    What I’m Watching/Reading

    I have been so, so bad about reading this year. I honestly haven’t read much. I really want to start again though.

    Tommy and I blew through Season 3 of How To Get Away With Murder in about 3 days. OMG you guys, that show. It is so well written. If you haven’t watched it, I would highly recommend it. But be warned, there is a lot of killing and it does really freak me out at the same time, so if you aren’t into shows like that, then nevermind. 😉

    Also, if you have any Netflix suggestions, please send them my way! Tommy and I really don’t know what to watch anymore.

     

    What I’m Listening To

    I actually have an answer to this one! I’ve never yet had a real answer because I never really “listened” to anything consistently. But! I started listening to Jeff and Alyssa Bethke’s podcast even though they don’t update it anymore, and I am loving it. It’s super encouraging. And I actually heard on Jeff’s Instagram story yesterday that they are starting it up again! What a great time to have started listening.

     

    What I’m Wearing

    Lots and lots of sweats. 😉 I actually have a Target gift card that I really need to go use and buy new clothes, haha. I’ve mentioned this before but ever since quitting my corporate job, I don’t have much nicer type lounge clothes (is that even a thing?). And I am not about to wear my corporate clothes around the house!

     

    What I’m Doing This Weekend

    I’m going to a bridal shower for my cousin’s fiance on Saturday! I’m actually really excited about it. My aunt asked if I could come up on Friday and help set up too. Should be a ton of fun.

     

    What I’m Looking Forward To Next Month

    Well since technically that’s when we’re going on the Florida trip, that’d be the same answer for this one too. Also, the weather warming up even more should be great.

     

    What Else Is New

    Tommy has actually been actively looking for jobs in Florida and we’ve been talking very seriously about moving there, which is so exciting! I would just love being in warmer weather all year round!

     

    Bonus question for the month…

    What Is Your Favorite Spring Thing To Wear

    via target.com

    I’d have to say floral maxi dresses. I absolutely love this one. I might have to buy it when I head to Target!

    \\What’s Up With Your Wednesday?

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